Bootstrapping a Technology Product Company from India: Sachin Bhatia, Founder of Ameyo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who was the first customer who validated the contact center idea.

Sachin Bhatia: She used to run a BPO in New Delhi. She is a very good friend now. I remember my meeting with my three colleagues. We were trying to decide who was going to pick up sales. I was chosen to do it because I talk better than the others. I went ahead and had a meeting and understood the problem.

At that point when I was meeting her, we actually didn’t have a product. I was just validating the concept. She said, “How much?” I didn’t know what price I was going to say so I replied, “How much are you willing to pay?” She gave me a price but told me that she needed to see a demo.

I told her, “I don’t have a demo right now, but I can get back in two weeks and we can demo the product.” We coded the product within two weeks. That’s how we got our first customer. 

Sramana Mitra: In terms of positioning, what did you learn from her? What was she using? How much was the cost? I presume that you were selling on the basis of total customer ownership?

Sachin Bhatia: At this time, we had no contacts for the product, but we were trying. A lot of them were still on-premise. For anybody buying contact enterprise software, there was only one software company and then you had to buy the hardware which was three times the price of the software. If you are buying the software for $100, then you were paying $300 for the hardware.

What we did was different. Let’s say the cost of ownership for that product is about $400. I could say that I can give you the whole solution for $200. I could still make $150 because the hardware only costs $50. I could sell at a higher price and still keep the cost of ownership low.

We build it on a Lynx box. It was a simple transaction solution. We started taking up small and medium business in India – BPOs especially. Enterprise sales happened much later in 2008. That’s what I would call the second phase of our journey. The first phase was this product. We just started selling. I started setting up teams in all parts of India.

In 2006, we started an office in the Philippines, because we realized that they were following what India was doing. We started early in the Philippines and we realized that it’s a very attractive market for BPOs. We set up our company there. At that time, we were already profitable. 

Sramana Mitra: I have one question. This first million that you reached by selling to small BPO businesses, how many customers constituted your million revenue?

Sachin Bhatia: I’ll have to estimate because it was such a long time ago. We used to sell $20,000 per customer. The first million would take about 50 customers.

Sramana Mitra: The first 50 were all in India?

Sachin Bhatia: Yes, these were all in India. We were making sure that we could talk to as many people because we knew that this would sell. It was a simple sale to make because our competition was really expensive at that time. 

Sramana Mitra: Who were the competitors that you were displacing there or winning against?

Sachin Bhatia: The company still exists but they are not doing it anymore. There is a company called Aztec Software. There used to be a few local Asian companies. Parsec software was popular at that time. Those were the companies that we were seeing. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping a Technology Product Company from India: Sachin Bhatia, Founder of Ameyo
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