Sandeep Kumar quit his job working for an Indian consulting company to start a software company in 2005, when product-focused startups were not common in India. For the next 10 years, they experimented with product features and customer profiles until they finally found an important buyer with budget power who needed their must-have software.
ProductDossier is now a comprehensive platform for enterprise consulting and IT services companies in India to manage project financials, project resources, project delivery, and new opportunities in one system. Over 50 large consulting companies in India use ProductDossier to manage their global project portfolios to ensure high-quality and profitable project delivery.
The company has 100 employees and is growing steadily without any outside funding. Sandeep shares the important lessons he learned in his 15-year journey about product-market fit, building trust with big Indian customers, developing a great organization, and thinking big.
Best quote from Sandeep:
“I think it’s a blessing that we didn’t raise outside funding. The reason is that we had the freedom to experiment, to try and experiment and then evolve.
“We finally figured out that we were not building must-have software, we were building nice-to-have software. And we were selling to engineering managers who don’t have decision-making powers or a budget.
“Based on those learnings, we pivoted. For me, it was step-by-step learning that we couldn’t rush in building the right foundations for our business, building our organization, and developing high trust with our customers.”
- What it was like to create a startup in India 15 years ago when it wasn’t common to create product-focused software companies there
- The critical lessons learned to eventually build a must-have software for buyers with decision-making power in a specific industry
- How their vertical focus and product feature depth enabled them to sell to large enterprise companies as a small startup
- What’s happening in the SaaS startup scene in India right now
- The advantages of not having big outside funding too early, including strategic flexibility, attracting the right talent, and patient grow
- How he defines work-life balance and how he manages time with his family
ProductDossier Company Facts
- Founded: 2006
- Description: ProductDossier is an enterprise-class software platform for digitizing and automating business processes for project-based industries like IT services and software consulting companies
- Number of Employees: 100
- Funding: Bootstrapped with self-funding and customer revenues
- Location: Pune, India
