WebKul – A Successful startup, No one talks about

Started by vipin sahu (director & co-founder ) and his friend /roomate( vinay yadav ) with prakash sahu during their college days, WebKul is a successful startup.
We got an opportunity to take insides out of business and with help of this post we are trying to take you through their journey.

Interview with Vipin Sahu – Director & Co-founder at WebKul
directorsTeam Bizztor: Firstly, can you please tell us a bit about yourself and Where the things started and What motivated you to become an entrepreneur ?

Vipin: Sure my name is vipin sahu and I am director & co-founder at webkul software well its started during my college days me and my co-founder ( vinay yadav ) were close friend /roomate and prakash sahu (My brother ) was very much involved in open source development specially opensocial , joomla , magento and various open source projects mainly php driven .

Well at the start there was nothing like to be an entrepreneur or something we were more focused on building the product .What we saw that small or mid scale organization having pain of managing things so we think to solve those problem so it was kind of more like building tools for issue solving .

As we at webkul believe that humans are tool builder so am i . That motivates us a lot when we solve users problem specially small and mid scale industries where they cant afford a tech team in terms of managing as well cost .

Team Bizztor: What is WebKul all about? Which customer pain you are solving and How ?

Vipin: Kul as you may understand is takes from gurukul what we have takes from that kul is “community” to build a community / company of same like minded people have passion for web thats how we build the name “webkul”

We are solving customer pain among all the industries but mainly mid and small scale where the customer having problem to manage the tech . We provide automated solutions / product for their needs which does not require any technical expertise at customer end . Imagine in this way suppose a person running a offline shop – e.g chair shop not he wants to put his/her shop online so he / she may choose any popular open source or cloud platform Till here everything is fine .

But now suppose he want to set a marketplace within his / her shop and here we solve the problem e.g he /she can build a marketplace using our ready-made software http://marketplace.webkul.com/ we have created more than 800 products in various domain from commerce to mobile and from cms to erp and CRMS ( https://store.webkul.com/ ).

Recently we have started our cloud apps as well . As small scale and medium scale business often see this problem of managing the traffic our cloud apps are solving this pain as well http://cloudkul.com/

Team Bizztor: What was the first thing you did to get the word out about your startup and how did you measure the effectiveness of this?

Vipin: As stated earlier we were very much focused on building a community even in customers we were super focused about developer / technical products instead of services . so we chosen few platforms like joomla , magento , openerp in starting days and we started useful app for the community and thats who community understand us and we get the brand name among community .

you may check here some of our starting apps
https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/openerp-bridge.html
http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/facebook-wall-feeds
https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/marketplace.html

apart for apps building we were focused on sharing knowledge as well which we are doing everyday even today as well through our blog

http://webkul.com/blog/

webkul-rank-9

Team Bizztor: “What’s the hardest decision you’ve made so far?”

From when we started the journey from 2010 to till now i think we have takes various hard decision but i think my personal decision was super hard of not joining MNC where i got placed and starting things out with my friend /roomate and brother

Team Bizztor: What mistakes have you made thus far in this business and what have you learned?

1000’s of mistakes we did may be more and still we are doing that and learning from them . Mistakes are all ok there is no issues with them if you learn from those mistakes and fix them that really matters for us .

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Team Bizztor: As a founder, what do believe to be the end goal for this startup?

we are here to build a real business not just a co-founder driven business we are thinking in this way even when we will die things must go one with full pace and speed . Company must run by ideas and brilliant people not by hierarchy. We will keep solving the problem as we are doing in web , cloud and mobile right now .

Team Bizztor: What helps you when you doubt yourself?

There is very famous line of steve jobs – life is kind of on-off switch . Off button and its all gone everything so i never doubt on myself or my team may be i am kind of more optimistic but thats what i am . I truly believe in my team and they never let me down 🙂

office-1Team Bizztor: Finally, would you have any inspirational tips for aspiring entrepreneurs about to kickstart their startup dream?

sure 1000’s of them which i learnt from my past experiences . may be some of them are right or may be some of them are wrong as totally depends how you perceive them
Failure is all ok there is absolutely no issue but you need to do that super fast . Fail -rise , fail-rise …… . You should do the same very rapidly
Listen to yourself no one will believe in you or your idea until you dont believe it and it must be a life practice not just a little span pf startup mantra .
Build A rockstar team Great and A+ player self managed people previously i think they used to be poet , artist now a days they are designer , coder , db admin and provide them a space , liberty and openness where they can build things in their way . I think what webkul have built till now is their super team of people i feel everyday like we are working among bunch of ironmans together.
Dont be startup guy or entrepreneur untill you dont really want it dont do in this way like some people are playing the guitar so you can do it as well for sure anyone can do but here you will not win , you need to play the same guitar for 20 years with more energy and passion everyday and where most of the people fails .
Doing Job is all ok and i truly love that find the true love of what you are doing and follow that even its more fun among the likeminded team . Even i know i am working with my team and i know all of them are entrepreneurs , there is one entrepreneur who is heading openerp , one entrepreneur heading mobile another heading opencart , magento , design and so one . People think them as an employee i see them as an ENTREPRENEUR.
Bootstrap your venture as much as you can like we are 100% bootstrapped venture . Why ? there is very simple reason – people get potential by practice and in bootstrap business you get a practice of earning money and thats the key manage the team , customer resource makes you more smarter and better decision maker .

Over a time you get better and better as a practice of making money . You cant ignore money , Money is oxygen businesses must generate profit as soon as they can like we were profitable from day one .
Be A great listener- listen to your customer your team mates your critics and improve .
there are 100s of them i hope i should write a book on them 🙂 anyways people can directly communicate to me for such question over sahu.vipin@webkul.com

Team Bizztor: What does it take to start an online business nowadays? A unique innovative idea? Know-how? Long working hours? People? What is your recipe?

Yes i think there is a great opportunity as the INTERNET penetrate more in india things will get smoother more and more specially in small cities .

Execution will work here as well – india is different unlike any small country we are 2nd in population in the world and i think that is our power as well we need to build things considering scalability . People need to think of about their target domain .

Recipe get changed based on user behavior and target domain . I think when ever you start a business you should not think of its exit you must build the business for centuries .

webkul-logoTeam Bizztor: Last question for everyone – Before we let you go, where can we find you online?
You may find me on facebook twitter but mostly on my email – sahu.vipin@webkul.com i still think the best tool or app is still email 🙂
https://www.facebook.com/sahu.vipin
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