Helpwise

Gaurav Sharma is a serial entrepreneur and founder of SaaS Labs, a 60-person bootstrapped and profitable company building cloud-based SaaS products. In late 2017, as his flagship product JustCall (a cloud phone system) grew, the team faced a critical problem: they needed a shared inbox to manage their help@, sales@, and other organizational email addresses. After spending 12-15 months testing every available shared inbox solution on the market, Sharma and his team found them all wanting—either prohibitively expensive or unnecessarily complex, especially for growing teams scaling from 5 to 50 members.

Rather than live with inadequate tools, the team built a shared inbox solution for internal use only. As their managers began layering analytics on top to track KPIs, the product evolved. During an annual planning offsite, someone suggested commercializing this internal tool. Sharma saw it fit perfectly with SaaS Labs' core thesis: cloud adoption, remote work, and automation. He allocated $20,000 from a "Seed Funding program" (modeled loosely on Y Combinator) and assigned a team of two young engineers (Vibhor and Rishabh), one engineering manager (Prabhat), and three months to build and launch. By August 2019, the MVP was ready for beta testing.

Sharma invested significant time in pricing strategy—a decision he'd neglected in previous ventures. Learning that competitors charged per-seat-per-month (a model he found punitive for growing businesses), he studied how Basecamp—one of the most-used tools in his company—priced, and landed on a different model: a free plan for up to 5 team members, and a fixed $99/month plan for unlimited team members and 5 shared inboxes. On December 2, 2019, Helpwise launched on Product Hunt and was featured. The team signed up 1,700-2,000 users in a short window, with 55 converting to paid subscriptions within weeks.

Sharma had a clear playbook: launch at the right time on Product Hunt (around 12:00-12:30am PST) with compelling images and an engaging first comment; spend two months before launch optimizing onsite and offsite SEO for key terms; execute cold outreach to LinkedIn contacts and existing SaaS Labs customers; run paid ads to validate demand; and integrate with third-party tools and marketplaces. Product Hunt itself didn't drive many customers but provided momentum. SEO and integrations (particularly Shopify) proved most effective. Paid ads validated that legitimate demand existed. The organic growth that followed has been steady month-over-month.

At the time of this interview (June 2020), Helpwise was generating over $8k per month in recurring revenue, on pace for approximately $100k annually—achieved on a $20k investment in just 6-8 months of commercial operation. Sharma was targeting $1 million ARR by mid-2021. The biggest challenge remained the 24/7 support requirement critical to shared inbox software, complicated by time zone differences between India (where the core team sat) and the US (the primary market). He hired support staff in the PST timezone via Upwork and worked shifts to bridge the gap. Looking ahead, Sharma planned to add a native chat widget, allowing customers to manage email, SMS, WhatsApp, and chat (via Helpwise or integrated Intercom/Drift) from a single dashboard.