An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Set yourself to fail fast and don’t be afraid to pivot if your product or service falls flat in the market.
As part of our series about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Successful App or SaaS”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rajoshi Ghosh.
Rajoshi is a serial entrepreneur, co-founder & COO of Hasura, an SF-based software technology company. She is the founder of 5 additional startups, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and started her career as a published bioinformatics researcher in the field of genomics at the Genome Institute of Singapore. Rajoshi is an alumna of the National University of Singapore and Stanford University Graduate School of Business Ignite Global Innovations Program.
Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. What was the “Aha Moment” that led you to think of the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?
When my cofounder Tanmai Gopal and I decided to start a company, the first thing we looked at was a food delivery application, believe it or not.
We did some market research and decided it had potential, but we delayed building the tech because we expected it to take the least amount of time. So, we did everything else, and when we had sufficient confidence that it was worth getting into, we started building the application.
As we built the prototype and started adding features, we realized that we wanted to build a way of building things faster. That’s when we realized that there had to be a way to make application development easier. That triggered us to create Hasura by asking ourselves why we couldn’t build this application in a week. We weren’t sure what that would look like, but it was a problem worth trying to solve.
Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
The initial period of starting up was one of the most challenging times. We started a consulting services company, building applications for other startups and established companies. Alongside this, we were bootstrapping a platform that could be used across different products we were building for our clients.
We wanted to do it in a way where we could sustain both services and product development together. But we realized that was going to be really difficult, so one of the hardest things we had to do was make a decision to focus entirely on the product and shut down the services side of the company.
Since it was our primary revenue source, we had to go and raise funds the minute we shut it down.
We never considered giving up, but the fundraising journey was really challenging because we were based in India during that time. There were very few developer-facing companies and almost no infrastructure companies from India in 2017. The VC ecosystem for developer & infra companies was practically non-existent, and investors didn’t understand how the products would make money.
It was a tough spot to be in, but our excitement and belief in the vision of Hasura drove us to continue. Positive feedback from early users of our product made us realize the pain was worth it.
So, how are things going today?
Hasura is one of the fastest-growing GraphQL products in the world today. We have an enthusiastic developer community. We grew from 0 to 2 million downloads the first year and 2 to 100 million the second year. Last year we started at 100 million downloads and ended with 400 million.
How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?
There are key decisions you make early in your journey as founders of a startup that shape your success. We decided to be bold and have faith in our vision, to make decisions that make a product great and pave the way to becoming a large company.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting?
Early in my career, I made the mistake of misspelling the name of a potential business associate. When I arrived at their offices, I noticed they went through an effort to get my name (which is not always easy to spell or pronounce correctly) on their lobby welcome screen. Throughout the meeting, the host was polite and did not correct me when I repeatedly mispronounced their name. It was only afterward that I received an email politely calling out my mistake. How embarrassing!
Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
Always pay attention to the details, no matter how small they may be. It could cost you your first major deal. Luckily for me, all turned out well, and we had a good laugh about it later on. But it could also have easily gone the other way.
What do you think makes your company stand out?
What typically takes large-scale development teams a year to two years to build projects in Fortune 500 companies can be reduced to three to six months with Hasura. Typically, products that help you achieve crazy amounts of speed or productivity are reached by giving up a lot of control and flexibility, forcing you to stick within the boundaries of the product.
But Hasura has managed to balance speed and power with flexibility built into its code. The ability to create powerful products in a fraction of the time makes Hasura stand out.
Hasura is built with the end-user in mind and with community-led adoption. Developers like using our platform, so the adoption is more bottom-up. It’s not somebody mandating that you have to use Hasura as much as the developers have chosen to use Hasura.
Can you share a story?
A solution architect at a large healthcare provider discovered Hasura at a conference. Eventually, his team adopted Hasura and saw a massive productivity boost in their development team, building applications that generally took 2–4 years in a highly regulated environment like healthcare to under a year.
The team saw the productivity benefit, but the architect who picked Hasura kept getting promoted and taking on larger projects because his team was outperforming in terms of development speed. So not only are we increasing product development, but our champions are also creating more impact and positively advancing their careers. It’s been amazing for us to watch, and it’s a story very close to our hearts.
We’ve heard this from many startups — they’re basically outperforming their competitors because Hasura is a part of the team doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Having a personal routine outside work helps you stay anchored amidst the chaos. That really helps me a lot.
I also find it helpful to use a notebook for my daily tasks and to-do lists. It takes me away from my computer and the constant notifications coming in. It’s just a pen and paper — an old-school way of planning that enables me to take back some time and reflect on the tasks at hand.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
I can’t point to any particular person, but I’ve always had my guardian angels. They’re in the background, helping me along and giving me advice. When you least expect it, someone comes along and opens a door for you that sends you on a whole different trajectory of success.
Hearing someone else’s way of solving problems brings in that fresh perspective that you can also apply. Being able to talk to someone who’s been in your position and seeing how they navigated challenges, even if it’s not the exact way you would navigate, helps. Just knowing that someone else has been there, done that, is surprisingly comforting.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app or software currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?
Hasura has over 25,000 GitHub stars and millions of downloads on the platform. Our enthusiastic and engaged community contributes to our code and rapid growth.
When we first launched Hasura, our entire team was on Discord, and our engineers could jump in any time a developer had a question on our community forum.
Being able to get back to people very quickly on any blockers they had was super important. That really kickstarted the community for us and was our first step. I would encourage anyone trying to build a community to get started by helping people out.
The second step is constantly investing in the community and listening to them. As our community grew, users could help each other out, and we would jump in, of course, but with enough people, the community was sustaining itself.
We started monthly community calls on Zoom two years ago, held on the last Thursday of the month. It’s an informal demo-driven engineer-to-engineer forum where our community, product, and engineering teams work closely together. Our teams showcase projects they’re working on or have already launched, allowing us to be very open with the community. They hear about it firsthand and can ask questions or provide feedback.
The third way is to find the final stage of scale. We’re at step two, and that is still something for us to unlock. The next phase for us is how we will enable our community to be successful. How do we enable the community members to become advocates who can influence the folks around them? If there are members in the community who want to speak at meet-ups or engage in other ways, how can we help them? How can we empower people to do things that grow themselves and the community?
What is your monetization model?
You can use Hasura to build powerful applications entirely for free on our open-source product. In terms of monetization, when you are running Hasura in production at your company, you’re already buying into the philosophy that you want to spend your most valuable time building things that will be a differentiator for your product or your business. So you do not want to spend time writing code or building repetitive things that are not giving you a competitive edge.
Continuing with the same philosophy, when you are deploying Hasura in production, there are multiple things that you need to handle at the ops layer that are also critical because Hasura is in your critical path. One simple part is the hosted cloud, hosting and managing the ops of scaling and high availability.
When we think of our monetization model, the economics of us running it for you must be cheaper than actually running it yourself. When you’re building, that’s open source. When you’re running in production, that goes into our monetization model.
Hasura’s commercial offerings are a no-nonsense choice because the economics of doing it with Hasura is better and cheaper.
Based on your experience and success, what are the most important things one should know in order to create a very successful app or a SaaS? Please share a story or an example for each.
Set yourself to fail fast and don’t be afraid to pivot if your product or service falls flat in the market.
We first launched Hasura as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product and got great feedback from the usual developer channels. We kept iterating and building new features on the platform, but the adoption rate was less than expected.
After several months, we realized that a lot of our growth and usage was coming from an audience that did not have the ability to pay and we didn’t see a path to building a successful business.
This led us to have a deeper discussion on the kind of adoption we’d expect and the right audience that would help us build a large successful business which led us to drastically simplify and pivot our product to offer only one of all the features that we’d built, but make sure that experience was stellar and an order of magnitude better than what was possible to do with existing technology. We made the right decision as Hasura would not be the success it is today without that critical pivot.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rajoshighosh
Discord — Hasura channel: https://discord.com/invite/hasura
Hasura Blog: https://hasura.io/blog/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Rajoshi Ghosh of Hasura: 5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Successful App or SaaS was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
