Build a Successful Company from Ground up - Growth Mindset Ep. 17

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um my name is Mahesh Chan the founder of c-sharp corner welcome to the show looks like I have some

sun bright sun is coming to my window should be gone soon maybe I should move a little bit

Yeah, it just started. It's a nice, bright, sunny day in Philadelphia. It's pretty cold outside, actually, snow outside. We got about, I think, 6 to 10 inches of snow in this area

and if you are joining us first time welcome to the show if you are a regular

visitor welcome back to the show in this growth mindset this is every Friday we

do 10 a.m. Eastern every Friday and we talk about growth mindset we talk about

the growth personal and professional growth we talk about careers job we talk

about community and any questions you have about anything it can be you know about career about

programming about community about growth startups consulting anything you have questions just feel

free to post your questions this show is for you so I want to make sure you get benefit out of it

If you are joining us and you think your friends and co-workers can benefit from it, they can learn something from it

Please let them know. Share on your social media. Let them know and let's get started

So today's show, we are first going to talk about startups and companies and how to build companies

and focus is just, you know, if you are somebody who plans to start your own company

either it's a consulting company or say some product company or service company

we're going to focus on that a little bit. And then in the second half of this, after 20 minutes in the show

I'm going to bring a guest. He's a friend of mine. He started his own company

He's a technical background and started his own company and running a successful company now here in Philadelphia area

so Vidyan we are going to have you know ask him his experience how we built the

company what are the challenges what are the you know problems he faced and how

did he overcome and so on so forth so let those start have your questions start

coming any questions you have good evening Deepak a lot of people looks

like joining us already from different places welcome to the show hopefully all of you guys are safe I know COVID is still growing at least

here you know it's not slowing down here in the US and I also know in India

there's a lot of problems going on right now in the capital about farmers

protests and I don't know the details what's going on there I know

I know government has some new laws about farmers where they can sell their crops or they cannot sell their crops

So maybe somebody wants to post what's going on there. And also maybe I want to bring some guests on the show where they can give us a little bit insight what's going on

why these protests are still going on. I wish I knew more details

Who's right, who's wrong and what's going on there. so welcome Bhaskar welcome to the show today we are going to talk about how to build companies

startups jobs consulting so any questions you have guys you can start you know

posting these here we are five minutes in the show for next 15 minutes it will be me

just talking on these starting building a company and then share my experience and after you know

15 minutes we'll have guests joining us uh vidyan um all right so let's start so

we're gonna start about a startup right when you think of you know starting a company

and it could be any kind of company company just a company it's a business right it can be

a product, it can be a service, it can be consulting, it can be also an app, right

It can be app direct serving consumers, it can be a delivery app for example

These are all startups. And then the person who start these companies is usually the founder, right

He comes up with the idea and then the biggest challenge is once you have an idea

how do you turn your idea into a working product right so you have this idea let's just say you

have idea i want to build an app where people can go on the app and start placing order online

let's say food delivery service and then there is some company you know some shop or some restaurant

or some store they can deliver that you know food or something they're ordering from that

So how do you take this idea and build into this product and launch it in the right

That's kind of life cycle of a startup. From idea to launch

And there's after there's certain things you also have to do with launch. So the person who usually comes up with this idea is usually a founder And sometimes there are more people Sometimes there are more than one person who are coming with ideas together there are startup they been built by four friends they started you know together you look at the history

for example you know Google was it started the two friends in college they

start you know thinking about some ideas and trying to solve problems how to do

you know web page searches look at you know Facebook Facebook there are a few

people working together look at you know you know all these companies if you look at they're like

same thing with twitter so in most cases they're more than one founder in most cases that the

successful startups and there is some you know startups start by just one guy one person

and then you know they they hire more people there so once you have the idea you have founder

or founders then next next thing is you need to work on the building the you know

build refining the idea and building product and to do that you need a team or if you are

a technical founder for example we are here talking about the technical startups right

we're not talking about a startup that does not include technology um you what you do is you

basically work with either i see a lot of founder they create product first by themselves they it's

a website they will create the website and then you know that's how they start with so same thing

in case of um if you are not a technical founder you need to find somebody who can help you build

the product that's the first priority and in our case here whoever is joining us good thing is all

most of you are technical so uh that part is covered right so in a in a in a startup when

you think of building a team you need to also think about who is going to do what work besides

building the product so let's say you are technical you can build the product you also need somebody

who can then um you know get funding you need somebody who can market it you need somebody who

can sell it so that's how you need to start building the team um again welcome to show we

We are almost 10 minutes in the show. This is a growth mindset show

Everybody who is joining us, welcome to the show. Feel free to ask your questions in the comments

You can post any kind of questions, right? We are not here restricting that this question is only for certain topics

You can have any kind of question. Just let your questions keep coming

Yes, there's definitely a new setup here. Oh, I forgot to tell you guys

This is the most exciting part. as you can see my background i have worked on my background so i have my favorite quotes in the

background if you can see i have swami vivekanand here i am mahatma gandhi i have churchill here

and buddha bill gates and a mindset poster so all these quotes are my favorite quotes

um maybe one day i will start sharing what these quotes are you know for example uh

this is you know they all they have meaning all these quotes have a meaning and there's purpose

behind them um i have two more posters coming up they're almost ready one is from uh i think one is

from nelson mandela and i i posted you know i posted one on my twitter account as well so yes

I am working on my office. That's my goal. My personal goal next to three months is I'm going to set up my office

This is in my house. I have a dedicated office called home office

Nobody comes in my office once in a while. Maybe my daughter, she will just run around

And then my goal is by next two, three months, I'm going to have three different setups in it

One is this setup. other is a couch setup and there will be some standing setup or something that's my goal so

good notice uh definitely you have any questions about my setup feel free to ask you can add again

you can ask any kind of questions here this show uh you can talk about you know politics you can

talk about products you can talk about any new products launched so i think uh i was talking to

simon a little bit ago and then microsoft just announced a new project called project

we bought something um i didn't get a chance to look at it but looks uh cool i think it's for

companies and employees uh so we're going to also look at that while i'm continuing talking about

these startups and building businesses i want to also add couple of minutes talk about our shows

so if you noticed on c sharp live c sharp dot live if you are joining us first time you can go

go to c-sharp.live where you will see all c-sharp corner live shows and right now we have you know

one show scheduled every day except Sundays and most of the shows start around 10 a.m eastern

so you can go to c-sharp live there's different show on monday different show on tuesday different

show on thursday and there's different theme to it if you are somebody who is senior who is

successful who have experience you would like to come on our shows I think there's an option on

that show's website you can say I want to become a guest on your show so feel free to click on that

link and you can fill out your name and what you want to talk about on the show we invite guests

on each show almost every show has a guest so if you're somebody who wants to you who have who has

topic wants to talk about it and you want to come on our show we would love to have you on the show

um there's yeah if you look at the comments there are links already being posted on the

comments so you can click on that and you can fill out and you have to explain what show is

your interest what show you want to come on and why you want to come on the show um

so so we talked about the shows we talked about what we're going to do today we also talk about

the current affairs there's one more thing we are working on c-sharp for we are working on

bringing live daily tech daily tech news to you so we are working on a new show

that will bring daily tech news to the show so every day you can come and watch the show

and you can know you know a bunch of major tech tech news for example you know i know just a

A couple of days ago, Amzahn CEO, Jeff Bezos, he kind of moved on from the CEO role

Microsoft is launching product and Google is launching product. All these news, our goal will be we are going to bring daily tech news live from different sources

So that's something we are working on. It should be announced soon

I think in next few weeks we will be announcing the new show on Saturdays we

are announcing one show again tomorrow is the first show is Saturday Saturday we already have David so David has his own dotnet Dave he has his own show Saturday but after that we are also adding one more show on Saturdays that will focus on jobs

recruiting and consulting and mostly around what kind of jobs are there in the market

companies, which companies are hiring, what are the salaries, how to get better salaries

how to negotiate your salaries and consulting rates and how to find a project so that show will

be all just focused on that so as you can see we are adding a lot of live content to the to the

community now you know so far c-sharp corner has been okay you go find an article read an article

learn programming copy code or takes you know that's has an ask questions forum but now we want

to bring more and more live live content to you um and that will also include current affairs for

example any problems are going on in the world we want to also talk about that such as this new

problem big problem going on in india right now we want to bring that to what's going on there

what's in how we can understand this better how other our viewers can understand this better that's

what we want to go to there so all right so we have five more minutes left in this uh before we

have guests join and join us in so i want to bring go back to our you know how to build a company

right so we talked about founder founder is the person usually who comes up with the idea and say

i think i want to build this pro company or product which is or you know it could be a service then

you build a team team is the you know group of initial i would say initial hires or they can be

a founding team you know founding team they are more than one person is founding the company they

call co-founders so sometimes you hear you know you go to the linkedin profile and you see this

person is a co-founder of this company they're basically you know founded a company with some

other people with um as founders right then after that you need to build a product product is either

you can build yourself your technical or you need to hire developers so those are your initial

employees to help you build the product so what happens once you build the product right now your

product is ready that's really hard work start after that right so either you have to figure out

either hire a team or your own employees or you want to hire somebody who can now take this product

and market this in marketing you know you can hire an agency you can have your own team

so at some point you need to figure it out that and some startups have this role called CMO

CMO is chief marketing officer and their job is to market your product or company

one and then there's a sales part right if you have a you're selling something you definitely

need a sales team so that's kind of so you start with the founder co-founders you build a product

they need to market and sell you know sale but during this time oh doing all the thing you need

money right without money you cannot hire people nobody's going to work you without without money

so you need to go and go get money and that's you know called you know funding some and then

And to get the funding, and then there's different kind of funding and I, you know, we'll talk

on our probably future episodes is, but you need to probably hire or engage somebody who

has done that. Usually these people, they have network, there's big network of investors

They have connections. Some are angel investors, some are VCs and some are in between

And you hire them and the way you work is they work on a commission base. mostly they they charge a commission fee for raising funds and the commission can be from

three to five percent that pretty standard so they charge up to three to five percent depends on how

much they raise sometimes less you raise they charge more you know five percent if they end up

raising a few million dollars it's probably four or five percent three percent four percent so it's

all negotiable um and and then once you have funding obviously we're going to have a full

episode just on funding. Once you're funding, then you go and engage your marketing and sales team

And that's how really you grow. So this is kind of brief about, you know, how you want to start

a company in a startup. And then let's have your questions coming. So again, this whole show is

all about you. This show is all about, you know, getting you your questions answered. It's not for

me. I'm here to make sure I answer your questions. We have our guest here in the studio

Today's guest is let's invite our guest, Vigyan. Hey, Vigyan. Good morning. Good morning. Good

morning, everybody. All right. You're looking sharp. That's a nice background there. Yeah

I'm in the office right now. Okay. All right. All right. So yeah, welcome to the show

this growth mindset show on this show all we talk about is different topics they range from anything

they are range from personal and to professional growth we talk about any questions we talk about

companies and mostly we you know invite like yourself i know you for what many years now

i would say 15 20 years and i remember so little background on vigyan when i met him you were more

you were working at the DBA and then since then I know you were starting your hotel business

and then you started your own technical you know this company product company and now you're full

time running the company so if you don't mind maybe you want to start little your background

like where you come from humble background in India how did you come and how you know your DBA

how did you start what made you to jump through these businesses right why did you leave your

full-time, you know, secure job, paying good money to go through these hustles and start your own

business. Great. Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me here. It's great to be here

And I also wanted to thank entire C Sharp Corner community. I think you are doing a great job

I see a lot of articles. I search something I occasionally find. Even unrelated searches

I find C Sharp Corners. It's a great, great work, Mahesh. It's really impressive what you have

built in the last 15, 20 years. Thank you. So as far as my story is concerned, as you said

I started as an Oracle DBA, like typical programmer, system admin, DBA type of job

I work for Fortune 500 companies, and obviously, job is very well-defined, restricted boundaries that you have to work with, which is also great

But at the same time, I always had something that I wanted to really try different projects

So back in 2010, me and my wife decided that we want to venture something different, and we chose restaurants as our fun venture project

But later we realized it wasn't fun. Right after we signed the lease, we were all ready

to roll it out We realized that it was a lot of work but not knowing anything about the restaurant we uh dive deeper into the industry and learning started learning about different things one

thing that we we had a lot of challenges with because we were not a full-time operator is that

we didn't have a good point of sale system so that really created the need for us to look for

something we tried another cloud-based uh point of sale system we didn't really like uh what we were

getting out of it. So we decided to really try out our own bonus sale system when we started

looking for a second location for our restaurants. This is how MetisPro was born. This is how the

software was born. In 2015, we decided that we don't want to continue with the restaurants after

having three locations of our restaurant brand. We closed everything and then we kind of moved into

completely in the software world and since then we are running Medus Pro and building software. Great that's great great story right so a lot of us are from

the you know technical background sometimes you're like you know what this is great but that's not

really me right this is what this growth mindset is all about figuring out and moving on and learning

new things is what really you want to do in life so everybody who's watching you know

is think about really if you want to be happy and said you know content in your life you need to

are you you know what really you want and that's really the key and as you said began you are you

you're a technical person and then you jump into a strong business and there were some challenges

so a lot of challenges for sure so and then growth mindset is all about learning from that

challenges and keep moving on and finding is still continue learning from there so um when you

when you started this company right if you go back what are the first challenges as a founder

right you have to obviously register company do the legal thing if as a technical person what are

those non-technical challenges you faced and how did you solve those problems so any of our viewers

who are trying to start their own startups or a company, what would you say to that

What are the things you learned from it and how they should do it? So my personal experience is that my challenges

mostly were around the technical area. The product that we picked up is very complex

When you start some sort of prototype and thinking that you're going to turn this into a product

or initially you were even not thinking that it's going to be a product. So when we started building the software initially, and I remember those days back in 2012, I actually wrote one program myself

I wasn't a programmer from the background, but I searched. Maybe I may have looked at G-Shark Corner

I learned stuff here and there. And very soon, within a month or two, I realized it wasn't something that I could handle

So I started basically contacting programmers and this is how we build the initial product

My biggest challenge was understanding the industry. And I think this is being in IT for so many years, working for, you know, other companies doesn't really kind of give you like you have certain domain knowledge where you're working

But if you want to venture something out, then obviously you need to learn that industry first

That's kind of what I learned, that I didn't have back then enough knowledge that would help the product to be where it is today

And it took me a while. We got there, but it was a learning curve

So understanding the industry, the scope of the product, what you can do within the scope of the product development, I think those were my biggest challenge

And beyond that, as you start rolling out something, the next big challenge that you experience and start building team is making sure that you have enough funding to continue that project

And that's where you basically go to your friends and family to start your seed rounds

And that's kind of what I did as well in the beginning to bring the funding together to continue the product development

There were a bunch of other things that obviously are important in the initial stage, making sure that you have the right accountant, right attorney, right team to execute the project

But yeah, I mean, for me, product was my biggest challenge in the beginning

So that's a good question. So everybody who's watching us today, we have here with us Vigyan Koshik

He's a co-founder and CEO of MedisPro. MetisPro is a POS system. We started actually for a restaurants industry

And I think now you can even, you know, use in different industries as well, correct

That is correct. So we originally started from restaurants, but then later in 2017, we got into retail

We started boarding liquor stores and some other menu markets type of businesses on our point of sale

And then one thing that we had to go through because we really did not have the whole idea about how product is going to shape up in the future

and this is something that could have been avoided as well, is that we have to rewrite the entire software again in 2018

The original software that we wrote and we rolled out in about 100 locations

then we realized that we were not scalable enough to be able to continue deploying the software

So we went back, we rewrote the software. At that point, we also kind of re-looked at our existing tech stack, see what we can do for a good cloud-based software

And we did that. And then last year, we launched another product, which is invoicing tools

So from point of sale, it went into restaurant retail and now professional industry

and our company now have a full stack of product from actual in-store point of sale to e-commerce platform as well

So we do e-commerce along with POS. Great. So, yeah, I picked up definitely a few things from, you know

last conversation and everybody who's watching the show. Today we are talking about how to build your own startup from ground up, right

It can be any kind of business, product business, service business. So if you're thinking to start your own company, startups, app, doesn't matter whatever it is, you have any questions, just feel free to post your questions

Yeah. And I think I picked up from you here is that industry knowledge is very important. Right

And being a technical founder, sometimes, you know, technically we know limited, we have limitations and we have industry knowledge, limited industry knowledge

but if you are starting your own startup and you are in the industry you don't know much about

so would you say that it's probably not a bad idea to find a co-founder or somebody who's kind of good

and expert in that industry? Well, you have two choices. Either you can start learning the domain knowledge

that could be learning from any resource that is available to you

It may be a book or it may be an online resource or

Maybe trying it out, what I did. After you have the business, you understand a lot more in depth about the business

Or you partner with somebody who already has the domain knowledge. And this is also a great idea

If you don't want to reinvent the wheel, you want somebody who already has done this in the past

then you can avoid a lot of the uplift in the project

Otherwise, it gets tricky because you don't know everything about the... the or you don't know the most important thing about the industry and then you build something

and then you realize well you don't have this you don't have that and then you go back and keep

building and you can imagine if you have the product live and it's working changing product

enhancing product can be a challenge yeah and I think I can relate to that I had a startup my own

and we it was unrelated to the industry I had limited knowledge and then it didn't go anywhere

because we were in the wrong place doing wrong thing and we didn't even know like well market

size is not even that big so sometimes if before you even start you know put your lot of money in

the product building make sure um you do all market research right what's out there who's your

competitor um what the you know pricing is important too sometimes you think your customers

gonna you know when i'm you know as a founder you know you know how it is you think oh this is your

baby once you build it everybody's waiting for you and they're gonna jump on it right but when

you go to these real customers and ask for money it's a different world yeah absolutely nobody

jumps on something that easily it's you have to create the need and again one other thing that i

wanted to share here is that when you pick a domain that is heavily crowded or there are a

lot of players in it, you have to have a different strategy than picking up something that is not

very well known or not crowded or not very many players. When you get into any crowded industry

you have to have some sort of different approach to your overall strategy, even how you market

product. In our case, we don't sell direct, we sell everything to general partners and we have strategy

for sales. But it's very important, as you said, that you've got to know the domain

and also how you're going to make a positive impact in that domain

Today, everybody who's joining us from different places, welcome to the show

So we are talking to Vikyan Kosik, founder and CEO of MadisPro

We're talking about how to build company, how to build your own company, startup, product, anything related to that

So if you have any questions, comments, feel free to post in the comment section

So this is our first half. We are going to take two minutes break

And when we come back, we're going to continue talking to Vikyan. We will take your questions

So have your questions keep coming. If you have friends, co-workers, family who think can benefit from these discussions, please, please go to your social media, share it, let them know

We are talking about hair startups. We are talking about hair businesses. Bring your questions

Vigyan is here to share his experience he has done through, what mistakes he made, what you don't need, you don't want to make mistakes so you can move faster

Because we all learn from our experience and we are here to share what we did wrong, what we did right

and what worked, what we didn't work, right? Correct? Absolutely. Absolutely. All right

So we'll take a two-minute break and we'll be right back. All right

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We offer advisory services for innovations and startups. We provide cloud and code security

and performance services. We also offer AI-ML blockchain development, consulting, and training

Just visit www.mindcracker.us to make your dreams into a reality. COVID makes us feel like this

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Learn how to change your mind and your mindset with the Growth Mindset Show every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern

Hey, guys. Can't believe we haven't seen each other since graduation in May

What's going on? Not much. With the pandemic, I can't really do anything right now

Me too. I mostly just stay at home, hang out with my dog, and watch the news. I feel you

Have you guys been able to get jobs yet? Funny that you ask. Gary and I actually have been working on something together

Yeah, we came up with an idea for a startup that's an app that will help us stay active

since we both have been sitting around so much during this quarantine. That's genius

I could definitely use something like that. When are you guys launching it

Well, that's the issue. We don't really know how to build it, so we're kind of stuck

I know of this company that does startup advising, if you guys are interested

Oh, really? Yeah, they're called Mindcracker, and they'll help you validate your idea

and connect you with angel investors and help you build everything from your product MVP to your technical team

and even your go-to market planning and execution. Wow, that's awesome. Do you know how we could get in touch with them

Yeah, you can just visit their website, mindcracker.us. That's awesome, May. Thanks. I'm excited to get started on this

Of course. Good luck, guys, and let's talk soon. Thanks, May. All right. Welcome back to the Growth Mindset Show

Again, you are here, our guest today. By the way, where are you joining us from

I'm in the office in Bourbon, Bourbon, PA. Okay, so that's not far from me

It's only about 25. How has this COVID impact impacted your business

And what are you guys doing to still continue doing the work

And tell us, our viewers, about this. How are things going with you

Well in regards to COVID it obviously has a major impact on a lot of different businesses For us since we are a more software development company we are working remotely for most of the time or if we are in the office we following all the

prevention that we can in order to be safe. But majority of us work from home. And the business

impact, we have a lot of restaurants clients. So obviously restaurants is a majorly hit our

industry in COVID. What we have done last year, and we have been very busy

actually 2020 has been one of the busiest year for us, or really the busiest so far

We help a lot of clients going online so that they can open online a store

or online ordering websites and helping them how to get more orders

orders through online using some sort of SEO and other means to be able to put them on the top of

the search. So some of those initiatives were taken during COVID. And yeah, it definitely has

a major impact. But we definitely have learned and together as, you know, I think we're now

realized how important online ordering aspect is people in the past i would talk to some of my

clients about online ordering and they will say oh no no no we don't like yeah we don't do online

ordering and and this now is becoming a trend and i think it's given everybody a different perspective

about shopping online um and uh what you can do not being in the store so we yeah we are busy with

that definitely so looks like your business a little bit pivot from you know just pos pos to

more like building their websites and services and apps and so on and so forth so that's great yeah

we yes we have so our point of sale system has a built-in e-commerce integration in it so what

we're doing is all of our point of sale customers were enabling e-commerce for them so that they can

accept order online but definitely it has uh given a little bit more um sort of insight um

into like what can be done online and now i some of some of the states are opening online liquor

sale as well so that's really something that wasn't possible in the past but now there are a

lot of options and a lot of things available to order online that's great that's great so now

Now, you know, everybody who's watching us, please, you know, if you have any questions, feel free to jump and post your questions

We're going to shortly, we're going to start taking the questions. But I want to pick up something you said in previously, right, in your discussion that when you launch your company, you pick the wrong tech stack and it wasn't scalable

And I have seen that time and time again when first time founders start the company, they just pick whatever the fastest way to build

And I've seen that this personally, I have been part of two companies, not me, but I'm more like I knew the founder that because they picked the wrong stack, they failed because they were unable to scale quickly

So when as a founder, when you have to give advice to young guys who are trying to build their own companies, what would be your advice to do research on tech stack

And with obviously they have limited money so they can go, you know, spend six months just doing research on that

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think what I have learned is that depending on your product type

So, for example, if you're building a product that will only be used a few times in a day or if you're building a product that will be touched several times in a day or I'll have, you know, hundreds and thousands of transactions

I think that is really the decision-making point. What do you select as your platform

Because if you are dealing with very transactional product that will be submitting tons of transactions, will be very moving from a scalability standpoint, then, yeah, you need something that is more robust and that can handle the load in future

So when we build application or product, what I have seen is that usually developer, they will create the smallest database possible with a bunch of, you know, tables in there

If they're talking about databases, obviously, I'm very technical. Still, I'm very technical

So I like technical conversations. So you start with that. And then you start writing your code, not thinking about it, when I get hundreds of users or thousands of users, how this is going to perform

And that's kind of where it gets challenging. So my challenge was kind of similar to this

I started with a database that wasn't very scalable. and we hosted our platform on AWS

and suddenly from like, you know, a few hundred dollars, it got into thousands of dollars from an expense perspective

and we started realizing, well, we're putting a lot of hardware and that's kind of a lot of the product need that

because you cannot rebuild product quickly. So what you do is you keep adding more horsepower into the platform

and that's what we did. But, you know, later when we kind of found out that this model is not going to work and we're spending a lot more money in our cloud platform, then we came up with a new strategy

It's more basically local processing or in certain cases as computing where we're actually doing a lot of processing within the device before we're pushing the data out to the cloud

And that has helped us so much because now in our business, when we're busy, we are processing somewhere in the evening

We are processing eight, 10,000 transactions per second. We get crazy busy because everybody is pumping orders through the system and you need to scale the system

So if everything is happening on the cloud and you are following traditional API driven methods to call the data

then you will have a lot more issues because then everything has to happen on the server side

So the way we address this using a NoSQL database, we have done, we shift a lot of the processing down to the device

So we started moving a lot of the business logic that we built originally in the API into the devices, and that has helped us

Right now, we are highly scalable. We also have built distributed clusters in our backend

So we can go with, there's no limit for us how far we can go with this structure No that great That great insight So yeah building make sure these are important decisions right Then other thing you said is you know when you go to you build a prototype

you went to first customers, right? You don't just want to go and launch. You need to pick

all your customers. And I think in your case, good thing was you were your own customer

Yes. So that kind of helps. So how did you get, how did you get your first

let's call them you know beta users and what is your recommendation on that like you you know

obviously you don't want to just launch it publicly you first need to test it out with

a few companies or customers or people yeah i'll share a story with you how we got this

really uh into the live environment well before before i say that it is very critical point when

you build a company and product, how do you get your first customer? I think it's the most

challenging thing. And if you're not into that business, then you have no way to test that out

And who is going to try your product? And if people are running live business that they're

making money and they don't want to jeopardize any of their normal operation by putting your

beta product into the business. So that is definitely a challenge. And I don't think there

is one way to address that challenge. I think you have to really figure it out, what can work

how you can impress people, how you can test well, so that it won't cause problems. So that was my

biggest challenge as well, when we started thinking that we're going to take the product to the market

So for me, I got lucky. I actually, one day, me and, you know, my wife and two kids, we were

actually walking out in a shopping center in Collegeville. And we basically, after we went

for a movie after movie, my daughter decided she loves pizza. So do I. And she said, well, let's go

and have this, you know, let's have pizza. And we saw one new store that was really looking pretty

interesting. We walked into the store and they had a bunch of iPads on the table and they were

taking the orders from those iPads. So I happened to talk to the manager

The manager actually connected me with somebody who was interested in trying out a similar

iPad-based solution. And this is how I found my first client in Delaware

And obviously, putting first client live, it's not easy. So as you put first client live, you got to go through all real life challenges

So we started with very basic point of sale. And as soon as we put system in the store, we found so many things that we couldn't actually think without having that client

So we spent three, four months kind of streamlining those different needs and kind of fine tuning the product

uh it was it was a challenge and from there on we found some more clients and yeah so first year

was very struggling um year because you know going back and changing product redeploying it

and in this process you might make some people upset as well it's not easy um and you know so

yeah that's really tricky yeah so that's good that's a good inside story uh that's good to hear

that and this is how it works. So you know how we start businesses and obviously ups and downs

there's always challenges. Did you ever in your early days thought like, you know, man

what am I doing here? I need to quit this and go back to my old job. That thought came to your

mind. If yes, what helped you not to give up on your dream? So one thing that I would say is that

I have not thought about that ever. I am always believer of having a plan A and not plan B

because I feel like if you have some sort of plan B that you can, I mean, it may not be very

practical to say you always want to have some sort of like safeguard, some sort of fallback plan

I'm not saying that you should never have plan B. You can have plan B, but in my case, I actually

was very much committed to make this work. And so I have not really thought that I want to go back

I just had this very determined idea that I will make this work

And one thing that helped me is that I was always able to add more customers

So when you get to the point where you're struggling and you're not able to sell and

nothing is happening, yeah, I can understand that that might be a little bit of a challenging

situation. So one thing luckily in my case that worked is that I was always able to acquire more

clients and more customers, although I had a lot of challenges with product, with operations

and we have a huge part of our product is also onboarding when we onboard a new client

So we had a lot of challenges there, but we were able to have more clients and that kept me going

with this. Great. No, that's a great story. And I'm glad to hear that you are not in a situation

Some people we talk to, I talk to, they're like, yeah, man, this has been really rough

I think I want to give up on this dream. And that's good that you kept going

And that's great. That's great. The one other thing that I want to mention is that the one person who helped me not actually

giving up on this or not even thinking is my wife. She's a co-founder of the company

she's a very strong lady tried to handle a lot of situations so that has helped a lot i don't

think i could have done without her yeah definitely i think one partner helps either it could be

co-founder or even you know i think that's a big support during the times when things are falling

right um so now we want to move to our next topic but before that let's uh you know i'm going to

talk about funding like let's take a question from vasker vasker has a question um uh which is

what is the good time to raise money or approach to investors? So have you taken any money

outside money for your company? If not, your yes or no, what do you suggest? And then I can add

there too in this. Yeah. So, well, we have been raising money. We have raised a few rounds. So we

are doing that. And I think we will continue to do that as we continue to grow

Well, my answer for this will be, I think you have to self-assist the situation

If you think you have a prototype you definitely want to be in a prototype situation or you have some sort of clear concepts that you wanted to go after I think one thing that investors don like is any sort of like

open-ended or vague plans or not being clear what you're trying to do. So you have to be very clear

So when you're clear and you know what you're going to do, you can definitely start approaching

investors. And investors might not be easy to really engage at that stage. I would suggest that

the best thing is going for friends and family around and see if you can get some help further

building the product. And then you might reach investors. And there are all kinds of investors

There are early stage investors. They're willing to take a risk. So yeah, they might be the

investors that you might want to look for? Yeah, well, good point. I think these days

the investment is you are probably more likely to raise money if you have a working product with

few paying customers. And you can even show the growth. I think the more you show

easier to get the money. So that's great. Okay. So it looks like we are almost approaching. We

a few minutes left in the show. Now, I'm going to talk to our last portion of the show. We talk

about really health growth mindset and we talk about people's good house, they should think

outside of the box and, you know, obviously during the COVID times, we struggle and all that

What do you do personally or, you know, when you're not motivated and when you are not like

you know, I don't feel like working. You know, obviously, you know, we are entrepreneurs

We are already self-motivated. But from time to time, you will feel like, you know what

today is not the day. But you still go get up and do things

What makes you do that? And what is your advice to, you know, people watching this

Well, you have to disconnect yourself. I think nobody can continue to work

you know, we always, you have to have some sort of outlets. So when I feel some, when I feel

exhausted, or I really feel that I'm not able to do what I wanted to do, and I always try different

things. I, you know, I like cooking. I do, I watch movies, I go out and do whatever is necessary to

do that and keep myself balanced and come back to the work. Obviously, you hit the limit sometime

although we work almost seven days a week, several 12, 13 hours, 14 hours a day on the weekdays

There's a lot of working hours, and I cannot figure out yet to cut down that time. But yeah

you have to keep going and whatever works for you but for me I have I've built some you know other

interests that I usually go after when I feel that I need a little bit of a break okay great great and

then the last question I'm gonna ask you before I let you go is you know I think you kind of

already mentioned this, you know, it's snowing outside. What else do you do for fun besides

working? Well, I like watching movies. I have watched a lot of movies almost every week

two to three movies, definitely. So that's one thing. And beyond that, you know, we as a family

we always have some sort of engaging conversations and spending time with kids. That's really other

outlet that I utilize. Well, great. I think that was a good learning experience for all of us

Before I let you go, is there anything else you want to advise, you want to give to our audience

Most of them are technical. Most of them are younger age. You know, I would say, what is any one advice you want to give it to them before I let you go

Well, I would say pursue your dream. There are a lot of things that you can do in your life

If you have interest, if you want to do something, don't give up

You may not have the team that you need. You may not have the money that you need

But if you have the idea and you're very strong and determined, everything will come together and help you in your mission

So if you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to build a company or even help a company or department that you're a part of, just keep doing

there are definitely challenges and issues in whatever you do but don't give up

if you really wanted to succeed oh yeah and one more thing

you have a son he's quite an entrepreneur you want to tell us a little bit about him

he's a young kid and we definitely want to bring him on our show too

there are different shows can you tell us about your son and

when we can have him Yeah, well, he's another part of, or actually our youngest developer

He has done a lot of things for the company. He's been obviously watching this company grow

He started learning programming in a very early stage. He was teaching other students in his class when he was in sixth grade

So he's been really passionate about the programming. He has built one of our algorithms in our printing, in our POS for printing

That was one of the most challenging things for us in the past

He's very, he's now 17 years old. He's going to go to college this year

But he's very passionate. And I think he'll be a great speaker and be a, you know

to come to what he's doing. That's great, Vigyan. Good to hear this and good to catch up with you. We definitely enjoyed

having you. And thank you so much for coming on the show. It was very last minute. I know

Have a good weekend and enjoy. Thank you. Thanks for having me here

Thank you. Thank you