Today we have selected Vishesh Singhal to take his interview. He is the Founder & CEO at CloudFiles.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
We started during the pandemic, and everyone was working from home. So it has been all good and healthy till now.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I have worked in B2B SaaS startups as a software developer for over eight years. I joined as one of the first employees both at Qwilr & Eltropy. I experienced HubSpot and Salesforce apps development at both places, so I was not a stranger to CRM app marketplaces. Moreover, I also observed that while these tools fulfilled their central purpose, the side features they provided, such as tracking, were never up to the mark and hence not much used by customers.
It seemed that sales & marketing did need good file-sharing capabilities, but businesses did not usually focus on them. The ones who did ask them to change their workflows, and this is a killer for adoption. This is how the idea of CloudFiles, an integration-first file-sharing app, was formed.
How does your company innovate?
We have weekly brainstorming sessions where the team goes through multiple issues that we may face in the future, and everyone contributes. Till now, these have been pivotal in all the product or business pivots we have made to date.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Talking about B2B SaaS, especially products that target inside sales such as CloudFiles, the pandemic has not much affected us. Except for the fact that the team is completely remote, and it’s slightly more difficult for everyone to bond.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Files being a common commodity, many direct and indirect players provide a subset of our features. E.g., DocSend is one of our biggest competitors. Many companies provide these features as add-ons to their core functionality, such as paperflite.
However, none of these companies are integration-first. Moreover, since their focus lies somewhere else most of the time, the feature set is usually incomplete. Thus we plan to stay in the game with focus and our integration-first philosophy.
Your final thoughts
We strongly believe that integration first is the future of software. In the 1980s, hardware and componentization led to the war between Apple & Microsoft and IBM. Later with the internet, businesses and CRMs moved online. App marketplaces started rising, and now almost every major player has a marketplace of their own (Zoom & Notion being the latest additions).
What we are currently seeing is software componentization. Future apps will be required to create a strong core (e.g., file sharing) and integrate it everywhere rather than a standalone “yet another” app. We follow this religiously at CloudFiles and plan to bring the product everywhere in the future.
- Spokesperson: Vishesh Singhal
- Company: CloudFiles
- Website link: https://cloudfilesapp.co
