hey hi everyone this is binu Jacob the managing director and CEO of experion Technologies a product engineering company based out of uh [Music] Kerala so boo welcome to the founder thesis podcast uh tell me your journey of becoming an entrepreneur actually so when I talk about my uh you know initiative with experion I would like to say that I was never meant to be an entrepreneur so because I should have actually been a teacher or a professor you look like a professor as well yeah yeah so it all happened I think the the intent or you know the interest to become an entrepreneur happened when I was doing my masters in IIT Delhi so kesab Mahindra was the person who actually gave and handed the certificates over to us so he was and invited guest for the convocation so I think it was in um it was probably in 85 so when we were actually passing out he was kind of making out a call and he said look guys you are all taking India government's money and then going and making America Rich so I I I couldn't understand what you saying so we had to be we were talking about the brain drain those days and then he said I've traveled around the world and not even a single corner of the Earth where where I have not gone and I have not found uh you know a team like in the IND I mean Indians who actually can do everything but then they are not good at marketing and then obviously he went on to talk about all that and and then he says that I am betting on the talent India and I'm going to create a project and he did not really talk about the name of the project until then and he says if this investment which was 675 crores is what I think I remember uh if this goes down and then you can be rest assured that you know Mahindra is not going to be on the face of the Earth so that was what he's meant and then at the end of the thing he said this project is called the project Scorpio you know so and U I mean life went on I passed out I went to Dubai for a couple of years kab mahra was like the an mra's father is it yeah I mean I think his father-in-law I mean so he he was the chairman before that okay so yeah so he I mean I went on to Dubai continued with my work and then I came back to India and I started finding the Scorpio Jeeps on the road you know so that's that's when I said oh my God this is what he meant those days and I found it was really good I mean it was a welcome change to see Scorpio from the typical you know 455 and and those kind of models so then U of course I went back to Dubai and somebody from uh Dubai wanted to get me back to India and then they said I've got this stpa rules coming into India so I want to start an it what were you doing in Dubai so I used to work for a Canadian IT company I was into software testing so it was mostly you know testing of Y2K days it was I'm talking about 2000 so Saudi Telecom alah Banks all these large companies because of Y2K they wanted to have testing of software so I was one of the test managers of course that happened because I I did not have any background in software testing per se I used to work in the armed forces before this job I was in the Air Force testing missiles so you know the the managing director of this company Pac M McManaman he was actually a I mean Canadian guy but he was again it service I mean software testing guy so he said oh if you can test missiles well and good you can test software so that's how I got in you know obviously he they taught us on how to uh what are the protocols to take up a software testing in a structured manner so that's how I actually got into the job but uh of course my IIT thing was actually mostly you know technology management so I I could understand how products are conceived and then how do you take it to markets all of that so this guy in Dubai he said you can come down and set up my IT company in India so you know ignorance is bliss you know so went ahead and started building a company it was a very tough job I mean from zero to about 105 I conceived a product and then I created a product started selling went into the market and there was no money so this guy though he committed a lot of money but he did not really have enough capital so I switched over in uh 5 years I mean after having built this company to about 106 people and then found a lot of customers it was a campus Erp it was a concept that I had actually created sold to customers in in Dubai and K so that is my early beginning uh but then I went on this company which you set up in India was selling a Erp to colleges yeah primarily universities and so on because India those days it was indan colleges yeah engineering colleges primarily and some of the universities management institutes and so on I had about 35 customers that I had personally gone and sold to at least about 20 of them that came on board and then people were using it but the business wasn't making enough money because the pricing was not properly done so there was obviously mistakes looking back don't you think the market opportunity itself was very limited I mean even today colleges don't spend much on it right it's a yeah but then the sap had a campus version so there was campus version which was actually priced very high for the big universities and so on uh so but then this was there was a market because I was selling to the campuses in in in Dubai you know those days because I based in Dubai so what happened was um there was um you know there was appetite to buy at whatever price I mean we not talking about so we had itm Mumbai that bought this product for about 25 or I think 35 lakhs so that was not a small amount those days yeah yeah you know so that that was interesting but anyway then we had other products also shipping and trading related but it was product conceiving products and selling and then you know but that was the early learning that I had because I after this job I worked for a company called IBS which today I don't know if you know that they are selling to the big Airlines and big oil companies and so on so I was actually selling products after this job so that product kind of products IBS uh no IBS has got cargo management for big Airlines like Lans and things like that so yeah so yeah and then oil and gas I used to man of few product lines in IBS so that is how my product story continued you know after being starting that initial company so when I decided so that is how experion you know the early uh Foundation blocks for something like an experion happened those days so I had my friends who are like we have four people out of IBS and couple I mean we have got the CTO come from Sri Kumar is come from uh quest which is today I mean which used to be Nest so we had all these senior people from IBS we had Manoj who's actually heading the US for us we've got sures who used to head you know IBS Bangalore and then Jamie who was one of the managing one of the product lines so all of us together we started thinking about how to create value and how to create wealth and I think that intent also happened because I used to be in the armed forces and when I was traveling on a continuous basis I could not find a single product made in India so if you go to let's say typical BMW uh bnq in in in uh let's say UK it's 348 sorry bnq is a big super store which has everything under the Earth you can buy building materials you can buy you know grocery you can buy everything there so you I was traveling all the way it's a 2 three acre uh Superstore and then when I mean wall I could find because on my travels I used to find this uh you know Place interesting so when I went around 34 hours there I could find only one product made in India which was a quir mat from alipe in Kerala you know and I used to think what is this one six of India's population uh I mean global population is India is one six and we don't have anything Made in India are we so low and on the value chain and I so that was another motivation I thought we should create something interesting and then so I sharing with my friends that see look there is an opportunity it is becoming quite you know in demand in the world so let's not why not create a company so that's how the whole discussion started and obviously experion used to be uh you know called in Forin and two guys one of my IIT alumni guys he based in Germany and another guy from Switzerland they already started a services company and on my trips to Europe this guy came and met me and said look uh we've got a small company but difficult to manage remotely so can you come on board you know so that is how the discussion all started and then I went and told them look I've got these friends who are proven to be working with very large customers like the biggest airlines in the world biggest oil companies so can you get them on board uh he was okay but the Swiss guy wasn't then okay that discussion went off and after a couple of months these guys came back to me again and said look let's look at your proposal that's how the whole experi on philosophy started and then we started we all met up together in Kerala and then he said U not for your business plan but for the people you know for the for the other Founders that you brought in we game let's go ahead so they moved out and then that's how we started in 2008 and 2008 you can imagine what is a you know uh phase in the industry you know we had the prime lending crisis but what happened was I think what was critical for us we had the right team you know if you look at the team that came along with us the five co-founders that we have um there was a right business knowledge technical knowledge you know Market approach and so on but over and above the value system ethics and integrity all of that uh and and the DNA of innovation existed so imagine what we started with we said we could do Uber on text so that was a big you know big initiative in 2008 so we went to vone vone said this idea is great because arpu average revenue per user today in the Indian Telecom is only based on voice Revenue so when I talked about this Uber on text which was like you know text message to a short code and then you have somebody calling you to take you for a ride that was a philosophy and then we had book my show equivalent on text so both these ideas vone said give us uh you know the right to Market and then don't give it to anybody else I said that doesn't work because then they asked for six months exclusivity so anyway long story short we could actually launch this product to Market because vone took us took us to Market so that is how it actually happened and I remember the CTO of the company he said this product concept can be created on Symbian phones so there was no apps those days so that was very interesting and then we actually created you know Nokia phones we had this booking application for movie theaters we had 129 theaters across Kerala we launched it we had some of the theater guys coming out so it was all you know great Fanfare and we could see actually who's booking for which movie you know and 22 taxi operators who actually tested this product and then we could actually have this work on lbs lbs is nothing but location based services so so we had the greatest idea those days but then obviously 2008 was you know all the customers we had from Europe vanished because of the prime lending crisis because they were from the financial sector what was the existing business the revenues were coming from what kind of services I mean we just had 10 people so when I took over it was like 10 12 people and they were doing pure services for fin fintech companies in Switzerland so that was what they used to do so it was primarily fullstack development it was those days net and even before noted I think Visual Basic aspx do I mean aspx based uh you know application developments for this fintech company so and how much revenue was it making I think it was some 72 lakhs was the you know Revenue I when I took over okay in Indian rupees so right that was nothing much and you yeah yeah nothing yeah it peaked to about 16 people and then when I took over it was like um you know 10 people plus one accountant so that was it and we were in the basement of a building in techn park called tasini so it was minus two so parking building converted to a you know so that that was how we didn't really have a lot of money so what we did all of us pulled in some money brought in equal stakeholding all of that anyway uh so the products did really well in terms of Market acceptance movie theater booking was you know we could see on a good movie it would get all the seats would get full we had a very limited in inventory so but uh the technology that we created was taken by you know Sun Microsystems to Mobile World Congress and so on so it was very exciting but now since we we were not making Revenue because vone was making about 70% of the revenue we were not really getting any money investing and continuously bleeding so we buying borrowing stealing you know whatever to sustain the operations because for creating this product from 10 people we had scaled up to about 35 40 people because we had to create technology on mobile apps web apps all of that but anyway so we we decided that we can't sustain not because the product was bad because the theater guys themselves actually said they were selling tickets on black so we could not really uh run with this product when movies were good movies were were being released anyway so finally we decided to shut down these products and then both myself and CTO I mean SRI Kumar we decided to pack the bags and go across to Europe start finding projects in mobile application development so that was the beginning so that was really how uh we could find some customers to sustain revenues I mean obviously we couldn't take any money home but we had to pay the salary so that's how we kind of got many small projects when mobile applications were coming kind of coming alive and I think 2010 or 11 the mobile U iOS was launched then later came Android so all these times we could so s was very um you know excited to build new technology so he would find youngsters teach them technology you know everybody you know motivated to build something exciting new so that's how we kep kept on our uh Innovation DNA alive and that's been there from then till you know even today so today you're talking about AI so we've got teams who learning that so that's how uh The Innovation thing got us projectss from uh Denmark Sweden because we used to go on a train journey all the way from Sweden down to Italy so wherever we could go and Pitch our mobile story we could go we started finding projects and I think 200 uh 9 to 11 was very very tough because Market was bad but from 11 12 onwards we could start getting smaller projects and we continuously scaling up so uh today what is interesting is every year we have continues to Contin to grow except 2009 and and growing quite fast so 2010 Manoj was there in the US he started creating a US market I think the first year Revenue was 250k you know US dollars but we started recording you know 150 200 because the base was small we could create uh you so H H how did you acquire clients because at that time uh very few companies would have been investing in mobile applications because I mean if this was pre iPhone uh you were essentially doing on Symbian uh so this would have been a very very small market so how did you even go and acquired this PL yeah so we had we had contact see being in the industry all of us were in the industry for quite some time so we used to kind of call out people talk about our technology skills so somebody would say there's a mini golf application that's required for a Netherlands company so we would go and talk to them because nobody used to know how to make mobile applications so I remember having gone and talked to people through Partners known contact even employees who pass you know moved out from previous organizations all of them so uh we had um you know cycling apps for because Netherlands is great for cycling right there was a Danish Army application where you know Armed Forces people wanted to attract people into you know joining the forces so all these different mobile apps were kind of created and the biggest one we got was Qatar Airways they were wanting to have a mobile booking engine because Emirates was trying to create one and they didn't know how to make it so we had our team which was already created uh I think about 15 people so we created Blackberry applications Windows applications iOS application and Android so four different booking engines for katway that came from us so so by I think 2014 we had enough case studies to group all these various applications you know whether it is mobile mostly mobile but even web applications into domain buckets and 2014 we decided to talk about domain stories and go to market so what was interesting was every three years those days we could change our strategy so you know so we scaling obviously but winning customers we went to US market Mano started the US market in 2010 I went to Australia created again a small set of projects in Australia through again known contacts so we were trying to get projects from anywhere that was how it was you know so 2010 to 14 the strategy was uh spray and prey like you would whatever projects you can get from whichever Industries you would aggressively just try and acquire customers because you needed survival you needed uh a capital base to be built up uh so then how did this strategy change from 14 onwards so 14 onwards we decided to look at the Domain Focus so see I I had a clear conviction that unless you are improving the domain or improving a business advantage to let's say Healthcare or retail you wouldn't really uh stand out because you can talk about technology story for a while but if you really want to talk good revenues then you got to look at so we had so the okay 20124 that is the time we decided we go and do product engineering work because we all came from product companies we said let's look at product engineering and not typical services like everybody does everybody does primarily by loading bodies is it product engineering the same as Services isn't it a service like how is it different like yeah so product engineering is see how you make products is a little different from uh Services Services is mostly like let's say G will tell you I need 2,000 people for my you know various projects and you need you know 100 net 200 Java that's the kind of and they would manage the project you don't really have to worry about product whereas uh typical product businesses you have either an old product that got to be created into newer skin or newer technology uh or conceive fully new products today you're talking about digital right so you look at Uber Uber is a you know product that is a platform which is completely digital so uh so the the nuts and balls of building a product is completely different from services so I can give you some of the examples we have uh one of the you know biggest retail application Builders you know in Australia who's our customer so they have about 1,800 stores which are running on their platform which is right from procurement to POS the entire life cycle of running a retail shop you're not talking about small ones you're talking about 25 30 tills you know like big Bazar or bigger than that running on this product so it's a very complex process of you know procuring or pricing it right right and then managing different departments whether it is grocery or meat and poultry section things like that so so those are products that will kind of repeat so the customer gives us the order but then they go and sell this products to multiple customers to make their revenue so we have one project which is a product engineering product which is a mission critical business critical application for their customers so that's the difference in products so that's uh for retail now if you look at let's say the one of the large Automotive companies in in us they're using us to build their EV charging platform so you go across North America and Canada that company's particular EV charging platform whether it's mobile application finding charging stations or whatever everything is running on a product that we built so it's a product that continuously gets improved and newer uh you know cars getting released you know the same application would get upgraded so that those are products then insurance companies I think one of the top three insurance companies in the world you know again out of us their product running in different in insurance companies we are building so Property and Casualty Insurance so products are typically uh interesting because it's also got a road map like you have your car right you have Honda Accord 2020 version 21 version 20 I mean so similar so that way products are completely different ball game and one is the stickiness you know once you build a product you you understand the domain how a retail is run how EV charging philosophy is there in the market so all these things are actually understood by your team and your team which is like uh you know start with probably 10 people it grows to 100 people and it keeps growing or it you know it'll get different um uh compartmentalized into uh sust maintenance and core product engineering training implementation so different uh buckets of uh you know activities so that's how uh when you have a product and then your uh domain knowledge is what keeps you on you know because you would know how retail is running in in let's say Australia and UK all of that so anyway coming coming back to the product engineering story so we pitched becoming a product engineering company in 2014 what is uh I'm assuming that infosis vipro all these it Giants would all want to do product engineering as well how did you as a small company compete with these giants like like what do you need to do to build a business in this product engineering space because for them it should not be very hard to do it right yeah see it's again about the scale see how do you how does infosis find let's say their revenues 70% of the business comes from large maintenance projects so you're talking about let's say Bank of America or large Banks where they require tons of people so it is all about fiveyear contracts 10e contracts where they have this committed you know thousand Java people and kind of things you know so that so the for them it is just about the cost Arbitrage and the number of people that's getting built so that is a focus it is not that they can't do project product engineering obviously they would also have products like finle they have which is a product which is inhouse but if you look at the kind of percentages it brings in very little Revenue but our thing is having lived in the product engineering philosophy throughout our past uh we could understand as to let's say you're talking about 100 member teams 150 member teams those are the kind of teams that will continue to grow the uh customers business and then sustain that business for long but then the value the value chain uh that you are in is much higher you know you're much higher in the value chain especially the challenge challenges with technology see uh whereas in a large maintenance project you're talking about a small screen an employee he would kind of work on a small screen for one year two years and you'll get bored of it whereas here you're looking at the entire um you know philosophy of the product right from uh let's say the conceptualization to productization to implementation and you know and you will see how customers are getting benefited like for example this retail product we realize that this um customer 57% of the revenue is from loyal customers because they have done something very special in the domain to create the Loyalty base you know and then they were also winning customers in other parts of the world because this product was actually giving them better Roi so this is really adding value see it is supposed to add value to a core business so domain value addition is a philosophy that that you know products are supposed to play this retail product was like the pa the retail PA for it or got yeah PA is one part of it PA is the final bilding section like you have but inventor iation youve got procurement youve got pricing you got how do you manage your expiry dates I mean a lot of those things how do you planogram see if you put bread milk and let's say eggs together they'll all get picked up faster you know whereas if you put milk in some other part so all of those also has got a bearing on how the businesses run better h so I I think uh so the products give you a lot of knowledge on how to improve that particular business rather than just giving bodies you know so that's so definitely different uh in in the value chain so that's what I meant okay interesting anyway yeah so coming to the growth Journey again so we were doing small product for small companies let's say in Netherlands then we started looking at the phase of growth that we did we said we should look atmes today we have done product for startups let's look at smmes so by 2014 to about 19 we were focusing on smmes who probably the deal value could be 100,000 $200,000 dollar so that shift happened from let's say $50,000 engagements to you know 200 quarter million dollar and 2019 is when we said these products were largely something like an specialized Erp for that company like to yeah it could be different I think uh so the smes obviously will be small erps but uh you know something like a mini goldf fac application where to find your you know golf courses and so on something like that for a startup was different which was much smaller project it was mobile applications couple of mobile applications IOS and Android from that for startups which was the the the core product of the startup which it was offering to customers you were that also was coming to you uh like people were Outsourcing that to you yeah because somebody with an idea somebody maybe who's running a golf course he would have this idea and he would come and tell us can you convert this idea into a product that's what he so startups would be mostly new ideas to products right whereas smes could be re-engineering this retail application re-engineering an old product to a proper cloud-based application uh now looking at larger applications like today we have one one of the biggest home healthcare companies in the US they got 30,000 employees you know mostly nurses and staff and they've got people who are sent or scheduled to go and service a home uh for probably looking after an old man so that kind of a product is a huge application it's a platform so we're building that again as a platform and you're talking about you know three to four years of product life cycle you know even more you know it will keep on growing so from uh small startup products to products so 2014 to 19 we were focusing on domain and products so we shifted gear in 2019 we said we should definitely look at Enterprise because that's a bigger play and that's a longer term play and that's how this uh you know uh EV charging application or home healthcare application or we've got one of the biggest luxuy travel companies building their application again three to four years life cycle so all these platforms that we started building for Enterprises happen in 2019 and in 2019 is when we found you know we we had shashan who's in us he joined us because he came from infosis able to Target large Enterprises so we decided to focus both in Us in UK as well as in Australia and larger Enterprises so we have some of the larger Enterprises again coming to us for product engineering so I would say 83% of the uh business that we do is all product engineering as a service and team sizes are biggest I think is about 160 for this one of one of the product engagements that we have otherwise it's all 100 people you know 60 70 people but we have many of those engagements so shifting years every 3 years to a new strategy was 2019 when you did the pay to Enterprise what was your Revenue like and um probably in 2019 I would say we would have been about 12 to 15 that range million dollars you know that would have the I would say we were probably sub 800 people or something like that and this was all bootstrapped no fundraise completely bootst so that was another thing so we had no way to go right I mean getting the first cgtm loan was a challenge for us one CR loan I think it was in 20112 we were struggling we didn't have money so that that itself was s because the banker who would say I mean those days you're talking about CDs right the banker would say your IP whatever is in sitting in a CD what happens if that CD breaks you know that is what one of the banker asked me as a question I said see this is not CD I mean we've got a product IP sitting there which is all interesting so they don't understand that they said can you give collateral so we were actually all of us we had no homes our own we were all rented you know those days so we said we have no collateral to give one of the guys had a small land one of the directors had land to pledge and that's how we got that one CR loan uh even to sustain the operation so that was why why did you need the loan because see um as I said we were um we lost the customers we were trying to just pay salaries and sustain operation we were scaling so growth was constant for us we were always growing but the capital wouldn't be adequate right I mean we had you know the typical compliance requirements youve got the Provident fund your taxes everything gets you know a backseat when you have to first pay the salaries and keep the employees happy so we wanted some working capital that wasn't available because we brought in I think you know some 20 lakhs per head you know that's how we contributed first but with the prim Landing crisis all that money was gone you know you got to build an you know we we we did something interesting you know 20091 we had a basement office in this parking area we said to impress customers we should have a beautiful office so we decided to go and sign up an office we didn't have the money to build it so in fact the park authorities who are kind of giving us a space said you run it for six months pay the rent later so lot of support was there in those days you know but somehow that office also got us some good traction customers came to visit it was looking beautiful uh though we were you know running in debt so all these um consumes Capital so that was why we wanted you know uh loans from somebody so yeah so coming back uh so 2019 when we looked at the Enterprise and that is when the real growth happened so 2014 uh when we were looking at this product engineering uh for startups and smmes we had sufficient Capital we could start taking some salaries as well on the directors it was very tough uh but U 19 onwards we did really uh see the light at the end of the tunnel where we could get customers customers could believe in the philosophy because we had some of our guys who are very very good in the middle level leaders who understood the product engineering life cycle processes much better than typical IT services companies and that got us attention in front of the larger customers and many large like this EV charging platform they were not letting us in for about a year but once they saw the value of the product engineering life cycle they said this is interesting because TCS is doing about half a billion worth of Revenue under us but you guys are bringing a different comp you know competence to like so and that's how we got in there and today we are like I think three four years now what is this product engineering life cycle uh so the process to build a product you know right from because a lot of time goes into planning the product it's like building a car you can't just you know buy a parts and assembly and then come out with a card you got to go to the drawing board you go to see how uh the the product uh road map is what are the features to be brought in release one because you got to monetize right so if you had to monetize rather than bring out all the features to build a complete product you will prioritize and you'll see that there's something called radial mind map which is actually done first and then you have uh uh you you know you will think about the competition look at the price so you're not looking at in typical service but you're looking at a lot of the other factors like what are the competitors doing what are the features that is earning Revenue why is a product like for example let me tell you in a car you have got a catalyic converter somebody will buy it because you know uh the bat 6 or you know whatever Norms that are coming in will want you to have that feature in the product so all those things get looked into a product when you're actually conceiving so our guys understand that philosophy and that's how uh we impress the customers to say look these guys are not uh typical Services where they're talking about bodies but they've got a different philosophy that's how we win projects and and conversion rate is also pretty good if you go and pitch in front of a customer talked about uh the story that we've done for various other customers see the biggest second biggest mining company in the world I would you know they're using a product to mine planning product to run their copper mines and you know ior M so there are smaller engagements but these are interesting you know in terms of the uh the philosophy that you're trying to take to Market essentially like you need a uh like typically most product startups have like a product manager or a head of product or or a chief product officer or whatever so so that that role you provide to a client like a product management team yeah product proy yes so we'll have the product proxy see client manager would be the product owner but our product proxy would actually work along with the product manager yeah why is it called proxy because see product generally see all the products that we build IP belongs to customer so customer is the one who actually is managing the product right okay we have somebody who is mirroring him within the company uh to be able to take up the role because we are also managing the entire life cycle because customer is most of the time business- wise managing the product where technology way we are managing the product and so your product proxy would actually need to understand both business consumer needs and product and technology and like it it would be a really uh multi-skilled kind of a person who can play that role right because he needs to speak the language of technology needs to speak the language of pnl as well uh yes he also needs to understand design uh wire framing all of that uh yeah yeah yeah so we have all those all those those functions so unless you understand unless you're able to talk the language getting the deal will not be uh easy I mean then you're not really different from a typical services company so we would have a domain so typical business analyst who understand the domain well who if they don't really know the domain fully well they would still research they will still engage with the customers um you know and and that get get that understanding so if you look at this retail product I think we started in 2016 so this been going on for so many years so we understand the domain pretty much the way they man their product you so so that domain understanding is key see other projects if you're doing a project for six months you don't get that domain knowledge you're talking about so many years this insurance product I think it's more than 10 years now that we've been working that customer so all these engagements are very long uh I mean uh sometimes we might also have to bring people from the domain somebody from you know banking Financial Services knowledge somebody with Logistics background so we built uh warehouses management application for customers we've got that competency sitting inside you know Having learned on the product itself sometimes customers the domain experts role is to explain uh what functionalities are needed like what the product should do like what should be the outcome of the product that is what the domain expert uh guides yeah yeah so outcome and uh Roi so the customers Roi philosophy should be well understood customer business should be well understood competitors's business should be understood what are the products in the market how technology is fairing see today you're talking about digital transformation so we are doing product engineering work you know in the digital transformation space where you got multiple Technologies or hybrid Technologies you know typically like all this uberization or air Airbnb all these are products with multi Technologies right multiple hybrid Technologies you have mobile apps on one side you got data intelligence giving you how to run your business better so all these um so it's a multifaceted role that this guy let play fascinating uh yeah is your sales done by these people only or is it done by a separate sales team how does the sales happen yeah so sales people we have people in the regions regions I would me so our operations are between us UK Europe Japan and Australia so Japan was a recent acquisition that we did okay but all the sales guys what they do is they'll go and find out customer prospects and then uh we'll have our business analyst who are part of the delivery team who are probably part of the product team they would come and engage with the customer in a typical pre-sale cycle and say look these are the kind of skills that we have these are the kind of domain elements that we've actually improvised for customer X or customer Y and then so hence we are well placed to you know take up your project or product development project so and then customer would look at oh this is interesting many times we can't even share what we are because IP protected but we let it go with the stories and they would during the conversation they would understand that these guys understand what they're meaning you know so that's how uh they get the confidence to entrust the product engineering work to us and then obviously it is a typical architecture discussions and why would this product scale you know for example let's say talk about this healthc care product company what happens if I mean they had many of these customers that come to us after failing with other companies you know if you launch it into a 30,000 people network will the scale really I mean you're talking about Cloud engineering or Cloud architecture because if it if it scales and if it doesn't if it doesn't scale then your business is again at risk so all these things uh we The Architects would come and give that confidence domain guy will talk about okay you don't have to worry about telling each and everything we understand the uh you know product road map we understand the business critical elements that are required so all these are required for us to give that confidence to customers and today we are seeing that you know um coming by more easily than what it used be in the past so we got uh domain teams so in Retail transportation Healthcare uh you know and you otch is another one so we've got uh five core domains where we are continuously you know doing projects and if you look at Transportation the biggest Transportation uh Road Network the best managed Road transportation is actually Transportation network is managed by our asset uh management product that we built which is getting replicated now so it was done in Europe and then it is going to other European countries it's going to Australia again customer owns the IP but the see the ROI is important since this product if implemented for a typical Road Network you know like your National highways it will probably save you billions of dollars of Revenue let's say in a 10- year life cycle versus not having that product you know so that's a kind of impa why does the national highway Authority need a software product for managing today yeah I I can tell you the you know I can draw a similarity with what is happening in India in India how do you m a road you will have the most powerful MLA will maintain the road in front of his house right I mean he'll continuously taret every year come what me because I'm the most powerful but scientifically roads are to be built let's say for 25 years or 60 years of warranty you know it has to be built to that quality but what happens is due to certain conditions maybe because of weathering or Rain Road might break up or overload of trucks could break the road faster so you have to actually uh scan the road through a road uh scanner using lar and deflectometers and things like that and then once you scan it you will probably figure out that this road is just beginning to crack you know if you don't if you don't fix it today it'll become a big pothole and then your cost of fixing will be much higher so uh generally around the world developed Nations will always have this uh scanning Vehicles which will run at the let's say 80 km/ hour 100 km per hour and still get everything footage into a uh good Google Map equalent they have much more professional maps and it will show you red Amber green uh kind of uh footprint on the map and if you're at a red means you you are spend on the fixing will be much higher Amber means if you fix it now your cost will probably not be 1,000 crores but it could be let's say 500 crores so that that is something that comes out of Road Asset Management systems and we built similar product for a company that is reselling this product to multiple countries you know so so that again is a big product with GIS underneath you got a web application mobile application to go and report portoles and things like that so it's a big application we talking about 100 people having built it over a two-year time frame so that's the kind of product that we actually built and now the thing is in a product engineering work we also work with the customer to help them do bidding you know like they'll go and let's say bid in let's say Pacific Islands for a road asset system we are the ones who actually go and show it on a road map on a GIS Google Map equalent as to how their Road network will look like you know giving in some past data and you know so things like that so that so these are very interesting very topof the Line Products you know uh that we actually are building for customers and you know employees really are happy because they are working on a piece of GIS on one side somebody else is working on a Android M you know application to report Road problems then you have a web application which will give you analytics and statistics as to how uh your road cost of Maintenance will look like you know again accidents all these are captured it's a it's a huge platform uh and the work that is an exper very interesting because of the nature of uh products and the technology that we use it's all DX digital transformation kind of projects that we do and nothing in the Legacy technology you know you know you're talking about Cobalt based applications still running in Bank of America are you interested in working on a black and white screen or are you interested in working on something very exciting with social media integr and all of that so I think that uh you know brings in a lot of excitement in the team so that also helps us bring down the attrition rates within the company and they get to work on something exciting they get a holistic view rather than working on a small piece of screen for six months you know you get bored of life and that's why uh sometimes people leave the large logos large brands in it companies in India and come and work with us I mean we got people joining from which is U very interesting for them you know coming in working on right working on products is a lot more appealing uh in your sales cycle so your sales cycle would be something like this your uh Regional sales associate will kind of open a door arrange for a meeting then a business analyst who has the expertise in that domain will give a presentation to the client and try and understand what kind of product they want to build uh yeah and uh after that uh do you also like start preparing like a business requirement document dou Etc or that happens after the deal is confirmed yeah most of the time this high level user requirements will be user stories as we call it today in the scrum world uh that comes in and then we'll probably analyze and then you know draw parallels to whatever we've done something in the past and then go back to them with a proposal you know which obviously will have a cost sometimes you won't get all the requirements you know because customers also wouldn't be able to spell it out but we go on a you know high level high ballpark estimates and say that we this is the kind of road map that you should probably take in and U you know go along with that and most of the time customers will do workshops you know it's we call something called The Discovery phase so in the typical product life cycle we've got something called explore and execute so these are the two phases explore phase will probably have some uh MVP to show them how a product should look you know recently we won a project from one of the large uh you know Financial Services customers I mean it was purely on usability see uh for example how does a product used there are so many if you look at whatsapp simpl simplest to use right I mean there are so many WhatsApp equalent that came in why is WhatsApp more interesting because the usability engineering that is done for a product for Mass consumption is probably different from a typical you know uh Dalal Street you know share trading application because there it's it's a different you're talking about limited users so you got to think about usability itself you should think not just about the usage itself but the culture of the country where this is getting implemented you know look at Europe they don't have this flashy colors as you have in India so all of that matters so we have to come out with all these elements that are going into a typical product building exercise and that they'll get it when they see the philosophy that we kind of preach okay okay and uh in uh how is the pricing decided is that decided upfront or you tell them that in our estimate this is x man hours and we charge y dollar per manh hour yeah I mean that so the estimation generally happens that way you know estimation is always uh dollar and the effort that is required but it's generally a guidance that we give but our bilding rates are definitely higher than typical Services I mean because for product engineering the kind of salaries you go to pay is much higher the processes are probably costlier we've been uh you know mostly on a lot of the tools that are required to run product process efficiently so all that cost so we have I would say we should be definitely 20 25% costlier than typical services companies I think a Services Company would Bill maybe what between about $5,000 per employee per month something like that it could be I mean there are services companies typical could be let's say 20 $20 an hour kind of a billing right okay um yeah it could be that that I mean smaller companies would probably go down the path you know because they they would use traines to kind of run projects and so we we wouldn't be anywhere we can't do that because see many of time customers would also see what is the kind of caliber of your architect you know because Architects are very expensive you know somebody who can do a you know AWS architect so data Architects you know and you usability engineering guys all these guys are you know Season guys who understand the culture the philosophy of the target uh region and so on so I mean obviously they understand that because I mean you can actually get comparable rates to even onsite you know some of the yeah not not that we we will charge that what I'm saying is if you're really product engineering you might also have to have people on on site you know like we have people in every region that we are operating not in too many numbers but senior leadership teams uh technical teams are also there that's that's important for uh effective customer coordination okay okay like the delivery teams are also on site not just the sales teams yeah I mean we'll at least have a skeletal delivery team so like this um National highways project that we're talking about we've been having on-site architect business analyst and you know uh technical guys um business analyst for the last three years I mean this project has been running so we require to have those kind of cost provisioned in okay fascinating how do you uh build Talent like you know you you need uh really self-driven intelligent people especially for the analyst the business analyst role because he is really holding it all together right he he's like yeah so we we have get built no we have experienced business analysts coming from I mean carefully being selected from companies from the domain like somebody working let's say for retail or someone working in the transportation space for quite some time kind of coming with the right attitude with the right temperament so we we have such guys in the team we also hire from MBA institutes uh you know and train them through the process you know because for scaling once you have one product engineering engagement definitely this will get replicated because you know something that you do let's say in a warehouse management you might require other warehouse management projects so you need to have people in the team in the mix coming in so a major um part of the hiring happens also from campuses like last year we we had about 250 odd Engineers join from campuses and they get trained in various batches so our product engineering philosophy that the training that we do our own guys actually do the training and uh they learn uh something six months they learn in the classroom and then another three months on OJT and typically at least a year before they can get into any product engineering engagement so that is how the fresh and we have found that fresh guys who come with fresh minds and newer ideas they're always better than you know you know taking everybody from laterals laterals are required for the experience and expertise but getting this into the mix I mean which is typically what everybody will do but uh we look for the attitude and aptitude uh you know in being able to learn multiple technology like your full stack developers you talk about we also have for products you require those kind of skills so we have uh the mix that is coming in uh through hiring from campuses and also from laterals so we for their attitude so we don't do anything unless somebody from the senior leadership looks at a person who's coming into the organization so we multiple interview and campus it's very interesting we have got tests one round and then logic test and then we have group discussions and then interviews so that happens and then sometimes psychometric tests also are done uh you know to get the right Talent on board what is your head count today today we are about 1,600 OD so 1,600 50 I think yeah I mean it keeps last year last quarter I think we added I was looking at the reports somewhere around 50 people was were added so somewhere around 1,650 and we're looking at we got something called the plan 3K uh which was announced last year so 3 years 3,000 people that's the kind of so we need to keep engaging the uh product uh uh you know contracts as many as possible replicating and you know the domain stories and so that's how we looking at it and scaling the sour well out of the 1600 how many are in India so I would say um between us Japan Australia and UK we would probably have about 65 70 odd people okay the rest are all in India so key leadership is only there in in the majority is still in India which I think is something that we trying to change we want to actually have more people on site because larger customers like the tier one we got at least half a dozen or more tier one engage customers you know all these brands that you can look I'm for confidentiality reason I cannot disclose some of the names but we have got some of the topnotch automotive companies you know insurance companies you know mining companies all of them as a customers so many of them demand on-site resources you know right like the you know most sexiest brand you know motorcycle brand they want uh people of both offshore and in India you know so we've got uh people being hired on site in the US now and also scaling up teams in India so so when a brand wants on site you send someone from India or you hire fresh resources it's it's difficult especially in the US it's difficult to move people because of Visa restriction so we hire them on site okay it's easier in the UK but um Japan it's easy so we have we've got 35 Engineers learning Japanese in India we moving them gradually so I think we've got a Japanese team teacher sitting at in our Kerala office both shifting between trandum and coin we also have an office in Bangalore but majority of the size is in Kerala so the Japanese teacher came from Japan you know living in Kerala teaching our good Engineers how to speak Japanese because Japanese they don't understand English it's very difficult to Converse in Japan in English so we have I think 35 Plus already completed I think four uh moved last month but we are moving more people to some of the interesting brands in uh Japan are also uh demanding people you know come on site so we have that in fact the EV charging platform that we did for the US customer we trying to replicate in Japan so Japan has been a little late to uh electrification so we are seeing such opportuni so cross pollination of opportunities happen you know when you do something in let's say us it can get replicated in Japan us so that's the interesting part of the about the product engineering story you uh said you acquired a company to enter Japan uh this was what like a software or product engineering in Japan it was it was not a product engineering company it was a typical Staffing Company it was a very small 25 member team okay so one of the reasons is that we had U uh the CTU again and he has got a few people I think we got about 15 people who came with him from his past life which was purely Japan focused so Japan is interesting because of the uh the quality expectations in Japan are very very high so if you do something in Japan you can be rest assured that you you know quality cycle in the project will be very good so uh so the so he was actually very keen but making an entry into Japan is a humongous process so that's the reason why we acquired this company which is like 20 years in Japan uh during covid they kind of went down or they had a reduction in head count so they were looking at support so we said we can actually take those people and we have some they had some customers already so use that customer uh you know uh customer background to go and tell others look we've got customer base we are a 20-year company so we renamed it to experion and then uh that then we did an inauguration last year uh which got some attention of local Japanese people who came from you know it associations and so on and we started getting projects from good logos so those were all tier three tier 2 Logos and we have now quite a few good tier one logos again talking about the product philosophy so that's uh that's how we made this Japan entry uh last year it's almost a year now fascinating what's your Revenue now how much will you close this year Revenue I mean we for technical Reasons I'm not supposed to say but we are sub 50 I would say Okay amazing amazing uh and this uh acquisition strategy have you used it in other markets also or this has only been in Japan so far yeah we recently uh also about 6 months back we took over a small Australian Product Company which is in the tier 2 tier three banking space so what they do is they have U uh like the unions like uh Credit Unions which are using uh products to process loans process collection services and also credit reporting so these um few areas they had but what was interesting was the the product that they had could be customized to Green lending so that's quite interesting so we took this company over and uh we have now a product called glass so glass is green lending as a service so that's again interesting so uh that lending platform that we've uh we already had is customized to uh you know look at the green lending Norms here solar panels or windmills or things like that project loans or even commercial loans or
2025-01-26 07:00