10 Lessons Learned from the Decade-long Journey at FusionCharts

Pallav Nadhani is the co-founder and CEO of FusionCharts, who you may recall from a previous feature on this site. The company recently completed a decade of being in business and came out with a book on its complete journey — Not Just Another Pie In The Sky. The following article is written by him, and focuses on some key lessons learned along that journey.

1. Focus on what you are good at

At FusionCharts, we have been developing and selling interactive data visualization solutions for a decade now. We pioneered the very concept of interactive charting and have been the industry leaders in it ever since. Traditional wisdom would say we should expand into other verticals and push the pedal. But we still stick to data visualization since that’s what we know best, that’s what people know us best for, and we think there is enough room to expand further in the space. Expanding into other verticals without much of a connect is only going to spread our focus too thin – and before we know it, another player in the industry would have surpassed us at the one thing we were good at.

2. Don’t offer a product, offer a complete package

Your product might mean the world to you, but to the world it’s just another product. In essence, people don’t care what your product can do, they want to know what it can do for them.

So right from the early days at FusionCharts, we had real-life business demos on our website like sales dashboards, KPI monitors, and network monitoring dashboards that people would check out as soon as they hit the website – and then they’d go, “This is exactly what I am looking for.” Given that we were this unknown company from India, we needed to establish that connect really fast to sell to large enterprises. In addition to the demos, the complete package we offered included comprehensive docs, a product tour, and best practices documents.

3. On the internet, no knows you are small

We were able to sell to 10,000 customers including the likes of NASA and the US Army sitting in India. And, more importantly, without having a single dedicated salesperson on our ranks.

How did we do this? Quite simply, using the power of the internet. A good website created a great first impression, a first-of-its-type product with comprehensive docs and demos, and quick and reliable tech support. That was it. We didn’t have to be present at tradeshows around the world, have expensive offices in expensive cities, or have affiliations with industry bodies just to prove our credibility. The internet helped us mask how small a company we actually were.

4. Hire slow, fire fast

I was working all by myself for the first three years at FusionCharts even though I had enough money to put a team together. Of course, being a 20-year old, I didn’t know much about putting a team together and all the legalities that go along with it. I didn’t want things going wrong.