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

By C Chaitanya

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

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