Social work management platform - Sagar Babber, Founder & CEO, CollaborateCloud

Connect your entire team, save time and money, streamline your workflow, and start enjoying the way you work and collaborate. These are the imperatives you find on CollaborateCloud. “It all started with an effort to improve operational efficiency of our previous business and to streamline our processes across multiple departments,” recounts SagarBabber, Founder & CEO, CollaborateCloud, during the course of a recent interaction with YourStory, over telephone and email. “We were using 15 different tools to manage different aspects of our business and it was really painful to collaborate with my entire team, vendor and clients, on all these tools. We needed something more seamless and well integrated that my entire team could login to every single day to collaborate and manage their entire work.With that in mind, we started CollaborateCloud in 2012.”Read on.

About CollaborateCloud, successes, plans going forward

CollaborateCloud is a social work management platform that allows any organisation to communicate and collaborate internally and manage their entire work. We showcased the idea and concept in an international tech conference in Ireland in October 2012, and got great feedback and response, which further fueled our aspirations.

In March 2013, we did a private beta with Titan Helios replacing an old school SAP product. Titan Helios loved the way they could communicate and collaborate with their entire team across India and the real time interaction between the stores and the management helped cultivate a more closely-knit culture within the company.Titan Helios became our first paid customer, starting June 2013, and we finally launched our public beta in August. We have had about 200+ companies across the globe signup with us, and interested to try out our product.We haven’t really started any marketing yet.

Our platform is adaptive and can be used by SMEs from any industry segment. The ability to hook up third-party apps or create apps on the fly through our app and workflow builder makes it convenient to automate and implement any business process. We estimate that about 200 million SMEs are across the globe; and, with an average of 10 users per SME, we are looking at a potential of atleast twobillion users to our platform.

 A view of the domain you operate in, as an industry thought leader

With teams andorganisations diffusing across timezones and geographies, it’s critical to have seamless communication and collaboration to have everyone within the company work towards a common goal and vision.

Companies comprise different departments and business units, which solely depend on people. It’s important these people work closely with each other, communicating and collaborating on every step to get things done. The more the people required to get a work done, the more the probability of inefficiencies and confusion.

Most SMEs out there rely on emails for their internal communication, which is very ineffective and messy. It’s more like a ping-pong game, with hundreds of messages to and fro every hour looping hundredsof people within the organisation most of whom have no clue what the whole discussion or chain is all about and are permanently distracted with repeated notifications. Spreadsheets anddocuments are used for working and organising business data, providing very limited access and zero collaboration with other people and there are hundreds of versions of these documents lying around in thousands of desktops.

Based on our research we have concluded that such a typical organisation wastes about $5000 per year per employee on productivity losses. We try to cut this down providing real time collaboration on business data and processes and a unified communication channel for effective internal communication.

Takeaways for wannabe entrepreneurs

Persistence and dedication are the keys to success. Each roadblock gets you a little closer to your goal. I strongly recommend that, before you embark onto any such journey, it is necessary to validate your idea and make sure you are solving a real problem out there. Speaking to industry leaders and people in the domain you are working in helps clarify a lot of confusion early on and helps you move forward in the right path.