Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: £50,000 is a high-touch sale.

Ajay Patel: It’s a high-touch sale. When I look at the customer lifetime value, that’s what’s actually impressive. We’ve compared sales. Who are the clients we’ve had in January 1, 2012? What do they make? What do the same clients make in January 2013? Our average cohort is 25%. The same clients spend on average 25% more with us by increased usage. That certainly helps the growth.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about your team. You said it was you and your co-founder Veenay. Then you hired a COO. What else have you done with the team since that time?

Ajay Patel: Back in 2001, we had five people in the UK. We probably had about 20 out of India who were all in development. Now, we have 150 people with 95 in India and 55 outside. This is when you start hiring dedicated sales people. I think what works for us is pre-sales and sales. You’ve got your sales people who are responsible to reopen doors and manage the deal itself. Then you’ve got pre-sales who are the product experts.

Sramana Mitra: The sales engineers.

Ajay Patel: Yes. Their job is to convince the client that this is the right product and the solution to their business problems. We first launched in the US back in 2011 with just one man. Today, US has 10 people. London has 35 people. Amsterdam, Germany, and Australia have four, two, and one, respectively.

Sramana Mitra: How is the business split? Where is most of the business?

Ajay Patel: Currently, the UK accounts for 65% of revenues. US brings in about 18% of revenues. Mainland is doing 13% to 14% and the rest is Australia. Those mixes are changing. US is increasing year on year while the UK is coming down, which is exactly what we want.

Sramana Mitra: My next question is about competition. Now that you have quite a bit of market experience, what does the competition look like? When you’re in deals, whom are you competing with?

Ajay Patel: One of our USPs is that there are many products but we’re integrated. At the basic level, we’re compared with people like IntraLinks on the transactional file sharing front. We compete with people like Box for general collaboration. The biggest competitor, at the end of the day, is SharePoint. I’d say about 20% are SharePoint replacements.

Sramana Mitra: Who else is trying to do SharePoint replacements in the same sector that you are going after?

Ajay Patel: Many players in what we do are quite horizontally spread in terms of the industries. You’d argue that Huddle and Box are trying to do that. You’ve always got the SharePoint Online, which is still early days at the moment. They’re getting there. In the transactional space, you’ve got IntraLinks that is trying to become an enterprise provider.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ
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