Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 3)

Sraman Mitra: In those four years, what kind of revenues were you pulling? How many people did you have? What was the scale of the business that you had built?

Harman Singh: We reached about a couple of million dollars in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: How many people did you have?

Harman Singh: We had about 50 people in India.

Sramana Mitra: So all your software development was in India all that time?

Harman Singh: Yes. There were actually three of us in the States and then everybody else was in India. We were using the off-shoring model at that time as well.

Sramana Mitra: So you had your own captive development operation. Where was that?

Harman Singh: That was in Chandigarh. That is actually the reason we are still in Chandigarh.

Sramana Mitra: In 2006, you had a couple of million dollars services business. You have a 50-people team in India and you have a bunch of clients for whom you’ve done services projects around the education vertical. What happens next?

Harman Singh: That was when we decided to quit services. It was taking too much effort and we couldn’t focus on WizIQ as it is. We decided not to take up any more projects. We had earned some money in those times through our services business. So we put that money into building out WizIQ. We reused a lot of technologies that we had already written. That’s how we got it started.

Sramana Mitra: What was the initial specs for WizIQ? What were you going to do?

Harman Singh: We actually set out to do a tutoring platform where anybody can list themselves as a tutor and students can come and learn. We got into a chicken and egg problem because you need to have tutors before it’s valuable for the students. At the same time, we had all this technology to deliver. We had to invest a lot in technology. That model didn’t work out at that time. We figured that first, we need all this technology. Then we need several thousand tutors if you want to go into tutoring.

The other challenge was, we didn’t know if tutoring was the right use case. We had the technology. So one thing was there. We knew our technology is good because I had seen the educators use those technologies successfully. We pivoted from being a tutor listing model to become a software company. We figured that’s not going to work. It would take us years to get to that point. We turned it into a software company rather than a tutor listing company. That was when we invested more in building tools. At that time, we were offering our tools pretty much for free.

In those days, we raised some angel investments. In fact, we got some pretty solid angels on board. One was the VP – Product Management at PayPal. He had just moved back to India. The other angel was Rajan Anandan who’s now the head of Google India. He used to be the head of Microsoft in India at that time. There was a couple of others. A year later, we were not generating revenue because we were building tools and were figuring out which group of people should pay—the students or educators.

Sramana Mitra: At this point, you didn’t know whether you were going to do a B2B or a B2C business. It sounds like it’s all over the place.

Harman Singh: Absolutely right.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh
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