Xiklab is a digital marketing agency that handles digital marketing campaigns for different clients in different industries. Within XikLab, we have XikLab ventures, which is a business unit that creates startup products. For my case today, I will be discussing one of my startup products. I’m working right now on getting my first SaaS (Software as a Service) product off the ground. A SaaS is a way of breaking down software to make it accessible to customers. We have been planning and developing this product for over a year now, but the pandemic disrupted our plans and our launch has been delayed this quarter or first quarter next year. We’re working on getting the first 20 paying customers to use our SaaS platform. 

The platform is related to employee engagement, advocacy, and e-learning. It’s an employee app for all things a company would need in terms sustaining and cultivating the relationship between the company and the employees. It’s an enterprise product targeting businesses that will be charged per employee per month.

We treat it as 3 distinct modules; 

1) Employee Advocacy helps companies run an advocacy program to help employees become ambassadors of products or company culture. 

2) Employee Engagement is a set of features that help HR build a culture. It is designed to help with engagement metrics. 

3) Employee E-learning: we wanted to create a democratized e-learning program that is accessible to SMEs in developing markets.

One of our hurdles is that we have to determine precisely who our target company is. We are learning more as we meet with more companies and present the product. We’ve learned that it appeals to SMEs but they have to have a certain degree of appreciation of employee engagement. If it’s not something that HR wants to do then the app loses its relevance. However employee e-learning is more acceptable to organizations of all sizes. A lot of businesses have acknowledged the need to upscale the e-learning of employees during this pandemic. Right now we’re trying to get companies to join the beta program and we’re targeting different companies of different sizes and industries to get a better understanding of how they use the platform. 

For the most part of this year, we presented the product to as many people as possible. I wanted to test which parts of the platform resonated with them. I tested the approval flow in order to determine who would be a decision maker for an organization, who is using this platform, and how they’d use it. We’ve gradually added changes based on the feedback that we’ve gotten. 

The very first target audience I tested was marketing teams. We wanted a solution that helped companies leverage their employees for marketing, but everytime ‘employee’ is mentioned, HR is pulled in. The marketing teams still felt the need to bring in HR for a decision. That’s a stumbling block because I discovered dynamics in a company that I’ve overlooked. For example, the SaaS product is designed for and beneficial to the marketing person but actually all of the work goes to the HR. It’s HR who has to figure out the rewards, who’s going to pay for who, and whose budget is going to be used. This makes the decision making process a little more complicated because two groups have to agree. So we expanded the app to cater to the needs of HR as well. We haven’t tried it with CEOs yet but we really want to do a top down approach because only someone with vision can appreciate the value our product can offer to their company.