A Play by Play of the Company’s Vision, its Earliest Inception, and a WIP Towards a Continuous Mission in the Technology Space
There is always a distinct history behind any organization – how it began, its first steps, important milestones achieved and the people who have worked towards making its initial vision a reality. Our vision which eventually became a reality was Emojot – a company that has grown remarkably over the past few years. So, sip on a cup of coffee (or tea if you like!) as we take you through a stroll down memory lane on how it all began.
So, How Did it All Begin?
Our company’s vision – to be the global leader in customer experience solutions with our emotion-based customer/employee/audience engagement solutions – was given its roots when our very own CEO, Dr. Shahani Markus was a lecturer at the University of Moratuwa, a top-notch university, that had a reputation for producing some of the most intelligent graduates within the Sri Lankan tech industry. Dr. Markus was an inspirational mentor to her students and was responsible for supervising the university’s final year projects. With her vision of encouraging students to create startups, she bootstrapped a product concept with two of her students – Andun Sameera and Sachintha Rajith in 2014. The founding team also included Dr. Markus’ colleague Manjula Dissanayake, who came with prior experience in the product space. In 2014, Emojot’ magic began with these 4 special and dynamic individuals.
Converting Initial Meetings into Positive Proceedings
With our founding team at Emojot working hard and overcoming the challenges that came their way, we were fortunate enough to be named as one of the top 3 event technologies at a conference held in Australia in 2015. This was certainly a massive stepping stone for us. Our success in events gave us hope to push our boundaries further and work tirelessly towards the end-vision of our company.
Dealing with Growing Pains to Generate Long-Term Gains
There are always growing pains for any company and one of the growing pains that any inceptual company goes through is the legality of all its innovations, operations and processes. Since we were focused on selling an innovative, software-based, engagement platform – we had to ensure that it was legally protected to exclude other individuals from copying the platform innovations. We made it happen in February 2016. This was a crucial time for us as we filed our first patent after so many sleepless nights of paperwork that had to be attended to on top of all the other work we had at hand. Our closely-knit team worked endlessly to make it happen and it’s certainly a milestone we’d never forget.
Relocation of Premises with the Team’s Extensive Expansion
Since our customer base was growing slowly and steadily, we had to increase our scalability as a company. With acquiring new employees comes along the requirement to move to a bigger space that can accommodate all of us. In August 2016, amidst all the stress with a crazy workload in our pipeline and a final decision to move office – we were so excited to get our first-ever, official, workspace in the heart of Colombo. We were thrilled to have our first few employees including Shehara De Silva who became the VP of Marketing, Amila Dissanayake who joined us as a Software Engineer and Ushanthi Sathiamoorthy who joined us as a Business Analyst. The first few employees were an important milestone for us as they were well-versed in their respective fields and had prior experience in larger, more reputed organizations. However, they placed their faith in us and took the risk to come onboard. Apart from them, we were thankful for our external consultants including Asanka de Mel and Karthi Ratnam who is now our Head of Operations. They have helped us immensely, to get to where we are today.
A Changed Identity to Define Our Personality
Looking back in time, a lot has changed since our inception. We are up and running with a remarkable team and have a portfolio of local and international clients including Brandix, Hemas Hospitals and the University of Adelaide. Our portfolio increased drastically and we decided to focus on tapping into the U.S. market as we realized that we were ready to widen our horizons in the international market. Because of this decision, we had to align ourselves in a way that would make it easier for the U.S. market to understand who we really are and what we really do. In July 2017, with a consensus from the current team, we came up with the name Emojot which refers to emotional surveys. We gave ourselves a new identity to depict what we are made of – a company that provided a real-time platform that uses an emotional survey feedback mechanism to understand voice of customers, voice of employees and voice of audiences, at any given place and time.
Looking Towards a Fierce Future Ahead
This year is nearly ending but we sense that Emojot has exciting times stored ahead. What began as a simple bootstrapped project in 2014 became a Silicon Valley company – a company that focuses on transforming the world of customer/employee/audience experience. With the accomplishments and failures, we’ve had along the way, we are standing brave and tall today. We will continue to let our faith in Emojot roar out loud, to get ahead of the game without a doubt.
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