Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Udupi, Karnataka: Rohith Bhat’s Exhilarating Journey with Robosoft (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: These were projects that Apple gave you to build these apps?

Rohith Bhat: We had customers of our own. We built it for them. Apple gave us the SDK.

Sramana Mitra: This was very early. My question is how did you find clients to build products for the Apple App Store?

Rohith Bhat: Because it was new, some of our clients also felt that this might be something that might become big someday. They had apps on the Blackberry. For them, it was an interesting experiment. We also did not charge them the full money that we normally charge because it was something new. We were able to agree on something. The interesting thing was, back then, this whole thing of managing the apps was new to everyone.

Because we knew how to do it, we were uploading apps to the App Store. We were getting data. During the first few months, we had access to all this data. The initial downloads that we saw was phenomenal. Then we realized that there was something massive that was happening. We decided that we should probably shift our focus from desktop to mobile.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you come to that realization? What year was it when you had enough data to draw that conclusion?

Rohith Bhat: By the end of 2008. By September, we had enough data. As a company, we wanted to pivot from desktop to mobile. That was also the time when we decided to start two smaller companies. One was fornbuilding mobile games for the platform. The other was about building photo, video, and audio-related products. We were building for a lot of customers. Customers were very happy with it. We didn’t have any single customer in India until 2011.

Sramana Mitra: Arbitrage works much better for a foreign company.

Rohith Bhat: Exactly. Because we were doing all this work for other customers, we thought of building our own IT. That’s when we started two companies. One is called Global Delight. That was built with the thought of building photo, video, and audio products. The other company was called 99Games that was into building games for iPhone platform. Our first product for Global Delight was called Camera Plus. If you remember, the iPhone didn’t have optical zoom. We released an app that added digital zoom.

Sramana Mitra: It was using iPhone camera but providing feature functions through the app.

Rohith Bhat: Yes. People loved it. Then we built a digital flash. Our philosophy was about building something that is not in the iPhone camera and providing other functionalities like the filters. We went on evolving that for two years. At one stage, it was the number one camera product for more than 20 countries around the world. Robosoft was transitioning from providing services from the desktop to the mobile. Global Delight was building its own camera product. Then, you had 99Games.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Udupi, Karnataka: Rohith Bhat’s Exhilarating Journey with Robosoft
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