Growing a customer support platform from 0 to 5,000 accounts

Meet Iris ten Teije 👋

Iris is a co-founder of Mava. She is currently based in London and have been in the startup scene for almost a decade.

Before starting her own company, she was the first employee at a digital bank, mainly working on business development and marketing. Being the first hire meant she got to dive into every aspect of the business, which was perfect training for entrepreneurship.

With her fintech background, she initially aimed to create a fintech product for her startup, but as is often the case in startups, plans changed, and pivoted to Mava.

The story told by Iris

What is Mava?

Mava is a customer support platform for community-driven companies. We connect to community channels like Discord and Telegram, as well as more traditional channels like web chat and email and enable companies to scale support across both private tickets, as well as in public conversations.

Next, we’re looking to help companies scale support and success in group conversations such as Slack Connect.

Building and launching

We (our team of 6) started building Mava almost two years ago - and went live with a simple MVP about 4 weeks after we started building.

Since we’d previously raised some funding, we were able to keep going for a while without revenue. Nevertheless, our priority was to launch quickly to gather user feedback. Although we released the product fast, we chose to delay monetization.

Today, we are of course charging for the product, but we recognized that V1 was too basic to justify charging much.

Getting initial traction

In just about 5 months af launch we had the first 100 users.

We currently have 5,000 Mava accounts - a mix of free and paid (freeminum model).

Marketing - The good and the bad

The majority of our leads today come inbound, either from SEO or product-led growth (PLG). Our products are Discord and Telegram bots that are branded, and our web chat is branded as well, so that all lends itself nicely to PLG.

A few examples of how Mava is branded below:

I also spend a lot of my time on outreach, a combination of automated and manual outreach via LinkedIn, Discord DM and email.

What I’ve found works well is mentioning a few client names of clients in the same industry. Especially now that we’ve got some very notable names in the web3 industry, LinkedIn invite acceptance rate is high.

Example of a message:

Given our initial target market has been very much the web3 industry, we do also attend industry conferences to meet clients. Conferences like ETHDenver and ETHCC have been fruitful for business development purposes.

Lastly, we’re running AdWords at a small budget. We started with broad match keywords highlighting our unique features, like "Discord ticket bot", to stand out. We avoided highly competitive areas like web chat; while it enriches our feature offering, it is not our USP.

We refined our AdWords campaigns by analyzing search terms and adding "negative keywords" like "free" or "cheap" to exclude irrelevant traffic.

At first, given we’re targeting web3 companies, I thought X would work well, but people get too much spam there so that did not work very well.

We recently started affiliate marketing (using Rewardful), and have not seen too much success with that channel yet, but we may just need a bit more time and effort to get that off the ground.

Reach out for more:

• The Mava website

• Iris on LinkedIn

• Iris on X