Sramana: Did you form a business out of one of the software projects you had developed in your study group? Girish Rowjee: Not directly. In 1993, after we finished college, a couple of folks in our late-night programming group stayed in the area to study for their GRE. Three of us from that group decided
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. [Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India] Girish Rowjee is the CEO of Greytip Software, a company that specializes in HR software. Girish is responsible for strategic direction, day-to-day operations, product delivery and international business. His “never say
Sramana: With $12 million, in revenue you can raise money anywhere you want. When a company has substantial revenues, they do not need to move to Silicon Valley to fund raise. Have you considered where you are going to look at raising money? Aaron Fulkerson: Making the decision to move to Silicon Valley or not
Sramana: There is also a difference between B2B and B2C oriented companies. In B2B there is only one metric: are customers willing to pay for what you are offering or not? In B2C it is a bit more complicated. There is free stuff flowing around, and you have to monetize through a variety of methods.
Sramana: What is your pricing model? Aaron Fulkerson: We price based on the value derived from the implementation, which is what I love about SaaS. You have to earn your customers’ business. If you don’t, then they turn you off. I have tried to make our pricing model entirely value based and tie the cost
Sramana: Do you make any assumptions about customer support agents? Do you expect that they will use this product as well? Aaron Fulkerson: Yes, and I will give you an example to illustrate this. A typical deployment by a software company will leverage our subscription payment system. It will typically start with one individual who
Sramana: It sounds like you avoided the problem of becoming diluted in a broad collaboration market by focusing on your original premise. Is that a fair statement? Aaron Fulkerson: Yes. We went back to what we were originally very excited about. This is a valuable lesson for other entrepreneurs. You will have investors and other
Sramana: When you started this project, what was going on in your mind? Why did you decide to tackle this particular problem? Aaron Fulkerson: I saw a problem I thought we could address. I had a bunch of friends who worked at WebSphere, and they had a couple of thousand people working on their project.