Oftentimes when we talk about startups growing, we hear the word “pivot” – a correction to the course of a company’s growth to test out a new aspect of strategy, product or service. But as many seasoned entrepreneurs are quick to point out, such a move is far from “some elegant pirouette.” Rather, implementing such a change requires an immense amount of hard work and continuous iteration until the startup gets it right ... or eventually flops.
Fortunately for Woburn, Mass.-based company Perfecto Mobile, this shifting of gears made all the difference.
Eran Yaniv and Yoram Mizrachi first founded Perfecto Mobile out of Israel in 2006, with the goal of developing technology to provide remote access to and automatic testing of mobile applications on real devices from within cloud.
“The thought was [that] if we had remote access to devices that reside here, we could develop applications from all over the world – onshore, offshore – and test the application on devices that reside in the target market,” Yaniv, who is now Perfecto Mobile’s CEO, told BostInno.
When Yaniv and his fellow co-founder and current CTO Mizrachi began the company, they planned to essentially put the tools in the developers by partnering up with telephone companies in Europe, such as Vodaphone Global (which now serves as a strategic investor in the company), creating “a small telco footprint.”
“We thought that the wireless operators would be center of the ecosystem. We were marketing our solutions to them, in the hope that they would be spreading them out to the developer community. But that didn’t happen,” admitted Yaniv. Sales processes took over a year to finalize. “It wasn’t something that could carry a company,” added the CEO.
One of the main reasons that didn’t work was that the smartphone had yet to skyrocket to its current state of popularity, particularly in Europe, according to Yaniv. The craze around the iPhone and other such devices was moving out of its nascent stages in the United States, however.
So the chief executive – and others from the Perfecto Mobile team – moved with the market, making the trip from Israel to Boston in 2010.
Upon opening up an office in Woburn, the company took a long, hard look at its model. With the understanding that telephone company deals couldn’t sustain the company, the team turned to the App Store itself for clues.
“What we saw was that the applications that are given for free are those that drive businesses. When we looked at those, we started to analyze them, and realized they all map to enterprises,” stated Yaniv.
It was then that company made the decision that would be responsible for propelling Perfecto Mobile’s growth. Moving forward, the company would target their offerings directly to enterprises, like Delta, Facebook, T-Mobile and Liberty Mutual.
To guide the company’s new direction in marketing and development, Perfecto Mobile hired Mark Boullie, an “absolutely killer VP of sales,” said Yaniv, noting that the new leader hailed from serving in field operations at HP. With the added brainpower of Boullie, the company began signing dozens of deals with enterprises.
“We changed our whole concept, our whole understanding of what it meant to sell to enterprises,” said Yaniv.
Since making the adjustment in 2011, Perfecto Mobile has doubled revenues every year for last three years, claimed Yaniv. The company employs around 130 people in offices and data centers around the world, but keeps its Woburn office as its global headquarters.
