Building Scale in a Niche with Abhishek Goel, CEO & Co-founder, Cactus Communications

On this founder journey, we speak to Abhishek Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cactus Communications. Abhishek & his brother Anurag have built a culture of excellence into Cactus. They have an on-time delivery of 99.63%! How many other Indian businesses can boast of numbers like that?

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On this podcast, we've often spoken about how the best place to build a business is where everyone else avoids. Abhishek and Cactus' journey is a testament to that. Cactus communication is in the business of helping science researchers and PhD candidates have greater impact through scientific services and various products  and tools. For example, you're a researcher in Japan and your English isn't great so you can just use Cactus's services to improve your paper and get it ready for publication.

This is as niche as it gets! All of this was made in India, but for the world.

Now, you'll probably think, sure, it's niche, but I doubt there's enough demand to build a big business in this market. It seems like a small market on the face of it and hard to build a differentiated product. Well, let me tell you some numbers. Abhishek and his brother started Cactus in 2002. In the first decade of being in business, Cactus was doing $15 million or Rs. 100 Cr in revenue! In the next 10 years, they've grown exponentially and will soon be 10x of that with a team of 1200 people.

Our jaws dropped when we understood the scale of this niche that looks tiny from the outside. That's the power of niche businesses, they can be outside limelight and build a large, profitable business without the madness of the large consumer markets where VC subsidises the market and makes it into a discounting race!

And throughout the years, they've also been leaders in tech in their industry. Through the story you'll hear how they used tech scaling and D2C before those words even existed in our vocabulary. Now, they've been leading the AI/ML/NLP race globally through acquisitions and organic growth.

In addition to the usual discussions on the episode on how Abhishek and his brother built Cactus over the past 20 years, we also speak in depth about the emotional journeys that entrepreneurs go through. Despite building this behemoth of a company, Abhishek talks about how we went through his own insecurities and the imposter syndrome he faced even after he had built a business doing more than $10m in revenue. Abhishek speaks very openly about his own experience, the emotional challenges and how we worked through them to build this large organisation!

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Now, onto the episode!