Success Stories From the Baltic HR&ED Tech Accelerator: HintEd
Baltic HR&ED Tech Accelerator starts the acceleration program for HR-Tech and Ed-Tech talents. Throughout the 8-week program period, we will be sharing the interviews with participating startups that not only present their concept but also share the ambitious plans for the future.
This week, we have a pleasure to introduce HintEd — a low-code tool for creating interactive manuals for complex software, web & desktop. Read the interview with Artem Taganov, the CEO & Founder of this unique startup, and get to know more!
What is HintEd and how did you come up with this idea?
HintEd is the low-code tool for creating interactive manuals for complex software, web & desktop.
With the help of HintEd companies, or web-services can integrate in-application walkthroughs, hints, tooltips, popups into any IT solution to guide users through the tasks. The tool helps to train newcomers to use the internal software of a company, e.g. CRMs, ERPs, speed-up the rollout of new digital tools, and create self-service technical support for employees. HintEd helps to reduce training, onboarding, and support costs. Also, HintEd can be used by SaaS companies and external Enterprise services for onboarding new users.
The concept creation of HintEd
The idea of HintEd was born when Artem, the Founder of HintEd, was working as a business analyst and business developer in Major IT companies like Luxoft, EPAM, and Microsoft and spent hours and hours writing user manuals and trying to teach users to use digital tools implemented by those companies. Those manuals were useless because people don’t even want to read them.
So essentially companies waste time and money on these manuals, software simulators. As a result, enterprise users can’t just make their work done without assistance. The initial idea of HintEd was to create a tool that will help advanced users or product owners to create in-app guides without any coding or integrations fast and covering several digital tools.
A brief summary of market you work in
Our main customers are medium-sized companies and Enterprises: Banks (80%), Insurance, Telecom, Construction companies. We help these companies to transform the way they teach their employees to use enterprise software. Digital transformation is the new reality. Companies constantly change their IT landscape and implement new software tools to automate internal and customer-face processes. The speed of adoption of these tools becomes of high importance for companies willing to grow faster.
Competitive advantages of HintEd
In comparison with traditional training, HintEd users never even need to leave their workplace for learning features of the software they use. They receive instant training and support in the interface of this software.
As compared with our direct competitors, HintEd supports creating walkthroughs and manuals for web and desktop applications. We are very fast, and companies can start using HintEd just in one day versus weeks for competitors. HintEd has very “light” architecture and can be installed both in the cloud or in-house.
Tell us more about your team and how did you meet?
Our key team members are:
Artem Taganov , myself, — CEO, Founder. Strategy, Product Management, Investor Relationships.
Lisa Kalinkina — CBDO, co-founder. Sales, Business development, marketing.
Sergey Yartsev — CTO. He manages the development and support teams.
We have worked together for 1,5 years. At first, HintEd was run by solo-founder — Artem. In 2019 Lisa joined HintEd as Business Development Director and Artem made her an offer to join the team and since she showed great results she became the co-founder of HintEd in August 2019. Sergei joined the team in October 2019.
The whole team consists of 8 employees. Andrey, Nikita, and Ivan — software developers, Nastya — Sales and Business development, Dmitry — customer success and integration.
Any memorable stories related to your customers?
I remember one crazy moment when Seven business departments of top Russian banks were competing against each other to make a pilot project with HintEd. At that time, we had limited resources, so we chose only four of them.
It was very exciting to watch how they sell the opportunity to work with them instead of us selling our product to them. Also, it was an inspiring moment, since our customers got so interested in the HintEd concept.
Where do you see HintEd in five years?
We want to build a global company working in the EU, USA, LATAM, and CIS. We understand that our core product may change several times, but we’re sure that we’ll stay focused on training and onboarding.
The main challenge for entering new markets is a different business mentality. For a reason, to become successful in the EU, USA, whatever, you need to establish a local presence in each country you plan to work in. In this case, we plan to make it with direct sales by founding a team at first and then go through channel sales with local partners and local sales offices.
Share your biggest struggles at the moment
Our major challenge is the long sales cycle since we are working with big companies. We usually face tough IT Security policies and long bureaucracy procedures when entering new clients.
We hope that the right value proposition for all stakeholders involved in the sales process, like a business, IT, HR will help us to move faster. Right now, we’re making deep customer research to understand what we can offer not only for our end-customers but also for all stakeholders to make them happy and satisfied with our product.
Thank you, Artem!
Interviewer: Kristina Kirkliauskaite, the Communication Manager at Baltic Sandbox.
