Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the use case for Cincinnati Airport?

Ritukar Vijay: To deliver goods. After the security check-in, there are gate-hugger personas. There are people who just fly off after the departure gate. We are not participating in any of the retail activities at the airport. 2020 was a time when the aviation industry was having a bad time. It was a nightmare.

They started looking at ways to engage people in more economic activities focusing on the non-aeronautical revenue. The airport came together to solve that problem. We did the first pilot in December 2020.

Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you find your co-founder?

Ritukar Vijay: One of the co-founders was in my college in the Robotics club. That goes back more than 15 years. The other two guys, we met through our careers during 2010 to 2012.

Sramana Mitra: In the robotics company?

Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 1)

This is a very interesting story of bringing really complex technology from India to the global market with a complex sales cycle.

The long term potential is huge. The short term complexity of the business is equally huge. The founding team is doing an admirable job navigating the opportunity with commitment and resolve.

Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about running a virtual company. What are some of the benefits that you’re deriving out of a global talent pool and the cost structure of a global talent pool? What are the nuances? I’ve been running a virtual company since 2010.

Dominik Angerer: In 2010, there was not environment that supported you doing that. Now there’s a lot of things you can use. My co-founder Alex moved back to Brazil in 2018. We both knew that if he moves back, we needed to find a way to employ him in Brazil. We actually created a subsidiary. If we wanted to create people in Germany, we had to create a subsidiary there as well. We cannot work with contractors all the time because of all the IP.

Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 5)

Dominik Angerer: Then in 2021, we wanted to get repeatability done in the sales motion. You want to have leads coming in from your marketing. Then they should create opportunities from that. This repeatability was what we were focusing on. The first half of the year in 2021, I had a chat with an advisor.

He was like, “If you see repeatability, you might want to accelerate. You’re like drinking from a fire hose with an espresso cup.” This image got stuck in my head. If the process seems to work, why shouldn’t we use the money that we just raised to hire more people. We scaled from 35 people in the middle of 2021 to about a hundred.

Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What other industries are you doing well in?

Dominik Angerer: Financial institutions. We can offer a really high SLA. Finance institutions are quite heavy and old, and have processes to be able to use a software. If the software you’re offering has a read-only option, it’s way easier to get in.

In education, Education First manages over half a million sites with Storyblok – half a million content pieces in 54 languages. For one landing page, it took them several weeks and months to create those sites. Now it’s a matter of days. The same applies to other industries.

Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise?

Dominik Angerer: $2.5 million. Each of them did $1.25 million. It was super nice because both of them have the same kind of upside. We had two investors who we can benchmark against each other. How many customers can they bring? How helpful are they? Both of them have been amazing so far.

Sramana Mitra: Is this the point where you introduce the enterprise pricing model?

Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s unpack some things. When you put out this product, you put it out on a website and people started coming. What was one that website that drew people into it?

Dominik Angerer: We have used an approach that is now a big theme – product-led growth. We wrote articles on long-tail keywords that we wanted to rank on. For us, it was headless CMS. Headless CMS was bombarded with advertisements. The first page was unreachable for us. We looked into what other people are searching for.