Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani (Part 5)

Sramana: In 2006 you were close to a million dollars in revenue and had a staff of 10 people. What happened next?

Pallav Nadhani: Over the years I had received a lot of requests to build new features and capabilities in Fusion Charts. Instead of building them inside of Fusion Charts, we built a new product. That allowed us to monetize it better. Not every customer was going to need such features, but those who were would be willing to pay for the additional time we spent developing it.

Sramana: What is your product portfolio, and what is the pricing of its various components?

Pallav Nadhani: We have three different products. One is meant for developers who can integrate charting with software applications. That has been the bread and butter of the company for the last seven years. We used to sell this for $15. Today it is $199 or $13,000 for the reseller license. Enterprise licensing goes up to $100,000.

We have two more product lines. One is for SharePoint users who need visualization capabilities on that platform. That product line is priced at $1,299 per server. Our third product is for non-technical users. This product is for people who need better visualization than what can be found in PowerPoint. That product line will be a one-time fee of $49 per user.

Sramana: How have you done product management? How do you know what to build?

Pallav Nadhani: We have been lucky. We have 450,000 users, and they give us product requests directly. Once they tell us what they want, we can integrate it into the main product, or we can determine that it is worthy of becoming its own product if we have 200,000 users asking for the same feature.

Sramana: What happened with the business after 2006?

Pallav Nadhani: A lot of the large enterprises started buying more of our products owing to the diversification in our product lineup. We set pricing for enterprises that includes enterprise support. That also required me to ramp up the team on the support and documentation side. Prior to 2009, I was hesitant to hire anyone on the support side and required the developers to provide support. That ensured customers received answers that were direct and to the point. From 2006 to 2009, we took a series of small steps, and those steps are what enabled us to start getting traction from enterprise customers.

Sramana: Did you proactively sell to enterprises, or were they referral and inbound inquiries?

Pallav Nadhani: Marketing helped us here. We do not have cold calls, but we have a strong marketing arm. We push our product primarily in online channels. Our users are technical users and managers, which means it is easy to figure out the keywords they are searching for. As long as we know that, we can make sure we get in front of them. The majority of our keyword searches are directed at our brand, which tells us that people know what they are looking for.

Another key for us is our documentation. It is well written, and people can get started in 15 minutes. We have a lot of ready-to-use examples and best practices included in our documentation. We guarantee that if you cannot get started in 15 minutes, we will refund your money. This is key because developers are always under pressure to get their products out the door.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani
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