Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were working at Ultisource when you negotiated with Indian Railways?

Ankush Sabharwal: Yes. In the appraisal cycle when I was about to quit the company, I got the highest rating. I was Group Manager that time. When you’re the manager’s manager, you hardly get the highest rating in appraisals.

Sramana Mitra: You managed to maintain quality of work while you were bootstrapping your other company. There is a particular question I’m asking. When you negotiated with Indian Railways to implement CoRover, did you still have the job?

Ankush Sabharwal: Yes, I had the job.

Sramana Mitra: How much of the product was ready?

Ankush Sabharwal: The product was in its nascent stage.

Sramana Mitra: How did you win the Indian Railways deal?

Ankush Sabharwal: Many companies reached out to them. When people were saying that it would take them six months to one year to create the virtual assistants, we went with a ready product. Even from that time, it took around one to one and a half years to go live. We surprised them when we went to them to talk about our company. We also said we will not charge. I was not so keen at that time to make money.

Sramana Mitra: It was not ready for primetime.

Ankush Sabharwal: Correct. Now consumers and companies are very liberal and they’re okay for their VA’s to be wrong. Earlier it wasn’t the case. If we give wrong answer, people will take the screenshot and go to Twitter. Lots of companies have apprehensions. We never gave the answer. You ask a question. We will give you most appropriate related questions. You click on those questions and get the answer. Even if you were 99% sure, we were not giving the answer.

A user would ask if they can carry a pet in the train. We will not give the answer. We say, “Do you mean you want to know the process of carrying a pet in the Indian Railways?” The user will say yes and then we show the answer.

Sramana Mitra: Who is building this technology? Were you building the technology?

Ankush Sabharwal: We had a lot of friends who contributed. We had outsourced to a small company. I was not full-time and we didn’t have a full-time team.

Sramana Mitra: There are other founders involved.

Ankush Sabharwal: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: They were full-time?

Ankush Sabharwal: None of us was full-time.

Sramana Mitra: This is a good point. We have companies where there are five founders and everybody is doing it part-time. One of them was asking me the other day about my guidance of how to transition to a full-time team. I said one by one. Not all need to quit their day jobs at once. At what point did Indian Railways pay you?

Ankush Sabharwal: We told them not to pay us. We gave it to them for free. We created four phases in the journey of our company to achieve our vision. Phase one was our product would be ready when we have a hundred million users. AI platforms are not just a set of algorithms. The data is very important. Engineers and students are very smart. People can create algorithms overnight. Sometimes you see that the better algorithms are open source.

Data is required. Even if you gave them free forever, that would have been fine because we would make our platform better and get good PR. IRCTC asked us how we will make money. We said we’ll do ads. They were okay with that. They wanted to share that revenue also. They’re also making money with our virtual assistant because we were monetizing with ads.

Sramana Mitra: You Google AdSense into the application?

Ankush Sabharwal: Kind of. Then we partnered with many other ad providers. We did music and games. We were not getting subscription fees so we were finding ways to get services to the users alongside making revenues. We were sharing a major portion of our revenue with our client.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover
1 2 3 4 5 6