Entrepreneur's Interview - Metrix Line

MandE: Good evening, today we have with us Prashanth Kaddi - a NITK and IIM A Alumn

He has since started the company called Metrix line. Without further delay lets request Prashant to give a background about himself and then explain about his company.

Prashanth: Thank you, 

I am Prashant. I had a very studious background –my schooling at Kendriya vidyalaya and then moved on to do my bachelors in Computer Science from NITK in 1995. Through the campus placements I joined IBM. While at IBM, I looked at how the IT industry was working and wasn’t happy with it. So within an year, I got a call from IIM Ahmedabad.

I had set a goal of being management consultant when I joined there; I got an opportunity to do my summer internship in the company – Anderson Consulting in their business consulting wing. I realized that just consulting wouldn’t give me what I was looking for; I needed more action in my work.

While at IIMA, I attended a course by Prof Sunil Handa – Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation. I didn’t have a very clear objective of what the course would give me – the course gave me a stimulus into what I wanted to do in life.

I joined ICICI from the campus placements, partly motivated by the education loan I had to clear. I also wanted to look at the marketing front of activities in business. I had a pretty good stint here – I was involved in many new financial product design and marketing. The impact of our work was significant – with a lot of results to show. The work I did was interesting, but I was not feeling excited about the environment – working in a large company. After having a stint in large companies this far, I felt I didn’t like working in large companies. 

Jump into entrepreneurship was more a decision from the head than the heart – I didn’t enjoy the stress levels that was building up which in turn prevented me from enjoying the good things that were happening around me.

After 2 years at ICICI, I began talking with a lot of people – there were multiple groups formed focusing on different ideas. In one such group, I had found a batch mate of mine, who himself wasn’t very serious – but put me in touch with his senior who was keen on starting off. This partner of mine had begun working with a startup and stayed with its journey towards being a large company. The idea we began working was – governance of IT outsourcing. Having observed the business very closely at IBM and Mphasis (where my partner worked earlier) – we realized that 

1. It is a high value business
2. It has a large amount of inefficiency built into it.

We decided to use metrics and quantitative assessments, which could according to our estimates increase the efficiency by 10%. Nasscom was projecting the industry to be of $ 50 Billion – and say with 10% we would be saving $ 5 billion for our clients. So clearly the company product we were developing had the potential of being $100 million.

We got our first consulting assignment in the same space – which could fund salaries of 5-6 people, we put together a small team – this was around end 2005. We came out with the first version of the product in 2006, two things followed – 

1. This version received a lot of resistance from the market and it wouldn't fly easily.
2. We would require raising finance to accelerate product development.

From our friend’s experience and the reading on the internet we realized that the equity we would part for this purpose would be extremely high!

The good thing that happened during this time was that a couple of companies we were speaking to began showing some traction – the challenge that these companies were facing was about the silos of organizing data. Each of these were understood only by certain group of people. Take for example - A product manager wants to get the P/L associate with his product; unless the finance person has the bandwidth to provide this info, there was no way it would be accessible to him. But this was an important feeder into the decision making about the product line!

This was the space of analytics and business intelligence. Tough our platform was capable of doing this, but we had a very narrow domain focus. We realized that we needed to make the product more generic and this would help us get a lot of traction. Large companies hadn’t figures out the solution to this problem world wide – So this was a problem we felt we could solve for the world the very first time from India!

IBM has bought a business analytics company for 6 billion dollars in 2008. SAP bought “Business objects” for 5.5 billion dollars. Harvard guys have begun writing about this too – a book called “Competing on Analytics”. These changes have happened over the last 5 years. In the book “Competing on Analytics” it is said that – product is no longer a differentiator – the only differentiator is going to be quickly you understand market trends and how quickly you could react to these trends.

And everybody looking at there is huge growth market, and in in hindsight the traction was real. So today, we have a product which we call –a data to information platform – we have figures out how we are different from all other solution in the market, also differentiate ourselves in a competition from large companies like IBM, SAP or other dozens of companies that have emerges in the same space.

MandE: How are you addressing the challenge posed by the larger companies in the field?

Prashanth: We could look at it in 2 ways – the technological angle and the business angle.  These are not by design, but have evolved over our years of business.

In general, any data to information service provider would do the following 3 things

1. Aggregate the data at a single place
2. Analyze and Synthesize the data
3. Interpret and Present the data as information.

Traditionally, it was extremely hard to have an integrated product for all these – it was typically a combination of 4-5 different products. These had to be configured and programmed to work for specific organizations – this meant a large cost implications for the companies. The companies would have to invest nearly Rs 4-5 Crores before beginning, also the problem addressed was typically fewer in numbers. This was a huge pain point with users.

We focused on this pain point and designed our technology to be extremely flexible with minimal programming effort at the customer end. This would make our product easier and faster to deploy. Our objective was to reach to zero-programming design; this has put us way better than many existing products. This was the differentiator on the technology front.

Pretty early we realized that most of the enterprise IT solutions were moving to hosted and subscription based solutions. The poster boy of this move was – Salesforce.com. Lot of people were beginning to say – I don’t want to buy your software, I just want to use it – this was a shift from ownership to usage of a license. Given this, we decided to try out the subscription model.

This decision helped us reduce the extra costs associated with trying to sell a high priced product. This was a differentiator for us from the business model point of view. 

MandE: In your journey of the last 6 years, what have been your best and worst moments?

Prashanth: Entrepreneurship is a crazy emotional ride with many ups and downs.

One of our first down we faced was when one of our best product developers quit - that was primarily for money. Since we were a small group, this reduced our team size by nearly 10%! It was really hard to accept this for a few days!

The second down side we faced was when we lost a client – we had engaged very close with a company; but then there was organizational restricting and the CEO with whom we were working was fired – the organization changed their complete direction; which made us redundant. We had even begun making some revenues and if the contract had gotten implemented completely, it would have defined our next growth!  2009 was anther hard year; we were close to closing 2 enterprise levels working with 2 fortune 500 companies. One of them fired 40% of their staff! What we had projected to achieve in 2009, we were finally able to achieve it in 2011.

In 2009 when we came up with the product, the market was tanking; but we stuck to what we had decided to have our first 10 clients from among the fortune 500 companies. This would make it easier for us to sell to the 11th client. When we achieved each of these milestones – it was great feeling. 

Another high has been in the last 2 years, when we were in direct competition with the major companies. When we won contracts for specific products from this competition – it was a bigh high for us.

In start ups, you don’t have the time to enjoy your small victories for a long time; you need to move on.  

Last year was the most memorable day for me – It was when we signed our contract with Microsoft. This was special for 2 reasons –

1. They themselves had a competing product to ours in the same space
2. They are the world’s largest product company.

MandE: How did you sustain in the last major economic crash?

Prashanth: 2009-10 was really hard years. We had entered the market in 2008 and the product revenues had just begun kicking in; the services revenue was still with us. While the services helped us survive, the product side was severely dented. 

The crash taught us an important lesson – Our primary target at that time was the US market given the margins. We realized that over reliance on US was really terrible – since then we have tried to expand our business into a mix of developing and developed economies.

Since we have subscription model for our product - it was in some sense was a recession proof business models. Though initially we stuck with this as a matter of chance, it proved to be extremely beneficial for us.

MandE: from this experience, what was your biggest take away?

Prashanth: 

1. When I look back I realized I was hung upon the Idea - which could be 100 million dollars; I didn’t want to be a small shop. In reality – you have to be there and do that, in order to say that you know. It cannot be based on imagination.

2. Cash is absolutely king. 

3. Its ultimately about people - we need to take this aspect more seriously and learn to keep the motivation high and running. It’s ultimately all about retaining the best talent when you have little monetary buffer.

MandE: What is your message for the aspiring entrepreneurs?

Prashanth: Start with a right motivation – it has to strong emotionally to handle the ups and down of the business. Do not take to entrepreneurship for reasons like – the glamour quotient associated or just for fun.

As a broad principle having an understanding about the space is a good starting point if you are thinking of – this is for non breakthrough sort of innovations.

It is important to manage the friends and families who would be your support line in this journey.

MandE: Thank you Prashanth, thank you once again.

Entrepreneur's Interview - Flower Aura

MandE: Welcome, Today we have with us Shrey, founder – Flower Aura. 


Could you please tell us your background and something about flower aura?

Shrey: I began the business of Flower Aura in Jan 2010, after working at Quetzal. The intent was always to have something of my own and that’s how I started this business. I and my cofounder always felt we wanted to operate in the e-commerce space. Both of us were from IT background so we felt online business is what we wanted to get into given our IT background, and also the financial restrictions, but we were not clear about which domain we would operate in. Gifting struck to me as an option since I had difficulty with the poor quality of service that I had personally experience – this let to us starting off with Flower Aura.

We made a search of around 40-50 websites, even at that time – but they were not an e-commerce site really. They were florists who built websites for additional sales rather than having online business model..  We were confident we could do a better job than them.

When we entered the market, our expertise was IT, but this is just a part of the business. Operations is critical in the whole game, and we are still learning, and this would be very important for our growth across cities.

MandE: Currently in which cities do you operate?

Shrey: We have a reach in over 100 cities – These are through the affiliate networks of existing florists, which we built by visiting different cities over the last couple of years. We have handpicked these florists, and provide them with a checklist of things before they go and deliver.
Not everything has been smooth sailing; there have been bad experiences in the past. We have sort of stabilized this now.

One big challenge in the current mode is that – on Valentine’s Day typically 10% of the year’s transactions happens. When you do not have your own warehouse, and you are dependent on so many people who are not under your direct control. There are absolutely no issues through the year but on that specific day something goes wrong – we would have to show a sorry figure. This strains our relationship with the customers.

MandE: Feedback is critical for your business, how do you handle get this?


Shrey: We encourage the recipients to send us a picture with the flowers they have received, along with some write up. These could be testimonials as well as some negative feedback.
Flowers are agriculture based, extremely delicate – so we have to factor in the losses that might affect due to these. Our florists too have been very understanding of the fact and have supported us this far.

MandE: Your business requires you to negotiate with florists across the country - how was the experience been?

Shrey: It has been pretty difficult – in all the major cities are able to do it, because we are in a position to provide them volumes. We can have strong terms with these partners. They were florists who built websites for additional sales rather than having online business model.

In the Indian Context, As we have also started our workshop in Gurgaon, we can relate to their challenges and work more closely with them. Both founders work on this aspect. We have divided the cities amongst ourselves and closely work with the florists.

In addition to this, there is the forecasting of such a perishable entity that getting as precise with the forecasting is important.

MandE:  Do you support your florist’s network in different cities with forecasting? 


Shrey:  We provide our florist network with a forecast of how many orders we can provide on Valentine day before hand.
We provide for only 5%-10% of our partner’s business so they do not heavily rely on us, hence there is no great dependence on our forecast. But we see this could be extremely crucial in the future as we grow larger.

MandE: Could you tell us a bit about your partner in business?


Shrey: My partner is Himanshu, who was my batch mate from in my engineering days at NSIT Delhi. The cities we hail from were along the same route and that helped bond better during those days.
Post engineering, while I worked at Quetzal in Mumbai, he was my roommate and used to work at TCS there. We used to discuss numerous ideas every day at that point of time and finally started off.
At the point of starting off Flower Aura, we had almost similar skills, but over the last 2 years we have focused on developing complementary skills. He focuses on technology, while I take care about marketing. For the operations, both of us pitch in.

MandE:    How did working at a start up help you?


Shrey:  I worked at Quetzal in the online and offline education space – I gained tremendous confidence from this experience. This helped me work on projects from scratch to scaling up. I started around 7-8 different products, and this experience of starting new things and meeting different people to make it possible etc was very valuable.  I realized that in a start up you need to extremely generalist to begin with and be pretty open to get moving quickly.

MandE: How was the experience of moving from online education to running an e-commerce industry?


Shrey: Definitely the two industries are definitely different from each other. When we entered into the e-commerce business, we entered it with the assumption that the major component would IT based. We realize, getting orders is only one part, there are aspects like how to buy, purchase, manage inventory, forecast etc.

The Marketing skills I developed while working in the educational space is what I carried over to this business. The other skills required today are the ones which we have acquired over the last 2 years.

MandE: Did you choose to get into the e-commerce business based on the trend in the industry?


Shrey: We got into the e-commerce business when the industry was just emerging. We operate in a very niche segment of the business, not many people operate in this segment given the kind of challenges I have discussed earlier.  There are some funded companies which have a lot of money to spare for the business promotion unlike us. We have started off in a boot strapping model using the investment of the founder.

Given that we have bootstrapped ourselves, and had a lot of learning by taking care of the operations ourselves, we are in many ways a head of the companies that we currently see.

MandE: Are you looking for funding now?

Shrey: Yeah, I guess the time is pretty apt now. I guess this is the right time to grow and we will grow irrespective of the fact that funding comes in, but funding can definitely speed up the growth.

MandE: What would be your major learning other than the operations that forms the basis of your business?

Shrey: I would say the major learning we have learnt is on the business front is the human resource management. Questions like, how to get the right people, hire them, retain them etc. Nearly 40% of my time is spent on managing people and handling issues related to them. From my experience I realize that, if you take care of people who are working with you, most of the operation and marketing things will be taken care of automatically.

MandE: What is your message to aspiring entrepreneurs? 


Shrey: My message is follow your heart and be smart.

When people come to me with the take that being an entrepreneur is extremely risky, I simply say - It’s not very hard to earn what you are getting now, so where is the Risk?”
Yes it will require some of your patience The entrepreneurial experience one has would be extremely valued and cherished.

MandE: Thank you Shrey for the interview. Thanks.

Entrepreneur's Interview - Taxi4sure

MandE: Good afternoon. Today we have with us the founders of Taxi4sure. Welcome to the interview Raghu and Aprameya. Could you please introduce yourself as the starting point of this interview?

Raghu: Hi, my name is Raghu. I am a Computer Science Engineer from KREC Surathkal after which I worked at Texas instrument. I then did my MBA from IIM Ahmadabad, followed by a stint at Feedback Ventures. My hobbies include reading books, running Marathons. 

Aprameya: Hi my name is Aprameya. I have known Raghu from the past 13 years. We were being batch mates from engineering and I was a year junior to him at IIMA. I worked at Infosys before my MBA. Post MBA I worked for Jones Lang LaSlle where I used to head Business development for India so one of the vertical. 

MandE: Could you briefly explain what Taxi4 sure does? 

Raghu: Taxi4sure is an Online aggregator  of taxi, we intend provide a customers a one stop solution for booking any kind of taxis and for a operators  to actually aggregate their inventory and try to  get customer. 

For the customer, our value proposition instant booking of taxi, a choice of all taxi operators across cities, price advantage, reliability, safety and surity of the taxi when you book it one line. We identified this problem as a common one across various customers and our own experience. This is what taxi4 addresses. 

Loosely, we could compare our business model to that of make my trip of taxi or red bus of taxi.

MandE: In your introduction, you mentioned that Marathon have helps you - could you please explain?

Raghu: When you jump into entrepreneurship, your income dries out and you begin feeling the pinch of it – it’s not as easy as you thought it would be. It’s when things are not going the way you expected that perseverance come into play. It is here that perseverance and determination helps you see through difficulties phase – This is what is akin to running a marathon. 

You hit a wall after cross around 30-35 km and all your physical energy has drained out. It’s only the mind that get you going – you tell yourself – just a little more and push harder. Similarly when you hit a wall in your entrepreneurship journey - You know that this is yet another race, another week, another month and you will be there. 

Once you hit the finishing line when you are really happy about it. Once you cross that, you feel you can still do another marathon. 

MandE: Aprameya, How did you begin thinking of entrepreneurship?

Aprameya: I didn’t have a predetermined intention of getting into entrepreneurship, I always thought of myself as working for some company. 

When at JLL I worked closely with CXOs of the company and department Head – this gave me an exposure to the everyday functioning of the company.  I felt this wasn’t very difficult and thought of trying it out. This was the best time to try it out before, your liability in life increase.

The confidence that my experience at JLL gave me, and the timing are the two things that gave me the confidence. 

MandE: Raghu, how did you begin this journey?

Raghu: Aprameya and I used to discuss quite a few ideas across the table but there were always many “what ifs”. Then I thought let me give the idea 2 years - if  things doesn’t works out – we could get to work elsewhere; but if it works out then we didn’t have to worry. 

In hindsight, that was one of the good decisions we made. Since I have already done my post graduation it is kind of easy for me to compare. If you are looking to do a post graduation, you generally take a loan and spend 2 years working for it, but in entrepreneurship there is generally no loan that you take and the returns invariably would be higher than what you could expect after an MBA or an MS. If it hasn’t work out then too, you would have learnt much more about what works and what doesn’t than in MBA or an MS. From the learning point of view, having started off early in life helps – So it was an easy decision for me to make. 

If it works out, fine. If doesn’t work out I am not learn from it.  Either ways, beneficial – so I decided to try.

MandE: OK. Your business is an operations intensive business – what where the challenges the business that you faced and how did you go about fixing these challenges? 

Raghu: Ours is an extremely customer centric business – our objective is to ensure we give an extremely good experience to the customer when he books taxis online.

It is an operationally challenging business, and we attempt to ensure that the taxi customers’ book reaches the customer in time – in addition we focus on a very smooth experience during the journey. 

It is very different from booking a flight or a train or a bus – in these modes of transport, the customer rarely interacts with the driver. The role of the driver is extremely critical in ensuring a smooth experience. We are still attempting to reach this, we are positive of achieving this goal. Handling drivers and ensuring they provide a good experience is our biggest challenge.

Apart from this, it is important to note that the taxi rental industry is extremely seasonal – it has very high peaks and very dry seasons. The technology, supplies and people to handle these is another major challenge in itself.

We are very cautious in our growth rate, and our operators too resonate this vision. They understand that in our success lies their success. Initially it was difficult to get the operators to align with our vision but, as we have shown the effectiveness of this model, they are now more willing. They don’t regard us as competition but more as facilitators to their business. This was a major hurdle we overcame.

There are many more challenges to solve, but the most critical thing that we need to focus on next is the drivers.

MandE: Your have scaled pretty well over the last 9 months of operation – how did you manage the finances for your venture?

Aprameya: We began with investing our own money. Right since the beginning we have been extremely critical of the way we spend money – this has helped us look at alternatives we wouldn’t have found otherwise.

We made sure that our employers are not driven by money alone but believe in the long term vision of the company. We have realized by our experience that whether it was a technology or call centre operations, over a period of time – the people who are stuck with us are those who actually believed in the long term vision.  Getting such people has helped us cut down our expenses. We pretty much have done a good job in terms of keeping our expenses low and keeping maximum benefits out of it – this very important to do that as a start up.  

Even when you go and rise investment later on your VCs or angels respect the fact that we have not spent too much to reach the current position. 

As entrepreneurs you need to be frugal, for at least one or two years, you are not  going to think about like going out on weekends or a trip somewhere etc. Whatever you spend on without thinking much right now has to be cut down. Give yourself a time limit so that you are not really bogged down by it.

You need to be disciplined at the personal level, and this would translate to the company too. This has to be extremely important.

MandE: How did you develop the necessary networks and how did you leverage it to grow up?

Aprameya: The initial networks that is always something that you grown up with. Our first set of advisers and investors came and our college from NITK. The first person who put us in touch with all the big VCs in the country is from our college IIM Ahmadabad. 

These networks have helped us initially, but then when you make new connections – you should not look at it as transactional. People need to buy into your story, and feel a part of what you are trying to establish. Once you do this, the network naturally builds around you. 

These are the softer aspects of network building that the entrepreneurs have to take care. Without people putting in confidence in you, you would find it hard to deal with various different unknown territories in business. You need to be out there interacting with the people, letting them know what you are doing. Media shouldn’t be the first point of approach, it is important to know the right people who matter for your business – media shall come if what you are doing is really worthwhile, i.e. if people are using your product or service, which investors seem to buy into etc.

Raghu: When we began networking – we believed our idea is our IP – if we reveal it to someone, they would leave all their work and get to working on this idea. This I believe was one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs do at the start up stage. This in hindsight we believed prevented us from using the doors that were open for us! Idea is only 10% of the business, execution forms the remaining 90%; so just because you have shared your idea, people will not get to doing it.

The second important lesson is to be at the right place at the right time, you will find the right place and time only if you visit a lot of places – and many of these wouldn’t be the right ones. You need to keep trying. 

Do not restrict your choice of meeting people based on their background; show them you are passionate about what you are doing. Even if the people you meet aren’t the right people to help you, they might know other who could help you. The passion you show, really rubs off on the people you meet. We have witnessed this in our interactions with both NITK and IIMA alumni.

The more open you are with your idea and sharing it, the more you gain from this sort of networking. Networking doesn’t just help you in finding the right finance sources, but also getting the right people to work with and for you.

MandE: Maintaining a good relationship with investors is very important, how have you done this?

Aprameya: Ours is an e-commerce portal that has a potential to scale up at an unpredictable pace. When you are speaking to people, don’t limit it to only those who can be a potential source of fund to you; discuss your idea, its feasibility, anyone  who has tried similar things earlier – this way you will get to know a lot of things other than just raising money. This way you create an existence in their mind space – it might not give you an immediate return, but you need to be determined.

If you find someone who could be very influential, don’t waste time – just go meet him; without the expectation of any financial gains, or connections. Unless you tell everyone whom you meet, nobody would come forward to help you. This is something that we have constantly being doing since the very beginning.

We never really looked at what stage of growth we are in – we never said we have these many transactions happening a day and so it is good to visit an Angel, or a higher number of transactions we go and meet a VC. We were never able to predict our growth. We never believe we have that extent of control of our business – in fact, being out of control in many ways is one sign of success in the initial period.

When you have been connecting with so many people, you realize that someone has shown interest in you. If we would have spoken with an angel today, the transaction growths over the period of a couple of weeks or a month would have got a VC interested in us… It is extremely had to predict such things in our business. 

You should never restrict yourself to the number of people you talk to, or the kind of people you talk to. Talk to everyone you get across – you never know what kind of value each one will give you.

MandE: What is the message for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Raghu: Message is simple – if you have always been thinking of starting off and haven’t done it this far, just take a two years break and start off. If it works out good for you, otherwise you would have learnt a lot. If you have an idea just go ahead! If you do not have an idea – don’t wait for a right one, work with multiple people that would help.

Starting something all alone, and taking yourself through entire journey would be extremely difficult - If you have someone whom you really trust and respect, that goes a long way. 

Just for statistics, 75% of the entrepreneurs who have started with their first idea were not successful, but they were successful in later their ideas. Don’t wait for idea, get a good team and get start.

Aprameya: Stop thinking about the pressures and liabilities you have in life – it doesn’t really help. In some form they are bound to exist.

If you have thought of starting something, just go ahead and do it – give yourself a timeframe and move head. It would be foolish if you do it for five years and still not done anything substantial. Give yourself a decent amount of time to explore an idea, and don’t keep shifting ideas.

Don’t keep shifting focus, and working on an idea and making it into a business is not as easy as one might think from the outside. It is important to give an idea the time it asks for! A simple benchmark could be - unless you are ready to spend one and half year on an idea, don’t start it. If you think it is worthwhile to spend that many numbers of years then you start and don’t shift focus. 

MandE: Thank you Raghu and Aprameya, for taking time out. Thanks

Interview - SecurityXploded.com

MandE: Good evening. Today we have with us NagareshwarTalekar who runs the community website called SecurityXploded.

Nagareshwar, could you please begin the interview with a brief introduction about yourself and then explain what SecurityXploded is about?

Nagareshwar: Thanks, I am a Computer Science Graduate from KREC – Surathkal of the 2004 batch. I joined Novell before moving on to Citrix where I worked on virtualization technology.

Since my college days, I used to do a lot research and publish articles in sites like Codeguru, Codeproject etc. Most of the tools I built during that time were all free. I grew more passionate about this, I felt I would need to have a portal of my own where  I could share the work I did – so I finally launched my own website – the primary objective being to share the research work which revolved around reverse engineering and security tools. The site was named - SecurityXploded.

The first tool I wrote was – “FirePassword” which was incidentally the first password recovery tool for Firefox, I then wrote another tool, FireMaster to recover the master password of Firefox. I would constantly add tools to this website based on the reverse engineering – so the website continued to grow.

I was more involved in Reverse Engineering stuff figuring out hidden things under Windows, undocumented stuff and write tools around these discoveries to make the system better.For example: One of the tools I developed was the ProcHeapViewer – whichcan enumerate process heap memory on Windows  much faster than the documented API functions – reducing the time from 20-30 minutes to just 10 seconds!

This quality work began getting attention from a lot of people. The users were steadily rising.

Around the same time, the work at Citrix was draining a lot of my energy and I couldn’t focus my energies on my passion of reverse engineering and tool development – This was around 2010. Around the same time – the movie “3 Idiots” inspired me to make the choice of taking this passion fulltime.

I guess the timing was also right – I had completed 7 years of corporate career; I decided to go full time to work on SecurityXploded and also had intention to run a Startup later on if things go well. That is when I decided to quit my work at Citrix.

I made this my first priority to complete the tools in my long to-do list and began working full time on it. These helped the website rating increase too –We grew from “Alexa Rating” of top 500,000 websites to coming in the top 100,000 websites.

Today we also promote a lot of local and international security conferences bringing more focus and success to these events.We also have local monthly meets along with other security communities such as null, g4h, owasp etc. Since this January we have also started a free training on ‘Reverse Engineering & Malware Analysis’ delivered by experts from corporate firms and some of our core team members. This is extremely beneficial for anyone either students or professionals working in this field.

MandE: Tell us more about building community and how challenging it wasto start with?

Nagareshwar:  Looking at the work I was doing, my friends approached – then some more people to put their stuff on the website. But that time it was more of personal knowledge sharing site. Then it stuck me that I can make it like Community Website where other passionate folk’s mainly young security geeks can showcase their work. It can not only help them to utilize the popularity of the website but also take their work to wider audience in shortest span of time.

So I transformed it to a Platform for contributors to freely publish their work.To make it easy for the contributors, I adopted detached model (rather than volunteer-ship) where they neither have to work for SecurityXploded nor have any commitment from their side.

The intension was never to increase the contributors, but to help youngsters get early recognition and grow at the international level. Today we have instances where people have got very good jobs having put up their work on the website. We cannot take the complete credit for this but it has definitely helped them to grow from no-one to some-one. That makes the difference!

So we are not like any community that runs on numbers and volunteers – this model mostly works as a medium to inspire youngsters to aspire for more – become role models for others. This is where I derive my satisfaction and motivation to live for another extra day J

This website has taken a lot of my effort into it – it is not easy. For Example: When someone submits and article, I proofread it, fine tuneit, add graphics etc–giving it that professional touch. This makes the article look far more professional than the original one. This takes a dedicated 4-5 hours of effort from the draft to final article. At the end of the day it is worth it.

Some of the contributors are now part of our core management team and they work on Training, leading local meets etc. All these efforts have immensely helped us to cut across the Indian boundaries and to grow at international level with strong community support.

MandE: Your site operates on a completely free basis – so the consumes of your website have given extremely good testimonies to signify the work you are doing. Could you explain a bit about that?

Nagareshwar: Currently, the portal contains tool written by me as well as other contributors. I specialize in writingtools; I can write tools faster than writing an article. Of course excluding the research work which takes significant amount of time.As of today we have over 80 security tools, nearly 70 of them developed by me alone. Some of these are also comparable to professional software from Elcom Soft. A major portion of these are password recovery tools, and most of the users are from the US, Europe and India. Over the last year, the downloads have also increase in line with the growth of the site ranking.

Our tools are recognized & published by leading downloading sites like Softpedia, Brothersoftetc and given 5 star rating, editor pick awards etc. Around 5 of the tools have crossed over 100,000 download mark. Our best tool, Facebook password tool has crossed over 800,000 downloads in just 14 months! Imagine if we had charged $1 for each download and assume 10% conversion – we would have been far wealthierJ.

Our users are either home users or professionals spanned across the world, but last year we had one special person – who works in Forensic investigation at Police Dept of Delaware County, USA. He wrote to us thanking for our Password Recovery tools and how they have helped in his forensic investigation. That was one of the special moments and he later sent us testimonial also which is featured on our site. Another memorable testimony was from the president of CompUSA – for our SpyDLLRemover tool. We have also received nice words from couple of security community founders citing our good work.

These testimonies inspire and keep us on our tows all the time.

MandE: Your website operates on a completely free model, and you haven’t worked for the last one and half year. How do you manage your finance?

Nagareshwar: Yeah, frankly it has been difficult period. It is not easy to convince people at home – saying you are on our own, running a community etc. especially in the Indian context. More than the money part, convincing at home was most difficult task and people are still not convincedJ. 

I had planned that; this activity would take substantial amount of time and so had been saving for a while. I am not married Jand have noother financial liabilities too. The internal urge was getting stronger, and I knew I had to jump in full time at some point. I expected it to be difficult and had planned my finances for a year or so.

At the SecurityXploded end - the major cost for us was the hosting – it doesn’t come free. Initially I paid it from my pocket, but later on it become difficult when last year we moved from shared hosting to dedicated-hosting. Now the advertisements and promotions help us to cover the hosting cost.

It is the satisfaction at the moment that I derive. And finally what goes around comes back around.

MandE:  You have been doing this for the past 4-5 years, it takes a passion to do something like this.What drives the energy for you?

Nagareshwar: Yes it has been nearly 5 years. Initially, it was a difficult especially when you try to manage your full time job along with it. 

The sort of reverse engineering I do, generally goes for days often weeks together –you constantly concentrate on the binary numbers on your screen.Once the research work is completed, it will lead to new tool or article. This takes a lot of work and energy. It is primarily the passion that has kept me kicking all these years. Inherently I am blessed with lot of energy and passion that drives me to do things – I guess it’s a God’s gift to me which helps me keep running.

MandE: What is your message for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Nagareshwar:  The most important is – pursue your passion.

An entrepreneur needs to look beyond the monetary gains. An enterprise cannot be built with only money as the motive. You would have to be passionate and believe in your ability to pull off things that you dream of. Only this can help you sail in the tough times and surge ahead!

MandE: Thanks Nagareshwar, thank you once again.

Entrepreneurs's Interview - Sen6

MandE: Good evening, today we have with us Smruti Parida. He is the founder of this company called Sen6 networks along with his batch mate from NITK Suratkal - Vinuth

Welcome Smruti to this interview. Could you please let us know your background and then tell us about your company?

Smruti: Hi, my name is Smruti; I am computer science graduate from NITK Suratkal, from 2005 batch. Immediately after my graduation, I was joined United Online.

United Online was a small 400 people company in Hyderabad which works in the area of email protection, spamming etc. For two years, it was a very good experience working on the basis of internet infrastructure; and definitely a high learning phase. I really experienced the potential of internet and its ability to bring convenience on a scale unthought-of.

After this, I moved on to Microsoft, where I worked for 3 year; I had the opportunity to work on “Bing” - the search engine. While working on this project I understood the way in which large projects are handled – how the efficient strategies could help achieve significant results. These learning were always happening.

I also began thinking – what does ambition mean for me? What would be my vision for life etc? After 5 years of working for these companies, and thanks to circumstances – I decided to take the plunge into entrepreneurship.

Along with my cofounders, I started Sen6. The idea of Sen6 has changed since the initial thoughts we had. All of us cofounders were technical people and with a background in internet technologies. We firmly believed that internet had the potential to break barriers and make people act smarter and more productive. Since one of the cofounders had an inclination towards arts, we decided to start working with this focus. Our objective then focused on empowering the artist so that the artists in remote areas can reach out to the rest of the world easily. We now envision ourselves as creating an e-bay like platform for Indian art.

Through this platform we would be democratizing the whole art scene in India and get to the forefront many talented artists and their original works which are inaccessible otherwise. The platform would attempt to put the middlemen and advisors, consultants etc – this could thus disrupt the existing structure and make the whole scene transparent.

MandE: You told your cofounder was instrumental in getting to operate in this domain, Could you just tell us about how you met your co-founder and how it started off?

Smruti: I didn’t do too much homework in choosing the cofounder – he was my batch-mate at my engineering college. Both of us joined United Online together and while there, we were also housemates.

We found that our frequencies matched. We tried doing things part time, however since our interest would quickly shift from one to another, we failed. That is when both of us came to the understanding that starting off something would be only possible when we are full time on it.

While there could be an analytical way to find a co-founder, for met it is the pre-established connections that helped. We used to complement each other well and that was something that helped find the right team for us.

MandE: Since you operate in the business that deals with Art Industry. Could you just brief tell us art and how the art work?

Smruti: I would be very frank that we do not understand art industry completely. The understanding we have got is by reading, meeting artist, and people who deals with architect, interior designs, art galleries etc. So we would like to say that our understanding could pretty much be wrong but I shall talk about the problem we address.

The consumers of art could be at any place, at your home, hotels, resorts, or art gallery – where you see paintings. It is generally the interior designers who really get these art pieces into these places. The kind of art that these interior designers get is called affordable art. But still art in general hasn’t been accessible to common people.

One of the reasons for this is that Artists are generally not the people who would like to market their work – they are happier exploring their skill. There are people who purchase art at a value which is much lesser than the market value of the art and make profits out of the deals. The price differential between the 2 is extremely broad.

There are lots of middle men who operate in this business, and generally art continues to remain accessible only to a small set of people. We want art to be accessible to common man – we do not want art to be considered as something that could decorate the walls of your home. There is lot of very talented artists whose work doesn’t get recognized – primarily due to the accessibility or lack of discovery platform. We want to be that discovery platform.

Reports say there are nearly 30,000 not so noted artists and trough the online platform we intend to give them a larger customer base to derive value for their art pieces.

MandE: In the last one and half year of operations, what has been the major learning? Do let us know some of the major mistakes you have done and how you overcome these?

Smruti: If I am to look back and think if the work that I have done this far – I feel I have taken longer than usual to accomplish this.

One of the initial mistakes was with us taking a long time to open up our minds – As said earlier, we were technical people and when starting off a business it requires a complete change in the thought process. It took us quite some time to get this realization. It would be of enormous help if this mindset shift occurs before you start your business.

As a business man, you would need to get to meet various people; understand their minds and only then will you realize that the way your consumers perceive your business. You need to be a salesman of sorts. In our case, we had to meet a lot of interior designers who are comfortable with the current way they do their business, then you go to them and talk about the platform which has features they might not need! You need to be persuasive, and not expect that things would happen naturally. It always helps if you can make a strict routine.

What we had done was building the product that we believed had to be the best in the world – but we now feel it would have been better if we began entering the market and showcasing the platform to people much earlier. Dividing the work and continuously being persuasive is what we learnt in this exercise. We are now smarter with this experience.

Having said that, as an entrepreneur, one is generally curious and wouldn’t follow the book; it is only when he has attempted and learnt from the mistake that he really learns it. It is really this characteristic that differentiates them.

MandE: Your business has 2 parts to bridge – one is the artist and the other is the purchaser of these art pieces. How did you go about bridging this?

Smruti: It wasn’t really a big problem for us, since our business was attempting to get a business model that had worked in the west, it was useful to learn from their experience and use it into the Indian context.

We found quite a few Indians who use these international websites to sell their work – we wrote to them and able to get them signed onto the platform. The appreciated our efforts to target the Indian Market. There are nearly 5 lakh other people across the world who also used the same platform and when we started sen6, they felt there could be a good recognition for their creations. 

Given our culture and traditions, only an Indian could understand and appreciate Indian Art, the larger western audience couldn’t appreciate this to a large extent. So this problem wasn’t a very difficult one.

MandE: How did you get through to the paying customer?

Smruti: Once the artists signed in, they asked their regular purchasers to use this platform to make the purchase of their art. So the initial set of our orders were received that way.

We did some online marketing through Google Ads, Facebook etc and these campaigns helped us get a few more orders.

We are currently working on building a B2B connect for the online portal.

MandE: How would Sen6 be in say three years time?

Smruti: Our study indicates that there are 30,000 artists in India who constantly generate new art, so we are targeting having around 15,000 of these artists on this platform.

We want to create a brand for our self in the home-buyer section of the business through the convenience that Sen6 intends to provide.

We also want the large B2B buyers using sen6 for their business and professional needs.

MandE: the customer of you platform could be anywhere across the world, how do you manage the logistic if you do manage it?

Smruti: Currently we operate only in the re-production print and fine art prints of original works business and not in the original painting sales. This is to keep our self in line with the affordability focus we have. In this model, the digital copy resides in our secure store and when a sale is concluded, we take care of printing and shipping the product. We accept the payment and then transfer the artist his share with a 15 day time period.

For original painting, the costs of these would be much higher and we would handle the logistics when we get into this segment of the market. Currently we are staying away from this.

MandE: What is your message for the aspiring entrepreneurs?

Smruti: If you are aspiring to be an entrepreneur, this is probably the best time for that in India. If you have a curious mind, you will find lots of problems in India, which need to be solved. Be patient and continue perusing – you will definitely make enough money – and in fact even more than what you could have earned otherwise in a job. It is all about taking the bold step of leaving your comfort zone and coming out. And then keep learning, be courageous, know your mistakes and adapt to the changes.

MandE: Thank you Smruti, for coming down to this interview

Entrepreneur's Interview - BrizzTV

MandE: Good Evening Amar, thank you for accepting to come on to this interview.  

Amar is the founder and CEO of Brizz TV. Brizz TV is an innovative platform that delivers internet content directly to the television using set top box technology.  

Without further adieu I would like to ask Amar to briefly tell us about his background and then about the idea?  

Amar: 

Thank you. My name is Amarendra Sahoo, I am a 2004 Computer Science Graduate from NITK Suratkal. After graduation from Suratkal in 2004 I worked across various companies like - Cisco, Juniper, and Lucent for about 5 year. Then I joined IIM Bangalore in 2009, and that is when I started the company – 2009 December.

Clearing the CAT I would say was an accident, and I joined IIMB – also to fulfil the dream of my parents, wife etc – not many could get a selection to IIMB and not join it. In all this, I was still a “Techie” at heart. Neither the work as an IT professional nor the MBA knowledge was able to satisfy the void I felt. There was a period of self introspection and the meaning of the MBA and the work that would be of interest to me while at IIMB.

I was also reading some very interesting technology and entrepreneurship blogs at the time, - the achievements of people seems to push me to believe I could do something too. I felt I had quite some time at my hand and I should consider starting off. 

I come from an embedded system, networks background and that probably fed me to believe I could do something more challenging than a e-commerce site. At the point I was thinking of all the idea I consciously stayed away from it even though ecommerce sites were getting a lot of funding.

While all these questions were popping up at the back of my mind, one day while sitting in a case discussion on Reliance Big TV – as part of the Marketing Course; It struck me that I could be very interesting if we could show Wikipedia on the television without any complex internet stuff in it! A regular TV but with Internet content in it – That is how BrizzTV began.

At BrizzTV, we show selected Internet content directly on your TV – Example, if we are pushing facebook on your TV you could watch it, unlike internet where you can pull the content. Just like you cannot watch a cricket match on ESPN unless it has been broadcasted, you wouldn’t be able to watch unless we broadcast it. So the data that we transmit will be available on the TV just like any normal channel.

Our focus is to keep this medium affordable, accessible and easy to use. The problem that we are solving is pretty interesting – in a country with a large rural population, an investment into a PC wouldn’t be economical. Added to this would be the cost of internet. Internet is also not all pervasive, and also costly for a rural consumer.

In addition to the cost of purchasing the PC, the other barrier for people to adopt to PCs is lies with the additional learning of the usage of the operating systems, brower etc that are  a sort of barrier for adoption.  Also the rural person could run his life without an internet connection! 

Given these thoughts, I wanted to give an affordable, accessible and simple solution – that would have to be the TV. There is not much complexity to using the TV too!

Facebook which I used as an example earlier is just to make a mention – our focus is on providing quality content that would be mass consumed like; say Wikipedia, or Exam preparation etc. The facebook example was primarily to relate with the present generation J.

Simply put, Brizz TV enables you put selected internet content on TV, available on a channel interface – say channel 931, 971 etc.

MandE: Could you tell us how you managed to put your first team together, and how you managed your finances?

Amar: 

I never thought I was heading this company, and hence there was no thought of putting up the team as such. I discussed the idea with my friends, and whoever felt that the idea was good I believed we could form a team.

The first friend I found this way was my batch mate from Surathkal – Jeetu. He was working with Cisco at that time. So we both came together to start this venture off. None of us were from the broadcast domain, and our limited understanding wouldn’t give us a real picture of the technical constraints we might face. We approached an expert – Krishnan who at that point was working at Philips and understood the set-top box pretty well. He encouraged us, and after some calculations and suggested this could be possible if a broadcaster like Airtel or Tata could agree. This was how we formed the first team. 

Coming to the point of Funding part – Both Jeetu and I were basically programmer, and hence we believed we didn’t need any funds to start off. We had a product bent of mind and hence finance was something that we didn’t bother much about. We began working on the product in December 2009 and by April 2010 we had built the prototype. We next had to move towards meeting a broadcaster.

We approached NSRCEL with the thinking that they could help us connect with the broadcast companies. At NSRCEL we met Guhesh who thought the idea was cool enough to try – he had a friend at Airtel and we were able to get the traction. With this prototype demonstrated, Airtel was willing to work with us. Other things began to move ahead – we were funded by NSRCEL in December 2010. 6 months post the VC round of investment from NSRCEL, we got our next round of investment from Ojas.

MandE: Could you tell us how the discussion with Airtel happened, how was the experience? 

Amar: 

Airtel is a very partner friendly company, most of their activities are outsourced. They weren’t very aggressive in the negotiation too.

I wasn’t looking for a negotiation too; I always thought that the product I was building had to see the light of the day. I approached it with an open mind.

Airtel wanted the technology evaluation and proof of concept – all this happened extremely quickly. The approach seemed to be that we (Brizz TV) could do a lot of value add if the young team was taken care off. Airtel has been a fantastic organization to work with. Given their long term vision with Brizz TV, they offered what they generally offer to anyone else without much negotiation.

There was some bit of luck and the remaining worked with the technical strength the team had.

MandE: You have been funded at a very early stage – it would be interesting to understand the experience? 

Amar: We are a pre-revenue product company – any VC who would invest in us wouldn’t be looking at any revenue for at least one year. It was pretty interesting if we look back at the instance. None of the factors seemed to be favoring us – I was studying, and there were 2 other members in the team. The product was just taking shape, and the company we were working with – Airtel was thought to be as someone whom a start up should be scared off. The technology that we were building was however a very interesting one.

We went about looking at many VCs in search of funding. The IIMB – NSRCEL connection helped us get a ear from the people we met. Though the technology was interesting, it want something that was tested – they weren’t sure about the monetization prospects of the company.

I was again luck that I came across to the Ojas investments – Mr Rajest. He was also an NITK alumnus, which helped connect better with him. The team seemed to have struck chords as well. The perspective of looking at Airtel being interested in us also seems to have worked for us. And I think he was willing to take the bet on us.

Though initially we went about just meeting folks, we began to feel the pinch towards May 2011. We required the money for supporting the operator lab that was crucial for the testing of the final product. Again I believe it was luck that pulled us through.

MandE: Out of curiosity, did Airtel help you? Did they co-develop the product or did you get an infrastructure support ?

Amar: 

Airtel provided free access to their labs, but given their schedules etc they couldn’t co-develop the product with us. We suggested that we would take care of the technology, and Airtel could help test the product in the lab.

I should say they facilitated everything around technology development and that help  for us. 

MandE: Most of your team is from NITK. What do you think excited people to work with you??

 Amar: At college we were always perceived as being friendly guys, we were not considered geeks. People knew us as these are cool chaps and straight from heart. They do things right and they don’t lie. When they say something they mean it. I think this reputation seems to have paid off. So our friends are always willing to work with us.

The open approach we have followed has helped us all through.

MandE: How do you envision yourself in the next 4 or 5 years?

Amar: I think I should be still be rocking. Doing something that excites me something in the tech space. Hopefully Brizz tv, will be a much bigger company – more than just in terms of revenue. We intend to create something meaningful out of India that world finds useful. 

MandE: If I could mention, you represented India at the Intel UC Berkeley Challenge. Could you tell us how that experience was? How did it help? 

Amar: 

The trip gave me a free trip to Berkeley – I saw a parking space “Reserved at all times for Nobel Laureates” – that excited me as I had never seen a Nobel laureate. I felt extremely excited about the concept. 

The competition was good too, we didn’t win the competition but the experience was pretty good. The exposure was pretty useful for us.

Some of the competitors from China were doing a bio-oil business – this got me to think of the Indian context where we do 90% business and 10% technology. The kind of innovations from these countries seems to be more technology focused than us. It was a feeling like we could see the future being built here.

MandE: You are an MBA and an Entrepreneur – It is generally felt that this combination doesn’t work best. What do you have say about it?

Amar: 

It is like telling people who have pistol are dangerous because they can fire!! 

MBA to me is a tool; it is good to have that. It tells you something beyond technology that you could use - you could value add. 

To me personally I have seen If I am not having MBA, things would have been little slower. 

It gives you a market focus, structures your thought. 

If there is a question is “Does the MBA make a better entrepreneur?” I cannot answer that question. But I  am going to  say it  never going to be a harm  it only helps as long as you know how to use it like a tool and it works in  some person’s hand and does not work some else.

Besides the large network that an MBA provides if you have graduated from a top institute, it gives you a different way of looking at things you know. I am personally excited of doing an MBA.

It definitely adds value to my team, my company – but I am still a techie at heart. If you consider MBA to be a tool it would be a good perspective. - It never harms, it helps 

MandE: What message would you like to send across to all the readers?

Amar: Since I am a techie at heart, I would talk about technology. If you are a technology person, build your technology product first. Build it so well that world just cannot ignore it. People just cannot take their eyes off it. 

If you look at Indian web companies, there is lot of things as an engineer I never liked. The scope to improve is vast. You can make it 50% or 100% better than what it is today.

Keep your eyes open. Don’t listen to the markets. The market’s foresight is pretty short – a quarter of a year. 

Do not believe when any one says you need leadership and all of that. All these are secondary. If you are good person given a chance, you can be a good leader.

Build your character and just keep building a good product. 

MandE:  Thank you Amar, taking your time to this interview. Thank you once again.

Entrepreneur's Interview - OnUs Payments

MandE: Good evening everybody, today our guest for this entrepreneur’s interview is G.G. Shrinivas. G.G. Srinivas along with Hari have founder this startup called ‘Onus payment’. 

Without further delay I would request G.G to give us brief background about himself, his co-founder and founding of the company.

Shrinivas: Thank you. I am a 97 graduate of IIM Bangalore. Hari and I were colleagues in Standard Charted Bank - we were working in card sales at that point of time. We occasionally kept in touch with each other and saying some day we want to start off. Everything kind of fell in place thanks to the circumstances and the opportunity that was there at that time. Both of us were in Bombay fairly dissatisfied with what was going on – that is when we began working on taking this off the ground. 

So there was sense of comfort with each other because, we had worked as colleagues. We were just ordinary colleagues, there was bit of respect, but I wouldn’t call it as deep friendship. I can talk about respect for Hari, I think he is the one of the best sales man that I have ever seen in my Professional stint. He gets across to the table something very fundamental. So even if we are not friends at that point of that time, the fact that we respected each other, we said let’s try it out. 

We went about the classical way, I mean like you know, normally whatever anyone would do, when he starts a company. Get the idea it’s like one of our boss used to say take a deep drag of band substance or is their market at hand. So, we did a lot of validation in that point of time. We went to lot of seniors who were in this fields, I mean to a couple of heads of MNC Banks in India, A couple assets heads in India of MNC Banks. And said this is the opportunity at hand, are we dreaming this or is this opportunity that is there to be exploited. The unequivocal response that we had from everybody was, this makes a lot of sense provided you scale it up. This is going to be pretty big opportunity. I think to the extent that we spent little too much time on the validation, but we went about validating the complete idea. We went customers and we said if we give this product how much would pay? It was never about would you like this product - it was always about would you pay money for this product? We had gone to some of the high end schools in Bombay, which is where we were located at that point of the time and asked them about this.

We had industry experts who said this possible. We had customers who said they are willing to pay. The funny thing was Hari being Hari, went out and actually closed to sales and came back and didn’t had product, money, technology nothing. I mean we had not even incorporated our company! 

The next phase of it was we had to go back to our families and say that this is what we starting. For first time entrepreneurs like us, it was very important to have a backing of the family. So we went up to senior people in Hari’s family and said, ‘this is what idea is’ should we be going ahead - one of  them actually ended up being on our advisory board. So, that’s the great thing for us. They actually liked the idea, after we had checked, cross-checked, verified and re-verified and we had wasted sixth month of time, is when we said OK fine now we have to form a company now. That’s when we started a company. 

MandE: Could you explain what your company does so that the readers of the blog have an idea? 

Shrinivas: Without going into great details about what the structure of payment industries is like in India; Think about any transaction less than 200 Rupees these are the transactions like buying coffee, buying an idly, buying a tea, buying a cholle buthur kind of thing and you are doing a lot of these transactions day in and day out. There are lot of transaction we do in less than 200 bracket - the only transaction tool that is available to us is cash. We can go by our personal experience or whatever we transact on a daily basis which is less than 200 Rs. Irrespective of which category of customer class it belong to the only transaction tool that is available to us is cash and cash is increasingly becoming difficult to use as a transaction tool because some of the changes we are seeing to. As you know, right in front of our eyes the 50 paisa is going out fashion. People neither give 50 paisa nor accept 50 paisa. As late as 2 year back some people were accepting it and without knowing it’s not getting accepted. 

So what happens is the bulk of the transaction that we are doing is less Rs. 200. And this transaction cannot be done on cash. So we looked at this and said - is there an opportunity for us to tap into these segments. These transactions come into the ‘C’ category of transaction - This is large volume low value. 

If we keep focus right and if we cherry pick within this transaction, this is substantial value of transaction that can be done on this. Provided you get across the right technology, keep your cost low everything else goes with to run a company. So if you keep everything else constant you should make money!

MandE: Both Hari and you are from the sales background of and to scale up the back end operations will be IT. We have seen that many firms begin with creating the software themselves. I understand that you have not taken that approach. How have you managed all that?

Shrinivas: Hari and I are yes from sales background, Hari is one  of the superlative sales guy that I  have seen. There is fundamental understanding that when you are up to start up a company, to start off a new product, new concept it will take heck a lot of selling to push the product across. May be a little naively, but we believed that everything else can be made. Once customer exist and once he is willing to pay, the rest of the stuff can be put in place - as in raising the money to start the operations, getting the technology to run the operations, actually running the - operations everything can be put in place provided you have customer first. Obviously two of us are forced to think like this because we are not technology persons. 

I am a jack of all, whereas Hari is primarily into sales. The advantage this gives us is that when the operations are still not scaled up I am pretty much capable of handling operations, technology and marketing. Having said that jack of all trades never works out when things going to specialization. When the company is starting off somebody like me, would be able to handle, all the other things that Hari is not handling. There is an understanding between Hari and me what he is handling at this point of time is one of the important things of business. Getting to run a company is almost like pushing a vegan once it is running even I can go and give it a push, but when it is standing to make it move  is what is very difficult. Hari provides the traction I ensure that I take care of everything else. So, we don’t increase our cost base in the interim. Now once the whole thing starts of we need to obviously get in people who handle the technology, operation - at that point of time there would be fair bit of specialization.I think we are approaching that time because what we have done. 

Because of this approach, have we made mistakes? - Yes we have made mistakes. I mean there was a wrong choice of one of the product we had taken which kind of set us back by about four months. Would trained technology have helped? Obviously, I mean like you know Grade A technologist would have helped. Have we suffered from other fronts because of this? No, technology is one of the issues that we had. But it was not unmanageable. Thankfully it didn’t sink the company. 

We put the paying customer in front of us and align the rest of us behind the paying customer. With one and half year of this, I can say it works. 

MandE: Putting the customer front and aligning all other things behind it definitely has some advantages, would you also highlight some of the challenges yuo faced in this approach and how you handled it? 

Shrinivas: Between Hari and me we have 21 -22 years of payment card experience. Either in sales, marketing, operations, a little bit of service and collections. What you try to do is you end up a duplicating a whole bunch of things which are there on a payment card.

The biggest example I can quote is - the credit card allows you to do paisa transactions. When you go and buy something in a super market you can buy for 1063.15. In real life I have not done a 0.15 transaction ever. Now over the last 15 odd months we have done over 17 lakh transactions. Within this transaction everyone of the paisa transaction that has come to us, is actually an error by the customer on the data entry front. What essentially has happened is something where I can go and probably pump my chest and say you do a one paisa transaction, is nothing but a boast .Which doesn’t hold any value for the customer because the customer is entering into round figure transaction of one rupee. And here I have build up a utility which can take paisa transaction. Now look at this and ask - why did this you stupid mistake happen? Don’t I go out and purchase? To put it simply, if I am drinking chai every day, and this were to be taken on a card how many times paid in a paisa. And answer is ‘NO’, so why did I put it on payment card? - Because I was aping credit card. 

So the experience that we have some time noose around your neck. That’s when we decided that will not invent feature that are nice on credit card, unless the customer comes and ask for a feature which we should have the ability to turn it around fast. We would not implement that idea because we burnt our fingers in couple of features which we put on the card which the customer never uses. They are nice to tell on the sales pitch but all most never the customer has a utility for that kind of transaction. Sometimes like the paisa example I gave you, they actually become a point of failure for payment solution.  We went by heuristic of saying if Hari and I want to X number of features on the card. Hari will divide feature at by half and I’ll divided the features at by another half. And whatever is the number of features are left is the features that we implement. Any feature that has to be implemented after that the customer has to ask for it. The design that will have it will take into account that the features may be added later but would not make feature unless customer ask for it. So what happens is we typically go to the customer and say this is the basic product this is what it is you tell us you will use this and if there something needs to be added we can turn it off fast that’s not a problem. Thankfully we have a very good technology partner. So what happens is we can implement those things very fast. We know that we are not wasting our money in terms of spending a feature. So it actually worked out for us very well. 

A wasted feature is wasted time and wasted money. We have couple of them I mean like we talk some experience on this.

MandE: You said, customer feedback on features is essential, did your dependence on this feedback hold you back?

Shrinivas:Thanks for the confluence of a couple of technology issues of that we had,  for first seventy days of operation we visited the customers every single day and at 11.00 O’clock in the night. One of us would drive, 50Kmtrs, two ways and visit the customer at 11.00 PM including December 31st of 2010. If you visit a customer 70 days continuously doesn’t matter whether the customer is a dumb guy - he will start talking. Even if you are deaf you will start listening because there will be issues on the card which would start understanding pretty fast. 

In hindsight, that was the best thing would have happened to us. Rather than the pain of going there every day at 11.00 O’clock that was the one best thing happened to us because at the end of it we understood how the customer is using. Simple thing like a 21 years young girl telling a boy with her - telling him that I will pay by my card it is much cooler! It makes your day. Obviously I am not giving you the bad news. 

70 days of visiting the customer you pretty much get it. I would honest enough say that we say that this is the not part of the design, If anything else it would be part of the bug. But it helped us a lot. 

Something that we tried now consciously to do that even when we set up installation, however small the installation is we ensure that for a  25 days we will visit the customer every alternate day. To a point the customers starts asking why are you not handling over the solution to us. There are a the couple of features on the card which we do not hand over because you want the customers to realize, otherwise he will never gets into the operation. We continue to visit - Till he says why you are coming so often, it is at that point that we complete the installation and at that time we handover. 

It is at that point of time that you understand lot of things which are going over there. First and foremost you know we need to know what the points of expansion in the business are.  It is not to understand the customer business, but it is to understand where our future points of expansion are. It’s a small installation one is I can say god has given me small installation to this place. Other is to look at it and say where can I expand his business and in the process expand myself also. So, it helps us in the 25 days to understand where we can be, where the solution has to move, what are the kind of thing. So, we added a couple of solutions, which are totally not part of payment in this process when we understood from the customer, so it helps us there, for us it is a big thing, even it is painful we will have to visit the customer first 25 days at least every alternate day. Obviously it is a big installation we will have to park as on there of 4,5,6,7 hours a day. In the process we understand good amount of thing of the customer and that tells us what are the feature sets that we need to have? what is the pain points? what is the future expansion that can happen?. You pretty much bit understand the flow of transaction, whose blocking the process, whose helping the process, who are your early adopters. So there is lot of things that you understand at this point of time. That kind of helps us to define the features set.  

MandE: Lot of aspiring entrepreneurs have questions on funding so – could you tell us how you organize your funding? 

Shrinivas: As a background I think we lost about 5 and half months of time on funding. Before we had gone off this entire round, there were three things that we ensured. 

The first thing we said was at all points of time have sufficient capital to run the business one mistake should not turn the game. That helps because both of us are experience professionals to that extent we had sufficient of payments so that we could spend on the company. 

That the second what we did was we said that as founders may be will not pick up money from company as in charges but as founders we also will never cross a particular limit – that is we would not get into a situation of good money of the bad money. We drew a line of what you would invest. We had friends and family money always as a backup, there are commitment from friends and family due to us. Third we were in touch with some couple of angels who were really helpful in the whole process. 

Thanks to a confluence of things we wanted to pick up our first funding from NSRCEL, that got delayed extremely and the mistake that we made and this is the second big mistake that we made  one was obviously the whole process of super validation and seeking over the customers and customers starting of everything. This is the second mistake that we made was we didn’t know when to  say no to NSRCEL money and actually go to the angle who was pretty much saying come and take the money. Because he was happy with the traction and he didn’t wanted us to die for lack of money. I think we did a mistake there. Yeah, it didn’t kill us it hurt us but all that were same mistakes, something that will carry forward from this wrong.  One was the complete validation phase we kept on validating. Second one we were also turning all the stones to figure out where we can find funding. Because we knew that some time we would be going for big amount of funding. So one of the things that we did was we started looking out for money not   asking for money but looking out for money before there was a need. We are happy that point of time because crux comes to crux we can get about 10-12 months of money almost in weeks time into our bank account but do you want that No. No we don’t want that because - like ambulance coming to you early is good thing but actually calling it is early is not a good thing.

MandE: In the discussion you did mentioned about first mistake waiting for a customer. Could you just tell us bit about that?

Shrinivas: We have three first customers all three of them like the product. All three of them are saying ya let’s do it. So, we are wearing the bride’s maid dress and marriage is not happening. 

Were we doing something wrong? Actually to say we are not doing anything wrong - we are good thing, we are adding value to the customers and customer are saying we are interested in you but guess what he is interested in his business I mean he is running his primary business. And there are days when I would to get frustrated and lets pick up the phone and like you know lets pursue and Hari would stop me , and there are days he would do that and I would stop him. We were like bride’s maid for for four and half months. 

Thats heck of lot of time, I mean like you know when you have product ready, everything is ready with you and you are dying to start of the race. And dam referee is not shooting the gun!. 

So you start wondering what’s happening. I don't know unlike the funding part of which doesn’t mentioned is the second mistake which where we clear learning in terms of to do next time when we have a situation like this. Here I don’t know what to do? Thankfully, I have never been in the state again. Its learning but I don’t know I will apply it next time.

MandE: What is your message for other aspiring entrepreneurs?

Shrinivas: I don’t know, whether we are to pass messages and give advice we need to have bank balance - Bank balance that has come from this operation.

When you look back at whole journey right from the stage of  validating  the idea to this point of  time where we are saying hey we are doing X number of transactions that represent a valid like high number of  transactions per month kind of thing. The sheer number people would want to help you is phenomenal and to anybody who doesn’t start off and cannot understand what I am talking about - because number of people who are likely to laugh at you, and declare as you public hazard, trying to kill you by laughter for having propounded such a silly idea is so miniscule compared  to the number of guy who would actually go on a limb and help you with the things like where find a customer, where to find the technology help you on their area expertise, giving a general bit of advice, maintain your operations. 

It is phenomenal, for example I have friend of mine sitting in UAE and writing major amount of code for me for free. Why because somehow people will always help somebody who is taking a risk. It’s something that we always discount. It is when you start off that you realize - there are some really nice people who really love to help anybody who are taking risks. 

I call it good luck that will not be a part of business plan but ones you are start off their bound to be huge amount of good luck. There are I mean like there are lot of people who would like to help you. It is very heartening thing, it’s very non-monetary payoff for the whole thing, obviously in the start of thing talk about non-monetary pay off.

MandE: Thank you once again for being in this interview. Thank you.