Hi Rohit! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?

I am a builder by heart, while I continue to consult and build things. I started out as a programmer, evolved into an analyst, e-commerce manager, engineering manager, and product builder. I am currently working on a product idea called Market Canvas - think ProductHunt for marketing software. A discovery engine that helps marketers find right and latest marketing tools.

What was Eloquis about? How did you build it?

Eloquis was all about bringing personalization to mobile apps. What I saw was that the web evolved from being hello user to “Hello Bob, it’s great to meet you on a wonderful December day” - whereas the mobile app was the same except for the social app e.g. FB, Twitter, 4Square etc. The rest of the apps treated the user very transactionally. We thought a way to remedy that was to offer a personalization platform and humanize the apps.

Which marketing strategies did you use to grow Eloquis?

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a strong marketing strategy. Our strategy was to get a set of small user groups in the mobile dev world to adapt our product. Once we did that, we started with email outreach and LinkedIn outreach which had very less impact.

‍

Which were the causes of Eloquis failure?

We spoke to a few interested parties initially and the feedback we received were:

- Personalization was not an immediate need as of that day in the app world. We failed to realize how big a problem like that was, and somehow assumed the market would see the value in the product.

- We approached the wrong end or segment of the market. A mobile dev house is the last mile for an app that’s being developed, so personalization software sale targeted towards them is not a great idea.

- We were yet another software in the already crowded mobile software field. There were no case studies or a quantifiable way to articulate our value proposition except for drawing parallels to the web. This failed to capture the interest of any prospective customers.

- We were early to the game of personalization of apps and our marketing strategy and approach was wrong.

- Our brand name was a disaster and most of the traffic that we got, for free, was looking for an alternate name called “Eliquis” a drug from Bayer. There was no way we would win the SEO game. We had no SEO strategy or any other ecosystem strategy to piggyback our marketing on.

- We were early and spent our energy on different things rather than focusing on building a case for ourselves and personalization needed in apps. We failed to educate the market.