1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: Sensible Softwares, Pune, India

Sensible Softwares is a 1M/1M premium company that launched in August 2009 with its flagship product BootStrapToday. BootStrapToday is an application life cycle management platform for software development teams. In just 60 seconds, software development teams can get started managing the life cycles of their projects.

In any software development undertaking, 30% to 40% of a developer’s effort goes into fixing bugs. That percentage is even larger for maintenance projects. The cost of fixing a bug increases exponentially with the time it takes to detect it, and writing bug-free code is impossible. But the cost of fixing a bug can be reduced by detecting bugs earlier.

With built-in intelligence and automation, BootStrapToday helps software developers identify bugs earlier through data mining and analyzing source code commit histories and task histories. This early detection translates into cost savings and improved code quality.

Prior to founding Sensible Softwares, co-founder Anand Agarwal spent more than 10 years working with Geometric Ltd. in product life cycle management, where he handled large-scale sensitive PLM initiatives for clients such as BMW, TARGET, and Nissan. Prior to Geometric he worked for Cognizant in the insurance and banking department. He has lived and worked in Germany and the U.S. and earned his bachelor of technology from IIT Kanpur.

Co-founder Nitin Bhide has 15 years’ experience in software development. He has worked on a variety of projects such as CAD, machining software, client and server software, and computational geometry algorithms. While working at a previous organization, he was instrumental in developing ALM infrastructure by using a combination of open source and cost-effective commercial softwares. Bhide earned his master of technology degree in material sciences at IIT Mumbai.

Sensible Softwares’ third co-founder, Vishwajeet Singh, who earned a bachelor’s degree mechanical engineering from the Army Institute of Technology, has comprehensive experience in the ALM domain and played an important role in deploying ALM infrastructure for a previous organization.

There were few players already in the market working on similar models when Sensible Softwares started working on this idea. Some were expensive; some had a pay-per-user model. But none had built in intelligence to reduce the cost of software project development. Sensible Softwares believes that the future of application life cycle management lies in building intelligence on top of features. Sensible Softwares counts Assembla, Unfuddle, Codesion (recently acquired by Collabnet), and GitHub as direct competitors.

The founders believe that Sensible Softwares brings value through intelligence and automation, which facilitate early detection of bugs, improve code quality, and significantly reduce the overall cost of each software development project. The company’s architecture design takes advantage of web 2.0 to provide near-desktop performance on mobile devices. Sensible Softwares also offers customers a simple, rich user experience that the founders believe will foster quick adoption.

Sensible Softwares is trying to claim its share of an $867 million market. Again, the founders believe that they will be able to claim a significant portion of this market because they offer a product that is affordable for small and medium business owners. Sensible Softwares has service tiers that begin at Bronze ($9/month for five users) and progress to Silver ($29/month for 20 users), Gold ($49/month for 40 users), Platinum ($99/month for 100 users) and Platinum Plus ($199/month for unlimited users). The company also allows customers to pay on a monthly, quarterly, semiannual, or annual subscription basis.

Sensible Softwares targets software development teams at companies with one to 200 employees as well as freelance developers in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Though not yet profitable, the company does have 25 paying customers and earns approximately $500 per month. The website has between 13,000 and 15,000 unique monthly visitors.

The founders invested $12,000 of their own money to start Sensible Softwares in 2009. In 2011, the company received $250,000 in seed funding from an independent investor in Pune, India. With a validated product and interested prospects, the founders hope to secure $2 million in series A funding. The additional funds would allow Sensible Softwares to offer on-premises and private cloud products for enterprises and pursue customers in countries where the company currently has no presence.

The founders intend to use a variety of strategies, such as guerrilla marketing, SEO, targeted email campaigns, social media marketing, and several others to help Sensible Softwares increase its revenue and its reach.

Recommended Reading
The Future of Software Development is Here. Are You Ready Yet?
The 1M/1M Deal Radar 2010: Avatron Software
The 1M/1M Incubation Radar: Bizosys, Bangalore, India

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012