Cody McLain founded his first company back when he was just 15. It was a hosting company that he sold a few years later, before going on to start another hosting company. Eventually this led to establishing a support company based in India for other web hosting companies. It was during this time that Cody hired the co-founder of SupportNinja, Roman Morris, who was in charge of operations for the thousands of hosting customers that they had in over a hundred countries around the world. SupportNinja thrives on helping startups scale at cost – their service embodies a structured outsourcing service based in their offices in the Philippines. Their Ninjas can handle a range of requests from customer support, outbound lead generation and much more. For one client they handle content filtering for their mobile app, and for another they process inbound leads for their sales team. SupportNinja’s goal is to provide consistent service that matches and exceeds the results of their clients, with weekly metric reports on performance and constant improvement within your team. This all seemed like a natural extension of what Cody and Roman were already doing in many ways. Their hosting company, Pacifichost grew to service several thousand customers around the world and that led Cody to go to India and establish a support office there. As his company grew, so did his support team and then they started reaching out to other hosting companies and started handling their support and server administration needs with Cody’s company, SupportMonk. One of the biggest hurdles that they had to overcome was figuring out just how to open up an office in a third-world country. It wasn’t easy and the process took a-lot of time, mistakes and money. By finding a mentor and advisor familiar with the industry, they were able to navigate the complicated waters of the Philippine labor code and still are learning new things as they go along.
It seems everyone is set on trying to create some new and innovative product set on changing the world, but what they lack is a proper business infrastructure that is prepared to deal with the chaos. It may not sound revolutionary, but it’s a problem every small business owner faces, especially any startup with no prior business experience. SupportNinja provides BPO solutions to startups by learning their product inside and out, then providing them with front-line support with innovative feedback loop systems.
SupportNinja targets founders and the executive teams of other startups in software and the IT sector. They’re growing incredibly fast, on-boarding a new startup every 2 weeks – and at the current rate of growth, they plan to expand into a new office before the end of the year. SupportNinja is competing against companies that have been around for decades and a handful of these competitors are worth several billion each. The problem is their minimum requirements and on-boarding costs for new clients – but SupportNinja takes a different approach that accommodates the needs of small and fast-growing startups, so that they can build a team from the start that is specifically built around the startup’s needs.
The Founder’s Dilemmas and Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers are two great books for anybody looking to run a company, according to Cody. The first book talks about the various roadblocks and hurdles that a founder will have to face in growing his or her startup. The second book, Traction goes into great detail about the various ways one can grow their startup and increase their user base with various marketing and sales tactics that can be implemented with little to no cost.
