Welcome to The Playbook. A brand new podcast from FactorDaily bringing conversations with the doers and inventors about how they build products of impact in India. The idea is to get under the hood, go behind the scenes, and offer deep insights from their playbooks of building products and ideas that matter.
Founded in May 2013 by Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas and Suresh Kondamudi, CleverTap has raised $41.6 million so far and is valued over $125 million.
But that’s not the story.
As a 12-year-old teen growing up in a lower middle class family in Ahmedabad, Anand watched and learned the value of frugality from his mother who stitched dresses to make ends meet in a small tailoring shop.
“Every time she would stitch a fall to a sari, we would make two rupees, and it would cost 50 rupees for every shirt I had to buy. So I knew it would take 25 saris to earn one shirt,” he says. “It would take an hour’s work by my mother to earn a shirt.”
“It’s very easy to spend money, but to earn money is really hard.”
“Can we be more resourceful instead of throwing resources at a problem.”
Anand became a self-taught entrepreneur when he was just 12 and had lost his father.
“I would get unused detergent powder from a popular factory, package it as soaps and sell them door to door.”
But this isn’t just a rags to riches story, either.
It’s more about applying the lessons in frugality, customer understanding and product building.
Listen in to learn more about what makes CleverTap among the fastest growing and most admired software products from India.