We all know the importance of solving customer pain points for product success but doing so in a B2B product is even more crucial. However, the devil lies in the detail.
Anybody can solve high-level problems but it’s those who target the nuances of the problem who succeed. And Saravana Kumar, Founder & CEO, Kovai.co, did exactly that. Having worked on the technology for the past 10 years, he knew exactly what the customer pain point was and went straight for it.
In this fireside chat with Vinod Muthukrishnan, Founder & ex-CEO, Cloudcherry, Sarvana talks candidly about his initial years – the first clients, building a team as tech founder and his vision for 2030.
Saravana is your typical technical founder who is more inclined to tackle technical problems rather than business problems. However, over the last couple of years he has been focusing on leading the team through strategic thinking rather than technical prowess. He has come to believe that he can move the needle more by being strategic.
Watch this fireside chat where Saravana talks about a wide variety of challenges faced by startup founders, including:
- Working solo as an entrepreneur
- Going from 1st to 5th customer
- Growing from five employees in 2013 to 240 in 2020
- Reaching $10 million in revenue through organic growth
- Devising and executing an organic GTM strategy
- Building a world class team from a Tier-2 Indian city
- Setting long-term goals and pursuing them aggressively
When Saravana launched the first version of his product in 2011, he already had 15,000 readers on his blog, who were also his potential customers. His is the classical story of a hobby project turning into a bootstrapped startup that is geared up to be a $1 billion revenue company by 2030.
So dive right in.
