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Vivek Kumar and his co-founder started working on something completely different back in January 2012 in India. They had a good background in the Wi-Fi space and initially wanted to get more people online for free. Over several years, they served small hotels, helping guests provide feedback over Wi-Fi and managing their networks. But the monetization wasn't working—they were growing incrementally but not seeing a path to scale. That's when they had the crucial realization: they could set up kiosks that rely on Wi-Fi, host everything in the cloud, and collect employee feedback at scale for non-deskbound workers.

Between 2012 and 2017, Vivek and his co-founder survived on a combination of $750,000 in capital raised through convertible notes (starting at a $2M cap in 2012, rising to $5M) and low operating costs in India. "We were good cockroaches," Vivek recalls. In May 2017, John joined as co-founder to help them think bigger and move beyond the "lifestyle type business." For about a year, John explored what the business could become, eventually leading them to shift from small hotels to enterprise customers.

The breakthrough came when they went out talking to different industries. A very large logistics provider keyed them onto the problem: 80 million hourly workers in the US had no easy voice to provide sentiment about their workplace. The team discovered a massive, under-served market and figured out what they'd need to build. They launched their new offering in early 2018 with a simple pricing model: $3 per employee per month.

The early hotel business got them to ~100 customers paying around $100/month ($10k MRR), but growth was incremental and investors weren't excited. Within 3 months of launching the new enterprise offering, they hit $1,000 MRR with several hundred employees across half a dozen large organizations in warehouse logistics, fast food, retail, manufacturing, and early healthcare interest.

What worked: word-of-mouth and referral networks. John described their growth as coming from "a lot of referrals, a lot of work through networks" based in Pittsburgh and the Bay Area, plus unaffiliated customers from trade shows. The new offering had zero customer churn (though they acknowledged the sample size was small), and some mid-size customers were paying ~$1,000/month, with one much larger. They were getting ~10,000 responses per day across their platform.

What almost didn't work: runway. Three months before this interview, they nearly ran out of cash. Vivek admits "we almost died like three months ago." If their pilots hadn't converted to paying customers, there might not have been a company. John doubled down on his belief by taking a severe pay cut and nearly doubling his equity stake. With a net burn of ~$20k/month and only ~$10k MRR at the time, they were in crisis mode. They were raising a new tranche of $250k on top of the existing $750k to keep the lights on.

They're at an inflection point. While they don't have a lot of cash in the bank, Vivek believes the opportunity is better than ever. They're starting to feel demand they literally can't keep up with—customers are willing to pay, and the story is compelling enough to attract investor interest. With a team of three co-founders (one in India) plus ~7-8 full-time engineers in India, they're focused laser-sharp on the new enterprise offering. The business is still burning cash ($20k/month burn, $10k MRR), but the trajectory and customer validation suggest they've finally found something people really want.