Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have to deploy any kind of professional services to do that?

Gaurav Rewari: Just upfront for that period of three to five weeks. After that, the customer generally becomes self-sufficient unless there are some new modules that they want to start.

Sramana Mitra: Each deal is what? Several million dollars?

Gaurav Rewari: We can’t publicly disclose the pricing.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size are we talking about?

Gaurav Rewari: Not in the millions of dollars. It would be in hundreds of thousands.

Sramana Mitra: Per year?

Gaurav Rewari: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a direct sales model.

Gaurav Rewari: Yes. Probably in the latter part of 2015, we’ll start building out our channel.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, you have your own sales force.

Gaurav Rewari: Right. Just a couple of weeks ago, we added a VP of Worldwide Sales. He was the VP of Sales at a company called Egnyte.

Sramana Mitra: We know Egnyte quite well.

Gaurav Rewari: Prior to that, he was VP of Sales at Cisco. By latter part of 2015, we’ll start investing in growing our partner ecosystem as well.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your story that is strategic? I think your positioning is very interesting.

Gaurav Rewari: Thank you. On the positioning front, it was very telling. We felt that there was a bit of irony in this whole story. If you look at CFO, Head of Marketing, or Head of Sales, by and large are well-served. It’s a priority to deliver BI and analytics to those executives. If you look at the CIO, they don’t have any such tools to manage a pretty expensive and costly business.

Sramana Mitra: Increasingly more so.

Gaurav Rewari: Increasingly more so as the CIO becomes a partner and agent of change along with the CEO. The irony for us was that it is the CIO and the office of the CIO that has often built those BI systems for the other functions and yet, they don’t have one for themselves. What we felt was it would be very compelling to go to them with something that’s targeted at their needs and tailor-built for the business issues that any CIO and IT department faces.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the TAM for this?

Gaurav Rewari: TAM is, in the near term, the Fortune 10,000 because every single Fortune 10,000 company has analytics needs around how they manage services, deliver projects, and maintain assets.

Sramana Mitra: What is the low end of the Fortune 10,000? I’ve never heard of that.

Gaurav Rewari: This Fortune is an interesting word because you can put any number after that. Global 10,000 probably. We see companies that have revenues of $500 million to $600 million or more tend to have an IT department of sufficient complexity where just managing it through spreadsheets isn’t an option.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve just finished this Unicorn book and we just released it in January. We went through a huge research to understand what to put in that book because we have over 600 case studies. I chose 17 of those to put in the book. Of course, they were Unicorn companies but we have more Unicorn companies as well. I would say positioning is what determines whether you’re going to become a big company or not. Of course, there’s execution. Most survey execution will determine whether you’ll get there or not. TAM, business model, price model, sales model—I flopped them all under positioning. If you can get a strategy that aligns, that’s what really drives whether you’re going to be a highly-valued company or not.

Gaurav Rewari: It’s interesting you should say that. That segues into the first part of our conversation where you talked about this is as an opportunity to talk about what’s worked for you. I feel as I reflect back, you’re always never going to be able to do everything you want to do.

Sramana Mitra: All the more important to position on something that you can do and can do well.

Gaurav Rewari: That’s exactly right. You have to make tough choices and you have to really ask yourself, “There are a hundred things I’d love to do. Ten things I really need to do but there’s only two things that I need to identify that I just absolutely have to do.”

This segment is part 6 in the series : Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify
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