Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about Guwahati. What was it like building this company in Guwahati? You must have a very loyal employee base, right?

Anjan Pathak: Yes, that is the best part. Employee loyalty is high. The attrition rate is low. In the last six months, only one or two people have left, but they left for higher studies. Earlier, we used to lose people because we could not pay well. We are technologically advanced, we use some of the best technologies.

Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do the US companies find you or how do you find them?

Anjan Pathak: Three years ago, we started content marketing. We were not sure how to market. We had questions in our minds, “From Guwahati, how do we reach out to the world?”

What we found was that there is this thing called content marketing or blogging. We started hiring good writers. We have good writers and designers in this part of the world. Initially, it was just content. We started about three years back. We are quite good at SEO.

Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you doing this out of Washington DC? 

Steven Job: Yes, I used to live in a town called Centerville, a suburb of DC. By 2006, it was at a point where it was making several hundred thousand dollars a year, so I hired my first employees who still work with us today.

Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we in now? 

Steven Job: While I was working those crazy hours, I developed a service called DNS Made Easy. It’s still around today. At that time, I was creating it as a side project where I could make a little extra revenue. It was a passion project.

It all started because I wanted to host a website at home. Back in the day, hosting was not for free, but now you can buy a domain name for ten bucks and get hosting and email for free.

Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many companies do you have today?

Anjan Pathak: In India, we almost have all the big IT companies as customers except TCS and IBM. Tata has selected us as their preferred vendor. 

Sramana Mitra: What revenue level are you at right now?

Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Steven has built a lean company with 37 people and has scaled it to $7 million. Read on to learn how.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was Infosys paying you extra for doing this? 

Anjan Pathak: No, they were not paying, because they were our first customer. We used to get a 5% discount on the gift vouchers. That was our primary revenue. Of course, there was a lot of incoming cash flow, but the primary revenue was anything that they gave. 

Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the business model? 

Anjan Pathak: It’s very simple. Samsung might have a new phone on their website. They want to sell it directly to corporate employees, but they cannot. They need a medium to market themselves, so they give the deal or coupon to us which can be redeemed on their website. 

Sramana Mitra: Does Samsung pay you for this?