I worked for a MNC for past 5 years, i quit this April and started dabbling with new technologies and platforms, with the intent to create a SaaS. As a person who is interested in startup, this article gives me a lot of hope.
On the back of your experiences, I think I feel that maybe I shouldn't feel as discouraged.
Would love to hear more about your journey and the problems you conquered.
Good luck going international!
Actually, things have improved a lot and in fact the Government is now doing pretty good things in trying to encourage startups, especially the Karnataka and Kerala Governments, where they have setup separate funds for startups.
Space may be a little bit of problem with regulation. But with education startups, you shouldn't have too many issues.
I will write a blog post soon on our learnings in the past 3 years.
Just wondering what ideas you have on start up's in the Space Industry.
Is there something specific you are aiming at?
The main problem was that although everyone was very excited, to the point of telling me that I'd be crazy not to enter this space (double-meaning intended) in India right now, they also told me to be ready to rip my hair out and scream, not because the startup ecosystem isn't ready for it, but because government regulations are opening things up VERY slowly. People were telling me that nothing will happen within 5 years, possibly 10, so it's a BIG time investment and effort to tussle with government.
I'm still really excited at the ideas I have, because I think they can promote commercial and social use of satellite technology in India to tackle a wide range of problems that my market research indicated are current and real.
[1] http://spaceupindia.org/?page_id=115 [2] http://dhruvaspace.com/
Great work and courage, to follow the path to profitability without external funding. Cheers!!! and best of all lucks going forward.
And also wish you best of luck for the next year!
The KooKoo platform is similar to Twilio and allows developers to develop their own innovative voice apps.
Cloudagent.in is a full featured cloud based contact center and this helps businesses run their contact center operations.
Bizphone.in is a virtual PBX/receptionist product and helps companies get a virtual PBX on the cloud.
So though KooKoo is aimed at developers, Cloudagent and BizPhone are aimed at SMEs and we have adapted a separate sales strategy to sell those products. India is a high touch eco system and hence our sales strategy involved both inbound marketing and feet on street.
For KooKoo there have been many innovative use cases, including missed call marketing, developers integrating into various CRMs, integrating voice into their social media strategies and using phone numbers as a tracking system for their ads.
Congrats. That's quite a neat achievement! There seems to be a bunch of companies quietly plodding away and doing good like this out here.
Would love to see what kind of margins are you hitting, but I guess that would be asking for too much. Quick back-of-the-envelope scribble says you could probably be doing 1-1.5 cr in profit before taxes etc. etc..
A question you can answer: What kind of mix are you seeing in the customer base - digital/non-digital, SME/Large Enterprises?
Digital:60% Non-Digital:40%
SME:90% Enterprises:10%
Obviously, though the number of Enterprise customers are less, their pie in the revenue is much more as they pay a lot :)
I hear from friends that are from India / Pakistan of slow internet speeds, access limitations and general bandwidth restrictions - I assume this also plays a part in how big your target audience is, and with the limited speeds / bandwidth available I guess it makes pitching the product slightly harder?
Though more than the speed of Internet, the telecom regulations play a large part in the solutions provided. For example, VOIP is still not legal in India for end to end communications. So, depending on the regulations our market size may vary.
And since many SMEs in India who are our target market are not Internet savy, our marketing efforts do become slightly harder and we have to rely on more traditional sales.
