Meet the entrepreneur who's revolutionizing how businesses connect with clients on WhatsApp – Teresa Overskei. Drawing from two decades of corporate experience across multiple functions, Teresa and her co-founder Louis Moynihan identified a gap in the WhatsApp business ecosystem and launched a solution that's transforming how companies leverage the platform. Their software empowers corporations with unprecedented visibility into client interactions, enables strategic marketing at scale, and provides automation tools that deepen customer relationships. Through her journey from corporate to founder, Teresa embodies the resilient entrepreneurial spirit, proving that sometimes the best ventures arise from intimately understanding an industry's pain points.
Hi, Teresa! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?
We help people who use WhatsApp for work with clients to increase sales and be more productive over WhatsApp. Our software gives corporations visibility into their employee WhatsApp chats so that they can better understand their top clients, has coaching tools for managers to improve employee performance, can send marketing messages at scale into the employee/client chat that don’t get blocked, and gives reminders and automations for common tasks for the sellers to help them deepen client relationships and save time.
Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.
The light bulb went off when, after years at WhatsApp hearing from clients about how they wanted a certain new functionality, WhatsApp put that functionality on their roadmap and I realized that someone has to build the application layer on top so that clients can harness it, why not me?!?!
Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.
I had worked at large corporations for 20 years, racked up skill sets across a few functions, and was ready to apply them to something that I felt real ownership in. And I'm applying all of those skill sets today - you really do wear so many hats at an early-stage startup!
Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?
I'm going to say that actually, the game-changer has been people and relationships, and not a software or tool. I've been pleasantly surprised and humbled by people I've met along the way who want to help. They open doors, lend their time, and stick their neck out, and it's a foundation that a person builds over decades - though every once in a while you get a game-changing bit of help from someone you just met!
We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.
I used to take misses or failures very seriously and personally earlier in my career, like getting rejected for a job several times, failing to get promoted, getting laid off... all of this has happened in my career - several times each :). But I learned to let it roll off of my back and keep at it, or look in a new direction, and eventually paths reveal themselves. It's a kind of "follow your nose" career trajectory that keeps you open to options that you wouldn't normally contemplate and seize opportunities when they appear.
What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?
We've decided to bootstrap so far and not take outside money, in order to move faster and be in control of our own destiny. We'll raise funds eventually, but it's allowed us to not worry about where the next check will come from and make more mid-term decisions today knowing that to fund or not is fully in our control.
What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?
That it truly is hard to get a company off the ground, you're depending on so many people to say "Yes". However, there is also a big support network of fellow entrepreneurs who want to help.
Want to dive deeper into Teresa's work? Find out more in the links below:
- Visit Coral Messaging's website coralmessaging.com
- Find Coral Messaging on LinkedIn
