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This Entrepreneurial Story is about Prashant Kumar who Founded ‘PromptCloud’ Located in Bangalore India
About : Prashant started PromptCloud in late 2009 after leaving his year-old job at Yahoo! in their data team. He graduated from IIT-Kanpur with a CS degree before joining Yahoo!.
When Started: 2009
What Motivated you to start your Business?
I had a passion for working on large scale systems and big data was the obvious halt point for it. But the real motivation came when there were immense “high-impact” opportunities in the field of big data using cloud computing.
Tell us about your Business
We are a data as a service platform (in B2B space) for enterprises that deal with large amounts of data. The data can be from travel, e-commerce, market research or any other vertical; our solution is agnostic to the domain the data is from. We offer big data solutions using this platform. An integral part of all these solutions is crawling sources of data on the web, and extracting non-noisy data from it, which is also our primary offering. On top of this data, we apply many machine learning techniques to give data relevant to a requirement set. We also index this data to make it searchable for our clients. This offering is popularly known as hosted indexing. Our USP is dealing with data on a very large scale and being able to provide low latency feeds that are clean and ready to use.
This data is very important to companies who’d like to run analytics, analyse sentiments, or monitor brands or anything else that might be relevant to their company in near real-time.
What is a Day in a life of you like?
I wake up to client mails to take stock of things and then take a general view of various components of our system. If something needs my immediate attention I do that first. Overall day is spent in a mix of tech and business stuff. On a daily basis, I sync up with team mates on our progress for the roadmap, it could be weekly roadmap, monthly or quarterly but we try to be on the same page.
Meetings with clients from Asia and Europe are generally in the day and late evenings are booked for clients from Europe, US and Canada. While in office, some time goes in design discussions and at times in code reviews too.
As a team, we need to ensure that all our clusters are running smooth in the cloud. We are mostly busy attending to new client requests or optimizing our infrastructure by adding new components. Its important that all our design decisions support scalability and uptime that are our key SLA’s. Moreover, being a service provider, keeping our customers happy calls for a lot of our time too.
One particular skill you got right and gave you best results…
We wanted to get the product right before gaining too much visibility in the market. Fact be said, we started marketing our product only 2 years after we had “paying” customers across the globe- all this through client referrals or expanding our network. Not saying that you should market that late in the game, but you definitely need to be super confident about your product. Along with that, our customer-centric nature is what has got us this far. We care less about the pennies and go to every possible level to make sure our data quality meets customer expectations.
What have been your biggest challenges in running your Business so far?
Where do I start 🙂 . There are obvious suspects of ideas vs execution. And the balance between these two. Plus being bootstrapped, we had to plan differently. New challenges always come up though- initially it was product validation, then product building, and now in growth phase its all about creating a brand.
How did you overcome these challenges?
Challenges are always there, hanging in there is the best thing to do. Plus we were taking baby steps being in the enterprise space- attacking one customer at a time and realizing some valuable features that could be added to our already validated product. During initial days, when we lost a big order for some reason or the other, there was a strong emotion to just shut it all down, but the very next day there was something so positive that such emotions go away immediately. It’s an experience, and you can only get better each day.
What have you found the most effective way to get new clients?
When you are small and new – referral works wonders. In later phases branding helps a lot to attract inbound leads. For the kind of business we are in, enterprises can’t take the trial and error risk. They really want to get it right with their choice of data provider and expect just the right results. So being visible in the market and having clients that speak highly of you within their network has worked best for us. Also, if existing clients get fond of your SLA’s, they come up to you with newer requests which might not be a part of your portfolio already.
What advice do you give to other business owners?
Focusing on value addition to the client’s business is the key and you should have long term view of things. There will always be ups and down in micro situations but if you plan and execute for long term, things will eventually be good.
How did you keep motivated through difficult times?
Randomness has done this trick for us. Call it luck, but any day there’s a real storm in office, there’s definitely some new client come in or an existing client talking highly of us. This is more than motivation to keep us going and do better. Sometimes there are momentary lapses but whenever I think of the big picture and long term goals, short term problems look small. Since we have been there for sometime now, at times I also look back and feel that we have had similar situation in past and got over it. Key is to stop stressing out and jump to solving problems.
What’s Your Marketing, Funding and Team Building Strategy?
Let’s start with the simplest one for me. Funding – we haven’t raised any so there is nothing concrete I can add. We can talk about how to bootstrap though :). With marketing, we have just followed common sense stuff like content, events, PR, etc. As long as you do it in a disciplined manner, it works well. Team building is of course very critical. We look at few things-
a. Willingness to work for a startup (which implies the ability to ignore the material comforts)
b. Interest (call it passion) in the related tech space
c. General aptitude and some tech abilities with algos
Your Achievements
Let’s skip it 🙂
What’s your favorite quote?
I am not those kinds who stick quotes on wall or desk . But here are few l like and repeat to others:
a. No one will care in 10 years, no one cares even now.
b. When a problem changes by an order of magnitude it is different problem.
c. Murphy’s law- when something can go wrong it will go wrong.
Who inspires you?
Many in their own way. But right now what Elon Musk is doing is phenomenal.
Do you have a Business Philosophy?
You should solve real world pain points and add value.
Contact links
Facebook | Website | Twitter | LinkedIn
More Info
https://www.startupfreak.com/promptcloud/
Startup Freak wishes Prashant, All the Best!
