How Hiver’s founders went from introverted engineers to high-quality PMF chasers

After small and flexible beginnings, Niraj Ranjan and Nitesh Nandy knew their email management company needed to go big or go home

When Greece was being battered by a debt crisis in the mid-2010s, it unexpectedly threw a Bengaluru startup into an identity crisis.

Some years earlier, Niraj Ranjan and Nitesh Nandy had built a one-of-a-kind product. It helped users sort and bunch emails on Gmail so that they could easily collaborate with their teammates. “Grex”, which is Latin for ‘flock’, combined with “It” had seemed like a cool name for the company then. They incorporated in 2011.

Everything seemed fine until the notorious financial downfall began playing out in Europe. Soon, a crop of advisors began proposing that Greece should leave the euro zone and go back to using the drachma. That idea had a nickname. Sadly for Niraj and Nitesh’s company, that nickname was Grexit.

They say it is not the crisis that determines your future but how you respond to it.

People already knew the company by that name, the majority of their customers had found them using that name for years. But sticking to it was not an option. “It was very painful. We knew this negative connotation was not just short term, there would be long term ramifications,” Nitesh says.

Which brand would want to be twinning with one of modern history’s most memorable economic collapses? So the Bengaluru-based team quickly began fixing things. “Rebranding meant losing SEO ranking for three months. We got agencies to advise us, we did diligence,” Niraj adds. They polled friends for suggestions. Everyone agreed that few words can describe collaboration better than ‘hive’.

That is how, in 2016, ‘Grexit’ was shown the door, and ‘Hiver’ got painted on the boards.

The rebrand episode is important. It reassured the founders about how adaptable the company was. If they were capable of this pivot, they would be up to the task of a bigger pivot. And there was one brewing. A more ambitious shift in their product offering.

From intuition to iteration

The company’s flexibility was born from its small beginnings.

Ever since Niraj and Nitesh were introduced to each other, they had sensed they could work together. They were both engineers. Both introverts. Both had graduated from IIT Kharagpur. Niraj ran a computer services consultancy and, based on a mutual acquaintance’s recommendation, he invited Nitesh to join. Just before that consultancy was to be acquired by a larger firm, the two decided to co-found a new company. “We were very restless. We wanted to break out and build things and didn’t wait any longer,” says Niraj.

At the time, Gmail struck them as an underutilised tool for business. Users should have a way to share emails with their colleagues, and they should be able to share labels among their team. To make sure there was a market for this, the founders went online. There were scores of how-to searches on Google for these functions but no one had built a product to solve that problem. Niraj and Nitesh started coding this original solution for email collaboration.

The first big validation came in 2012. The team had been sharing a closed beta version of the product with a few customers. One of their advisors suggested switching on pricing. They went in with minimal expectations and a low price of $1 per user but the very next day, one of their existing customers had paid for it. Demand came from the US and the EU. The company grew slowly at first and as these go, it slowly started to get momentum. A few months later it was making a monthly revenue of $30,000.

Because the team was still small, they chose a flexible iterative approach to development. Making incremental changes, and expanding the product vision a little with each version.

Around 2015, they had another hiccup. It was becoming fashionable to pronounce email dead. Gmail had no future, everyone declared, Slack was going to take over. “That feedback was coming even from savvy investors,” Niraj recalls. “They were asking ‘why are you building on Gmail’ and ‘who uses Gmail’, while all of their portfolio companies were still using it. They said there was no intrinsic value in what we were doing without going into the first principles, i.e. the value in the problem we were solving.”

It was a difficult pill to swallow. They had hoped others would be able to see the potential that they could see. But that did not deter the duo. They had the faith of their customers because the sign ups were pouring in. “Remember, the founder has a 360° view of the problem which the others don’t have.”

As we know now, Gmail lived. And the team continued iterating.

Vision vs Reality

From this point, the company’s vision began outgrowing its resources as quickly as babies outgrow clothes. The founders were growing a bit frustrated, even impatient.

“The disappointment came from the product not being able to do what the customer expected,” Niraj shares. “A prospect would walk in, they would want the product to do something and we knew it needed to do that too. Their need was very much on our roadmap but we could not build for it right then because of constraints.”

Trying to scale the product faster than they were scaling people and resources led to some instability. Amid all this, they lost a large enterprise deal. A biotech company had been interested but the founders could not win them over. “I think a more tactful sales leader would have made them convert at that point of time. We definitely lacked the skill to convince them to even start a trial with us,” Nitesh says. “Both of us were not very good at sales.” The two are surprisingly fearless about identifying their weaknesses.

In 2016, the duo realised that if they were to pivot their product, there would be more demand. There was interest in what they wanted to build but true scale seemed just out of reach. The pivot to what Hiver sells now was difficult but needed. The company decided to put more muscle behind customer service. “It was that product that helped us find PMF and with that came all the customer love,” explains Niraj.

<pivot to the current product>

This security in their strengths and belief in their product meant they scrapped, hustled and managed to get to an impressive $1 million ARR by end of 2017.

What was the strategy?

They did this by relying very heavily on inbound sales, which required little real time interfacing with customers. The two rarely stopped to think about adding an actual sales team. But it was clear now that further scale would only come by being deliberate about selling.

Flexibility alone was not going to serve them. They needed a full fledged team.

Hacking the high-quality PMF

Starting from 2017, things progressed a lot like the classic movie makeover montage. The company already had its shiny new name. Now it went in search of a sales head. The founders tried out a couple of people but none of them fit quite right. When they finally brought in Rajiv in 2018, everyone nodded in approval. They identified people to head their marketing and engineering departments.

They could dream bigger now. Niraj and Nitesh already had PMF with their earlier product, but it was a ‘low-quality PMF’ which came with limitations. The iterative process had brought them that far. From there on, the only way to really solve the problem was by going after high-quality PMF. And that would take a product shakeup.

Hiver proceeded in the direction of a multi-channel SaaS offering — including email management, shared inboxes, collaborative inboxes, chat support. The first sign of approval for some of those product changes came in early 2018. The team was able to close a financial services customer who was willing to pay $700 per month.

“The fact that a customer was using us for solving a critical problem, like running their frontline support, was a very clear signal that the PMF that we had been chasing was not too far.”

Everyone slept a lot better from that day on. That same customer pays more than $100,000 a year for using all of Hiver’s solutions. A measure of the kind of scale high-quality PMF can lead to.

Hiring and Hiver-ing

Hiver has a 160-people strong workforce now. The company has raised $27 million since 2017. None of that could have been achieved without a team. “One key indicator of whether a leader will be able to scale to 10x of where they are, is whether they can hire people who are more capable than them in at least one area. If you cannot do that, then you will certainly not scale more than 2x or 3x,” Niraj reckons.

Most of the things the founders know about hiring, they learnt by making mistakes. Nitesh thinks back to when he was interviewing people for the position of head of engineering. He went with someone who had the qualities of a leader but he had not checked if his technical skills were up to the mark. They were not. “The gap started showing up. The engineers would not respect someone who is not technically good themselves.”

All decisions in hiring must go back to one core thing, notes Niraj. “Motivation.” Why does someone want to join your team, and what do they hope to achieve in that role? Why did they leave their last job? Why do they want to take this one up? What will they do in their role in the next 3–5 years?

As a startup you may not have much financial wiggle room, but you have to at least match the industry standard to attract the talent you like, he adds. “Never ever expect a seasoned professional to take a pay cut.”

At the end of all that hard work of getting together a team is an upside. Having a room full of different personalities can spark lots of joy. Hiver’s head of sales is an extrovert, for instance. From him, the introverted founders have taken tips on how to throw parties and enjoy the finer points of a single malt.

That is not just fun, it is functional. Drawing up and achieving a roadmap requires such mingling and meeting of minds. For its ultimate goal of giving people a high level of collaboration in their inboxes, Hiver needs to make room for a high level of collaboration within its own workplace too. The founders do this by fitting a few core tenets of transparency and freedom into their culture.

Whenever they disagree, Niraj and Nitesh give each other the space to make a case for their side of the argument. There is no proceeding without consensus among the two. They also try to get feedback from the bottom up. Juniors are encouraged to speak up in town halls. “No one falls back on their authority,” Nitesh explains.

The 10-year journey has given them the gift of experience. “When we started, we wanted to build small tools to solve that large problem. But I think we understand the world a lot better now,” says Niraj from his home office, where a poster of The Beatles hangs. “We have so much more competence and knowledge, the connection between that large problem and what we build is much better. We can see more into the future a lot earlier.”

After a hurried Grexit and moments of self-doubt, the Hiver journey has entered bright new territory. As the Fab Four might have said: Here comes the sun.