 I will try my best, I will not be talking more of agile or will be more of how I applied agile. So, if you ask any questions on agile, I am sorry, I have been in 5 years since I studied anything solid about agile or I do not know what the latest trends in agile are also. I can tell you the core philosophy which we used when applying agile to it. We are off on everyone. So, my name is Venkat Kandaswamy, I am the co-founder of Apartment Adda, the journey started in 2008 and before I begin, I think I should clarify certain terminologies, bootstrap start-up. So, you all know what a start-up is. So, start-up if you think it is a WhatsApp or an Instagram or a snap, all these guys sorry, there are also start-ups but they are the lucky ones who got hit by lightning. There are like numerous thousands of start-ups in India in the world who are all trying to make a mark, trying to create a company like an Infosys or a MineTree or a product company like Google or Apple, they all started as a start-up at one point or the other. And bootstrap, okay, so there is a euphemism for bootstrap, sorry, bootstrap means that we are broke actually, when we started we were broke, we were broke throughout the period, we did not have enough fronts, you never have enough fronts actually. But in a serious terms what a bootstrap start-up means is we fund all the income back into the start-up. We do not take any money out, any profit, meager profit we make, we use it to fund the start-up. The moment we have a little bit more money, we either buy more servers, do a little bit more marketing and things like that. So, this is where I am going to talk, in fact I had another funny title which I did not want to put it here because it would not have got approved, if it was a bar camp I would have called it as, this is a talk your employer would never like you to hear. Okay, the reason is I can bet my bucks on it, after listening to those you will be tempted to go start your start-up, or Monday you might be tending in your resignation, that is my goal of this talk. Let us see if I do justice to it, okay, I will talk only about three things here, okay. I am not going to talk, overload you with too much stuff. So number one, discovery, so discovering the pain point, the problem, discovering your own solution, that is the discovery part of it, then marketing, obviously, and then scaling. Is there any techies in the room? Sorry, I am not going to talk about scaling as in how we scale from one lakh to ten lakh users, that is not that part of scaling. Scaling is how do you add more customers to it, okay. So before I get a little deep into this, I just want to give you a little 35,000 feet overview of this problem space. So apartment complexes, how many of you live in apartment complexes today? Okay, most of you, so you all know. And yesterday while coming from the Bangalore Airport, on the way I saw just apartment complex advertisements, and of course a couple of HTC and iPhone ads. If you notice, there is like tremendous competition going on within the builders. They are giving so many features, amenities. Human swimming pool is given. You can't think of an apartment complex without those two things. Nowadays they are having jacuzzi, saunas, steam rooms, what else, billiards, tables, everything. They are trying to differentiate themselves very hard. And they flood you with all these features. They sell you, you get bought into the pamphlet. And then the builder leaves the place after a year. Then who do you think runs this place? Okay, the management committee. How many of you are here part of a management committee, or have been in a management committee? There you go. That's one, two, three. Great job guys, seriously. I mean, without you, this place will run into, will just break down. And it's not an easy job. There is a word for it called thankless job. Because you spend so much time brainstorming, trying to cut costs, the maintenance fee, for instance. From 2 rupees, 75 paisa, you want increase to 3 rupees per square feet. You know how hard you have to fight it in AGMs. It's pretty hard. And then at the end of the year, people come and blast you saying you spent, wasted all the money. So you have to defend all those things. It's not an easy job. So these are the 12 people who take care of the property. They form the laws, what they call the bylaws, like the constitution. And then they hire the security agency, they hire the housekeeping agency. And this is actually a very responsible and legally difficult job. The reason is, cult and fire. Many of you remember that, right? It happened in Bangalore. The chairman goes to court still now, because it's a very serious, important job. The security and safety is in their hands. So now, how do you think they run this place? What are the tools do they have? This is in 2008. Google groups and Yahoo groups, many of you might already be having it for communication purpose. Complaint register. That's not a single upon complex which doesn't have a complaint register, which gets lost. The pages get torn at the end of the year. And then bugzilla. You wouldn't believe it. Techies in Bangalore, they set up bugzilla to track their tickets. And finally, tally and Excel. A lot of startups have started to kill Excel. And again, in tally, a lot of startups in India have started to kill tally. Not kill tally, be an alternative to tally. So yes, so these are the tools that they have and none of them talk to each other, right? You know how hard it is. It's just a lot of wasted time not only trying to manage an upon complex and managing all these things. So here's where I got in. We were the sixth family to move into an apartment complex. So we were from the very early stages trying to put things in place. And as I said, in startup world, there are two things which help you in starting a startup. Identifying a gap. So this is a gap. There's an opportunity. And second thing is this one, scratching your own itch. So I knew first and what the problem was and I knew that I could solve it. So that's what came out of it. So quickly a small walkthrough of this timeline, September 2008, I still remember that it's September 18, 2008, the day when Lehman Brothers collapsed, the whole US market collapsed. That was the day I started my first code on a partner. And around that time, I showed this to my co-founder, she also happens to be my life partner. She used to work in SAP, she was a financial consultant. I showed this to her and said, what if we create something like this? And she says, wow, let's do it. And she was in and she said, I'll fund you this for the next one year. So she moonlighted and the kind of the concept was nailed there. Then in November 2008, kind of a prototype was built and we showed this to our apartment complex Oasis Breeze in Whitefield and they bought this idea. And also it helped that we were the six families. So we had a little cloud there and they decided to use it. And then February 2009, like six months after we started, we got this site built with the help of, we made the UL a little bit better. And we got the first check, Greenwood Regency in Sajapur road. And then we entered the value of death. This scares the shit out of me when I think about this. When I was preparing this speech, I thought like, man, how did we survive? This is the next four years of our life. We could have taken to the brink of death most of the time. And there are a lot of ups and downs, but we learned a lot. The product got matured, we knew how to sell. We learned a lot of things, we made a lot of mistakes. Somewhere in the middle, in April 2012, we opened a second office in Mumbai. Totally bootstrapped, no funds from external agencies at all. And November 2013, this is the site it is as of now. We showed it to a bunch of investors and they funded us in November 2013, five years after we launched. And the investors are couple of them are from Silicon Valley, couple of them from India. Sharad Sharma, some of you might be knowing him. He's the head of NASCARM product conclave and also an early friendly advisor to us. So this is the life story and here's where the product discovery, the market discovery happened. And here's where the marketing phase started almost from day one and then scaling. So these are the three things I'm going to touch base upon today. So before we get in, I said I'm going to give some gifts. So first the mug. So this mug is given only to our employees and our investors and our vendors and partners and I'm going to give it away now if you could answer, identify this building. You're from Mumbai. So anyone from Mumbai, you should be able to answer this. Yes, sir? The one that pointer is there. So I'll give you a clue. This is the tallest residential tower in India. No, it's under construction, but it'll be when it's completed. Okay, take a wild guess. How many floors does this have? I'll give the mug to that person. Okay, the closest one? It's lesser than that, lesser than 70. 62? Okay, I'll give it to him, 62. So it's 60 floors. The imperial, who said that? I still have to give it to him. They told the right answer. Really, this come on these days of smartphones smart. So, and the other thing about it is they are on apartment data. So that's another thing. Okay, second quiz question. Let's see how fast you can Google this. Can you identify this place? Apartment complex, it's in Bangalore. Prasri Shantaniketan, there you go. So this is a calendar, a crowdsourced calendar. This is one of our marketing things we do every year. So we ask our people to upload their own photos of their balconies and things like that and people vote on it. So it also has a small viral tendency. People send it to their friends to get more votes. So that's how we kind of spread the word. So yeah, the Prasri Shantaniketan 3000 units, they are on apartment up from day one. So we're kind of lived through them, rolled through them. So the discovery phase. So how I'm structuring my talk is it's going to be on the goal of this phase. The constraints we had, the agile concepts that we applied and outcome what we caught. So what do you think the goal of this phase is? The discovery phase? Any guesses? So what are we trying to discover? Right, kind of. So we have known the gap. I know I'm going to scratch my gap. So what I'm going to build, right? That is the first thing we want to achieve here. So what I'm going to build. Is it going to be a mobile app, web app, or is it going to be like full focus solution? And the second important thing, right? We are bootstrap startup. We have to earn to live, to survive, how to price it, right? So these are the two things which we want to achieve in this phase, the product discovery phase. So what are the constraints? We had only one developer, myself, right? And the second one, we had only one seller. That's it, that was Sangeeta. So these are actual photos actually. I used a Dell Studio laptop and I got her a BlackBerry. And we used to go on demos on weekends and fall-offs will happen. With sales, it's always follow-up. So someone will call her and she'll say, okay, just call you back in five minutes. She'll run to the loo, she'll take the call. It happened, SAP used to do that. And I used to sit at home and code, code, code, code. This is what happened, the first, almost a year plus, before we got more people and got into an office. So this actually is very important. Why this constraint is very important is, if you notice, we have Infosys, so many IT companies are there, but how many products have come out of it? The reason is they're flush with funds, flush with resources, but certain things cannot come out if you don't have that right ecosystem where you are totally constrained for resources. Give me 10 developers. I would have probably built something else which doesn't look like, doesn't solve the problem. So since I had only these very few constraints, I took advantage of it. So actually constraint is an opportunity if you look at it correctly. So what kind of agile concepts we applied? The minimum viable product, there are tons of definition. Osh Maria's website has got beautiful description of what is a minimum viable product. So minimum viable product is actually a working prototype. This is not a PowerPoint, this is not a HTML mockup, it's actually a working prototype. And it does things which it claims to do. So why it's very important. So what we did is, first thing is, once we started making the product work, we showed it to a bunch of people. And who are these people? These are the management company people, friends, whoever else, we go and show it to them. And we didn't ask for feedback, do not ask for feedback. If you're having an idea in mind you already have a product, don't ask for feedback. Just ask them a direct question, look into their eyes and say, will you buy this? Or don't say will you buy this? Just buy this. Then you get the real feedback. Then they tell, you know when it actually, something is not there, something which is to just stop me from buying. And then you say, then you'll ask, how much do you, does it cost? Then you throw in a number, we had no idea, we just 1000 rupees or 100 rupees, doesn't matter. Try 1000, start with a bigger number, the better. And then they'll say, do you think it's worth 1000? They laugh at you. Then the next time you see a customer say, it's 500 rupees, still they laugh at you. So then when the laughing stops, probably that is your price. So you got to go to that number through a lot of trial and error. And having a minimum viable product helps a lot. Not a product, not a PowerPoint, not a vaporware. The real thing, because they should be able to play with it and see it, they should be able to start using it. And then luckily, since our target customers were these management committee members, they are only free on weekends. So if it was a corporate product, you can go Monday through Friday. But for us, we can only meet them on Saturdays and Sundays when they are free. So we treated them as regular agile project showcases. So we show the demos on Saturday, Sunday, note down a bunch of requirements or ideas, gaps that we find in the product, prioritize them, take the top three things, build it. It'll be ready by the next week. So just like weekly iterations we had. And one important thing is when we started doing that, typically the tech champion is the one who will get interested. The key guys, the secretary, president and treasurer, these are the people who cut the check who decide anything and everything. These guys are not techies. So the tech champion will look at it and you're showing the product to him. And then we will be constantly studying what he's saying. Sometimes they will say that, you know what, our whole complain management system is a mess. They actually stole the record book. So we have no idea how many plumbing tickets came, electrical tickets came and things like that. So and he will arrange for a demo with their secretary next week. During that time we'll take our notes, okay, this is the secretary. Let's hit him with this. Then we'll just focus more on this part of it. Or if they say accounting is a problem, we'll show the accounting aspect of it. So by this way, you know, all these demos were actually planned, well, well fine tuned actually. Friday we sit and plan it out. These are the features we have, how best we can showcase it to them. So this helped a lot. And we built rapidly. The pace, because I was a single developer, I had direct push commits to the production. I did not have any deployment process. Now we are having it. But that time we did not have anything like that. So and it was a prototype. So we could like, bugs will be there, let it be there, just build it out, bring it out as fast as possible. This helped a lot. And last thing, the product was absolutely minimal. I learned my lessons. Despite of being in ThoughtWorks for quite some time, learning agile and everything, I never got learned my lesson. So you know how forum works, right? So one customer, one user will send a message. Hey, I want to get Kata transfer in Bangalore. How do I do that? And then people will start answering. So there'll be like a lot of replies. 10 replies, 20 replies, 30 replies. So when I was building the forum, I thought, you know what, suddenly there could be a hundred replies coming and I should build a paging to this forum. So I went ahead and built paging. It took some time probably a day to build it. But then interesting thing I observed is it took almost like four, five months before the first, the whole forum topic got some 30, 40 replies. So the paging that I built was not used for three, four months, which is a criminal waste. So this actually got imbibed to me very early in my startup. And now I go by this like my Bible, my rule, that nothing gets built unless there is a need. There is a need for it. Customers need to ask for it. Then we build it. We don't assume things that, okay, my customers might need something. So let's build it. So having an absolutely minimal thing helps a lot. And also the bloat is not there. So if you have a lot of unnecessary features, people will start clicking on it. They'll start imagining things by themselves. And you need to have a lot of FAQ, a lot of support comes. So keep the project product absolutely minimal. It helps a lot. So finally, what was the outcome of it after going through all these things? So we got the definition nailed. Problem definition got nailed. It's just communication management accounting. So all these things fall into these three things. And where we differentiated from all that complicated mix-up of tools, everything was integrated. They could talk to one another. Actually, this reminds me of a thing I picked up from Kunal Shah, free-charge startup. So he says that Indians are good in solving problems. We are all engineers. Most of us are engineers. But where we suck at is, we cannot identify a problem. We are really bad at it. So if you look at all the American startups, the Silicon Valley, each one is bringing out a problem. And then they solve it. Whereas in India, there are very few problems we have been able to solve it. Look around, there are so many problems around us. But we are not solving them. So in fact, that is the saddest thing about Indian startups. Of course, we don't have enough funds and things, but those are changing slowly. But Indians, as Indians, we don't try to find out the problem that is around us. We try to solve them. Yes, we are great solvers. So we got it defined. And then immediately, yes, we do have competitors who are able to take it and start building products immediately. But it's a good thing. So there you go. This was the integrated solution we offered. And second thing, pricing. So meanwhile, while we are doing all this, when we were going through the valley of death, we had a competitor. Some of you might know he's a very common startup in real estate industry. So they got three rounds of funding during that time. And what they do, they do property-buy-sell rental. They don't solve this problem, what we are solving. And for them, this is not an essential thing. This is not their core. What they did, they gave the entire thing free of cost. So we were forced to give this free of cost, communication management. Even though I would like to charge for it, because whatever I could, I want to, there's a price to it, but still we couldn't charge it. But accounting, we could charge. 180 rupees per flat per year. So in demos, we used to say, by saw we just cost the cost of a coffee. In CCD, this was the cost, one free to 200 rupees. Starbucks wasn't there, otherwise I would have charged 400 rupees. But anyway. So this came out of it. And had I done any other way, wasn't agile way, I couldn't have nailed this thing. So everything helped in the journey. So how many of you have seen this movie? You recognize this movie? Yeah, Ender's World. This is actually a science fiction. Next to Dune, I read this as the best book I've ever read. Ben Kingsley over there, sitting on the other side. He is Major Rackham. He is trained preparing an army to go fight with the aliens. And who's the commander? It's a 10 year old kid called Ender. And the theory Ben is in future. They find that the kids are more focused. They don't have any complication of empathy and everything. And they'll be like hardcore killers. So they'll be able to command an army and defeat the aliens. So he's telling the other guy sitting on the other side, Colonel Graf that, you know, Ender is not ready, okay? And this is what Colonel Graf says, you're never ready. You go when you're ready enough. So they're just in the verge of going for a battle. And this is the conversation that happens. So this exactly mirrors your product, your minimum viable product. The day it's ready enough. Just take it, showcase it to your friends, your customers, possible customers. And don't ask for feedback. Ask them to buy it. That's the end of it. Next phase, marketing. Same. So what is the goal? What is the goal of marketing? Can anyone guess this movie we're in this? Yeah. So this is what we are trying to do. Trying to put apartment at the end of everyone's head. So what is the constraint? It's a new segment. So when Pepsi got into the market, Coke was already there. They could just say, hey, look, we are like Pepsi, but we're like Coke, but little sweet or little different. When Android phones came in, they could easily go behind iPhone. Hey, this is iPhone, but we are Android. We are like this. But Google Glass, nothing like that has been built before. It is a combination of various things. So we are in that thing. And of course, we don't have the muscle power of Google to go market it. And this is another interesting problem. If you see this big oval, this is an apartment complex of 1,000 people. And who do you think are interested in our product? The three people, the president, secretary, and treasurer. So how do you pinpoint these guys? How do you get to their heads? You try walking to a manager. The secretary's security wouldn't even let you inside. You still go meet the manager somehow. The manager is not going to take your brochure and give it to the secretary. He's never going to give you his phone number. He thinks his job is at stake. I have felt it. He thinks there is some online software head. My job chala jayaga, something like that. He doesn't even send the thing. So how do you get to these people? And of course, the unsaid thing is we don't have a big marketing budget of throw 20 lakhs at economic times or times of India to bring it. Even if you do it, these three people might not read it, right? So this is the constraint. And what did we do? It's people. At the end of the day, it's all people, about people. So one of the agile manifestos says it's people over process. So I didn't understand till I got into this. So yeah, I just was mimicking, yeah, it's people over process. So I will not work more than 5 p.m. at work, whatever. But this again reminds me of a nice, simple thing where I bumped into Citaraman X Thoughtworks MD and he asked, hey, Venkat, how's it going? You're building a product, I've heard and all these things. I said, yeah, I'm having this product. I go for demos. I said, you're giving demos. Your developer should never give demos. I said, yeah, because we talk about features. I said, you know, you can send this through SMS gateway and it'll send it in the next two minutes. You'll reach the queue there, get SMS. All these blah, how developers talk. I'm a developer. And then he says, Venkat, you're doing something wrong. Stop talking about your product. It's not about you, it's about them. The end user, talk about them. Think about them. Get into their shoes. So that helped me a lot. That small pep talk he gave, he was just drinking coffee and giving me that. That helped me a lot. Because end of the day, it's people who are going to use your product. People who are going to pay you. It's the people who are going to make them successful. So once we realize that, how do we make these people successful? That automatically means that your product will become successful at the end of the day. So for the same example, the SMS thing. Nowadays, I don't tell this. Moment I know that a treasurer is sitting opposite me, I tell them, by sub after you generate the bills, you just click this button, it'll send an SMS to all your members, saying this is your due. Or a secretary is there. Secretary is into compliance, security, safety of things. So if there is a fire break out in your 10th floor or in one of the wings, what do you do? Come to apartment or take your mobile phone. Pick the block you want to send and send an SMS. It'll reach them the next two minutes. So there's a whole mindset change for being a developer. Probably for sales and marketing people, this is basic things. But for me, it was a mindset change. It's people. And again, employees. So as we are looking at customers, we are also growing as a team. So we should also, we are also looking at how do we make our people successful? So if they don't feel successful, we don't make them successful. Customers or end customers will not be successful. So a lot of things over there. So again, how did we reach these three people? This was early 2010. So Bangalore was suffering with water, even though there is a big water problem. So Water Tanker Mafia is there. When you take a bath, the water stops because the tank has dried out, all those things. So what we did, we looked around. We found that water is the problem. So we connected with the water experts. Bayon was one, our inverter harvesting experts. And we created a workshop. It didn't cost us much. 10,000 something for the venue and everything, Samosa and all those things. And we just pinged most of the upon complexes we knew, saying that, hey, send us your eco champion, eco warrior. And who are these guys? Some of them are treasurers, presidents, secretary. These are the crazy ones, like we call it, the champions. So they all came to the room, we brainstormed, some solutions came out of it. And then they went back and they started spreading the word. We didn't do anything. So one thing led to the another. And we got covered by Deccan Chronicle and the things like that. We spent like what, 10,000 rupees? But we made people successful. We gave solutions to these people. How to conserve water and things like that. It happened over and over again. When the BBMP passed the waste aggregation law, we were there. Within two weeks, we conducted a workshop. We got all the experts and we kind of showcased how to solve this problem. 80-20 rule, a lot of times, you notice that 20% of the features is what people are interested in buying. There are the other 80% which people don't care. So the sooner you find this 20% of the product which sells with people, you're successful. You're not wasting their time and your time. Demos will be over in 10 minutes moment you hit this exact 20%. And again, this varies from segment to segment. Mumbai looks at the product differently. Bangalore looks at it differently. Chennai, Gurgaon, everything. So you need to talk to customers, try to understand what people are looking for. 20% is very important. That's all marketing is. And responding to change, like I said, the BBMP thing or government finally woke up to the thing that housing studies are flush with money. So let's start taxing them. So they started introducing service tax. And then moment it got passed, we spoke to most of the leading auditors. We created a nice packaged material for our customers to consume. We sent it, that got forwarded. There you go. So a small viral thing happens to the exact segment we are talking. Of course, it goes without saying. Everything we had to keep doing it in a iterative mode, as when we keep doing it, it becomes better and better. The outcome, like I said, Deccan Chronicle covered one thing later another and we got hit with Bangalore Mirror front page. Even if you pay money, you cannot get the front page news. This is the total purely Gorilla marketing that we did. It's another way of doing agile marketing. And second, we have very good customer base. These are all our managers. So again, like I said, the manager will not let you talk to the secretary, Prasheesh Anthony Ketan. That manager, we helped him. We placed that manager there. He's a very good friend of ours. Every startup in the real estate industry, the common startup I said, Homeshikari, all these things, they all try to get into Prasheesh Anthony Ketan. There are 3,000 people living there, around 40% are tenants. So they all want access to it. And who stops them from talking to the secretary, president, or person? So we do have these very well-trained people in the apartment and we just spread the word around. And it's a very iconic ad actually. So what image comes to your mind? So before that, can you tell what this ad is? Apple's 1984 Super Bowl ad. So what is one word that comes out of it? Do you mind anything about it? Anything? No, it has got nothing to do with agile. So let me open your mind. Don't think of agile. Liberation. Sorry? Liberation. Liberation. Yes, it's a nice word. Yeah. Endurance. Okay. Sorry? Estacy. Okay, the word I'm looking for is obviously, everything is right. So what I'm looking for is disruption. So here's a clue for all of you who are going to start a startup or looking at doing something. Try to disrupt an industry. It's simple actually. The moment you disrupt an industry, automatically media will like to talk about you. People like to talk about you. People have to talk about you. The days of you going on TVs and putting an ad is all gone. It's all like people nowadays. People are on Facebook, they're well connected. They like something. They'll put it on Facebook or Twitter. So we need to make people talk about your product. The only ways to do is cause disruption in an industry. So there are a lot of avenues. So keep an eye for them. So the third and final phase, scaling. Again, no technical scaling here. That's the easy part. You can just go to Amazon and get a load balancer and throw in bunch of servers in auto scaling mode or a lot of ways you can achieve it. But this scaling is different. And what is the goal? Save each and every request. So in a day, I'm sorry, in a month we get thousand plus requests. New registrations, request for quotations, webinar requests, customers who have gone live asking how do I do this? How do I do that? Password request, so many things, right? We get, keep getting them again and again. And what we also want to do is want to respond to each and every request that comes. This is a true story. Couple of years back, I got a message through a contactless page, just a name and an email. And no message, nothing. So by habit, I just sent back, so how can I help you? I mean, I did not ignore it, thankfully. And this gentleman was looking for an apartment management solution for a Hyderabad society. And one thing later in the next two months they signed with us. And this is the fourth year they have renewed. It's LNT Serene County in Hyderabad. It's like a landmark over there. And one of our competitors, their co-founder, he still lives in that apartment complex. And I was debating whether I should tell the story or not, but now I can tell there is a reason. Because today morning, one of our COO had gone to Hyderabad to seal the deal. So today it was like a make or break thing for us. So I woke up and I was tense, not for the talk, but for this thing. Because if this breaks, a lot of things happen. Because a co-founder, the competitor has been able to win this account. He was ready to give it free. These people are giving us a five digit check here on here. So thankfully it went fine. We were able to convince them that they are still happy with the product. But as far as it's a fight here on here, even though it's a subscription model we sell, every year it's a new committee which is looking at us. And the same questions keep getting asked, why should we pay for you when there is a free option or there is other competitor? So yes, so that was very important, saving every request. So now the constraints. Of course there are a lot of off the shelf components. Sales force is really good. But the problem is our market, our dynamics is not yet established. So if you are doing something like a traditional business, this is really good, but we couldn't use it. Of course the other thing that we do have the money constraint, but still at this point we were cruising. So it wasn't a big problem. We did evaluate sales force, but we found that it is only good for pre-sales aspect. So for us it's not only pre-sales, it's also post-sales and a big life cycle is existing. So we couldn't do that. Second thing is we couldn't hire an army of minions. This was a money constraint. We had very few people with us. So what agile concepts we applied? We did fanatic automation. This one thing I love and learned in ThoughtWorks. So we automate everything. The deployment process is so smooth, you wouldn't believe it. This helped a lot. And again, my deployment is like click and it goes to production. That is not the automation I'm talking about. This is into our sales process, into our support process. So if someone asks us a question, a lot of times what happens, a tenant moves out, immediately he's deactivated by the management committee. And this person, he tries to log in, cannot log in. We do show a message there. You cannot log in, okay? You have been deactivated. Still they come to our contractors page and put a message, very big message. Why did you log in? How did you log in? All those lock me out and all those things. So we have one click button there which says copy to the secretary. And that just copies to the secretary of our deployment complex. So these kind of things you couldn't have got with a solution like a Zendesk or something. Because the whatever solution we have, the automation we built was totally built into the product. So again, pure automation here. Increasing efficiency. You guys attended agile conference, right? Tell me how do you increase efficiency? Answers. Point of error. Okay. Exactly. Reduce wastage. So that's what we had to do. Try to increase efficiency. So we tried to find out where people were wasting their energy. So you wouldn't believe it. Even recently, we hired an office boy to go pick up checks and do all those things. What we noticed, half the day he was just sitting doing nothing. Right? I mean, he doesn't have that much work. And what we did, our salesperson, he just called him, said, we have these calendars, right? We had a bunch of calendars. They're like, take you to this society in Andheri, right? And just go distribute and see if you can get the secretary's number. So he's such a sweet looking, simple man. So he was able to easily walk into the manager's office. He gives it and says, this is a gift for your secretary. Can I have the secretary's number? They were giving it. So just like that, he generated so many leads out of it in like a period of one week. So I don't know it's an agile story, but it's just so measure. So this is another thing, which of course, being agile or not, you still have to measure anything because it's important for the next step to identify bottlenecks. So we need to know in which phase we are struggling, right? So can you guess what my next slide is going to be? Anyone? Yeah, so what is the theory behind it? Theory of constraints, exactly. This we do apply diligently in a partner. So again, you identify the constraint, know that this is stopping you from achieving your goal. Then you start exploiting it. Put all your resources into that, trying to solve it. Solve it. And then you notice a constraint, the bottleneck has moved to somewhere else. Then again, you do the same thing. So the whole process, all the aspects of your company starts growing up. So what are the aspects I'm talking? Simple, it's pre-sales, the marketing and sales effort, and post-sales, support and renewal. Each one is important for our survival, actually. So first thing is what we notice is, once we started measuring, we don't even measure, you get an idea. So whenever an apartment complex registers or a RFQ comes, I get an email alert. So I know just in a day, I didn't get any emails. Something is seriously wrong. So we stepped up on marketing. We stopped development, known new features. We put all the resources on sync how we can increase marketing. So search engine optimization is one. So our development team started learning how to do a search engine optimization. We attended a few lectures about it. Then we conducted workshops. Workshops are fantastic results for us. So in fact, next week, we were conducting one in Chennai. So that worked. So all these things happened and lead started coming in. Doesn't pour any day, but at least we get one or two leads in a day. And in a month, we get around 80 to 100 solid leads. So this is actually, I'm talking about the funnel. Sorry, I mean, this is like sales and marketing one-on-one, but for me, it's all new to me when I started on doing this. So it's actually a funnel. So all the leads are there and slowly they come into qualified leads. Some then become valid leads. Then we show demos, negotiations, and finally they sign up. So ours is like three to six months long process. So it doesn't happen Monday. They see it Saturday. They're signing the check has never happened actually because the tech champion sees it. Then he reduces to the management committee. The management committee deliberates. They have a thousand one pressing issues. They meet once a week or once every fortnight. And then our agenda has to be positioned somehow. And then they discuss, decide. Sometimes it goes to the AGM because they do have some rules like beyond a certain amount they cannot decide. They have to ask the community to decide. Community one guy will stand up and say, that is this free thing. And then again, back to square one. We had again go to the thing to again convince them. Sorry, I went off track. So marketing. So we nailed it. Then what we noticed, it all moved back into sales. We got this bunch of leads and then we're not being able to service them. So again, pull the developers out of it. Put them on sales, send them to sales. Our accounting support people have gone to sales. In fact, right now this today in Mumbai, our accounting support guy is actually showing a demo. He's not a salesperson. Because we find that when this guy goes, he just nails them. He just tells, I'm an accounting support person. Ask anything about accounting on a pound order. I'll be able to tell. And he closes deals faster than our salespeople. So we nailed the sales problem that we could solve it. And of course, a little bit of deals here and there helped also. We give a quick closure deal. We had a Valentine's Day offer till February 14th. So anyone in Bangalore who signed up within February 14th, we gave it at six rupees per unit, which is like half of what we typically charge. It helped actually. And then it moves to support. So all the sales have been converted, checks have been given. We started deploying. And then suddenly there is a bunch of 10,000 people coming within like two weeks span. Lot of password problems. How do I do this? How do I do that? How do I set my billing? How do I pass interest? So much of support things. So what we did, we again put the focus back in support. This month, it's like employee of the month. The bottleneck of the month is support. Let's see how we can elevate support. So a lot of automation, FAQs, simplifying the process, UX. One thing, I've been telling only good things about minimum viable product. I did not say the bad things. Bad things, the UI UX takes a severe beating. It's become scrapped very fast actually because we just keep adding things without thinking how this can look like. So at times it does help to do in waterfall model where you really design it out and let the design come out nicely. But when you're doing it, building it so fast, the UI UX takes a backseat. So again, support becomes very difficult when your UX is very bad. So in fact, like we have been doing this exercise last two, three months. We have been working with the UX firm, not the UI firm, the usability firm to understand how Apartmenta can become more simpler because a lot of support will be taken care of if the usability is better. So again, that's what we did. So then support was taken care of and then a lot of customers, they come up for renewal. And during renewal time, they ask this question, why should I pay you? You did not do us anything. So in that time, what we had to do is again, look into their data to create a nice report saying that these are the things that you have used. These are the things you can still use. You haven't exploited the product fully yet. Not for our fault, we gave you the product but you did not deploy it. So this has to be told in a very simple, gentle, nice, beautiful way. So we were able to do that. We now have a way to create automatic reports. So many things happened actually, parallely. So what was the outcome of it? First thing, we have our own InnoCRM. Anyway, you take any management book, they say, do not reinvent the wheel. Okay, so we do have reinvented the wheel. We are not the only ones to do it. Prakto, another bootstrap startup. Prakto is a startup where you can register for a doctor's appointment. Lot of doctors have started using it. Another Bangalore-based startup. So they have their own InnoCRM. CRM, if you don't know, it's customer relationship management. This is like the DNA of any company. So any lead that you get gets into this and any time you pull up the customer's data, everything is there. So the next sales guy can read through it and understand. So why is this was very important for us? For the renewals I was telling you, we create a beautiful chart out of it. It's automatically available over here. So the renewal person looks at it. Sales person looks at it. The person who's deploying looks at it. So everyone in the team can go to one place to read this. So using a sales force wouldn't have been beneficial for us because we couldn't have mined this data into sales force. Second thing, what we did, we built our own support ticketing. Again, there is beautiful products in the market of the shelf, Zendesk, Fresh Desk, all these guys. But we have kind of created it. Again, all each one of them were built in an iterative fashion for the team. But now we have a very good working model. So like the automation I said, just click on this. It sends a message to the secretary. It's possible only through this. It couldn't have been possible in any other way. All these things thus take us time away from the actual vision of going, building the product. But we did somehow find time to build these small, small things. We built over a time. So now we have very good working systems. Third thing, product newsletter. We tried using MailChimp, which is really good. In fact, a lot of your agile emails were coming from MailChimp. But the problem we had is the secretaries keep changing. So the secretary who signed up with us today, suddenly after three months, he would have quit and the new secretary would have come in. MailChimp will never know. I mean, had we kept this data outside our apartment. So now, because our CRM, someone will enter that, hey, this is the secretary. Immediately, our product newsletter, when we send it out, it'll go only to the new guy, not to the old guy. So all these things were possible because all these things are nicely integrated. So do I recommend? Yes, if you have the resources to do it, go ahead and do it. But there are other off-the-shelf components. So I think use it with your own judgment. So finally, this is the status as of today. We have two lakh plus users and 4,000 apartment addas. Each apartment complex, we call it an adda. And who are the people behind this? This is all we have. Three sales people, two tech support, two accounting support, two deployment managers and three developers. I'm one of the developers still. This is all it is. And this is the graph which, how we are growing. We are growing exponentially, actually, okay? And this is where our team is growing. We are growing linearly. This is a graph of a product company, not a services company. Services company cannot grow like this. 37 signals, the guys behind Ruby on Rails and Basecamp and all those things. They are like the product company. Typical, they're a textbook product company. So your aim will be to grow like this. Investors, when they look at it, they're gonna check. I mean, can you scale? They keep asking you, can you scale? This is what they mean. Are you going to scale exponentially along with your user base? Then you never make a profit. So only way if you scale linearly, you could do that. And the only way to do it is through automation. That's it. Not wasting any resources. All those nice agile concepts we know of help you into achieving this thing. So just recapping the discovery phase. Build an MVP. It's very simple, okay? Second is marketing. It's purely about people. So as long as you think like how I can make the guy in front of me successful, you'll automatically become successful. I don't know if this is agile or not, but this is a secret I have learned. And finally, third, scaling. For your scaling, you have to learn, understand and implement theory of constraints. There is no other go to manage the bottlenecks that keep coming, the curveballs that keep hitting you nonstop. So that's it, guys. That's my speech. Thanks a lot. Thank you. 4.15 PM. I was able to, just like a good agile project, I was able to deliver beforehand. So questions, yeah. Sure. Right. So it's more than value provisions, how you scare people. So in the sense that it's a treasurer, he's looking at your product and your competitor product which is giving free. You say that, okay, fine, go ahead and use him. At the end of a year, when you're trying to close your book of accounts, will you be able to show it an auditor and say, look at this product? This is the report that is generating. Will I be able to get it signed by an auditor? So as long as you're able to differentiate that, yes, I mean, whatever. Yes, I agree. But this is from our experience. We know what has happened. So we know the customers who have gone outside. We have the references also. So they had problem closing book of accounts because accounting, it has to be done by standards. So since we moved to Mumbai, we know the Mumbai style of accounting where it is very compliant and a lot of things happening. In Bangalore, it doesn't matter. Just an Excel sheet is enough to submit to the registrar of society, they'll be fine. But Mumbai, it has to be done in a very organized manner. So our product has that which the other product doesn't have. So that is a big differentiator. So end of the day, you still have to move all your records in whatever product you use to tally to do it. As an apartment, right from apartment, you can get the reports out and you can show it to the auditor and it'll be pushed to the secretary, the registrar of secretary. So that is one. And then second thing is, I think someone else mentioned today, so I was talking to someone. They said like, actually everything is expensive, nothing is free. So either it's time or money. So with us, yes, you pay some money, but your time is saved. In other case, yes, you're saving money, but you're losing a lot of time. The time when you should be probably putting out fires or creating a vision for your apartment complex. What you're doing, you're trying to get these reports done because you had to go to an auditor, he'll say this doesn't work, then you copy to tally or get someone to enter it in tally. So anyway, you waste your time. So that's the same thing. Like you get Linux, I love Linux, so nothing against it. But seriously, if I have time, I will use Linux, but I don't have time, so I use a Mac, it's equivalent of that. So that's the thing. And just one last thing is it's very hard. Fighting free is extremely hard in Bangalore. It's again by segment. You go to Mumbai or Pune, people see that why should I take it free? There is something suspicious. You're going to probably sell my data or something. You're going to make money somehow. So I don't trust you. So there it's very easy for us. So the other sort of if it's giving free is not even the picture there. So yeah, sorry. Yes. Yes, I do. In fact, just few months back, just two, three months back, I went to Pune to meet a customer. And he said, hey, let's meet in Cafe Coffee Day. It has never happened before. I always go to their apartment complex and sit in the basement or in the lobby. And so apparently he was someone behind a startup or is investing in a startup. So he was trying to look at it. Yes, we do have that problem. But it's a speed actually. So yes, probably when we started, that could have been people who looked at us. In fact, the hydropath customer was saying the co-founder is leaving.