A School Dropout Makes CRM Affordable to SMBs Through Bizsol
College dropouts becoming tech czars is not a new phenomenon in tech industry. But school dropout Amar Chakravarthi is a step ahead (or rather a step behind) in this no degree, only knowledge technical field. Amar is the founder of Bizsol,, a company that provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to help small and middle scale businesses run their day-to-day operations.Who is he?
When Amar took up a six months course after finishing his 10th grade on web designing and programming, he was so enthralled and spell bound that he never bothered to goto school again, and as a consequence faced expulsion. While academics may not have interested him, his interest in computers continued and he took some other courses on multimedia and graphics. Amar started his own company when he was supposed to give his HSC board exams! He has been a serial entrepreneur since and has given birth to five startups till date. They were Tomato, Brand Trumpet, ModelsOnly, Piazza and finally Bizsol.
After working on CRM for couple of years, Amar decided to develop his own CRM product. What inspired Amar was that small and middle scale business (SMB) never used CRM owing to immense costs. Amar took up the challenge and started developing a CRM affordable to SMB. To avoid inflating costs, Amar moved to Madurai from Chennai and hired locals in the team. Started in February 2011, Bizsol was self funded to the tune of 70 Lacs over a period of time. His success and contacts that he made in his previous startups -- over 70,000-plus domains and which serves 400 clients helped him at Bizsol.
A high quality, low price product
Bizsol is priced at Rs 3600 per year / per employee, a price quite difficult for others to offer, says Amar. Bizsol offers all the features of product within a simple plan that makes it easier for the client. The general features that Bizsol includes are Lead/Client Management, Project Management, Expense Order Management etc. The features that set Bizsol apart from others are version control, gamification & transferring the work to other staff, claims Amar. Bizsol is being used by three customers now, with shipping pending for another five.
Bizsol banks on Google advertisements for its marketing. A bootstrapped venture, Bizsol is yet to break even, but Amar is not yet looking for angel funding. Amar operates on a shoestring budget that helps him to develop a cost effective CRM/ERP. Based out of Madurai, Bizsol operates with a team of five and hires other employees as freelancers. Amar is looking out for employees based in Madurai itself, so that they can be retained for a longer period of time. Having seen a lot of ups and downs in his entrepreneurial journey, Amar credits his family for the constant support they have shown to him in all the ventures till date. His wife and sister have handled the operations of his other startups while his dad has been his financial advisor. “We aim to develop tools that can be used by the SMBs. I want Bizsol to be a household name across all the SMBs.”
