Having signed our first customer, Book of the Future on 15th April 2016, we signed our second and third customers recently.
ITS Technology Group
ITS Technology Group was signed on 19th at the Tech Founders Dinner hosted by me and Stewart Townsend, Channel Director of Zendesk at Malmaison Hotel, Manchester.
L to R: Andrew Threlfall, CEO of Malinko, Manoj Ranaweera, CEO of UnifiedVU, Roy Shelton, CEO of ITS Group and Tim Langley, CEO of CANDDi. (photo credit: Stewart Townsend)
We will be working with Roy’s team at ITS Group to ensure they finally have single truth of customer across CRM (CapsuleCRM), finance (Xero), customer support (Zendesk) and email marketing (MailChimp).
I’ve seen the inception and growth of ITS Technology Group first hand. The initial team came together from a venture-backed similar company, and achieve significant traction almost immediately, and then started growing organically as well as through strategic acquisitions. Their sweet spot is controlling the last mile of your communications network (broadband, wireless Wide Area Networks and Wi-Fi hotspots) which allows them to increase the quality of services delivered including VoIP, Microsoft 365 and Sharepoint.
We are looking forward to adding significant value to their operations over time, as we learn their usage of our initial solution (single customer view) and get a better understanding of their operational bottlenecks. We see a future, where additional services could be offered through UnifiedVU to their customers increasing their customer lifetime value, once we start supporting Microsoft Stack.
Malinko
Malinko and we both exhibited recently at Business Rocks 2016 event on 21st and 22nd April at Central Manchester, the key exhibition centre in Manchester. On the second day, Malinko became our third customer.
For Andrew’s team, we will initially be unifying customer support (Zendesk) with sales (Pipedrive) and accounts (Xero). I first met Andrew many years ago at a Beermat event organised by Mike Southon at Tiger Tiger in Printworks in Manchester. He was then running a software development business. Over time, he started focusing more and more on Malinko and ditched the software development business, when he secured venture capital investment from AXM Ventures in Manchester.
With Malinko, we also see a future where their scheduling and invoicing software can be extended through UnifiedVU.
Summary
All of our first three customers are friends I’ve known for many years. Our 7000+ contacts in CRM includes many more friends who might find value in what UnifiedVU is bringing to market. Our ideal position is that we help them overcome operational barriers first, and then work together to increase their overall offer. There’s nothing more satisfactory than helping friends before we embark in building new friendly relationships.
Come and join the revolution – we are a friendly lot.