Featured Videos

India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 6)

Sramana: Have you lost clients to the companies that offer an SaaS model?

Arvind Agarwalla: We have not lost any clients to the public cloud. We offer our clients a private cloud option. We allow our clients to determine what kind of security they want. They allow what branches they want to connect to the system and how to secure them, via VPN or placement of firewalls.

Sramana: In your market geographies, the public cloud has not become a major issue yet. I think the public cloud is still a phenomenon in the West.

Arvind Agarwalla: It is a phenomena in the West. I would still like to see some numbers that show how many Western companies with over $5 million in revenue are going to the public cloud, where they have no control over the security aspect. >>>

India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 5)

Sramana: In the history of any company, a few key people become the legs on which the table stands. Who were those people for you, and how did you find them? Kolkata was not the hotbed of management talent.

Arvind Agarwalla: If you look at a product company, research and development is one leg. Sales and support are the other leg. I am very passionate about marketing, so I took that on as my responsibility. By the time we had moved to Singapore, my partner had built a very solid engineering team. We worked like a family. Today we have 160,000 people worldwide, but we still function by the power of five. I strive to have five direct reports whom I trust implicitly; I am doing my job. In turn, each one can have five direct reports whom they trust implicitly. That was the strategy we followed. >>>

India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 4)

Sramana: It sounds like your market started to mature by 1991.

Arvind Agarwalla: It was getting mature by then. We had started advertising, we had strong word-of-mouth recommendations, and we had a good user base. People recognized us as a software company. Our customers felt we delivered very effective software, and our pricing was extremely attractive.

During the initial euphoria of purchasing computers, a lot of companies had hired freelancers to develop software. They would spend money developing their customer solutions and then watch them fail. We had some pretty large companies come and buy our software. >>>

India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 3)

Sramana: How did you deal with the piracy situation? It was pretty bad in the 1980s and 1990s.

Arvind Agarwalla: The first thing we decided to do was implement copy protection on our software. Of course a lock can be broken, but we had to copy protect it or we would not be able to make revenue. Our software to this date is copy protected. The second thing is that we released regular upgrades. When people paid our maintenance fees, they got the new versions free of charge as well as support.

Accounting is mission and time critical. Once you have moved onto computerized accounting, if the software goes down, your entire operation goes down. Our pitch was that you are paying a small insurance fee to us to make sure your accounting operations will always be up. >>>

India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 2)

Sramana: When you first started the company, how did you get the product into the market? How did you build the product and acquire your first customers?

Arvind Agarwalla: I set up the company at the end of 1987. My first colleague was a very good friend of mine and remains a close friend to this day. He used to work for a consulting company and traveled all over Kolkata. He was the techie, and I was the commercial guy between the techies and the customers. In February 1988 we made our first sale. If I recall correctly, it was for 3,999 rupees. It was a very basic ledger system that we sold to some friends and family who knew that I was getting into this business. >>>

India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 1)

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

Arvind Agarwalla is the founder and CEO of FACT Software. Arvind founded FACT after recognizing that in the mid-1990s computers were primarily sold to automate accounting practices, yet they did not have a standard software package to accomplish the accounting functions. Now FACT has been established for 25 years and helps small and medium enterprises become more efficient, productive, and profitable.

Sramana: Arvind, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Of course you are from Kolkata, my favorite city. What kind of circumstances did you grow up in? You are one of the earliest product entrepreneurs in India. Tell me more about your story.

Arvind Agarwalla: I wind the clock back prior to my birth. My family moved to Kolkata in 1900. Entrepreneurship runs in our genes. We were a large industrial family, and like any large industrial family we had our share of brother vs. brother rivalries. My grandfather was thrown out of the family in 1955 when my father was 16. We went from owning an airline, steel plant, and a piece of every industry in the country to becoming paupers overnight. >>>

Authors as Entrepreneurs: Bella Andre, Hugh Howey, Jasinda Wilder (Part 7)

Sramana: Do you maintain blogs as use those as a strategy for promoting your writing?

Bella Andre: I do not blog at all. I don’t think I am very good at it and I would rather spend the time interacting on Facebook.

Jasinda Wilder: I don’t blog either.

Sramana: Let’s talk about the publishing industry in general. Given where you are today I don’t imagine you would ever give up your electronic publishing writes for any reason. Is that true?

Jasinda Wilder: Correct.

Bella Andre: Correct, absolutely. >>>

Authors as Entrepreneurs: Bella Andre, Hugh Howey, Jasinda Wilder (Part 6)

Sramana: Another strategy that I have noticed appears in all of your success stories is the presence of series and interconnected stories. Are there other strategies that we have not discussed yet that you think are good secrets to your success?

Hugh Howey: I can throw in a couple of things. First of all there is a lot of luck involved. You have to put the hard work in and you have to have the books written. If you sit in slush piles and you are unwritten forever then you are not giving yourself a chance. The things you can do to improve your chances are to really put yourself out there as an artist. >>>