Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the business model? 

Anjan Pathak: It’s very simple. Samsung might have a new phone on their website. They want to sell it directly to corporate employees, but they cannot. They need a medium to market themselves, so they give the deal or coupon to us which can be redeemed on their website. 

Sramana Mitra: Does Samsung pay you for this?

Anjan Pathak: Yes, Samsung gives us a commission for every sale. 

Sramana Mitra: Samsung gives commissions and then Infosys gives you what? Do they subscribe to a benefit service or package of some sort?

Anjan Pathak: We don’t charge our corporate customers. 

Sramana Mitra: So you only charge the brands that market through you?

Anjan Pathak: Correct. 

Sramana Mitra: In 2013, you went back to Guwahati and joined Vantage Circle?

Anjan Pathak: That is correct. I joined as a co-founder, because I had already invested a lot. 

Sramana Mitra: Are you currently the CEO?

Anjan Pathak: I am the CTO. There are no real external investors even now. It’s just friends and family who have invested in the company. In 2013, I invested quite heavily. I invested about £100,000. That is the last biggest investment that we had in the company. 

Sramana Mitra: Is it all in Guwahati? 

Anjan Pathak: Now it is almost all in Guwahati. We have 89 people in Guwahati right now. Employee perks were not making us any money; it was the employee rewards. 

Sramana Mitra: Hold on. We are doing an entrepreneur journey story, so back to 2013 and start telling me what happened sequentially. 

Anjan Pathak: In 2013, we started having these corporate clients. It was quite easy to get into the corporate market at that time because we were the first mover. We had Infosys and HCL followed by Deloitte and Cognizant in 2014.

By 2015, we had all the major corporates with us as clients. We were the only ones providing corporate perks in India then. Now, I think there is another one. 

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenues were you doing in 2015 with all these corporates as your partners?

Anjan Pathak: It was small. We were only making less than a million at that time.

Sramana Mitra: But you managed to get from 2013 to 2015 with a million dollars?

Anjan Pathak: It was about a million. 

Sramana Mitra: That is pretty good for a bootstrapped company. That is not bad. What happens after 2015?

Anjan Pathak: In 2015, Infosys came in and they said, “Why don’t you give rewards?” We had this concept called Vantage points which is basically a wallet. We have this concept where people get fantasy points if they do some online shopping.

It’s like a cashback from online shopping. We tied up with all these big e-commerce companies like Flipkart and Amazon. If someone buys through us, then we give some cashback in terms of Vantage points. In that same Vantage point, Infosys said that they can offer five rewards as well.

This means that they want to give a certain kind of rewards to certain employees for doing a good job. They already had some programs running like that, but they wanted to make it detailed. The idea was simple. They used to give us a CSV file. The same thing is still running by the way.

The idea was they would give us these points through employee IDs and we’d just upload them. They can redeem the vouchers on our platform. Our main business model is getting people to redeem the vouchers through our website in exchange for Vantage points. 

Sramana Mitra: Let me understand this. Infosys said that they wanted to contribute to the Vantage points program as an employee reward. They would create vouchers that would get translated to Vantage points through a digital system and then they would give you a list of which employees get it and you load those employee wallets with Vantage points. Is that correct?

Anjan Pathak: Correct. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle
1 2 3 4 5 6