Hey Ai Ching (I hope I’m addressing you in the proper way re your first name)! Thank you for kind words!
Maybe some of the earlier answers also help but here’s how I saw it with other co-founders. We did believe that
- if we increase the level of simplicity for salespeople, more people will understand it, find it less burdening, use it and less will churn.
- if we increase the level of usefulness for salespeople then more people keep it in their pocket and feel that it’s an important helper, or even instrumental to their success in sales.
- if we increase the level of customization that can be applied without IT experience, then more people will be able to feel that “this product reflects how we really work and do our business” rather than “we really try to use it for our work but we have to adjust our real life to fit the tool”.
That’s how we approached it. There were tactics we used a lot, like “let’s mimic our analog world approach to work and tasks on this digital screen”, or “if a quick glance at the screen does not already tell you something about what you should be doing then we’re not connecting with a deeper brain of a user”, but explaining those would require more time 
.
Obviously we benefited from a decade of sales experience ourselves. It gave us a deep sense of what pains we’re solving and it was more difficult for anyone (customers, investors) to distract us from the main pattern we had recognized. So that definitely played a role.
I think it’s important to ask yourself whether you see your space crowded by things that you specifically do. In other words, the space might feel crowded for some, especially on a high level, but near empty for someone else. Depends on what you believe you’re solving.
In our case, CRM market was crowded for years before we came around, and it’s even more crowded now. People in San Francisco in 2011 asked us point blank, “Why would you enter the market that’s so crowded and dominated by Salesforce?”. For us, though, there were huge gaps in geographies, salespeople really didn’t think they had a tool built for them, acquisition models were too expensive for all parties, configurations were time-consuming, costly or even impossible, etc. I sometimes look at FlightAware and it seems that the sky is completely covered by planes but then realize that it’s only at the very high level that it looks that way .