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Pallav Nadhani is the co-founder and CEO of FusionCharts. He started FusionCharts at the age of 17 without any external funding. Today, FusionCharts has over 28,000 customers and 750,000 developers. His entrepreneurial journey has been covered by various magazines like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Today, Economic Times and numerous blogs and websites.
Pallav holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, UK. He has co-authored a book on combining the power of Flash and .NET called ‘Flash.NET’ in 2002 and has written several technical articles for international journals ever since.
“The primary reasons why startups fail are – building the wrong product for the market (no Product-market fit), not figuring out distribution/sales channels, and over-spending (bad unit economics) across my portfolio.”
Read on to know more about Pallav Nadhani, his entrepreneurial journey, his investment strategy, and how he bootstrapped his way to success.
Pallav Nadhani: I’m an entrepreneur first. I started building my first company at 16 – FusionCharts, which I’m still running now (for the last 18 years). While I bootstrapped FusionCharts and didn’t raise money for my venture, I realized that many other companies can make use of seed capital – which is how I started investing.
Pallav Nadhani: I was investing my personal money and didn’t raise a fund.
Pallav Nadhani: I’ve done investments across B2B Global SaaS (security, cloud telephony, agri-tech, cloud-tech, ed-tech, marketing automation), B2C India (health, e-commerce, media, mobility startup), and a couple of accelerators.
Pallav Nadhani: I do NOT invest in capital heavy companies and non-IP driven companies.
Pallav Nadhani: The primary factor I now track is market size, and LTV/CAC ratio. In addition, can that market be sold to, from India and what is the India advantage the company has.
Pallav Nadhani: Overall, I’ve done 25 investments starting 2011. Of late, I’ve slowed down a bit with just 2-3 investments per year. The companies can be headquartered anywhere.
Pallav Nadhani: The primary reasons I’ve seen are – building the wrong product for the market (no Product-market fit), not figuring out distribution/sales channels, and over-spending (bad unit economics) across my portfolio.
Pallav Nadhani: Know your market (size, problem), how are you different (better), and what’s your advantage (why you)
Pallav Nadhani: For me, global is the world. The important factors are great product, clear positioning/messaging, and a good GTM process.
Pallav Nadhani: Constantly doing things that matter to customers, and keep me creative (always learning).
Pallav Nadhani: From an investor’s perspective, know the market forces better, and add more force multipliers early to the startups I invested in.
You can follow Pallav Nadhani here.
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