Circa 2009, consumer telephony was peaking, emerging markets were growing at a healthy rate while developed markets had plateaued out and their bull runs had run their courses. Telephony had seen some extensive liberalization and was growing in three figure percentages which opened opportunities for striking it big in the sector. User growth in emerging markets was gaining momentum and while still in its nascent stage of usage, the logical progression to business usage was inevitable. The thought did occur that users were going to have to deal with a plethora of calls, thus opening up an opportunity to have a system that could deal with the volume of calls and be integrated their numbers, route and record these calls in the case of them not being answered, thus giving the user the high end convenience and power of professional enterprises. A CRM solution to this seemed the likely answer and thus pushed me to build a platform that was flexible, highly scalable and easily integrated into any business, without the need for extensive and highly expensive hardware costs, informs Ambarish Gupta, CEO and Founder of Knowlarity Communications, Asia’s leading cloud Telephony Company.
As he continues to share his story, he says, one of his earliest experiences with this was the offerings to job search portals of a phone number with a welcome message without the investments costs of hardware and installation etc.
Here's his inspiring jouney, in his own narrative.
One of the barriers that existed at the time was that India unlike the US doesn't allow VOIP which warranted us to develop a different technology using PSP and cloud telephony. This allowed us to service the largely un-penetrated Indian market which had at the time close to 15 million SMBs in India compared to just 6 million in the US
My steps towards being an Entrepreneur pre Knowlarity…
After graduating from IIT Kanpur I lived the tech dream of working in the Silicon Valley for close to three years. The bug of launching my own start-up in my own country bit me as early as 2004 and I returned to India to start and online real estate brokerage company called Inventica. The timing of my initial entrepreneurial venture however was poor as the sentiments of venture capitalists were rather bearish and the market for online businesses was rather lethargic. After a tragic failure to take off, I returned to the US and completed my MBA and served a stint with McKinsey. The start- up bug however did not stay latent for very long and it wasn't very long before I upped and returned to India in 2009 to start up Knowlarity.
Making a lone stand has not been the adage to very many entrepreneurial ventures. Keeping this in mind, I started up my next venture with a friend and batchmate from IIT Kanpur. We weathered the good and bad and rode the ebbs and flows of entrepreneurship and achieved milestone after milestone in our journey.
Funding challenges
Funds and funding play an integral part in the success of any business and ours was no different. At the time as mentioned earlier, investor confidence was at an all time low and risk appetites were very low because of various circumstances in the market. Customers and business were hard to come by and we had to create a serious push with customers to generate business. Along the way we pivoted from outgoing to incoming calls as the outgoing model was not generating the kind of revenue stream needed. Needless to say all this was made possible through us relying on personal funds and savings and borrowings from friends and families.
Things did start to look up a couple of years down the line and we received our Series A funding through Sequoia Capital in 2011. This fresh round helped us improve our R&D capabilities and helped roll out a slew of new products designed for SME/ SMB business communication.
Our first success story, SuperCaller, was used by a prominent politician in Orissa for electoral canvassing purposes. Supercaller supported more than 500, 000 outgoing calls in a day. On Election Day, SuperCaller, sent a pre-recorded message to the electorate asking them to come out and vote for the candidate. The campaign was so successful that it was used the second time around for thanking the electorate for voting for the candidate.
Lessons learned along the way…
Selling technology to small businesses in India is hard work. Customers are uninitiated to technology’s sophistication, and have expectations of high-touch customer service even when they pay little in subscription fees.
There are challenges in sales as well. In India, the target customer base is your typical mom-and-pop stores, travel agents, real estate brokers. They do not know much about generating traffic for their websites and digital marketing. They need to be educated through traditional modes such as channel partners and through phone calls. The access to this market is very costly because it’s physical and it’s slow. We addressed this challenge by simplifying the product to the level where it could be understood by the target market.
Operations are also very complex because if your customer doesn’t understand how to use a particular software, he is bound to ask questions, which increases the cost.
Expansion plans
Our main focus in the next few years is going to be on expanding businesses internationally. To succeed, we needed to build a strong brand presence. Besides selling directly in the market we also wanted to sell with the help of our strong chain of IT integrator and value resellers.
We strongly believe that small and medium size enterprises in India are the growth engine of the Indian economy. These entrepreneurs run their business on their mobile phones. We have dreamed to enable these millions of entrepreneurs with innovative, inexpensive and hosted telephony based business products that can help businesses improve their bottom-line.
In our continuous effort to deliver great products to our customers, we will be releasing the all-new-version of ‘SuperReceptionist’, our flagship offering for the SMB segment, by mid 2015. It will offer enhanced customer usage experience. Simultaneously, we are working on releasing a mobile app for the same in Q3 2015.
In the evolving world of technology, we are excited about the “Internet of Things” which is being touted as the next big thing. We are exploring the space with a bunch of big players to integrate the voice platform with smart devices.
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