What can you tell me about your entrepreneurship journey? How was/is your life as an entrepreneur?

I started my company AllinCall almost 3 years ago. We got formally incorporated on 21st April 2017. My friend Soham and I were the initial co-founders.

It was the month of August 2016. My 3rd-year summer internship had just ended. I had a great time in the Bay Area, working at this amazing startup called Rubrik. I enjoyed the work and the people at Rubrik. There was 1 little problem — I realized that I could not work for someone else. Coming from a Marwadi family, I have hardly seen people who are employed somewhere.

When I came back to India after my internship, I decided to pursue something of my own. The college courses were almost completed. I had to take a few electives. I was talking to a friend of mine about my entrepreneurship desire. That’s when he told me about DSCE — Desai Sethi Center for Entrepreneurship, a teaching body that had been a part of IIT Bombay for almost 3 years. I was completely unaware of such a thing — IIT Bombay is huge and there are so many things always going on. It is impossible to know everything!

I decided to enroll in a few courses at DSCE — Introduction to Entrepreneurship, Technology Venture Creation, Marketing for Entrepreneurs, and Intellectual Property for Entrepreneurs. While typical IIT courses may be focused on assignments, quizzes, and exams, the Entrepreneurship courses at DSCE were different. The Professors were mostly Industry veterans themselves and so, they didn’t care about pen-paper exams and assignments. They were keener on practical work — find a problem statement, build an MVP, get feedback from customers, etc.

As a part of the course, we were supposed to partner with someone and build a team. I partnered with Soham, my friend from IIT Bombay. Soham and I iterated on a bunch of ideas — building a Quora-like platform for JEE aspirants, a web development agency, a mentorship platform where IITians could mentor JEE aspirants, etc. Most problems revolved around the difficulties we ourselves faced.

Later, we were instructed to boil down on 1 single idea. So, we decided to develop something interesting — a voice-enabled platform wherein, people like our parents who are not too tech-savvy can just call and talk to a virtual assistant to book a cab, order items from Amazon, etc. The idea was that parents are usually not able to use mobile apps even though they have a smartphone and internet connection. So, why not give them a number wherein they can just call and get things done? “All-in-Call”.

As the course demanded, we went to talk to various potential customers. Here is me, talking to my dad’s office employees on how they avail such services, trying to get their feedback.

We roamed around across malls and other public areas of Mumbai to get feedback from people.

We presented some of the ideas to our Professors. Here is a slide from one of the presentations we created.

One of the Professors suggested that rather than exploring the B2C concept, we should try and see if we can sell such a solution to large enterprises. The idea was that Banks and other large enterprises would already have multiple such customers and so, we can ride on the Banks for customer acquisition rather than doing it ourselves.

We pivoted to the B2B idea — sell solutions to enterprises that will help their customers get banking services at their fingertips. Now, we had a new customer persona — a Bank’s head of Customer Support. So, with the help of an advisor’s network, we met some of the Bank officials — HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, YES Bank.

We met the Bank’s Digital Team at the HDFC Bank office at Peninsula Business Park, Lower Parel, Mumbai. The idea was to not sell anything and just get their feedback and explore the gaps.

We also went to their Kamla Mills Branch in Lower Parel to see one of their latest Technology Initiative — the IRA Robot which helps customers navigate within the Branch.

Based on our discussion with the HDFC Bank officials, we realized that they are quite keen to develop solutions on voice-based technologies like Voice recognition, Voice biometrics, etc.

Later, we met a couple of other Banks — YES Bank and Axis Bank to get their feedback. We were fortunate to get support from our advisor who helped us get those meetings. Nobody knew us, but people knew him. He was an ex-Vice President of South Asia at one of the largest logistics company and so, he stayed in a society where many such senior corporate executives lived. That’s how he knew them.

He advised us to sell before we build. Basically, he told us to find a way to first get a pilot/POC (proof-of-concept) from a large enterprise and then build the actual product. We started working on the same. Here is one of the old videos I found.

The video has been recorded in my hostel room (Hostel 3, Room 347) at IIT Bombay. Remember, this is during the 4th year of college. I had not graduated by that time.

I was quite excited about the meetings with senior Bank officials and told my parents about them. Obviously they were not happy because I had a couple of high-paying job offers in my hand. While my dad is a small business owner himself, my annual salary was more than what we could earn in 10 years.

This is another of my offer letters at a large Indian company.

We were extremely naive at that time. Both of us were Software Engineers, with bare minimum knowledge of Business. Soham was a Gujarati and I was a Marwadi, but deep within, we were hardcore programmers and so, these meetings, presentations, discussions, were all quite a new thing for us. Here is an excerpt from the PPT that we showed to Axis Bank.

We were so naive back then that we put “Finish Graduation” as a part of the PPT. No wonder we never got a contract from Axis Bank!

Here is a part of the video we showed to Axis Bank. Obviously, the product is hard-coded. The entire video is hard-coded. The goal was to sell before building and that’s what we were trying. We had learned so many things by this time — making presentations, recording videos, editing videos, etc.

Later, we started working on a basic Product. We showed it to our Professors who were mentoring us and they helped us get incubated at SINE, the IIT Bombay startup incubator. SINE had a huge network of large enterprises, investors, mentors, etc. With the help of SINE, we approached the giant — State Bank of India.

SBI had recently started a Startup Engagement Program wherein, they would buy certain technology-based solutions without the tendering process. We met their DGM of Startup Engagement in March 2017. We had all the learnings of HDFC Bank, YES Bank, and Axis Bank and we made a great presentation to SBI. The DGM was quite impressed with our background and capabilities and told us to incorporate a company.

My cousin was a CA in Delhi and we approached him for help for the company incorporation. We had suggested the name “CX Research and Solutions Pvt Ltd” (CX = Customer Experience). He asked us for an alternate name in case that name is unavailable. We suggested “AllinCall Research and Solutions Pvt Ltd”. We were quite sure we will get the name CX Research and Solutions. However, the CA without informing us registered the company with AllinCall, because the name CX required some Rs. 5,000 extra.

Anyway, we were happy that the company was incorporated. So, we went back to SBI. In the meanwhile, we had significant progress on the product side. On 15th May, SBI told us to initiate a POC (proof-of-concept) for a simple FAQ ChatBot. The DGM lead the POC. We were given 2 weeks of time. We developed it in 1 week and showed it to him. He was impressed by our speed and the final output. He told us that on 1st July 2017, its the Bank’s foundation day and he would like to deploy our solution in the Bank.

Therefore, he told us to proceed forward with further development of SIA ChatBot (SBI Intelligent Assistant) which could answer the most common customer queries. Obviously, there were multiple internal approvals required — Commercial approval, Legal approval, IT approval and most importantly, Information Security approval.

We barely knew about all of these things. Thanks to the DGM, he helped us understand the process. We shared an ad-hoc Commercial Proposal document which was obviously rejected by their committee. It took us almost 8–10 days to get SBI to agree on our proposal document. For Legal approval, the DGM helped us with the NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement), SLA (Service Level Agreement), etc. IT Approval was something we could ourselves manage given that we came from a tech background. There were many new things to learn — Web Server, App Server, Database Server, etc., but we managed to pick those things quickly.

The last one, Information Security Approval was a big challenge for us. We had almost ZERO knowledge about Enterprise-grade Information Security. SBI gave us a long list of vulnerabilities in the Application/Software we developed. Thankfully, we could take help from Google Search and close most of the points. For some left-out points, they took internal exceptional approval.

We went live with SBI SIA ChatBot on 1st July 2017. On 2nd July, their CIO and CTO felicitated us in the Bank’s Foundation day ceremony in front of their 1,200 employees (I am 3rd from the right).

Here is the photograph of us receiving our purchase order from SBI.

Right to left: Me, Our Advisor, Soham, DGM Sir (I would not want to mention his name), DGM Sir’s wife. SBI gave us a memento which is still kept in my office.

In August 2017, I had my graduation ceremony at IIT Bombay. Yes, we had our first customer as the giant SBI, before we even graduated!

SBI was so impressed with us, they asked us to take a workshop in Programming, Machine Learning and ChatBot development for some of their employees.

SBI was a huge launchpad for us and I would like to sincerely thank them for their support in helping us start AllinCall. Without them, it would have been a far more difficult journey. Special thanks to DGM Sir for helping us navigate within the giant SBI and get relevant approvals without any enterprise knowledge.

SBI referred us to their sister companies and SBI Life Insurance also purchased our solution in no time (Nov 2017). They remain our client even today. Things were going well so far. However, Soham somehow felt that the ChatBot solution was too shallow and we had to do something bigger.

I was of the view that we should focus on selling what’s working and as we build relations with enterprises, we will learn more about the other problems that they may be facing. However, we could not come to a mutual agreement on the same.

By March 2018, we had barely onboarded any new customer. We just had 2 clients — SBI and SBI Life Insurance. Soham and I, therefore, started to think of some other ideas. I was of the view that we should stay persistent and focus on what was working. However, I also had to support my co-founder and so, I also spent time with him, searching for new ideas.

This is where things started going South. As complete freshers, we barely had any knowledge of Enterprise problems and so, we could not think of any ideas whatsoever. Soham felt that the enterprise sales process is tough and we should find out startup ideas where we can avoid such long sales cycles.

One such idea that he was exploring was around Algorithmic trading — building algorithms that can automatically buy/sell assets and make money. Crypto was at its peak at that time and he suggested that we should try algorithmic trading of cryptocurrencies. I was not really convinced about it, but then I agreed to what he suggested.

Fast forward August 2018, he suddenly decided to leave the company and pursue algorithmic trading full-time himself.

I was stuck in a terrible situation. By that time, we had also started working with ICICI Bank and SBI Mutual Fund and now, suddenly, my co-founder who was managing SBI and SBI Life Insurance decided to leave. I was left alone with a full-time Software Engineer and a newly hired Software intern. I was in deep shit at that time. I did not know how to manage the situation. My parents were extremely worried about what happened.

A bunch of problems arose:

• Soham was managing SBI and SBI Life Insurance. Now, the load was on me, without much context. Payment for these projects was planned to come in a month or so but it got delayed because the projects slowed down.
• I was managing ICICI Bank and SBI Mutual Fund. The load of handling these clients also fell on me.
• He had gone to his home town. So, a lot of places where his signature was required got stuck. For instance, SBI used to pay in our SBI Current Account. Since we did not have an Online Banking facility for that account, we used to depend on the branch. The branch guys refused to help me without Soham’s signature.

So, I was in trouble from all sides — new money from projects got delayed and existing money got frozen in the bank accounts. I had to pay September/October salaries to the 2 team members as well and the company had no money since I had paid some amount to Soham on his exit. In this desperate situation, I had to put in some of my own money in the company to pay salaries. Remember, I was just 22 years old at that time and I myself did not have a lot of money.

It was at this time, I partnered with a friend, Harshita and explained to her the entire situation at my end. I told her how screwed up I was and how desperately I needed someone to help me. She kindly agreed to leave her job and help me with my business. I assured her of decent equity and also a decent pay when things were under control. She was kind enough to not take a penny of salary till December 2018, when things started to improve.

We divided our roles very clearly — I would work on sales and customer management and she will work on projects and technology. That worked really well for us. I told her about each and every mistake that Soham and I made and we sat down to find a solution for each of them.

At this time, I should mention that ICICI Bank’s Startup Engagement team helped us a lot. They knew that Soham had abruptly left the company. They knew that we were in deep shit. Being such a large institution, they could have kicked us out and taken away our projects. However, their Head of Startup Engagement and their CTO called us and offered any help we needed to keep the company afloat. We borrowed just 2 weeks of time from them which they kindly agreed.

We went back to them after hiring a couple of more Software Engineering Interns and guess what they did? They gave us a couple of more contracts. We were extremely happy with the bank’s gesture. They helped us get business when we were in the worst of our situation. ICICI Bank has a completely different culture as compared to any organization we have ever seen. We will forever remain indebted to them for the help they did to us at that time.

In November 2018, things started looking better and we moved to a small 8 seater office in Powai (Mumbai). The rent was a smallish Rs. 25k per month, but it was not a small amount for us at that time. Nevertheless, contracts from our customers helped us maintain cashflows.

Gradually, from there, things started improving. We had divided our work and so, we gradually started to specialize in our respective domains. On 20th April 2019, we celebrated the 2nd birthday of AllinCall (21st April was a Sunday).

We had a small 8 member team at that time, comprising of 2 co-founders, 2 full-time Software Engineers, 3 SDE Interns, and 1 Sales guy. During all of our thick-and-thins, another of our advisors really helped us. He was from the private equity industry and he had a lot of contacts. He used all his network to help us get more business. We are really grateful to him for the help he did during our bad times.

With the help of his network, we gradually started onboarding more and more clients. We continued working hard on our ChatBot product and also launched a couple of new Enterprise solutions around Customer Experience and Customer Engagement.

On 15th May 2019, we shifted to a bigger office.

We worked really hard during the last financial year (April 2019 to March 2020) and onboarded multiple large clients, getting repeated contracts and revenues from them. We also stayed Bootstrapped, not raising money from any investors. Today, we boast of several large companies as our clients.

We did 4x growth in Financial Year 2019–20 as compared to Financial Year 2018–19. Today, I am glad to mention that multiple investors have reached out to us for equity investment in AllinCall.

We also recently won the prestigious Technoviti 2020 Award by Mr. Satej Patil, Minister of Information Technology, Government of Maharashtra.

ICICI Bank also honored us for the work we did for them.

I love Business and I enjoy working with large Enterprises. We have a team of 20+ smart people working with us across Technology, Operations and Sales functions. We have happy customers who have extended multiple contracts to us, helping us build recurring revenues.

We have followed just 1 simple principle — focus on the customer and rest everything else will fall in place. We never chased any investor. We just remained focus on doing the best for our customers and everything else automatically improved.

Today, the business has stabilized quite well and we are growing rapidly. The names of existing customers are enough to onboard new customers.

To end this answer, I would like to mention 2 things:

1. I would like to sincerely thank our customers, our advisors and all the team members of AllinCall, especially Harshita who trusted me and helped me during the entire roller coaster ride. I will always remain indebted to all of the people who helped me during the worst of my times.
2. Do not give up, come what may. There is always a solution. You just need to be persistent enough to find it.