Tech Story spoke to co-founder of Solutions Infini – Aniketh Jain, to understand the reason and secret behind bootstrapping a company and growing it to a team of 120.

What inspired you to start Solutions Infini?

There are few things that led to start Solutions Infini. To begin with my partner and I come from a business background with our family running traditional business. Moreover, after completing our college, we wanted to get into corporate world. What we realised during the time we started i.e. in 2008-09, during the recession is that a majority of the companies were either cancelling the offer letters or were postponing. This created a panic situation amongst us and we had very less expectations of being hired. Above all, we had really good support from our family wherein they encouraged us to startup on our own. Our families supported us in raising capital and also providing space for workplace which was free of cost for few months.

However, the biggest inspiration was that we started with the strategy being planned with a team of 110 employees. That drove us to scale up in the industry and we hired people with different background which led to different opportunities.

What is your competitive advantage and how does your product disrupt the market?

During our inceptions, there were about 3-4 competitors which were already in the market. I think we were the last company to enter into this market. If you look at our competitors, some of them have already been in operation for a long time. Our company entered the market in 2009.

Unlike other companies where they had their own limitations and other problems, we were quite fast and our technology was a unique one and we were also able to adapt to the consumers requirement faster to further implement it and deliver the final product to the customer. This helped us to scale up our business growth.

What are your visions for Solutions Infini? How have you communicated that Vision?

At present, we have en-vision ourselves as one-stop-shop clock platform. We are trying to communicate with the customer to sit back and relax while they want to reach us means of communications such as SMS, voice call and e-mail. At present we work on technology and a single global cloud communication platform to revert to customers which attracts customers.  The customers get access to one company end-to-end and we deliver that to the customer. With this proactive service that we provide user-friendly product to our clients.

We currently have around 6100 active clients with majority being from India and the remaining about 250 customers are from overseas. we have major clients include banking and financial sectors like Manappuram among others. We get more contributions from online marketplace that amounts to around 20% of our total revenue. Some of our online marketplace sources include Myntra, Flipkart, Ola, among others.

Our vision is to achieve revenue of 200-250 crore within next 18 months. However at present, we want to keep it simple by reaching out to small, medium and large enterprise and implement these products and others strategies being deployed to acquire these customers and achieve minimum 40k business globally.

As a co-founder, what is your go to strategy to expand the business?

As a co-founder I try focusing on strategic decision making. Also look into other crucial departments such as value to operations, customer service, the actual conversation that we have with our customer and areas where I will be able to add a lot of data analysis for the strategies of acquiring our customers and sustaining our customers for a long time.

We follow a mix of online and offline strategy. We are an entity trying to focus on B2B customers with minimal target and we follow the traditional background which we reach out to customers via email, phone call and messaging for the same. To support this, we have digital marketing through platforms like LinkedIn and Google. Since we find social media is more of consumer based, we don’t use it much. We also contribute a lot in digital blogs with relevant contents that increases traffic and customers reach out ot us for products and services.

What are the challenges that you have faced in this industry?

We did face a few challenges which we have faced. One is getting competitive in terms of price perspective. We have to differentiate and add value to our products and services and further implement the same. If this is executed in a right path, there wouldn’t exist a question of competition.

The second challenge is to retain talents. B2B is more challenging while dealing with B2B customers and we need to ensure we meet their expectations on time. Since majority of talents prefer consumer based companies and find them more comfortable, it becomes difficult to manage when several employees prefer to relocate themselves.

The other challenges includes fluctuation is in terms of sales and we are working in full swing to ensure that our order flow should increase consistently.

What is your plan of action in the next 5 years to sustain and grow your business?

We are trying to bring in technologies like chatbots, data messaging which is IP messaging, such as communicating through an app using internet. We are also trying to implement is data analytics to ease the communication process.

What we realise is that the communications with our customers will keep continuing as the layers of communication might change such as from e-mail to SMS and Data. Thus in the next 5 years we will keep renovating and keep figuring out other unique ways to communicate with our clients so that we can offer our platform to them.

Read the original article here: https://techstory.in/aniketh-jain-solutions-infini/