Bootstrapping Using Services to a Fabulous Exit from Ohio: Gathi Analytics CEO Vamsi Kora (Part 3)

Vamsi Kora: We decided to focus on our core strength, which is leveraging platforms and products that exist in the marketplace and leverage our services that we built so far, keep maturing them, and provide these as accelerators. In that sense, this is more akin to the business approach of Palantir.

You bring two critical aspects. You bring industry expertise and become a true partner for a CIO, Chief Data Officer, and Chief Digital Officer. You augment that with these accelerators that we built that help them think about the right combination of tools for them and argue why specific set of tools are needed or not needed.

We usually convince our partners that, “You really don’t need to buy the three tools that they either already bought or are thinking of buying. You can actually buy cloud-native services on one of the top three providers. Come see our lab. Here are the accelerators. Here are the datasets similar to yours.” We have demos that are very specific use case-driven. Your IPs are these connectors and accelerators. You go to market with those but more as a solution delivery company as opposed to a product or services company.

Sramana Mitra: Who was your first customer?

Vamsi Kora: There is a company called BST Systems in Kansas. They had a need for migrating their large legacy data assets onto Hadoop.

Sramana Mitra: How big was that contract?

Vamsi Kora: In the first 18 months, we had closed about $3.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: That’s incredible, because you don’t need any outside financing.

Vamsi Kora: That’s exactly how we did it.

Sramana Mitra: I love that strategy. There is a lot of pushback in the venture capital industry against this model. They want you to take a lot of venture capital early on and dilute yourself. I like this model very much. We have a whole track where we are really pushing bootstrapping using services. A lot of products are born out of this mode of technology building and business building. You can sign up big clients that will be a zero-dilution path.

Vamsi Kora: I belong to the same thought process.

Bootstrapping using services gives the founder tremendous freedom in pursuing what they believe.

-Vamsi Kora

Sramana Mitra: How many such clients were you able to pull in in the early stages?

Vamsi Kora: We got the first three customers which gave us close to about $5 million in revenue in the first two years. We could have done a lot more, but I’m not an outsized sales guy. We focus on specific roles in organizations rather than going for the traditional sales process. We can speak the language.

Sramana Mitra: Your profile is very common in technical founders. Selling highly-technical products, a technical founder is more credible than a swashbuckling salesperson.

Vamsi Kora: The decision-makers are tired of salespeople.

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you need to service this $5 million worth of revenue?=

Vamsi Kora: By the time we reached 2018, we had about 45 people. We are evenly distributed between India and the US. We have a development center in Hyderabad. I never had any second thoughts about having a team in India. It’s not only about the financial advantage; it’s about the speed and skill.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve always used India operations. For my second company, I had built an entire product in Calcutta. I was raising venture capital in Silicon Valley. 47 VCs rejected me because I was doing product development in India. Fast forward, everybody is asking what your India product development strategy is.

Vamsi Kora: You’re slightly ahead of the curve.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after 2018?

Vamsi Kora: I felt we were stagnating no matter how hard I ran around. We were unable to close deals. There’s only so much growth I can make by reaching out to my own contacts. I need to build a traditional sales team. I spent 10% of our revenue on that part. It didn’t work at all.

Fortunately, our entry is always about the C-level people or one level down, and feeling their pain and show a solution that they can touch and feel. We did six different POCs without taking a dime. By January 2019 when I got my first contract signed from the POC, we gained three more customers after three months.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services to a Fabulous Exit from Ohio: Gathi Analytics CEO Vamsi Kora
1 2 3 4