Priyom Sarkar: We Are an Online Cloud Software and Have Clients From 100s of Cities All Over India India So Physical Location Has Not Affected Us Too Much Till Now

Priyom Sarkar of Asanify Technologies Private Limited.

Tell us about yourself?

A computer science engineer by training, I earned my MBA at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad graduating in the Dean’s list in 2010.

The first half of my career I have been a Technology Strategy consultant at PwC followed by a stint in M&A and Strategy in the latter half. Post my MBA, I helped plan the launch of Reliance’s 4G services in India.

Thereafter I spent 6 years at Viacom18, the $16 Bn global media conglomerate, gaining a deep understanding of consumers in India. I launched and scaled Viacom18’s video streaming app Voot to 100M monthly users as Head of Growth and Innovation and International Sales.

What lessons has being an entrepreneur taught you? 

The sharp vicissitudes of an entrepreneur’s life has taught me how to stay grounded. 1 client win propels you to the top of Mt Everest whereas 1 rejection hurls you down from the top of Niagara Falls.

It’s important to keep your mental calm and confidence in the face of such VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) circumstances.

If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

When I started Asanify I was juggling between the startup and some part time work. Speed is essential for a startup because you’re always fighting against depleting funds and competition. I would choose to have focussed more on getting Asanify off the ground sooner than letting it simmer in the 1st year.

A lot of entrepreneurs find it difficult to balance their work and personal lives. How have you found that?

As a husband and the father of a 3 year old daughter – I think this question is better answered by my better half. Of course entrepreneurship puts a lot of pressure on family life – especially when you’re married.

It’s important to set boundaries in terms of time so that work doesn’t seep through your time with your family.

Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?

Small business compliance continues to be a problem for small businesses in India. My father runs a small manufacturing company – which had a payroll tax compliance issue that took up 2 years to clear and took valuable time away from the business.

As a CFA and earlier as M&A head in Viacom, I understand these compliances well. I had spoken with 300+ startup and small business founders before starting up. They all said that the non-core payroll compliances and HR operations take up ~5 days a month – which is a significant loss of founder time.

Given my experience in launching and scaling Voot (a video streaming OTT app) from 0 to 100 mn monthly users in 2 years, I felt that I can be in a unique position to bring consumer app like UX to enterprise products.

Additionally my co-founder Gaurav is an experienced sales leader and launched loyalty programs and partnerships with large banks which helps us for banking integrations.

What do you think is your magic sauce? What sets you apart from the competitors?

Current SMB focussed HR portals just perform basic payroll calculations while small businesses still need to depend on external statutory compliance consultants in order to comply.

Asanify goes to the next step and provides end-to-end compliance and salary payment automation so that payroll administration and basic HR processes runs on almost auto-pilot mode. Our biggest substitute is excel. Asanify loves excel.

Our interface is excel like to enhance adoption I am using excel strategically by developing google sheet add ons that can allow easy end-to-end operations of HR/ Payroll data on G-sheet/ excel.

Additionally our technology is friendly with faulty data that seeps in on manual excel based processes and can handle the typical mistakes in data onboarding automatically resulting in a go-live time of just a few hours.

How have you found sales so far? Do you have any lessons you could pass on to other founders in the same market as you just starting out?

We grew 10X in revenues during the last year and are on track for our journey to simplify people management in small businesses around the world. We feel that sales becomes easier if we align the process around the pain points of our customers.

Instead of thinking of a paid client conversion process as sales – we think of it as a series of nudges towards unlocking value for the client.

Thus our sales team as well as product marketing functions coordinate on just nudging the prospects towards realizing how their specific objective can be solved using Asanify.

As an example if someone is struggling with any payroll compliance calculations – we try to focus on specifically how Asanify completes that in ~10 sec – instead of selling the entire end-to-end HR suite.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced so far in your business, and how did you overcome it?

Since Payroll is a centuries old function, it was hard initially to convince our first few prospects that a young startup can reliably solve the complex payroll calculations.

To solve the trust issue – we made our process transparent. Instead of a black box like process – we show step by step details of each and every calculation that happens in Asanify payroll – which gives complete peace of mind to the users.

Now that we run payroll for even publicly listed companies – of course social proof has also helped overcome the external challenge of trust.

What do you consider are the main strengths of operating your business in India and the specific state you are in over other states in India?

We are an online cloud software and have clients from 100s of cities all over India India so physical location has not affected us too much till now. That said, our head office is in Kolkata which has a huge small business community (~9 mn MSMEs – #2 in India after UP).

This helps us stay close to the customers. Additionally, cost of living in Kolkata is one of the lowest among large cities in India. Moreover the city has some of the best education institutions in the country – which helps us attract some amazing talent as we grow our business.

What (if any) are some weaknesses of operating your business within India and your state?

I would say that overall tech adoption and online recurring payment infrastructure is still immature in India for SaaS businesses.

We have built our product and processes in a very scalable way from the beginning and are now looking to expand globally in the next few months.

If you could operate your business in another state in India rather than the State you are in, which state would it be and why?

My co-founder sits out of Mumbai – so in any case we have physical presence in the West and East parts of the country.

We plan to have plan to setup additional offices down south in Chennai and Bangalore going forward primarily to help us attract engineering talent and be closer to startups operating there.

India has an incredibly diverse population. How has the affected your consumer base and business?

India is of course very large and diverse country in terms of not just language and culture but also tech adoption. So in order to scale – we have been in a constant journey to simplify the complexities of compliances, labour laws and people management for even first time users.

We focussed on fast onboarding as a core differentiator from the very beginning. Thus we boast of onboarding typically within a day (sometimes a few hours only) vis-a-vis our competition which takes weeks or even months.

We now have customers from industries ranging from tech startups to Hospitals to Manufacturing to Restaurants. Moreover our users speak 10+ languages and come from around the country.

Infrastructure is really important to businesses. How have you seen India’s infrastructure improve recently? Do you see new opportunities opening up?

India’s Online payment infrastructure is still maturing and recurring payments success rate should go up in the future.

Because of fast 4G adoption and digitization of various government services such as GST – we have seen adoption of HR digitization services has also gone up sharply.

What do you want to accomplish in the next 5 years with your business?

In the next 5 years we wish to simplify the lives of 1mn+ small business employees and their management. Running a business is hard – and people are the key to success.

We hope to simplify the people management and administration so that the GDP contribution of small businesses inch towards ~50% in the next few years for India.

And finally, if people want to get involved and learn more about your business, how should they do that?

We have not been affected on this for our line of business

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