Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you position against a Huddle? We’ve done the Huddle story for instance. SharePoint is a well-known product. Tell me how you position against each of them. The reason I ask you is because we try to give our readers a lot of exposure on positioning. If you could help us think through how you are doing your positioning, that is something that I want my readers to understand and learn from.

Ajay Patel: On day one, we said we’re going to target the legal market. Indirectly, what that meant was we’re going to have to build the most intense security you can think of. Security has always been at the heart of everything we do. That’s application security and infrastructure security. When we were trying to decide which vertical was next and how to position ourselves, we realized we’re going to tick-up 80% of the competition if we stick to highly-regulated and security-conscious industries. We’re now branching out to public sector government work where you’ve got to tick every security box. Otherwise, you’re not even allowed in the door.

From our positioning perspective, we’re enterprise and we’re file sharing but we’re very focused on the verticals that we target. We have industries outside of those verticals because of inbound interest from our marketing. If I’m hiring a sales engineer or a salesperson, I’m hiring people from that industry. Everyone working the legal vertical today either used to work in legal technology or used to work in a law firm. When you’re talking to people and they get your business, it makes all the difference in the world. That’s why our vertically aligned strategy makes sense. We’ve just launched in financial services. They understand the market and the problems and it makes a world of difference.

Sramana Mitra: What you said is basically focusing on a segment where your functionality and capabilities are of value. It makes perfect sense.

Ajay Patel: In terms of software, you may pivot from one to the next because suddenly there’s an opportunity. One thing we’ve made sure with our technology is, if you look at the core of our platform, there’s nothing legal-specific about it. The legal-specific comes in when we do the integration, but the platform could just as easily apply to legal, financial, public sectors, and media. The platform is very generic in its capabilities. We made sure that there’s nothing industry-specific about the core platform itself.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ
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