During his years as a product executive, Jagan Nemani observed what he calls an “information black hole” between manufacturers and indirect sales partners. He knew that both sides could benefit from sharing information about indirect channel sales, but channel partners avoided sharing that information out of fear of poaching.
He teamed up with veteran engineer Sandeep Kanaparthi to try to come up with a solution. The result was Viato, a software platform they call “the world’s first deal escrow.”
“By removing these stalemates, both product manufacturers and their channel partners can realize significant revenue upside,” said Nemani. “But this cannot be done by policy or using any tools that are available in the market.”
Viato recently graduated from the 9Mile Labs Accelerator’s spring cohort. We caught up with Nemani for this Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature.
Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: “We are the world’s first deal escrow. We enable sharing of deal information between indirect sales channel partners and the product manufacturers, in a way that is a win-win opportunity for both the parties.”
Inspiration hit us when: “I experienced this information black hole first-hand in previous companies. This made the partnership very inefficient; it didn’t make sense. So, we started talking to a lot of software vendors and channel partners. We learned that software vendors cannot get sales pipeline information from their channel partners. On the other hand, channel partners seemed to have burned their fingers by sharing such information. The word ‘trust’ started popping up in our conversations very frequently. The lack of trust was leading to stalemates in these partnerships.
Right when we thought this to be a way of doing business, we came across a very successful partnership. A vendor and a channel partner had been working on building a relationship for years, so trust existed between them and they shared their pipeline. This led to 227 percent increase in lead-sharing between these two parties and a 56 percent decrease in their sales cycle time — their revenues soared. This was an amazing story.
We started brainstorming on how we could offer the same benefits to all vendors and their channel partners. We knew that we could not build a tool that would help them build strong relationships, but we could build a tool that could solve the trust issue. Hence we started Viato, the ‘World’s First Deal Escrow,’ providing deal protection to channel partners and automating the deal registration process.”
VC, Angel or Bootstrap: “We are bootstrapping right now, but will look to raise angel/VC funding later this year. We are going to disrupt the current deal registration processes, and make it easier for product vendors and their channel partners to share information and close more sales together. We are the first to market here with this concept, so we need to build fast, sell fast and deliver value fast.
We are working with a few customers who clearly see the value of our solution. Once we have delivered some initial results to our pilot customers, we would raise money.”
Our ‘secret sauce’ is: “Our team is our secret sauce. We have a strong founding team and a great board of advisers. Both of us together have 35 years of experience building scalable, customer-focused, data-driven products. We have a lot of experience in working with unstructured, semi-structured company and people data and have built algorithms to normalize, de-dupe and link it in real-time. This is the core essence of the product that we are developing, and this helps us find opportunities that are a win-win for both product manufacturers and channel partners. We have a patent pending for the core essence of our technology, which is another part of our secret sauce.
The other part is that we have a board of advisers with deep channel experience. They know the workings of the channel and guide us on the right solution that we need to develop to solve some the problems.”
The smartest move we’ve made so far: “From the beginning we were determined to build a product that will solve a real market problem, not a product that solves a problem that we think is real. So we took our time to understand the needs of the market before we narrowed down on the problem we are going to solve. We spoke to a lot of channel execs and channel partners, asking questions focused on uncovering their pain points. This led us to the current problem that we are solving. The process that we followed taught us a lot about our customers and about us, and we will continue to use this process to further refine the solution that we are building.”
The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: “That would be around sales prospecting. It took us some time to realize that not every company that is working with a channel partner has the problem. So now we have a profile of a customer, and we don’t waste time on prospects that don’t fit well into that profile.”
Would you rather have Gates, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner: “Definitely the man who has built the largest indirect sales channel partner network for selling their product: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Building a global channel with more than half a million engaged partners that sell your product is tough, but Gates and his leaders at Microsoft seem to have done a great job.
Bezos and Zuckerberg would be great as well for their ability to build great innovative companies that have done well over a long run.”
Our favorite team-building activity is: “We strongly believe in celebrating every win, however small it is. So don’t be surprised if you find us in a bar working on our laptops while drinking beer. Recently, we were at a bar to celebrate a win and realized that almost all of the of the people in the bar were couples on a date. But, that’s the story for another day.”
The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: “Leadership. Great leaders build great companies. We believe in hiring the leaders, who believe in our vision, understand the needs of the company, show responsibility and purposefully do the right things to move the company forward. We like people who take risks, try out different approaches, and find successful methods to win big in the market. We have taken this approach to building Viato, and we expect the same from our hires.”
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: “Focus on your customers, get out there and talk to as many of them as possible. You will learn a lot about problems that need to be solved. Once you have a good understanding of the different problems they face, then pick the one that motivates you the most and solve that problem. Know which customers have this problem and focus on those customers first. Remember: The customer always comes first.”
Editor’s note: GeekWire is featuring each of the companies participating in the 9Mile Labs incubator fall cohort.
