No More Excuses
By: Jasminder Singh Gulati
Tags: 2016, Small Business, Startup, Annual Report, Growth

(NowFloats Annual Mail, Dec 2016)

Links to the past three annual mails are here: 2013, 2014 & 2015

State of the Nation

In November of 2016, the government announced demonetization leading India towards a more cashless economy. Macroeconomics aside, this is great news for a company like NowFloats and should give us tail-winds towards of enabling a billion Indians meaningfully on the internet (via Making Small Businesses, Bigger). We have certainly seen a short-term slowdown in our revenue and customer acquisition primarily because of the sudden unavailability of cash flow in the market and the FUD around this move. While we tried to leverage this opportunity in the short term, we were unable to find willing partners as they were extremely busy making their own deeper in-roads after the announcement. (Lesson: Be ready & more agile). We should see a positive impact of this move in 2017.

State of the World

2016 kept us busy with the US presidency, Brexit and Middle East crisis (among many other). Some unexpected developments but from my perspective the world seems to be getting more polarized than ever before and that may impact the global economy. But India, with its healthy ~6% growth rate, remains on track and all its clear that most of the global action is here. It’s a great time to be in India!

NowFloats in 2016

Highlights: What we did well

Innovation: We developed an amazing new platform that will make any existing business website more discoverable and easier to manage. In fact, NowFloats is the first customer of this technology! In addition, our regular hackathons throw some earth-shattering ideas. And we ship these ‘ideas’ within in 48 hours, not to mention that many are worthy of being a start-up in itself. Having seen a fair bit of innovation & design, I can easily say we are on par with the best, globally. We must do these more often.

Investment: Many people (including the media, other start-ups, etc) see raising capital as a sign of success. While we do feel proud about it, more so because of the market conditions at the start of 2016, raising money has never been a primary goal at NowFloats. In January of 2016, we raised our Series B of investment. Many of you know this and we will soon announce this externally. Till then please keep this within the family.

Growth: I can say a lot but why don’t the numbers do the talking?

*We focused on the quality of our customers and servicing even more in 2016. We also disabled a bunch on inactive customers.

Data: One of the key things we were able to get a much stronger handle was our MIS and data. We have live MIS, accessible to the entire sales organization and to our investors. Now we are taking data-based decision along with our gut. For e.g. on

Multi-year Customers: The SME business is hard. In India, it is harder! The average small business is extremely ROI focused, is pretty price sensitive and does not trust easily. In spite of this we have not only grown but also have a fair bit of customer who renewed for multi-years. Here are just a few examples — one from Kolkata, Dr. Sita Bhat, Exide Batteries in Hyderabad and even Cannon did it.

Customer Engagement (Technology-based): Our Relationship Intelligence Agent (RIA) continued to evolve and has some rocking customer engagement numbers. For e.g. in Q3 we have seen a 10%+ growth month-on-month in active merchants. And all this, via an automated, personalized message. Our aim for RIA is to act like the human brain (scary!). In October 2016, we had about 1200 tickets. After follow-up emails were introduced, 2600 tickets were generated in November! Basically, businesses replied back to ‘RIA Ji’. We had about ~100% email open rate on these automated follow-up emails and active merchants grew by 10% in November. And 8% of all active users got prompted to update content.

Digital Desh: After a successful Digital Desh 2.0 our report was launched by Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister for IT, Govt. of India. Some of these amazing insights are here and the launch event is captured here. The Digital Desh Drive 3.0 is currently in Karnataka and is focusing on the Cashless Economy and Vinglish (Vernacular + English) Internet. The report will be out by Feb-March of 2017. Also my talk at TEDxHyderabad also went live like yesterday!

Customers Events: We got out existing customers to come us and we made a regular activity of this this. Here is one from April and one in Hyderabad. And some were more successful than others, like the one in Jaipur.

Customer Case Studies: From Dr. Narendra Gupta from Gurugram, to Dr. Thomas Paulose from Kochi, Sajeesh Kalliyath from Surgi Shoppe to name a few.

People: We are more than 580 people today. Are we a start-up? And 28 of us celebrated 2 years at NowFloats. Almost 200 attended our annual offsite in Goa — and what a party! We also put a structure on regular bi-weekly emails, Chat Pe Charcha, The NowFloats Way and other regular communication platforms. Some of our people continued to go far and beyond and it was great to see a lot of ‘unprompted leadership’ while having a lot of fun.

Key Hires: We hired a bunch of senior people in key roles. And many of our people moved into more responsible positions. A few of them got covered in the media as well. Add to this, 88 promotions and NowFloats is a destination for some solid personal growth.

Facilities & Procurement: 2016 also saw us get this department off the ground and into action. It’s not easy running one NowFloats office let alone opening 30-odd new offices in 2016!? Wow. And just take a look at our new Gurugram office. Both quantity & quality.

Readiness: While it’s both a highlight and a low light, we kicked off our internal readiness and trainings in a more structured manner in 2016. We launched NF Inside & the NF Customer Insights portals for all training materials. We will mature this in 2017 as a part of what we are calling NowFloats Shiksha.

Processes, Tools & Audits: Many of you are unaware that we have the very capable EY (Ernst & Young) as our internal and GT Grant Thornton) as our external auditors. Everything that we do (and don’t) is minutely scrutinized and this is what keeps us honest as a company. Whole we have lots to cover (better ERP, processes, tools, workflows, controls, etc) we had two successful audits and we remain one of the best run companies from a corporate governance perspective.

Awards & Recognition

Internal: We rolled out Atlas, Hercules Awards for sales

External: We were in the iSPIRT inTech50, Fantastic 14 in TechInAsia, Senior hires in Economic Times & BW, LookUp Acquisition in TechCrunch, ET, TechInAsia & YourStory, Digital Desh in Inc42 & ET, Nitin Jain in Hindu Business Line, my opinion in Mint, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad talking about Digital Desh on NDTV, CNBC & Twitter.

The Big One: Finally, the Forbes 30 under 30. Of Asia! Ronak floated into this list in 2016. While we are at this see his Tedx talk here.

Low-lights: Scope for Improvement

· Revenue diversification

· Sales efficiency and hiring (Direct)

· Better customer engagement

· Business predictability

· Revenue per local alliance partner

· Readiness content & consumption of Internal Communications

· More diverse customer case studies

· More enterprise business

· Some negative reviews on social media

· Strategic, inorganic growth

· Marketing, internal sales-focused events

Kitsune: Made with Love in India

This is a game changer. Not for our existing and the new customers we acquire but for the entire business internet. Think about this — a full stack programming framework which can make any business website more discoverable (automatically, in minutes) and managed by an app? And we not only innovated on UX/design but also wrote a UX language! This opens a new world for us, which positions us directly with some of the biggest companies & innovators, globally. Even NowFloats is the first customer of Kitsune. And very soon a lot of website developers (globally) will want to Get Kitsune !

LookUp, now floats

This is also the year we made our first acquisition. Acquiring LookUp was one thing, integrating that team and making this a success is quite another. We have already shipped our first joint offering and I think we have done a supper job of bringing in external thinking and churning out innovation from this newly acquired diversity. We wish to continue finding other such inorganic means of growth and have at least 3–4 organizations that we are evaluating at any point in time. Here is my blog on this marriage. Did you know that LookUp was funded by Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter), Vinod Khosla, Kris Gopalakrishnan & Narayan Murthy of Infosys. Here is what TechCrunch has to say.

Footprint

We are now 580+ people in 43 branches across India, over 101 partners (in India) and global partnerships in Singapore, Philippines, Dubai and Turkey.

Give before you take

Across our organization there were people who included the less fortunate into our lives. From someone who felt that the security guard’s daughter needed a geyser to the many people who choose to share their birthdays with the underprivileged to sharing the Christmas cheer. Nothing makes a company a great place to work than this. We all want to hang out with good people; it gives us meaning, a purpose and keeps us energized. If you don’t believe me, listen to this. NowFloats behaves like a family, we have friends at work who are there for us. What an honor it is for me to work at NowFloats!

NowFloats in 2017

Success a Mexican wave

All businesses are a series of Mexican waves. A bunch of people in a stadium raise their arms and then the folks next to them and so on, completing a wave around the stadium (see this). Before this is completely successful you can see multiple failed attempts. (And it’s usually the same set of crazy people who will try this). But once the first, full round of a wave goes around the stadium there is no stopping it! That’s like when the product, the customers, the partners, the employees — all different people come together to make something that is so absolutely in resonance and beautiful. This is the goal for us in NowFloats. That is wave we aspire for. And that’s why we don’t worry when a few of us try to do something and fail. Because once we complete the circle we will never stop. It’s energy with a self-sustaining source of its own.

No More Excuses: In action!

The last time we all met at Goa (Feb 2016) our theme was ‘No More Excuses’. And one of us really took this to heart. The story of Satyarth from our Delhi sales team, has left me the most inspired this year.

This is the guy who in this past week, made it to the India A Cricket Team, after scoring a blistering 502 runs last month. What is really amazing is that he approached us and requested his sales revenue target be increased. Yes, you read that right, higher revenue target than what we allocated to him. We soon realized why: because he wanted a higher incentive/cash flow to take care of his sister’s wedding. And he exceeded this increased target! But why will a 23 year old be responsible for his sister’s wedding? Because he lost both his parents last year in a span of 24 hours.

We all cannot be like Satyarth. But we can take a moment to reflect on his life, his stresses, his responsibilities, her age, his need to remain focussed on the field, his discipline. And perhaps this will make 2017 the year where we all must ask: What is our excuse??

Have a great 2017!

Jasminder Singh Gulati

Dec 2016