Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Let’s go back to when you started the company. What was the premise of the company? What were you going to do?

Ganesh Shankar: In my prior life, I was a product manager. I jokingly say this to my team, that I don’t have any typical startup garage or dorm room story where a bunch of friends under the same dorm came up with an idea and then take it to the market. It was nothing like that. The three of us – my co-founders Sundar and Shankar, and I – all three of us were working at the same company. I was a product manager. Sundar was the engineering manager and Shankar was the implementation manager. We were all in the process of helping our sales team.

As a product manager, I was helping my sales team write Request for Proposal (RFP). I was the subject matter expert for the product, Sundar for technology and security, and Shankar for implementation and training. We all contributed to the sales team, but my boss, the chief product officer, never appreciated my work or gave me a pay raise. It always felt like we were doing charity work for the sales team. I couldn’t say no because RFP was the breadwinner for the company. If I refused, we would lose the deal.

I estimated that 30-35% of my time went into sales support activities, leaving only 65% for my key performance indicators like product management, release management, and sprint planning. This was a real hindrance, but I couldn’t say no. In 2015, we looked into the market for technologies to solve this problem but found none. My co-founder and I realized there was no technology out there for our 250-employee company, let alone larger enterprises.

We decided to take matters into our own hands in late 2015 and launched the product in 2016. Eight and a half years later, we have about 600 employees worldwide, more than 2,000 customers, and are the biggest player in the space. Out of those 2,000 customers, almost 25 are Fortune 100 companies, and we have nearly 400,000 users on the platform.

Sramana Mitra: So let’s go back to that beginning. What was going to be in the product? When you say you’re doing an RFP product, what’s in that product? As an MVP, what’s in the product?

Ganesh Shankar: That’s an amazing question. When you look at an RFP, there are two sides of the spectrum: the buy side issuing the RFP and the sell side responding to win the deal. Initially, we aimed to create a platform that would help both sides. Soon enough, we realized that focusing on one side was a massive market in itself. Pivoting to focus on one side was one of the best decisions in our journey.

At that time, the three of us had about 50 man-years of experience responding to RFPs. We started the job in December 2015 and launched the product in June 2016. It took us almost six months to evaluate the MVP, despite our combined knowledge. The advice I usually give to other entrepreneurs is that you are not the universe to your product. The experience we had was not the full version.

The product evolved significantly from December 2015 to June 2016. Today, we have a completely different product.

Sramana Mitra: There are a couple of questions I have here. The three of you quit your jobs in December 2015. When did you start building the MVP?

Ganesh Shankar: Right. So, I quit the job in December. Sundar and Shankar quit about a year and a half later because they were supporting the engine. I mostly took care of sales and marketing, Sundar handled engineering, and Shankar managed operations. Most of their work was done in the evenings after their day jobs.

When I quit, all I had was an early-stage wireframe, a click-around prototype, and a PowerPoint. By January or February, after a couple of months, we had a real product—not a full product, but one flow from start to finish of one use case. That was ready by January-February. We tested it in March, April, and May, and started onboarding our first customer in June. It took us almost six months to go from a PowerPoint/prototype to the first version of our product.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive
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