1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With BV Jagadeesh, Managing Partner at KAAJ Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. Is there one that you have done from India that you would like to discuss a little bit?

BV Jagadeesh: Let me take Futura. They used to be employees of MindTree. They approached me through some common connection. They hadn’t started yet at that time. They were thinking of getting into this analytics space in heavy engineering areas. Even though they came from a services background, they had the desire to do a product business.

At that time, I was keen on supporting these Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to build these enterprise-class product companies. I knew there was going to be a challenge because they come from a services background. Just to give you a simple example, they didn’t even understand, at that time, the role of a product manager. They think that they understand what needs to be done because the company that is giving them the business has done the job of product management.

Bringing the need of the whole product management and slowly focusing on certain markets rather than boiling the ocean kind of thing, those were key. It’s been an interesting journey. We had to move that to the US because this is where the market for a product like that is. We did have some initial success in India, but the majority of our success comes from US and European countries.

Sramana Mitra: This Bootstrapping Products Using Services is a theme that we’ve done a lot of work on. We have case studies after case studies of successful companies. It requires focus and commitment to becoming a product company. This dichotomy of a first-time entrepreneur building a fat startup where product building requires investment, bootstrapping using services is one way that people are bridging that gap.

BV Jagadeesh: It is. What happens for a first-time entrepreneur is that fundraising is an issue. At the end of the day, the entrepreneur has the dream. That was the case for us when we started back then. What did we do? We started a services company on the side. The money that we get out of that is what we invest. Once we got to a stage where we’re $3 million in annual revenue is when the interest from investors happened.

Sramana Mitra: I’m very happy to hear from you that you have experienced that. We based the whole program around case studies. This Bootstrapping Using Services kept coming up. I really looked into that very carefully and put a methodology together. We see this all the time.

BV Jagadeesh: My advice to people who are coming from services backgrounds is that it’s doable. It’s a mind shift that they have to undergo. Make sure to emphasize the importance of product management and the focus of the few markets that you want to build the product for. In services businesses, it’s whatever comes. Here, you have to think clearly about what market you’re building this product for. That is where the exercise they need to go through. You don’t really have to depend on early-stage investments.

Sramana Mitra: The other thing that we see as a recurring problem is because technology is a comfort zone, people build all sorts of things. You need to build one thing well and sell it a lot. You don’t need that many products. You should be doing one thing and one thing well.

BV Jagadeesh: Exactly. I actually teach a course on entrepreneurship. My whole goal is to help the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With BV Jagadeesh, Managing Partner at KAAJ Ventures
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