My partners and I started 6 businesses in 10 years.

In one line, what do you do and what is your most significant achievement?

My partners and I started 6 businesses in 10 years.

Who are you and what business did you start?

I am Wei Lin, the co-founder and CEO of Joyform.co, the fastest way for SMBs to automate WhatsApp for work.

In 2022, WhatsApp business is the most downloaded messaging app for businesses to communicate with their customers. Integrating WhatsApp into business workflows is the key to stay ahead. However, WhatsApp is a walled garden, which makes integration with other apps agonisingly painful.

Joyform can connect any app to WhatsApp in a few clicks, making it 10x faster and cheaper than any existing solution today.

What's your backstory?

I caught the entrepreneurship bug after representing Singapore in the Queen's Business Plan competition in Canada during my university days.

My studies in Mathematics helped me to develop mental models that were highly applicable in the world of business. Justin McLeod (founder of Hinge) said that to be a great entrepreneur, you'd have to be hopelessly idealistic yet ruthlessly practical at the same time. For me, that's where the theoretical aspects of Mathematics are joined at the hip, with the practical aspects of running a business.

For Joyform, we started as an enterprise SaaS helping our clients to deliver frontline engagement and training at scale. In the process of setting up WhatsApp automation, we went through the pain of setting up and maintaining the WhatsApp API. The insight we got was that most SMBs did not require the full functionalities of the WhatsApp API and nor did they have the technical expertise to set it up.

Hence we re-launched our product as a micro SaaS on Google Workspace and Zapier marketplace. More than 500 users from 26 countries signed up, in less than 5 months.

As a former government scholar in the education sector, I still have a desire to share what I've learnt. In fact, I'm the co-author of InvestLah, a best-selling business and investment book in Kinokuniya and Times Bookstore.

What should be the first steps to take to enter your industry?

To begin, validate whether the problem is real and worth working on.

I especially love these 3 key questions by Cooby's CEO Wen Shaw, regarding the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) validation framework:

1 Do they agree it's a problem?

2 Can they articulate what the problem prevents them from achieving?

3 Have they tried to find a solution unsuccessfully?

If you're convinced that the problem is real and you have the passion or the curiosity to solve it, then go ahead and build an MVP quickly and show it to your customers.

Get their feedback and continue to iterate from there.

Check out the framework here https//medium.com/coobyhq/find-a-problem-worth-solving-for-startups-in-small-countries-c243748dc6d8

How did you spend your First 100 Days of launching your business?

As we've been working in the enterprise SaaS space for a while, we are quite certain of the pain points, specifically in the domain of WhatsApp automation.

Hence, this allowed us to build and launch our micro SaaS product very quickly.

If we were to launch the micro SaaS product from the beginning, the steps I'd take will be as follows

1 Customer validation - intimate user interviews and follow-ups (make sure you validate that what the users say are true, don't just take it at face value)

2 Market sizing - minimally you should figure out either a list of 200 B2B clients which you wish to sell to or the size of the market based on your ICP

3 MVP - even if it's just a deck, show it to your potential customers and gauge their level of interest. Try to get them to commit to a contract or even a money-back guarantee of sorts

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain partnerships/customers?

Keep our users engaged by constantly checking in with them.

It might be a courtesy check-in to get their feedback or to share with them upcoming features. You can also ask them what other pains they're facing.

Focus on customer pain rather than expect your users to tell you what might be the solution - it's their job to describe the problem well but it's our job to fix it.

What has taken you from 0 to 100?

Honestly, we were quite surprised about this ourselves.

It's our first foray into building integrations with existing marketplaces. We have no idea what it might bring - we just thought that it made sense to meet our users where they are.

In fact, if we observe human behavior with a keen eye, it's always easier to get someone to adopt an add-on to a process that they're familiar with rather than to adopt a whole new process altogether.

That's why many of our users choose to connect Joyform to their existing Google forms (this can be done within a few clicks btw).

What was one failure you had to go through that others in your industry should look out for?

I would think of the challenges which we've encountered as a necessary evil - it definitely sharpened our thinking and help us understand the thought processes of our customers better.

If I could highlight one key aspect, that would definitely be learning about what's important to the various stakeholders in the enterprise buying process. For example, the user, the paymaster, the gatekeepers etc.

We had to learn how to identify each of their roles and how to pitch accordingly when we met with different folks in the enterprise.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We're working on two key areas right now, marketing the existing features and continuously working on more integrations to other marketplaces.

Our goal is to get to 20,000 downloads by end of 2023 and a high single-digit conversion to paid users.