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As part of the podcast series at Xoxoday by Giift, we sat down with Gautam Tewari, Co-Founder of Trezi, a VR-based SaaS platform based out of Delhi-NCR.
Trezi works with architects, designers, building product manufacturers, students, and other AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) stakeholders to make their designs more immersive.
They boast an impressive customer base, with more than half of the country's top 50 architecture firms using it internally to enhance their designs.
Some of the names using the platform – Aditya Birla, Schneider Electric, GMR, Delhi Metro, and others - are integral to India's infrastructure growth story.
We spoke with Gautam about many topics, including scaling his company, the company's early days, the challenges he faced as a sales leader, building a high-performance team, and so on.
Below is a compressed version of the entire podcast.
On Starting Up
1. What made you start up?
Tithi and I worked at SpaceMatrix, a workplace design firm based in Singapore. Tithi was the managing director, and I handled projects globally.
One of our biggest challenges was immersing people in the design model. And it didn’t matter how senior or what role that person had; the challenges were broadly the same.
As a result, clients were often disappointed with the physical form of the design they initially approved. This resulted in costly iterations that we could have avoided if the client had a better sense of the design early on.
Our goal with Trezi was to digitalize the entire design communication, collaboration, and product selection process. We are trying to remove the physicality as much as possible and help the people who inhabit the eventual space understand it right upfront rather than getting confused when they enter the space.
We started the company in 2016 as SmartVizX. Initially, we were a service-based company. While the service-based journey was easy for us, we pivoted to a product-based company after we got a seed check.
And what a journey it was! We had customer discovery discussions, built and iterated quickly, developed products, developed marketing collaterals, and so on.
The Challenge
2. How big is the total addressable market?
The AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry is 11.5 trillion dollars — about half the size of the US economy. Within that segment, we are focused more on the finished products—the light fixtures, the table you are sitting on, etc. This was a $500 billion segment by itself when we started in 2018, and it must only have gotten bigger.
3. How big of a time delay do you typically notice in these projects?
I have been discussing this problem for 2.5 decades. Regarding the most delayed project, I remember working on a 120-crore campus project in Pune years ago that was delayed by nearly 15 months. The original duration of the project was about 11 months.
It was delayed so much that the company had to spend money out of its pocket to finish the greenfield project. However, a few months' delay is commonly observed in such projects.
The reasons were typically because of mismatched expectations, iterations, etc. If we had Trezi as a technology back then, we could have controlled the delay to 3-4 months.
Pitching the Solution
4. Can you share your experiences building a sales team at Trezi?
Our journey at Trezi from 0 to 50 customers was easy. Within weeks, through our contacts, we were able to onboard 50% of the top 50 architectural firms in the country.
We quickly doubled the customer base from 50 to 100 with low marketing costs, which is when we decided to go with a channel partner.
We brought in the largest seller of AutoDesk products in the country, and the 100 remained 100 for the next 6-7 months despite 1000+ demos having been done. The channel partner team couldn't deliver.
In our board meeting, our investors clearly told us that it was not working out and that we had to get our act together. That is when we regrouped and decided to take selling into our own hands. The result was we sold 400-odd subscriptions during the pandemic.
When it comes to selling, you are your own best friend. For early-stage startups, my advice to young entrepreneurs would be to set up their own sales team and start selling. Do not go for a channel partner network early in your journey. In fact, we should have started with an inside sales team earlier ourselves.
5. If you were to build a reseller/channel partner network now? How would you do it differently?
First, check if the product has a product-market fit. While everyone has their definitions of PMF, it is the product that customers use regularly, contribute to the product development cycle, and are happy to renew.
If the product has 100% PMF, I will go to a channel partner, especially at this company stage in 2024. Right now, we are partnering with a channel partner in Dubai – someone who is the region's largest seller of AEC-based products.
Over the past four years, we have been testing our products, and we are confident of selling them in international markets via a channel partner. But the story is different in India.
See I understand the fact that everyone has targets in life, but the thing is I found that Indian channel partners have a general lack of ownership.
6. How do you typically measure success when you are working with a salesperson/channel partner?
It is simple. The prime indicator of how you measure reseller performance is -
- If there are no people and no demos are happening, something is seriously wrong.
- If there are people and there are demos happening – you may not be getting immediate success, but you know the product is being spoken in the market and it will benefit you sometime in the future.
See when it comes to sales, you need to incentivize the person right? So I read somewhere and implemented these small competitions between regions – like how CSK fights with MI or DD.
Whichever region performed well rewarded the team from that region. Thus, there was healthy competition between different areas, which helped us grow faster.
Currently, the sales split between sales and channel partners is 65:35, with internal sales teams contributing 65% and partners contributing 35%. But it was hard arriving here. Getting the contribution from channel partners up to 35% was not easy.
7. How do you build high-performing teams at Trezi?
You must internalize within your DNA that non-performance is not acceptable, which means you must take tough calls every two quarters when you see a non-performing individual in the sales team.
It is not easy to rejig the team regularly, but if you let non-performance as a culture, it is very difficult to break away from it.
Also, when it comes to sales, you need to understand that the best sales folks work for money and incentives. This is not a bad thing per se. If you, as a sales leader, can align this instinct with your company's goals, it is a win-win situation for everyone.
8. How has your company's revenue been in the past five years?
Year 1: 50 lakh INR
Year 2: 2.5 crores INR
Year 3: 3.2 crores INR
Year 4: 2.4 crores INR
Year 5: 8.5 crores INR
Year 6: 14.5 crores INR
There was a slight dip during the pandemic, but we have been growing steadily over the years, selling upwards of 400 subscriptions during and after it.
9. How do you compete with giants like Autodesk in your industry?
Other companies work on making designs more immersive— startups similar to us that compete with us on specific use cases like IrisVR. But, having said that, I don't consider large enterprises like AutoDesk competition because our customers can load an AutoDesk model in Trezi and get into the design.
So, they are more complementary, and they do not threaten us.
Thank you, Gautam. That was an insightful discussion. Thanks again for joining us today.
Thank you, Sathya and Ganesh, for hosting me today.
Links
If you enjoyed reading about Gautam’s journey at Trezi, here are some links to check out
Follow Gautam on LinkedIn here -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/gautam-tewari-220a0920/
To know more about Trezi, check out -> https://trezi.com/
