Pradeep Padanthaya of Vectorviewer On The 5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Successful App, SaaS or Software Business
One thing I would like to tell all fellow colleagues and entrepreneurs is to keep chasing your dreams without giving up when things don’t go your way. There are more downs than ups in the path initially and key to success is to believe in what you conceptualized and never give that up.
As part of my series about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Successful App or SaaS”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Pradeep Padanthaya, CEO and Founder, Vectorviewer.
Pradeep comes with a huge experience in cloud computing especially in AWS and Azure along with a solid technical background. The highlight of his experience is architecting large enterprise grade applications and spearheading the delivery of it. Pradeep has been entrepreneur for last 5+ years and is part of several SaaS startups in the tech world. He is also an avid sports fan and has funded several Sports Academies across the globe. He is passionate about playing tennis and keeps himself fit through various forms of physical activities.
Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
My name is Pradeep, and I am one of the founders of VectorViewer — a cloud enterprise document management startup. We help enterprises across the globe with their document digitization efforts. With our unique HTM5 Viewer solution and the e-Form generator we have successfully helped many companies move towards a cloud microservice solution for all their document management needs.
What was the “Aha Moment” that led you to think of the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?
Having worked in large enterprises for a long term, we had always seen an opportunity to provide an end-to-end Document Management solution that can be easily integrated with any existing enterprise application. With the advent of Cloud solutions in last decade and players like AWS/Azure dominating the enterprise world, we the founders of VectorViewer, while sipping a coffee in the streets of New York City on one fine Summer day, found that there was not a single solution out there that provided an end to end solution to Enterprise Document Management needs. On further validating this requirement with fellow developers and colleagues we decided that VectorViewer is something that we would like to offer to all enterprise customers looking for a document management solution.
Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
The biggest challenge for us was to build the product with minimum resources since the startup was completely self-bootstrapped. On top of that all founders were having a full-time job before making a switch. We all took this as a challenge and with some great support from family and friends, we were able to come with the first version of the product in less than years’ time. The only thing that kept us going in this journey is the passion to build a world class product and we were able to achieve that just with our sheer determination and experience.
So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?
Everyone in enterprise world understand that the sales cycle is long and tedious one. However, with our connects we were able to get few potential clients on the sales table and finally sign up one large software product vendor in the insurance space as our first customer. This was a big breakthrough for us and since then there was no looking back.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
One of the funniest (or you may call it stupid too) mistake we did initially was presenting a half-baked product to one of the potential client. While the client was nice enough to explain us on what he needs and what we offer is not even close to what he was looking it. This was one of the biggest lesson we learnt in the product demonstration process and since then we have been pretty vigilant on our product presentations.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
We are the first in the Enterprise Document Mangement space to offer Document Digitization as a Service model to enterprise customers who usually deal with few hundred million documents on a regular basis. Our end to end solution ensures that clients have solutions for everything they need to manage digital documents — from setting up the configuration rules to customizing the look & feel and to store documents in cloud. To further meet customers demand we offer two business models — one being a SaaS model and other being On Premise model where everything is setup in client’s private cloud. Even our SaaS model is flexible to offer document storage in a private cloud while all the computing will still happen in the VectorViewer SaaS. On top of this, VectorViewer offers highest level of encryption on all client assets we store or process.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
One thing I would like to tell all fellow colleagues and entrepreneurs is to keep chasing your dreams without giving up when things don’t go your way. There are more downs than ups in the path initially and key to success is to believe in what you conceptualized and never give that up.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
There are quite a few people whom I would like to personally thank for being there to support our idea. From my ex-colleagues to ex-managers to family and friends — everyone supported this concept of Document Management solution for enterprises. But the one person whom I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart is my wife. I say this specifically since there were times in this journey wherein, I was in the verge of giving it up for various reasons — be it the technical challenges, work pressure, financial issues etc. It was my wife who stood by me strongly during all these times and asked me to be firm on my idea and made sure that the journey never stopped.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app or software currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?
While we don’t have a large online community behind our Software since it caters enterprise customers. Our customer base includes few enterprise clients with whom we have a direct relationship, but we don’t have much control on the end users who use the actual application.
What is your monetization model? How do you monetize your community of users? Have you considered other monetization options? Why did you not use those?
Our primary monetization method is our SaaS model. We also offer a flexible On-Premise model to large enterprises who usually like to keep everything in a private cloud. Our simple inhouse built cloud deployment too makes sure that the entire software suite gets installed in a private cloud in few hours. We are also exploring offering Document APIs as a Service model. The preliminary work towards this is already done and we are making sure that this API service handles many common use cases such as convert documents from one format to another, provide AI solutions around the input document to gather more valuable information from the document and much more.
Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful app or a SaaS? Please share a story or an example for each.
a) Know the market you are targeting and make sure that people are willing move from an inhouse solution to a SaaS model.
b) Have a clear roadmap on what you would like to offer both in short term and long term.
c) Marketing the great product you built is as important as building the product, so make sure that you form a great market team.
d) Keep innovating and improvising the product and make sure that you are always relevant in the market.
e) Customers always come first, so make sure that you keep them always happy.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
The one movement that I would like to start at some point in my life is bring more awareness on fitness, especially in the corporate world. I always think that doing some form of physical exercises and being fit the best gift one can give to themselves and their family. I have been physically active for most part of my 20+ year corporate career and have my own mantra on how to keep oneself motivated to be fit in the long run. This is something I would like to share with others and in the process even if I am able to inspire one person, I would consider myself successful in that journey.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I am not much active on social media but the one place to follow me is on LinkedIn. I am available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pradeepj/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
