We’ve covered Pipedrive a few times in the past, and even pay for our own license for sales use in the office. Overall it’s a nice sales CRM service that helps users keep all their leads and sales ideas in place by giving a good overview of the big picture. At the core of the product is their sales pipeline that offers different steps where deals can reside as you move them forward towards closing. Over this past weekend Pipedrive has announced they hit their 1000th paying customer.
“1000 is not a big number, but as this number was zero a year ago it means a lot for our team,” says Timo Rein, Co-Founder and CEO of Pipedrive. Plans on Pipedrive run €10 a month for a single user, €20 for 5 users and 15 GB of storage, and €40 for 12 users and 30 GB of storage.
On their blog, Rein says getting to a thousand paying customers came down to three factors: addressing pain, getting the product into the hands of the right people and making it easy to sign up. First They learned early on they they weren’t going to compete in the crowded CRM market based on features, so they focused on Dave McClure’s pain-killer vs. vitamins analogy. Secondly, they got their product into influential people’s hands by applying to and meeting people at AngelPad, YCombinator and Seedcamp. They also say their AppSumo ad worked well to get Pipedrive into more hands. And finally the drastically simplified their landing page, driving 3 times as many conversions according to their A/B testing.
“And this is not to say time spent on going the extra mile in support, sending kick-ass emails, blogging or other activities is a waste of time,” says Rein. “We did lots of different things in our first 18 months and almost all of them contributed to our growth. But had we only focused on these three things we would still be in more or less the same place. It’s probably different for most other startups, and I hope you’ll agree that the journey to discover them is bloody exciting.”
