#CoRiser Of The Day 1 : Gridle - Salesforce for productivity suites

About #CoRise Experiment in April/May 2017:

- The selected 30+ #CoRisers who will proactively play some role for fellow entrepreneurs

- Starting from 1st April - we'll feature 1 #CoRiser - with their detailed interview on eChai Showcase and stuff about what kind of support are they looking for from the community

- Rest of the #CoRisers will do something proactive to help the featured #CoRiser - it could be becoming their customers, proactively connecting them with key partners or customers, becoming early adopters of their products/services, help them with key service provider recommendations, help them find right talent, giving constructive feedback for their products/services and/or give a shoutout on social media about their ventures. Also once you know the venture, you can always figure out how you can proactively help someone or play a positive role for their venture.

In case, if you are not among the first 30 #CoRisers and want to be part of this experiment, then do actively contribute for the featured #CoRisers to become the part of #CoRise Experiment.

--------

#CoRise of The Day 1 : Yash Shah, Co-Founder, Gridle

This interview is part of the interesting #CoRise Experiment.

Yash Shah is the Co-Founder of Gridle.io - a Salesforce for productivity suites. Yash did Mechanical Engineering from NIT Surat, where he also became Kairos Fellow & MITx Boot camper and then he worked as an investment Banker for a year where he understood how money works. At Gridle, he manages resources, business development and sales.

Here is an insightful and candid conversation - an eChai with Yash & Gridle team.

How did you come up with the idea of 'Gridle'?

Yash, Abhishek and Anupama, Co-founders at Gridle, have known each other for over 5 years now. In early 2013, they were working on a project, part-time. Yash was at his job in Mumbai, Abhishek was working with a startup in Ahmedabad and Anupama was running her own IT services firm in Gandhinagar when they had to use Skype, Dropbox, Email, Facebook and WhatsApp to work together. Over a period of 5 months, they realized that they are spending more time juggling between these platforms rather than getting work done. 3 more months of speaking to 200 individuals at different profiles in 33 companies belonging to 14 industries, they had identified a gap and decided to build Gridle.

What problem are you solving?

Has it ever happened to you that a colleague forgot to CC you in a mail and you lost the thread? Or, you are trying to find the attachment your client sent to you a month ago? Or, you are checking your sent folder to figure out deadlines for your team that is slacking on a project. Happens a lot, doesn't it?

Companies and their employees spend over 28 Man-hours/month because they use multiple tools to work together including Chat boxes, file-sharing tools and email clients. Gridle unifies them. Gridle is a productivity platform for work.

Gridle unifies chats, files, task, project and team management along with audio-video conferencing tools; in essence, it brings together all forms of communication possible today on the internet on one cloud based platform so our customers have just one place for their content, context and colleagues across web and mobile. Gridle is convenience. Peace of mind.

As it turns out, when you have just 1 place to go to work, productivity ends up increasing; from our case studies, it does by 11-13%.

How does it work?

The best way to genuinely try out Gridle is to sign up, invite your team-members and make a pact of communication only through Gridle for a week. Try doing that and you will be hooked on. It’s okay to be hooked on to Gridle because we have a free-forever version too and more importantly, it will end up increasing your productivity!

The other way is to get in touch with us. No matter whether you are a 2 people startup or a 200 people company. We will do a demo for you and your team, onboard you, support you and then let Gridle do it’s thing.

What is your target market?

In a way, Gridle is suitable for companies that have fluid teams and multiple projects working in mostly dynamic environment; where information silos dampen work-flow and communication is the key to faster results, and ultimately profitability.

As a vision, Gridle, with it’s scalable applications will be an ecosystem suitable for companies of all sizes. The current version however is being targeted to 15 to 500 employee strength companies in Design (Interior, architectural, web & graphic), IT (Products & services) and consultancy (Any contract basis association) verticals.

Imagine a team of 50 people behaving and working as if they are 55 (11-13% increase in productivity) with Gridle. Scale that up to a company, the size of 500 or 1000 employees. The kind of operational expenses that we are helping our target customers not incur, is game-changing.

The market is large, diverse, global and has the capacity to pay against the time and cost that we are saving. We are looking at $18B being invested into collaboration globally to grow at 21% CAGR and $1B being invested into collaboration in India to grow at 17% CAGR.

Moreover, since the technology is scalable and while we move to self-service usage, we will be able to achieve at least 7.5X growth in revenue YoY till 2020.

What is your competitive advantage?

The things that stands us apart and in process imparts most amount of value to our customers is unification of tools on our platform. While Gridle has native functionalities for all the modules stated above, it, being a scalable platform, integrates with all other cloud based tools. This, in effect, means that if you are already using something for part of your team communication, Gridle will form a single interface and bring that data within our platform as well.

Eg: If a company is using dropbox for file-sharing, Skype for video-conferencing, Lync for chat and Outlook for email & Calendar, Gridle brings together all these tools and forms one single user interface for our end users. Forget opening 4 different tabs and chatting on Lync about a file shared on Dropbox by your colleague and communicating that to your client through outlook.

How much time did it take you from conceptualization of 'your venture' to actually launching it in the market ?

We have launched a couple of times. Since conceptualization, it took us about 5 months to enter private beta. And that private beta went horribly wrong. So another 6 months to get to open alpha. That was when we scored our first paid customer as well. Then we entered into open beta and on 28th Feb, we are announcing the product open to general public.

Tell us more about your team?

Yash Shah (Co founder & Chief Executive): Did Mechanical Engineering from NIT-S where he also became Kairos Fellow & MITx Boot camper and then worked as an investment Banker for a year where he understood how money works. At Gridle, he manages resources, business development and sales.

Anupama Panchal (Co-founder & Chief of Tech): Did her Computer Science engineering from DA-IICT, Gandhinagar and owned and ran her own web-design studio for 2 years where she worked on projects from global clients and became a full-stack developer. At Gridle, she looks after the tech behind the platform.

Abhishek Doshi (Co-founder & Chief of Product): Did his graduation in planning from CEPT university and worked as a UI/UX designer with a startup for 2 years. At Gridle, he looks after the product design, roadmap and developments.

What is your technology stack?

Backend: CakePHP, Node.js & database in MySQL

Hosting: Amazon EC2 instance (AWS)

Front End: Angular.js, D3.js, CSS3, HTML5

How do you plan to market your product? What are your customer acquisition strategies?

We currently serve over 211 companies from 14 different industries hosting about 3000 teams amongst 15000 users. All of these customers are acquired through word of mouth. In fact, 78% people who signed up on Gridle invited 2 or more people to work with them without any monetary or in-kind incentive which is a phenomenal data giving insight into the scalability of the business reducing our cost of acquisition of customers.

What is the revenue model of Gridle ?

SaaS Freemium model. We currently charge $5 per member per month after a one month free trial. To put it into perspective, it is less cost than what a company might pay for that particular employee’s refreshments/month and this leads to an increase in productivity by 11-13% which is a tremendous return on investment; tangible in nature.

Gridle’s paid plan is completely free for as long as our customers want for startups, NGOs, not-for-profits and educational institutes.

What do you want to achieve from Gridle? What is your larger goal or vision?

The larger goal is to become “Salesforce” for productivity suites. Just the way you go to Salesforce when you want to do anything related to sales, any app, any product; similarly, 3 years down the line when a company decides to improve their productivity, they will think of Gridle because Gridle will have an ecosystem of applications, partners & developers that will be able to give them any app they may need in this domain.

What sort of support and feedback are you looking from the community?

The community is great as is. The greatest support they can provide is to use Gridle and get back to us with their feedback on design and the overall idea of the product. That would be of the largest help to Gridle.

You can download the iOS app here & Android App here

Also, you can use the comment section to ask any questions to Yash about his entrepreneurial journey, how he is building a global SaaS product company from Ahmedabad, his experience of working from an incubator, raising funds thru angel network and any other interesting aspects of building a venture.