Bootstrapped To Being Revenue Funded - Indiqus Journey So Far

In today’s ever-growing environment of funding-driven but revenue-starved startups chasing the Unicorn dream, here is the story of a startup who remained customer and revenue focused from day 1 and very quickly moved from being “Bootstrapped” to being “Revenue-Funded”.

When  IndiQus started in 2013, they knew that to be sustainable in the long-term, they made  revenues and customers their first focus and hence went the consulting and services route. They built stack offering (called opencloudrack™) on established open-source platforms, backing them with commercial support and convinced some large customers, like Oxigen and Meritnation, to move away from proprietary vendor-locked solutions to open architecture. The team’s extensive experience in the service provider domain helped them crack a large deal with Sri Lanka Telecom, followed by Ucloud Nepal and Palcom Online.

However, the real ambition was to build their own cloud management product to sit on top of opencloudrack™ and manage all the underlying layers.

What next:

They are currently looking to raise $ 1 million funding to expand globally and aggressively market the solution stack in growing regions like South East Asia, Middle East and Africa.

Aiming to build a strong competitive product against Onapp, the largest Public Cloud Management software vendor, and have devised a strong product and  go-to-market strategy to counter them.

The BWDisrupt.com team met up with Sunando Bhattacharya and spoke to him on the future course of action.

How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you?

This is an interesting incident. It was sometime in 2012, I was travelling to Mumbai for work and missed my return flight. Jet Airways was kind enough to accommodate me in the next flight leaving me with 1-2 hrs to kill. I walked into the airport bookshop looking for a good read and saw an interesting title “Stay Hungry Stay Foolish” on the show window, and promptly bought it. Over the next 2 hours I was mesmerized by the stories of some of the early startup entrepreneurs like Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Deep Kalra.. brimming with inspiration I reached home at 1 am, woke up my wife and announced “I want to do something of my own”… well that’s the day the bug really bit me. However, my wife had also quit her job a few months back to start her own Headhunting practice, and with 2 toddlers in the house, I had to wait for 2 more years before taking the plunge.

What were the challenges before you while setting up this startup?

– The biggest challenge/mind-block initially was to mentally let go of a fat 6 figure salary, especially with a family and liabilities (read loans) behind. As they say, to learn swimming you need to simply jump into the water. So after a few uncomfortable months I got used to the lack of cash inflow. We didn’t draw any salary from the company for 14 months initially. Even 3 yrs hence, i am only taking home 25% of my last drawn professional salary!

– The next challenge was to convince the first set of people to join us. no revenues-no funding, just our passion to showcase. It was tough but it worked

– The whole process of getting the company on road, incorporation, tax registrations, bank account etc etc its really tough job.

What are the challenges for startup companies setting up shop in India?

I think the biggest challenge is the bureaucratic environment in India. I firmly believe that the govt operates from a position that all entrepreneurs are crooks out to rob the govt and the onus is on them to prove otherwise. For e.g. we took a VAT registration in Delhi but since we did not have any VAT transactions in the first year, we didn’t file any VAT returns (we thought no transactions=no returns). We also didn’t have a CA on board initially to advise otherwise. later when we were doing out first transaction we got to know that not only has our Vat license has been suspended (which is ok since we didn’t file our returns), a hefty fine a ~Rs 3 lakhs was levied for non-compliance… that is with no transactions!!! We made several representations to the VAT office but were only able to reduce it by 25%. So ended up paying around 2 lakhs, that was 15% of our bottomline that year. Even today when we are 100% compliant, the kind of notices we receive every month from various govt depts is abhorring and the cost of compliance is so high !!!

How is your business model different from the existing ones?

From an Indian context our model is quite unique since we are providing an integrated solution (consulting + services + software + hardware), that is open-source based and vendor agnostic. We initially wanted to build towards launching our own cloud service, but due to lack of funding options we moved towards a software-led business model. We are creating a globally relevant software product that will enable anyone to launch a cloud services business very quickly.

Who are your clients? How do you look at expanding?

We are currently active across South Asia with customers in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. We work with Marquee clients (enterprises and Service Providers) like Sri Lanka Telecom, Oxigen and Meritnation.com to name a few. We also recently signed up a very large service provider in India and are in the process of re-designing their cloud service, expect big news in a couple of months.

The best and worst memories while setting up …

In the initial days when we had a small team, we had to do everything on our own and it was really fun. I remember delivering hardware boxes to customers, working late nights with the tech guys (primarily moral support and to keep them fed), it was exciting.

I really don’t have a bad experience but we had a disappointing one. We were hoping to land a large portal (the largest portal in its spaces our first customer, they were convinced of our solution, we did a successful Demo, we were 50% cheaper than our competition but at the final stretch their CEO thought that going with a startup was not a good idea ! It took us 2 months to get over it!

Today when I look back over the last 3 years, its been a roller coaster ride and we are just getting started.