Cloud Telephony Experiments

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 cl...

When Nextbigwhat  published about the constructive ways of funding your startup , I was reminded that after we launched KooKoo , we had utilized almost all the means mentioned in the video. So, in this blog post, I will recount how we used the different types of money available to us to fund KooKoo. 1. Bootstrap/Self: This is the primary source of funds for us. We have a cloud telephony platform, and a couple of products, a cloud call center and a cloud PBX  which have proven useful enough to businesses that they are paying us a monthly fee for using those products :). From the beginning, we have run a lean process and had one eye on our expenses so that our expenses were never too much over our revenues. During the initial stages when we were building the product and doing R&D, we used the savings of the founders to fund KooKoo. 2. Friends and Family: The advantage of doing a business in India is that family will always help you out. We the founders have borrow...

Things will go wrong. When I was younger, I tried all the new things. Whenever a new programming language came, or a new library/API was realized, I would be the first to try it out. It almost always made sense as these new things were being released to solve some problems and I would adapt them to solve my problems. At first, they always work. But then they start showing signs of problems. First small things, then big things and finally showstoppers and I would move back to tried and tested systems. I see that trend a lot now. And we have very cool toys to play with. Redis, Mongo, Meteor, Firebase, Angular, nodejs etc. Each new thing is good and I still play with all of them and I still use them in our products. But now, I always plan backups. 'cause I know that they will fail and thats why I program backups in case the new tools fail. I always fall back to the tried and tested. Also, for all our products, the foundation is still tried and tested tools like ...