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Year in review

By C Chaitanya
So we have just completed 2 years since we launched at Unpluggd 2. Startup Weekend's "The Entrepreneur's Journey" gives a snapshot of a startup's journey. In general, every startup will have the following phases:

  1. Get an idea
  2. Decide to startup
  3. Startup
  4. Build a team and product
  5. Validation of the product
  6. Scale
  7. Conquer the world :)

As per the above resource, we did the 'I got an idea', 'I want to startup', 'Startup', 'Build a solid team and product' phase in our first year. The second year was all about 'Validation' and 'Scale'

So without further ado, some of our numbers this year.
  1. Calls handled : 600 million+
  2. Clients : 350+
  3. Registered developers : 4000+
  4. Phone numbers managed : 30000+
  5. Servers managed : 124
  6. Locations : 8
  7. Audio Data managed : 6 TB with 25 GB getting generated everyday
  8. Average Database queries per day : 20 million ( max of 70 million in a day, yeah our Mysql clusters are getting hit pretty hard :) )
  9. Log data : 4GB per day
  10. Products validated : 2, Bizphone(Virtual business phone system) and Cloudagent(Cloud based call center solution)
  11. Technologies used : PHP, Memcache, Beanstalk(Website, API), Mysql (Database), Mongo (Logs and analytics), Java(BizPhone and Cloudagent), Android(Bizphone mobile app), Perl (Background scripts), C (core KooKoo engine)

More than the numbers, the thing which has given us the most satisfaction has been our ability to scale and bring PSTN based cloud telephony to the mainstream. Traditional businesses like Agarwal packers have also embraced cloud telephony and are using it for their day to day operations. Also, in this year, we crossed one more barrier and became "Idli Profitable"(since we are in south India, thought it made more sense to call it Idli profitable than Ramen profitable :)). Basically, what I mean to say is that we have reached a stage where now, we do not need to raise money to survive. Our ability to scale was also validated by our selection in the Nasscom Emerge 50, this time in the growth category. Last year, we were in the startup category.

As communications is core for any business, our platform and products are in use in more than 15 verticals. And since more than 600 million calls have passed through our platform, if you have booked a bus ticket on the phone, called to find the cricket score, called to move your furniture, booked a cab on the phone, called to book a doctor appointment, called to make a recharge, called to know your horoscope, called to book a restaurant seat, called to order vegetables, called to know the status of your ecommerce order, called to book a hotel room, called to order food, called to book a movie ticket, called a news paper ad for real estate or called to complain on your banks service or DTH service  then most probably, your call has passed through our platform :)

Most Fun:
The most fun we had during the year was when we were judging the student entries for the Desert Hack and the two year KooKoo birthday bash we had in an employee's farm house(Sorry, Things got really out of hand at the party and due to the NSFW nature of the photos, we cannot post any of them in this blog :))

Most Stress:
The most stressful time was during an outage due to the fiber cut of a telco and we had to migrate some customers to alternate numbers.

Turning point:
The most important decision we took consciously during this year was to build sales DNA into the company. Till 4 months back, we did not have a sales team. All our customers had come through word of mouth. At that time, we had seen enough traction for our products. Platform & products were also rock solid and hence we went ahead. In the last 4 months since the sales team has been in place under Rajiv's leadership we have more than doubled our revenue. Rajiv joined our team with more than 30 years of industry experience and almost 10 years as a VP in RCom. His guidance has been immeasurable. It was a very good learning for us. In India, especially if you are in the B2B space, its mandatory to have a direct sales backed by a strong pre-sales.

Thanks:
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers who have shown their trust in our systems. We hope we have lived up to your expectations and we promise that we will continue to serve you to the best of our capabilities. We would also like to thank the startup ecosystem of India. Especially, the Hyderabad startup ecosystem. It is not very active in the Internet scene, but when it really matters everyone has helped us. It has been really wonderful to discuss with the most vibrant minds and bounce off ideas and learn from them.

Our goals for the next year:

  1. Achieve the billion calls mark. This should happen in the next 4-5 months.
  2. Complete the startup cycle by finishing point 7 in the first list above- Conquer the world :)

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