Ankit Gupta
Aug 20, 2021
Companies in the Information Technology Services industry provide services such as software support, computer systems design, and data processing facilities management etc. Demand for IT services is driven by rapid technological advances, but spending depends on the health of the economy. The profitability of companies depends on technical expertise, innovative services, and effective marketing. This is where Technohertz Technologies come into play. Technohertz Technologies is a software engineering company based out of Pune, one of the major IT hubs in India. Incubated in 2017, Technohertz is fast growing across skills, people, and market landscapes. In a span of few years, the company earned the privilege of working with prominent organizations in the domains of Manufacturing, Healthcare, Banking and Finance, Consulting, and Education. Being a start-up, Technohertz proves to be a reliable, agile, and flexible tech partner to its customers with a commitment to realize their goals no matter what challenges come in the way. Read along to know more about how Technohertz plays its role in this industry:
Kindly mention in detail about your startup and its inception story.
We have delivered some breakthrough solutions in the said lines and were fortunate to gain the trust and confidence of our clients. Our cost-effective solution conceptualization and innovative approach help us in defining, designing, and developing some valuable solutions for our clients which can transform their business and operation activities exceptionally. We have automated untouched areas of a manufacturing company’s business and operation processes using our purpose-built solutions.
Our solutions are fundamentally unique in concepts and custom-built based on the problem statement. Founders – Ankit, Abhijeet, and Shailesh, have more than a decade of experience in the software field. The core team’s combined expertise and hard work are the keys to the company’s sustainable growth.
Brief us about the featured person and your journey towards starting your business.
With a Master of Business Administration educational background, I started my career with an MNC IT company and got involved in multiple roles such as Pre-sales Analyst, Business Associate, Business Analyst, and Sales Manager. As I was actively involved in business development and sales, it nurtured me with great business perception and laid hold of how to drive business growth and sales smartly. In the same company, I met with my partners, and we decided to build something which could contribute value to the industry with which we have been earning our livings.
That is when, Technohertz was incorporated in 2017 and our entrepreneur journey began with defined milestones to achieve. It was never easy for us to run the venture without funding as the entrepreneur journey brings a lot of ebb and flow. However, we got some good responses from our clients and managed to survive for four years. In the first year itself, we got associated with some renowned companies which helped us sail the ship easily.
What is the current scenario of the industry that you are catering to?
There is an immense spike in the demand and need for automated solutions in the manufacturing industry which could reduce human dependency and automate business and operation areas. Organizations are looking for custom-made or ready solutions which could help them subsist with Pandemic and lockdown. However, Organizations are very cautious about spending any amount on IT software. The sales cycle has increased a bit as organizations are willing to test the company’s capability before making a move to finalization. A lot of organizations are requesting POC so that the concept and idea could be validated before taking it to the full-fledged implementation.
Is your startup bootstrapped or are you looking for funding options?
We have been using our skin to run the company from more than 4 years and were able to survive. But as we want to grow big and have the zeal to work in some niche areas such as Robotics, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence and for that, we need backing from investors so that we could have some breakthrough solutions in these lines. We also want to have our global presence and reach to capture good market size which would only be possible when we would have the investments to execute global level operations.
How has the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic influenced your business operations?
There was a financial impact on the business as new opportunities were put on hold for an undefined duration. However, the existing clients are showing sunshine and continuing the work. There is a delay in payment but still, things are not very bad and trying to come back to the normal state. I believe that it would take more than a few months for any company to get back to its regular business as it was in the past.
As a startup, what steps are you taking to acquire new customers or retain the existing ones in these challenging times of Covid-19?
I must say that due to Covid, our customer relationship has improved and evolved a lot. The customers whose businesses are dependent on us as we are up keeping it had asked our support even in post office times, weekends, vacations, at the eleventh hour and so and we backed them in every situation. There were times when we were asked to make major changes so that their team can work from home and the monitoring can happen remotely, we stood by their side and made those changes.
For the new clients, it was hard for us to make them realize the importance of a digital solution to fight COVID, but now the clients understand it and want such solutions to be introduced in their organizations. We have gone above and beyond for our new clients and have been doing free or paid POCs based on the use cases so that the client would get enough confidence while doing investment for a full-fledged solution.
What kind of products or services does your startup offer?
We are mainly into IoT, Digitalization, and Automation of Business and Operation processes. Our solutions have given eye-opening insights and shown tremendous ROI as a value of the investment to our clients as we allow them to peek into their plant remotely, check the productivity of machines and staff, prevent downtimes, and send alerts. We also enable matrix between machine, staff, time duration and number of jobs, dynamic scenarios of production lines and their combinations to maximize the production and that’s what we take pride in.
What kind of challenges have you faced while incorporating your company?
We did not face any major challenge in incorporating a company because our business circle has people who are well-experienced entrepreneurs. Their self-experienced knowledge and guidelines helped us in every aspect of company incorporation.
Where do you envision yourself and your company to be in the long run and what are your future goals?
The kind of work we have done and are doing, I am very confident that we would be getting immense work from manufacturing industries. I look at Technohertz as one of the major IoT and AI Company, serving a great portion of global manufacturing companies with its unique IoT and AI combined solutions 3 to 4 years down the road.
Give your opinion on how to survive as a startup in these pandemic times amidst Covid-19.
Instead of an expert opinion, I would like to share my experience here. One thing which I observed amidst the pandemic is that it does not matter how much savings you have done in your business and how much revenue you generate. If the client would stop the work and you would not get new clients, then that money would not be sufficient to continue. What we did in the pandemic was that we extended our support to our clients in every aspect, at any time and we showed them that we are backing your operations so that your business would not face a big impact. Our clients valued that and did not stop the work, they paid every month more or less but the business engagement continued.
If the startup could make its’ working operation altered, based on customer need, then the client would not look out for another option. First and foremost, we should think is how our clients’ business could be saved. In some cases, where the client wanted a major transformation in the software so that the team could work from home, we did not ask the client to first confirm it as a change request and let us estimate for it. We started the work immediately and post the work completion, we informed the client of the effort we put in to achieve it. The client did not argue, and we got paid off for our efforts. My opinion is that, to survive a pandemic, we need to help our customers survive it so that our business would not be impacted.