PDF - FusionCharts

Transcription

PDF - FusionCharts

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Contents
Page
A note before you begin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II
Chapter 1
Cold-coffees, 10-pins and the quest for pocket money . . 1
Chapter 2
The quest becomes a business . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Chapter 3
The acorn sprouts, growing bigger by the day . . . .
. 31
Chapter 4
Take a bow, FusionCharts has arrived . . . . . . . . . 46
Chapter 5
A dent in our universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Chapter 6
Act 1, Scene 1, charting a new beginning . . . . . . . . 75
3II
A note before you begin
Hi, I’m Sanket Nadhani.
I am here to tell you the story of how a quest for pocket money
became a multi-million dollar venture. The story of how a
company grew from a shared bedroom to one that has 20,000
customers and 450,000 users in 118 countries today, powers
more than a billion charts per month and does $7M in annual
revenue.
I tell the story as an insider, since the bedroom the company
grew out of was the same I shared with my brother. I was a part
of the story too, heading Marketing and Sales at the company
from 2009 to 2011.
I think this is an unconventional story for two reasons. I will tell
you one of the reasons now, and you will know of the other at the
end of the book. The first is that this is a story of persistence. In
an age of scale-fast-or-die-quick, this is the story of the decadelong trials and tribulations of a company founded by a 17-year
old, with no business knowledge whatsoever, and in a country
not exactly known for its software products. Read on to know
the second one.
I hope you will have as much fun and inspiration reading this
book, as I have had writing it.
Sanket Nadhani
15th October 2012
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III
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1
COLD COFFEES, 10-PINS
& THE QUEST FOR
POCKET MONEY
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Cold coffees, 10-pins & the quest for pocket money
I
t was 2001. Pallav Nadhani, a bubbling 16-year old, was
in high school. Like any other teenager back in the day, he
wanted to go bowling and sip cold coffee in cafés. In the hot
and humid Kolkata, cold coffees are always a good idea. It’s
just that the boy didn’t really care much about the coffee. He
was there for the cute girls that hung around in these cafés.
Baristas are charitable to your cause only if you look good in
a short skirt and going bowling caused a sizable dent in the
pocket too. There was only so much pocket money Pallav had,
but he wasn’t ready to give up on his new-found “vices” for fun
anytime soon. He had to make more pocket money.
When it came to after-school jobs for teenagers, the Indian
society sported a stiff nose to pretty much everything. Waiting
tables at a restaurant was frowned upon by the society at
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large, as was working in a mall. Nobody from a respected
family did that, and more importantly, nobody gave teenagers
a job. Teenagers went to school, studied hard and attended a
good college to become an engineer or a doctor. When they
weren’t studying, they played cricket and discussed the state
of Indian cricket as if it was a fundamental duty mentioned in
the Constitution. But we digress. Essentially, teenagers had to
make do with whatever pocket money they got. Pallav wasn’t
exactly ready for that.
Meanwhile in the world of Information Technology, the
landscape was changing. The era of eager investors putting
sacks of money into online pet-supply stores and grocery
delivery business was over. The world was coming out of the
dotcom hangover and was ready to experiment with new
technologies. And users were ready to pay money for things
that solved an actual problem.
Pallav had been helping with the web development arm of his
dad’s firm for a couple of years now, which developed websites
for local businesses. While at it, he got a pretty good hold of
creating dynamic websites in ASP and jazzy animations
in Macromedia Flash 4. Concocting these two technologies
together could yield interesting results; he just needed to create
something useful that people would pay for.
While the search was on, he chanced upon a website called
ASPToday. The website paid handsomely for writing articles
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that talked about how to do cool stuff with ASP. Handsomely
meant anything from $600 to $1,500 depending on the size and
usefulness of the article. This was a godsend.
The idea for the article struck quickly too. Pallav was sick and
tired of the boring charts Microsoft Excel generated, something he had seen and made tons of for his school projects. Flash
was jazzy, Flash was fun. Why not use it to make sexy animated
charts for web applications? And ASP could then help connect
the charts to databases, thus making it actually useful. What
people were using those days were bulky components that put
a heavy load on the web servers, and generated boring output
at the end of it all. This was it.
He wrote a long article on how to combine the very-verybusiness ASP with the hey-how-you-doing Flash to create
animated charts for web applications. The concoction was a
first to create charts for web applications. He sent the article
to the ASPToday guys at the end of 2001, who published it on
their website and featured it on the homepage for a week as
well. Developers hanging out on the website were intrigued by
the idea and liked the output. Most importantly, $1,500 hit the
bank. One thousand five hundred dollars!
The ASPToday community also started suggesting feature
additions that Pallav could make. Not having much to do after
school, he started working on these features and bounced
them off with the techies who had suggested them. They quite
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liked what they saw, and soon the idea of converting it into a
product started germinating.
The pre-cursor to FusionCharts
At the start of 2002, Pallav began work on converting his
find into a product. Specifically, a product he could sell in the
market. The only business learnings he had were the pickings
from his dad’s web development business. Unlike today, not
every startup was telling every other startup how to a run a
startup in those days. The web was a small place with limited
business lessons, so this was going to be an experiment. And
Pallav was determined to run with it.
By March, all the coding was done and it was time to get ready
for the launch.
He put together a 12-page documentation on how to use the
product. While it sounds like a hastily done job, it was all of
what you needed to get the charts up and running. His dad
had a website that offered web development services for local
businesses, and sold accounting and payroll-related software.
Even though there was no overlap between the two target
markets, he didn’t have to pay for a domain name and web
hosting. A penny saved was a penny earned for the boy.
He decided to call the product fXgraph for a reason he doesn’t
remember today, except that it sounded cool back then. Heck,
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it sounds pretty cool even now.
It was time to figure out two more things and get rolling. How
much should the software cost and how should the money be
collected, in that order. The order that was ultimately followed
was the exact opposite. Since Pallav didn’t know how the
complex world of finance works and that too with the plethora
of rules and regulations in India, he sought his dad’s help.
Kisor, Pallav’s and your dear author’s dad, recommended
having two payment options — checks, just like his business
had all these years, and online through credit cards.
They started looking for an online payment gateway. They
identified a company called Virtual Software Store that charged a hefty 25% fee for processing online payment in addition
to the bank remittance fees but back then, they didn’t know
better. Now on to the final barrier, the price. They wanted to
keep the software low-priced but without any international
exposure as such, they couldn’t exactly place a finger on what
was low. Luckily for them, the price chose itself. The lowest
a software could be priced on the Virtual Software Store was
$15, and that was chosen as the price for fXgraph. They also
introduced another version at $49 for people who wanted to
buy the source code of fXgraph. The idea behind making the
source code available for purchase was that people would feel
safe about their purchase — even if fXgraph went down under,
they could keep their charting up-to-date by building on the
source code. Nobody was really going to buy the $49 version
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The idea behind making the source code
available for purchase was that people would
feel safe about their purchase.
— it was a lot of money to pay for a charting component but
just in case. The $15 version was called the User Edition and
the $49 version the Developer Edition. There was one small
problem, however.
Virtual Software Store required a $29 setup fee. Not only was
that a reasonably big amount for a setup, neither Pallav nor
Kisor had a credit card. They decided to get started with checks
itself, and that they would come back to the online payment
option if there were enough people asking for it.
fXgraph was launched in April. The first version had four
chart types. You could toggle between the chart types using
icons at the top to see the same data represented in different
forms. Supposedly, each of these different forms gave you
different insights into your data and animated the chart again
— something that was so fancy people would want to see it all
day long.
To promote fXgraph, Pallav wrote articles on technical sites
talking about how to combine the very-very-business ASP with
the hey-how-you-doing Flash to create animated charts for web
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applications. All the articles started with how a picture is worth
a thousand words, but thankfully, you had a different chart
type at the end. He also got in touch with the developers he
had met on ASPToday, and told them that he had a complete
product now. That’s all the marketing he knew, and that’s all
the marketing he did.
In mid-April, a fine gentleman from the US wrote to him with
an intent to purchase the User Edition. Pallav still recalls that
as the sweetest email anyone has ever written to him. The
gentleman was asked to send a check for $15. So there it was.
First customer in the bag and many more to come. The check
was received in a fortnight and deposited in the bank. Pallav
started checking his bank balance every day to see the
princely increase in his bank balance. Nothing happened for a
fortnight, but boys are boys. He kept at it and finally there was
a change.
The bank balance had gone down by $20.
Quite clearly something had gone wrong. He muttered a few
solemn words about the bank’s proficiency and called them
up. “There has been a goof-up. I deposited a check for $15 a
fortnight back, and today my bank balance shows it’s gone
down by $20. Can you fix that real quick?” Then he added
proudly, “The check came from the US, you know.” “Sir there
has been no goof-up. Our clearance fee for an international
check is $35, which was deducted from the amount deposited,”
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the bank representative replied. She probably empathized
with him as well, but those words were lost out on him. So
there it was. First customer in the bag and a loss to be had.
The next day, Pallav borrowed his uncle’s credit card and set
up the online payment gateway.
Fortunately for him, two more people decided to buy Developer
Editions of fXgraph in the same month, and he turned a profit
in the first month itself.
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The word about fXgraph had started going out, slowly but surely.
Pallav was in constant touch with the early downloaders and
customers, and they had started sending their feature requests.
He got to work on the new features. Being a small and simple
product, the release cycles were small and fXgraph went from
v1 to v4 in a couple of months.
A steady stream of a couple of hundred dollars was coming in
per month, but Pallav was soon moving out from high school
to college, and his needs were going to increase. He decided to
turn it up a notch.
In July, instead of fXgraph, he launched fXgraph 3D. As the
name suggests, fXgraph 3D was supposed to redefine the world
of charting with its stunning 3D charts. The first version started small with only a 3D column chart, the column chart being
the most commonly used chart type. He put it out in the market
and waited for the customers to pour in.
There were no takers.
Pallav was quick to realize what had gone wrong. fXgraph 3D
had only one chart type, which didn’t cover even the basic
charting needs of people.
He decided to go back to work on the 2D version itself.
Given how disastrous the 3D experiment had been, fXgraph v6
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would be regarded as yet another candy factory experiment
gone wrong. He had also come to know that very few people
were using the chart toggle option to look at the same data.
In fact, the choice of chart depended on what kind of analysis
you wanted to perform on your data and switching to another
chart was wrong by its very fundamentals.
A new type of charting component had to be built. Nothing
would change drastically. It would have the new features that
fXgraph customers had been asking for, each chart would be a
separate file and most importantly, it would have a new name.
It would be called FusionCharts.
The birth of FusionCharts
In August, Pallav started work on FusionCharts. He had got
done with high school, and was looking for a college where he
could meet new people and have fun.
He enrolled in a course in Computer Applications but the peo-
ple there were not fun enough for him. He decided to shift to an
Economics course in another college. Not like he cared much
about Economics either, but the people in the new college were
fun and the girls were cute.
On the work front, fXgraph 3D had been buried. Customers for
fXgraph 4 were still trickling in, which was quite surprising to
be fair.
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In September, a gentleman named Brian wrote in, wanting
to bundle fXgraph with his reporting software. He wanted to
know what the cost of an OEM* license would be and what the
licensing terms were. Pallav had no idea what an OEM license
meant. He let Brian know that he did not have an OEM license
agreement in place and wasn’t even sure how much he should
charge for them. The gentleman that Brian was, he not only
helped Pallav come up with the terms of the OEM agreement,
he also figured out a royalty model that was a win-win for both.
Brian was going to send in a quarterly report of the number of
licenses he had sold, along with the payment itself. Sometimes
being honest is the best thing you can do.
In the meantime, development of the new product was going
strong. FusionCharts was ready to launch in October.
It had six chart types, a 50% increase from fXgraph. It had a
15-page documentation, a 25% increase. It took data in XML,
which was becoming a standard data exchange format by
then. It even had a logo and a tagline. The logo was a pie chart
that had gone wrong during development to end up with six
star-like strobes in different colors. The tagline was A new
dimension to graphing, which sounded cool, just like the name
fXgraph. The payment systems were in place with the option
of paying through check now removed. All that was to be
done was figure out the pricing and show the world the new
dimension.
* An Original Equipment Manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are
licensed by another company to embed in their product and retail under that purchasing company’s brand name.
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For pricing, Pallav decided to rely on experience this time
— his 12 months of experience with fXgraph. The pricing of
fXgraph seemed to have worked well since nobody asked
for a discount. Also, all the customers had bought the $49
developer edition, the just-in-case edition. Quite clearly, users
could afford to pay more than $15 for a charting software.
FusionCharts launched on 22nd October with two editions. A
User Edition at $35 and a Developer Edition at $99. Just like
fXgraph, the Developer Edition came with the complete source
code of the product.
Continuing with the tradition, Pallav wrote articles for different tech websites to get the word out about FusionCharts. The
articles talked about the troubles with traditional charting
components — the output was boring, the components bulky,
and the installation a pain. FusionCharts, on the other hand,
gave you sexy animated and interactive charts, was lightweight, and installed the copy-paste way.
Also, after he figured out that developers looked for components and libraries in tech directories, he submitted FusionCharts
to as many directories he could lay his hands on. Finally, he
emailed the fXgraph customers.
For the first five days, nothing happened. Even the fXgraph
folks didn’t reply. Pallav was beginning to have his doubts,
“fXgraph 3D all over again?” FusionCharts was genuinely a
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better product, so it was tough to put a finger on what had gone
wrong this time.
Then on the sixth day, someone from California purchased a
Developer Edition. He had made the purchase directly, without even sending in any queries prior to the purchase. FusionCharts was in business. God bless the Americans!
Over the next two months, the influx of customers picked up
a steady pace. Developers were talking about FusionCharts
on technical forums, customers were showing the animated
charts to their friends, and more users were giving the trial
version a shot.
Also, since Pallav was the developer of the product, it didn’t
take him more than five minutes to reply to a tech query. Even
for more complex issues, a 10-email thread with someone at
the opposite end of the globe would be completed within half
an hour. People were amazed at the speed and reliability of
the tech support, and often asked him if he slept at all. The
quick technical support egged on the word-of-mouth.
Over the next two months by the end of 2002, FusionCharts
had 35 customers.
On the web, someone had picked up the article on how to use
FusionCharts with ASP and converted it to an article on how to
use FusionCharts with PHP. The PHP developers gave it a shot,
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People were amazed at the speed and reliability
of the tech support, and often asked him if he
slept at all. The quick technical support egged
on the word-of-mouth.
liked what they saw and started talking about it. Pallav realized
that there was more than just the ASP market to tap into.
FusionCharts v2 was launched in March 2003. A couple of
thousand dollars were coming in every month by now, and the
40% month-on-month increase made for a pretty picture on
the line chart.
However, parting with almost a quarter of that just for an
online payment gateway was starting to hurt. Virtual Software
Store had brought down the commission to 18% after repeated
requests, but even that was too high. There were other gateways that took only a 7% cut. Pallav pressed for lower cuts in a
mail that ended like this:
Paul - I have been doing business with you for more
than 15 months and I never had any problem with you.
During this course, we have developed personal rapport
and I would surely love to continue the relationship.
Since I head the FusionCharts/fXgraph business, using
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my say I had been putting off the management pressure
to switch to other agency so far, but now the gulf is
widening and moreover we require large resources
on ad spends; therefore we are not in a position to pay
such a hefty cut on Sales. So please try to be reasonable
and bring down your rates to enable me to ward off
the pressure. I would like to mention that this time the
management is serious since the difference is glaring in
the two product groups and I have no defense! The next
management meeting is scheduled at end of this week;
please share your thoughts in the meantime.
Thanks and kind regards,
Pallav Nadhani
FusionCharts changed payment gateways in August.
The part about the large resources on ad spends was right
though. Now that thousands of dollars were coming in every
month, Pallav had his vices covered. Beers had replaced the
cold coffees when the boy turned eighteen. He could afford to
spend money on the business now.
He spent a hefty $256 for getting featured listings in a tech
directory, where he had been using the free listing all along.
Google Adwords had also come out by then and he gave that
a try as well. Though the monthly spend on Adwords was
less than what he would typically pay for a night of drinking,
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it taught him valuable lessons about search marketing and
business in general.
To dedicate more time to FusionCharts, Pallav decided to switch from his Economics course to Commerce. The Commerce
course required him to go to college only for the exams. He
showed his zeros in all the subjects in the Economics course
to the Vice Principal of the College, who agreed that Pallav was
a dumb kid and would be better suited to the simpler Commerce course.
What had started as a quest for pocket money was threatening to become a business now.
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2
THE QUEST
TRANSFORMS
INTO A BUSINESS
The quest transforms into a business
19
I
n April 2005, Pallav realized he was onto something big
for the first time. FusionCharts had clocked $1.4M in the
last financial year* and was growing 100% year-on-year. In
addition, he had just put out a big product release and got some
slick corporate branding done. With the realization sinking in,
his dreams started getting bigger.
FusionCharts had hit the 2,000 customer mark a month back.
With an increasing customer base, feature requests were
coming in thick and fast. A lot of users asked for a speedometer
widget, similar to that of a car. Businesses use speedometers
to display important metrics like cost per sale and customer
satisfaction index in their report cards. The request made
sense. Pallav could think of more widgets that could be useful
to businesses, but he had other ideas.
“Why not put all these widgets together to create a new product? Two products on the shelf definitely look better than
one.”
But pulling off another product all by himself was not going to
be easy. The development of FusionCharts had to go on, and
support tickets had to be replied to. The idea of hiring someone
finally crossed his mind. He had the money but had no idea
how to go about it, or even what to expect. “How was I going
to trust someone with my product, and why would someone
come work with me in the first place?”
* In India, a financial year begins on 1st of April and ends on 31st March of the subsequent year.
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“How was I going to trust someone with my
product, and why would someone come work
with me in the first place?”
The second question wasn’t misplaced. Pallav had started
shaving only a couple of months back.
Someone comes onboard
The first hire was made at the end of the month. Akhil was a
cousin’s friend, in his early twenties. He had worked on AVL
trees* in an earlier project, something Pallav hadn’t even heard
of. Surely, he could be trusted. Akhil was also given a 4% share
of the profits in addition to his salary. With skin in the game, he
got to work from Pallav’s home itself.
The arrangement was working well. Akhil was putting in long
hours and together they released FusionWidgets, then called
FusionCharts Instrumentation Suite, in August.
Pallav marketed FusionWidgets the way he had marketed
FusionCharts. Those who had asked for a speedometer liked
what they saw and bought a license. Then there were others
who realized they needed a speedometer when they saw one.
By the time the year ended, FusionWidgets had 80 customers.
* An AVL tree is an advanced data structure in computer science. It is a self-balancing binary
search tree wherein the heights of the two child subtrees of any node differ by at most one;
if at any time they differ by more than one, rebalancing is done to restore this property
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Steady start.
Pallav realized what he could do with more people in the
team. Not only would he be able to push out new releases
and products faster, he could also go out on Saturday nights
without having to worry about support tickets and bug fixes.
He started looking for an ActionScript* developer, technical
content writer, designer and web developer.
With plans to hire more people, working from home was not
going to be an option anymore. In India, children stay with
their parents. So Pallav’s house essentially was his parents’
house having a family of five, your dear author included. The
place wasn’t going be able to accommodate any more people,
unless they sat on the bed.
FusionCharts needed an office.
Pallav’s dad came into the picture again. Pallav knew nothing
about real estate except that he had a budget of $50,000 for
the new office. Kisor, on the other hand, had a solid 35 years
of business experience in trading and construction, and could
drive a hard bargain.
Kisor found a 20-seater office. It was a ten-minute walk from
the house on the ground floor of a quiet residential building,
with a narrow path leading to it. It had a low price tag for a very
unusual reason — the neighboring building leaned in towards
* ActionScript is an object-oriented language developed by Macromedia (now Adobe) for
programming in Flash.
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it, think Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a jump from one roof to
another wasn’t exactly a stunt — and then Kisor pressed further.
“No one would like to endanger their life by working here.
To get people to join the company, I’ll have to buy insurance
for all of them and pay the premium year-after-year. That is a
massive cost to me. I’ll need to offset that cost against the lump
sum for the office.”
Kisor got the office for $30,000.
They spent another $20,000 on office interiors and furnishing,
bringing in the orange and purple from the new FusionCharts
logo, to end up with an office they are proud of even today.
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Knowing that administration and finance work will pile up
once a team is in place, Kisor made a hire as well. A girl called
Neha, who was a neighbor earlier and had just completed her
graduation, became the first non-technical hire of the company.
The team of four moved into the new office in January 2006.
Now, it was time to put a team in place. Job listings were put
out on a job portal, which was a pretty expensive affair back
then, and a couple of resumes trickled in. The IT landscape in
Kolkata was a services-driven one, so finding people with indepth technical expertise turned out to be a major problem.
Pallav’s inexperience with hiring and the lack of formal HR
documents didn’t help either.
The first person scheduled for an interview was a guy for the
web developer position. It was on a Saturday when nobody else
was in office. When the bell rang, Pallav himself opened the
door. The interviewee didn’t quite approve of Pallav’s spiked
hair. Closing the door behind him, Pallav went to his cabin
and asked him to come along. All this while, the interviewee
had thought he was a well-paid office boy. And as soon as he
entered the cabin, Pallav started firing technical questions. No
pleasantries, no small talk, no warming up. Suffices to say that
the interview did not go well.
Pallav quickly realized he needed to learn the art of interviewing. He looked up questions that large companies asked to
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gauge the competence of candidates. He learnt how to get a
candidate comfortable before starting with the technical
barrage. He also learnt how to project FusionCharts as an
established company that candidates would feel safe working
for.
The next interviewee was an Einstein look-alike with black
hair, Nilanjan, for the ActionScript developer role. Pallav had
invited him for a “mutual discussion” on a Monday and enlisted
Neha to open the door. Turns out none of that was needed.
Nilanjan just wanted to work on exciting technical projects
that had a huge scope for R&D, no matter how big or small the
company.
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He liked Pallav’s plans for the product, and Pallav liked
Nilanjan’s knowledge of mathematics. Mutual admiration
happened, and Nilanjan asked for the offer letter.
“What on Earth was that supposed to be? With Akhil and Neha,
we agreed on a salary and shook hands. No papers were signed, and none of them asked for anything called an offer letter.”
Luckily, Google had crawled the deepest darkest corners of the
world by then, and finding an offer letter to copy from was
much easier than Pallav thought. Nilanjan was sent the offer
letter, and he’s been with FusionCharts ever since.
Marketing without marketing
The word that there was a business to be had from interactive
web charting was out by early 2005. Nothing big enough for
the industry giants to jump into the picture, though they all had
their free versions tucked away somewhere, but big enough
for a couple of developers to jump in. For the first time in his
career, Pallav saw what competition looked like.
“Meh” was how he reacted. He was focused on building a
great product and providing fanatical customer support, so he
didn’t really care about what others were doing. In hindsight,
it should have actually been a proud moment for FusionCharts
to see other players enter a market it had created but hindsight,
as they say, is always 20/20.
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There was one company out there, however, that had Pallav
worried. This company from Eastern Europe had bought a
Developer Edition of FusionCharts, made some small changes
to the source code and started selling it as their own product.
They also copied the documentation, product description and
the licensing structure word-for-word. Their trick was to sell
the product slightly cheaper than what FusionCharts itself sold
it for.
They had to be sued.
The only thing that Pallav knew about law was that lawyers
talked and drank a lot. He did some reading on how he could
file a case against the infringers, only to find out that it involved
huge costs and time. He had to take a different approach to the
problem.
Since the infringers were trying to bag customers by selling
FusionCharts at a cheaper price, they had to be beaten at their
own game. The question was, “How cheap?” Pallav decided on
zero! When a major release of FusionCharts was launched in
March 2005, he released the previous version as FusionCharts
Free, then FusionCharts Lite. FusionCharts Free was completely
free to use in both personal and commercial projects.
No strings attached. What the copycats were selling for a couple
of hundred dollars, could be had straight from its original
developers itself, for free. Since then, every time a new version
27
of FusionCharts comes out, the previous version becomes
FusionCharts Free.
Looking back, FusionCharts Free has done more marketing for
FusionCharts, than even the best of paid marketing campaigns.
It got the FusionCharts brand name out in the market. It got
developers, who are otherwise not willing to play with a trial
version, playing with the product. It got startups using the
product, many of whom upgraded to paid version once they
had customers themselves. It also got FusionCharts a cover
story on Linux.com — Cross-platform charts that rock.
The culture of using free marketing campaigns has since stuck
at FusionCharts. Another prime example of the practice is the
FusionCharts Google Gadget.
Google had come out with iGoogle in May 2005, previously
known as Google Personalized Homepage. Users could add
gadgets like photo streams and daily literary quotes to their
pages. By mid-2006, Google was looking for companies to
develop more gadgets. FusionCharts decided to jump into the
picture and released FusionCharts Google Gadget. The gadget
FusionCharts Free has done more marketing
for FusionCharts, than even the best of paid
marketing campaigns.
28
allowed users to create animated Flash charts for webpages,
blogs, and iGoogle pages using a simple interface. People
with no programming knowledge whatsoever could use it to
build great-looking charts for themselves. Google put it out
as a featured gadget and wrote about it on its blog. Other
bloggers picked up the article and wrote detailed step-by-step
tutorials on the gadget. Again, marketing without marketing
gave FusionCharts the reach that traditional marketing dollars could never have.
The shelf gets prettier
FusionCharts hit the magical 5,000 customer mark in October
2006. The customer list now included not just small developerdriven companies, but even Fortune 500 companies who used
FusionCharts in their products and projects, both external and
internal.
A first-of-its-type product and fanatical customer support
definitely had a big role to play in getting the company to the
magical number, as did the marketing without marketing
approach. But there was another magic potion that had been a
part of the mixture all along.
“Right from the early days, FusionCharts had readymade
business demos and chart galleries. Rather than hitting people
with boring feature lists, I wanted to show people what the
product could do for them,” says Pallav. “When large companies
29
“Rather than hitting people with boring
feature lists, I wanted to show people
what the product could do for them.”
started writing to us, I saw that a lot of these people were nontechnical people — product managers, project managers,
marketing and sales managers. These were people who would
look at a sales dashboard, get mighty impressed with it and
then write to me with their licensing queries. Looking back,
I realize how it was not just about the product that made it
sell — it was the complete package we offered, right from
our readymade demos to the comprehensive documentation
that came loaded with real-life examples. People don’t want
to know what a product can do, they want to know what a
product can do for them.”
In November 2006, two more products were added to the shelf
— FusionMaps and PowerCharts. Put together with the new
version of FusionCharts and FusionWidgets, the complete set
of products was called the FusionCharts Suite.
FusionMaps came from the need of people wanting to show
geographical data like sales by region and election results on
their maps. PowerCharts was a collection of all customization
work the company had been doing since its early days. When
customers sent in domain-specific chart requests that Pallav
30
didn’t see fitting into the main product roadmap, he offered
to do a custom chart for them. The first custom chart was
developed for a paltry $100, with the clause that the chart could
be used for other custom projects and for the main product
line as well. Often, quotes had to be reduced by as much as
50% just to be able to get this clause through. But when PowerCharts hit the market, the price cuts paid for themselves, many
times over.
With the launch of FusionCharts Suite, the shelf was looking
pretty and the complete product line was moved to a dedicated website — www.fusioncharts.com.
In February 2007, a guy called Sudipto came in to interview for
the post of technical content writer. He had gone to college to
study literature following his father’s footsteps but it was the
world of technology that fascinated him. During the interview,
he had nothing on the questions about content writing but aced all the technical questions. Finally Pallav asked him, “So do
you want to join as a technical content writer or a developer?”.
“I think I will go with technical content writing since that is
what I applied for in the first place,” he replied.
Sudipto got started the next day and would go on to head the
implementation team.
31
3
THE ACORN SPROUTS,
GROWING BIGGER BY
THE DAY
32
The acorn sprouts, growing bigger by the day
F
usionCharts was flourishing as a business, but Pallav
was not done with his fun yet. He was still in his early
twenties and didn’t want to have any regrets later on.
While the previous college in Kolkata had been fun, and he
had met the cute girl who would go on to become his wife,
he wanted more. He wanted stories he could tell his grandchildren. He wanted to go to a college for post-graduation to
have the craziest time of his life.
He wanted to do a Masters in Computer Science, he just needed
to figure out where.
“I did not like the education system in India as it is based mostly
on rote learning. While the top 3-4 colleges are different, it is
a rat race getting into them. Also, the cultural exposure is very
limited. I had never been outside India and wanted to go to a
college where I could meet people from all parts of the world.
The USA and UK were my best candidates,” says Pallav. He
zeroed in on the UK. “The course in UK was a 1-year one, so
I wouldn’t be away from FusionCharts for long. Plus, it was
relatively closer to India, so I could make frequent trips back
home.”
In July 2007, the University of Edinburgh sent him the green
for the Masters course.
The land of Scotch was calling, but there was work to be done
before he flew across the oceans. Business had to to go on as
usual, even without its captain.
33
“The release we had put out was a good couple of years ahead
of its time, so if we could just support it well, we would still be
in good stead by the time I came back. The team was new, but
they were a very smart bunch of people. And in the short span
that they had been at the company, they had done enough to
prove that it was not just another job for them, it was their
company. I just had to make the team self-reliant, and pull
myself out of as many day-to-day operations as I could.”
Pallav left for Edinburgh in August and did go on to have the
craziest time of his life. His grandchildren might not get to hear
all the stories though.
The wild times aside, he picked up valuable business lessons
as well.
“One of these days, I had gone to the administration department
of the college and saw a guy using FusionCharts. Someone in
my college using a product I had built from scratch. Wow! But
it got even better. Another of these days, when I was hanging
out at a pub, I met a gentleman who had used FusionCharts
before. When I told him I founded the company, he was ecstatic
“They had done enough to prove that it
was not just another job for them,
it was their company.”
34
to meet me. He even bought me a beer. I felt like a bit of a
celebrity that night. I also went to a couple of startup events,
where I picked up important business learnings. I learnt how
to segment our audience, how to position our product in the
market, how to hire smart people, and how to take the business to the next level on the whole. I had finally found what
I had been missing in the services-dominated ecosystem in
India, and more so because of the cocooned life I had been
living in Kolkata till then.”
Pallav came back to India with a renewed vigor in August 2008.
Hitting the 10,000 mark
For a business, when you hit the 10,000 customer mark, you
know you have arrived. For FusionCharts, that fateful moment
came in March 2008. Yays were exchanged and chests were
thumped. FusionCharts had done $2.8M in revenue, in 200708, a 75% increase from the previous fiscal year. The customer
list now boasted of a majority of the Fortune 500 companies,
and also included organizations like NASA and the World Bank.
But the interesting part about the milestone is not the number
itself. It’s that FusionCharts got to it without any dedicated sales
person on its ranks. Pallav and Kisor were the sales team, both
with their well-defined day jobs.
The smaller licenses sold directly off-the-shelf, and the team
35
got to know of it only the next day. This because half of FusionCharts’ customers were from the US and a third from Europe,
so the team was well asleep by the time they were pulling out
their credit cards. With the larger licenses, people wrote in
only if they wanted to check the credibility of the company,
apart from enquiring about the price itself.
“With a majority of Fortune 500 companies on the customer
list, establishing ourselves as a credible company was not too
difficult,” says Pallav. “We had a slick website that created a
great first impression, spoke for the quality of our products
and made us look like an established company. The extensive
product literature, comprehensive documentation and excellent
customer support were always there to back the product. And
when all of these were not enough, we finally pulled out our
trump card. We were an insanely profitable company with
a bottom-line of $2.2M, so there was no way we were going
down anytime soon.”
By then, the reseller network had also started making a healthy
contribution to the company’s coffers. At the end of 2006, a
company from China had contacted FusionCharts, wanting
to resell its products in China. Prospects from countries
where English is a third language or lesser were often asking
if FusionCharts had a local reseller, sometimes in the local
language itself. Pallav and Kisor had been thinking about tying
up with local resellers for a couple of months now, they just
didn’t know how to get started. So when the Chinese company
36
“With a majority of Fortune 500 companies on
the customer list, establishing ourselves as a
credible company was not too difficult.”
wrote in asking for a straight 25% cut, they agreed.
Within a couple of months, FusionCharts was able to make
inroads into China, a market that was very tough to crack
online. Excited by the results, Kisor plunged himself into
developing a reseller network in the APAC region, South
America and Europe.
“In non-English speaking countries, companies felt safer
buying from local resellers. It gave them a local point of contact for tech support, even though the support ticket ultimately
came to us,” says Kisor. “Soon, we started training the resellers
extensively on our products over phone and Webex. Language
was a barrier with most of them, and we often had to transcribe entire product training sessions over email. But we kept
at it and created product literature in simple English that they
could follow. Once they got a hang of the product, they started
talking about FusionCharts to their existing customers and
soon found many takers. Some of them even converted the
literature to the local-speak, thus helping us reach previously
inaccessible markets and raking in the moolah themselves.”
37
By the beginning of 2008, South Korea became the secondhighest grosser for the company, with an overwhelming
majority of the sales coming from the reseller network.
More people with charting dreams
In 2008, three more important hires were made. Rahul, a freshout-of-college engineer who would later turn product lead;
Shamasis, a web developer who would later turn JavaScript
architect; and Sumantra, a designer who was sick of being
told the exact shade of pink to use at service companies and
then having to go back on it. They continue to have charting
dreams.
Rahul was earlier a student at the computer training institute
Kisor ran in a small town called Bhagalpur. He had just
graduated from college and was looking for a job. He contacted “Kisor Sir” to see if he had anything. Turns out he did, and
Rahul joined as a software developer. A year later, as soon
as Rahul’s brother got done with his graduation, he joined
FusionCharts too.
Shamasis’ first date with FusionCharts was memorable, to say
the least. In September 2008, Pallav’s uncle and Kisor’s elder
brother, Asok Nadhani, had also rented an office in the same
building on the third floor. He wrote books on accounting
software.
38
When Shamasis came to meet “Mr. Nadhani” for the interview,
the security guard promptly sent him to the third floor. Pallav
was called Pallav by everyone and Kisor as Sir, so the only
Mr. Nadhani in the building was on the third floor. Once
Shamasis announced his arrival, he was given a sheet with
some tables printed on it and the task of reproducing it in
Microsoft Word. Unsure of what was happening, he proceeded with the task anyway. He got done in four minutes. The guy
who had given him the sheet was amazed. “Are you sure you
want to join us in the role of a typist in the accounting team?”
“Well, it looks like there has been some mistake. I had written
in for the role of a web developer.” Shamasis replied calmly. By
the time Asok had come out, “Why don’t you go to the ground
39
floor? My nephew runs a software company there, he might
have something for you.”
Shamasis obliged and finally met the Mr. Nadhani he had
come to meet. Pallav’s eye for details impressed him, and the
blooper was forgotten.
His later dates with the company have been better. He went
on to meet his wife at FusionCharts, and they got married in
December 2010.
With a rapidly expanding customer base, support queries
were steadily increasing. For the first four years, Pallav had
taken it upon himself to provide technical support. Later,
Sudipto and Rahul joined in as well. Both of them were technical, liked solving problems and loved talking to customers,
so tech support was as good as always. But with the volume
of queries coming in, it was taking up a bulk of their time.
Someone had to be brought in specifically for the role of
technical support.
Dhruva, a bespectacled young man who reached for water
as soon as he had a tough problem on his hands, joined
FusionCharts in March 2009. The recession was on and he
was waiting for a joining date from Wipro, one of India’s Big
Four in IT services. In the meantime, he decided to come work
for the company that came highly recommended by his
friend Shamasis. He would ultimately spend only two months
at the company, which included a 45-day notice period, but laid
40
the foundation for the FusionCharts customer support team.
“Technical support is one of the most important roles in
an organization,” Dhruva says of the customer support
philosophy he put together. “Every day you go to office with
the single aim of solving problems and making the world a
happier place. When people cannot get things to work the
way they want them to, they get frustrated. As a technical
support executive, your job is to understand what the user is
trying to do, as opposed to what he is saying he is trying to do.
Then you tell him — Hey you know what? It’s not the end of
the world. We are in this together and we will figure this out.”
“Being nice is no rocket science. The only time I faced a
disgruntled customer was when a gentleman’s query was
replied to in 36 hours. He typically got his replies in 5-6 hours
and this delay was, well, unacceptable to him. He went on to
write some not-so-nice things about us on the FusionCharts
Forum. So once I had solved his problem and his head was
back at room temperature, I wrote a hug to him. I think he
slept a happy man that night.”
Before leaving, Dhruva passed on the baton to his friend
Rajroop, who would go on to lead the customer support team
and get a job offer at every tradeshow he would represent
“Being nice is no rocket science.”
41
FusionCharts at.
Don’t stretch or you will hit someone
The FusionCharts office was in a location light years away
from humanity, an area called Bangur Avenue, but it worked
with a small team for three reasons. There was a metro
station, what you might call the subway or the tube, 15 minutes from the office which is a rarity in Indian cities. The area
was so quiet that birds could be heard chirping during the
evening smoke breaks, another rarity. And there were tons of
puchkas* to be had in the area.
By March 2009, the FusionCharts team was 25-strong. Every
time someone stretched in their seat, they were 93% likely to
hit their neighbor flat in the nose. FusionCharts was no longer
* Puchka, also called panipuri, is India’s most famous street food. It is a small, hollow, fried, crisp
Indian bread that is filled with a mixture of water, tamarind, chili, potato, onion, chickpeas and
other spices. it goes into your mouth at once, and delights many a taste bud at the same time.
42
a safe place to work in.
There was also the risk of waterlogging, a menace that had
struck earlier. Bangur Avenue was a low-lying area without
a proper water drainage system. So every time there was
a heavy downpour, it would take hours for the accumulated
water to clear out. In the September of 2007, it had rained for
five days straight. The office, being on the ground floor, was
flooded with knee-deep water for almost a week. Needless
to say, nobody could come to work during this time. Many
computers got damaged, and so did the Intranet server. Shelter
was sought in Mr. Nadhani’s office on the third floor.
While the menace hadn’t struck again in the subsequent
monsoons, the threat always loomed.
With plans to expand the engineering and customer support
team, and hire a VP of Sales, the current office was not going
to work.
Pallav and Kisor decided to find a 50-seater in the heart of the
city. The recession was at its peak, so the office would come
cheap, and talented people who are otherwise hesitant to
work for a startup, would be easier to find.
Kisor got to know of a 5,000 sq ft office in one of the finest
buildings in the IT sector of the city, the Infinity ThinkTank in
Salt Lake City, at a realty exhibition on a Sunday. He and Pallav
decided to check it out the next afternoon.
43
It was on the top floor of the building, the eleventh floor, and
had a wonderful lakeside view running along the length of
the office. The rent for three months at Infinity ThinkTank was
the same as the lump sum they had paid for the earlier office.
But they decided it was time FusionCharts came to swankyland. They closed the deal the same afternoon.
The team of 25 moved to the new office within a fortnight.
In flesh and blood
In April, Pallav was invited to speak at the NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave, about how to create a sustainable go-to-market
strategy as an Indian company. NASSCOM is the premier
association of IT and BPO companies in the country. To be
invited by them as a speaker was quite an honor. It was the
first time Pallav was representing FusionCharts in person, and
he was very nervous about it. Thankfully, he got a side panel
which had an audience of thirty.
“The only thing I had going for myself was a good-looking PPT.
So even if I completely screwed up, I could just read out from
the PPT and run for the nearest exit. But once I started talking,
I felt what a DJ feels at a party. The sixty eyes upon me were
feeding off my energy. It was my show, and I wasn’t going to
screw that up.”
At the end of his talk, he got a standing ovation.
44
The rent for three months at Infinity
ThinkTank was the same as the lump sum
they had paid for the earlier office.
After soaking in the adulation, Pallav moved around to meet
other people at the conclave. While talking to them, he got to
know that other companies of a similar size frequently exhibited at tradeshows. “It’s a great way to get your brand name
out, generate leads, get instant feedback on your products, and
even find talented people to join the company,” he was told.
FusionCharts was going to a tradeshow — the Silicon India
Startup City in Bangalore that June.
Your dear author was in the final semester of college in
Bangalore at that time. Pallav asked me if I could help put
together the show. I had absolutely no idea what went into
putting together a good show at a tradeshow, so I said yes.
I had been making a bits and pieces contribution to FusionCharts ever since it was born in the bedroom I shared with
my brother, and had a very good idea about what the brand
stood for.
The FusionCharts presence at the tradeshow had to be larger
than life. It had to be stunning and delightful. And every visitor
had to leave with a warm and happy feeling, even if he had
45
spent only a minute at the FusionCharts booth.
We booked two booths and combined them into one. The
backdrop of the booth was jet black which boasted of the 12,500
customers FusionCharts had. For an Indian product company
that not too many people had heard of, that was a big deal. We
replaced the standard chairs and tables that came along with
the booth with three colorful columns of different heights. On
top of the columns went our shiny Macbooks. The idea behind
the columns was that they resembled the FusionCharts column chart from a distance. We would realize later that they
were in fact a great way to distribute the crowd as well.
And then we had the cookies. Delicious Australian cookies.
We were running a contest, “Make a chart, get a cookie” and
had put up small printouts announcing it around the venue,
including the restrooms. We got into some trouble for that,
but nowhere do you get the kind of attention that you get in a
restroom.
The tradeshow opened at 9 am. Right from that time, to when
it ended at 5 pm, we had people waiting in line at our booth.
We handed the cookies we had for the contest to keep them
occupied. Customers, investors, press, potential employees, all
of them waiting in line to talk to us.
We felt like rockstars.
46
4
TAKE A BOW,
FUSIONCHARTS HAS
ARRIVED
Take a bow, FusionCharts has arrived
47
1
6th July 2009 brought forth what many at FusionCharts
regard as the proudest moment of their careers. Earlier
in the month, the US national CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled
the new Federal IT Dashboard. The dashboard was designed
to give the public a look at the current status of thousands of
ongoing IT projects in the government and the effectiveness of
the overall IT spending. 600 billion dollars of them.
Tim O’Reilly wrote an article talking about what the dashboard
meant for America, the radical transparency it would bring,
and mentioned that it was built using Drupal and FusionCharts.
The team was overjoyed that their product was being used in
such a massive project.
At the same time, I had joined FusionCharts after completing
my graduation. Over a period of six months, Pallav had been
trying to convince me that FusionCharts needed me and I
needed FusionCharts. Initially reluctant, mostly because I
wanted to stay in Bangalore itself, I finally gave in and went
back to Kolkata to take care of marketing. That was one of the
smarter decisions of my life.
On 16th July 2009, while idly surfing the web in the night, I
came across a picture of an important-looking gentleman
using the Federal IT Dashboard. It was Barack Obama, the
incumbent President of the United States of America. He was
staring intently at the dashboard’s main screen which had
FusionCharts all over. In essence, Barack Obama was looking
48
at FusionCharts. My midnight eyes became the largest they
had ever been.
This was massive. How many other companies can boast of
the President of the United States using their product, with a
picture to prove it? We immediately wrote about it on our
blog. Soon, this would become the story that would get us
covered in all major publications in India and what we would
hang as portraits in our office.
Barack Obama was looking
at FusionCharts.
Recognition and celebration
In September, FusionCharts was selected by NASSCOM as one
of the top ten emerging companies in India. The product wave
was just picking up momentum in the country, and the
award meant that FusionCharts was redefining the benchmark of excellence for the next generation of SMEs in India.
In the years to follow, a lot of tech startups in India would look
up to FusionCharts and Pallav as role models to build the next
product success story from the country.
49
“Winning an award for creating a business is great validation.
It makes you feel more confident about what you are doing
and motivates the team as well,” says Pallav. “It also brought us
to the notice of the industry veterans, a lot of whom would
give me valuable advice that no business book can teach.”
FusionCharts also hit the 15,000 customer mark in November
that year and was selected as one the fastest growing tech
companies in India by Deloitte.
All of these achievements were celebrated with gastronomic
excesses, something that would become an important slice of
the pie that was the FusionCharts culture.
Cleavage and coverage
Right from the early days, a lot of technical blogs had been
writing about FusionCharts. They wanted to tell their readers
about the stunning charts they could generate with any
web scripting language and database, in no time at all. The
blogosphere coverage reached developers, designers, project
and product managers, a sizable chunk of whom would
subsequently become users and customers of FusionCharts.
But Pallav wanted to get the word out about FusionCharts
in the mass media. “Coverage in the mass media establishes
credibility. Smart people working elsewhere look up the
company to see if it’s a company they would like to work for.
50
Current team members show the coverage to their spouses
and parents, and come back to work with a renewed vigor the
next day. The company as a whole becomes more determined
to scale bigger heights, given that the world is watching.
FusionCharts needed all of these things at that point in time.
And if there were customers and mentors to be had, that was
a welcome addition.”
By then, I had taken over all the marketing responsibilities
from Pallav and was the Head of Marketing now. As a oneman army, I wasn’t much of a head in its literal sense but then
everything marketing was coming from me, so I took it gladly.
As Head of Marketing, I had to come up with a story that got us
mass media’d.
However, mass media cares only about stories that inspire,
educate, entertain or piss off the common man. A story on how
FusionCharts helps you create stunning charts for your web
applications was going to be used to wrap chewing gum in,
before it went into the bin.
“We have to figure out an angle that strikes a chord with the
common man,” I said to Pallav as we brainstormed on our
mass media strategy. “We have to sex up our story, we have to
show some cleavage.”
We thought hard but were not able to come up with anything.
No matter how we morphed our story, there was nothing
51
about the product that would interest the common man. Then
we thought, “Why not take the product out of the equation
completely? How about we just tell a good story and focus on
getting the FusionCharts name out?”
As soon as we agreed on that, we came up with an entire bunch
of angles that made for a good story.
“FusionCharts was founded by a 17-year old.”
“FusionCharts has 15,000 customers spread over 110 countries,
52
including the likes of NASA and the World Bank, and all of that
sitting in India itself. Kolkata to be specific.”
“FusionCharts got to 10,000 customers without having any
feet on the street, not even a dedicated salesperson on the
team.”
The first mass media coverage came out in Entrepreneur
India, in January 2010. It talked about how a 17-year old had
built a company that sold to 15,000 customers. Later in the
month, Forbes wrote about FusionCharts in an article titled
“India’s rising tech stars.”
“I was initially drawn to the FusionCharts story as I was
researching Indian product companies with $1M+ in annual
revenue,” says Sramana Mitra, a serial entrepreneur and
strategy consultant in the Valley, who wrote the Forbes piece.
“There were oddly few, and they stood out. See, Indian IT
industry still remains largely an outsourcing driven one.
Product ventures are few and far between. Successful ones,
even fewer. Against that backdrop, FusionCharts shone as an
important case study. As I got to know them better, I found
many more things that I liked in their story. One of them is that
they are a 100% bootstrapped company, built on blood, sweat
and tears, instead of gobs of venture capital. Last but not the
least, I love the fact that the company came out of Kolkata, a
presumed barren land for IT in India.”
53
“They are a 100% bootstrapped company,
built on blood, sweat and tears, instead
of gobs of venture capital.”
Now that a couple of media outlets had run a story on
FusionCharts, other media outlets wanted to talk about it too.
But they wanted a story no one had heard before. The situation
was similar to when a Hollywood starlet becomes an overnight celebrity and everyone wants a new story on her — Where
did you grow up? Who was your first boyfriend? Did your first
kiss have tongue?
Luckily, FusionCharts had a bunch of angles ready that it mixed
and matched for every new media outlet. But the masterstroke
came when the company let the story of Barack Obama using
FusionCharts out of the bag.
“Initially I wasn’t too sure if saying Barack Obama uses
FusionCharts was the right thing to do. After all, the truth was
more like Barack Obama uses FusionCharts as a part of the
Federal IT Dashboard. Even though we had put it out on our
blog months ago, we didn’t actively talk about it to the media.
We didn’t want to risk rubbing the CIA on the wrong side,”
Pallav explains why the Obama story was kept under wraps all
this while. “Then one fine day, we just decided to let it out of the
54
bag. As a startup, if we can’t take such risks, who can? If nothing
else, we would all come out wiser from it. At FusionCharts, a
whole lot of things we did were experiments anyway.”
The media lapped up the story. FusionCharts was covered in all
major media outlets in the country including Economic Times,
CNBC, Times of India and Outlook Business. Over time, even
though the story has gotten a little old, no media outlet misses
the chance of squeezing it into a coverage on FusionCharts.
The media has also twisted the story to suit their editorial
calendars, often producing hilarious results. One such coverage
talked about how Obama personally chose FusionCharts
for federal projects, another one mentioned how he follows
FusionCharts on social media, and then there are the ones that
talk about FusionCharts’ products like interactive spreadsheets
that the company itself doesn’t know about. But all publicity, as
they say, is good publicity.
On the international front as well, FusionCharts has been
covered in Washington Post, Business Insider and Penn
Olson. Mixergy did an hour-long interview with Pallav on his
entrepreneurship journey.
Mass media coverage has gone a long way in building credibility
for FusionCharts and pumping up the team as a whole.
55
Not everything FusionCharts touched
turned into gold
Back in 2008, Rahul was working on FusionCharts for Visual
Basic, an extension that helped users embed charts in classic
VB applications easily. The extension itself didn’t find many
takers but during the course of development, he accidentally
came across a way to embed FusionCharts in PowerPoint. The
focus was on building FusionCharts for VB at the time, so the
idea was kept on the back burner.
But with time, a lot of FusionCharts users started asking if
there was a way to embed FusionCharts in PowerPoint. While
it could be done crudely using 10-step methods, which people
had even written articles about, it was a painful process. In
mid-2009, work on FusionCharts for PowerPoint began.
The product was launched in public beta in February 2010
under the name oomfo.
The idea behind launching FusionCharts for PowerPoint under
a different banner was twofold. One, oomfo was meant for the
consumer market. These consumers were not very technical
people, and if they hit the FusionCharts website that talked
about web scripting and databases, they were sure to drop their
mouse and run for their lives. The ones that did stick around
might download FusionCharts, and when it didn’t create a
magical chart as soon as they installed it, a support mayhem
56
was in order. Second, oomfo was about oomph in a fun way,
while FusionCharts was about oomph in a trustworthy way.
The brand values were very different.
Users were impressed when they saw the oozing-with-oomph
charts they could generate in less than a minute. They liked
the freshness oomfo brought to their presentations, when
compared to the PowerPoint charts that the world had been
using since Stone Age. One of them even said, “I personally
don’t want oomfo to get any more popular than it already is.
It is just that for me, oomfo has become a secret weapon. And
the rarity and non-awareness of it makes it an add-on to my
presentations, and thus, the impact I create for my audience.”
“I personally don’t want oomfo to get any
more popular than it already is.”
Clearly oomfo was going to go viral, and users were going
to tell their cats and dogs about the fancy stuff they had built
earlier in the day. But that was not to be. After the first
couple of charts, it kind of lost its charm for most users. The
product had to do more than just jazz up an existing feature in
PowerPoint.
“We added more chart types to oomfo, the ones people needed
57
but PowerPoint didn’t offer,” says Pallav of the company’s
endeavors to find the product-market fit with oomfo. “When
that didn’t bring in the kind of traction we were looking
for, we tried looking for other pain points people have with
charting in PowerPoint. We figured out that every time a sales
manager has to make a presentation to his boss, he has to pull
out the latest data from Salesforce, put it in a spreadsheet and
then generate a chart from it. Tedious process. What if the sales
manager could connect the PPT to the data source and have the
latest data in a delicious chart every time he opens the PPT?
And all of this in a very simple non-technical manner.”
oomfo introduced connectors that could connect to live
data from pretty much anywhere, be it Salesforce or Google
Analytics. This found more takers but still not the traction the
company was looking for.
At the time of writing, a new user interface was being developed
for the product and work on solving bigger pain points with
oomfo was going on. The first version of the product will soon
be out.
FusionCharts gets a CEO
In March 2010, FusionCharts went to international shores at the
world’s largest computer expo. Over 300,000 people descend
in a city of 500,000 people during the expo. FusionCharts was
fully prepared to be a speck in the dust in the madness called
58
CeBIT, that takes place in the city of Hanover in Germany.
Just before heading to the expo, Pallav decided to change his
title to CEO and co-founder. He had been using the title CTO
and co-founder all these years, even though he was performing
all the duties of a CEO.
“I understood almost all of the code written at FusionCharts
till a year back and was still spending a fair amount of my time
writing code, so the CTO title sounded more natural. Only when
I stopped writing code and started focusing all my energy on
the business side of things, I thought it was time to finally pick
up the CEO title. To think of it, it’s quite funny that FusionCharts
was without a formal CEO for all these years.”
“I thought it was time to finally pick up the
CEO title.”
FusionCharts put up what can be called a pretty good show
at CeBIT. The vibrant booth with the colorful columns went
down well with the visitors, as did Rajroop’s antics, who got
his second job offer at his second tradeshow appearance.
“It was just after lunchtime when the expo halls were a little
empty,” Rajroop says of how the job offer came to be. “I was
59
talking to a group of visitors when I saw this 6’2” well-dressed
distinguished gentleman looking at me from a distance. I got
done with the group in another three minutes by when the
gentleman was looking intently at our booth. I went around
the booth and stood next to him.”
“The colors are not so nice, are they?” he said to the gentleman.
The gentleman gave him a look. “You cheeky bastard,” the look
said.
“We are all about colors and visuals, and how they can help
you make better business decisions. If you have five minutes, I
will show you what I am talking about,” Rajroop said.
“Yes I do,” the gentleman replied.
“Excellent, I will take two.”
They went on to talk for half an hour — Rajroop for five minutes
and the gentleman the rest. He was an exhibitor himself, and
he invited Rajroop to come check out their booth later.
In the evening, when Rajroop was casually taking a stroll
around the expo hall, he came across the gentleman’s booth.
He wasn’t there at the booth, so Rajroop went up to ask for him
and introduced himself.
“So you are the guy he was talking so animatedly about? He
60
has been in sales for twenty years now, and when he came
back after meeting you, he said that he has never seen anyone
with your kind of energy in sales.”
By that time, the gentleman had come back. He was excited to
see Rajroop.
“I will make you a job offer you can’t refuse,” the gentleman
said. Or something on similar lines. “50,000 Euros, a car and a
place to stay in Germany. Come work for me.”
Rajroop smiled. “As inviting as that sounds, I am already
61
committed.”
He would be offered another job at his next tradeshow
appearance, which he would decline, again.
Finally, a sales team in place
FusionCharts had another first in March 2010. Its first sixfigure deal. You could say it was a large account.
Putting together a sales team had long been on Pallav’s mind.
The six-figure deal only pushed him to do it quicker. While
this deal had closed easily over a couple of emails and phone
calls, he knew that FusionCharts could close more deals, both
large and small, with an inside sales team in place. Also, his
industry mentors always stressed upon the importance of
having dedicated salespeople.
His previous two attempts at getting dedicated salespeople
had gone to dust. The first was a VP Sales hired in mid2009. Being a salesman, he was able to smooth talk his way
through the interview. Also, he was a man in his early
forties, which fitted the picture Pallav had in mind for his VP
Sales perfectly. All his experience was in wining and dining
enterprise prospects, and getting their account. A handful of
these deals completed his quota. Selling in volumes was not
something he could wrap his head around, and working for
62
deals sized less than ten thousand dollars was beyond his
dignity. He lasted a handful of months.
Having burnt his fingers once by hiring a senior executive,
Pallav decided to hire someone with mid-level experience.
Instead of a smooth talker, this time he went to the market
looking for someone with knowledge of the web, and software
products in general. He found a candidate soon, but once
he joined, Pallav had no clear plan on how to use him. The
candidate’s selling skills weren’t razor-sharp either, and this
relationship ended in a couple of months as well.
Pallav decided to do some reading on sales. He had to figure
out how to get the team rolling before he hired them.
“Till now, pretty much everyone who joined the company
was thrown into the pool that is FusionCharts. You had to
figure out what the company did, how the team you are in
contributed to it, how you could contribute to the team, and
make a contribution on the first day. If you couldn’t figure out
something, you walked around and found someone who
could help. The people at FusionCharts are generally helpful.
You talked and got work done, setting your own task lists
and goals. There were hardly any systems and processes. But
with sales, this was not going to work,” says Pallav of what he
realized had gone wrong.
I had started sharing the sales responsibilities as well by
63
then. So when Pallav decided to try putting together a sales
team again, he asked me if I could put together an orientation
program for them. I had never done that before, so I said yes.
I put together an orientation program that started with our
sales philosophies.
1. Be the customer’s friend.
2. Sell FusionCharts to a customer only if he needs it.
3. Treat competitors with respect. Do not make false
statements about them.
4. Wow the customer.
5. Collaborate with your sales team, not compete.
6. Under-commit, over-deliver.
7. Keep your word.
These had been the FusionCharts sales philosophies for long, I
just put them in writing.
The program then went on to talk about the company’s
products in details, the completely inbound selling approach at
FusionCharts, and finally the systems and processes that had
just been put in place. At the end of the program, every sales
Treat competitors with respect. Do not make
false statements about them.
64
member got a Sales Bible.
With the orientation program, systems and processes in place,
Pallav decided to give another shot at putting together a sales
team in June 2010. The idea this time was to divide the sales
responsibilities among different teams, and hire for each of
these teams separately. There would be different teams for
enterprise sales, volume sales and pre-sales.
He asked me to head sales as well, with both him and my dad
for guidance.
Three sales members were hired that month, one for each
team, who would then go on to be the founding members of
their team. With a structure in place, the sales team fitted in
well this time. It started picking up steam over the next couple
of months and was ramped up to ten members by October.
One of these days, after the orientation program was done for
the day, I took the team down for a coffee. Deb, one of the sales
team members asked, “So Sanket, what were you doing before
FusionCharts?”
“I was studying engineering, though there’s not much that I
learnt from it,” I replied.
“Interesting. Where did you go to college?”
“Bangalore. R V College.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Turns out Deb was ten years my senior from college.
65
66
5
A DENT IN OUR
UNIVERSE
A dent in our universe
67
S
teve Jobs was an icon at FusionCharts. Everyone admired
him for his sense of design, attention to detail and the
desire to make a dent in the universe. In April 2010, Steve
would make a dent in FusionCharts’ universe.
In January, he announced the iPad to the world. Right after
the announcement, there were widespread speculations
on whether it was going to support Flash or not. The iPhone
had never supported Flash, but then it was never supposed
to replace the laptop. The iPad was set to replace the laptop,
at least for consuming information. In March, it hit the
stores and everyone got to know that it didn’t support Flash.
Apple said that Flash was a “proprietary” technology of the
dark ages, and it had no place on their devices. HTML5, CSS
and JavaScript were going to be the future of the web. Apple
declared important sites like The New York Times and CNN
that were in sync with the future as iPad-ready.
There was a huge uproar on the web. People in opposite camps
were caps locking each other to death. Given the grandeur of
the debate, there was still a chance of Apple going back on its
decision. And then in the end of April, Steve settled the dust
once and for all. He wrote an open letter to Adobe — Thoughts
on Flash — which delivered a fatal blow to Flash on account
of its security, reliability, performance and what it did to the
phone’s battery life.
FusionCharts was completely Flash-based. When the letter
68
came out, companies offering basic solutions in HTML5 and
JavaScript had already hit the market. FusionCharts had to act,
and act quick.
Sleeping with the competition
Anyone who has ever built a product would know that a
change of technology takes quarters, if not years. FusionCharts
Suite was a comprehensive offering that had been built over
years and years altogether. Customers had already started
writing in asking what the company was going to do about the
change in scenery.
“All the HTML5 and JavaScript players in the market at the
time had very basic solutions, as basic as what we offered half
69
a decade back in Flash. But they were still picking traction
because at that point in time, organizations just wanted to
ensure that their applications worked on all platforms and
devices. They were expecting a lot of iPads and iPhones
coming in soon. So I figured, if we could have a basic fallback
for iPads and iPhones for now, without needing any change
in the customers’ existing implementation of FusionCharts, we
could buy some time. And in that time, we could enhance the
basic solution and bring it to FusionCharts quality,” Pallav says
of what was running in his mind at the time.
For the basic fallback, he didn’t want to wait for the time while
FusionCharts developed its own JavaScript solution.
He decided to sleep with the competition. “We decided to pick
the best available JavaScript solution from the market, work
on it and bundle it with FusionCharts for fallback on iPads and
iPhones. That was the quickest solution we had at that point in
time.”
Talks with the competitor were closed quickly. They got a
sweet deal and credit for the JavaScript fallback. They were a
startup, so the money and the credibility were both welcome.
FusionCharts got the fallback it needed. A win-win for both.
In September 2010, FusionCharts was declared iPad-ready.
These five months were challenging times for FusionCharts.
70
One of the biggest challenges was the shortage of JavaScript
experts in the company. Shamasis was the only team member
who liked discussing software architecture with Pallav, and
had written a few JavaScript modules that proved his prowess
with the technology. He was given a team of two fresh-out-ofcollege but very smart guys. Their task of getting the charts to
fall back automatically to JavaScript on all iPads and iPhones
essentially comprised of two parts — map every single feature
in the Flash charts that had been built over years to the fallback charts and work on the fallback charts themselves, which
were pretty basic in nature. The work on enhancing the fallback charts was to be done in a phased manner, so that releases
could be pushed out in quick time.
“For me, it was more exciting than challenging,” says Shamasis
of his thoughts heading into the project. “This was the biggest
and the most important project I had worked on at the company, and both time and resources were short. These are the
kind of projects that turn boys into men. Pallav believed in us
and never doubted our ability to be able to pull it off, which is
exactly the kind of confidence you need going into something
like this.”
The team got to work.
In the meantime, the sales team was keeping the customers
updated on the development, sending them screenshots and
feature peeks.
71
When the fallback solution was nearing completion, it was
time to work on the documentation and release management.
Sudipto’s implementation team got down to business. With
an entirely new technology in place, this was a massive task.
Anyone who could contribute in any way to the task was
enrolled in his camp.
He himself stayed in office for 45 days straight to pull it off, a
process in which his girlfriend nearly broke up with him. But
once he explained the importance of what he was doing to
her, she understood and today they are happily married.
Special company for special times
During the all-nighters the team was putting in, they had
some special company. Company of the paranormal kind.
The paranormal entity’s presence was first acknowledged on
FusionCharts’ seventh birthday. The office had been dolled
up with streamers and balloons taped to the ceiling, but
mysteriously the balloons started bursting one by one. By the
time the birthday song was sung and the cake cutting was done,
only a handful of balloons remained. No human being could
be responsible for this.
A lot of team members had heard stories of how a woman
named Paula had jumped off from the ninth floor of the building. Nobody was sure of the authenticity of the story, especially
since it was a glass-enclosed building, but the dots were
72
connected anyway — Paula’s ghost was in the FusionCharts
office. The music system in the office was also known to turn
ghostly once in a while, playing random music no one had
plugged in.
During the five months, folks at FusionCharts felt Paula’s
presence in different ways. Some heard her typing away,
73
while others heard her playing with the window blinds. A
handful of them heard erotic noises coming from rooms
they knew had no one in them. But FusionCharts is a friendly
place, so even paranormal entities would be swept away by
the warmth of the people. And at a time when everyone
was contributing in whichever way they could, Paula was
only doing her bit.
On the 17th of September, the iPad-ready FusionCharts was
launched to the world. It was one of the strongest team efforts
the company has ever seen. As is the FusionCharts culture,
yays were exchanged, chests were thumped and a party was
thrown.
The lobby area outside the office was converted into a party
zone. The neighboring office was waiting for its new occupant,
so the entire space belonged to FusionCharts for the night. Disco lights were set up, music systems were placed, champagne
was ordered. The evening began and the entire team partied
as if there was no tomorrow.
I, for one, will never forget that party. It was also my 23rd
birthday. Since I had turned eighteen, all my birthdays were
spent drinking to glory with friends. I was drinking to glory
even on this one, but I was surrounded by a team I was proud
to be a part of. It was a team that had come together during
a very challenging time, put in everything they had and delivered against all odds. I will remember that night for a long
74
time to come.
After a good night’s sleep, the team got back to work on
improving the fallback solution. In a very short span of time,
it would no longer be a fallback. It would become the primary
solution.
On the business side of things, life was going on as usual.
Revenues were increasing. Awards for being one of the fastest
growing companies in the country were coming in. Media was
calling FusionCharts the great Indian tech story. And more
people with charting dreams were coming onboard. The team
turned 50-strong in November 2010.
75
6
ACT 1, SCENE 1,
CHARTING A
NEW BEGINNING
76
Act 1, Scene 1, charting a new beginning
F
usionCharts clocked $5M in revenue in the fiscal
year ending March 2011. The company had hit its next
milestone, and everyone was delighted. But to get to the
next milestone, the same strategy that the company had used
all these years wasn’t going to work.
Till now, apart from the sales team, most of the people at
FusionCharts were at their first job. They were a bunch of
smart and hungry people who didn’t come with any set ideas
of how businesses are supposed to function. They did what
sounded the most logical at that point in time, and things often
went wrong. Everyone learnt from their mistakes, and came
out wiser.
But now that FusionCharts was looking to scale up, it needed
people who could structure this chaos. People who could bring
in their experience to plug in the holes the company had in
its knowhow and overall way of doing things, and get things
moving quick. People who could turn this chaos into organized
chaos.
FusionCharts needed a middle management.
Finding product people in Kolkata had been a challenge till
now, and it was only going to get tougher when shopping for
experienced people.
Also, I had decided to move on from FusionCharts. I had always
77
wanted to travel around and meet new people, and this was as
a good time as any. So that left another two positions for the
company to fill in.
It was time FusionCharts went to India’s Silicon Valley,
Bangalore. The energy in the city was much higher, the talent
much better. People were actually excited about working with
small companies, and there were a lot of cool products coming out from the city. More people knew of FusionCharts here
than in its hometown anyway. And, of course, there was the
lovely weather.
FusionCharts opened shop in Bangalore, its first outside
Kolkata, in July 2011. It was a cosy office in one of the most
happening areas in the city and had a lovely view from the
terrace. Now it was time to get people who had been there and
done it before.
Job listings were put out. Hiring agencies were contacted. Word
was spread from mouth to mouth. Finding the right people
didn’t turn out to be as easy as Bangalore promised. And the
company wasn’t willing to hire someone just for warming up
a seat.
Finally, in three months, heads of engineering, marketing, user
experience and operations were hired. People moved from
other cities to join the company. A FusionCharts customer,
became a FusionCharts team member, changing jobs after
78
eleven years.
I moved on from FusionCharts in September, six months after
I had actually decided to, and headed to the Himalayas.
The transitory phase
With a middle management in place, a lot of the people who
had been reporting directly to Pallav all these years would now
be reporting to them. A lot of the ad-hoc-ness, like the making
up of this word, would be replaced by systems and processes.
People are resistant to change, especially when it comes to the
way they do their everyday work, and the resistance showed
up at FusionCharts too.
It was time FusionCharts went to India’s
Silicon Valley, Bangalore. The energy in the
city was much higher, the talent much better.
Both Pallav and the senior members were expecting the
teething problems. Pallav assured the team that he was still
as accessible to ideas from everyone in the team as he was
before, just that he wanted to spend more time focusing on
the company vision rather than on day-to-day operations. The
senior members, on their part, made frequent trips to Kolkata
79
to work closely with the team and get to know them in person.
After the initial friction, the two teams warmed up nicely to
each other. “Now when we go to Kolkata, we are welcomed
like old friends. We sit down, talk, laugh, go out for dinner and
have a gala time,” goes the common opinion in the Bangalore
team.
Hand in hand, they plunged into action.
FusionCharts came out with a new website, expanding on
the concept of providing not just a product, but a complete
packaged experience. It released another exclusive product
for SharePoint, Collabion Charts for SharePoint, broadening
the FusionCharts product ecosystem even further. It came out
with The Dude, the company mascot, who graces the cover of
this book too. And it put out the biggest release in recent times
of its flagship product suite, FusionCharts Suite XT, which
brought all the awesomeness the company had been bringing
in Flash for over eight years to JavaScript.
The company hit the 20,000 customer mark in March 2012, and
was now powering over a billion charts per month. The joy
was doubled soon when a beginner’s guide to FusionCharts
was released by Packt Publications the next month. The
publishing house had put out a tweet looking for authors,
which the company spotted and replied to on the lines of —
“Hey, you know what. We developed the product, so we could
80
do a semi-decent job of writing the book too.” The guide was
released as the official guide to FusionCharts, making it the
first data visualization solution in the industry to have a book.
FusionCharts completed ten years of developing and selling
data visualization components on October 22nd, 2012. A
decade is a fairly long time for any business, an eternity for a
tech startup.
The happy ending
Ah, finally to the happy ending. If you wanted to hear the story
of how the company got acquired for an obscene nine-digit
figure and how everyone lived happily ever after, well, sorry
to disappoint you. FusionCharts has been an independent
bootstrapped profitable company, and it continues to remain
that way.
Acquisition offers have come the company’s way, but it has all
the time in the world to wait for a good parent. “I would like
someone who cooks well and lets us watch TV all the time,”
laughs Pallav talking about acquisitions. “Right now, I am
enjoying the journey and do not really have an end goal in
mind.” FusionCharts has never raised any money, so there is
no investor pressure either. It can chart its own destiny.
The company’s focus going forward is on building better data
visualization products.
81
With an increasing amount of data being generated every
day, and an equal increase in the number of devices people
consume the data on, the evolution of data visualization is
going to be fast and interesting. Being the leader in the space,
FusionCharts wants to be at the forefront of this evolution. It
also wants to redefine how the common man thinks of data
visualization. Right now, people just look at a chart and derive
meaning from that. It wants to convert that monologue into a
dialogue.
Given the company’s laser sharp focus on data visualization
82
for over a decade now, you know where to place your bet.
“For several years, FusionCharts has been the provider of
advanced charting capabilities within Jaspersoft’s commercial
reporting and analytics software suite,” says Brian Gentile,
Chairman & CEO of Jaspersoft. “Tens of thousands of our users
chose to build their reports and dashboards with stunning
visualizations based on FusionCharts. The FusionCharts library
is fully integrated into Jaspersoft products and we are excited
about the company’s HTML5 vision and new capabilities that
we plan to leverage in coming releases.”
I will finally pass on the baton to Pallav, now 27 years old,
whose cold coffees and 10-pins have given way to scotch and
poker.
It’s never easy to understand how life’s a journey and
not a destination till you take a moment to look back.
And when you do, you feel a rush of satisfaction and
restlessness all at once. I feel a good measure of
both right now, as I pause to reflect on the journey of
FusionCharts so far.
Those little things along the journey seem amazing
in retrospect. I still remember the loss I made on my
first sale. The date I first fired an employee on —
1st of January. The time I switched accents and the
customer thought the call had been transferred from
support to sales. The phone interview I fell asleep right
in the middle of, only to wake up ten minutes later and
pretend I had been listening all along. Then there was
the delight in seeing Barack Obama using our charts.
The pride in having a team that gave it their all when
the world of technology flipped overnight.
These little things, both good and bad, are priceless
moments that I will remember for the rest of my life.
The past decade as a sum of business learnings has
been nothing short of tremendous. Among all the
learnings, there are three that I consider most valuable.
First, nothing in the business world is carved in stone.
Traditional business wisdom has no guarantee of
working for you. Second, business isn’t just about your
product or service, a large part of it is about what people
feel about you. A genuine conversation, a good story,
they all add up. Third, even in this intangible world of
software, it is all about people. Customers, employees,
vendors, partners, industry watchers, they are all
people. And people have their own aspirations, wants
and needs, that you need to listen to and take care of.
From where I stand today, it has become important for
me to share my learnings with upcoming entrepreneurs. Of course, it gives me deep satisfaction to share the
lessons I have learnt along the way with the potential
rockstars of tomorrow, but it is also my way of saying
83
84
thank you to the brilliant gentlemen who have mentored
me.
Ten years of a company that started as a quest for pocket
money and turned into a multi-million dollar outfit can
never be smooth-sailing. But what it can be is satisfying.
And extremely satisfying it has been.
What’s next? That’s the record constantly playing in
my mind now. All I know is, there is a lot more waiting
to be done. Dreams to be dreamt, and milestones to be
charted. I want to get smart, and foolish.
The journey of FusionCharts has just begun.
Pallav Nadhani
85
86
Thank you
To Shyamal for the lovely illustrations.
To Jacob for bearing a first cut of this book, and helping beat it
into shape.
To Udhaya for a book name I was sold on in five minutes, and the
guidance throughout.
To Sanchit and Nitin for the attention to details.
To The Dude for being the voice in my head as I wrote the
book.
To Mom and Bhabhi for all the support you have always given
me.
Thank you to all the FusionCharts members, both current
and ex, for answering all my bizarre questions. Andy, Arka,
Bedisha, Deb, Dhruva, Huzefa, Nilanjan, Nishant, Pallab, Rahul,
Rajroop, Ryan, Sanjukta, Shamasis, Smita, Sudipto, Sushant and
Udhaya.
And a final thank you to my brother and dad for giving me a
story.
| 101
About the author
Sanket Nadhani headed Marketing and Sales at FusionCharts
from 2009 to 2011 before he gave in to his mind’s urge to
expand horizons and left for the hills in a search for soul and
meaning. Now back with a head buzzing with ideas, he heads
Marketing at FusionCharts and spreads the love on his blog
Poke And Bite.
He is often accused of rapping while talking, and wears socks
and floaters to parties. He loves his food, beer and traveling.
Sanket can be reached at [email protected]
or @sanketnadhani
88

PDF - FusionCharts

Transcription

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