Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where is the domain knowledge for supply chain coming from in your team?

Suuchi Ramesh: My domain knowledge with supply chain is with respect to the data piece of it. Then of course I had the opportunity to study supply chain from a data standpoint with the companies that we had sold predictive data solutions to.

On the ground, I did not have supply chain knowledge. The executive and mid-level management that I invested in pre-Series A was all on the operations and supply chain side. I was the Head of Sales, the Head of Engineering, the Head of Product. 

Sramana Mitra: You were providing the vision of what the product was going to do during this period. 

Suuchi Ramesh: Correct. I spent my time on the product, sales, and engineering. We were able to get that first version of the product out by leveraging an offshore team and having fewer people here in Jersey. That is something I would recommend to others that are bootstrapping through the early years.

You could find some great developers overseas. I over indexed in the hiring of supply chain and operations folks. That’s the part that I didn’t know very well. Now that we have investors, we have executives in the team.

Sramana Mitra: Where did that first customer come from? Was it somebody you had a relationship with from a previous sales experience?

Suuchi Ramesh: We weren’t really selling the product. We didn’t want to commercialize our software for the first few years. That was something I was clear on. We had to build a differentiated product.

Our pitch was that we have a network of factories. We can get you speed to market. Now we are a global network of factories. One thing that I had experience with was having a database of contacts and A/B testing campaigns.

I would just sit down and A/B test subject lines and content. I would just shoot out a bunch of emails to a bunch of executives. That was how we got our first few customers. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the value proposition you were offering them?

Suuchi Ramesh: It was a sourcing platform that could eliminate the execution challenges that they were facing. It was speed to market. We would take away the risk and deliver on time.

Sramana Mitra: You offer to manufacture stuff through your network of factory contacts?

Suuchi Ramesh: That is correct. We are the player in between that would leverage our network of factories. We had the ability to move across categories. We didn’t own these assets, but we had access to these resources. You were able to deliver really fast. 

Sramana Mitra: Is that still the business you’re in? You parcel out manufacturing to a network of factories and deliver products for manufacturers.

Suuchi Ramesh: Today, we’re a subscription software or a software plus sourcing platform. At the beginning, we were just a sourcing platform. Today, Suuchi GRID is a core part of what we do. It’s a cloud-based, intuitive, end-to-end supply chain system. It empowers participation for everybody across the supply chain.

Today, the main model retailers in other industries can also subscribe. For those that need access to the sourcing platform, one of the features that can be turned on is access to our network of factories. The sourcing platform is one of the modules.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi
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