Bootstrapping a Technology Product Company from India: Sachin Bhatia, Founder of Ameyo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now we are in 2006. What happens next?

Sachin Bhatia: We went to the Philippines in 2006. By 2017, the Philippines was a repeatable market for us. We hired a local team there. Things were going well and we were growing. For the first time, we met with industry leaders.

I remember having a conversation with the founder of DAX, which later sold to IBM. They later became a VC. They have been a guiding force for us, but they never invested. BPO is a small market. The tank is really small. All our business has been on BPO. Why would we want to diversify at this stage when it’s growing so well?

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue point at this point when you were having this conversation?

Sachin Bhatia: $1.5 million. 

Sramana Mitra: So you had about 75 customers?

Sachin Bhatia: Yes. In hindsight, that’s the best advice that we got because today, 95% of our business happens out of enterprises and not BPO. We did some ground-up analysis of how many BPOs exist.

Let’s say that there are about 300,0000 agents. We said, “This cannot get us to a really large scale even if we take a 40% market share.” At that time, the other big trend that was happening was that a lot of telephony was moving towards voiceover IP. That was becoming a popular protocol.

There were all these questions about contacts and moving to other channels. This time we said, “What will an enterprise require and how can we serve a mid-to-large enterprise which would have a more diversified requirement?”

The challenge that we faced was that we couldn’t scale it too much. We had the whole platform. We had written Contacts, an inter-application, as a dialer and an inbound contact center. We started thinking that we need something that is much more flexible.

Once you go to an enterprise environment, other channels come in and we have to integrate with 10 other applications. How would that work? That was the first time that the concept of Ameyo was born. This was late 2007. Ameyo is also derived from Sanskrit. It means boundless.

The idea was that you don’t have a point product, but you have something that is fluid. You go to an enterprise and make sure that enterprise requirements can be met. We got our first enterprise customer in 2008. They are still our customers today. They are a fairly large stockbroker in India. 

Sramana Mitra: You, more or less, figured out that there was going to be a notion of the multi-channel contact center for the enterprise and you decided that you were going to re-architect the product for that need. Is that accurate? 

Sachin Bhatia: There were three triggers. First, there will be more channels. Second, enterprises would require a platform that can integrate quickly. The third trend is connected with the voice over IP. All of it was going to move to the cloud, so how would you scale on the cloud? Those were the three triggers for us to re-architect the platform. 

Sramana Mitra: You figured out the cloud trend in 2007

Sachin Bhatia: Yes, we knew in 2007. There were a few players in the US. We were reading about what was happening in the global space. I remember a company called Sizemind. We met in the Philippines. They were trying to enter India, but of course, we didn’t allow them to enter.

They were doing okay in the Philippines, and we competed with them a lot there. They were an inspiration for us to move to the cloud if voice over IP is involved. They gave us the idea that this would go on the cloud very fast. 

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to your early customer adoptions with that vision of the enterprise product?

Sachin Bhatia: The first customer that we had was Multidollar Securities. They were using Aspect at that point in time. They were looking at a unique use case of a relationship manager in a stockbroking firm using a contact center software where they can talk to multiple people at the same time.

He could talk to multiple people on software that is connected to a headset. That was the challenge that was given to us. We said, “We could have one agent connected to two or three people at the same time.” There was another unique use case. They said, “Could you do a PLC?” We said yes.

Later on, we completely replaced all their customer servers. That is the story of our first customer. It was a little peculiar. That was not the product that had a product-market fit, but the platform got an entry there. From there, we were able to acquire a few Indian enterprises.

Around this time, we realized that enterprise sales are done through large system integrators, and it’s hard because the sales cycles are very long. We were lucky because during this time in India, there was a consumer internet revolution happening. We got a lot of our enterprise customers at companies like Meru, Flipkart, and Ola.

The second wave of growth for Ameyo happened out of the consumer internet more than enterprises. By the end of the four-year journey from 2007 to 2012, most of the business growth was happening from these modern consumer internet companies.

These were young founders who were very passionate. They were tech-aware and didn’t have legacy in mind. We were able to convert them quickly. Today, 70% of the funded internet companies are using Ameyo. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping a Technology Product Company from India: Sachin Bhatia, Founder of Ameyo
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