Skip to main content

KooKoo Year In review - From 0 to $1 Million ARR in 3 years with Indian Customers


ozonetel
It's that time of the year when we do our yearly review. Exactly 3 years back, we started our foray into Cloud telephony by launching India's first cloud telephony platform KooKoo at the Unpluggd event. So maybe the title of the blog should be "From Unpluggd to $1 Million ARR"

This third year has been a milestone year in many respects for us. Especially the last couple of quarters. In the life cycle of every SaaS product, there comes a time, when it starts taking off. And that is the whole reasoning behind the hockey stick growth philosophy. We have been plotting our own hockey stick revenue growth points on the hockey stick curve :)
Major Milestones:

1. $1 Million ARR 
Given the fact that we cater to only Indian businesses(no dollar revenue :( ), we thought this milestone would take much longer. A lot of VCs said the Indian market was not big enough. But we were pleasantly surprised at the rate of adoption of cloud telephony by Indian SMEs. All our clients are Indian and all our revenues are from within India. So in a way, we have answered the query 

"Is it possible to do a million dollars in SaaS revenue catering only to the Indian SME segment?" 

and the answer is Yes :)
(You can also add "And with no VC funding" to the question)

2. Profitable
Being a bootstrapped company, this was a very important milestone for us. We adopted various innovative techniques to raise money for our startup and finally by acquiring some marquee customers, we moved from being idli profitable last year to being profitable this year. This year, we may even end up paying taxes to the Government :)

3. Customers
People say that it is difficult to find an early adapter crowd in India. Luckily for us, our experience has been different. We have found that Indian businesses are always willing to try new things as long as there is a value add for them. We found a lot of takers for our cloud call center, Cloudagent and Cloud PBX, BizPhone. We added a lot of marquee customers this year. Some of the big names include Redbus, Housing.com, Zovi, Principal India, GetIt, Shaadi.com, TripAdvisor. In fact, we are proud to power the communications and call centers of most of the well known startups and established enterprises out of India. Can't disclose all the names, but think of a startup and most probably KooKoo is powering their communications ;)

We also, successfully transitioned Voicegain customers onto Ozonetel(A first in the nascent cloud telephony space in India.)

4. Metrics(Approx figs):
  • 4-5 million call center minutes handled per day
  • 20 million API hits/day on the platform
  • 30,000 agents on the platform. This includes intelligent as well as dumb agents
  • Million dollars ARR in Revenue
  • Coverage in 12 cities
  • 21+ verticals served
5. Most Fun

6. Thanks
A special thanks to the whole product ecosystem in India. A lot of people have provided guidance and advice without which we would not have been here.  A special mention to Hyderabad startups. A lot of people don't know about it, but the startup ecosystem is very much active and big things are happening here.

Obviously, the biggest thanks goes to our customers for giving us the opportunity to serve them.

7. Next year goals
  • Going International. We have already started the process, news will be shared soon.
  • Multi channel communication.
  • Pay a tax to the government ;)
Hacker news discussion here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625674

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE .   Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive.  Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures.  While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...