

From 0 to $1 Million ARR in 3 years with Indian Customers  - kvprashant
http://blog.kookoo.in/2013/10/kookoo-year-in-review-from-0-to-1.html

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vignesh_vs_in
Congrats on growing a company in Indian market, let alone a bootstrapped one.

I worked for a MNC for past 5 years, i quit this April and started dabbling
with new technologies and platforms, with the intent to create a SaaS. As a
person who is interested in startup, this article gives me a lot of hope.

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nutanc
Glad to be of some inspiration :)

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kartikkumar
Awesome! Really great work and it's great to see more success stories from the
Indian startup scene. It's particularly heartening that a bootstrapped company
can get there. I was working on trying to lay the groundwork for startup in
Bangalore last year and was told by many people that I'd fail for the simple
reason that government regulation would kill me. There are in fact two spaces
that I've been wanting to enter into India: space and education.

On the back of your experiences, I think I feel that maybe I shouldn't feel as
discouraged.

Would love to hear more about your journey and the problems you conquered.

Good luck going international!

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nutanc
Government regulation will try its best to make it hard, but it will not kill
you :)

Actually, things have improved a lot and in fact the Government is now doing
pretty good things in trying to encourage startups, especially the Karnataka
and Kerala Governments, where they have setup separate funds for startups.

Space may be a little bit of problem with regulation. But with education
startups, you shouldn't have too many issues.

I will write a blog post soon on our learnings in the past 3 years.

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kartikkumar
Great! Thanks for the feedback and looking forward to the blog post! I'm
flying out to Mumbai on Thursday and will be in Bangalore for a few days too,
so going to use the opportunity to try and figure out how, what, where, when,
and with whom. Any tips, suggestions?

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nutanc
You can find my email on my profile. Please feel free to shoot an email and I
will try to introduce you to some nice startup folks in both places.

By the way, you just missed the Product Conclave by Nasscom. This event
started today and will go on till Wednesday and would have been an awesome
opportunity for you to network with startup minded folks in India.

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kartikkumar
Thanks! Will shoot you an email after I grab some lunch. Would be great to
make the most of this trip and network with startup folks in Mumbai and/or
Bangalore.

Shame, sounds like a great event. Perhaps there are others over the next 3
weeks. I'll Google around.

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ggjain
Kudos! Always good to read product people getting success in Indian market. As
you said, the market is not wrong or small, if the value provided by product
is good. It's just the way customers in India define value is slightly
different than other countries, which is the case everywhere.

Great work and courage, to follow the path to profitability without external
funding. Cheers!!! and best of all lucks going forward.

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ksoti
Congrats! And thanks for posting this. Definitely an inspiration for people
looking to start a company in India. One of the things you mentioned is that
Hyderabad is a growing place for startups. What are other pieces of advice you
would give to people starting a company in India? Do you have blogs/forums
that I can follow to catch up on the startup news happening in India? Thanks
in advance.

And also wish you best of luck for the next year!

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nutanc
If you are starting up in India, then it is best to network with like minded
people at events like Startup Saturday.

For blogs, you can checkout nextbigwhat,Medianama, your story and techcircle.

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ksoti
Thanks! That was very useful.

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apapli
How did you attract SMEs - keeping in mind it looks like your service is aimed
at developers? I'm keen to hear what your most common use cases are too.

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nutanc
We try to look at ourselves as solving the communication needs of businesses
and the 3 products are 3 ways of solving those needs.

The KooKoo platform is similar to Twilio and allows developers to develop
their own innovative voice apps.

Cloudagent.in is a full featured cloud based contact center and this helps
businesses run their contact center operations.

Bizphone.in is a virtual PBX/receptionist product and helps companies get a
virtual PBX on the cloud.

So though KooKoo is aimed at developers, Cloudagent and BizPhone are aimed at
SMEs and we have adapted a separate sales strategy to sell those products.
India is a high touch eco system and hence our sales strategy involved both
inbound marketing and feet on street.

For KooKoo there have been many innovative use cases, including missed call
marketing, developers integrating into various CRMs, integrating voice into
their social media strategies and using phone numbers as a tracking system for
their ads.

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nutanc
Thanks for posting this. This is Chaitanya from Ozonetel. I can take questions
about our journey so far

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codelust
Chaitanya,

Congrats. That's quite a neat achievement! There seems to be a bunch of
companies quietly plodding away and doing good like this out here.

Would love to see what kind of margins are you hitting, but I guess that would
be asking for too much. Quick back-of-the-envelope scribble says you could
probably be doing 1-1.5 cr in profit before taxes etc. etc..

A question you can answer: What kind of mix are you seeing in the customer
base - digital/non-digital, SME/Large Enterprises?

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nutanc
I am assuming when you mean digital, we got the leads online.

Digital:60% Non-Digital:40%

SME:90% Enterprises:10%

Obviously, though the number of Enterprise customers are less, their pie in
the revenue is much more as they pay a lot :)

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codelust
Thanks!

No, was not asking about lead sourcing. More on the lines that I'd consider an
e-commerce company a digital company, while I'd think of an FMCG company as
primarily non-digital.

In digital companies, the product awareness tends to be higher, so product
education is a smaller chunk of the sales process. It mostly boils down to
commercials. Non-digital, education forms a big chunk. This results in
different approaches/cycles -- is what I have seen. Thus the question :)

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nutanc
Oh!Ok. Even in that case, its around the same. I would say

Digital:65%

Non-Digital:35%

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prashka
Thanks Prashant for posting, this is Prashanth from Ozonetel

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kvprashant
You guys should probably do an AMA.

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nutanc
Thats a good idea. Will do that soon. Thanks for the suggestion

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iusable
Congratulations - A great start!

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nish1500
How many employees?

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nutanc
We currently have 40 employees

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bender80
congrats guys. :)

