Curiosity is an eager confession of ignorance. Once you see something or hear a certain word for the first time, it ignites the thirst of knowledge in curious minds. You are driven to know it all about the subject and convert your lack of knowledge into an opportunity to discover new path of success for yourself and others. Shailendra Bramhvanshi, Co-founder of Techaroha, is one such curious dynamic entrepreneur who converted his lack of knowledge about Blockchain into an opportunity to take his business to the next level.
In the quest to grow their SugarCRM firm Techaroha, Shailendra along with his business partners Sagar and Umesh entered the Appathon contest by ICICI Bank and made it to the top ten finalists. During the contest, the trio heard the term Blockchain for the first time and were eager to know more. With an extensive research Shailendra and his partners took the deeper plunge in the world of Blockchain and decided to incorporate Blockchain development and solutions in their company, Techaroha.
In the following interview with Insights Success, Shailendra Bramhvanshi shares the major challenges they faced to enter the blockchain world, motivation to being an entrepreneur, and his growing curiosity about the latest technologies that has become the power asset to his success.
Read the following interview of Shailendra Bramhvanshi to know more about his dynamic entrepreneurial journey in Blockchain space.
Brief us about you and your journey since the beginning of your career.
Techaroha was founded by Sagar, Shailendra and Umesh, tech-freak passion trio. Journey of Techaroha started in Sep 2013 with an idea discussed over a beer about exploring their skills and innovative minds in making something huge. And the next fine day, we quit our jobs and founded a proprietary firm “The Missing Floor”.
We started operating from a friend’s flat and used to work majorly for offshore clients. We had a good freelance base from different countries before starting a proprietary firm. We had expertise in SugarCRM, had our names mentioned amongst Top 10 Worldwide Contributors on SugarCRM Forum.
As the business was growing, we took a small office on rent in Mumbai Suburbs in 2014. We expanded the business and started development in PHP-based web applications, mobile app development, and now in Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We hired a team of tech enthusiasts. We preferred their logic and passion over knowledge while recruiting. Techaroha is a well-known name in SugarCRM development and has clients around the world like Netmagic Solutions, NTT-Data etc.
Who has been your guide, source of inspiration, or support?
We found biographies of successful Entrepreneurs inspiring. We are highly motivated by journey of Apple Co-founder Steve Jobs and Alibaba’s Co-founder Jack Ma. Robert Kiyosaki’s ‘Rich Dad and Poor Dad’ has motivated us to stay in business over doing jobs. We three partners have a good bonding between us. Apart from business partners, we have been best friends since past seven years. We have always had each other’s back through thick and thin. There were so many ups and downs in the company, but we sorted things out together.
What do you like the most about your job? State us about your passions, mission, and goals. What acts as a motivation tool for you?
This work is just amazing. There is no one specific thing to love about this. Here we get to work with people, helping them finding business solutions. We love trying new ideas and the challenge of staying at the forefront of a changing industry which allows us to get more learning opportunities.
We are passionate about new technologies, which will help making world a better place to live with advanced technologies available to people easily. We at Techaroha, want to be the pioneer in Blockchain and AI Services.
Kindly describe in brief about your company and its services/products.
Techaroha Solutions provide a range of services in Blockchain and related technologies. Key verticals of Techaroha in Blockchain includes:
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New Cryptocurrency Development
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ICO Development
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Web and Desktop Wallet Development
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Mining Pool Setup
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Mining Farm Setup
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Hyperledger Development
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Web Application
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Angular JS and Node JS Application
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SugarCRM Development
State your major achievements and your company’s achievements under your leadership.
Techaroha was listed amongst Top 5 Finalists of Blockchain for e-Governance Grand Challenge in 2018 held by Chhattisgarh Govt. There, we presented the solution to Chhattisgarh Govt Officials and their technical team about how blockchain technology can help improve and bring transparency in government transactions.
Techaroha has also been in the top 10 finalists of ICICI bank Mobile App Development Challenge for improving mobile banking experience for users. We had presented a solution that would help users to transfer money by sending a simple SMS using mobile number and UPI gateway.
Techaroha was listed in Top 10 Most Promising Blockchain Service Providers among Start-ups in India by SiliconIndia Magazine, May 2018 Edition.
State about the most memorable and remarkable moments of your life.
The most promising moment was when our solution was selected by ICICI bank for the Grand Finale and we had to demonstrate our solution to top authorities of ICICI bank and their technology partners. It was a big deal for us then. We got media exposure and most importantly, we got to know about Blockchain Technology through one of the key persons’ speech.
Kindly tell us about the challenges you took, and the risk associated with it and how did you overcome them?
SugarCRM
Challenge with SugarCRM was that most organizations using SugarCRM were big corporates and asking them to use our services were a big challenge. We didn’t have the brand and our experience as a SugarCRM development company was zero.
To handle this, we used our earlier contacts and forums. We asked our developers to give solutions to people having SugarCRM queries on forums free-of-cost. As a result, our image in SugarCRM forums improved a lot and whenever big companies’ developers use to look out for SugarCRM queries our name and blogs appeared in top. This created an image of us as SugarCRM experts in India. After doing this for a while we approached our contacts who were using SugarCRM. Since our expertise were proven in front of their technical team it was easy to convert them. This is how we got our first big client and then there was no looking back.
Blockchain
Major challenge was identifying the need of Blockchain development. Awareness was very less in 2017. People just knew Blockchain means Bitcoin. So, it was impossible to approach clients for Blockchain services like Mining Setup, Mining Pool Setup, Coin Development, ICO Development and many things like that. So, we started extensive marketing on Google via SEO. We wrote lot of blogs, posted answers in forums, created knowledge base on our website.
Within few Days we were top on Google result for Blockchain services. We got few enquiries and then we converted first Project of Coin Development and ICO Development.
Share your point of view on the current scenario of the industry and its future.
Well, Techaorha is working on two fronts, one is SugarCRM Services and the other is Blockchain Technology.
There are a few big corporates in India which are using SugarCRM extensively. SugarCRM being opensource and full features attracts many CTOs. With the cloud based SAAS CRM software available at low cost this market is going down. It is important for small companies to convert their features and solutions into SAAS module which will help clients to reduce cost and small companies can earn profit with the volume it will generate. High size tickets will soon be a thing of past.
The future of Blockchain space is bright with more organizations incorporating the technology. Major challenge in Blockchain is awareness and its implementation from small to large organizations. Though bitcoin has made Blockchain popular, it has hardly penetrated the common live internet. Blockchain requires major investment from corporates as well as the government. And even government needs to amend law. Small industries are finding it difficult to enter Blockchain market due to high infrastructure cost and high cost of acceptability. Huge marketing is required here to create trust.
What would you advise to the budding entrepreneurs?
Patience and focus are the key strengths of any entrepreneur. On management front, explore and analyse all aspects, especially for finance management, consult an expert if require. Maintain a good CIBIL score, you never know when you need it.
Don’t try to do everything by yourself, for the sake of cost reduction. It costs a lot in the long run. Hire experts, it will help you get the quality work done at lower cost.
Please tell us about your future business plans.
Techaroha wants to be pioneer in Blockchain and AI Services. These technologies will dominate the future of IT. In Blockchain technology, Techaroha is working on a solution to eliminate the need to send the same documents such as xerox, salary slips, rent agreement, and many other things for the same purpose. We are working on Blockchain CV and Blockchain KYC which will have secured verified documents in Blockchain which can be accessed easily with the owner’s permission.
With AI, we are working on real-life problems in India and creating a team of trained developers who will be ready to take on any task on AI easily.
