Vishal Purohit was a Bulls Eye student in 1997. He is a BE in Comp. Sc from DY Patil College, Pune. He is now Chief Executive Officer at Wooqer. He is also an Angel Investor. He was the founder of GarageAgain Ventures and CoreObjects prior to bootstrapping Wooqer. Wooqer is a California registered company with offices in Palo Alto, India, Middle East and China. In India, Wooqer has offices in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. The southern city has the largest headcount out of a total of 72 employees. 

Wooqer is an enabler that adds a technology stack to the business stack in the form of an operations software suite which a customer can tweak to suit their needs. When he tells people that his company works in the collaboration segment, they often confuse Wooqer with the likes of Zoho or even Slack. But he considers Wooqer to be a more evolved platform. “If you want to compare us with Zoho, then the best analogy I can give is that Zoho is like an app maker and we are like the iOS operating system,” he said. Today Vishal likes to think of Wooqer as an Amazon for business apps. Mostly for non tech work. 

For the first 18 months, Wooqer conducted business out of India before expanding to geographies such as Palo Alto and Dubai. By the end of 2014, the firm had raised $6 million from angel investors in Silicon Valley. Wooqer’s client roster now includes more than 200 companies and 250,000 users across 14 countries. One of its biggest customers is retail giant Walmart, which uses Wooqer’s platform to sync activities such as tracking packages, inventory, merchandise and sales. In all, Wooqer’s clients now run more than 6,000 applications on the platform to assist with such processes. 

As Wooqer has expanded globally, India’s share in the company’s revenue has sharply declined from nearly 100% in 2015 to only around 40% now. (These stats are for FY 2018. The domestic revenue  share has further dropped to 22% in FY 2020.) WOAS Technology Pvt. Ltd, Wooqer’s India unit, reported a total revenue of Rs 16.03 crore for the year ended March 2018 compared to Rs 13.86 crore for the previous year. The company’s losses also dipped to Rs 2.01 crore from Rs 3.30 crore in 2016-17. Purohit said that while the US will be the largest market in the long term, Wooqer will depend on the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia to fill its coffers for now. Here is a transcript of the Q and A session with Vishal.

Atul: Discuss your experience at Bulls Eye. 20 years down the line, what do you remember about the time you spent at Bulls Eye?

Vishal: Bulls Eye in those days was less of a classroom, more of friends trying to do something together. Don’t remember being a student. I remember those days Hari and Baskar had rented an apartment at Dahanukar Colony. Resembled a Silicon valley startup. There were days we guys actually crashed out in the apartment itself. It was my first introduction to a startup. Late night brainstorming. Camaraderie. Fun. Experiments. The ability to connect with people. This is the reason I continue to have a great off work relationship with Team Bulls Eye.  

Atul: In your Core Objects days you did a lot of startups coding. Was there anything special about this customer you had – LinkedIn?

Vishal: Core Objects did a lot of work with entrepreneurs. The magic potion of entrepreneurship has three ingredients: Ideas, Funding, People. It is difficult to get people in most places, especially so in the Valley. Core acted as a startup’s CTO. We would execute. I remember we would even accompany some of our customer-entrepreneurs to meetings with VCs. Sometimes the entrepreneur wanted a minimum viable product, even before funding happened. 

At Core, we were sure 9 times out of 10 about which of our customer companies would become the lambe race ke ghode. Core Objects would be ready to take part of the fee as equity for companies we believed in. LinkedIn was one such client. Jerry Wang, the founder of Yahoo, and I share an office at Palo Alto. Jerry is an angel investor in 800 companies in the Valley. Angels invest in nothing but ideas. Jerry is betting on people wanting to solve a problem. Every Sunday, Jerry visits the parking lots of his investee companies. Jerry knows he has to write off his investment when he sees an empty parking lot. 

People’s view of entrepreneurs is about the likes of Mukesh Ambani enjoying his day at Antilla, jetting around the country to receive awards and attend parties. We need to view entrepreneurship as separate from enterprise. An entrepreneur is trying to solve a problem. An enterprise is trying to bridge the gap between known solutions, using arbitrage to make money. An enterprise is driven by profits. An entrepreneur is driven by value. The contrast is between clock builders and time tellers. 

For the entrepreneur, the last micro milli second counts. The glamour in entrepreneurship revolves around the idea. Indian entrepreneurs have ideas which are as good as their brethren in the Valley. But building business and brands is about selling stories. IQ is the Indian enabler, and also its disabler. The typical IIT IIM entrepreneur/manager has one major piece missing in his armoury – imagination. 

Entrepreneurship is over romanticised. The entrepreneurial non romantic aspect is in the execution. When you look at failed companies, you find that the primary cause of failure is execution, secondary is the team, and tertiary is funds. Ideas are not small, execution is. Byju’s is not fundamentally different from Bulls Eye. But execution at Byju’s is bigger. In enterprises, revenues come from day 1, for entrepreneurs revenues are always late. Steve Jobs lamented that there are more people starting more companies, but very few sticking to them. Fail-fast is a selfish VC attitude. Entrepreneurship is a brick by brick house building. 

Vinay: In the process of business expansion, should the focus be more on internal aspects or the external? 

Vishal: I would reframe the question: Should you be a product thinker or a services thinker? Products are more about mechanisms. What works in products is Simon Sinek’s Inside Out thinking. At Wooqer, we don’t ask customers, we like to think for the customer. In services, it is primarily about skills. Skills that can be applied to a wide gamut of problem solving. The service provider has to be on a constant look out for markets. Typical outside-in thinking. Bulls Eye, in its initial days, could product-ise its CAT course material. Hence the scalability in CAT happened. But I think a lot of new courses that you guys have launched – law, hotel management – are more in the services category. Outside in. Students have driven the demand for these courses. And that is the reason scalability is not happening in these courses. You need to product-ise courses asap.

Priyanka / Bhavya: How feasible it is to have a mobile app for maintaining a student database vis a vis education (coaching) industry. Is it possible to have the following features:

1. Student Management : Students details by course ID, controls duplication of student details.

2. Student Inquiry management : Inquiries details, notification or reminder on mobile to follow up with the inquiries

3. Fee management: Maintains fee records of the students as per the course opted, reminder messages of fee recoveries to the organisation.

Further, is it possible to have access at different levels? Like a different access for the counselor and the center head.

Vishal: 40 different coaching institutes are doing the same with \Wooqer. Wooqer uses a Mobile first approach for its apps. ALS Delhi is a customer which coaches 5000 students for UPSC in Delhi and now online. Juhu based Momentum trains for IGCSE subjects in Mumbai and has been one of the earliest customers of Wooqer. The 3 things that educational institutes do with Wooqer: 

• Admin activities like rostering, onboarding, fee management et al. 
• Delivery of curriculum – self paced learning. They are acting like colleges. Paced material – first complete this then you get next. Workflow automation. 
• Creating a community of students – one of our clients manages a 40,000 strong current students and alumni community brilliantly. The amount of effort to do this is phenomenal, but the long term benefits justify this. 

Santosh: Wooqer hosts 6000 apps. How do you host these apps? What software is used to maintain records? 

Vishal: The likes of the big four IT consulting companies are also now publishing apps on Wooqer. The content management software, a proprietary software done by us, is similar to Google PlayStore. I would advise use of existing mappings rather than creating new ones of your own. We have used a lot of open source – 26 plugins of WordPress are used to run the marketplace. The dB we use is NoSQL. 

Atul: Was intrigued by this database. Here is a Wikipedia extract. A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. Such databases have existed since the late 1960s, but the name “NoSQL” was only coined in the early 21st century, triggered by the needs of Web 2.0 companies. NoSQL databases are increasingly used in big data and real-time web applications. Motivations for this approach include: simplicity of design, simpler “horizontal” scaling to clusters of machines (which is a problem for relational databases), finer control over availability and limiting the object-relational impedance mismatch. The data structures used by NoSQL databases (e.g. key–value pair, wide column, graph, or document) are different from those used by default in relational databases, making some operations faster in NoSQL. 

Aakash: How has the Covid19 outbreak impacted the CRM software market?

Vishal: On 6th March I called a companywide meeting at Wooqer. No one had any idea of what was going to come, but I had gauged that this was going to be serious. For the first 3 months, we guys had no idea about what was going to happen. 52% of our customers are retailers – so they got hit badly. People lost jobs, shops were shut. We decided to double down in our efforts to help our customers to do whatever they were doing. We did not lose a single customer in those 3 months. Think about your people and your customer, and you will be fine. 

The post Covid impact has been positive. Earlier it took a lot of effort to get CXOs to meeting tables, not so now. Covid has erased boundaries. Our typical international customer, say in Sri Lanka, would finish a call with ‘Let’s meet when you come down to Colombo.’ No we close on Zoom. Zoom is a great leveller of geography. 

One of India’s leading hospital groups has a telemedicine practice, that has grown 16,000 per cent in the last 5 years, mostly in small towns, not metros. The VCs current herd mentality is education. Education in remote areas will follow in the footsteps of telemedicine and e-commerce. It will now reach people who need it, but don’t have it. My 16 year old daughter observed that her parents have no complaints about her screen time now. We are erasing boundaries in education. The need for a school is being questioned now. Tomorrow’s students can choose their own palette of courses from whichever schools they like. Ed tech is going to be transformational, thanks to Covid. 

Atul: When should one pivot a business?

Vishal: The move from Services at Core to Product at Wooqer was a personal choice. Like a lot of hot shot graduates, I too wanted to join the likes of McKinsey in my younger days. The second company that I worked with, ended up being sold to BCG. I hated consulting. Nothing that we recommended would get executed. It was frustrating. The likes of McKinsey are good for people who like living it in style – on expense accounts. 

Core was doing products – as a service. I enjoyed doing products. So when Wooqer got started – it was templated in products. Though Wooqer has changed over the years, in some sense it has not pivoted. We are doing more extensions than pivots. DIY is what we started with – and it is still part of our offering. 

Pivots could be a forcing function from markets. Post covid, VCs – mentality changed from encouraging spending to saving in companies like Ola and Oyo. 2020 is a pivot for everyone in that sense. 

Sales, as we know it, will be out of fashion for a while. The moment the pandemic hit, we centralized our sales team in Bangalore. We used to sell 100 K dollar deals. We moved down to sell 25 K dollar deals. How ready were we for that? From an overhead PoV, no. So we built a market place. Work started in Apr, we launched on 26 Jul.

Early on in my career, I used to fill my day with as much work as possible. 12 hours was the norm. But that did not give me too much time to think about the changes that were happening. We need time to make sense of these changes. We need time to think out what we want to act on. 

Alas, we missed out one question from Pankaj. He wanted to know if there is a way to revolutionize the education sector in which parents and teachers can categorize the students by  *learning speed*. What if we let the students learn at their own speed (BYJUs is already doing this. Will this prove to be a good idea? Or should just increase the learning speed of all our kids? My suggestion would be for Pankaj to watch this TED talk. It may provide him with some answers.

To Be Omitted for Blog

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