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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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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next milestone? How far did you go with the angel financing?

Steve Liu: We grew and then there was a point where we needed more formal funding from an institutional investor. That’s when we brought in Buckhead Investment. They came in about nine years ago. The initial round was a couple of hundred thousand.

Sramana Mitra: How did you meet them and why did you go with them?

Steve Liu: One of the smart things we did early on was hiring a retired advertising executive as a marketing director. It was that classic awesome market where you’ve got folks who were C suite of their own companies but they’ve retired and want to stay in the mix of things. This guy had his own firm. He just wanted to keep his feet wet. I’m not sure how we met him but we hired him as our advertising executive. He would work for us >>>

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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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in your first year?

Steve Liu: I honestly do not remember. It’s been so long. Over the first few years, we quickly got to a couple of thousand users. During that time, we enhanced the product and started increasing the price. Pretty quickly, we got a lot of clients—enough for a startup at least.

Sramana Mitra: It’s always helpful for us to know the pace at which a startup is scaling because when you’re recommending strategies, there’s also metrics that help validate what is really happening. Was it just you or were there other people in the company at that time?

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were the specs that they wanted?

Harman Singh: There was a technology called Smile technology for education programs that wanted to deliver video-based along with some other content. These days, people would not know what that is. But in those days, it was really hot. We worked with professors and discuss what they needed. They had recording studios and we were the programming guys who put the whole thing together by integrating instructional design with technology. That’s when I got close to streaming media whether it’s real-time or video streaming. I was an engineer at that point but I learned a lot of about how business is done. I got into sales and project management. Those few years, we sold to many customers including our university.

Sramana Mitra: All of this was around the Smile technology of real networks to deliver video content?
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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You programmed your PalmPilot to have that available as a mobile application. You presented at this conference and everybody wanted it.

Steve Liu: Pretty much, yes. That was when we figured out we might have something. A few months later, we put up a booth. I was a physician. I just wanted to be a physician, but this took a life of its own. I actually talked to my parents. I said, “Mom, I think I have a company here. I think I have to do this, but I have no idea about businesses.” She thought I was crazy, but she also knew that I made that big decision to become a physician at the last minute. They supported me.

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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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