Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 5)

Sramana: Do you have any proof points of your technology working and providing actionable recommendations?

Krishna Kumar: We are very new and we have just started the pilot project for that use case. It is not a tried and tested method from the business method standpoint. We will be working with more established ERP vendors like SAP Retail. There are proof points there about seasonality and inventory management.

What we are doing is taking basic business processes and optimizing them with socially enriched data. We are that extension. The right answer to your question is not yet, but that will change six months down the line.

Sramana: What is the financing strategy that you are following with this company? Is it still bootstrapped?

Krishna Kumar: Yes, right now, it is.

Sramana: Are you using the same methodology of bootstrapping with services?

Krishna Kumar: We are and we have already reached $1 million in revenue. We have an office in Freemont, Tel Aviv, and a third in Pune. We have made a conscious decision to make Tel Aviv and Pune our workbenches and core zones for development. We believe that Tel Aviv is a hotbed for data science. It is a hot bed of artificial intelligence and there are a lot of people who have worked in intelligence. We have one customer in Israel who is using our product and we are bootstrapping our operation in Israel with the money that we are getting from that company.

Pune is a bit of a cost for us. We have a pretty professional relationship with another professional services company where there is a particular arrangement. We have a promise of future revenue as long as we achieve certain milestones. There is not a whole lot of attrition from a cost perspective. We are cash flow positive right now with a million dollars in revenue.

Sramana: It sounds like you are still experimenting a bit with your services projects and have not completely finalized the product that you are going to build.

Krishna Kumar: The products are pretty much built. They are both pretty substantial. Our largest deployment has over 500,000 licenses. We do have a fully based product. That said, the idea here is to target the Internet of Things marketspace. That would be retail, insurance, utilities to a degree, and verticals like that.

What we need to do is use our product to build use cases within those verticals. We need to do that to show the value to the Accentures of the world so that they can go run with it. We are not chasing professional services endlessly. As a product company, we can be sucked dry trying to do both.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid
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