The Fugu Chat Story -Why we rebranded?

In 2017, we started experimenting our in-house chat to create our own workspace, talk one-on-one with our office peers, discuss projects or interests in group chats, and to quickly catch up with teammates. Thus began Fugu with a dream to make a dent in the world of communication. Since then Fugu continued to evolve.

As we expand our vision and build more exciting products, we felt that this was the right time to rebrand Fugu. Today, we are happy to announce that we are offering our chat products as Fugu Chat for team communication and Hippo for customer support chat system.

For those of you who are interested in knowing more about this journey, please read on…

Creating an opportunity for ourselves

Over the last few months, Fugu- customer support chat helped our clients seamlessly communicate with their customers and helped them solve queries. We continued to see good promise with Fugu(now Hippo). Our revenues grew steadily and we added a few hundreds of customers from across the world. Towards the end of 2017, we had a new idea.

We’d create a chat with internal customers and made it our second product. The key thing here was that we could stay in control of our narrative without doing something too different from our original product.  With Hippo aimed at customer support, it was a natural extension because we saw that a lot of clients were using fugu chat for internal communication among the teams.

It was an experiment worth doing because it was a chance for us to demonstrate that we could build, launch and scale the second product in a reasonable amount of time. Despite this being unconventional, and not something you see in typical SaaS companies, our investors were on board with our idea. While we continued to work on Hippo and kept growing our customer base, we put together a separate team to work on Fugu Chat and continued work on both fronts, in parallel.

Within couple months of its launch, we managed to get our existing clients to sign up for Fugu. We were able to show our investors that we could be successful building multiple products at the same time, and also use our lessons from our past to grow faster. This was a key turning point in our journey that helped us align our board with our strategy. It also gave us the confidence to take on more challenges.

Way forward

When we started thinking about what to build next, the answer was obvious. Most of the Hippo desk customers were integrating their helpdesk with their CRM, and we regularly got requests to integrate with different solutions in the market. Having tried a popular CRM for our own sales team, we realized that integrating it with other tools was a nightmare. In fact, we found that most of the time, our salespeople had to switch between multiple tools in addition to their CRM every day.  

With the important part of our rebranding now done, we are excited more than ever to carry forward with our vision and make things happen. While we’ve been busy getting here for the last few years, this date really feels like day one all over again.

We believe we are taking an important step towards expanding our horizon and changing the way we do things as a company. We are not in this just to change the way businesses do customer support; we are in it to change the way they do business.

This is a huge moment for all of us at JungleWorks. We would like to thank all of you for being a part of our journey and making our dreams come true.