FusionCharts is undoubtedly one of the most successful start-ups in India. And like any other rags to riches start-up stories, FusionChart has bootstrapped its way to success by keeping the company lean and efficient.
Today it serves 18,000 customers and 375,000 users to create animated and interactive charts for web and enterprise applications. FusionCharts serves big name clients including Google, LinkedIn, and U.S President, Barack Obama.
We spoke to Pallav Nadhani, the man who started FusionCharts at age 17, in an effort to find out more about his story as an entrepreneur. His thoughts are below:
Work hard, play hard: Pallav in a pirate hat
1. Could you briefly describe your personal entrepreneurial story?
I was born in Bhagalpur, a small town in India and then I shifted to Kolkata (a metro city) when I was almost 15. My father was running a web design business in Kolkata. I worked with my dad for a few quarters and picked up valuable lessons in client engagement, web designing, and tools of the trade. During that time, I got to meet other web designers and programmers, which helped me pick up things fast. I then came across ASPToday.com which used to pay a good amount of money for writing innovative articles. I joined them in the end.
While at ASPToday, I had to prepare charts in Microsoft Excel for my school work – and it was only after doing web design that I found these charts very boring and dull. And since I had been working with Macromedia Flash (Adobe Flash now), I started exploring how to marry that to business data to create better charts for web. After a few weeks of coding, I made an animated and interactive charting system, though it was very crude.
I wrote an article on that and it got published. I got $1,500 from the article (and another article that I subsequently wrote for ASPToday.com itself). That was my seed capital for my business, and it also marked the start of my entrepreneurial journey. Developers who read that article liked it and kept on asking for modifications and enhancements. This is when I realized that a product could be created out of it.
2. How was it to be a CEO and Founder at age 17?
For the first three years I worked alone – I did all the coding for product, built websites, wrote documentation, created marketing collaterals, did customer support and anything that was necessary to run the business. This was necessary at first, and I was learning things as I went along. Secondly I had no capital (and nobody would have trusted their money with a 17 year old). But this was crucial as it allowed me to focus on things which were most important.
Since I had to do everything, I needed to prioritize the right things. And this also helped us to learn how to run a lean operation (we’re still just over 50 people today, serving 18,000 customers and 375,000 users in 110 countries).
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