Business showcase : Akita

Describe the company – the elevator pitch…

Akita is a Customer Success Management platform. Our software helps ensure that your customers get real value from your product or service. When they do, they are far more likely to renew or hopefully expand their contract.

To do this, we enable companies to measure the health of the their customer relationships, analyze how their customers are using their products and services, give businesses the ability to review and act on customer feedback, and finally provide tools to help them monitor and automate interactions with their customers.

How are you different?

Existing Customer Success Management platforms are very expensive, don’t integrate with businesses’ existing software tools, and can take months to set up.

We have automated much of the integration and onboarding process allowing companies to start seeing the value of a Customer Success Platform in just days. This automation allows us to provide a solution that is affordable for small businesses but will scale up for large Enterprise companies.

Why will the company/product do well?

More and more businesses are built on a subscription or loyalty model. This is great because it provides companies with predictable revenue over time. These companies quickly realize that it is essential that they nurture the relations they build so that the time and money invested in gaining a customer is repaid many times over. Akita provides businesses with the tools they need to ensure this.

Where are you based?

We are Dublin-based company but with a 100% remote workforce. My co-founder Barry Devon currently resides in Sweden while my wife and I travel extensively.

When was the company launched?

Akita was founded in 2014 as part of the NDRC’s Launchpad accelerator.

What have been your biggest wins to date?

In Spring of this year we decided that our initial Customer Success Platform was fundamentally flawed. It was powerful and feature-rich but it took weeks to configure and was expensive. This resulted in a very long sales cycle. We made the hard decision to shut down that product, take what we had learned, and rebuild from the ground up.

Our new platform is completely reimagined. It is easier to set up and use, easier for us to sell, and provides far more value to our customers. Interest since we re-launched this Summer has been amazing.

What type of people (market segment) are you trying to attract to your product?

We primarily target subscription-based software or “software-as-a-service” (SaaS) companies. As these companies mature, the vast majority of their revenue comes from renewing existing contracts, “up-selling” customers more licenses or bigger plans, or “cross-selling” customers other products or services they provide. Most know they need a product like Akita to help them manage this.

Tell us about your team?

I moved to Ireland from the US in 2006 and worked as the Head of IT at a Dublin-based, online marketing company. Barry Devon joined as co-founder in 2015 after a career in Sales at companies like Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. My wife Sandra, who studied Computer Science at NUI Maynooth, joined the company then as well. It is currently just the three of us but we are looking to hire by the end of the year.

What are your long term plans for your product/company?

We are fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. Customer Success as a field is only just beginning and existing companies are learning that they need Customer Success software. At the same time, entire industries are moving to subscription and loyalty-based models growing the market even larger.

Our plan is to stay laser-focused on building the very best Customer Success management platform out there, and when we have, go beyond software to industries that might not be familiar with the concept but could benefit greatly.

What are your favourite tech gadgets?

We travel constantly and always bring a Google Chromecast and a knife sharpener. The Chromecast is great because we can watch tv shows and movies just about wherever we are. The knife sharpener is great because AirBnB’s usually have a knife or two but they are always dull. It’s low-tech but it makes life on the road way better.

What tech gadgets do you wish you could use to help you?

My computer is Mac from 2011. I’m due a new one.

How do people get in touch with you?

You can visit our website www.AkitaApp.com or email me directly: clay@akitaapp.com.

Prepared and edited by @EdinaZejnilovic, Journalism student at DCU

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking