How IT products startup GoodWorkLabs clocked five-fold revenue growth

While pursuing her graduate degree in computer science at UIIT, Shimla, Sonia Sharma was clear about her career path: not to be a job seeker but to become a job creator. Entrepreneurship, says Sharma, has always held a charm for her and no job could be a worthy substitute to it. True to her ambition, after spending a few years learning the ropes in a couple of startups, she founded IT products company GoodWorksLab in March 2013, along with her husband Vishwas Mudgal, a serial entrepreneur and author.

Given the founders’ training and experience, IT was a natural choice: “We had identified a key gap in the IT services industry—lack of good product companies. The idea was to be the ‘product’ guys in an otherwise ‘services’ industry,” says 34-year-old Sharma, Cofounder and Managing Director.

Founded with an initial investment of Rs 25 lakh from Mudgal, GoodWorkLabs is in the business of developing apps and products as per clients’ needs and specifications. In less than three years, this Bengaluru-based company counts the likes of Hindustan Unilever, Sesame Street, ST Dupont, Flipkart, CommonFloor and Avaya among its clients.

The start for this company, which won several business awards including ‘Fastest Growing Indian Company’ award in 2014 conferred by International Achievers Conference, was a bit challenging. While the founders, owing to their previous corporate relationships, did not have trouble securing business, finding the programming talent to build products proved to be a tough task.

“We needed high-quality talent. There was an immediate need to recruit quality talent to serve clients in a fiercely competitive business environment. It was difficult to get it,” says Mudgal, 34, Co-founder and CEO. GoodWorkLabs had to give up some of the projects that came its way for want of talent. Gradually, the startup was able to hire the right people.

“Birds of the same feature, eventually, flock together. After initial hiccups, we ended up creating a fantastic tech and design team that we were proud of,” says Mudgal, 34. The company now has 70 employees on its rolls. “Even though we have a good team in place, we still have to say no to some of the projects as we do not have the necessary bench strength,” says Sharma.

GoodWorkLabs, whose offerings range from designing games and apps to cloudbased tech support, saw a revenue of Rs 3 crore in 2014-15, which grew five-fold to Rs 15 crore in 2015-16. What is it that has helped this startup grow at such an impressive rate? The founders feel it is their design-oriented thinking when it comes to building products.

“So, if we have to build an app to enable movie-ticket booking, we’ll look at the demographics. People from which age group are most likely to use it? Accordingly, we’ll design both the look and features of the product,” says Mudgal. GoodWorkLabs, which also has operations in the US (35% of the startup’s revenue comes from its US operations), is aiming at aggressive global expansion in the next 2-3 years.

“Our current challenge involves expanding our business to Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region,” says Mudgal. The expansion, which will begin with the company boosting its US operations and then entering Europe by end-2016, will be funded by internal accruals. “We are profitable and have enough cash reserves to help fuel our expansion,” says Mudgal. The founders are also focusing on introducing newer products and exploring partnership opportunities in these regions to boost the company’s growth.