Introdex — a startup that helps sales teams find useful connections

Admet Akhter, Singapore, Co-founder & CEO at Introdex, Founder at Akhter Studios, @admet_akhter

How it all started

I have been an IT entrepreneur for a little over three years. I started a startup called Introdex along with my co-founders a year ago. I also founded an existing business, Akhter Studios.

Everything began with Akhter Studios. Since we do custom software development, consulting, and work with large businesses, we always had the question of how to generate sales. We had experience selling through networks. We realized that if you sell this kind of service, it is better to sell through acquaintances or connectors. This is the best and most effective way to sell. I had the question of how to expand internationally. I came to the conclusion that I need to communicate with other founders, find out how they build sales, and see what is going on with them. I found out that they were selling the same way. Warm networking and connections bring 90% of the results. Despite spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising, they only bring in 10% of the leads. Even if there are orders coming in, sales are low. Actually, this gave me the idea to go to another country and study their experience.

Target audience

We help sales teams. They create a list of companies where they need to go with services or products, and their further task is to establish the first contact, to find the decision-makers. Because in corporate companies there is no sales without warm connections. And the question of how to reach out through someone takes 45% of their working time.

Our clients are mostly global product companies from the US and Europe, and they can also be IT outsourcing and consulting companies. At the moment we have 31 clients, some of them are paying, the rest are pilot clients. We have about 600 connectors on the platform, which are in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Acceleration programs

In Singapore, we have been accelerated by Antler. This is a global accelerator based in Singapore that is present in over 20 countries. They are the number one VC in the world in terms of investment. We came to Singapore because of the support for startups here. We applied, went through a three-stage selection process. Every day from morning to evening we were in their office, taking workshops, testing ideas, talking to investors and clients. In the middle of the acceleration we came up with the idea of Introdex.

In an accelerator, at the first stage a team is formed, then there is a preliminary investment committee. At the final stage, the investment committee decides who to fund. We went through all the stages and got the maximum number of votes from VCs. Eventually we got the investment and registered the company.

The main pre-seed round was closed by investors from Singapore and the USA. And also MOST investors from Kazakhstan invested in us.

Challenges

It is expensive to live in Singapore, the salary we pay to funders is not enough and we have to invest our own money.

Not many people know about Kazakhstan, when talking to investors from Southeast Asia we often faced the fact that they had questions about who invested earlier. There was a big issue of distrust in our country. We also face visa problems.

Achievement

We have fully closed the pre-seed round, were able to establish a lead source without spending money, and maximize resources. For us the sources of leads are connectors, government agencies are also actively helping.

We were able to build a team, small but effective, with which we developed the first version of the product, and released updates every two weeks.

Gained a lot of visibility in Singapore circles.

Plans

We were faced with the fact that we have small resources. We have a large amount of inbound flow of companies at the moment. There is a potential partnership with the biggest communities in Singapore who work with all of our target leads. If we let them in, our traction can increase 5-10 times. So we need to increase the resources of the team. We have supply and demand, we know how to regulate it, and we need capital to grow. Then we have a clear strategy on what figures we need to reach by the end of the year. We want to attract connectors from South Korea and Southeast Asia.