Business intelligence is projected to grow to a nearly $26.9 billion industry by 2021, but its solutions are only as good as the data behind it. Decision makers require spot-on data and efficient, streamlined systems to maintain it. Otherwise, they’ll end up with incomplete, duplicate, or wrong information that obscures useful insights for making smart decisions.
Many Sales & Support team enter data by hand without any accuracy. Many times, they miss important leads or forget to follow-up and these universal problem for businesses is noticed by Gaurav, like any other entrepreneur and he took an initiative with JustCall to solve this problem by own instead of doing a complain or shouting on Sales person. Here is a chat with Mr. Gaurav Sharma regarding his journey and learning :
Q. How will you Introduce Yourself to the world ?
Gaurav : I’m an entrepreneur and an angel investor based out of Noida. I love solving problems and automating processes through programming. And, when I am not writing code, I am selling.
Q. Tell your readers about your achievements till today (Be Honest)!
Gaurav : I built, scaled and sold two companies in last 6 years. At the age of 24, I sold my first business and moved to US. Then, built another company in US, scaled it to millions of dollars in revenue and finally sold it to a well known media company.
Q. What’s the most important thing you’re working on right now, and how are you making it happen?
Gaurav : I’m currently building a cloud phone system for businesses around the world to make office telephony flexible, scalable and omnipresent. We have built a solid tech product that allow businesses to setup a phone system for their teams in minutes. We are very focused on building the best product and providing an awesome customer service experience. Thanks to this, we are growing 30-40% every month and have touched $150K ARR within 6 months.
Q. What’s your take on your segmented/targeted Market ?
Gaurav : We are targeting sales and support teams in SMBs around. There are 5.73 million SMBs in US alone that have 4 or more employees. The cloud telephony market is $8 billion growing at 12% every year. So, we are confident about building a $100 million revenue generating company in next 7-8 years.
Q. What are the challenges you have faced and what are the current challenges ? Mention top three challenges for both.
Gaurav : In past, we have faced some critical challenges, they are:
1. Hiring is huge problem that we are still facing.
2. While selling to US market, providing support & handling leads across different time zones is a challenge for a bootstrapping company
3. Lack of legal advisors or professionals who understand multi-geography company formations, share transfers and ESOPs
Currently, we are facing challenges in:
1. Hiring continues to be a big challenge
2. International expansion and local presence to close bigger deals
3. We are growing really fast so retention & providing quick support to every customer has become a huge challenge
Q. Why you have started up ? Be specific with your reasons!!
Gaurav : We started JustCall.io because while running our previous business, it was really difficult for me to track.
Q. Where do you want to see yourself in next 5 years ?
Gaurav : In next 5 years, JustCall will be serving 1000 companies around the world, we will have a bucket of products around JustCall like CRM for Sales, CRM for Support etc. Business will be at least 100 people strong doing $50 million ARR.
Q. Please share your learning for fellow Entrepreneurs ?
Gaurav :
1. You can create a successful business even if the idea is boring.
2. Give special care of your first 100 customers and keep talking to them
3. Track and measure your NPS and other key metrics
4. Start paying yourself salary as soon as it is possible. Helps in avoiding burn out.
5. Find out unfair advantage and passive distribution channels to help you grow organically from beginning.
Currently, JustCall is operational in Noida and targeting SMEs around the globe, we wish a very smooth journey for the team and hope they will create magic worldwide in their endeavor.