The Singapore startup pioneer who went from sleeping at the airport to making $42m a year

In Deskera’s early years, founder and CEO Shashank Dixit slept at Singapore’s Changi Airport for days at a time just to save costs.

Capital was dry in 2008, unlike today’s investor-fuelled startup scene. It was the year Dixit registered his company in the city-state. It was also the year the global economy burst into flames.

Undeterred, Dixit went door-to-door selling his online enterprise software to customers, and got many rejections.

These same folks now welcome him with open arms. Deskera made US$42 million in revenue last year. It’s also been profitable in many of its years of existence, a rare feat for young internet firms.

Deskera is putting Singapore on the enterprise software map. Unlike massive incumbents Oracle and SAP, it is laser-focused on serving small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Asian success stories have started from SMEs,” he says, citing Alibaba and Sony as companies which prospered by first serving small businesses.

Deskera keeps its solutions affordable by offering mass market software to tackle common and complex problems that small firms face.

For US$6,600 a year, SMEs get an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which essentially integrates various business functions together so they can be easily managed. ERP is critical for businesses that manage inventory, says Dixit.

A cafe chain with two stores and a warehouse is a good example. If one store runs out of sugar, it can request more packets from the other store or the warehouse. But as the chain adds more stores, the number of paths that inventory can travel on grows exponentially. Soon, using spreadsheets to track the flow of goods becomes impossible.

That’s where Deskera comes in. Its 80,000-strong clientele today includes Starbucks and Sushi Tei.

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Dixit attributes its rapid progress to an unlikely source: Unassuming and hardworking Singaporeans, who often look down on themselves.