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Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 3)

Sramana: Obviously you don’t have a background in marketing. Typically we see people getting into a field with fairly significant domain knowledge and then building a product using that domain knowledge. You seem to have come into marketing optimization without real knowledge of marketing. How did that work?

Paras Chopra: Looking back I think I was a little bit naïve. I think that led to a little bit of overconfidence. When I started to struggle I thought back to my time in biotechnology. I entered school with very little understanding of the topic but I was still able to perform at the top of my department and I was able to publish some papers. I also remembered how I was able to learn and progress through machine learning. That gave me confidence that I could learn this new field as well. >>>

Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 2)

Sramana: When did you graduate from college, and what did you do after you graduated?

Paras Chopra: I graduated in 2008. Even though I studied biotechnology, I remained very involved with computers the entire time. My area of concentration for biotechnology was computational biology. In that specialty I would model biological problems using computer programs. I would write programs to simulate protein functions, or anomalies in genes. That morphed into using big data sets.

I started reapplying all of my knowledge of artificial intelligence to this line of study. I did a lot of work with neural networks and genetic algorithms within this data set. As a result of that, I became very interested in data mining and analytics. >>>

Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 1)

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Paras Chopra is the founder and CEO of Wingify, a company that builds web analytics and optimization technology to include its flagship product Visual Website Optimizer. Prior to Wingify, he was an R&D engineer at Aspiring Minds. He has also founded Kroomsa which is a website to help Indian bands promote their music on the web. Prior to founding Kroomsa he was an Analyst at Grail Research. He has a BE in biotechnology from the Delhi College of Engineering.

Sramana: Paras, let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where were you born and what are your family circumstances? What leads up to the Wingify story?

Paras Chopra: I was born in Punjab. I have been very lucky to have very forward-looking parents. I was introduced to computers very early on. I got access to a computer in my eighth standard year of school. My father had been playing with computers for a long time. He has an agriculture and biochemistry background, but he needed to use computers to conduct his work. He had a computer back when a 200Mhz computer was best in class! >>>

Scaling a SaaS Company in a Competitive Space: Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta (Part 7)

Sramana: There are larger companies such as Oracle who have internal projects to address the same market you are going after. Of course they have a lot more market reach than a startup. How do you position Gainsight knowing you have those types of companies getting involved?

Nick Mehta: We have to focus on our strengths. There are some upsides to being in a startup. We have to leverage our ability to be nimble and innovative. We are also more likely to have customers who are not in the sweet spot of an Oracle or an SAP. I also believe SaaS is changing the dynamic of what used to happen in software, specifically around consolidation. SaaS has made it very easy for business units to buy software themselves. They can do integration in the cloud. SaaS can support a much more diverse set of vendors.

Sramana: How long is your sales cycle.

Nick Mehta: Our inside sales deals typically take 6 weeks. Our outside sales take around 3 months. The bigger the deal size the longer it is going to take. Sales cycles are shortening in general because vendors like us let people take software and try it out. Deployment is very easy as well. >>>

Scaling a SaaS Company in a Competitive Space: Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta (Part 6)

Sramana: Thought leadership marketing is very expensive. When you are building a category, it takes time to build a market. It’s helpful to have competitors because you are no longer the only company investing in leadership marketing. Have competitors to Gainsight emerged?

Nick Mehta: Yes, they have, and you are 100% right. I like having competitors because customers have comparison points. It legitimizes the space we have worked so hard to build. We were able to get ahead of the rest of the market in terms of defining the category but we did not build the category alone.

There are some products where the demand is latent. People know they need something and it is about finding those potential customers and developing a method to get sales volume targeting those customers. However, if the category is nascent it is more about understanding customer need and mapping your capabilities to their needs. We are in the latter category. We had to hire salespeople who are really good listeners. We had to develop a sales process that addressed the various concerns someone would have in the buying process. We had to build content to support that sales model and we are still building out our sales methodology. >>>

Scaling a SaaS Company in a Competitive Space: Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta (Part 5)

Sramana: What is the background of the founder of Gainsight?

Nick Mehta: He was running another SaaS company called Host Analytics, a SaaS-based corporate performance management product. It is a sizable business with a lot of customers. He brought in a CEO and became the chief customer officer of Host Analytics. His job was to ensure customers continually renewed their subscriptions and bought new services. He realized there were a lot of technologies to get customers to purchase a product, but there was no technology to help him understand his existing customers in terms of what they were using, how satisfied they were, and whether there was a risk level in their leaving.

He founded Gainsight to solve that problem. He wanted to build a technology that was the equivalent of what marketing and sales had that could be used for customer retention. That was the original genesis. He built this as a side project while he was at Host Analytics, and then he bootstrapped the company and ran it very lean for a couple of years. >>>

Scaling a SaaS Company in a Competitive Space: Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta (Part 4)

Sramana: Which firm did you join as an EIR?

Nick Mehta: I joined Trinity Ventures at the end of 2007. That was great because it got me to step away from the singular vision of running a large business unit and opened my eyes to the entire world again. I was meeting with young entrepreneurs and was able to explore my options. I thought about starting my own company, joining another company as an executive, or partnering with someone else.

I remember meeting Drew Houston when it was just him and his cofounder in a little conference room. I met several other individuals who went on to be incredibly successful. In the process I ended up looking at a number of different opportunities to join companies and run them. One of the companies was LiveOffice, which was funded by Summit Partners. I ended up joining them as the CEO in May 2008. >>>

Scaling a SaaS Company in a Competitive Space: Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta (Part 3)

Sramana: What came after your exit from RedPoint?

Nick Mehta: In 2002 I was talking about my career options with a VC. We were talking about big companies, and he told me that if I ever wanted to go work for a big company to get that experience, I should do it at that point because it would be a lot harder to do it later. He told me that I would learn a lot about how things work at scale.

I then went to Veritas, which was a storage company that was pretty hot at the time. They were growing pretty fast. I found a product management job listed on the website and called. I was able to get an entry-level product manager job working for a very boring product. I was excited about the job, though, because I felt it was an opportunity to see how to sell technology at scale and how to build a large product. >>>