Craze (YC S22)

Obviously, at BarrierBreak we need all the technology to be accessible. One of the biggest challenges has always been "an accessible HRMS solution". We did manage to get one organization interested about 4 years back. To their credit, they did make it accessible at start. But after that - they never really gave us any of their new features or anything. Kinda like we were stuck in time. Last month, we started to talk to the team at Craze (YC S22) - they understood and were aware of the the problems of accessibility. They could have very easily said, no accessibility isn't in our roadmap. But they did just the opposite, they first downloaded A11yInspect (https://lnkd.in/djDp7RVG) and started to fixed automated issues! They took the feedback from our users and implemented it and are continuing to improve their solution as we go through the different modules of the product. Kudos to Kabir Nagral Deepit Patil for being responsive, proactive and building responsibly! Need more startups and tech founders to be inspired by and learn from them. #Startups #Accessibility #ResponsibleTech

Last week, I spent hours sitting inside one of our customer offices. Not a boardroom. A coffee shop ☕️ Visited Overflow Coffee in Lucknow and met the founders and managers there. We did a proper sit-down to understand how they’re actually using Craze day to day, what’s working, what’s broken, and what’s just annoying. Some of the best product insights don’t come from dashboards or support tickets. They come from watching someone use your product while running a real business. We spoke about Shift managements, Time tracking, HR ops, payroll workflows, edge cases we never thought about, and where we can make things faster and simpler for teams like theirs. Founder lesson I keep relearning: Nothing beats talking to customers in their own environment. Also helps that the coffee and pasta were excellent 😋 So, if you're ever in Lucknow and want to visit a cafe with great coffee, food & vibes, Overflow Coffee is must visit!

Here’s one advice I give to every young founder starting out: Sell before you build. When we started Craze, the product wasn’t ready, not even close. We were still figuring out the product, MVP features and what to even prioritize but we already knew one thing: a lot of legacy HR and payroll systems suck. Just raw conversations with founders and operators to see if people actually cared. Every startup we spoke to was facing the same problems: disconnected tools, broken workflows, and clunky interfaces that slowed teams down. Tbh it was pretty awkward because we got on calls and pitched the product, got them excited, only to end it with saying "Our product isn't live yet :(" Here’s what we did: • Talked to potential users before writing a single line of code • Took feedback which shaped our direction • Showed rough prototypes: sometimes just a few Figma screens • Took verbal commitments from people who said, “If you build this, I’m in” • Launched and surprisingly, 60% of them converted and became our first customers We wanted to make something which actually saves time for founders & HRs, not another outdated dashboard that feels like it was built in 2005. Those early conversations did more than validate the idea: they shaped what we built, how we priced it, and how we spoke about it. Looking back, that was the best decision we made. So, sell before you build.