Interview with Kristijonas Urbaitis, the CEO of SignalZen [2023]

Hi there, thank you for hosting me! Yes, sure. I’m a web technologies enthusiast and a beginner entrepreneur. My background consists of various roles in software development and some products created solely by myself. I love crafting web and mobile-based solutions that help people around the globe.

SignalZen is a strong attempt to join the Live Chat market from the productivity angle. It’s about enabling Slack teams to talk to website visitors via Slack and in this way make our clients’ Live Chat experience integrated into the same communication platform as for the internal communication.

My journey started when I was a teenager and discovered web technologies. After getting into the web development world by joining some companies as a freelancer, I decided to create my own products and had success in a couple of products within the gaming industry. It was a great experience in terms of entrepreneurship.

However, the desire to become a top-level craftsman in web development won, and I switched focus to becoming a great software developer.

In 2017 I decided to pursue a career in SaaS and that’s how SignalZen was born. The Live Chat industry seemed to match my personality and I was confident about making a top-level product with the knowledge that I gained during all my years of software engineering.

Just after a couple of years, I decided to niche down to the productivity aspect of Live Chat services. I noticed that the demand for this kind of software exists and since then I put effort into making the product better and better each day.

Our clients value the ability to give all or a part of their team access to Live Chat without additional platform involvement. There are great tools like Zendesk, Intercom, etc., but for those who don’t have a dedicated Customer Support team, it’s an additional burden in terms of productivity. By using Slack for responding to Live Chat questions, all team members are capable to participate in providing Live Chat support and it’s a seamless experience like you’d participate in conversations with your team members on Slack.

Like any Live Chat service provider, the nature of the solution makes the conversion rates higher because most of the prospects want to talk to real people about their questions and get the support they need quickly.

Another side of conversions is the strategy of Live Chat providing. We support statistics and ratings by website visitors about their Live Chat experience. In this way, any team can keep track of their performance in terms of Customer Support via Live Chat.

Yes, SignalZen definitely helps to mediate communication between businesses and consumers. There are indeed many benefits of having a Live Chat on your website and leveraging it in a way that would be productive for your business.

SignalZen is a productivity tool and, as I’ve mentioned before, it matches my personality. You’re right by saying that there are a couple of cornerstones in life that create happiness. My answer to this question is productivity.

Clean up your daily routine from something that is not worth your attention, push hard when you have time for work, and you will always find time to enjoy rest with your family.

The problem which you find in the Live Chat market is about competition indeed. There are tons of competitors but the Live Chat industry is growing which means that the opportunities through time as well.

The level of niching down is a constant issue that you need to solve in terms of the product development roadmap. SignalZen’s attitude is to make Live Chat easy and productive which means that not all features should be implemented to support the idea of a simple product.

There is just one way to fight with competition: keep pushing each day to serve the clients and create a top-level product. No one said that it can be easy and it’s rather a journey than a quick win. You need to keep in mind this all time.

I admire the fact that you have to wear all possible hats within the company. Also, the uncertainty and testing of various strategies boost excitement.

Positivity is one of the cornerstones of any organization that is just starting up. Seeing a bigger picture of your efforts helps to keep motivation.

I’d say that it’s necessary to find a niche for that and remember that starting marketing activities as earlier as possible is very important. Finding first clients and shaping the product according to them is a very good start.

We target introducing more plugins apart Live Chat for the product and keeping it simple.