Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The angels invested on what thesis? Typically, investors look for investment thesis. What was the investment thesis?

Harman Singh: The thesis was that educators want to be connected to students over the Internet. That thesis never changed. The business model was unknown, but this thesis hasn’t changed. It wasn’t about B2B or B2C. This is all about whether educators can be connected to students online. We went on and the company Educomp invested some money into the business. The good thing was that we had users. Thousands of educators were using our product although for free. That was when we experimented by introducing a $50 a year membership. However, $50 per year is a very small amount.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems (Part 2)

Chris Sullens: From a solution standpoint, we have a proprietary route optimization algorithm that we have developed. It does two main things. One, from a longer range planning perspective, it can put the schedules in any given constraint. For example, a certain technician needs to do a specific job because of whatever constraints. We feed all that from an operating system into our algorithm. The algorithm then computes the most optimal way to organize that work to minimize downtime and maximize productivity for those set of assets.

What we see is upwards of 40% improvement in capacity. That has a big impact on businesses. If you can grow your company without having to go through the process of buying another vehicle or training another employee, it is definitely positive. It makes it quicker and a lot more efficient. That’s one side of it.

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 3)

Sraman Mitra: In those four years, what kind of revenues were you pulling? How many people did you have? What was the scale of the business that you had built?

Harman Singh: We reached about a couple of million dollars in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: How many people did you have?

Harman Singh: We had about 50 people in India.

Sramana Mitra: So all your software development was in India all that time?
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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems (Part 1)

There are sectors of industry that have made their entry into the world of technology very recently. Often, these sectors leapfrogged all the prior architectures and have come straight onto the cloud. Partly, this is because of the cost structure of prior architectures that they could not afford. The cloud is bringing many such industries into the age of modern technology at a furious pace. Chris Sullens talks about one such corner of an old-fashioned industry that is now modernizing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you and Marathon Data Systems. What do you do? What’s the business?

Chris Sullens: I’m President and CEO of Marathon Data Systems. We’re a leading provider of cloud-based mobile workforce solutions for the field service and transportation industry. In the field service side, we have an end-to-end business management platform that spans everything >>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Harman Singh has put up a heroic effort to build a global education SaaS company from Chandigarh, India. Now, many years since his journey began, the company has started finding its stride. As the cliché goes, it’s a marathon, not a sprint!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Harman Singh: I was born and raised in a small town in North India, which was known as the Manchester of India because of its small manufacturing businesses. My father was one of those small business owners manufacturing electrical goods during the  >>>

Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 1)

We just launched out Bootstrapping With A Paycheck book, the 11th volume in the Entrepreneur Journeys series. Here’s yet another instance of a very successful company being built in this mode.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Steve Liu: I was born in the United States. I was born in DC and lived in Virginia my whole life. My parents were immigrants but not your typical immigrants. My father came to UVA for his undergraduate studies. I grew up pretty typical with Asian parents. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how exactly that move played out.

Grant Kohler: We started to get some outside requests from clients who wanted to use our system to provide things other than just strokes. Two of the other service lines were based around trauma patients coming into the ER and patients that were possibly coded as septic patients. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The other interesting slice of the market view that you’ve provided is this whole world of people who are not doing e-commerce. They’re slow adopters that you’re now bringing fresh onto the Internet. That’s a very interesting world. Given that you’re operating in a territory that is a lot more behind than where a lot of the early adopter market is, what other white space areas do you see in your orbit where you would point entrepreneurs who are starting today to look at providing solutions?

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