The Caplead Story: A Lead Capture App for Exhibitions

We entrepreneurs love solving problems. That is basically what we do. But seldom it happens that you find a problem that is worth solving, that impacts thousands of people, that can be solved on a large scale and in a viable way. Building good products is challenging. What is even more challenging is getting it to the people and constantly iterating it according to their feedback. Well, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that you often find such problems when you least expect them.

Lead Capture
Lead Capture App
Event Management App
Exhibitions

The Idea

The idea of the product came from one of our business friend who is a regular exhibitor. He participates in various exhibitions as they are very crucial for his business because it helps the business to get more exposure, get new clients and expand the network. So what was the problem?

It was everything that happens during and after the exhibitions. See, the exhibitions are organized since years and are important for all types of businesses but still, when it comes to management, it has been a big pain for all the exhibitors and the organizers of the exhibition.

Our friend told us that it is very hard to keep track of everything during the exhibitions. There is lot of paperwork, managing every salesman and keeping track of the data was hard. It inflated the cost of exhibitions with unnecessary expenses and made it difficult for him to spend enough time in building relationships with his potential customers at exhibitions.

So he told us “Why don’t you guys build something that help exhibitors like me to manage the exhibitions from start to end?”

We were a perfectly established IT firm, we worked with multiple clients across the globe, and this was the perfect opportunity for us to get started in the product space. So we were like “Why not?”

So what was the next step after having the idea?

Once we had the problem in our hand it was important to validate it. Like we said earlier, building good products is challenging. So, if we are building something from scratch, the efforts should not go in vain.

It turned out that it was a serious problem that no one has solved yet on big scale. While researching we also discovered that there are already apps that can scan the data and eliminate the paperwork.

But that’s not we intended to do. We didn’t want to simply build a scanning app. We planned to build something through which the person can manage the entire exhibition from start to end. Right from scanning, to managing salesman and handling the data securely.

Building the first version product

As we started building the product, we also discussed about it with a lot of executives, salesmen and exhibitors who have been in the industry for years to better understand their problem.

After some iterations, we came up with the first version of the product called EMAILOPEDIA”. But there were a lot of challenges in front of us…

Firstly, it was making the exhibitors understand how this was different from just a scanning app. The people who were our potential customers were not tech savvy. As this was something new, we knew that it would take some time to make them understand what the product is and how it can be helpful to them.

So we started reaching out to the pharmaceutical companies in our cities as they go to a lot of exhibitions every year. And initially we only aimed to target the pharmaceutical companies.

We pitched it to a few clients, and we did get some positive responses, so we decided to take it further. It was January 2022, and the 10th Vibrant global summit was going to be organized in our city Ahmedabad.

It was the perfect event to get our product to reach more people as a lot of national and international companies were participating in the summit. It would also help us make our product better because it would get validated by so many exhibitors. So, we registered ourselves for the summit and were ready to take the next step.

But things don’t always go as we plan them, do they?

At that time the Covid 19 cases were again on the rise so the Vibrant global summit was canceled. Soon after that as we are a service-based company, we shifted our focus back to our client work. At that time no new exhibitions were organized so we decided to keep our product on hold till the situation became normal again.

Coming back bigger and better

After around a year of keeping the product on hold. We now had even better plans for it. Firstly, we changed the branding completely and came up with a new name “Caplead” short for Capturing Leads. We wanted it to be known as a go to app for lead capturing at any events or exhibitions.

Not only did we make changes to the branding, but now we have also found a better way to execute the same problem.

While working on the first version we were solving the problem for exhibitors, but we were missing the bigger picture. The organizers who organize these exhibitions can also be a part of this.

How? You might ask.

Well for an exhibition, organizers also have to manage exhibitor’s and visitor’s data.

With this new version we were not only solving the problem for exhibitors, but we were aiming to completely change the way in which exhibitions are conducted.

Organizers, exhibitors and visitors, all of their data can be managed through a single app.