DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

Headquartered in Gurgaon (India), iYogi provides computer repair and technical support for consumer and small businesses in United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Vishal Dhar, President, Marketing and Co-founder, spoke to Manavi Siddhanti about how the startup project landed a Rs14-crore funding from Canaan Partners in 2007

Vishal Dhar President, Marketing and Co-founder

How confident was Iyogi of landing funding from Canaan? What were your thoughts when you first approached them?
iYogi’s business model is a very simple one. Someone has a technology problem, iYogi solves it and gets paid. Given the growth of the technology market globally and multiple devices proliferating our homes and offices, the support market is still catching up. It is a vastly underserviced market.

So, we were sure that we had a business which had large growth potential.

Before we approached venture financing, we built a scalable delivery platform, invested in a start-up team and demonstrated that we could deliver on high customer satisfaction standards.

Sure, you had a unique selling point. But how did you pitch it?
In our pilot phase, we had demonstrated that we could aquire customers efficiently through online marketing and provide them a high standard of tech support, to engender their loyalty. This, combined with the availability of a large talent pool that could be harnessed across multiple geographies through our global services delivery platform, demonstrated our ability to scale the business rapidly to make good of the large opportunity.

I would say it was a combination of market potential and our unique model for building a direct consumer services brand from India. The tech support market is rapidly growing and is expected to touch $11.8 billion in the US alone by 2015 according to a recent research report by Parks Associates.

How many meetings or what kind of time did it take for Canaan to green-signal the funding?
We had a good business proposition and had been successfully running a pilot for a year with resolution rates which were way ahead of the industry average.

Canaan understood the marketing opportunity and quickly engaged with us to understand the building blocks on how we planned to execute on our plan.

The Canaan team has several accomplished enterpreneurs with varied competencies that helped in evaluating all aspects of our business and we came out richer with their perspectives.

What would you advise budding entrepreneurs or those seeking venture funds? What are the must-haves in a proposal while approaching a VC?
It is important to be passionate about the idea, which  must be backed with a realisable market opportunity and a solid execution plan. The team must demonstrate the execution capabilities to build on the plan and harness the opportunity.

How important is it to have worked in the same industry before seeking funds for launching a company?
I believe that having worked in the same industry always gives you the comfort of understanding the domain. However, if you are not from the industry, you could be bring in a fresh perspective to create a distruptive approach.

My partner Uday Challu had setup a tech support business many years ago, whose time we felt had finally arrived with the ability to diagnose and resolve problems over the Internet. I had experience in marketing.

Both our past experiences combined with the start-up team that had deep experience in every aspect of the tech support business helped make our idea into a successful reality.

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