From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to come up with a product?

Manish Jethani: This is very interesting. We signed an agreement with one customer that if we deliver that product, they will pay us $50,000.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customer?

Manish Jethani: This was the largest food-tech delivery company in India. They were scaling hyper-fast. They didn’t have a team. After we got such strong validation, we started building the product. From my past learning, it was obvious that unless we have a very strong intent from the customer, we’re not going to build the product. The first version was out in four months. It didn’t have a lot of functionality. It wasn’t self-serve yet.

Sramana Mitra: What does that bring us up to?

Manish Jethani: This is towards the end of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still bootstrapped?

Manish Jethani: We got a million-dollar seed investment from Chiratae Ventures in India.

Sramana Mitra: You have a million dollars in funding. You have one enterprise customer. What happens in 2018?

Manish Jethani: We started acquiring customers every month.

Sramana Mitra: In India still?

Manish Jethani: The focus was not India. We just had the first few customers in India, so we could work closely with them. After the first six customers, it was all global.

Sramana Mitra: How were you acquiring global customers?

Manish Jethani: Content marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Content marketing got you the leads and you gave them some pilot to try. They would figure it out by themselves. You didn’t have to participate in that process?

Manish Jethani: We did a strange decision. We wanted the product to be so good that people should be able to use it without talking to anyone. If you’re trying to build a product from India, we will not have access to the sales team in all geographies. The experience has to be so simple and intuitive that it doesn’t require any sales involvement or implementation cycles.

For our business model to work, the product has to do its own selling. That required a lot more time to build the product, because, for every single edge case, we had to make it very simple and intuitive. In the initial stage, the scaling was slow. Once we crossed that critical majority, the growth has been phenomenal.

Sramana Mitra: You were getting these enterprise customers that gave you validation and customer relationships. At what point did the product stand on its own?

Manish Jethani: Towards the middle of 2020. We started to see that customers were signing up and using it and we didn’t have to do anything.

Sramana Mitra: Between the Chiratae round and that inflection point, was there any more funding?

Manish Jethani: We raised $8 million led by Surge, which is Sequoia’s acceleration program, along with a Singapore-based VC called Qualgro Ventures.

Sramana Mitra: That got you to the 2020 inflection point.

Manish Jethani: We didn’t have to use any of that money. We were still running through our million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2020 when you hit that inflection point? What was your revenue until that point and what did that do to the revenue after?

Manish Jethani: We were close to half a million up until that point. Our burn was very low. Towards the end of 2020, we were about close to a million dollars. After that, it was a completely different journey. In the next 14 months, we went from $1 million to $4.5 million. The number of customers went from 100 to 1,200 companies across 45 plus countries.

Sramana Mitra: What is the pricing model?

Manish Jethani: It’s usage-based pricing. You can start with a few hundred dollars a month. As your data consumption grows, you pay more.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other strategic element in your journey that we should discuss?

Manish Jethani: One thing that we’ve done right is we’ve taken a very coherent move around pricing, go-to-market, and product. This whole notion of getting to one million the fastest. One million is the milestone or a signal that you’ve figured out a model.

Sramana Mitra: Getting to one million is not enough; getting to one million with a high-velocity, repeatable, and scalable model can give you a trajectory to $200 million in five to seven years. If you have a few customers and made a million in revenue but it’s not repeatable and doesn’t have that velocity, it’s not going to scale the venture-scale growth.

Manish Jethani: Every decision we’ve made had that in mind. Customers were paying us $50,000, but we figured out that wasn’t our core ICP. Our core is the customers who can start small and grow up. After getting some of the enterprise customers, we said no to a lot of those. We felt that we were not best suited to serve them in a repeatable way. Saying no to certain types of revenues, which is hard, helped us stay focused.

Sramana Mitra: What about team?

Manish Jethani: We are now close to 200 people. Given the rapid growth, we launched our second product as well. The repeatability just doesn’t have to be on one product. The repeatability has to be on building multiple products for the same ICP.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent story! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani
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