Vinay is a Serial Entrepreneur and currently running his third venture – RChilli. 

RChilli is known for providing parsing, matching and enrichment to every recruitment management system, making sure that resume data is captured, managed and analyzed in the most proficient manner. 
Before this, he was running a consultancy company called e-Connoisseur Infotech Pvt. Ltd. which was into product development outsourcing. 

They developed 17 different products, worked with companies like Pay Pal, T-mobile but today they are growing very good with RChilli. 
He spends the majority of his time in meeting my mentors, going to the conferences, listen to think tank. 
And bringing these concepts into his business and translating them into the current execution level. 

1. What motivated you to start Rchilli? 

While heading e-Connoisseur Infotech Pvt. Ltd., I participated in many fundraisings. 
I was also managing a couple of companies as CTO or CIO of companies. 
That was the time when I thought we should have our own products or services with minimum footprints i.e. minimum liabilities and minimum resources and sell them globally to fortune companies. 

We found recruitment as a niche and realized that companies are selling a resume parser as a luxurious product at a whopping price of $10,0000-150,000 per year. 
My whole wish list was to enter this space for resume extraction as a commodity so that the small enterprises and startups could afford it. 
I am thankful that the team was able to find out the right niche, the right technology, and the right penetration. 

2. So what’s Rchilli about? 

We provide parsing, matching, and enrichment for every recruitment management system. 

For example, if a company receives resumes, we can pick up the resumes from any source such as web application, emails, bulk orders. 
We extract data from the same and also provide automated job/resume recommendations with our matching technology. 
This is not the limit. 

We also enrich the candidate information by extracting his history from social media. 
Now talking about the use case, we can shorten the candidate application to 10 seconds. 
For recruiters, we enhance their searching capabilities by showing them 7-10 good profiles with all ranking and parameters they can think off. 

This shortens the recruitment process and saves recruiters’ time. 
So, where a traditional hiring process takes 45 days to close a job, our technology allows you to close the same in less than 3-4 hours. 

3. How did you manage to fund the business? 

I remember my days in 2011-2012 when we were looking for the funding. 
Wipro approached us to buy our product. 
They said they could pay us the funds we were looking for, but the only condition was that they wanted our product under certain customization. 
We gladly agreed. 
So, we are fully customer funded. 
Once we delivered to Wipro, they referred us to a couple of big MNCs in India and USA and after that, we never stopped. 

4. Any other companies that are in your space? 

Sovren is our closest competitor because when we talk to our leads, 60-70% have a competitor quote from Sovren. 
Second is Daxtra. 
Both are very good friends, but we do compete in the business space. 
We all have a different value proposition. 
All of us compete for 80% of the total leads whereas 20% is owned by us and is not being touched by any of our competitors. 

5. Currently, who is your biggest customer? 

I would say that we have never converted any big customer to us. 
But yes, we have worked with companies such as Zoho, gr8 People, Phenom people who started as startups and became bigger. 

And we were a part of their journey. 

They were not using anything else and we had a very clear vision that we would grow with them. 
Whenever they came up with a requirement, (be it language, a new feature or field) we were always ready with it. 
We never made them wait for months to let us create a solution and deliver. 

Our response was always instant. 

6. Marketing plays a big part in B2B sales. What worked well for Rchilli? 

Gorilla marketing is what works. 
When we started, we used to go to HR Tech conferences and do door-to-door or say booth-to-booth marketing. 

But with time, we started investing heavily in startups. 
Today, we are partnered with 30 different startup communities across the world. 
Our service goes free of cost to them. 

We partner with them in depth where they need customization or have any other requirement. 
The only condition is that the startup has to be part of the particular incubator. 
Secondly, we have a well-trained team. We keep on adding different channels of traction. 
Thirdly, we spend our money very intelligently. 

Initially, we focused only in India, followed by the USA and we are now entering into Europe. 
We focus on cities, we focus on companies, we focus on marketing. 

7. What is your proudest business moment? 

I remember we were exhibiting in the HR Tech conference in Las Vegas in 2017. 

I was roaming around in casuals and people recognized me. 
They told me that they knew me and appreciated our services. 
I never met them or talked to them, but the recognition and appreciation stayed close to my heart. 
I still live in those moments and feel proud of the fact that our clients are happy with RChilli. 
The whole credit goes to the systematic approach we follow in marketing and sales. 
Everyone uses the same language and the same approach. 

8. Any significant business failure that set you up for later success? 

In 2012, we had a major fire break out in our office. 
We lost almost all our servers and 80-85% of the infrastructure. 
The disaster struck to the point that we even lost our source code. 
We informed all our customers about the mishappening and that our support and service would be halted for a week. 
We had to figure out how to get the new infrastructure and the source code. 
It was a big failure because we had four different backups but unfortunately, every backup was sitting on one geographical condition. 
But we survived this disaster. 

The team became one unit and they came up with new source code and covered everything in one week. 
That was the time we decided that everything must be on the cloud. 
We launched our cloud products in 2013 and continuing with them. 
All our developments happen on the cloud. All backups are on the cloud on almost three different geographical locations/continent. 
We are growing very fast as we are offering cloud offering or SAS offering at a much lower cost. 

9. Are there any role model(s) that influence you professionally? 

I would love to talk about two specific mentors. 
When we started RChilli in 2011, we were struggling to price it right. 
There were no sales for the first nine months. 
I went to my mentor, Puneet Vatsayan, and discussed the issue. 
I got a very clear direction on what to do and how to do and I started getting what is a marketing strategy, what is a market position, how a product can be built up and how a product strategy is made. 

As a result, we started getting customers in the next 15 days. 
After a while, we tried to pitch enterprises but failed. I met my mentor Rudy Karsan and he changed my vision towards approaching the enterprises. 

I still talk to these mentors when I face any hurdles or confusions. 
have a whole network of mentors and they are always available to help. 
Thanks to them for their continuous support. 

10. What are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? 

One is ‘Play Bigger’. 
It changed my vision completely. 
I am sure all the entrepreneurs have gone through this book. 
Second is ‘Execution’ written by Ram Charan. 
If you want to build a culture of your organization, I recommend this book. 
Recently, I read an amazing book written by Richard Bandler called ‘Get the Life You Want’ which influenced me greatly. 
Apart from this, I keep on reading technical books, books on marketing and sales strategies. 
But these three books have changed my vision and ability to see things differently. 

11. Over the last 12 months, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? 

A new belief system which has come to me is that we can learn new things quickly and that too, from people we don’t even know. 
I have done NLP training which has helped me in understanding more about myself. 
It has changed my perception of handling and executing situations in real-life scenarios and most importantly, how surroundings can impact me and how I can put an impact back. 
My vision is now bigger. 

I am not looking anymore for a million-dollar transaction. 
I still remember Rudy’s words that you have to touch six billion souls. 
So, I am going to be a part of that ecosystem with a broader vision. 

12. Running a business requires constant experimentation. What are you experimenting with in your current business? 

Competing in this highly competitive world is a challenge. 
There are new strategies and techniques coming up every day. 

When we learn something new in our CRM, it comes with other different features. 
So, we get stuck whether we should keep learning or start utilizing them. 
Secondly, we want to do new experiments, but we don’t have a starting point. 
For example, we want to follow the ABM approach for the last year, but we have no clue how to execute it till date. 
I circumvent this by approaching people who know about the solution. 
We start finding mentors and training resources and get a direction. 
We also do war room exercises, group discussions and come up with solutions. 

13. Are there any productivity hack(s) you can’t live without? 

Zoom and Google Calendar. 
These tools help me in scheduling meetings and take me to the client location very closely with high-resolution availability. 
It is my priority to stay closer to your customer, not physically but emotionally. 
My calendar link is publicly available so everyone can schedule a meeting with me. 

14. Where can people learn more about Rchilli and yourself? 

Simply search for ‘Vinay Johar’ on google. 
You will get all my videos, links, blogs, comments. 
To know more about RChilli, logon to RChilli Solutions. 
If you need any information, there is a link for chatbot on the website. 
You can schedule a meeting and we will be happy to help you. 

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