eChai with Tejas Jasani, Founder, The App Guruz
Our today's guest for eChai with an Entrepreneur is Tejas Jasani , Founder, The App Guruz, very exciting Mobile Games and Apps development Company based in Rajkot.
Tejas Jasani founded The App Guruz in 2011, fast growing company in gaming industry with 500+ games and over 7 million players globally. Tejas is a avid reader, sports lover and hardcore gamer, Tejas loves to spend time with his team. As CEO of The App Guruz, Tejas heads strategy, design and development of mobile games for rapidly growing iOS, Android and other platforms. As an advisor outside of The App Guruz, Tejas supports programs that help startup community and upcoming entrepreneurs. He also loves to communicate with students and help them take their future decisions. Tejas has received his Masters degree in computers from Nirma University in 2009 and prior to that he has completed his graduation in business administration in 2004.
Here is the insightful and candid conversation with Tejas. Join the conversation to ask any specific questions to Tejas.
Early Years : When did it first strike you to begin this venture and why? Your Eureka Moment (the moment you decided to be an entrepreneur).
I have done bachelors in Business Administration from Rajkot and then did Masters in Computers from Nirma University. I got final year training as well as post training placement at HP, Bangalore. The HP experience gave me opportunity to connect with lot of programmers and designers, though I never quite liked it there. I could never imagine myself working with big teams and doing stipulated time job. So instead of continuing without any purpose, after completing my training, I decided to quit the job (which I never had, since I did my training only).
After quitting, I started out with 2 of my classmates and 1 junior from Nirma University at around August 2009 in Ahmedabad. The company was called Yudiz Solutions . And after 8 months or so, I took off to Rajkot (my native) in order to start out branch of Yudiz @Rajkot. After being at Rajkot for some time, we had some issue related to management so I quit Yudiz Solutions and started my own venture called The App Guruz in August 2011.
So at this point in time, I serve as Founder & CEO of The App Guruz. So, from this point onwards, all my answers would be in context of The App Guruz.
Business Venture : What is your business model and what problems does it solve? What are market opportunities? How is it different from your competitors? How do you generate revenues ?
We started out as services company only. We are mainly into development and design mobile games and apps.
Personally I always like to venture into new technology. So in 2011, when Android was in its infant stage, we started working on Android and made lot of Android apps. Then we started with iOS in the starting of 2012, crafted lot of iOS apps too.
In around mid 2012 I was quite fascinated with mobile games, and I wanted to get into that space, so we started with making few small games in Android and due to our awesome technical team, we learnt a lot in quite small period of time and became one of the leading gaming studio.
Though we still do mobile apps and websites today, more than half of our company resources are spent into mobile gaming.
The gaming industry is growing at very rapid rate, so there are surely lot of big opportunities. And there are not too many competitors for us at this point in time. It actually takes time to get into gaming plus it needs different kind of company culture, where creativity can flourish.
Our main source of revenue is still services we give to our clients in terms of websites, mobile apps and games. But we are slowly and steadily moving towards products. And one of our latest game Table Tennis 3D is doing quite well with over 400k downloads in 4 months.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tag.tabletennis3D
https://itunes.apple.com/tc/app/table-tennis-championship/id925623445?mt=8
Down the line, we would like to get more into products.
Sales : How did you make your first sale and how much time it took you from starting up to closing the first sale ? How long is your sales cycle ?
We got our first sales through one of our friend’s friend who was working with Google, USA (he is still working there). It was a website project, and deal took around a week to get finalised, and overall project took around 2 months to get completed.
At this point, our normal sales cycle would take around a week to month.
Company Culture : What kind of culture exists in your organization? How did you establish this tone and why did you institute this particular type of culture?
I strongly believe that the culture plays a major roles in success of any company. Any normal person would spend around 50% of his day at work (not counting sleeping time), and if he doesn’t like to be at the place, he won’t be able to produce great work.
At our company, we believe in empowering people. We give them full freedom to explore new stuff they like. And unlike any other services company, we stress on quality and not on deadlines. Our quality gives us edge over our competitors.
And as gamer I always believe work hard, play harder. So for that we have lot of facilities in house, we have got Table Tennis, carrom, cards, chess, PS3, 16 bit console and various other stuff to keep the adrenaline rush flowing.
Partnerships : What are your views about finding the right Co-Founder ? How did you find your business partner? According to you who is the ideal business partner?
Currently I don’t have any business partner at The App Guruz. But my previous experience has taught me few things. As Co-Founder you should always look for a person who shares your vision and compliments you. You both don’t have to think alike in order to be Co-Founders, but having common interests and common background might give you an edge. I haven seen lot of new start ups make partners because they are friends or they want to pull in some money and want to divide risk. You can choose your friend as partner if he is logically a good solution, but not in other case. In my opinion, that kind of partnership never goes long way.
Hiring - How did you hire your first employee ? And in general what's your hiring policy ? How important have good employees been to your success?
We hired a designer for part time as we couldn’t afford full time employee at that time (that designer is still working with us full time). We got his reference from a friend, so we interviewed him (I knew nothing, but still took an interview :D) and hired him.
Employees are heart and soul of the company. So now we follow very stringent interview process and make sure we hire only the best people for our team. We rarely hire experienced people, we generally prefer to hire freshers and train them well.
Learning : How did you handle your disappointments and failures?
Personally I am big fan of the Fight Club movie, and I believe in that philosophy - I wrote a blog on the same topic, quite a long time back now :)
So, without getting much into details I would say, I believe failure is part of life. Surely, it hurts but it gives more pleasure when you have failed consistently and then proved yourself. And you don’t have to do it for others, do it for yourself.
Vision: What's your vision for your venture. What do you want to accomplish in your life ? What are your future aspirations?
When I started this journey I never quite understood the meaning of entrepreneurship and merely became businessman in the process. And I find lot of people doing the same mistakes, and there is no one to guide them. I understand lot of this has to do with the culture we are having around us, and it can’t be changed overnight.
But I think I would like to try and make difference somewhere down the line to bring true innovation and make this world a better place (sounds very cliched, but can’t help it, sorry!)
Work-Life Balance : How do you find a balance between work family and social life?
Again, I would like to quote Fight Club
“Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.”
Initial when I had started out, I wasn't getting much time to do anything else. I thought it wasn't hte right thing to do. If I want to make a sustainable business, I needed to set the processes right, and I worked on those things and made the whole process quite smooth. So now, generally I do have lot of time for the stuff I like (reading books, playing cricket, movies, spending time with family). We also try to give this same kind of freedom to our employees. Since I believe, this keeps them happy and in turn they really like working with us.
Risks : Which was the boldest decision you ever made to have this venture work?
I think getting into gaming when we didn’t have any significant experience was the boldest decision I took and it paid quite well :)
Checkout some of the awesome games developed by The App Guruz team.
Table Tennis 3D Live Ping Pong Game teaser trailer – The App Guruz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad4WmDxRKsM
Basketball Shooting 3D 2014 Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR1Ut37wKMk
Snakes And Ladders 3D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPJpJWt8FM
Here are some amazing photos from his entrepreneurial journey.
