Something unusual happened last financial year at Frappe. We became seriously profitable for the first time ever. Here is what chart for profits looks like:

This is what total revenue looks like:

(These are real numbers in US dollars converted in current value - they are available on the ministry website for a fee, but will spare you that expense)

It feels good to reflect and connect the dots backwards, but the path to building first, a viable and then, a profitable business has been a long one. Looking back at just the data, it seems that building a product business requires a lot of investment, specially if its a complex product like an ERP system. When we started out, web technologies were very new, the world was moving from server generated to Javascript apps. There were no ready-to-deploy platforms available either, so we had to build our own platforms as well. In the first few years, most paying customers did not care about open source, but later it became a big part of our values and identity, and monetising open source is notoriously hard, even though it is a lot easier to find early users and build a community.

My own journey has been tumultuous. While I was very confident of building an application, I had no idea how to build teams, how to scale engineering quality and complexity, how to deal with customers and how to run a top class outfit. Since we were incapable of a raising capital for a while, there were no mentors or external advisors who were guiding us. I was mostly relying on blogs and HackerNews for inspiration. For a long time, I was indiscriminate about who to hire - very few people wanted to work in a company with very little brand and revenue, so we had a high churn as well. Some of the people we hired were absolutely unskilled and clueless and it is embarrassing how we ended up hiring them. I also struggled with a “managers mindset” where the goal is more important than doing the work and was unable to balance the needs of building a product and building a team. While we were reasonable at engineering, we struggled with other areas like design, sales and support. By trial and error we found some good people to work with to cover those gaps. The journey in hindsight seems more like a learning journey for me than anything to do with markets or customers.

When people think of companies, great companies, because who wants to talk about the ordinary ones, they talk of the sheer ambition, vision and energy of the founders. These founders tend to be magnets for capital and talent. Everyone wants to be part of this tremendous energy they bring to the world and live in the tailwind. I have met a few of these people in my journey, read their books and seen films made on their lives, and somehow I am not able to convince myself that I am one of them. I believe all of us have aspirations of doing great work and being recognised by society as outliers but most of us do not have what it takes to become those people. Every time you hit a bottleneck or a blocker, you question your purpose. The woods look lovely, dark and deep, and you end up forgetting the promises you have to keep. Doing something great requires you to take great personal risks - of failure, reputation and over promising - so your family is always against you taking them. As a founder, you not only have to be the “giver of energy” but also deeply involved in every aspect of the business, right from understanding the markets to the aspirations of each individual in the team. This requires extra ordinary mental capacity and commitment and comes at some cost - mostly at the cost of your close personal relationships. Again, I am just not sure if I am that person, even though I am pretty sure I am not meeting expectations of my family and friends, or even my own personal needs.

This is turning out to be a very different kind of a post than I set out to write. (Maybe an overhang of reading more memoirs, biographies and literary fiction than Harvard case studies). I was supposed to write about all the various external events that shaped Frappe’s destiny, but it turns out that my own internal shortcomings and learnings were what blocked our progress for so long. Most of the good things that have happened at Frappe is because of the effort of people other than me. All I have done is run few bold experiments, guarantee the safety (sustainability) and hold the vision for the team. Very few of the people who joined Frappe came because they wanted to build great products or teams themselves. They were people with talent and general ambition but no specific visions. My role in their journey is to help them define their own vision of what they want to contribute to society. While I became a better version of myself, my primary job is to make everyone in my team become better versions of their own selves. The external milestones like products and revenues and profits somehow feel incidental to the individual stories that have created Frappe.

As we go forward, we rate ourself as “sub-par” in both products and ecosystem. The world conquering strategy is extremely simple - make the best products and build the best parter ecosystem in the industry. Both are extremely hard and non-trivial problems. Children start at the age of six if they have any hope in competing in world sporting events like the Olympics and the level of competition in building the world’s best products is no less. Frappe will build the best products and partners if each one of our team members is a “champion”. Most of our people do not come with pedigree (most successful companies are led with extremely bright people who went to the best colleges, with rare exceptions). The challenge for us is to create the self-belief that we can build the world’s best products and partners. The journey to greatness is the journey within. For me and for all of us.