My journey from - employee working on $160 per hour work - to - founder of mobile apps agency working on $10 per hour projects - , AMA.

March 31st is financial year end in India and when I checked my bank a/c it showed $5,000 [not considering founders salaries]. This is the profit my 12 member strong mobile app agency made. Probably it is peanuts for a typical mobile app agency but last year at this time we didn't even thought of at this stage even in our wildest dreams. We have grown from a 2 members team [Me & my wife] to 12 members team which was able to stand on its feet. If you feel success is in journey not in $M profit, then here is a success story from an Indian mobile apps agency.

1. My Background
   

Passed out from BITS, Pilani [School ranked No : 4 or 5 in total India] in 2005, worked with a tech giant for 3 years and then moved to a silicon valley consulting company which is trying to develop a niche product. In Jan 2015 for a customer implementation every hour of mine was charged $160. [I was paid $30 per hour. Very high rate for an Indian S/w engineer of my experience. ]. For some reason I was not as excited as I used to be in 2009 to do the kind of work I am doing then. I introspected for one month and realized that my passion is in developing the mobile apps. I thought it is the time and jumped out of my full time job to start a mobile apps startup.

1. How I started ?
   

First I convinced my wife to be my co-founder. Which Indian wife will loose a chance to boss her husband for full time ? We hired a fresher who knows a little bit of Android. We bought three refurbished laptops and rented 200 sft room as our first office. We zeroed on building white label mobile apps for Tradeshows, conferences and corporate events. We started working on our first version and started reaching event organizer to try and sell the app. We hired another developer and I started spending half of my time in sales along with my wife and remaining half helping developers when they are stuck. Our first sale is $300 and that really excited us all. Since we are going to re-use the code base we thought we are on track for next big saas [or mobile app as a] product.

But our happiness is short lived. The more we understood the market the more we realized that our first few customer are fluke. We are not solving a major pain point for event organizers. For them ticket sales is of high priority. Attendee engagement is not even in top 10 pain points list. For next six months we got only four customers. In Sep 2015 it is time to take a call whether we need to continue doing it or not. Then we happened to meet an event aggregator website founder, who confirmed our fears. Yes Indian event industry didn't have enough market for a product we are trying to sell. They are struggling for ticket sales. After lot of deliberations we have decided to pull the plug and close that product.

1. Unexpected turn !
   

A friend of mine started a web development and digital marketing agency. He stumbled upon a client who is looking for a custom mobile app for his e-commerce website. They offered us to pick up that lead and work on that project for next six months. I was a bit skeptical to do that because I was dreaming to build a next big saas based mobile app. Within one week same company got another lead and they want to give that too to me. We need a team of 4 android & 4 ios developers to build both the apps simultaneously. $10 per hour for 10 members team for 6 months in the first year itself is not a small thing for 6 months old 4 member team company. Me and my co-founder [wife !!] and all our employees [2 members] all had lengthy discussions for 2 days. We have finally decided to go for it. We decided that we will not be another typical Indian services company which produces low cost & low quality software. We decided to keep exploring various options for our next product idea while these projects are executed and not to take up any more projects till these are completed. We did a quick research about what are negatives with Indian outsourcing companies and try to fix them during our execution.

1. Here is our list
   

a) Indian companies can't work on projects involving complicated logic. We asked our our clients to pick some pieces from their project which they feel are very complex. We did them in the first one month as one poc per week. The existing team handled this part and gave confidence to the clients in first one month that their projects are in safe hands.

b) Indian companies don't hire good programmers - We decided to hire only the best. We published a list of three programs [prime number, Fibonacci number and your resume as program] in all social networks. People who complete these programs are only considered for the interview. We don't care about the current job or education qualifications. We are able to hire 6 more programmers in this process.

c) India companies don't focus on UI & UX - We hired a creative guy who knows Photoshop very well and trained him in google material design & apple human interface guide lines for one complete month. I sat with him every day for one hour to understand his progress and discuss few well designed mobile apps UI & UX. We took nearly 6 weeks for each app to finalize the UI & UX. In the meanwhile our existing developers were building poc's and new developers are coming on board learning the concepts they need to work on in next few months.

d) Indian companies can't be team players - While hiring itself we explained to each developer about his role in upcoming projects and how it is going to help them in future. We made one guy in android team and one girl in ios team to build only layouts. One in each team to do backend integration and two more to understand functionality and write business logic. We promised them to take care of their salaries for next 12 months as long as they are playing their role successfully.

e) Indian companies won't communicate well - We attended weekly calls with our customers to give progress update about the project. There were times we gave daily updates during the design time. We didn't miss a single call in last 6 months and constant communication helped the customer to know the status of their projects every week.

f) Indian companies won't be honest - We decided to be honest and share what is our current company position, what is the project plan and what are the risks involved and what how we are planning to over come them.

1. Infrastructure

We moved to a 1600 sft office in downtown area of our city the moment we hired our 6th employee. We upgraded to brand new workstations, chairs and conference tables. We upgraded to 100 mbps internet plan, got separate ceo office, conference room, ios room and android room. We purchased four macbook pro's and eight dell latitude's. We arranged a small kitchen with some cutlery, induction stove and lots of green tea sachets.

1. People Management
   

India is a different place. It is not easy to airdrop 10 people and make them start working on common goal. Fears, ego's , inhibitions, typical indian habit of taking things casually are
prevailing in everyone when they joined. But we know that we got the best possible candidates. People who are job ready and can be deployed immediately are already locked inside the Indian offices of American tech giants. We had to work hard with every one individually every day to make them motivated work hard, work smart , work as a team and work to get things done. At one point of time I was spending 1 hour with each person every day in conference room and slowly conference room became my regular desk. We had cases of people leaving to other companies without notice, we have people who asked for hike within one month, we had cases of people running away with laptops. And me and my team were able to settle every case. We were able to convince the employee who joined other company to come back to us by talking to him and solving his personal problem which made him to take to hasty decision. We made the employee who needs extra pay to agree for variable bonus based on client feedback every month. Our team talked nice to the employee who ran away with laptop to convey sorry to me and return it [We asked him to be brave and come to us and take a farewell party but he choose to not to face us.]. We hired a replaced immediately.

Based on my experience I choose 'Honesty' & 'Passion' as values of my company and communicate with employees all the time. I ask all my employees to be honest in their weekly client calls and in daily reports and not fake things which is not working as working.

1. Cash flow
   

With these many things happening there are many times we are running out of money. In Nov 2015 we realized that we are seriously out of money and we will not be able to pay Dec salaries on Jan 1st. We don't want to delay the salaries on new year day. While surfing the upwork I stumbled on a job post from an IOT company which is looking for an expert mobile app developer to help to their 3 member development team. But that is onsite job due to their hadware. For some reason I felt that job is for me to pickup. I applied to that job and got a call from the company to meet the founders. I went there, went through the code, digested it line by line and understood that it is a cool idea, excellent team but poor architecture. I offered them a deal they can't reject. I will work with their team for next one month 6 hours every day and guide them to complete the project. No need to pay me anything in advance, no need to pay me after 30th day. Pay me X amount on 45th day [x = deficit amount i need to pay jan salaries of employees]. Its a stupid business deal to make but on that day it is necessary for me. I used to come to office early, assign work and jump to other office and come back in the evening check every ones's work. Somehow the team in the other company was able to complete the task under my guidance. I got the money I want on time.

1. New customers
   

Word got out that we are working on mobile app projects and a new customer approached us in January. We listened to him and decided to purse that project. This time me and my wife did the who journey of gathering the requirements, preparing the proposal, convincing the customer and closing the deal. We have good pipeline now and we confident about converting few more in this year.

1. Where we are right now
   

We almost completed both the projects. And two more projects are in development. Good thing is all customers are happy or satisfied with the progress. We are also working on our own saas based mobile app product simultaneously and planning to release in next few months.

1. Our goal for next year
   

We want to separate out our product division from services division.

We want to create a sales team to get new customers and arrange partnerships with agencies with overflow.

We want to achieve revenue turn over of $200,000 [Not profit only revenue]

We want to scale to 25 member team by April 2017.

Yes we know that we were not world's best or we do world breaking work. But for the niche we operate in [startups with a cool mobile app idea but with shoe string budget] , we are working hard to become the best. The $5,000 we made is the proof that we got the breathing space to stand on our foot. So If entrepreneurship is about journey then we had a hell of a journey in the past one year and we are still enjoying it.

Probably the first time entrepreneurs could relate to this. Feel free to Ask me anything related to this one year journey, I will answer.

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