2023 W41 - WhatsApp business

Humberto Ayres Pereira, CEO and Co-Founder, Rows

Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!

WhatsApp is pretty good for catching up with other founders for sales purposes.

(That's the story, but I will add a bit more context.)

We're on Week 2 of our new pricing plans.

There's a free plan; and
There are paid plans if you want to use >3 Integrations, have fast scheduling or access Premium Integrations like OpenAI. Plus and Pro variants.

And now we're also going through the inbound interest we've received from companies to try and win some custom deals. We are also reaching out to other founders and business leaders to get traction going.

WhatsApp seems to work well here.

An example conversation

Hi <x>
I hope you're well. I come with a business request, but first <personal update, pic of family, exciting thing>.
Onto the business request: Rows just started selling our offering, and I'm looking to get deals with companies beyond our bottoms up offering.
I'd love intros to 2 people at <your company> who run business teams that make decisions through savvy data analysis. Not data engineers, rather your Excel-wizard business user.
We can work on 2 things:
1) give them the fastest, simplest access to data, great analysis tools, and a way to share great reports. 2) offer you a way to send <your company or unit> data to your business clients. this is a great way to make them go deeper into your offering without investing in a custom data UX. To this end, we could build a bespoke Integration.
Let me know what you think!

Then they ask for clarifications and examples, like "would this person/ profile be the right person?" and we get the ball rolling.

Another pitch was specifically targeted at e-commerce:

Hey <x>
We just launched something cool.
https://x.com/RowsHQ/status/1712808560390807958? (yes, I sent this very link)
Our AI now generates automatic product descriptions from basic tags, in the spreadsheet. Who at your <ecommerce company or fashion group> should I speak to? Someone who manages the process, efficiency and resources for content production and translation.
You can use it as is, or we could help you get the most of it. Does this sound cool or what?

In this case, the conversation went immediately technical, and I got these questions as a reply:

Well, you should talk to me! Questions:
1. is it easy to adopt? 2. does it work for <list of other languages>? 3. we'd need shorter text than what's on the twitter video, can you do that?

It's a YES on all 3 questions, so this convo also moved forward.

So this is how I got the ball rolling with a bunch of high-level contacts. I never imagined WhatsApp being so smooth for business, but here we are.

See you next week!

- Humberto