A History of Surfly - from pie to the sky 🥧🚀 (Part 2)

Written By Tariq Valente

Over the next couple of years until 2019, we scaled the team to around 9 champion's with 22 legs (struggling with the maths? we also got a Fussball table as any sensible startup with some investment would do!). We also tripled our user base to around 60,000 fans. After making it through the dreaded startup "valley of death" and finding the mystical product-market-fit, we found that insurance was a hot vertical so we rolled up our sleeves and got down to business. As a small company focus is so important, sure our incredible technology can be used in many different verticals, but with only so many hands on deck we understood we need to get laser focussed. The tip of the iceberg was our work with leading Dutch insurance group Achmea and then the successes started rolling in. 

It wasn't easy and all the above was only made possible with everyone's hard work which was paying off! We started working with leading insurance companies around the world, including AXA, Nationale Nederlanden, Generali, AAA, MetLife, Harel, New York Life, Swiss Life, Empire Life, a.s.r., Mitsui Sumitomo, National General, SSQ, Zilveren Kruis, Centraal Beheer, FBTO, UnitedHealth Group, Fidelis Care, Southern Cross, Health Insurance Comparison.

In parallel with our insurance endeavours we also understood that given our customer support origins and increasing demand for companies to WOW customers with memorable customers experiences - that contact centers where prime routes for us to deliver our magic. Most of our initial success came from contact centers looking to transform. We also understood that we had really easy technology to integrate with existing tools and that in order to get the reach that we need to lift off that we needed to partner. We developed and iterated over our Partner Program in order to enable more established contact center technology vendors to integrate our technology with theirs. Besides this we relentlessly pursued the Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders in the Contact Center-as-a-Service space to form alliance with great success. Our partnership success was becoming truly global:

At the end of 2019 we hit the €80K MRR (monthly recurring recovering) mark which made us all very happy 😊 This momentum had given us a lot of confidence and we knew that we had to seize the opportunity and scale! This is that time when we go and find some money again. All this traction grabbed the attention of Mundi Ventures. A well known InsurTech and Deep Tech Venture Capital company which is spearheaded by Javier Santiso (ex-Chief Economist at massive Spanish bank BBVA and MD of New Ventures at Telefonica). After much due diligence, the folk at Mundi realised that Surfly wasn't just this lone mad-man Nicholas with his nerdy cult - they also ended up seeing the huge opportunity and decided to invest €2M - TIME TO LIFT OFF 🚀 Yago, a pretty funny guy from Mundi joined our Advisory Board and came over to enjoy a little Christmas party and raise some champagne glasses in December 🍾🥂

The Notorious B.I.G. once famously quoted "mo money, mo problems". However we (should) all know that the problem is the way we see the problem. The opportunity now was to hire all-stars and grow the Tribe in order to hit our new goals. The new north star and revenue target for 2020 was €200K MRR. We started in January with many new recruits, doubling the Tribe to 20 Champions. It was time to grow up and another phase of our evolution. Everything was going fine and then COVID hit. This came with challenges around adapting to woking remotely but it also bought us a huge window of opportunity, that is still wide open, as our technology of course solves the very problems of working remotely. We continued to sign some great brands, ran our first hackathon, took part in an award winning accelerator and won some awards. We also ended up just €10K short of the target, for us this was still a big win as we were aiming pretty high (which is normal for us Surfly lot!). These wins were down to hiring the right people and keeping our awesome culture alive despite our remoteness. Everyone adapted, everyone helped one another and everyone was willing to go beyond expectations. Here are some highlights:

And that, kids, is how some grandma's home made, humble apple-pie started it's ascent to becoming an intergalactically renowned phenomenon 🥧🚀🌌

Tariq Valente
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A History of Surfly - from pie to the sky 🥧🚀 (Part 1)