In our constant goal to discover and give our community a glimpse of the fascinating and original stories of the startup ecosystem this week, we had an Interview with Nikhilesh Tiwari, to learn more about his inspirational journey along with his ideas for the future.
Nikhilesh Tiwari is a BI and analytics expert and Co-founder of Helical Insight, an open-source platform for business intelligence and Helical IT Solutions.
1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey as an entrepreneur
I did my schooling from Nasik, followed by Engineering from Pune University and MBA from Symbiosis. After Engineering I had worked in Siemens for a few months and after my MBA I worked for 1.5 years in the telecom sector. Me and my co-founder Nitin Sahu, we had done our schooling together. We always wanted to start our own company and tried a few things and failed. We had also started a healthcare IT company and tried to provide software products to hospitals, labs, blood banks, etc. But we didn’t had much idea about the domain and thus had to shut it down.
Armed with these from various failures learning’s we had started Helical IT. We had started the company as a pure-play services company and used to provide services in the domain of Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, and ETL space and that too focusing primarily on the open-source tools and technologies. We also raised an angel funding and after that, we have been pretty profitable. Over the years we have provided services to more than 80+ clients including some big names like CA Technologies, Tata Communications, Fractal Analytics, Technip, Government of Micronesia, Government of Marshall Islands, Government of Kiribati Islands etc.
While providing services over various other BI products we felt the kind of issues and limitations which are there in other BI products and that’s what prompted us to start working on and launching our own Open Source BI product Helical Insight. Right now there are 51 clients who are using Helical Insight on their production environment across various domains and geographies and we have had 8 releases so far and we are working on a major 5.0 release. We provide our product as a developer-friendly, and extensible BI framework and that too in two versions i.e. a free version and a paid version. Our paid version is also almost 85% cost-effective as compared to other BI products without really compromising on the features.
2. Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a job?
Both I and my co-founder were working in big organizations wherein we felt like a clog in a wheel wherein we were not able to make much of an impact and every day we were doing the same kind of work. Also, there wasn’t really a lot of learning which was happening and we felt stuck. We felt that we have the potential to do much more. We wanted to be our own boss, create something which can make a lot of impact on the long run.
That was the main motivation behind why we choose to become an entrepreneur.
3. What was the vision behind it?
Our vision behind our Open Source BI product Helical Insight is to provide enterprise customers a very cost-effective and feature rich BI tool using which they can analyze their data and make correct decisions. We want to be the most popular and feature rich Open Source BI product in few years down the line. Our current version provides features like canned reporting, self-service drag drop interface, exporting, email scheduling, user role management, data security, container support, caching, embedding, SSO support, and much more. We are also working on next generation technologies including integration of NLP and Machine Learning algorithms into our product, support of inmemory modules and much more.
4. Describe the services that you offer to your customers and in what way they are unique?
We are a mix of both products and services. On the services side, we provide services on the below
Business Intelligence: We provide services on various BI tools which include open source as well as proprietary BI tools like Jaspersoft, Pentaho, PowerBI, Quicksight etc. We consult customers, build various reports and dashboards, white labeling, embedding and other services we provide. Aside we also have got experience on various stand along charting engines as well as mapping engines.
ETL: We also help customers in building their data pipelines. We use various ETL tools like Talend, Kettle, AWS Glue, Apache Spark and various other data processing engines to build the data pipelines.
Data Warehouse: We also provide consultation on designing the data warehouse, populating the data warehouse, best practices etc.
Big Data Migration: For customers who are looking to migrate to big data technologies that is also something we help with. We have got experience on various big data and NoSQL technologies which includes Apache drill, mongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, hadoop, Presto etc.
Apart from the above list of services we also provide our own BI product Helical Insight. We offer our product both on subscription model as well as perpetual license model. For certain customers we also provide services on our BI product and help customers in building their various required reports, dashboards, white labeling, embedding, SSO etc.
5. What difficulties which you have faced or you are facing?
The biggest challenges which is there is in terms of getting good talent and retaining them. Even though our country adds a lot of new engineers every year into the talent pool but most of them are poor on skills. So it is very difficult to get a person with the required skillset, experience and attitude. It is even more so for a small company which is not a big brand as compared to the MNCs and big organizations.
Aside when we had started we also had problem of cash flows but that soon got resolved as we got funded and as we started getting customers. Further with our product maturing the margins and top line has been improving substantially.
6. How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
Running a company is an extremely stressful task with every day offering new challenges. It is very important to have a cofounder, with complimentary skillsets, so that there is always someone to speak to and discuss. We try delegating the work as much as possible so that we have some free time. Also trying to make sure that we keep the weekends free for ourselves and family. I also try to engage in sports which helps me to keep stress under control.
7. How do you market your business?
We extensively use the SEO and digital marketing best practices to market our services. For the services and product we offer we try to generate a lot of inbound leads. Aside we also create case studies through which we try to create awareness of the kind of work we are doing and how we can help organizations make better data driven decisions.
For our product we also have partners in various part of the world (like Indonesia, Africa, South America etc) who also helps us in reaching out to newer customers as well as providing support and implementation to the local geographies. In future we are also planning to open some regional presence in US and other prominent geographies.
8. How many hours a day do you work on average & can you describe/outline your typical day?
Generally I work around 10-12 hours a day. My typical day includes
- Responding to the client calls and emails
- Having call with the team and discussing on the list of tasks and progress
- Reaching out to new clients and prospects
- Giving demos to new leads and follow-ups
- Taking interview if scheduled
- Any regulatory or finance work if is to be taken care of
9. In your opinion, what are the keys to success?
When starting up it is very important to have patience. There is nothing like an overnight success. For me the key to success is perseverance. Just do not give up, keep on trying and don’t give up. There would be bad days, there would be terrible days but keep hope and keep on trying. Sooner or later you would start seeing the fruits of all the hard work which you have put in so far.
10. What advice would you give to someone starting out as an aspiring entrepreneur?
We would like to give a couple of advices to someone starting as an aspiring entrepreneur
- Try to start in a sector wherein you know the sector pretty well, what is missing and how you can fulfill that gap. Otherwise in many cases learning itself can take much more time that you can run out of patience and money.
- Don’t try to start alone, have more than one cofounders with complimentary skillsets.
- Try to chase and create value for your clients, money will follow
- Never run out of cash. Always keep your expenses under control. Expenses can increase exponentially but not necessarily your revenues
- Build fast and release fast. Do not wait for the perfect product/perfect feature.
Website links:
Helical Insight: https://www.helicalinsight.com
Helical IT: https://www.helicaltech.com Linkedin Link (Helical IT): https://www.linkedin.com/company/helicaltech/
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