Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do the US companies find you or how do you find them?

Anjan Pathak: Three years ago, we started content marketing. We were not sure how to market. We had questions in our minds, “From Guwahati, how do we reach out to the world?”

What we found was that there is this thing called content marketing or blogging. We started hiring good writers. We have good writers and designers in this part of the world. Initially, it was just content. We started about three years back. We are quite good at SEO.

After two and a half years, we have gotten a million visitors every month. We just reached that last December. Last year around this time, we only had 100,000 visitors. It is 10x now. We are hoping that we will have 10 million visitors around this time next year.

We are in the top three HR blogs in the world. You can search anything around employee engagement, and we will come out. That is the magic of content marketing. People find us because they want to learn about employee engagement, rewards, and health.

The fourth product is a product called Pulse. That product is not being sold very well.  We have four products in our employee engagement, and we are writing anything around employment. We are trying to help the HR community.  We have learned to make sure that we are on top and we use SEO and employ good writers. For starters, there are multiple SEO companies, such as the SEO agency in Sydney, that can provide you with the right tactics that can help make your business soar.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of US companies are coming to you for this product? Is it larger technology companies? What are you seeing in the inbound?

Anjan Pathak: In India, it’s very good, because we have a brand. In the US, it’s not easy, but I think it’s changing. Google came to us saying, “We want the employee parts.” Whoever is searching the internet will find us.

Sramana Mitra: This employee engagement app that you are talking about, did Indian IT companies who are already your clients deploy your product?

Anjan Pathak: Mostly Indian companies are taking us, and then they are pushing the US counterparts to take us. As I mentioned, we have companies like Deloitte who are now our customers. Initially, the Indian team was talking to us, but now some of the US counterparts are also talking to us. It’s not converted yet. 

Sramana Mitra: How much subscription revenue are you doing? 

Anjan Pathak: In the US, we are not doing subscription revenue yet. It’s very small right now. In India, it may be a crore rupees (~$137K) every year. 

Sramana Mitra: When did you start this?

Anjan Pathak: The subscription is only about two years old. It’s only part of Vantage Rewards. We could not do a subscription in Vantage Perks. Vantage Fit is a pure subscription model. We are hoping that it will pick up in the future. 

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