Soft Solutions Limited

Ankit Nagar is a software engineer who discovered a frustrating problem through his wife's dental practice. She had 5,000 patients but kept hearing the same complaint: "I forgot my appointment" or "I didn't get your message." The issue wasn't that patients didn't care—it was that they weren't checking email. In India, regular people use WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and SMS. Ankit searched for existing software that could automate appointment reminders across these platforms and found nothing that fit. Calendly and similar tools were email-focused, a channel that wasn't working.

In March 2022, Ankit started building a demo himself, spending two months to create a simple proof of concept. Rather than rely on third-party messaging APIs like Twilio (which charge per message and would make a $10/month price point unprofitable), he built a custom mini-version of Twilio on his own cloud infrastructure. This infrastructure decision became core to his unit economics. Over the next seven months, he gradually expanded from a solo engineer to eight developers, adding one person every two months. He bootstrapped the entire operation from his own pocket, investing $40,000 by the time of this interview. His wife used the software to communicate with her dental patients, providing feedback but not paying—"she's giving me feedback, that's the compensation," he said.

Ankit installed the software across 20 different businesses—all friends and family—purely for feedback and data collection. Early testing revealed that shop owners were comfortable paying $10 per month (about 1,000 Indian rupees), a price point that only worked because of his custom infrastructure. He planned to launch officially in June 2023 and begin charging customers at that point. Rather than target a single vertical first, he wanted to reach all local businesses: dentists, hotels, restaurants, water parks—anyone running a small business.

Ankit's biggest insight was building custom infrastructure instead of relying on third-party APIs, allowing him to keep costs flat and offer unlimited messaging for $10/month. However, when pressed on his go-to-market strategy, he revealed a potential weakness: he planned to hire 50 sales representatives per month on a 100% commission basis with no guaranteed salary. When asked how he'd recruit salespeople for an unproven product, he said applicants would sell to their own network of 4-5 business owner friends, posting job openings on platforms like Monster.com. Questioned further, he acknowledged this looked like multi-level marketing but insisted he had a real product. He was pre-revenue at interview time and hadn't started charging even early customers, waiting instead for the "official" June launch to begin monetization.

By the time of this podcast interview (late 2022), Ankit had a team of 8 engineers, an MVP with integrations to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram, and a custom infrastructure that solved the unit economics problem. He was raising no external capital, bootstrapping entirely from his own $250,000 fund pool (of which $40,000 was spent). He was 6 months from launch and planning an aggressive sales rep hiring model targeting the Indian market. His vision was clear: make it affordable ($10/month) and easy for every shop owner in India to automate customer communication.