Rahul Am of Dial2Verify on how Bangalore Traffic Helped Him Launch His Startup

We all have small and big problems in daily life. What makes one different is the reaction to the problem – ignoring it, cribbing about it to the world’s end or pulling up sleeves to find a solution. Our dear rodinhooder Rahul Am,  co-founder & CTO Dial2Verify belongs to the last category. When his first Startup BookMyCloud failed, he picked up the lessons and ventured into Dial2Verify, with a never dying entrepreneurial spirit.  Read on to find out why his Startup shut the shop, and why a technical person is the best sales person for a product.

1.  How did you get the idea for Dial2Verify?  In 5 sentences, tell us what Dial2Verify can do to your customers.

For Job reasons I had to move to Bangalore.But the traffic here…huh….Frustrated with traffic, I decided to launch a carpooling portal. Being aware that none would actually go for carpooling with strangers, I was bugging around finding an option to validate user identity. SMS OTP was an obvious solution in mind, But I wanted to save on every possible penny. There an idea of missed call based authentication was born, We created a prototype and it worked well. The next thought was, why not avail this as a service to other start-ups.

Dial2verify ( Dial2verify.com ) is a Missed Call Telephony Platform, One can leverage its features to implement user identity verification ( as an alternative to OTP & Captcha ), Missed call for voting / polls, Missed call to support ticket etc variety of missed call driven applications.

 2.  Apart from having API to integrate with existing business, what else is Dial2Verify coming up with?

We are emphasizing more on value creation around the Missed Call Framework we have built up, For instance we recently launched ‘customer telco push’ feature, which pushes customer’s telco provider details ( state, provider, phone type etc ) along with DND status. Such information can be used by a business for optimizing campaigns ( viz, avoiding sms to DND listed customers,  Intelligent outbound dialing rules creation etc etc )

Apart from above, We are exploring more opportunities around Cloud Telephony Space and working on some of the proprietary algorithms to help, cut down the cost of calling ( within india ) by up to 80%. ( Umm, You might feel, why are these guys wasting time over market, which is already saturated by tons of providers and is dominated by some of the giants….Hmm, But As it was a story with Dial2verify, We are focusing more on re-touching the Ideas instead of re-inventing the wheel ….

3. How easy has it been convincing clients of the potential advantages of using your plug-n-play  plug in?

Umm, This is one of the biggest challenges for (newer) technology startups. It was definitely a difficult task to convince businesses, who were already relying on technology ‘X’, to scrap down it and adapt to technology ‘Y’.

In fact Plug-N-play plug-in helped us a lot in kick starting our meetups / discussions. We had a strong point with us, to project how easy and cost effective it was to quickly migrate to Dial2verify framework.

 4. What are the challenges you faced while creating this product? Share your key learnings with us.

Biggest challenges we faced throughout were,

1.  Building a Reliable and controlled platform:
The very first version of the Dial2verify API was built around third party telephony solutions and hence we were pretty much dependent on their platform stability. The service used to be down quite often and the worst nightmare was faced, when our startup was featured on NextBigWhat and on the same day there was a fiber cut at our service provider end….Dial2verify faced its biggest down time of about 12 hours…and we were help less. There was hardly any cooperation from provider end and even they did not have any backup plans for their services. That made us look back at our platform again.

We realized the importance of Redundancy, Importance of customer support and many other factors. Within a month, we came up with our proprietary solutions. Now we have a better control over our platform and its stability.

2. Scaling up:

To some extent, scaling up was also a challenge. For B2B startups, service utilization rates are exponential, What I mean is, 
Suppose Website ABC.com plans to adapt Dial2Verify service, and ABC.Com triggers approx 10K API Requests a day, then acquiring even 2-3 such customers, would raise a bar to have your infrastructure strong, capable, reliable and scalable enough, to handle 30K requests per day. Now think when API User count grows to 100s or 1000s.

We almost had to re-structure our  backend system to make it easily scalable,  Now the system is capable of adding new processing nodes, without even a single line of code change.

3. Convincing client:

As stated above, convincing clients is one of the biggest challenges that almost every new startup faces. 

5. As a geek, how do you find the other aspects of Startup? Do you involve in any other aspects like Sales/ Customer Support? 

It’s time to reveal the secret it seems 😉
Before Dial2verify, I launched couple of startups, some of which succeeded and other’s had to see the shut door. One of the startup was in cloud storage space ( BookMyCloud.com ) which saw really a great traction. Within a month or two, it witnessed 20k + registered users and was rocking over different review sites and It was one of my ‘One Man’ Start-ups. I was responsible for Coding, Designing, Customer Support, Sales, Technology enablement and funding as well 😉

Yes, I do majorly look after Technology And Support, but being a small startup, you are bound to try fitting yourself into different shoes. I personally believe a Technical person can be a better sales person. Unless you thoroughly understand your product, You can’t sell it.

6. Tell us about the smaller startups you did before Dial2Verify. What lessons have they taught you, that helped in this startup?

My Interest and career into Entrepreneurship world started with assisting small web application projects.Post which, I built up my own biz portal and started serving ‘Logistics clients’ in building their web and data filing applications.

In Parallel, I kept on exploring different ideas and built up series of small projects ( Right from web conferencing solutions to sms apis, to code generator tools, to consumer softwares ( billing / personal finance / sms messengers / chat robots / AI Developments / Text to speech / 2D to 3D animations / 3D Animations etc etc…almost everything which buzzed my brain. ) After joining MNC, I was tagged to BI Role and so I also tried replicating data warehousing tools 😉

But till now, everything was out of my interest and hunger to code. Whatever applications I created were limited to my personal use, I was still not much aware of start-ups and business opportunities. In 2011-2012, Cloud storage was getting Big highlight, I thought of giving it a try and launched BookMyCloud.com – Free Cloud Storage & Management With Unlimited Space.Obviously those ‘Unlimited Space’ & ‘Cloud Editing’ words caught attention of western startup review portals, sooner I got much response to it.Merely 2 months down the time, BookMyCloud witnessed 20k+ users,and then somewhere around 2012 end, BookMyCloud was off the web….

Now, You might be thinking, everything was going great,then why sudden shut down?Yes, That’s where I got a lot of lessons.

Most influential reasons for failure were,
No Business Plan, Limited Knowledge Of Technology, Failure in Scaling Up, Lack of funding (wrong selection of business line), Ignorance of Legal Aspects.

Book my cloud was launched out of curiosity and with little knowledge of  the technology. I started it on a shared server ( With extremely constrained budgets ), and soon was banned due to large bandwidth flood.Over night, I decided to move it to VPS ( Virtual Private Server ).In.the mean time, I had no option but to keep BookMyCloud under  ‘Under Maintenance’ flag.There was no support system to receive customer inquiries and customers started feeling anxious.Soon, Review portals too updated negative remarks about BookMyCloud and slowly things started getting worse .I had no option but to migrate entire data ( in terabytes ) to the Dedicated Servers.In the mean time, a lot of individuals and educational systems shown an interest in BookMyCloud services….It was daily, a day & night duty for me to look after server and user queries.Few of the users literally exploited Unlimited storage facility by uploading Pirated And Pornographic materials….On and on, it was becoming a hectic task to manage on own.But, I hardly had any budget to hire anyone.Dedicated server host too suspended my service once, on receiving legal notice/s for keeping pirated softwares on their machines.I had only option, to develop a shell program ( kind of a firewall program ) to block pirated / pornographic uploads ( by matching file patterns ).I was running out of money, time, technology…..and so finally I decided to halt at some point of time.So, with a notice of 2 months period, I started winding up BookMyCloud.With this BookMyCloud remained just a Story, But the the failure left behind a lot of learning….

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Saraswathi Pulluru is the editor and partner at TheTechPanda.com, digital media catering to Indian Startups & Entrepreneurship. While maintaining a day job and a busy home, her mind is nothing short of a jungle. A strong believer in karma – Do good or bad, and it will come back to you, many-fold.