It’s scary when you have bills to pay and don’t have the money. Fees to cough up and yet you stand hard and fast with the startup that you have set up. The pull of reality is almost impossible to fight against an idea that has yet to prove itself. Kapil Khangaonkar has paid the price of entrepreneurship and the bet he placed on his start up Clodura, is well worth it.
A problem that needs a solution
Kapil was a sales and marketing professional working with a reputable company and was doing very well. “As a salesperson we used different tools to generate leads for the company’s business,” says he.
“We had to rely on multiple tools, including sales navigator, database tools, verification tools, outreach platforms, and various other solutions to get contact numbers and other data. My team was completely fragmented, juggling multiple tools, making it extremely difficult to manage. The costs were high, and the output was not as effective as we expected,” he says.
And that is where he saw a problem that he eventually decided needed to be worked on. “If you get on sales navigator, you have a free version or a paid version. In their free version you can get just one connection at a time. And if you are ready to pay $80 per month the field is wide open to you. You can get any number of contacts and use their filters to narrow down your search contacts. You can get 10,000 contacts and can send in-mails to a maximum of 50 in a month. If you want to send to more people you have to pay more. No sales guy can ever live with just 50 contacts a month.”
Kapil clearly saw the problem. What these lead generation tools were doing was clearly not enough to help any salesperson truly. He says, “Moreover not everyone checks their social media accounts daily. So often these in-mails are ignored. But, on the other hand everyone checks their emails regularly. As a salesperson I felt that we needed a way to get people’s email ids to be able to send them whatever I wanted to communicate about my product directly. That I felt had a better chance of being viewed, rather than via in-mail.”
The problem was defined, but now the question was how to do this? Kapil took his own experience for this. Says he, “If I am a chief information officer (CIO) of a company who wants to implement SAP in his organisation, I would typically go to multiple sites such as quora, answer.com, tech target, reddit etc and search for the industry specific info that I want.
“But how would a sales guy find such a CIO? How would he know, who is looking to buy what and when?”
Lessons learnt
In 2016 Kapil felt strongly about this issue that he faced as a salesman and decided that he had to build a tool that would simplify the process. He quit his job and set about to work on his idea. “In 2016 I started with a seed funding from an investor Ajay Dubey of ₹1 crore. I thought it would take us 18 months to develop a platform that could do all that I wanted it to and expected it to be ready by 2018.” But that was when Kapil learnt his first lesson. Not everything goes as planned. In fact, in a startup, you can count on almost nothing going as per the plan.
He says, “Though we had developed a POC by 2017, we could not build the whole platform as envisaged. All the money that I had received was exhausted. I had hired 10 developers and didn’t know how I would pay their salaries. I had two options before me. We either shut down completely or fight it. I chose to fight it.”
Kapil rolled up his sleeves and started taking work from other companies to do their lead generation. “I would sit at night and provide this service to other companies in the typical old way. I was doing it manually. Making cold calls to generate leads for them. I was building data sets for companies manually and charging them to be able to fund my own company’s expenses partially.”
Challenges ahead
From the end of 2017 to the end of April 2021 was the most trying period for Kapil. Says he, “It was the biggest exam of my life. I struggled to keep up with my financial obligations, and despite some income coming in, it simply wasn’t enough. To get through those months, I had to liquidate several assets, yet by April 2021, I had hit rock bottom. I had no idea how I would pay salaries or even afford basic necessities. I was completely shattered.”
It’s really easy to put your hand up and give up. But such battles are won by those who persevere. “Despite all the problems I was dealing with, I kept on meeting investors, VCs I think I must have met about 45 or more such people. And in that devastating month when I thought I was losing the battle, Dr Aniruddha Malpani got impressed by my idea and gave us ₹3.5 crore to further refine the platform.” That came like a soothing balm to stress and strain that Kapil was going through.
At that time, though Kapil’s team had begun work on their lead generation platform the architecture was too heavy. Says Kapil, “Our platform was doing so many things in the background, it was not correct, it was too heavy. We were collecting 5TB of data and processing it daily. Our competitors were doing this with 200 developers and over $100M in funding while we were doing it with just 10 freshers. But we kept on working and innovating.
“In 2019 Abhay Nawathey joined Clodura and since he is a tech guy with great expertise at fixing things, he became my co-founder. He came in and rolled up his sleeves, jumped straight into the issues and started fixing them one by one,” says Kapil.
“We didn’t have money to throw at our problems. So, we had to innovate. We had to build a better product than our competitors. For every engineer that we had, they had 8 more experienced engineers. For every dollar we had in the bank, they $150 lying around. We had to really push our boundaries,” says Abhay.
To do this, Abhay leveraged machine learning and AI. Says Abhay “We used AI and ML to collect data on 51 million companies globally, which was a massive challenge. Over time, we processed and structured this data into a large database of companies and contacts.”
“Our vision was to create a platform that is accessible, easy to use, and empowers users with actionable insights on improving their sales process,” says Abhay.
Silver lining
Despite the difficulties that his company had to face, Kapil had some luck with sales and perhaps that is what made him more steadfast in his resolve.
“When I had a POC ready in the early days, I showed it to Harbinger, and the head of sales was so impressed by what was still work in progress that at that first meeting itself he wanted to buy it. He asked me how much it will cost per user per month. Since I was not prepared for this, I went out and spoke to my tech person. None of us were ready to sell this so we had no price in mind. But if a sale was coming, how could I refuse it simply because I haven’t worked it out. So, I went back into his cabin and told him it was $29 per user per month. I had no idea what price point was right at that time. He could have said ‘Why so high?’ or ‘This is just not worth it’. Instead, he said, ok take this, this is my personal credit card. I don’t want to wait for formalities. I want to buy it now. I didn’t know how to react.”
But did he factor in the cost of delivery of this service? “No, I did not. We discovered the price as we went along. We now charge $139 per user per month.”
What Clodura does
Since Clodura is the making of an inveterate salesperson, Kapil has built it from his own experiences. Says he, “Fundamentally we are a data-first company. While there are many database providers offering email IDs and phone numbers, our objective goes beyond that. We have built a one-stop shop for all company-related information, sourcing data from highly authenticated and verified sources. This ensures that the information is trustworthy and actionable for sales teams.
“Another key differentiator is that Clodura is built by salespeople, for salespeople. This makes it highly tailored to sales professional needs. Because of our deep sales expertise, we believe our platform adds immense value and has long-term sustainability.
What it does is automate the entire lead generation process. For example, let’s say a company selling cybersecurity solutions wants to identify potential buyers. Traditionally, they would need to buy multiple tools, manually research data, validate information, and then start outreach campaigns.
Growth, sweet growth
Given his circumstances, Kapil was very cautious in spending and saving pennies. Says he, “I think the only thing we did well consistently was being frugal with our expenses. We never got a big fancy office or splurged on secondary things. This gave us a runway to fight.”
When Dr Malpani invested in Clodura, the company was in its early stages. “By consistently incorporating customer feedback and focusing on improvement, we saw remarkable growth. This momentum attracted significant institutional investment from Bharat Innovation Fund, fuelling further expansion. Now, Clodura is experiencing phenomenal success. We’ve achieved a 700% increase in revenue this year and are projecting continued exponential growth, aiming for a substantial milestone in the coming years.”
They have large companies as customers amongst their 1,200 customers today.
Clodura has come a long way, but the fruits of its labour are just as sweet!
