Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You have a wonderful positioning because anything that has a compliance angle to it has a very mission-critical purchase cycle. You must have experienced pretty high-velocity customer building.

Sarva Srinivasan: That’s correct. In parallel, we started building EZOPS. As part of our engagement, we were talking with the clients and their challenges. Oftentimes, it was just a lack of an end-to-end platform. It could be that I have the wrong data. Therefore, I’m not able to send the right information to the regulators. It could be that I have 10 different applications sending the same data and I can’t figure out what the right data is. These are very simple problems. 

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. How did you go from a services to a product business?

Dutt Chintalapati: Once we built out the services business, the client demand was, “We want you guys to handle the end-to-end.” In building out the services business, you have to have a lot of scale. Products is where you get a lot of value and scale. That’s something that we have done before and knew how to build it out. We transitioned very quickly. The clients were amenable to that. We launched with our first set of clients who co-developed the platform with us. Then we transitioned off. It was a good reference point. Slowly the word spread. We started converting some of the existing services clients.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to build the product?

Sarva Srinivasan: We started in 2016 of June. At the end of 2017, we had started tapering off in the advisory business. We got out of it fully by 2018. By that time, we had a run rate of $1.5 million ARR for the product. We felt confident that the product that we had built had a market. 

Sramana Mitra: You didn’t need services to deploy these products?

Sarva Srinivasan: We actually spent very little on services. One of the thesis is we wanted to build something that was truly self-service. The people that are helping in this process is the operations team. The operations folks were these banks and financial institutions. They all are dependent on technology teams to support their day-to-day lives.

We said we’ll build something that is self-service that can help them manage their day-to-day jobs. We use very little implementation as part of our deployment. The product is built as a cloud native platform. We deploy both on our SaaS platform and in-house at the client.

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. Very often, people need a lot of service to deploy a solution. It sounds like you did a really good job. 

Sarva Srinivasan: It was a conscious decision on our part. We really wanted to make the product self-serviceable. 22% of this year’s revenue will come from implementation services. We don’t do anything besides product and product-related at this time.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re in complete product mode now?

Sarva Srinivasan: Yes. 2019 onwards, we didn’t have any advisory revenue.

Sramana Mitra: How many people at the company at this point?

Sarva Srinivasan: In 2018, we were about 50. By then, we had started our office in San Francisco as well. In 2019, we grew to about 70 people. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati
1 2 3 4 5