Vipin Sahu graduated at summer of 2009 with electrical engineering stream and was very much involved in open source development mainly web development and already started developing plugins and modules for various open source platform during his college days, so after the college instead of joining any company for the job, Vipin started his own startup WebKul with several co-founders to escalate the very same idea.
What exactly is Webkul?
Webkul is the largest selling marketplace ( https://store.webkul.com/ ) for self created open source plugins (i.e all the plugins listed in our store are developed by team webkul ) on different open source platform including magento, prestashop, joomla, opencart, shopify ,virtuemart and openerp.
How did you come up with the idea of Webkul?
In India GURKUL means school as we were strongly involved in web related open source developed we thought we should keep the name as web gurukul or webkul thats how we put up the name also behind the name strategy was to put something unique so that people can understand it, as there were tons of infos, infotech infosystem kind of domain name or companies there thats why we choose something new and unique so get more attraction. As I explained earlier we were heavily involved in web development during our college days so we start exploring platforms like wordpress, joomla, magento and saw that still frameworks lacks in many area, so to fill those gap we started developing plugins. just an example – as magento is a brilliant system for e-commerce platform but they are lacking in multi vendor marketplace solution, we build that out and right now we are the best marketplace plugin developer in the world (https://store.webkul.com/Magento-Extensions/Magento-Marketplace.html)
Could you walk us through the process of starting up Webkul?
As me and Vinay Yadav were the room mates at our college time (2005-2009) we are very much excited with open source as we have learned a lot from open source projects and tools so during our second year (2006) we started developing tiny applications and put them up as free with ,source code open. As we think college is THE BEST time for the entrepreneurship when we had nothing to loose and everything to gain. So we started constantly developing open source tiny apps and developer blogs as our selves we are the developers. Soon we getting good response from the other users from blog and plugins. So at 2010 we registered the company with three co-founders now we have 40+ people and still hiring.
Could you walk us through the process of developing Webkul to date?
Sure in start we were just two people living in single room flat to cut the expenses of ours as we are a bootstrapping company so we never borrowed any money from any VC not even from any relatives or parents we started things by our own as explained earlier we were involved in plug-ins development from college days so we extend the very same area but in more platform initially we were building for joomla and Facebook, then we started for magento , prestashop , opencart , openerp , shopify , wordpress , x-cart and woocommerce.
Did you find anything particularly difficult during the startup?
In india or I hope in other developing countries too, job is the biggest issue every family parent expect a decent job after graduation as we all were placed in multi-national companies in India so we quit the job and started the journey that was pretty scary at that time because at that time in month we were not earning more than 300-400 USD, as a bootstrap company we need to regulate our budget as per the revenue so that was initial days challenge.
When we hired a intern fellow we don’t have computer for him so I used to sleep in day time so that he can work in day and I work at night.
Hiring right people and regular and increase profit was main challenge as a bootstrap company you need to regulate the profit or revenue everyday else you will not survive, profit is oxygen for any business and if you don’t make it you will die soon.
What was the initial response you received from the market?
It was really good, because we were creating the modules and apps for already established market and user base we just figured it out what functionality is lacking in that particular platform and we start creating applications to bridge the gap also we are developers so we keep writing good post on our blog http://webkul.com/blog/ to help the community so initial response was very good.
What is your strategy against your competition?
Yes there are tons of competitors and we consider as a good part that push us to keep innovating and keep upgrading everything example we are developing plugins for open source platforms kind of developers tools. So any one can read our code.
If code is not scalable no one will purchase it or people will not use it so we need to check again and again about everything code scalability, brilliant customer support, quick issue fixes better team management.
Our strategy against competition is to improve our selves if we are lacking some where.
Have you developed any industry insights that you could share?
Its constantly growing industry as now a days people are using frameworks or cms instead of scratch development , people wants readymade solutions and where they have access to alter things thats why wordpress almost contains (9%), joomla almost contains (3%) and magento contains 1% of global Internet website space and this data is growing everyday and all of them are open source. So opportunity are knocking everyday but as a market leader you need to understand the customer need, as a developer many times developer does not understand customer requirement and that is the big part you need to see the world through your customer eyes and then mold it in developer way and to solve the real world problem.
What is the future of the industry in your opinion?
Well from my opinion future of any open technologies is very bright where you have tons of developers and thinkers not just a single owner or corporation.
Also in open source research part implementation is enormous and adaptability of the new technologies is ground braking.
In near future people will surely use more and more platform and cms’s as its easy to setup and easy to manage with almost free or minimal cost with latest technology adaption.
Were there anything that disappointed you initially?
There were many things and if you are starting a company those kind of hindrance will come for sure every day from our point of view in starting days hiring was quite challenging to take the interview of 100’s of people and sort them out was really tough task I guess rest of the issues were like normal routine issues.
What do you think about being an entrepreneur in Asia?
Well its harder and easier in both way:
harder – still i think people in asia mainly SME’s and medium scale industries dont rely much on software so to sell them software application is really hard in asia mainly when we started right now we are getting good response from asia as well for software business I guess USA and Europe still top the chart so in this way its harder
easier – resource cost is less like to setup things including office , team and other. so you can setup things easily.
What are some personal principles or personal values that guide you and your career?
Personal values which I learned and trying to follow is to ” improve things ” do what you love if you don’t love it what you are doing soon you will get tired of so you must have a lot of passion of what you doing and I guess that is most important part for my personal uplift, I am just loving every bit of it what I am doing.
What is your definition of success?
Success is a kind of very ambiguous term – we don’t assume money generation solely as a success. Our definition of success is happiness with money generation . So we do always try to keep our customer and team happy as much as possible and in this way we generate money as well to be true you must generate profit either you are self funded or bootstrap company.
Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur?
We just wanted to do what we love and what we realised to do things in best way to start creating things in your own way, we always wanted to build things so that other people can use those tools and for us its divine when people (25000+) customers are using our product.
Any parting words of wisdom for entrepreneurs out there?
There are a lots i would like to share some of my personal views for my entrepreneur journey every company has a story so always try to build a story, stories may be your customer support, wide range of product, brilliant technology or anything but always try to build. Also there is no rule to starting the company you just need remove obstacles which you facing in your vision .my company is my first priority and every one should have. Be honest to your selves not because starting a company is pretty fancy in society but for your happiness always try to keep happy to your customers are yours team mates and at last always be ethical, ethics is really a big term, you need to be ethical in every way for the long run of business.
The post Vipin Sahu, Co-Founder of WebKul appeared first on The Asian Entrepreneur.