1Mby1M Entrepreneur Bootstrapping an AI Deep Learning Venture to over $5M ARR: Bharath Gaddam, CEO of Data Poem (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was in your MVP? What did you put in the MVP that could take on conversations like this and deliver something meaningful?

Bharath Gaddam: The MVP was a simple, modeling capability with a proposition for you who is struggling to get an actionable measurement system, which is agile enough.

I would offer that. While there was a proper demo that is built on the whole system, and they can see what they can get, they really don’t know what it is because they don’t believe that agility is possible. Because for 40 years, it’s been told that agility is impossible.

Sramana Mitra: And you are selling agility. The real value proposition is to figure out which marketing programs or marketing actions are delivering the ROI, and you’re offering to do that quickly.

Bharath Gaddam: On a monthly basis. To give you the context, the normal systems would do that max once in a year. The most agile companies, if you could call them agile systems, were doing it twice in a year.

And guess what the lag is! The lag of getting that once in a six-month output is nine months. kay? Let’s say, they would get it twice a year, which means H1 and H2. In June of 2025, they would be getting the data for H2 of 2024 or much, much earlier.

Sramana Mitra: So, you are getting them one month close to real time.

Bharath Gaddam: So, we’re saying that we can deliver this within a month, and it’s almost too good to be true for them. So, the MVP’s proposition was getting that agility dimension and telling them that we can get it in a month’s time. It’s too good to be true.

Sramana Mitra: You got the value proposition, you got the buyer, you figured out the economic buyer and the technical decision maker, and then you did a vertical focus as well.

Bharath Gaddam: Yes, the third dimension is that we decided to do only marketing because that we come from it.

We don’t know whether it was for good or bad, but we also decided to focus on only enterprises. That’s the other call we took.

There was also the closed loop attribution trap that was going on. It kind of proved to be right two to three years later because people were doing cookie-based attribution for a lot of these digital and B2B companies. We decided that there is no point in selling them an interconnected world when they’re so sold on to the closed loop attribution or cookie-based attribution world. So, we said, let’s not fight it because they’re going into a deterministic world. Theoretically, deterministic world is the most powerful world, but it’s not possible. They’ve already bought into that world. You can’t break it.

So, we decided that will go to the enterprise world, because at least there you are not fighting deterministic versus probabilistic. Because of the number of drivers that they’re using, they already know that deterministic world never works. The journey to map out TV and digital and to make a deterministic is never going to work.

So, we focused on enterprises, at least enterprises did not have a barrier of deterministic versus probabilistic.

Sramana Mitra: Really what that translates to is you needed multi-channel marketing organizations that were having difficulty attributing what’s coming from where.

So, marketing still is horizontal. You went after a vertical function within enterprise as well?

Bharath Gaddam: No, in a way. We didn’t start out like that, but we found a sweet spot in CPG [consumer packaged goods] because they spend monthly. Their requirement in intelligence is monthly because they spend huge monies monthly.

There was a transition from traditional systems to digital systems. So, they needed a new mental model to work on this new thing. So, that’s why they needed agility, because if you recall around 2021-22, a lot of new channels were coming in in digital too. Netflix was new, Hulu was new. The entire OTT space is new for them. So, they wanted a new mental model to understand this faster so that they can make those changes.

So that’s a trigger in a way. So, vertical is a seed marketing issue. The sweet spot we chose came from the signal that we got from the market. They’re the ones who are resonating the most.

To tell you one other context of this focus, we were talking to the world about intelligence when the world was talking about productivity and operational efficiency in SaaS. Because of that, we were not funded, we were bootstrapped from day zero. We’re very focused and conscious that we must make our resources work very efficiently in all forms and means.

So, we focused only on agile, enterprises, within marketing for CPG. Once we did that, we were able to talk to the largest of the enterprises. We were able to get the traction that we wanted in conversations, and then we did multiple pilots across the world, from QSR [quick service restaurants] to the latest in CPG.

The initial stage was pilots.

Sramana Mitra: It was paid pilots, right?

Bharath Gaddam: Yes, paid pilots. We decided not to do any free. That was the first choice that we took.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Entrepreneur Bootstrapping an AI Deep Learning Venture to over $5M ARR: Bharath Gaddam, CEO of Data Poem
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