Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do that? What’s your algorithm for doing that?

Gaurav Rewari: Sometimes, it just comes from within. Sometimes, it’s through talking to people who’re willing to tell you things you don’t want to hear. For us, one of those was, “Make sure we crack this product market fit.” All too often, you have a situation where you fall in love with a product that you built and that you think people are going to need , but they don’t. Then it becomes execution.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not easy but it’s a little bit easier when you’re doing a B2B product or service. At this point, there is a tried and true process where you go talk to a hundred customers especially if you are a senior enough person. You can go sit down with a whole bunch of lead customers. You know how to listen to them and you know how to extract the nuggets out of that. You can pretty much validate an opportunity in the enterprise reasonably well. I’ve talked to many founders who have used that process and built very sizeable companies.

In SME also, it works to some extent. In the very small business world, it’s basically taking enterprise ideas and simplifying that.

What about team? You said you were doing partly here and in Bangalore. What is your experience in your Indian operation today because India is a very tough market right now from a hiring point of view?

Gaurav Rewari: We took a very different approach. We started that organization very early. It’s not a place where we just offshore mundane work. We actually do cutting-edge R&D work there. We have recruited folks who are very seasoned, very experienced to form part of the fabric of the company. We opened that organization within a couple of weeks of getting started here.

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you have?

Gaurav Rewari: Right now, we’re about 75.

Sramana Mitra: Your VP Engineering is here or there?

Gaurav Rewari: We have our Head of Engineering here. We have a country head who’s got engineering roots. Because we have apps and platform, we have two engineering heads.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s a very engineering-rich organization.

Gaurav Rewari: That’s how we started off. Now, we’re really building out our sales and marketing organization.

Sramana Mitra: It’s going to get into a channel play soon.

Gaurav Rewari: Yes, in the latter part of 2015, we’ll start to work the channel more. Fundamentally, it’s going to be direct sales because the Global 10,000 companies is a higher touch model.

Sramana Mitra: That’s exactly where the Accentures and the KPMGs are going to help you do that.

Gaurav Rewari: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to share with your story?

Gaurav Rewari: One thing I’d say is what we’ve come to believe is analytics is a large space. It’s very crowded. It’s very jargon-rich. What we saw in the top-tier of the analytics segment is there’s a bill versus buy divide. You can either choose to buy BI tools and then stand up the whole data warehouse. Then there’s alternatives for certain domains, which are buy alternatives like Hyperion. We think that in the age of the cloud, the packaged BI apps play is actually very compelling because it is consistent with the psychology of the customer who has purchased the underlying cloud application operational application whether it’s a Salesforce.com or a ServiceNow.

Sramana Mitra; I think the enterprise is shifting to the cloud at a gigantic pace right now. It’s a matter of time when everything is going to shift into the cloud. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify
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