Not Just Another Pie in the Sky

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Transcript of Not Just Another Pie in the Sky

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Contents Page

A note before you begin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II

Chapter 1

Cold-coffees, 10-pins and the quest for pocket money . . 1

Chapter 2

The quest becomes a business . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Chapter 3

The acorn sprouts, growing bigger by the day . . . . . 31

Chapter 4

Take a bow, FusionCharts has arrived . . . . . . . . . 46

Chapter 5

A dent in our universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Chapter 6

Act 1, Scene 1, charting a new beginning . . . . . . . . 75

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A note before you begin

Hi, I’m Sanket Nadhani.

I am here to tell you the story of how a quest for pocket money became a multi-million dollar venture. The story of how a company grew from a shared bedroom to one that has 20,000 customers and 450,000 users in 118 countries today, powers more than a billion charts per month and does $7M in annual revenue.

I tell the story as an insider, since the bedroom the company grew out of was the same I shared with my brother. I was a part of the story too, heading Marketing and Sales at the company from 2009 to 2011.

I think this is an unconventional story for two reasons. I will tell you one of the reasons now, and you will know of the other at the end of the book. The first is that this is a story of persist-ence. In an age of scale-fast-or-die-quick, this is the story of the decade-long trials and tribulations of a company founded by a 17-year old, with no business knowledge whatsoever, and in a country not exactly known for its software products. Read on to know the second one.

I hope you will have as much fun and inspiration reading this book, as I have had writing it.

Sanket Nadhani15th October 2012

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COLD COFFEES, 10-PINS& THE QUEST FORPOCKET MONEY

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It was 2001. Pallav Nadhani, a bubbling 16-year old, was in high school. Like any other teenager back in the day, he wanted to go bowling and sip cold coffee in cafés. In the hot

and humid Kolkata, cold coffees are always a good idea. It’s just that the boy didn’t really care much about the coffee. He was there for the cute girls that hung around in these cafés.

Baristas are charitable to your cause only if you look good in a short skirt and going bowling caused a sizable dent in the pocket too. There was only so much pocket money Pallav had, but he wasn’t ready to give up on his new-found “vices” for fun anytime soon. He had to make more pocket money.

When it came to after-school jobs for teenagers, the Indian society sported a stiff nose to pretty much everything. Waiting tables at a restaurant was frowned upon by the society at

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large, as was working in a mall. Nobody from a respected family did that, and more importantly, nobody gave teenagers a job. Teenagers went to school, studied hard and attended a good college to become an engineer or a doctor. When they weren’t studying, they played cricket and discussed the state of Indian cricket as if it was a fundamental duty mentioned in the Constitution. But we digress. Essentially, teenagers had to make do with whatever pocket money they got. Pallav wasn’t exactly ready for that.

Meanwhile in the world of Information Technology, the landscape was changing. The era of eager investors putting sacks of money into online pet-supply stores and grocery delivery business was over. The world was coming out of the dotcom hangover and was ready to experiment with new technologies. And users were ready to pay money for things that solved an actual problem.

Pallav had been helping with the web development arm of his dad’s firm for a couple of years now, which developed websites for local businesses. While at it, he got a pretty good hold of creating dynamic websites in ASP and jazzy animations in Macromedia Flash 4. Concocting these two technologies together could yield interesting results; he just needed to create something useful that people would pay for.

While the search was on, he chanced upon a website called ASPToday. The website paid handsomely for writing articles

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that talked about how to do cool stuff with ASP. Handsomely meant anything from $600 to $1,500 depending on the size and usefulness of the article. This was a godsend.

The idea for the article struck quickly too. Pallav was sick and tired of the boring charts Microsoft Excel generated, someth-ing he had seen and made tons of for his school projects. Flash was jazzy, Flash was fun. Why not use it to make sexy animated charts for web applications? And ASP could then help connect the charts to databases, thus making it actually useful. What people were using those days were bulky components that put a heavy load on the web servers, and generated boring output at the end of it all. This was it.

He wrote a long article on how to combine the very-very-business ASP with the hey-how-you-doing Flash to create animated charts for web applications. The concoction was a first to create charts for web applications. He sent the article to the ASPToday guys at the end of 2001, who published it on their website and featured it on the homepage for a week as well. Developers hanging out on the website were intrigued by the idea and liked the output. Most importantly, $1,500 hit the bank. One thousand five hundred dollars!

The ASPToday community also started suggesting feature additions that Pallav could make. Not having much to do after school, he started working on these features and bounced them off with the techies who had suggested them. They quite

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liked what they saw, and soon the idea of converting it into a

product started germinating.

The pre-cursor to FusionCharts

At the start of 2002, Pallav began work on converting his find into a product. Specifically, a product he could sell in the market. The only business learnings he had were the pickings from his dad’s web development business. Unlike today, not every startup was telling every other startup how to a run a startup in those days. The web was a small place with limited business lessons, so this was going to be an experiment. And Pallav was determined to run with it.

By March, all the coding was done and it was time to get ready for the launch.

He put together a 12-page documentation on how to use the product. While it sounds like a hastily done job, it was all of what you needed to get the charts up and running. His dad had a website that offered web development services for local businesses, and sold accounting and payroll-related software. Even though there was no overlap between the two target markets, he didn’t have to pay for a domain name and web hosting. A penny saved was a penny earned for the boy.

He decided to call the product fXgraph for a reason he doesn’t remember today, except that it sounded cool back then. Heck,

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it sounds pretty cool even now.

It was time to figure out two more things and get rolling. How much should the software cost and how should the money be collected, in that order. The order that was ultimately followed was the exact opposite. Since Pallav didn’t know how the complex world of finance works and that too with the plethora of rules and regulations in India, he sought his dad’s help. Kisor, Pallav’s and your dear author’s dad, recommended having two payment options — checks, just like his business had all these years, and online through credit cards.

They started looking for an online payment gateway. They identified a company called Virtual Software Store that charg-ed a hefty 25% fee for processing online payment in addition to the bank remittance fees but back then, they didn’t know better. Now on to the final barrier, the price. They wanted to keep the software low-priced but without any international exposure as such, they couldn’t exactly place a finger on what was low. Luckily for them, the price chose itself. The lowest a software could be priced on the Virtual Software Store was $15, and that was chosen as the price for fXgraph. They also introduced another version at $49 for people who wanted to buy the source code of fXgraph. The idea behind making the source code available for purchase was that people would feel safe about their purchase — even if fXgraph went down under, they could keep their charting up-to-date by building on the source code. Nobody was really going to buy the $49 version

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— it was a lot of money to pay for a charting component but just in case. The $15 version was called the User Edition and the $49 version the Developer Edition. There was one small problem, however.

Virtual Software Store required a $29 setup fee. Not only was that a reasonably big amount for a setup, neither Pallav nor Kisor had a credit card. They decided to get started with checks itself, and that they would come back to the online payment option if there were enough people asking for it.

fXgraph was launched in April. The first version had four chart types. You could toggle between the chart types using icons at the top to see the same data represented in different forms. Supposedly, each of these different forms gave you different insights into your data and animated the chart again — something that was so fancy people would want to see it all day long.

To promote fXgraph, Pallav wrote articles on technical sites talking about how to combine the very-very-business ASP with the hey-how-you-doing Flash to create animated charts for web

The idea behind making the source code available for purchase was that people would

feel safe about their purchase.

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applications. All the articles started with how a picture is worth a thousand words, but thankfully, you had a different chart type at the end. He also got in touch with the developers he had met on ASPToday, and told them that he had a complete product now. That’s all the marketing he knew, and that’s all the marketing he did.

In mid-April, a fine gentleman from the US wrote to him with an intent to purchase the User Edition. Pallav still recalls that as the sweetest email anyone has ever written to him. The gentleman was asked to send a check for $15. So there it was. First customer in the bag and many more to come. The check was received in a fortnight and deposited in the bank. Pallav started checking his bank balance every day to see the princely increase in his bank balance. Nothing happened for a fortnight, but boys are boys. He kept at it and finally there was a change.

The bank balance had gone down by $20.

Quite clearly something had gone wrong. He muttered a few solemn words about the bank’s proficiency and called them up. “There has been a goof-up. I deposited a check for $15 a fortnight back, and today my bank balance shows it’s gone down by $20. Can you fix that real quick?” Then he added proudly, “The check came from the US, you know.” “Sir there has been no goof-up. Our clearance fee for an international check is $35, which was deducted from the amount deposited,”

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the bank representative replied. She probably empathized with him as well, but those words were lost out on him. So there it was. First customer in the bag and a loss to be had.

The next day, Pallav borrowed his uncle’s credit card and set up the online payment gateway.

Fortunately for him, two more people decided to buy Developer Editions of fXgraph in the same month, and he turned a profit in the first month itself.

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The word about fXgraph had started going out, slowly but surely. Pallav was in constant touch with the early downloaders and customers, and they had started sending their feature requests. He got to work on the new features. Being a small and simple product, the release cycles were small and fXgraph went from v1 to v4 in a couple of months.

A steady stream of a couple of hundred dollars was coming in per month, but Pallav was soon moving out from high school to college, and his needs were going to increase. He decided to turn it up a notch.

In July, instead of fXgraph, he launched fXgraph 3D. As the name suggests, fXgraph 3D was supposed to redefine the world of charting with its stunning 3D charts. The first version start-ed small with only a 3D column chart, the column chart being the most commonly used chart type. He put it out in the market and waited for the customers to pour in.

There were no takers.

Pallav was quick to realize what had gone wrong. fXgraph 3D had only one chart type, which didn’t cover even the basic charting needs of people.

He decided to go back to work on the 2D version itself.

Given how disastrous the 3D experiment had been, fXgraph v6

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would be regarded as yet another candy factory experiment gone wrong. He had also come to know that very few people were using the chart toggle option to look at the same data. In fact, the choice of chart depended on what kind of analysis you wanted to perform on your data and switching to another chart was wrong by its very fundamentals.

A new type of charting component had to be built. Nothing would change drastically. It would have the new features that fXgraph customers had been asking for, each chart would be a separate file and most importantly, it would have a new name. It would be called FusionCharts. The birth of FusionCharts

In August, Pallav started work on FusionCharts. He had got done with high school, and was looking for a college where he could meet new people and have fun.

He enrolled in a course in Computer Applications but the peo- ple there were not fun enough for him. He decided to shift to an Economics course in another college. Not like he cared much about Economics either, but the people in the new college were fun and the girls were cute.

On the work front, fXgraph 3D had been buried. Customers for fXgraph 4 were still trickling in, which was quite surprising to be fair.

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In September, a gentleman named Brian wrote in, wanting to bundle fXgraph with his reporting software. He wanted to know what the cost of an OEM* license would be and what the licensing terms were. Pallav had no idea what an OEM license meant. He let Brian know that he did not have an OEM license agreement in place and wasn’t even sure how much he should charge for them. The gentleman that Brian was, he not only helped Pallav come up with the terms of the OEM agreement, he also figured out a royalty model that was a win-win for both. Brian was going to send in a quarterly report of the number of licenses he had sold, along with the payment itself. Sometimes being honest is the best thing you can do.

In the meantime, development of the new product was going strong. FusionCharts was ready to launch in October.

It had six chart types, a 50% increase from fXgraph. It had a 15-page documentation, a 25% increase. It took data in XML, which was becoming a standard data exchange format by then. It even had a logo and a tagline. The logo was a pie chart that had gone wrong during development to end up with six star-like strobes in different colors. The tagline was A new dimension to graphing, which sounded cool, just like the name fXgraph. The payment systems were in place with the option of paying through check now removed. All that was to be done was figure out the pricing and show the world the new dimension.

* An Original Equipment Manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are licensed by another company to embed in their product and retail under that purchasing com- pany’s brand name.

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For pricing, Pallav decided to rely on experience this time — his 12 months of experience with fXgraph. The pricing of fXgraph seemed to have worked well since nobody asked for a discount. Also, all the customers had bought the $49 developer edition, the just-in-case edition. Quite clearly, users could afford to pay more than $15 for a charting software.

FusionCharts launched on 22nd October with two editions. A User Edition at $35 and a Developer Edition at $99. Just like fXgraph, the Developer Edition came with the complete source code of the product.

Continuing with the tradition, Pallav wrote articles for differ-ent tech websites to get the word out about FusionCharts. The articles talked about the troubles with traditional charting components — the output was boring, the components bulky, and the installation a pain. FusionCharts, on the other hand, gave you sexy animated and interactive charts, was light-weight, and installed the copy-paste way.

Also, after he figured out that developers looked for compone-nts and libraries in tech directories, he submitted FusionCharts to as many directories he could lay his hands on. Finally, he emailed the fXgraph customers.

For the first five days, nothing happened. Even the fXgraph folks didn’t reply. Pallav was beginning to have his doubts, “fXgraph 3D all over again?” FusionCharts was genuinely a

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better product, so it was tough to put a finger on what had gone wrong this time.

Then on the sixth day, someone from California purchased a Developer Edition. He had made the purchase directly, with-out even sending in any queries prior to the purchase. Fusion-Charts was in business. God bless the Americans!

Over the next two months, the influx of customers picked up a steady pace. Developers were talking about FusionCharts on technical forums, customers were showing the animated charts to their friends, and more users were giving the trial version a shot.

Also, since Pallav was the developer of the product, it didn’t take him more than five minutes to reply to a tech query. Even for more complex issues, a 10-email thread with someone at the opposite end of the globe would be completed within half an hour. People were amazed at the speed and reliability of the tech support, and often asked him if he slept at all. The quick technical support egged on the word-of-mouth.

Over the next two months by the end of 2002, FusionCharts had 35 customers.

On the web, someone had picked up the article on how to use FusionCharts with ASP and converted it to an article on how to use FusionCharts with PHP. The PHP developers gave it a shot,

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liked what they saw and started talking about it. Pallav realized that there was more than just the ASP market to tap into.

FusionCharts v2 was launched in March 2003. A couple of thousand dollars were coming in every month by now, and the 40% month-on-month increase made for a pretty picture on the line chart.

However, parting with almost a quarter of that just for an online payment gateway was starting to hurt. Virtual Software Store had brought down the commission to 18% after repeated requests, but even that was too high. There were other gate-ways that took only a 7% cut. Pallav pressed for lower cuts in a mail that ended like this:

Paul - I have been doing business with you for more than 15 months and I never had any problem with you. During this course, we have developed personal rapport and I would surely love to continue the relationship. Since I head the FusionCharts/fXgraph business, using

People were amazed at the speed and reliability of the tech support, and often asked him if he slept at all. The quick technical support egged

on the word-of-mouth.

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my say I had been putting off the management pressure to switch to other agency so far, but now the gulf is widening and moreover we require large resources on ad spends; therefore we are not in a position to pay such a hefty cut on Sales. So please try to be reasonable and bring down your rates to enable me to ward off the pressure. I would like to mention that this time the management is serious since the difference is glaring in the two product groups and I have no defense! The next management meeting is scheduled at end of this week; please share your thoughts in the meantime.

Thanks and kind regards,Pallav Nadhani

FusionCharts changed payment gateways in August.

The part about the large resources on ad spends was right though. Now that thousands of dollars were coming in every month, Pallav had his vices covered. Beers had replaced the cold coffees when the boy turned eighteen. He could afford to spend money on the business now.

He spent a hefty $256 for getting featured listings in a tech directory, where he had been using the free listing all along. Google Adwords had also come out by then and he gave that a try as well. Though the monthly spend on Adwords was less than what he would typically pay for a night of drinking,

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it taught him valuable lessons about search marketing and business in general.

To dedicate more time to FusionCharts, Pallav decided to swi-tch from his Economics course to Commerce. The Commerce course required him to go to college only for the exams. He showed his zeros in all the subjects in the Economics course to the Vice Principal of the College, who agreed that Pallav was a dumb kid and would be better suited to the simpler Comme-rce course.

What had started as a quest for pocket money was threateni-ng to become a business now.

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THE QUEST TRANSFORMS

INTO A BUSINESS

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In April 2005, Pallav realized he was onto something big for the first time. FusionCharts had clocked $1.4M in the last financial year* and was growing 100% year-on-year. In

addition, he had just put out a big product release and got some slick corporate branding done. With the realization sinking in, his dreams started getting bigger.

FusionCharts had hit the 2,000 customer mark a month back. With an increasing customer base, feature requests were coming in thick and fast. A lot of users asked for a speedometer widget, similar to that of a car. Businesses use speedometers to display important metrics like cost per sale and customer satisfaction index in their report cards. The request made sense. Pallav could think of more widgets that could be useful to businesses, but he had other ideas.

“Why not put all these widgets together to create a new pro-duct? Two products on the shelf definitely look better than one.”

But pulling off another product all by himself was not going to be easy. The development of FusionCharts had to go on, and support tickets had to be replied to. The idea of hiring someone finally crossed his mind. He had the money but had no idea how to go about it, or even what to expect. “How was I going to trust someone with my product, and why would someone come work with me in the first place?”

* In India, a financial year begins on 1st of April and ends on 31st March of the subsequent year.

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The second question wasn’t misplaced. Pallav had started shaving only a couple of months back. Someone comes onboard

The first hire was made at the end of the month. Akhil was a cousin’s friend, in his early twenties. He had worked on AVL trees* in an earlier project, something Pallav hadn’t even heard of. Surely, he could be trusted. Akhil was also given a 4% share of the profits in addition to his salary. With skin in the game, he got to work from Pallav’s home itself.

The arrangement was working well. Akhil was putting in long hours and together they released FusionWidgets, then called FusionCharts Instrumentation Suite, in August.

Pallav marketed FusionWidgets the way he had marketed FusionCharts. Those who had asked for a speedometer liked what they saw and bought a license. Then there were others who realized they needed a speedometer when they saw one.

By the time the year ended, FusionWidgets had 80 customers.

* An AVL tree is an advanced data structure in computer science. It is a self-balancing binary search tree wherein the heights of the two child subtrees of any node differ by at most one; if at any time they differ by more than one, rebalancing is done to restore this property

“How was I going to trust someone with my product, and why would someone come work

with me in the first place?”

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Steady start.

Pallav realized what he could do with more people in the team. Not only would he be able to push out new releases and products faster, he could also go out on Saturday nights without having to worry about support tickets and bug fixes. He started looking for an ActionScript* developer, technical content writer, designer and web developer.

With plans to hire more people, working from home was not going to be an option anymore. In India, children stay with their parents. So Pallav’s house essentially was his parents’ house having a family of five, your dear author included. The place wasn’t going be able to accommodate any more people, unless they sat on the bed.

FusionCharts needed an office.

Pallav’s dad came into the picture again. Pallav knew nothing about real estate except that he had a budget of $50,000 for the new office. Kisor, on the other hand, had a solid 35 years of business experience in trading and construction, and could drive a hard bargain.

Kisor found a 20-seater office. It was a ten-minute walk from the house on the ground floor of a quiet residential building, with a narrow path leading to it. It had a low price tag for a very unusual reason — the neighboring building leaned in towards

* ActionScript is an object-oriented language developed by Macromedia (now Adobe) for programming in Flash.

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it, think Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a jump from one roof to another wasn’t exactly a stunt — and then Kisor pressed further. “No one would like to endanger their life by working here. To get people to join the company, I’ll have to buy insurance for all of them and pay the premium year-after-year. That is a massive cost to me. I’ll need to offset that cost against the lump sum for the office.”

Kisor got the office for $30,000.

They spent another $20,000 on office interiors and furnishing, bringing in the orange and purple from the new FusionCharts logo, to end up with an office they are proud of even today.

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Knowing that administration and finance work will pile up once a team is in place, Kisor made a hire as well. A girl called Neha, who was a neighbor earlier and had just completed her graduation, became the first non-technical hire of the company.

The team of four moved into the new office in January 2006.

Now, it was time to put a team in place. Job listings were put out on a job portal, which was a pretty expensive affair back then, and a couple of resumes trickled in. The IT landscape in Kolkata was a services-driven one, so finding people with in-depth technical expertise turned out to be a major problem. Pallav’s inexperience with hiring and the lack of formal HR documents didn’t help either.

The first person scheduled for an interview was a guy for the web developer position. It was on a Saturday when nobody else was in office. When the bell rang, Pallav himself opened the door. The interviewee didn’t quite approve of Pallav’s spiked hair. Closing the door behind him, Pallav went to his cabin and asked him to come along. All this while, the interviewee had thought he was a well-paid office boy. And as soon as he entered the cabin, Pallav started firing technical questions. No pleasantries, no small talk, no warming up. Suffices to say that the interview did not go well.

Pallav quickly realized he needed to learn the art of intervie-wing. He looked up questions that large companies asked to

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gauge the competence of candidates. He learnt how to get a candidate comfortable before starting with the technical barrage. He also learnt how to project FusionCharts as an established company that candidates would feel safe working for.

The next interviewee was an Einstein look-alike with black hair, Nilanjan, for the ActionScript developer role. Pallav had invited him for a “mutual discussion” on a Monday and enlisted Neha to open the door. Turns out none of that was needed. Nilanjan just wanted to work on exciting technical projects that had a huge scope for R&D, no matter how big or small the company.

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He liked Pallav’s plans for the product, and Pallav liked Nilanjan’s knowledge of mathematics. Mutual admiration happened, and Nilanjan asked for the offer letter.

“What on Earth was that supposed to be? With Akhil and Neha, we agreed on a salary and shook hands. No papers were sign-ed, and none of them asked for anything called an offer letter.”

Luckily, Google had crawled the deepest darkest corners of the world by then, and finding an offer letter to copy from was much easier than Pallav thought. Nilanjan was sent the offer letter, and he’s been with FusionCharts ever since.

Marketing without marketing

The word that there was a business to be had from interactive web charting was out by early 2005. Nothing big enough for the industry giants to jump into the picture, though they all had their free versions tucked away somewhere, but big enough for a couple of developers to jump in. For the first time in his career, Pallav saw what competition looked like.

“Meh” was how he reacted. He was focused on building a great product and providing fanatical customer support, so he didn’t really care about what others were doing. In hindsight, it should have actually been a proud moment for FusionCharts to see other players enter a market it had created but hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.

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There was one company out there, however, that had Pallav worried. This company from Eastern Europe had bought a Developer Edition of FusionCharts, made some small changes to the source code and started selling it as their own product. They also copied the documentation, product description and the licensing structure word-for-word. Their trick was to sell the product slightly cheaper than what FusionCharts itself sold it for.

They had to be sued.

The only thing that Pallav knew about law was that lawyers talked and drank a lot. He did some reading on how he could file a case against the infringers, only to find out that it involved huge costs and time. He had to take a different approach to the problem.

Since the infringers were trying to bag customers by selling FusionCharts at a cheaper price, they had to be beaten at their own game. The question was, “How cheap?” Pallav decided on zero! When a major release of FusionCharts was launched in March 2005, he released the previous version as FusionCharts Free, then FusionCharts Lite. FusionCharts Free was completely free to use in both personal and commercial projects.

No strings attached. What the copycats were selling for a couple of hundred dollars, could be had straight from its original developers itself, for free. Since then, every time a new version

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of FusionCharts comes out, the previous version becomes FusionCharts Free.

Looking back, FusionCharts Free has done more marketing for FusionCharts, than even the best of paid marketing campaigns. It got the FusionCharts brand name out in the market. It got developers, who are otherwise not willing to play with a trial version, playing with the product. It got startups using the product, many of whom upgraded to paid version once they had customers themselves. It also got FusionCharts a cover story on Linux.com — Cross-platform charts that rock.

The culture of using free marketing campaigns has since stuck at FusionCharts. Another prime example of the practice is the FusionCharts Google Gadget.

Google had come out with iGoogle in May 2005, previously known as Google Personalized Homepage. Users could add gadgets like photo streams and daily literary quotes to their pages. By mid-2006, Google was looking for companies to develop more gadgets. FusionCharts decided to jump into the picture and released FusionCharts Google Gadget. The gadget

FusionCharts Free has done more marketing for FusionCharts, than even the best of paid

marketing campaigns.

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allowed users to create animated Flash charts for webpages, blogs, and iGoogle pages using a simple interface. People with no programming knowledge whatsoever could use it to build great-looking charts for themselves. Google put it out as a featured gadget and wrote about it on its blog. Other bloggers picked up the article and wrote detailed step-by-step tutorials on the gadget. Again, marketing without marketing gave FusionCharts the reach that traditional marketing dolla-rs could never have.

The shelf gets prettier

FusionCharts hit the magical 5,000 customer mark in October 2006. The customer list now included not just small developer-driven companies, but even Fortune 500 companies who used FusionCharts in their products and projects, both external and internal.

A first-of-its-type product and fanatical customer support definitely had a big role to play in getting the company to the magical number, as did the marketing without marketing approach. But there was another magic potion that had been a part of the mixture all along.

“Right from the early days, FusionCharts had readymade business demos and chart galleries. Rather than hitting people with boring feature lists, I wanted to show people what the product could do for them,” says Pallav. “When large companies

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started writing to us, I saw that a lot of these people were non-technical people — product managers, project managers, marketing and sales managers. These were people who would

look at a sales dashboard, get mighty impressed with it and then write to me with their licensing queries. Looking back, I realize how it was not just about the product that made it sell — it was the complete package we offered, right from our readymade demos to the comprehensive documentation that came loaded with real-life examples. People don’t want to know what a product can do, they want to know what a product can do for them.”

In November 2006, two more products were added to the shelf — FusionMaps and PowerCharts. Put together with the new version of FusionCharts and FusionWidgets, the complete set of products was called the FusionCharts Suite.

FusionMaps came from the need of people wanting to show geographical data like sales by region and election results on their maps. PowerCharts was a collection of all customization work the company had been doing since its early days. When

“Rather than hitting people with boring feature lists, I wanted to show people what the product could do for them.”

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customers sent in domain-specific chart requests that Pallav didn’t see fitting into the main product roadmap, he offered to do a custom chart for them. The first custom chart was developed for a paltry $100, with the clause that the chart could be used for other custom projects and for the main product line as well. Often, quotes had to be reduced by as much as 50% just to be able to get this clause through. But when Power-Charts hit the market, the price cuts paid for themselves, many times over.

With the launch of FusionCharts Suite, the shelf was looking pretty and the complete product line was moved to a dedicat-ed website — www.fusioncharts.com.

In February 2007, a guy called Sudipto came in to interview for the post of technical content writer. He had gone to college to study literature following his father’s footsteps but it was the world of technology that fascinated him. During the interview, he had nothing on the questions about content writing but ac-ed all the technical questions. Finally Pallav asked him, “So do you want to join as a technical content writer or a developer?”. “I think I will go with technical content writing since that is what I applied for in the first place,” he replied.

Sudipto got started the next day and would go on to head the implementation team.

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THE ACORN SPROUTS, GROWING BIGGER BY

THE DAY

3

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FusionCharts was flourishing as a business, but Pallav was not done with his fun yet. He was still in his early twenties and didn’t want to have any regrets later on.

While the previous college in Kolkata had been fun, and he had met the cute girl who would go on to become his wife, he wanted more. He wanted stories he could tell his grand-children. He wanted to go to a college for post-graduation to have the craziest time of his life.

He wanted to do a Masters in Computer Science, he just needed to figure out where.

“I did not like the education system in India as it is based mostly on rote learning. While the top 3-4 colleges are different, it is a rat race getting into them. Also, the cultural exposure is very limited. I had never been outside India and wanted to go to a college where I could meet people from all parts of the world. The USA and UK were my best candidates,” says Pallav. He zeroed in on the UK. “The course in UK was a 1-year one, so I wouldn’t be away from FusionCharts for long. Plus, it was relatively closer to India, so I could make frequent trips back home.”

In July 2007, the University of Edinburgh sent him the green for the Masters course.

The land of Scotch was calling, but there was work to be done before he flew across the oceans. Business had to to go on as usual, even without its captain.

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“The release we had put out was a good couple of years ahead of its time, so if we could just support it well, we would still be in good stead by the time I came back. The team was new, but they were a very smart bunch of people. And in the short span that they had been at the company, they had done enough to prove that it was not just another job for them, it was their company. I just had to make the team self-reliant, and pull myself out of as many day-to-day operations as I could.”

Pallav left for Edinburgh in August and did go on to have the craziest time of his life. His grandchildren might not get to hear all the stories though.

The wild times aside, he picked up valuable business lessons as well.

“One of these days, I had gone to the administration department of the college and saw a guy using FusionCharts. Someone in my college using a product I had built from scratch. Wow! But it got even better. Another of these days, when I was hanging out at a pub, I met a gentleman who had used FusionCharts before. When I told him I founded the company, he was ecstatic

“They had done enough to prove that it was not just another job for them,

it was their company.”

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to meet me. He even bought me a beer. I felt like a bit of a celebrity that night. I also went to a couple of startup events, where I picked up important business learnings. I learnt how to segment our audience, how to position our product in the market, how to hire smart people, and how to take the busi-ness to the next level on the whole. I had finally found what I had been missing in the services-dominated ecosystem in India, and more so because of the cocooned life I had been living in Kolkata till then.”

Pallav came back to India with a renewed vigor in August 2008.

Hitting the 10,000 mark

For a business, when you hit the 10,000 customer mark, you know you have arrived. For FusionCharts, that fateful moment came in March 2008. Yays were exchanged and chests were thumped. FusionCharts had done $2.8M in revenue, in 2007- 08, a 75% increase from the previous fiscal year. The customer list now boasted of a majority of the Fortune 500 companies, and also included organizations like NASA and the World Bank.

But the interesting part about the milestone is not the number itself. It’s that FusionCharts got to it without any dedicated sales person on its ranks. Pallav and Kisor were the sales team, both with their well-defined day jobs.

The smaller licenses sold directly off-the-shelf, and the team

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got to know of it only the next day. This because half of Fusion-Charts’ customers were from the US and a third from Europe, so the team was well asleep by the time they were pulling out their credit cards. With the larger licenses, people wrote in only if they wanted to check the credibility of the company, apart from enquiring about the price itself.

“With a majority of Fortune 500 companies on the customer list, establishing ourselves as a credible company was not too difficult,” says Pallav. “We had a slick website that created a great first impression, spoke for the quality of our products and made us look like an established company. The extensive product literature, comprehensive documentation and excellent customer support were always there to back the product. And when all of these were not enough, we finally pulled out our trump card. We were an insanely profitable company with a bottom-line of $2.2M, so there was no way we were going down anytime soon.”

By then, the reseller network had also started making a healthy contribution to the company’s coffers. At the end of 2006, a company from China had contacted FusionCharts, wanting to resell its products in China. Prospects from countries where English is a third language or lesser were often asking if FusionCharts had a local reseller, sometimes in the local language itself. Pallav and Kisor had been thinking about tying up with local resellers for a couple of months now, they just didn’t know how to get started. So when the Chinese company

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wrote in asking for a straight 25% cut, they agreed.

Within a couple of months, FusionCharts was able to make inroads into China, a market that was very tough to crack online. Excited by the results, Kisor plunged himself into developing a reseller network in the APAC region, South America and Europe.

“In non-English speaking countries, companies felt safer buying from local resellers. It gave them a local point of cont-act for tech support, even though the support ticket ultimately came to us,” says Kisor. “Soon, we started training the resellers extensively on our products over phone and Webex. Language was a barrier with most of them, and we often had to tran-scribe entire product training sessions over email. But we kept at it and created product literature in simple English that they could follow. Once they got a hang of the product, they started talking about FusionCharts to their existing customers and soon found many takers. Some of them even converted the literature to the local-speak, thus helping us reach previously inaccessible markets and raking in the moolah themselves.”

“With a majority of Fortune 500 companies on the customer list, establishing ourselves as a

credible company was not too difficult.”

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By the beginning of 2008, South Korea became the second-highest grosser for the company, with an overwhelming majority of the sales coming from the reseller network.

More people with charting dreams

In 2008, three more important hires were made. Rahul, a fresh-out-of-college engineer who would later turn product lead; Shamasis, a web developer who would later turn JavaScript architect; and Sumantra, a designer who was sick of being told the exact shade of pink to use at service companies and then having to go back on it. They continue to have charting dreams.

Rahul was earlier a student at the computer training institute Kisor ran in a small town called Bhagalpur. He had just graduated from college and was looking for a job. He contac-ted “Kisor Sir” to see if he had anything. Turns out he did, and Rahul joined as a software developer. A year later, as soon as Rahul’s brother got done with his graduation, he joined FusionCharts too.

Shamasis’ first date with FusionCharts was memorable, to say the least. In September 2008, Pallav’s uncle and Kisor’s elder brother, Asok Nadhani, had also rented an office in the same building on the third floor. He wrote books on accounting software.

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When Shamasis came to meet “Mr. Nadhani” for the interview, the security guard promptly sent him to the third floor. Pallav was called Pallav by everyone and Kisor as Sir, so the only Mr. Nadhani in the building was on the third floor. Once Shamasis announced his arrival, he was given a sheet with some tables printed on it and the task of reproducing it in Microsoft Word. Unsure of what was happening, he proceed-ed with the task anyway. He got done in four minutes. The guy who had given him the sheet was amazed. “Are you sure you want to join us in the role of a typist in the accounting team?”

“Well, it looks like there has been some mistake. I had written in for the role of a web developer.” Shamasis replied calmly. By the time Asok had come out, “Why don’t you go to the ground

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floor? My nephew runs a software company there, he might have something for you.”

Shamasis obliged and finally met the Mr. Nadhani he had come to meet. Pallav’s eye for details impressed him, and the blooper was forgotten.

His later dates with the company have been better. He went on to meet his wife at FusionCharts, and they got married in December 2010.

With a rapidly expanding customer base, support queries were steadily increasing. For the first four years, Pallav had taken it upon himself to provide technical support. Later, Sudipto and Rahul joined in as well. Both of them were techni-cal, liked solving problems and loved talking to customers, so tech support was as good as always. But with the volume of queries coming in, it was taking up a bulk of their time. Someone had to be brought in specifically for the role of technical support.

Dhruva, a bespectacled young man who reached for water as soon as he had a tough problem on his hands, joined FusionCharts in March 2009. The recession was on and he was waiting for a joining date from Wipro, one of India’s Big Four in IT services. In the meantime, he decided to come work for the company that came highly recommended by his friend Shamasis. He would ultimately spend only two months at the company, which included a 45-day notice period, but laid

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the foundation for the FusionCharts customer support team.

“Technical support is one of the most important roles in an organization,” Dhruva says of the customer support philosophy he put together. “Every day you go to office with the single aim of solving problems and making the world a happier place. When people cannot get things to work the way they want them to, they get frustrated. As a technical support executive, your job is to understand what the user is trying to do, as opposed to what he is saying he is trying to do. Then you tell him — Hey you know what? It’s not the end of the world. We are in this together and we will figure this out.”

“Being nice is no rocket science. The only time I faced a disgruntled customer was when a gentleman’s query was replied to in 36 hours. He typically got his replies in 5-6 hours and this delay was, well, unacceptable to him. He went on to write some not-so-nice things about us on the FusionCharts Forum. So once I had solved his problem and his head was back at room temperature, I wrote a hug to him. I think he slept a happy man that night.”

Before leaving, Dhruva passed on the baton to his friend Rajroop, who would go on to lead the customer support team and get a job offer at every tradeshow he would represent

“Being nice is no rocket science.”

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FusionCharts at.

Don’t stretch or you will hit someone

The FusionCharts office was in a location light years away from humanity, an area called Bangur Avenue, but it worked with a small team for three reasons. There was a metro station, what you might call the subway or the tube, 15 min-utes from the office which is a rarity in Indian cities. The area was so quiet that birds could be heard chirping during the evening smoke breaks, another rarity. And there were tons of puchkas* to be had in the area.

By March 2009, the FusionCharts team was 25-strong. Every time someone stretched in their seat, they were 93% likely to hit their neighbor flat in the nose. FusionCharts was no longer

* Puchka, also called panipuri, is India’s most famous street food. It is a small, hollow, fried, crisp Indian bread that is filled with a mixture of water, tamarind, chili, potato, onion, chickpeas and other spices. it goes into your mouth at once, and delights many a taste bud at the same time.

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a safe place to work in.

There was also the risk of waterlogging, a menace that had struck earlier. Bangur Avenue was a low-lying area without a proper water drainage system. So every time there was a heavy downpour, it would take hours for the accumulated water to clear out. In the September of 2007, it had rained for five days straight. The office, being on the ground floor, was flooded with knee-deep water for almost a week. Needless to say, nobody could come to work during this time. Many computers got damaged, and so did the Intranet server. Shelter was sought in Mr. Nadhani’s office on the third floor.

While the menace hadn’t struck again in the subsequent monsoons, the threat always loomed.

With plans to expand the engineering and customer support team, and hire a VP of Sales, the current office was not going to work.

Pallav and Kisor decided to find a 50-seater in the heart of the city. The recession was at its peak, so the office would come cheap, and talented people who are otherwise hesitant to work for a startup, would be easier to find.

Kisor got to know of a 5,000 sq ft office in one of the finest buildings in the IT sector of the city, the Infinity ThinkTank in Salt Lake City, at a realty exhibition on a Sunday. He and Pallav decided to check it out the next afternoon.

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It was on the top floor of the building, the eleventh floor, and had a wonderful lakeside view running along the length of the office. The rent for three months at Infinity ThinkTank was the same as the lump sum they had paid for the earlier office. But they decided it was time FusionCharts came to swanky-land. They closed the deal the same afternoon.

The team of 25 moved to the new office within a fortnight. In flesh and blood

In April, Pallav was invited to speak at the NASSCOM Emerge-out Conclave, about how to create a sustainable go-to-market strategy as an Indian company. NASSCOM is the premier association of IT and BPO companies in the country. To be invited by them as a speaker was quite an honor. It was the first time Pallav was representing FusionCharts in person, and he was very nervous about it. Thankfully, he got a side panel which had an audience of thirty.

“The only thing I had going for myself was a good-looking PPT. So even if I completely screwed up, I could just read out from the PPT and run for the nearest exit. But once I started talking, I felt what a DJ feels at a party. The sixty eyes upon me were feeding off my energy. It was my show, and I wasn’t going to screw that up.”

At the end of his talk, he got a standing ovation.

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After soaking in the adulation, Pallav moved around to meet other people at the conclave. While talking to them, he got to know that other companies of a similar size frequently exhi-bited at tradeshows. “It’s a great way to get your brand name out, generate leads, get instant feedback on your products, and even find talented people to join the company,” he was told.

FusionCharts was going to a tradeshow — the Silicon India Startup City in Bangalore that June.

Your dear author was in the final semester of college in Bangalore at that time. Pallav asked me if I could help put together the show. I had absolutely no idea what went into putting together a good show at a tradeshow, so I said yes. I had been making a bits and pieces contribution to Fusion-Charts ever since it was born in the bedroom I shared with my brother, and had a very good idea about what the brand stood for.

The FusionCharts presence at the tradeshow had to be larger than life. It had to be stunning and delightful. And every visitor had to leave with a warm and happy feeling, even if he had

The rent for three months at Infinity ThinkTank was the same as the lump sum

they had paid for the earlier office.

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spent only a minute at the FusionCharts booth.

We booked two booths and combined them into one. The backdrop of the booth was jet black which boasted of the 12,500 customers FusionCharts had. For an Indian product company that not too many people had heard of, that was a big deal. We replaced the standard chairs and tables that came along with the booth with three colorful columns of different heights. On top of the columns went our shiny Macbooks. The idea behind the columns was that they resembled the FusionCharts colu-mn chart from a distance. We would realize later that they were in fact a great way to distribute the crowd as well.

And then we had the cookies. Delicious Australian cookies. We were running a contest, “Make a chart, get a cookie” and had put up small printouts announcing it around the venue, including the restrooms. We got into some trouble for that, but nowhere do you get the kind of attention that you get in a restroom.

The tradeshow opened at 9 am. Right from that time, to when it ended at 5 pm, we had people waiting in line at our booth. We handed the cookies we had for the contest to keep them occupied. Customers, investors, press, potential employees, all of them waiting in line to talk to us.

We felt like rockstars.

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TAKE A BOW,FUSIONCHARTS HAS

ARRIVED

4

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16th July 2009 brought forth what many at FusionCharts regard as the proudest moment of their careers. Earlier in the month, the US national CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled

the new Federal IT Dashboard. The dashboard was designed to give the public a look at the current status of thousands of ongoing IT projects in the government and the effectiveness of the overall IT spending. 600 billion dollars of them.

Tim O’Reilly wrote an article talking about what the dashboard meant for America, the radical transparency it would bring, and mentioned that it was built using Drupal and FusionCharts. The team was overjoyed that their product was being used in such a massive project.

At the same time, I had joined FusionCharts after completing my graduation. Over a period of six months, Pallav had been trying to convince me that FusionCharts needed me and I needed FusionCharts. Initially reluctant, mostly because I wanted to stay in Bangalore itself, I finally gave in and went back to Kolkata to take care of marketing. That was one of the smarter decisions of my life.

On 16th July 2009, while idly surfing the web in the night, I came across a picture of an important-looking gentleman using the Federal IT Dashboard. It was Barack Obama, the incumbent President of the United States of America. He was staring intently at the dashboard’s main screen which had FusionCharts all over. In essence, Barack Obama was looking

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at FusionCharts. My midnight eyes became the largest they had ever been.

This was massive. How many other companies can boast of the President of the United States using their product, with a picture to prove it? We immediately wrote about it on our blog. Soon, this would become the story that would get us covered in all major publications in India and what we would hang as portraits in our office.

Recognition and celebration

In September, FusionCharts was selected by NASSCOM as one of the top ten emerging companies in India. The product wave was just picking up momentum in the country, and the award meant that FusionCharts was redefining the bench-mark of excellence for the next generation of SMEs in India.

In the years to follow, a lot of tech startups in India would look up to FusionCharts and Pallav as role models to build the next product success story from the country.

Take a bow, FusionCharts has arrived

Barack Obama was looking at FusionCharts.

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“Winning an award for creating a business is great validation. It makes you feel more confident about what you are doing and motivates the team as well,” says Pallav. “It also brought us to the notice of the industry veterans, a lot of whom would give me valuable advice that no business book can teach.”

FusionCharts also hit the 15,000 customer mark in November that year and was selected as one the fastest growing tech companies in India by Deloitte.

All of these achievements were celebrated with gastronomic excesses, something that would become an important slice of the pie that was the FusionCharts culture. Cleavage and coverage

Right from the early days, a lot of technical blogs had been writing about FusionCharts. They wanted to tell their readers about the stunning charts they could generate with any web scripting language and database, in no time at all. The blogosphere coverage reached developers, designers, project and product managers, a sizable chunk of whom would subsequently become users and customers of FusionCharts.

But Pallav wanted to get the word out about FusionCharts in the mass media. “Coverage in the mass media establishes credibility. Smart people working elsewhere look up the company to see if it’s a company they would like to work for.

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Current team members show the coverage to their spouses and parents, and come back to work with a renewed vigor the next day. The company as a whole becomes more determined to scale bigger heights, given that the world is watching. FusionCharts needed all of these things at that point in time. And if there were customers and mentors to be had, that was a welcome addition.”

By then, I had taken over all the marketing responsibilities from Pallav and was the Head of Marketing now. As a one-man army, I wasn’t much of a head in its literal sense but then everything marketing was coming from me, so I took it gladly. As Head of Marketing, I had to come up with a story that got us mass media’d.

However, mass media cares only about stories that inspire, educate, entertain or piss off the common man. A story on how FusionCharts helps you create stunning charts for your web applications was going to be used to wrap chewing gum in, before it went into the bin.

“We have to figure out an angle that strikes a chord with the common man,” I said to Pallav as we brainstormed on our mass media strategy. “We have to sex up our story, we have to show some cleavage.”

We thought hard but were not able to come up with anything. No matter how we morphed our story, there was nothing

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about the product that would interest the common man. Then we thought, “Why not take the product out of the equation completely? How about we just tell a good story and focus on getting the FusionCharts name out?”

As soon as we agreed on that, we came up with an entire bunch of angles that made for a good story.

“FusionCharts was founded by a 17-year old.”

“FusionCharts has 15,000 customers spread over 110 countries,

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including the likes of NASA and the World Bank, and all of that sitting in India itself. Kolkata to be specific.”

“FusionCharts got to 10,000 customers without having any feet on the street, not even a dedicated salesperson on the team.”

The first mass media coverage came out in Entrepreneur India, in January 2010. It talked about how a 17-year old had built a company that sold to 15,000 customers. Later in the month, Forbes wrote about FusionCharts in an article titled “India’s rising tech stars.”

“I was initially drawn to the FusionCharts story as I was researching Indian product companies with $1M+ in annual revenue,” says Sramana Mitra, a serial entrepreneur and strategy consultant in the Valley, who wrote the Forbes piece. “There were oddly few, and they stood out. See, Indian IT industry still remains largely an outsourcing driven one. Product ventures are few and far between. Successful ones, even fewer. Against that backdrop, FusionCharts shone as an important case study. As I got to know them better, I found many more things that I liked in their story. One of them is that they are a 100% bootstrapped company, built on blood, sweat and tears, instead of gobs of venture capital. Last but not the least, I love the fact that the company came out of Kolkata, a presumed barren land for IT in India.”

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Now that a couple of media outlets had run a story on FusionCharts, other media outlets wanted to talk about it too.

But they wanted a story no one had heard before. The situation was similar to when a Hollywood starlet becomes an overn-ight celebrity and everyone wants a new story on her — Where did you grow up? Who was your first boyfriend? Did your first kiss have tongue?

Luckily, FusionCharts had a bunch of angles ready that it mixed and matched for every new media outlet. But the masterstroke came when the company let the story of Barack Obama using FusionCharts out of the bag.

“Initially I wasn’t too sure if saying Barack Obama uses FusionCharts was the right thing to do. After all, the truth was more like Barack Obama uses FusionCharts as a part of the Federal IT Dashboard. Even though we had put it out on our blog months ago, we didn’t actively talk about it to the media. We didn’t want to risk rubbing the CIA on the wrong side,” Pallav explains why the Obama story was kept under wraps all this while. “Then one fine day, we just decided to let it out of the

Take a bow, FusionCharts has arrived

“They are a 100% bootstrapped company, built on blood, sweat and tears, instead

of gobs of venture capital.”

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bag. As a startup, if we can’t take such risks, who can? If nothing else, we would all come out wiser from it. At FusionCharts, a whole lot of things we did were experiments anyway.”

The media lapped up the story. FusionCharts was covered in all major media outlets in the country including Economic Times, CNBC, Times of India and Outlook Business. Over time, even though the story has gotten a little old, no media outlet misses the chance of squeezing it into a coverage on FusionCharts.

The media has also twisted the story to suit their editorial calendars, often producing hilarious results. One such coverage talked about how Obama personally chose FusionCharts for federal projects, another one mentioned how he follows FusionCharts on social media, and then there are the ones that talk about FusionCharts’ products like interactive spreadsheets that the company itself doesn’t know about. But all publicity, as they say, is good publicity.

On the international front as well, FusionCharts has been covered in Washington Post, Business Insider and Penn Olson. Mixergy did an hour-long interview with Pallav on his entrepreneurship journey.

Mass media coverage has gone a long way in building credibility for FusionCharts and pumping up the team as a whole.

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Not everything FusionCharts touched turned into gold

Back in 2008, Rahul was working on FusionCharts for Visual Basic, an extension that helped users embed charts in classic VB applications easily. The extension itself didn’t find many takers but during the course of development, he accidentally came across a way to embed FusionCharts in PowerPoint. The focus was on building FusionCharts for VB at the time, so the idea was kept on the back burner.

But with time, a lot of FusionCharts users started asking if there was a way to embed FusionCharts in PowerPoint. While it could be done crudely using 10-step methods, which people had even written articles about, it was a painful process. In mid-2009, work on FusionCharts for PowerPoint began.

The product was launched in public beta in February 2010 under the name oomfo.

The idea behind launching FusionCharts for PowerPoint under a different banner was twofold. One, oomfo was meant for the consumer market. These consumers were not very technical people, and if they hit the FusionCharts website that talked about web scripting and databases, they were sure to drop their mouse and run for their lives. The ones that did stick around might download FusionCharts, and when it didn’t create a magical chart as soon as they installed it, a support mayhem

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was in order. Second, oomfo was about oomph in a fun way, while FusionCharts was about oomph in a trustworthy way. The brand values were very different.

Users were impressed when they saw the oozing-with-oomph charts they could generate in less than a minute. They liked the freshness oomfo brought to their presentations, when compared to the PowerPoint charts that the world had been using since Stone Age. One of them even said, “I personally don’t want oomfo to get any more popular than it already is. It is just that for me, oomfo has become a secret weapon. And the rarity and non-awareness of it makes it an add-on to my presentations, and thus, the impact I create for my audience.”

Clearly oomfo was going to go viral, and users were going to tell their cats and dogs about the fancy stuff they had built earlier in the day. But that was not to be. After the first couple of charts, it kind of lost its charm for most users. The product had to do more than just jazz up an existing feature in PowerPoint.

“We added more chart types to oomfo, the ones people needed

Take a bow, FusionCharts has arrived

“I personally don’t want oomfo to get any more popular than it already is.”

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but PowerPoint didn’t offer,” says Pallav of the company’s endeavors to find the product-market fit with oomfo. “When that didn’t bring in the kind of traction we were looking for, we tried looking for other pain points people have with charting in PowerPoint. We figured out that every time a sales manager has to make a presentation to his boss, he has to pull out the latest data from Salesforce, put it in a spreadsheet and then generate a chart from it. Tedious process. What if the sales manager could connect the PPT to the data source and have the latest data in a delicious chart every time he opens the PPT? And all of this in a very simple non-technical manner.”

oomfo introduced connectors that could connect to live data from pretty much anywhere, be it Salesforce or Google Analytics. This found more takers but still not the traction the company was looking for.

At the time of writing, a new user interface was being developed for the product and work on solving bigger pain points with oomfo was going on. The first version of the product will soon be out.

FusionCharts gets a CEO

In March 2010, FusionCharts went to international shores at the world’s largest computer expo. Over 300,000 people descend in a city of 500,000 people during the expo. FusionCharts was fully prepared to be a speck in the dust in the madness called

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CeBIT, that takes place in the city of Hanover in Germany.

Just before heading to the expo, Pallav decided to change his title to CEO and co-founder. He had been using the title CTO and co-founder all these years, even though he was performing all the duties of a CEO.

“I understood almost all of the code written at FusionCharts till a year back and was still spending a fair amount of my time writing code, so the CTO title sounded more natural. Only when I stopped writing code and started focusing all my energy on the business side of things, I thought it was time to finally pick up the CEO title. To think of it, it’s quite funny that FusionCharts was without a formal CEO for all these years.”

FusionCharts put up what can be called a pretty good show at CeBIT. The vibrant booth with the colorful columns went down well with the visitors, as did Rajroop’s antics, who got his second job offer at his second tradeshow appearance.

“It was just after lunchtime when the expo halls were a little empty,” Rajroop says of how the job offer came to be. “I was

Take a bow, FusionCharts has arrived

“I thought it was time to finally pick up the CEO title.”

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talking to a group of visitors when I saw this 6’2” well-dressed distinguished gentleman looking at me from a distance. I got done with the group in another three minutes by when the gentleman was looking intently at our booth. I went around the booth and stood next to him.”

“The colors are not so nice, are they?” he said to the gentleman. The gentleman gave him a look. “You cheeky bastard,” the look said.

“We are all about colors and visuals, and how they can help you make better business decisions. If you have five minutes, I will show you what I am talking about,” Rajroop said.

“Yes I do,” the gentleman replied.

“Excellent, I will take two.”

They went on to talk for half an hour — Rajroop for five minutes and the gentleman the rest. He was an exhibitor himself, and he invited Rajroop to come check out their booth later.

In the evening, when Rajroop was casually taking a stroll around the expo hall, he came across the gentleman’s booth. He wasn’t there at the booth, so Rajroop went up to ask for him and introduced himself.

“So you are the guy he was talking so animatedly about? He

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has been in sales for twenty years now, and when he came back after meeting you, he said that he has never seen anyone with your kind of energy in sales.”

By that time, the gentleman had come back. He was excited to see Rajroop.

“I will make you a job offer you can’t refuse,” the gentleman said. Or something on similar lines. “50,000 Euros, a car and a place to stay in Germany. Come work for me.”

Rajroop smiled. “As inviting as that sounds, I am already

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committed.”

He would be offered another job at his next tradeshow appearance, which he would decline, again.

Finally, a sales team in place

FusionCharts had another first in March 2010. Its first six-figure deal. You could say it was a large account.

Putting together a sales team had long been on Pallav’s mind. The six-figure deal only pushed him to do it quicker. While this deal had closed easily over a couple of emails and phone calls, he knew that FusionCharts could close more deals, both large and small, with an inside sales team in place. Also, his industry mentors always stressed upon the importance of having dedicated salespeople.

His previous two attempts at getting dedicated salespeople had gone to dust. The first was a VP Sales hired in mid-2009. Being a salesman, he was able to smooth talk his way through the interview. Also, he was a man in his early forties, which fitted the picture Pallav had in mind for his VP Sales perfectly. All his experience was in wining and dining enterprise prospects, and getting their account. A handful of these deals completed his quota. Selling in volumes was not something he could wrap his head around, and working for

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deals sized less than ten thousand dollars was beyond his dignity. He lasted a handful of months.

Having burnt his fingers once by hiring a senior executive, Pallav decided to hire someone with mid-level experience. Instead of a smooth talker, this time he went to the market looking for someone with knowledge of the web, and software products in general. He found a candidate soon, but once he joined, Pallav had no clear plan on how to use him. The candidate’s selling skills weren’t razor-sharp either, and this relationship ended in a couple of months as well.

Pallav decided to do some reading on sales. He had to figure out how to get the team rolling before he hired them.

“Till now, pretty much everyone who joined the company was thrown into the pool that is FusionCharts. You had to figure out what the company did, how the team you are in contributed to it, how you could contribute to the team, and make a contribution on the first day. If you couldn’t figure out something, you walked around and found someone who could help. The people at FusionCharts are generally helpful. You talked and got work done, setting your own task lists and goals. There were hardly any systems and processes. But with sales, this was not going to work,” says Pallav of what he realized had gone wrong.

I had started sharing the sales responsibilities as well by

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then. So when Pallav decided to try putting together a sales team again, he asked me if I could put together an orientation program for them. I had never done that before, so I said yes.

I put together an orientation program that started with our sales philosophies.

1. Be the customer’s friend.2. Sell FusionCharts to a customer only if he needs it.3. Treat competitors with respect. Do not make false statements about them.4. Wow the customer.5. Collaborate with your sales team, not compete.6. Under-commit, over-deliver.7. Keep your word.

These had been the FusionCharts sales philosophies for long, I just put them in writing.

The program then went on to talk about the company’s products in details, the completely inbound selling approach at FusionCharts, and finally the systems and processes that had just been put in place. At the end of the program, every sales

Take a bow, FusionCharts has arrived

Treat competitors with respect. Do not make false statements about them.

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member got a Sales Bible.

With the orientation program, systems and processes in place, Pallav decided to give another shot at putting together a sales team in June 2010. The idea this time was to divide the sales responsibilities among different teams, and hire for each of these teams separately. There would be different teams for enterprise sales, volume sales and pre-sales.

He asked me to head sales as well, with both him and my dad for guidance.

Three sales members were hired that month, one for each team, who would then go on to be the founding members of their team. With a structure in place, the sales team fitted in well this time. It started picking up steam over the next couple of months and was ramped up to ten members by October.

One of these days, after the orientation program was done for the day, I took the team down for a coffee. Deb, one of the sales team members asked, “So Sanket, what were you doing before FusionCharts?”

“I was studying engineering, though there’s not much that I learnt from it,” I replied.

“Interesting. Where did you go to college?”

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“Bangalore. R V College.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Turns out Deb was ten years my senior from college.

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A DENT IN OUR UNIVERSE

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Steve Jobs was an icon at FusionCharts. Everyone admired him for his sense of design, attention to detail and the desire to make a dent in the universe. In April 2010, Steve

would make a dent in FusionCharts’ universe.

In January, he announced the iPad to the world. Right after the announcement, there were widespread speculations on whether it was going to support Flash or not. The iPhone had never supported Flash, but then it was never supposed to replace the laptop. The iPad was set to replace the laptop, at least for consuming information. In March, it hit the stores and everyone got to know that it didn’t support Flash. Apple said that Flash was a “proprietary” technology of the dark ages, and it had no place on their devices. HTML5, CSS and JavaScript were going to be the future of the web. Apple declared important sites like The New York Times and CNN that were in sync with the future as iPad-ready.

There was a huge uproar on the web. People in opposite camps were caps locking each other to death. Given the grandeur of the debate, there was still a chance of Apple going back on its decision. And then in the end of April, Steve settled the dust once and for all. He wrote an open letter to Adobe — Thoughts on Flash — which delivered a fatal blow to Flash on account of its security, reliability, performance and what it did to the phone’s battery life.

FusionCharts was completely Flash-based. When the letter

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came out, companies offering basic solutions in HTML5 and JavaScript had already hit the market. FusionCharts had to act, and act quick.

Sleeping with the competition

Anyone who has ever built a product would know that a change of technology takes quarters, if not years. FusionCharts Suite was a comprehensive offering that had been built over years and years altogether. Customers had already started writing in asking what the company was going to do about the change in scenery.

“All the HTML5 and JavaScript players in the market at the time had very basic solutions, as basic as what we offered half

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a decade back in Flash. But they were still picking traction because at that point in time, organizations just wanted to ensure that their applications worked on all platforms and devices. They were expecting a lot of iPads and iPhones coming in soon. So I figured, if we could have a basic fallback for iPads and iPhones for now, without needing any change in the customers’ existing implementation of FusionCharts, we could buy some time. And in that time, we could enhance the basic solution and bring it to FusionCharts quality,” Pallav says of what was running in his mind at the time.

For the basic fallback, he didn’t want to wait for the time while FusionCharts developed its own JavaScript solution.

He decided to sleep with the competition. “We decided to pick the best available JavaScript solution from the market, work on it and bundle it with FusionCharts for fallback on iPads and iPhones. That was the quickest solution we had at that point in time.”

Talks with the competitor were closed quickly. They got a sweet deal and credit for the JavaScript fallback. They were a startup, so the money and the credibility were both welcome. FusionCharts got the fallback it needed. A win-win for both.

In September 2010, FusionCharts was declared iPad-ready.

These five months were challenging times for FusionCharts.

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One of the biggest challenges was the shortage of JavaScript experts in the company. Shamasis was the only team member who liked discussing software architecture with Pallav, and had written a few JavaScript modules that proved his prowess with the technology. He was given a team of two fresh-out-of-college but very smart guys. Their task of getting the charts to fall back automatically to JavaScript on all iPads and iPhones essentially comprised of two parts — map every single feature in the Flash charts that had been built over years to the fall-back charts and work on the fallback charts themselves, which were pretty basic in nature. The work on enhancing the fall-back charts was to be done in a phased manner, so that releases could be pushed out in quick time.

“For me, it was more exciting than challenging,” says Shamasis of his thoughts heading into the project. “This was the biggest and the most important project I had worked on at the comp-any, and both time and resources were short. These are the kind of projects that turn boys into men. Pallav believed in us and never doubted our ability to be able to pull it off, which is exactly the kind of confidence you need going into something like this.”

The team got to work.

In the meantime, the sales team was keeping the customers updated on the development, sending them screenshots and feature peeks.

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When the fallback solution was nearing completion, it was time to work on the documentation and release management. Sudipto’s implementation team got down to business. With an entirely new technology in place, this was a massive task. Anyone who could contribute in any way to the task was enrolled in his camp.

He himself stayed in office for 45 days straight to pull it off, a process in which his girlfriend nearly broke up with him. But once he explained the importance of what he was doing to her, she understood and today they are happily married.

Special company for special times

During the all-nighters the team was putting in, they had some special company. Company of the paranormal kind. The paranormal entity’s presence was first acknowledged on FusionCharts’ seventh birthday. The office had been dolled up with streamers and balloons taped to the ceiling, but mysteriously the balloons started bursting one by one. By the time the birthday song was sung and the cake cutting was done, only a handful of balloons remained. No human being could be responsible for this.

A lot of team members had heard stories of how a woman named Paula had jumped off from the ninth floor of the build-ing. Nobody was sure of the authenticity of the story, especially since it was a glass-enclosed building, but the dots were

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connected anyway — Paula’s ghost was in the FusionCharts office. The music system in the office was also known to turn ghostly once in a while, playing random music no one had plugged in.

During the five months, folks at FusionCharts felt Paula’s presence in different ways. Some heard her typing away,

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while others heard her playing with the window blinds. A handful of them heard erotic noises coming from rooms they knew had no one in them. But FusionCharts is a friendly place, so even paranormal entities would be swept away by the warmth of the people. And at a time when everyone was contributing in whichever way they could, Paula was only doing her bit.

On the 17th of September, the iPad-ready FusionCharts was launched to the world. It was one of the strongest team efforts the company has ever seen. As is the FusionCharts culture, yays were exchanged, chests were thumped and a party was thrown.

The lobby area outside the office was converted into a party zone. The neighboring office was waiting for its new occupant, so the entire space belonged to FusionCharts for the night. Dis-co lights were set up, music systems were placed, champagne was ordered. The evening began and the entire team partied as if there was no tomorrow.

I, for one, will never forget that party. It was also my 23rd birthday. Since I had turned eighteen, all my birthdays were spent drinking to glory with friends. I was drinking to glory even on this one, but I was surrounded by a team I was proud to be a part of. It was a team that had come together during a very challenging time, put in everything they had and deli-vered against all odds. I will remember that night for a long

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time to come.

After a good night’s sleep, the team got back to work on improving the fallback solution. In a very short span of time, it would no longer be a fallback. It would become the primary solution.

On the business side of things, life was going on as usual. Revenues were increasing. Awards for being one of the fastest growing companies in the country were coming in. Media was calling FusionCharts the great Indian tech story. And more people with charting dreams were coming onboard. The team turned 50-strong in November 2010.

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ACT 1, SCENE 1, CHARTING A

NEW BEGINNING

6

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FusionCharts clocked $5M in revenue in the fiscal year ending March 2011. The company had hit its next milestone, and everyone was delighted. But to get to the

next milestone, the same strategy that the company had used all these years wasn’t going to work.

Till now, apart from the sales team, most of the people at FusionCharts were at their first job. They were a bunch of smart and hungry people who didn’t come with any set ideas of how businesses are supposed to function. They did what sounded the most logical at that point in time, and things often went wrong. Everyone learnt from their mistakes, and came out wiser.

But now that FusionCharts was looking to scale up, it needed people who could structure this chaos. People who could bring in their experience to plug in the holes the company had in its knowhow and overall way of doing things, and get things moving quick. People who could turn this chaos into organized chaos.

FusionCharts needed a middle management.

Finding product people in Kolkata had been a challenge till now, and it was only going to get tougher when shopping for experienced people.

Also, I had decided to move on from FusionCharts. I had always

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wanted to travel around and meet new people, and this was as a good time as any. So that left another two positions for the company to fill in.

It was time FusionCharts went to India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore. The energy in the city was much higher, the talent much better. People were actually excited about working with small companies, and there were a lot of cool products com-ing out from the city. More people knew of FusionCharts here than in its hometown anyway. And, of course, there was the lovely weather.

FusionCharts opened shop in Bangalore, its first outside Kolkata, in July 2011. It was a cosy office in one of the most happening areas in the city and had a lovely view from the terrace. Now it was time to get people who had been there and done it before.

Job listings were put out. Hiring agencies were contacted. Word was spread from mouth to mouth. Finding the right people didn’t turn out to be as easy as Bangalore promised. And the company wasn’t willing to hire someone just for warming up a seat.

Finally, in three months, heads of engineering, marketing, user experience and operations were hired. People moved from other cities to join the company. A FusionCharts customer, became a FusionCharts team member, changing jobs after

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eleven years.

I moved on from FusionCharts in September, six months after I had actually decided to, and headed to the Himalayas. The transitory phase

With a middle management in place, a lot of the people who had been reporting directly to Pallav all these years would now be reporting to them. A lot of the ad-hoc-ness, like the making up of this word, would be replaced by systems and processes. People are resistant to change, especially when it comes to the way they do their everyday work, and the resistance showed up at FusionCharts too.

Both Pallav and the senior members were expecting the teething problems. Pallav assured the team that he was still as accessible to ideas from everyone in the team as he was before, just that he wanted to spend more time focusing on the company vision rather than on day-to-day operations. The senior members, on their part, made frequent trips to Kolkata

It was time FusionCharts went to India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore. The energy in the

city was much higher, the talent much better.

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to work closely with the team and get to know them in person.

After the initial friction, the two teams warmed up nicely to each other. “Now when we go to Kolkata, we are welcomed like old friends. We sit down, talk, laugh, go out for dinner and have a gala time,” goes the common opinion in the Bangalore team.

Hand in hand, they plunged into action.

FusionCharts came out with a new website, expanding on the concept of providing not just a product, but a complete packaged experience. It released another exclusive product for SharePoint, Collabion Charts for SharePoint, broadening the FusionCharts product ecosystem even further. It came out with The Dude, the company mascot, who graces the cover of this book too. And it put out the biggest release in recent times of its flagship product suite, FusionCharts Suite XT, which brought all the awesomeness the company had been bringing in Flash for over eight years to JavaScript.

The company hit the 20,000 customer mark in March 2012, and was now powering over a billion charts per month. The joy was doubled soon when a beginner’s guide to FusionCharts was released by Packt Publications the next month. The publishing house had put out a tweet looking for authors, which the company spotted and replied to on the lines of — “Hey, you know what. We developed the product, so we could

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do a semi-decent job of writing the book too.” The guide was released as the official guide to FusionCharts, making it the first data visualization solution in the industry to have a book.

FusionCharts completed ten years of developing and selling data visualization components on October 22nd, 2012. A decade is a fairly long time for any business, an eternity for a tech startup.

The happy ending

Ah, finally to the happy ending. If you wanted to hear the story of how the company got acquired for an obscene nine-digit figure and how everyone lived happily ever after, well, sorry to disappoint you. FusionCharts has been an independent bootstrapped profitable company, and it continues to remain that way.

Acquisition offers have come the company’s way, but it has all the time in the world to wait for a good parent. “I would like someone who cooks well and lets us watch TV all the time,” laughs Pallav talking about acquisitions. “Right now, I am enjoying the journey and do not really have an end goal in mind.” FusionCharts has never raised any money, so there is no investor pressure either. It can chart its own destiny.

The company’s focus going forward is on building better data visualization products.

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With an increasing amount of data being generated every day, and an equal increase in the number of devices people consume the data on, the evolution of data visualization is going to be fast and interesting. Being the leader in the space, FusionCharts wants to be at the forefront of this evolution. It also wants to redefine how the common man thinks of data visualization. Right now, people just look at a chart and derive meaning from that. It wants to convert that monologue into a dialogue.

Given the company’s laser sharp focus on data visualization

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for over a decade now, you know where to place your bet. “For several years, FusionCharts has been the provider of advanced charting capabilities within Jaspersoft’s commercial reporting and analytics software suite,” says Brian Gentile, Chairman & CEO of Jaspersoft. “Tens of thousands of our users chose to build their reports and dashboards with stunning visualizations based on FusionCharts. The FusionCharts library is fully integrated into Jaspersoft products and we are excited about the company’s HTML5 vision and new capabilities that we plan to leverage in coming releases.”

I will finally pass on the baton to Pallav, now 27 years old, whose cold coffees and 10-pins have given way to scotch and poker.

It’s never easy to understand how life’s a journey and not a destination till you take a moment to look back. And when you do, you feel a rush of satisfaction and restlessness all at once. I feel a good measure of both right now, as I pause to reflect on the journey of FusionCharts so far.

Those little things along the journey seem amazing in retrospect. I still remember the loss I made on my first sale. The date I first fired an employee on — 1st of January. The time I switched accents and the customer thought the call had been transferred from support to sales. The phone interview I fell asleep right

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in the middle of, only to wake up ten minutes later and pretend I had been listening all along. Then there was the delight in seeing Barack Obama using our charts. The pride in having a team that gave it their all when the world of technology flipped overnight.

These little things, both good and bad, are priceless moments that I will remember for the rest of my life.

The past decade as a sum of business learnings has been nothing short of tremendous. Among all the learnings, there are three that I consider most valuable. First, nothing in the business world is carved in stone. Traditional business wisdom has no guarantee of working for you. Second, business isn’t just about your product or service, a large part of it is about what people feel about you. A genuine conversation, a good story, they all add up. Third, even in this intangible world of software, it is all about people. Customers, employees, vendors, partners, industry watchers, they are all people. And people have their own aspirations, wants and needs, that you need to listen to and take care of.

From where I stand today, it has become important for me to share my learnings with upcoming entrepren-eurs. Of course, it gives me deep satisfaction to share the lessons I have learnt along the way with the potential rockstars of tomorrow, but it is also my way of saying

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thank you to the brilliant gentlemen who have mentored me.

Ten years of a company that started as a quest for pocket money and turned into a multi-million dollar outfit can never be smooth-sailing. But what it can be is satisfying. And extremely satisfying it has been.

What’s next? That’s the record constantly playing in my mind now. All I know is, there is a lot more waiting to be done. Dreams to be dreamt, and milestones to be charted. I want to get smart, and foolish.

The journey of FusionCharts has just begun.

Pallav Nadhani

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Thank you

To Shyamal for the lovely illustrations.

To Jacob for bearing a first cut of this book, and helping beat it into shape.

To Udhaya for a book name I was sold on in five minutes, and the guidance throughout.

To Sanchit and Nitin for the attention to details.

To The Dude for being the voice in my head as I wrote the book.

To Mom and Bhabhi for all the support you have always given me.

Thank you to all the FusionCharts members, both current and ex, for answering all my bizarre questions. Andy, Arka, Bedisha, Deb, Dhruva, Huzefa, Nilanjan, Nishant, Pallab, Rahul, Rajroop, Ryan, Sanjukta, Shamasis, Smita, Sudipto, Sushant and Udhaya.

And a final thank you to my brother and dad for giving me a story.

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About the author

Sanket Nadhani headed Marketing and Sales at FusionCharts from 2009 to 2011 before he gave in to his mind’s urge to expand horizons and left for the hills in a search for soul and meaning.

Now back with a head buzzing with ideas that combine clever marketing with soul and meaning, he is currently based in Bangalore, spreading the love at Poke And Bite. He consults with tech startups on marketing strategy and communication, and has also co-authored the FusionCharts Beginner’s Guide.

He is often accused of rapping while talking, and wears socks and floaters to parties. He loves his food, beer and traveling.

Sanket can be reached at [email protected] @sanketnadhani

Looking to connect with Pallav? Get in touch at [email protected] or @pallavn

Illustrations & Design byQuirk Brand Communication