Guts, Gumption & Grit: The Four Musketeers
A tech geek, a beauty nonconformist, a sales expert and a product wonk join hands to disrupt a fossilized office space. Well, the four musketeers had guts to think the unthinkable, they had the gumption to pull off the nightmarish task, but there was something else needed for the glory. The battering during the pandemic made them discover the missing element. Here’s the gritty and untold story of Veris!
It was a savage blow. Utkarsh Jain recalls how ruthless and unrestrained the fall was. “Around 10 lakh visitors used to come to our system every day,” says the cofounder of Veris, the cloud-based visitor management system cofounded by Jain, Aastha Sharma, Vaibhav Jain and Anoop Poonia in 2016. “By March 20, 2020, the numbers crashed to 2,000,” rues the serial tech founder, who along with his maverick partners decided to take the boldest gambit of his life by starting an unconventional and riskiest venture which had been running on a 3G network of ‘Guns, Guards and Gate’ since decades.
The friends tried to take on 3G with 2G: guts and gumption. They armed themselves with technology, loaded their armour with data, AI and SaaS, and brandished their mobiles as potent weapons to disrupt the decadent office culture, which was a pain — more for the visitors and less for the stakeholders, though. Back in 2016, the army generals were supremely confident about their chances of breaching the impregnable office walls. They thought that the world is ready for ‘tap and go;’ they believed that individual identity could easily reside inside a mobile; and they were convinced that it was the right time to make the ‘credibility’ score of individuals, much like the ‘credit’ score!
The opposition, though, was unyielding. Nobody wanted to either replace Guns, Guards and Gates or question — forget disrupt — the status quo. “Sab chal raha hai (everything is going well) was the recurring reaction of the office stakeholders. From admin head to HR honchos to the sales and marketing team to the founders…everybody was happy with the state of affairs. Nobody wanted a mobile solution, nobody cared for a seamless check-in experience and nobody gave an inch to the rebels. “Tumhare cloud se business nahin hota (business doesn’t happen on your cloud); kya hoga agar cloud gayab ho gaya (what will happen if cloud disappear); tumhara software hamare gunman se better hai? (is your software better than our gunman)…there was no end to unrelenting pushback from all the quarters.
Formative struggle days, endless rejections and countless skepticism exposed a basic flaw in the approach of the young guns. “We confused the end user with the buyer of the product,” recalls Utkarsh. Both, painfully, were as different as chalk and cheese. The need to streamline the visitor management was a sigh of big relief for the visitors, but the buyer — the office — didn’t care for the need to provide the relief. “Sab chal raha tha, Sab chal raha hai, aur sab chalta rahega (everything was okay, everything is okay, and in the future, things will be okay). “Our struggle was to make them realise that this okay was not okay,” chips in Aastha Sharma, another cofounder who brought in a new level of clarity and simplicity into the SaaS world. Reason? She was an outsider, was not exposed to technology, IT, or coding, and her hefty stints at the beauty industry made her look at problems and solutions from a different lens.
Vanit, Sanity & Reality!
But Aastha too was stumped with the enormity of the problem. Veris, she points out, was looked upon as a good-to-have product. In fact, it was more of a vanity for the office owners. Aastha, however, pitched Veris as something that would bring sanity. “Veris has to be a must product,” she argued.
The to-be-must-product, however, had a small problem. Though the office guys were excessively reluctant for a tech makeover, their unwillingness had something to do with their bitter experience. The ones who did try to make office and visitor management a seamless experience were conned by some unscrupulous elements who made most of an unorganized industry which had a sea of players who sold services, but never cared to own the post-sale experience and service. The result was a loss of trust, and most of them started looking even the genuine ones like Veris with a lens of suspicion. The resistance to Veris also stemmed from the nature of its business. SaaS meant recurring payment. It meant an annual fee. The office industry, on the other hand, was used to the concept of ‘pay once and then pay nothing.’
Meanwhile, a few years later, in March 2020, Veris was paying a heavy price. And this time, there was nobody to be blamed. It was neither guns nor guards. It was neither office administration nor fly-by-night thugs. The culprit was the pandemic, which shut down everything, including offices. Work from the office shifted to work from home, and Veris was suddenly out of work! Zero visitors, no office management, and Veris’ identity now had a big question mark. The timing of the pandemic was cruel. Just 10 days before the lockdown, the cofounders had prepared the funding deck and were getting ready for investment pitches. Over the next few months, all thoughts of raising funding vanished as revenue almost fell to zero.
Forget funding, the survival of the startup was at stake. Months of negligible revenue and months of office shutdown pushed Veris back by years. “Three years of journey suddenly became zero,” says Utkarsh, who was standing at the starting line again. What was even more traumatic for the entrepreneur was the realization that he could do nothing and just painfully witness his world falling apart. The first big ‘failure’ of his life — and the cofounders had nothing to do with it — was coming after two back-to-back stunning entrepreneurial exits for Utkarsh. And when this happens, it’s natural to question oneself. “Did I make the right choice? Was the office the best place to enter? Could the outcome be different had it been coding or IT? What if the offices never open or open after years…all kinds of thoughts started to torment him.
Khul Jaa Sim-Sim
Aastha, who did her MBA in social entrepreneurship from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and has had purposeful stints at Avon and The Body Shop, too was badly shaken. The pandemic tested her conviction to the hilt. There was a big problem — entrepreneurs would call it a pain point — in streamlining office space and management, and a compelling solution was conspicuously missing. Aastha, along with her cofounders, could see the elephant in the room and they tried to make it dance. And they were successful in their attempt as their belief started paying off after the first few years of toil.
But the pandemic shattered hope, belief and confidence. The founders did all they could to survive: pumped in reserves, reduced expenses, and cut salaries to avoid layoffs. There were compelling reasons to pivot, exit the office space and look for greener pastures in the segments which were helped by the pandemic tailwinds. The friends, though, backed their conviction, which at times foundered a bit. They came up with a host of services which could solve the needs of the office owners, who now had no option but to digitize operations.
Efforts on multiple fronts prolonged the runway of Veris. The flight, though, was yet to take off. Every agonizing quarter seeded the hope of a less taxing quarter in the future. Clients assured that they would open their offices as soon as things normalized. The first wave receded, shops, malls and schools gradually started opening up, and the offices too were warming up to the idea of going back to normal schedule. Then came the second wave, which was catastrophic. “All hopes again got snuffed out,” says Aastha. Office had turned into a nightmare, and the space was for sure morphing into a graveyard. “But we continued to stay put,” she says. “We knew the tides would turn again. We just had to be in the game and not exit,” she adds.
Call it bravado, foolishness or entrepreneurship, the hope of ‘one more try,’ ‘one more attempt,’ and ‘one more day’ is what makes founders a different breed. When you just hang on, and don’t press the quit button in spite of strong temptation to do so is what brings out the grit side of an entrepreneur’s story. This is what the Veris cofounders did. They went through a trial by fire, their conviction was stirred, and their belief was shaken. But during such trying times, they conjured their grit, which helped them tide over the crisis. Finally, the guts and gumption met their third counterpart: grit. It was during the pandemic that Veris transformed from just a visitor management to a full-stack workplace experience company. “Staying firm in your conviction is hard,” says Aastha. ‘But had it been easy, everybody would have done it. Right,” asks the cofounder.
Well, what Veris has managed to do so far is indeed commendable. From sab chal raha hai to fogg chal raha hai to Veris chal raha hai…that has been the story of Veris so far.
