➡️ Summary ➡️

In this conversation, Siddharth Sehgal, founder of 360 Degree Cloud, shares his journey of building a successful business focused on providing communication solutions through the AppExchange. He discusses the evolution of their flagship product, the 360 SMS App, and how they navigated the challenges of balancing consulting services with product development. Siddharth emphasizes the importance of customer feedback in product development, the strategies used to penetrate the enterprise market, and the significance of building a strong partner ecosystem. He also touches on the integration of AI into their products and offers valuable advice for early-stage founders.

➡️ Guest ➡️

Siddharth Sehgal https://www.linkedin.com/in/sid360degreecloud/

360 Degree Cloud https://360degreecloud.com/

➡️ Takeaways ➡️

Siddharth founded 360 Degree Cloud to serve SMBs and mid-market clients.

The 360 SMS App evolved from a need for better communication solutions.

60% of revenue comes from the AppExchange, 40% from consulting.

Listening to customer feedback is crucial for product development.

The company is 100% bootstrapped, relying on consulting revenue for growth.

Dedicated teams are essential for successful product development.

Salesforce events are a key lead generation strategy.

Building a partner ecosystem has been beneficial for growth.

AI integration is being approached through multiple channels.

Founders should focus on revenue generation and customer needs.

➡️ Youtube ➡️

Watch this episode on our Youtube channel

➡️ Keywords ➡️

360 Degree Cloud, Siddharth Sehgal, AppExchange, SMS App, Salesforce, Consulting, AI Integration, Marketing Strategies, Partner Ecosystem, Startup Advice

➡️ Hashtags ➡️

#salesforce #isv #appexchange #smb #sms

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Today I'm joined by Siddharth Sehgal of 360 Degree Cloud. Welcome to the show, Siddharth.

Thanks Scott thanks a lot for having me here.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to ⁓ getting into hearing more about your story, how you founded 360 degree cloud, and getting into it. So let's just start. So take me through the process of ⁓ founding the company. And I know you have today a number of apps. Maybe we can jump into one of the first apps that launched your business on the App Exchange.

Yeah, interesting story. So I started my career with a big SI partner based out of India in 2009, eight, nine, this kind of time Worked with them for three years and then promised myself hey-I can do something on these lines and obviously these big giants they are all there for enterprise but who is looking after the SMB? So I thought that was a good sweet spot and we started as a pure consulting company

Mm-hmm.

for Salesforce and targeted the SMB and the mid market and that's where 360 degree cloud was born in 2011-12 time period. Then while we were working for multiple clients doing a lot of stuff on Salesforce, we saw a big white gap. Our label in the app exchange, we saw there was no great communication app and we thought, yeah, that is something which excites us. That's an area we would love to go. I'm always in love with horizontal solution and.

Mm-hmm.

the communication was required by everyone. So that's where we thought of going into the app store with 360 SMS app. And that's where we moved into product space also. So now we do both consulting and product.

Very cool. OK, so would you say today the majority of your revenue is coming from the consulting or from the app exchange?

So our revenue 60 % is from the app exchange and 40 % is from consulting.

Oh, very cool. Okay, so that's great to have your hand in both honey pots in case, you know, one sees a wave while the other sees a valley, right?

Right and that also helps us in growing like sometimes you know, it's economy something something is up something something is down But having two buckets help us out So I treat them as two different end companies or which stays a common owner or common founder is how I always treat them So that we can get both best of both worlds

Mm-hmm.

Great. OK, and like I said, I know today you have a number of apps. What was the first app that you launched on the App Exchange?

⁓ We lost 360 much duplicates and unfortunately that no longer be served, but there was a huge amount of learning we got from that product and all. We understood the whole app exchange ecosystem. We understand what level of coding requires, how complicated the orgs were. And we tried our hands with that and then moved to 360 SMS app, which we are working to date.

Okay.

Yes, I think a lot of people listening probably are familiar with 360 SMS. It's one of the first, if not the first, SMS application I think on the AppExchange.

Yes, we are almost there. I think so we were the second or the third one on the app exchange ⁓ when we launched the C60 SMS app did the classic mistake launched with an SMS channel and named ourselves as C60 SMS app. And now we have grown into a complete communication suit. We have like multiple channels. We do SMS, we do MMS, we do WhatsApp, we do calling, email, then we do global channels like Line for Japan, KakaoTalk for South Korea, WeChat for China.

wow.

Viber for Eastern Europe, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, Ringless Voicemails. So we have lot of channels now.

Well, I think you're in good company in terms of ⁓ naming a company after a pigeonholed product, maybe, because Salesforce themselves have fell into that trap too, right?

Yes, so I always say that I did the...

Yes, I fall in the same trap of saying, I can feel them now.

Yeah.

So ⁓ one thing, another thing that's interesting about building an SMS is there's no native functionality in Apex to send SMS. So I'm guessing that this product is, ⁓ has at least some hybrid component to it. ⁓ I'm sure you have a lot of on-core or on-platform code and technology, but I'm guessing you also have ⁓ a third party server that either is under your control or another company's control for.

managing the SMS communication and some of the other channels that you mentioned, is that right?

Yeah, that's partially correct because we are the only ones in the entire ecosystem who is native to Salesforce, which means I don't have a server. use Salesforce as my server. So that gets me in front of all the legality. So legal loves me. So I'm loved by healthcare. I can say by financial institutes because there's no server. My competitors, they have a server and then they have to tell them how the service secure. When you don't have a server.

Mm.

then you don't have to worry about data and the security of it. So that's had the unique proposition of our application. There were totally built on Salesforce. And then yeah, we use APIs to talk to lot of aggregators. We have 27 in the back end.

Very cool. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, so as long as you you partner you keep as much on platform as you can the things that you can't you partnering with vendors that also are very large organizations perhaps right and that that makes the ⁓ The C suite a little ⁓ rest a little easier at night when you're talking to large organizations that imagine especially those industries he talked about So, okay. ⁓ sorry. Go ahead

Absolutely, Yeah, right, because...

Yeah, there was a meeting like an example, there was a meeting and the legal came up. It's a big pharmaceutical giant. We all were there in the legal side that pharmaceutical business said we love these guys, but it's up to legal. If they approve, then only we can have you guys. We went into legal. were seven or eight legal people who were on the call with my share stream and all. And the first thing is started is, okay, tell us where you host our data. And once it was, no, we don't host it at all. It's your Salesforce, which is approved. We just use your Salesforce.

Thank

As a CEO and founder, cannot even access your data. said, wow, this is the best review I have ever done. You can proceed. But should I ask you if you don't have a server? So that's the advantage.

Hehehehe. Hehehehe.

That's a quick call. That sounds good.

Very cool. ⁓ you know, I want to get into the fact that you mentioned that's a horizontal app, or you have several horizontal apps now, ⁓ because that can be great from a technical side and it means you can cast a wide net. Sometimes it can be challenging though, if you want to hyper focus on one specific niche or industry. So I do want to talk about that. ⁓ But something that I think might be unique that you just touched on is ⁓ given you're fully native, you're

and you've been around a while, you're an established brand, you're not only focusing now, it seems like, on the small SMBs. I'd imagine you have a Rolodex of some pretty large logos now. Maybe you could talk about, to founders listening to this, the sales process, how you kind of made that leap into enterprise and how it differs selling to an enterprise versus an SMB.

Yeah, so I use two or three approaches which we are taught in marketing and various marketing books which have worked for me very well. So the approach number one was like I when I made my product I priced it very, very low so that it becomes accessible to everyone and give it to all the startups and SMBs who wanted to come. I never lost any kind of pricing because I wanted to have them in the company to try it out.

Mm-hmm.

then we made a rule that we will not build anything which we think of. We'll only build things which the customer will ask. Otherwise, that will never come in our pipeline. So as we started giving it at a cheaper price to everyone, once the expectations were low, because they were paying pennies for an amazing product, but then they always came to us and said, it would be amazing if you can give me this. I can wait for it. Obviously, they're not paying a heavy price to it. So they waited for us.

Mm.

bring them in our products in three months, six months in the pipeline. So we had time to play with it and all, but we listened to their feedback very, very closely and started giving them all the things which they wanted. So within one year, we became very feature heavy app with all the features which customer wanted. It was never which we decided wanted. So our adoption rate was very, very high. They loved those ideas, which we brought into the app because it was asked by one client and the others loved it up. Once that happened, then we started making it a journey. priced it nicely.

And we started going after the mid-market and then the enterprise. Today we have lot of Fortune 500 companies in the US with us. So that has been a journey. The product has been very, very strong and architecturally correct because we tried it out into a lot of customers.

Very cool. Okay. So you had kind of a land and expand approach, it sounds like almost. You just wanted to get as many customers leveraging the app so you get that early feedback. ⁓ That's very cool. I'm curious, in the early days then, if your pricing was that low, ⁓ did you have to fundraise to keep the company afloat or were you leaning on ⁓ consulting revenues to kind of stand up the product side?

Right.

So...

Yeah, so Scott, we are 100 % bootstrap company. So we never we have never raised a single dollar. So all our product development came from consulting business and a lot of our bench resources who were not placed anywhere. So we thought, hey, why can't we build something of our own if we have resources with us waiting for client work? So that's where the initial development came up. But very early I realized that model was not great for the success because as soon as a consulting client came up, you always pull that resource out.

and your product was hanging in balance. think so that was the reason we failed with merge duplicates because we didn't have a dedicated team. So afterwards we started to put dedicated people who have a pure KPI of making SMS app and making it live and all. And the money was being funded by the consulting in initial stages. First year also, but this from second year we started increasing our price to make it self sufficient. And then we started making money out of it. So that was a journey.

Mm-hmm.

And to give you a pricing idea, like there was a client of us, we got him in $3,000 for a year. Huge enterprise customer Salesforce might have 4,000 licenses of Salesforce unlimited. And they said, you cannot afford me in this price. It's a joke. You won't be able to do service to it. we tell them, no, no, this is our price. We are confident. We'll be handling you out and all to try us. And said, it's okay. This is not a risky one. I don't want to go back and find my personal credit card.

to use this but the cost you are asking me about and we still have them eight years back they got us today they are the client of half a million dollars for us we started generally with three three thousand dollars with them

Wow.

That's amazing. And it sounds like honestly, you almost, they almost didn't close because they were worried the price was too low that they were wondering if it was devaluing the product that they'd received, right?

Yes.

Right, yes, so they had to personally go on a call with them, convince with them that no, you will get top class service. We have this full channels and everything, so you don't have to worry about it. The product will work.

Wow, that's great. Okay. So, and I also think it's, it's very, it's very interesting what you pointed out that the merge duplicates, ⁓ didn't take off like you wanted. And a lot of it sounds like has to do with focus that if you weren't hyper focused on your, on building the app, on servicing the clients, then, then the, the app exchange product would just kind of wither on the vine. If you weren't, if you weren't nurturing it.

Yes.

Yes, very, very true. You have to have full focus and full energy. You cannot have people doing two things. Then part time they are doing this and the full time they are doing other stuff also. That's a disaster. That's recipe to fail. That's what I've learned the hard way out. Have dedicated people never give a person two jobs to do or two roles to do it. Give him one role so you can have accountable on that particular thing. Otherwise, when you give him two, he will say I was busy doing first or second field. So in that you will going to lose either first or the second one.

or sometimes both.

Yes, that's very smart. I think your story resonates with a lot of folks. There are many different companies I've spoken with that started consulting and are easing into app exchange development and becoming an ISV. So I think that that's a problem a lot of people have faced or maybe are facing currently is they're trying to juggle too many balls in the air. And ultimately, you're just going to drop them all. Well, OK.

Very true, very true.

Now you've got some heavy hitters now under your belt, some Fortune 500s. You're starting to raise prices. The app is self-sufficient. ⁓ Were there any other specific marketing channels you leveraged? Because again, this is totally horizontal product. how did you ⁓ approach sales and marketing? Did you hyper-focus on industries or verticals, or were you mostly responding to app exchange leads that came in?

We align with Salesforce very well. When we say Salesforce, it's events. So we almost sponsor all their very big events. So we start from ⁓ Sydney World Tour, then we go to Dubai World Tour, then India World Tour, then London World Tour, then we do in US New York World Tour, we do Dreamforce, we do Education Summit. So we go into almost all these Salesforce big events which to do. That's one of our very big lead generation strategy.

Mm-hmm.

App exchange is one, SEO, Google Ads, then we have our own outbound team. The partner channel ecosystem is also great. So trying to do almost everything in those 10 years slowly and steadily.

Very cool. And when you're going to Salesforce events, are you getting, are you sponsoring booths or are you just attending and talking with as many folks as you can? Or are you doing sessions?

So

Sure.

Very cool. Okay.

Mm-hmm. And what has been your greatest channel, you would say? Is it the Salesforce events or is it, you mentioned a number of different tactics y'all are doing, SEO, Google Ads?

So what is AppExchange

has also will be good, SEO ⁓ AppExchange and events, I think so that's big three I will take it.

Okay. ⁓ so let's talk about maybe some of the early days and when you founded the company, ⁓ it was just you, you're growing the consulting side. What were some of your early hires on the app exchange side? You mentioned how you realized I can't hire one person to do two jobs. So were you focusing at first on the development side or were you getting help on the sales and marketing for the app exchange products?

So I have always considered myself as a sales guy. So I'm not a great developer. So the first thing I had was an amazing developer who could help me out build the application. So my initial hire was the development side of the things. I was managing the sales myself in the initial days. And once we have few customers, then started replicating them with sales manager and the sales executive and all. But the initial few hires were totally development side.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, that makes sense. and ⁓ how would you say your marketing and sales tactics have shifted since those early days? I imagine when you first started, you were able to lean on a lot of your consulting clients to get early feedback. ⁓ And then I know you mentioned events and AppExchange has been a big channel too. Some partners I've talked to have been saying that they're seeing fewer leads than previously coming in from the AppExchange. So have you ramped up your outbound efforts?

Yeah.

Yes, we have been focusing on the outbound efforts. So that's a shift where now we have a big partner ecosystem also, which we are trying to set up and get some good leads from the partners. Then now we are going after the wallet share a big time. So instead of having the new clients every year on year, we try to consolidate those wallet share from those clients. So that's where these new channels come up. So previously, like we were only an SMS WhatsApp kind of an application, but a couple of years back, we launched Telephony. So Telephony itself is a huge market, a bigger market than us.

So we went after initial our own SMS clients and also that has given a big bump to our revenue from that point of view. Now we have started bringing AI into all of our products. So that is also giving us the revenue inside of things. So we have these new things which are coming up, which is increasing the wallet here from our customer. That's a very big strategy change which we have done. And then also we are building a couple of more products, which are even linked to the texting space and all. And the whole idea.

Hmm.

of the strategy is that the customer is with us, he loves us, he trusts us. We know CIO, we know CEO. If we can make them more productive with other products, why not?

Sure, I love that. Okay, I definitely wanna chat about AI a little bit and how it's transforming your company. But before then, you've mentioned now a couple times that the partner ecosystem has been a great lead generation channel for you. So I wanna ask how you navigate that ⁓ at 360 degree cloud, given y'all.

are consulting yourselves. ⁓ So I imagine you're with the AppExchange products, you're leveraging other SI partners. Has that been an issue at all that you could leverage the partners, but perhaps you could also take on the consulting work yourself? Has that caused any friction? Because I think some partners are of the mindset that I have to choose one lane or the other. ⁓ And obviously, you all have seen a lot of success in both.

Yeah, so we have been very clear.

Yes, so we have been very clear with our partners from the day one that hey, see if it's an open lead, then we both are competing with a lot of other companies. But if you just submit that lead to me, I will never ever go on to that kind of client into consulting that is permanently marked with you. So you have one less competitor to worry about. And as you win the deal, I will get my product in it. So I have no issues at all. So that's the contract which I have with almost all my partners that anytime a lead comes from

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

haha

them, even they lose that client, doesn't matter, I will never ever work with that client. So we have been very clear with that kind of an approach with our SI partners and Salesforce is a very big ecosystem with too many customers. So we don't have to worry about having enough on the plate.

Mm.

Yes, okay great, I like that. ⁓ But the pie is big enough for everybody, right?

Absolutely. It's a big pie. So everyone has something out of it. And then there's a partner model, right? Sometimes what we do even like that, we don't have a local person. As someone says, Hey, we want someone in local in us. That's where the partner comes into picture and we say, Hey, why don't you go and do the consulting from this client? And so it becomes a win-win kind of situation in many cases.

sure, that makes sense, that makes sense. Okay, so you... Go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah. And there are a ones. And there a

of the clients where we directly go into picture. And that's where we go after the consulting side of the things.

I see, okay, that makes sense. I feel like that's an ethical approach and everyone can get their head around that. If they bring the lead to you, then you're not going to be competing with them. As long as they can be sure of that, they're not going to worry about bringing you leads.

Bye bye.

Yeah.

100 % that's always the case. And even like we come across the clients after three years that hey this was bought by this partner but the partner is no longer there. They were replaced by some other company and all but still will never go and talk to that customer. In our system that is we have no consulting phase allowed. That's it.

Yeah.

Yes.

All right. So let's talk a little bit about AI, which you brought up a moment ago. ⁓ Obviously, Salesforce is pushing ⁓ Agent Force very hard and ⁓ among their own products. ⁓ You mentioned that you're beginning to add AI into your products as well. I'm not sure. you leveraging Agent Force for that specifically? Are you building out integrations to ⁓ LLMs and AI APIs yourselves? Or how are you approaching that?

both the approaches. that's double the work, but unfortunately we had to take a call from that because we got both side of the clients. said we need AI and we absolutely have agent force. So there is no second choice. Why will we go outside? Which absolutely made sense for us and native product like us. So we latched onto that and bought agent force into it. But then there are few clients we got, hey, agent force is too expensive. That's a mistake Salesforce did in the starting saying, no, agent force is too expensive. Per consumption will be.

Hmm.

Sure.

not be able for us, especially the SMB and the mid market, give us AI. And we would then have to go with the NLP of Lama, ChatGPT and all. And then we still got the third one where it said, hey, can we bring it our own by integrating with our own GPU servers and all? So we said, yes. So now every development we do is always compatible with all three of them.

Mm-hmm.

wow, okay. That's a lot to tackle, but perhaps maybe your team can be also leveraging AI to develop some of this, so that helps a little.

Yeah.

That's a debatable topic. Sometimes we don't want to develop the product side of things because of the IP things and all. ⁓ We don't want it to be leaked and all. But yeah, lot of internal projects and consulting, we absolutely use AI. But for product development, we try to remain a little away from that.

sure.

And what is it, I love that you're attacking all three approaches. What would you say your developers find to be the easiest? To develop directly against the LLMs? To leverage a framework that's already, that's handling some of the heavy lifting like Agent Force or?

So.

So Agent 4 and the chat GPT's of the world are simple and easy to tackle on. GPU is quite difficult because the training of the data and all is becoming quite challenging. But for us like that, too modest to it. If someone is coming up and using our own application, then there's some of the things which you have to do again and again and again. And we can reduce the cost trustingly by using our own NLP. So that's where our GPU service coming up. It's taking some time and all, but we see.

Mm-hmm.

in long term that will be very cost effective for our customers. But in some of the cases where they are very unique to them, then we typically go with agent force and or the AI depending on which they have bought from their entity.

Mm-hmm.

So earlier, you had mentioned how the legal teams love you because you don't have your own server. You're not storing data. You're not reaching out. ⁓ The only times you reach out to trusted vendors when you leverage outside APIs. ⁓ Is AI just a big enough area?

that even the legal teams from some of your Fortune 500 organizations are just having to say, yes, we understand you have to go outside Salesforce for this, ⁓ or in the case when you're not using Agent Force, or are there times when you're also getting pushback? Are you making your AI features optional, or are they just built in because you assume everybody's gonna need them?

So.

So all of them are optional. So they're built in, but you need to tick a box to have them started. We don't charge for the AI at this point of time because we all understand AI is not 100 % accurate. there at 85, 90%, but not 100%. And we cannot take that risk from the client's perspective. So we tell them open at their own risk. But then at this point in time, we try not to send everything automated.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

we make a manual checkpoint where they can always check before sending any of the messages or initiating the calls. From the legal perspective, we still try to tell the client which tool you are already using, which is approved by your legal. And they say we are using agent exchange. They say, hey, we have GPT enterprise. They say we have our own server. We have been choosing Lang chain. We try to piggyback on the same one so that we can easily say that, hey, you approved Salesforce. You approved GPT enterprise.

We are just leveraging your GPT enterprise, not even ours. So that way we can easily navigate through that loop.

Very cool. All right. So it's interesting to hear the story, how the story started, where you all today, where do you see 360 degree cloud in a few years from now? Where do see all this headed?

⁓ I love building products, especially on So we are not going anywhere from Salesforce, that's for sure. So I live, breathe, eat Salesforce, I can say that. So I see it creating a small 360 exchange in itself, where we have few of our products, which our clients can take from ourselves and be happy about. So like they have this commission suit completely. We are working on building a productivity suit also for our customers. So that will itself have a couple of more applications. So he can use.

360 exchange as an application and as a service provider for them to have them not worried about other products which they want to use or how they can use it up. We can solve both the problems.

Very cool. Well, Siddharth, I've loved hearing your story. I want to ask you, if you were to go back and talk to yourself in the early days when you were founding 360 cloud, ⁓ what advice would you give yourself?

don't take everything on yourself, hire people, good people, a staff. The most time I will save for myself, the more the company will grow. So every year, like in the starting, was very difficult, a person who had just done job at a smaller level to start with two and a half years experience starting company, you want to save every penny, you want to take everything on you. And like, obviously with Indian culture and all, you're always afraid, hey,

How can I open finances? How can I tell me my client rates? This guy is not good enough for sales. I can do much better. So over the time I realized as I kept hiring people, as I kept giving them things from my side, I grew every year 100 % because I was free to do bigger things and also my advice would be to do that much quicker. Leave everything tactical level to the teams to do it up. Think bigger on the strategy level.

I love that. I love that. It is very easy to get sucked into the day to day of the business when you really need to be focused on growing it as the founder, right?

Right Scott. So it took me 10 years to understand this that so we used to do appraisals. So this is our appraisals time typically we end our year in December and do appraisals in January. So it took me last two years to train myself that the person who don't come to me in the whole year are the best guys. If they're meeting the numbers and have zero interaction with them, they are my rock stars. Previously, the people who were around me sucking my time always

used to be good in my eyes because they are always with me. They understand me, but then I realized, no, they are using my shoulder to fire gun. And this is, you only advise me to do this or do that? And those people who are safe, sustained, doing great, they are the ones who deserve it. So I, two years back, I switched it up. I cleared everyone. If you come and discuss with me things, I will help you out. But that's super negative in my book because you are taking my time. So no brownie points for them. I'm taking points out into that. So that has

Mm-hmm.

spent a lot of my time and made a lot of my team accountable and doing things on their own. Obviously, they're stuck. I'm there to help them out, but not on a daily basis.

Yes. Did you, you mentioned before having a KPIs, keeping folks accountable. is this something that you established, a few years into the business to, kind of get it, get a grip on how things are running or cause it, cause I think a lot of early founders and of small teams have a hard time managing accountability, tracking these kinds of things that you want to, when you're small, you want to kind of be, ⁓

Yes.

anti-establishment almost sometimes, right? And then I think sometimes as you grow, you start to learn why enterprise organizations have these frameworks and have these rules in place.

Yeah. So, partially yes, partially no. Good thing about us was luckily we are in Salesforce ecosystem. So all my dashboards, everything was built on Salesforce. We use Salesforce for ourselves. So from day one, I didn't had any kind of reporting challenges and all because all my leads, opportunities, everything was tracked in Salesforce. So that was always nice for me. KPIs, yeah, it took me six, seven years to come to that stage where my wife held me on a gunpoint and said, no, we cannot scale like this.

Mm-hmm.

We need processes now when you want to scale it further because otherwise things will start falling into crack and yeah, so I'm a more of an execution guy, a fast execution guy. So I knew that yes, I have to reduce that to 80, 90 % that have processes start coming up, but we never wanted processes to make us super slow. So it's always a middle way around because we don't, we want to be nimble still because we have to compete with larger giants. tell them, Hey, the approvals, which they take in two weeks will give you an

Mm-hmm.

One day. Previously I used to say in two hours ⁓ or 20 minutes. Now we take it one day or two days for that.

Yeah.

Yeah, don't want to get too ambitious, I guess, of those timelines. You mentioned earlier that one of the pressures ⁓ was Indian culture. And a lot of the folks that I've had on the show are based in North America. ⁓ So I want to hear. I'm sure, though, that there are listeners and other founders out there that, like you, are based in India.

Yes.

And so I'd be curious to hear some of the specific unique challenges that you face with that. mean, I imagine you mentioned you have a lot of US based customers. I imagine that means a lot of a lot of calls at odd times for your time zone. Quite frankly, you and I, you're joining late in the evening right now to be with me, which I very much appreciate. this do you have to work on a shifted schedule or how has building up a ⁓

a business in India and serving so many folks in the US time zone has been a challenge.

Yeah, so that we were clear from day one that US was our primary market. we used to work late. So that has not been a challenge to be to be true because we automatically adjusted that time zone and that something but demands as of now also we promise our customers that ⁓ whatever time zone you are in the world with you will the resource which works with you will start at nine a.m. your time. So we start our office on Monday at three thirty a.m. That's when Australia wakes up.

and it closed on Saturday 5 a.m. when California sleeps. So the office never closes. 24 by 5 running around the clock because someone is awake at that time and we have to serve him up. So that's a business model we started from the starting itself. And when the app goes live, we have the customers across the world. And I promise that we'll give them the best support which is available. So we had a lot of support reps working around the clock to help them out.

And we tell them, hey, no, we don't believe in email conversations. So for us, whenever you have an issue, you will get a Zoom link. Come on in the Zoom link. We'll just solve it on the spot instead of going to and fro through various emails and all. So that's the business model we made it up. The challenges which I have to tell my team to meet the client expectations is like, are very hardworking guys. Indians are very hardworking in matter. So if issue comes up, my team leaves everything and starts working on that issue.

And they're so engrossed in that issue that they are not telling the client we're still working and the client tells after five hours, Hey, what's happening? Are you guys sleeping or I will I get it tomorrow? And the team says, no, no, no, I will only sleep when this issue is fixed up, but I don't have time to open the email because I want to just fix it right now. So I will tell the team, Hey, wait, take a break. Tell them that we have started working on your issue and we'll wrap it up soon. And the team says, yeah, I'm working on it. And after seven hours, they resolve it and they say, yeah, this is resolved. They will not tell that client that, I spent seven hours.

Mmm.

in resolving this issue and now I'm going to sleep. They said this is resolved and the client always feel, hey, was it like five minutes issue and they took seven hours, why they replied me late and all. So that kind of communication gap, which we have to tell the team to teach because that's our Indian culture more or less to not show what you're doing. Yeah. Assume the things that you've done and we're working on it and we'll tell you when it's done. So we have to teach the team that, hey, this person doesn't know about it. You have to tell that, I've started the work and this is how I've done it.

That's great. you're, it sounds like your team is facing issues of being too humble and not wanting to share how, how much effort is actually going into it when in fact clients appreciate that if they, if they only knew, but they can't appreciate it if they don't know. Right. It's ironic too, you, you're a company built on communication and you're having to tell the team like, we need to communicate more. Um, and it reminds me too, there have been times where Salesforce has had, um,

Right.

Yes, that's absolutely correct.

Right. We need to communicate more with Peritra.

some major outages or some major issues ⁓ in the past. And oftentimes they'll set up ⁓ a site you can go to. think sometimes they'll set up a long running webinar that folks can join or drop out of at any time. And I've also seen times where they set up a timeline and they just post regular updates. And sometimes there's really no update. The update is basically we're still working and doing everything we can. But I think you're right that as long as

There's a sense of calm given when people know that you're at least working on it, even if you don't yet have a solution yet to the problem. ⁓ that really showcases how important that is to just always communicate with your clients.

right.

Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah. So now we have started making it as our own boarding program. We would tell them that, hey, this is how you need to handle this stuff. And these are the expectations and all. So things are getting improved, but I think so that's a little more culture.

Communication really runs ⁓ deep in your veins, I can tell, at 360D Cloud. mean, your whole application suite is based around it. It's a core focus, it sounds like, ⁓ of building in the early days. You had mentioned how you wanted to just get into a product for very cheap and get into an organization at a very low cost.

and then immediately start communicating on how you can improve and what else you need to build for them. Sounds like it was a core tenet of your customer service. Just communication seems very key to everything related to 360D cloud.

Yeah.

Absolutely. So when I started this, also wrote this book, ⁓ cracking the SMS conversion code. So to tell people how to send the SMS, when to send the SMS, what to do, when not to do in order to generate those leads and be in front of your customers and all. So yeah, I love communication space.

I love that. Can folks still get that book? Well, we can link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes. So anyone who can leave the address on your webinar, ⁓ we can call you that. No problem at

Okay,

wonderful, wonderful. Well, Sidharth, this has been such a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on. Anything you want to share with some early stage founders that might be listening right now before we wrap?

My biggest advice would be product development. Obviously everyone loves it up. That's why you're building that product. You love the idea, but the pitfall is it's endless. You can spend years and years and years on building the product. Like I launched this SMS app in 2016. It's 2025 and I have the biggest team till date who works on still SMS and building things up. So building of product is endless.

What matters for a founder is revenue generation. So please build what your customer wants. So start build a prototype, start giving it to your customers, build what they want and start charging for it. Let the money flow in. I'm invested in a couple of other companies. I have seen some founders which keep on building, but their focus is not on selling. And after five years, six years, you have to just throw it out because there's no bias for it. What you build was sitting in an AC room, which actual customer doesn't want.

You are just assuming that they will want it up. So my advice is build basic functionality. Give it to your customers. Whatever they say, just build it up because as you only one out of the 10 customers telling you what they need. So that one customer who's telling you there are 10 more who are not telling you but will love that feature. So start building those features and you will have an amazing product and immediately go and start selling it up because also initially people will take it for free. But once they have to pay money.

you will actually know you have built something of scale or not.

That is wonderful advice. Thank you so much for sharing that. For anyone that wants to get in contact with you, Siddhartha, how can they do that and how can they learn more about 360 degree cloud?

So I'm very active on LinkedIn. So you can always search me on LinkedIn, Siddharth Sehgal or feel free to send me an email said at 360degreecloud.com or on chat on our website, just come and say want to talk to set and they will guide you to me for sure.

Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining today. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Scott. Thank you for the opportunity. Love the conversation, man. Thank you.

Cheers.