Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you’ve read it, we’ve released a book called Bootstrapping Using Services where we deal with this topic extensively. We have companies that have gone up to $25 million in revenue using bootstrapping using services. This is a very viable strategy. However, you have to do it right.

Harman Singh: I agree with you. I wouldn’t do a lot of things I had done in those days. It survived only because of one reason—perseverance. There was nothing else that got us to this point.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. Frankly, I used to think a lot like you when I started out. That was a long time ago. I started my first company in 1994 while I was still a graduate student at MIT. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I’m talking of an era which was pre-Internet. This knowledge flow wasn’t happening as smoothly and fluidly. Entrepreneurs starting out today start with a much bigger knowledge base than we did at that time. Unfortunately, there was no way to learn these things at that time without actually making all these mistakes. I’m sure, to some extent, that was true about you. Part of it is that there is such a massive noise in the industry around raising funding. Entrepreneurs continuously fall into that trap.

Let’s come back to 2010 when you had concretized what you were actually going to go to market with. Define for me what that is and let’s take it from there.

Harman Singh: I traveled back and forth in 2006, but I didn’t really move back. I had a co-founder in India who is also my brother-in-law. That’s how we were running the show. I couldn’t be here at all times. 2010 was when we experimented. We had no clue how to go about it because back in those days, we couldn’t find the right sales people here in India. We had no idea because our customers were still in the US even for the new product that we had. Then we found somebody and started, in January of 2011, a more structured sales by calling outbound, generating leads on the platform, and calling them. That was when we decided to focus on businesses and organizations and not on just individuals.

Sramana Mitra: Can you define what you were selling in that structured sales mode?

Harmana Singh: Our offering was namely the platform that we had built, which is much like WebEx and Adobe Connect but designed for education. That was the product that we were selling. We still sell that product and it’s doing well. At that time, that’s all we had.

Sramana Mitra: In the structured selling mode, whom did you go after?

Harman Singh: Test prep academies and also some community colleges. We still have those kind of customers. Basically, anyone who wants to do some distance learning program.

Sramana Mitra: Your customer base was all in the US?

Harman Singh: Mostly in the US, but since we were on the Internet, we were getting leads from all over. Our sales team would call pretty much all prospects in the world—pretty much wherever we could communicate in English. We were not spending any money to get leads. They were all inbound leads.

Sramana Mitra: Was it organic search? Is that how people were finding you?

Harmana Singh: Search is one. Word of mouth is the other. There’s this inherent, if you may, viral effect in doing this. The content gets indexed in Google. Everything was through Google. Some educators were writing about us. That was how the whole thing happened. A couple of evangelists also came on board and started promoting our product. Those were the generic tools that we were using. I remember that in February 2011, we were doing $5,000 or $6,000 a month and we were super excited.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh
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