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Success Story of Xender, Sharing Files Without The Expense of Mobile Data

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India is surely a developing country but still, the internet has not reached every corner of the nation. Even today, it is a part of luxury for some people to be able to use mobile data. Now, mobile phone users without the internet can transfer a file through Bluetooth easily but it also has limitations.

When sending files from an Android OS to iOS, it is not possible via Bluetooth. In this kind of crisis, a software that can help users to transfer files from one device to another without using data and also allowing transfer between different OS is absolutely a blessing.

And to meet these needs of the people, Xender was developed in 2011. Xender is a software written in languages Java and Objective-C which helps connect two smart devices and transfer files without turning on data. The application is currently available on four operating systems, Windows, iOS, Android and Tizen.

  • Xender Founder Peter Jiang

A Chinese Start-up

Xender was developed in 2011 by three developers, namely, S.S Chandwara, Lokesh Narwani, and Tingu Urf Tikiya and was founded by Peter Jiang. Apart from the main advantage of application being running without mobile data, Xender connected with computers as well. And, in the case of computers, Xender was made available for both Windows and MAC.

The main feature of the application was the personal hotspot feature that also assured high speed for the file transfer system. With Xender launching in the market, the two main problems often faced by the users were resolved. First, people didn’t need to think about the cost of data anymore and second, file transfer was made possible between dissimilar operating systems.

The obstacles

After a couple of years of launching Xender, the main competitors of the application were Zapya and SHAREit. Though Xender managed to bag 200 million users by 2015, the stock market of China slowed down during these years. The biggest impact of this sudden change in the economy of the Chinese market was suffered by the tech start-ups as they were unable to find suitable investors. Raising funds became a living nightmare for the company but they didn’t stop looking for investors.

But, after many struggles, this four-year-old start-up raised a good amount of undisclosed funding from angel investors, Linear Venture and investors of WeChat.

Expansion of the market

Xender has been launched in more than 22 countries by now but most of its active users are from Mexico, Brazil, and India. One of the biggest markets for Xender is India given those big companies like Micromax pre-install the application before selling it to the customers. India is Xender’s biggest oversea success and the largest market after China itself. The company is expected to grow exponentially as the production of smartphones is also increasing over the years.

Xender in India

By 2016, Xender announced that it has hit a 50 percent share in the market of India and along with that revealed the growth rate of users, that is, 100 percent. Xender witnessed around 170 million active users of the application blooming in the Indian market. Xender reached 500 million global users by this year and Jiang announced that their goal was to reach 800 million by the next couple of years.

The main users of Xender were from the expected metropolitan cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi. But, the application was also gaining popularity in the northern parts of India especially in the areas where internet connections were not so strong. After the next couple of years, Xender took a gigantic step by coming into a partnership with SONY India for MovieChain Project.

An offline distribution system for movies was a huge change in the business model as compared to the conventional way. But, this sudden change would have definitely increased the Indian Xender user base as transferring movies through mobile terminals without turning on data definitely sounds advantageous in every way.

Jiang, after successfully starting a joint venture with SONY India announced that he plans to expand his partnership with major movie studios around the globe and explore new ways to expand the business. By this time, Xender was used in more than 190 countries with its availability in more than thirty languages.

Paycom

Managing your Human Resources: Success Story of Paycom

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Paycom Software better known as Paycom, is an American heavyweight that deals in HR technology, focusing on completely automatic, online payroll systems. Based in Oklahoma, Paycom was the first major company to introduce a fully online payroll system and is credited as having established all the norms companies follow regarding payroll maintenance and updating. Here’s a look at how a small idea from a young entrepreneur grew to become one of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

About the Founder

Paycom was founded by Oklahoma native Chad Richison, who did his schooling from Tuttle High School, and then went on to do his degree from the University of Oklahoma in Mass between 1989 and 1993. Richison began his career in the payroll processing industry, and left it in 1998, at the age of 27 to found Paycom. Since then, he has retained his position as the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

A native Oklahoman, Chad started out as a salesman for a payroll agency before moving into human resources management. He then shifted to Colorado to work for another payroll service provider, and finally in 1998, quit his job and moved back home to found Paycom. Working at these companies gave Richison in-depth knowledge regarding the workings of the payroll industry, and that is when he came to the realization that it was the technology that was holding the sector back.

As soon as Paycom started making money, Richison turned his attention towards charity and is a notable contributor to several Oklahoma based NGOs. In 2015, Richison gave $10 million to his alma mater’s athletics program to help them build a complex, and a year later contributed $4 million more to help with the completion of the project. He is also the founder of the Green Shoe Foundation, which helps adults face and gets over traumas they experienced as kids.

Founding Paycom

Richison’s discovery that the biggest issue that plagued the payroll industry was the lack of competent storage and sorting database, which led him to found Paycom which offered those services at a minimal cost. During the company’s early days, Richison used to go from door-to-door asking people if they wanted such a service and even made thousands of phone calls trying to acquire. Hence, initially, Richison was just as much a salesman as he was the company’s CEO. Convincing naïve clients about the potential of the internet was one of the biggest challenges he faced early on, and it was a big hurdle for a twenty-seven-year-old, as per Richison.

Paycom started out as an internet-based payroll service provider catering to businesses of all kinds and has since then expanded to several domains such as HR management and employee relations management. The company went public on April 15, 2014, under the symbol PAYC on the New York Stock Exchange. The public offering was a resounding success with the company selling 6,645,000 shares and bringing in over $64.3 million. As soon as the IPO was done, Richison invested some of his own money in the company and bought himself another 52,600 shares.

As the company grew, it started hiring a lot more employees, and by 2011 had to shift to a much larger office building in Oklahoma. The same year, they launched new services such as electronic verification systems, budget tracking, and document analysis and storage systems. By 2016, the company ran out of space again and added a whopping 90,000-square-foot extension to its headquarters. Paycom also completed the construction of a third extension in the same year, expanding the office to a mammoth size of 250,000 sq. ft.

Paving the Way

By 2018, the company had run out of office space again, and hence built a fourth extension that brought its corporate space to an enormous total of 500,000 square feet. Due to the exemplary service it provides, the company has won several awards and laurels including the Service Bureau of the Year Award and has been a constant feature in the list of Oklahoma’s best workplaces, and even came first in 2016. Deloitte too listed Paycom as one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, for the last two years.

The company’s share has also grown at the same rate and now stands at $230/share, roughly 1400 times what it started out as. Such a high share value placed Paycom at number seven on IBD’s list of fifty most important stocks on the exchange.

Today, thanks to Richinson’s initiative, the economic landscape of Oklahoma has changed to include more tech-based industries, whereas it was littered with only oil and gas industries in the past. Recently, Forbes’ magazine mentioned Paycom in its list of fastest-growing American public limited companies, and it also earned a spot for itself in the Fast Tech rankings, which looks at international companies, and grades them based on their growth.

Almost twenty years after being found, the company now makes over $500 million a year, raking in $433 million in 2017, and bringing in another $566.3 million in 2018. company is now growing at over 31% and boasts of over 23,500 clients from all over the US. With an estimated net worth at the U.S. $2.1 billion, Richison is one of Oklahoma’s seven billionaire’s and is the youngest person on that list.

jugnoo

Story of Jugnoo : The Desi Uber for Autos

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Over 5 million auto-rickshaws ply in India, and only 30% of them are properly utilized. This leads to a loss not just for the rickshaw drivers, but also for people looking for some affordable means of transportation. Jugnoo was established as a means to solve this problem by helping customers make use of affordable services for their daily needs all on a single platform. Beginning as an auto-rickshaw aggregator, the company revolutionised the way rickshaw service worked in India, and have now branched out into other fields and sectors by launching services such as Meals, Jugnoo Fresh, Menus and even Jugnoo Delivery. Here’s a look at how Jugnoo grew from being a small idea that two IITian’s had to a thriving business.

The Founders

Jugnoo was founded in November 2014 by two IIT-Delhi alumni, Samar Singla and Chinmay Agarwal. Samar always dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur and had already invested in other companies before founding Jugnoo as he hails from a business family. He tried his hand at entrepreneurship with his first venture Prodigy foods and then sold it to start Click Labs. His second outing, which he founded in 2011, with Chinmay as a partner was a profitable marketing automation software that used SaaS technology. While Samar is a physicist by his education, it is business that excites him, and that is why this serial entrepreneur decided to take a risk again with Jugnoo.

Chinmay Agarwal who serves as the Chief Operations Officer at Jugnoo has a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi. Following his graduation, he won the Erasmus Mundus scholarship, and so went on to do his Joint Masters in Advanced Robotics from Ecole, France and the University of Genoa in Italy. He later switched to business, embarking on his first venture, Click Labs with Samar, where he held the position of Chief Technical Officer. At Jugnoo, he wears multiple hats, helping Samar with both the operations and product side of things.

Founding Jugnoo

Jugnoo founders
Image Source: homebusinessmag.com

In 2014, while at Chandigarh, the duo launched Jugnoo at PECFEST and gave people free rides as a part of their marketing strategy. The idea caught on, and soon the pair realised that there was untapped potential in this sector. Samar and Chinmay then began connecting drivers and customers, and soon enough Jugnoo took shape.

One of the toughest challenges they faced initially was getting the rickshaw drivers familiar with the technology they employed. This introduction wasn’t always smooth, as the drivers came from an environment wherein technology wasn’t so well integrated. Hence, it took a lot of time, effort and dedication to explain the process to them, how the layout works, and how it would help them. Convincing the drivers that such a platform would be beneficial to them wasn’t an easy task, because these weren’t people who liked the idea of change. But, the duo persisted, and soon enough, people started seeing the application as a boon that would help improve their accessibility, and that was when the company started taking off.

Leading the Way

Soon enough, Jugnoo started earning a name for itself, and the first big investment came in the form of seed funding, when the company raised USD 1 million through investors such as Junglee Flywheel, BCG Group, Rapportive, and Kirloskar Bros. It followed this up with a Series A funding and was able to raise another USD 5 million. Furthermore, recently they embarked on a Series B funding round which raked in an additional USD 10 million with their main investors being big players such as Paytm and Snow Leopard ventures.

Within the first seven months, Jugnoo had amassed over 80,000 users and was completing over 1,500 transactions a day. They earned 80% of their total revenue from auto-rickshaw deliveries and bookings and was making more than $1,500 a day.

By 2016, Jugnoo had evolved and had branched into various verticals, growing into an end-to-end solution for their customers. The app has continued to grow at over 20% a month and boasts over 5 million registered users and an auto-rickshaw fleet that is 12,000 drivers strong. Jugnoo recently added the facility of UPI payment on their app as a means to promote a cashless economy that the government is pushing. They have also launched products in the B2B market, including the likes of Tookan and Juggernaut.

Unlike other start-ups that rush towards the metros once established, Jugnoo prefers to stay in Tier-II and Tier-III cities, because 80% of India’s population resides in such cities. Today, the company is rapidly growing and employs over 1000 people, across 35 cities and successfully completes more than 50,000 transactions a day. Jugnoo does more than making money for its founders. Rather, it has a social side to it as well, as it helps people get access to affordable transportation, while also uplifting the lives of millions who depend on menial jobs for their survival.

The Smart Taxi

The Smart Taxi : India’s Premium Cab Service; ‘Travel in Style’

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There are so many companies and brands out there that businesses are forced to gain a client’s approval to provide them with their services. Since they have a wide variety of options, customers have the freedom to choose a company that best suit their needs and requirements. Gone are the days of absolute brand loyalty wherein a whole household would use one product, and one product alone. The future is about giving the clients what they need and also being courteous and polite while doing so, to improve customer experience. Delivering unique and pleasant customer experiences will help in retaining clients, and none understand this better than the new-age start-up The Smart Taxi. Here’s a look at how an ordinary middle-class man dared to dream and made his dream into a reality.

About the Founder

Dhruvam Thaker was born in Jamnagar, and shortly after his birth, his family shifted to Ahmedabad. While growing up, Dhruvam was a quiet, and an introvert boy who had a knack for mechanics and solving riddles. Being shy and apprehensive, he preferred the company of his cars and toys over other people. It was cricket that finally helped the shy Dhruvam make friends and get over his fear of interacting with people. His father is a retired government bank employee, while his mother is a housewife. He has two siblings, a brother and a sister, who have hearing and speaking disabilities.

Due to financial constraints on the home front, Dhruvam studied in a Gujarathi medium school till class 9. His interest in science led him to take up science in his 11th, and he aspired to become an engineer. The first setback he faced in life was failing his 12th-grade exams. He, therefore, used his 10th-grade results to join a diploma course in Nirma University, determined to get his life back on track.

The Smart Taxi Founder
Image Source: startupidols.com

As his love for automobiles and machines grew, so did his grades, to an extent where he came in second in his University exams. While in college, Dhruvam worked part-time jobs and did several odd jobs to make ends meet and to ease the financial strain on his family. Soon after, he got placed and joined an MNC in Bengaluru in 2008 and worked in process improvements and production engineering. In 2013, he came back to Ahemdabad and joined a job near his home. Apart from his job, Dhruvam started feeling the need to do something of his own. While this thought was always in the back of his mind, pressure from society and financial constraints prevented him from taking the leap of faith. But one day, he made his mind and quit his job without letting anyone know about it.

Founding The Smart Taxi

While working in Bengaluru, it required him to travel using taxis, and he often found taxi services to be lacking, when it came to customer experience. He realised that issues such as poor car maintenance, rude staff behaviour and late pickups plagued the taxi service industry, while he found the airline and hotel industry to be the opposite.

That is when he came up with the idea for a taxi service that provided the same hospitality extended by airlines and hotels all over the country. The idea stayed with him all the while as he moved to Ahmedabad and started his new job there. Finally, after four years of running the idea through his head, he decided to quit his job and make his idea a reality. Dhruvam chose Ahmedabad to be his company’s headquarters as he had a local advantage and knew the market there well. So, in September 2016, Dhruvam finally gave life to his long-standing idea of a luxury taxi service, and The Smart Taxi was born. He, and his brother, who is a graphic designer, quickly got to work, and created over 22 test logos, before finally choosing on their present logo.

Speeding Forward

The Smart Taxi now has a fleet of well-maintained cabs, which have all the state of the art features and installations. The taxis themselves are driven by courteous, experienced, polite and well-trained professionals. There is an elite group of people in India who don’t mind paying extra for premium service, and that is exactly what The Smart Taxi provides; exemplary service and outstanding customer experience. The Smart Taxi has several plans and offers, and rents cabs for both hourly trips and longer outstation journeys. Their cabs welcome clients with crafty speeches, play soothing music in the taxi to create a positive ambience, and even offer customers everything from water bottles to chocolates and snacks! Some of their taxis even have WiFi, cold drinks, a plethora of magazines and an Amazon Kindle to help the customer relax and enjoy their favourite book or novel.

The Smart Taxi began its journey with just one cab that Dhruvam used to drive. Since then, the company has grown and now owns a fleet of over 60 cars, including comfortable Sedans and powerful MUVs. The company has now expanded and functions in seven cities; namely, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot, Jaipur, Pune, Indore, and Bhopal, with plans to expand even further. As the company is a bootstrapped startup, they make use of online platforms, like Google and Whatsapp to run their operations. The company also has a centralized booking centre from where they delegate bookings to local taxi companies or fleet owners. At present, the booking happens only online, but Dhruvam has plans to extend this functionality to other platforms in the near future.

Dhruvam remembers how during the initial days, he ran the entire company, doing everything from driving cabs to attending calls. But throughout his struggle, he never gave up, but rather kept pushing forward hoping that things will work out eventually. And work out it did, as within two years, the company has grown in every way with two out of every three customers coming back to them and 3 out of 4 even providing them with referrals. While a long road lies ahead for Dhruvam, it is safe to say that this shy, introverted mechanical engineer will surely leave his mark in the field of taxi service!

Search Engine Land, Success Story Of A Publication Company Pioneering In The World Of Search Marketing

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The most used and the most popular search engines that have been dominating the market since the arrival of the internet are namely Yahoo! and Google. And even before Google was launched in the market, it was Yahoo! that ruled in the web search engine. But, with time many search engines came up, few of them dissolved while the rest of them are just trying hard to exist on the web. So, a lot of confusion arises regarding search engines and search marketing. To eradicate this problem from the domain of search engine, SEO and SEM permanently especially for the people who are aspiring content creators, Danny Sullivan along with Chris Sherman founded Search Engine Land in 2006.

Search Engine Land is basically a publication that has got every news, information and trendy topic related to the search engine on the website. It is a very popular platform used by content creators, search marketers and consumers from different fields as well.

Danny Sullivan

Born in 1965, Sullivan was brought up in California. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree from the University of California and started working as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register. Sullivan was intrigued by the internet and left the job as the reporter in 1995. He wanted to delve deeper into the world of search engines and hence started doing research about these engines and posted guidelines on the web which was popular as A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engine. In 1996 he became Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Watch.

Sullivan’s guide continued for years and he finally co-founded Search Engine Land in 2006. The parent company of Search Engine Land was Third Door Media and Sullivan served as the Chief Content Officer of the company from 2006 to 2017. Sullivan, after founding Search Engine Land was named as one of the 50 marketing influencers in 2015. After he retired from the company, Sullivan announced that he will be joining Google as an Advisor.

Chris Sherman

Sherman went to the University of California, San Diego and pursued his Bachelor’s degree in visual arts followed by acquiring a degree in Interactive Educational Technology from Stanford University. In 1988, Sherman was named the Vice President, Technology of Leadership Studies International followed by becoming the Executive Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. In November 2006, Sherman joined Third Door Media and in the next year, he became the Founding Editor of Search Engine Land.

Founding Search Engine Land

How many of you are confused between Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch? Search Engine Land is under the company Third Door Media which was founded by Sullivan in 2006 as a digital agency to provide services in the area of marketing technologies, SEO, SMX, and related services. On the other hand, Search Engine Watch is the company that both Sullivan and Sherman worked for co-founding Search Engine Land. Search Engine Land was launched as the product of the company, Third Media Door in the same year when it was founded.

When Sullivan become a newspaper journalist and started off his career in 1995, the Internet just started gaining popularity. So, with people around him who wanted to advertise their websites through search engines barely had any idea about how they are ranked in a search engine at all or how they can improve their rank. This motivated Sullivan to do research about it, publish on the internet about search engine guideless which ultimately led to founding his own company after a decade.

The popularity of Search Engine Land

With the arrival of this new era of digital marketing, every start-up or freelancer or the content creators needs to understand the importance of SEO and SEM. Sullivan, in one of his interviews, said that he since day 1 has preferred to emphasize SEO and its importance though there were much negative feedbacks initially. But, with the site providing ample news, suggestions, updates, and guides about SEO, SEM and more, the company is leading in the publication world for technology. It covers every aspect of the search marketing industry that one user can probably lookup for on the internet and the company also conducts events and conferences around the world.

Currently, the company is having around ten team members with its headquarters based on New England. The estimated annual revenue of the company is $4.4 million and to date there hasn’t been any funding round for Search Engine Land. The website tracks more than 1 million monthly visitors and it is ranked 52,645 among all the global websites.

pebble

Pebble : The Biggest Kickstarter success story

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Smartwatches are a new trend in today’s time, and above the trend, it is the most useful tool anyone can get. Apple smartwatch being the leader in the game is not alone, and the competition is tough with its rivals and tech giants like Samsung, Fitbit, etc. working on similar products. But before Apple or Samsung, it was Pebbles, that developed the idea of smartwatch and ruled like a boss. But getting on the top, and maintaining the position, are two different things. Despite, Pebbles is no more the leader of smartwatches, it, still, will be always be known as the pioneer in the field of smartwatch development.

Eric Migicovsky is the founder of Pebbles from the Netherlands. While studying engineering at the Delft University of Technology, he got the chance to migrate to the University of Waterloo as an exchange student. Migicovsky loved cycling but was annoyed how he had to stop for taking calls or to see the messages on his smartphone. Eventually, he came up with the idea of connecting smartphones with smartwatches and created the first model of such a smartwatch named InPulse with his friends.

Later, Migicovsky entered the Y Combinator business incubator program with his idea and was able to raise US$375,000 from angel investors including Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Though the amount was quite big, Migicovsky successfully sold watches to Blackberry with the name Pebble Technology. But after its first successful business deal, the company was not able to attract more investors.

Pebble Founder
Image Source: uwaterloo.ca

To raise more money, Migicovsky put the product on the Kickstarter website with a target to raise $100,000. The idea behind the Kickstarter was to offer a huge discount on the $150 watches on first 200 pre-orders. The target was indeed achieved, and that too, just in 2 hours, and eventually, the Kickstarter was closed at $10,266,845, the project becoming the most funded project at Kickstarter to that point. The fundraiser also got a world record for the company of the most money raised for a Kickstarter project.

In January 2013, the company partnered with Foxlink Grou and produced 85,000 watches to be shipped to the people who had ordered through the Kickstarter. The watches were connected with both Android and iOS devices through Bluetooth and could show the incoming call, a text message, notification from Facebook and Twitter as well as events on the calendar. By the end of the year, the company had shipped around 300,000 watches. In the next three months, it shipped another 100,000 units of watches. And by the end of 2014, the company had sold a total of 1 million watches successfully.

In February 2015, the company released its $199 second-generation Pebble smartwatch named Pebble Time at Kickstarter campaign. Here too, the company made another record of raising $500,000 in 17 minutes and a $1 million in 49 minutes. In 48 hours the company had already raised a $10 million, and by the closing, it raised a $20 million breaking its own previous record of raising the biggest amount of money in a Kickstarter. The same year, an 86-year-old Japanese watchmaker Citizen offered Migicovsky a $740 million for buying the company, but he turned down the offer, as he was certain of the success of Pebbles.

Despite the company was able to raise a huge amount of money, it had started to struggle financially. New rivals came up for the business, Apple being the prime threat to the success of Pebble. Migicovsky played with the design of the smartwatch and brought new technologies like tracking the health through the watch. But the software used in the watches was not that powerful and the smartwatches failed to put the impact.

The Pebble, Pebble 2, Time, Time 2, and Pebble Core are some of the smartwatch models from Pebbles. In December 2016, the Pebble’s rival company, Fitbit, acquired the company’s assets, employees, and Pebble’s intellectual property, in a total amount of $40 million.

Despite the company has been acquired by Fitbit, Pebbles will always be known as the first, and the fastest funded project in Kickstarter history.