Bootstrapping a Technology Product Company from India: Sachin Bhatia, Founder of Ameyo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I think the obsession in the US is misplaced. The methodology that we teach is to find the gap. Where is the gap where you can cost-effectively sell and have a good customer acquisition and not mindlessly chase after the US?

Sachin Bhatia: One should not believe that success in one market means success in another market. You have to learn how to crack that market. We were able to crack the US later on, but this time we did mid-market and said, “We are not going to rely on marketing.”

I’ll tell you a story about a company in the US. They used to be a company called Frontier Utilities out of Texas. It was later acquired by NextEra Energy which is headquartered in Florida. I was there last year. Frontier has been our customer for the last seven years.

They continued to use our product on-premise and they were being acquired by a company that was ten times the size of their company and they were using a software called Genesys. They told us, “Genesys is going to replace you guys.” So we said, “If you guys are open, we are going to make a presentation.”

I went to Texas last year and we were able to replace Genesys at one of the large companies in the US. You figure out what strength is. Strength is a platform that you created. You can deliver a cost-effective solution around the use cases that the customer requires in the engagement space. That has been our strength.

Sramana Mitra: There is one other thing that you should note from the Genesys experience. You have now figured out how to sell against Genesys. In your follow-on customer acquisition strategy, what would make sense is to go after Genesys customers and go use that pitch and those positioning points to those customers.

Sachin Bhatia: When we hired a team again for the US targeting the mid-market and not putting our eggs in that basket but experimenting with it very carefully, we realized that there is a segment of people still using the legacy platforms.

There is a simple replacement strategy for that. We are going to pick up 500 accounts and just make sure that we get 10 of them. That’s about a $10 million business for us. 

Sramana Mitra: The five million that you had raised in 2015, who was the investor?

Sachin Bhatia: There is a private equity player in India called Forums Synergies. It is run by some experienced folks from Tyco Electronics and Madura Garments. They are the fund managers. We required that because we were primarily an on-premise, profit-centric company rather than a pure SaaS company.

The primary question that people asked us is, is it growing and is it profitable rather than just asking if it is growing. We liked how our investors were in line with what we were thinking. In the US experiment, we said, “If we are able to crack this, we might be able to increase the valuation but if not, we are still going to be a profitable company.”

That is what has happened. If anybody is reading this article and they are thinking about a bootstrapped profitable company, that is the right way to do it. That is the right way to grow a business.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping a Technology Product Company from India: Sachin Bhatia, Founder of Ameyo
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