Side Project to $10M in Revenue to Exiting - The Journey of Building FusionCharts

Today's episode is part of our Micro-SaaS edition of the Trends Series.

Micro-SaaS Newsletter

This is a story about how a 16 Yr Old's quest for pocket money lead to a multi-million dollar software business. , Based out of Calcutta in 2002, Pallav needed all the extra cash he could get to spend at the Bowling Alleys. He came across an opportunity to write a technical article and get paid for it. He set out to write the longest article possible since it paid by the number of words. That technical article would garner enough interest that Pallav would soon be working on the first version of the product which we today know as Fusion Charts. Fusion Charts is a charting tool for developers to use for their websites & apps. Back in 2002, the graphs and charts that we take for granted in our programs like excel today weren't really that common. The existing solutions had limited functionality and poor aesthetics. That's the problem that Pallav set out to solve in 2002.

If you think about it, he was the OG in the whole Niche Software game, what we today also refer to as Micro-SaaS. Going through Pallav's journey makes you realize he did a bunch of innovative things back in the day which we now assume as part of the basic playbook. For example, Content Marketing at Scale, Optimizing for Time to First Value for the User etc.

At its peak, Fusion Charts had revenues of $10M/year with extremely high profit margins. However, the journey wasn't all smooth sailing for Pallav. There were periods in the entire journey where the growth stalled and the company saw heavy attrition. In true entrepreneurial spirit, Pallav rebuilt and made a comeback. This year, Fusion Charts was acquired by Iderra Inc of the US.

We go through the journey of building Fusion Charts while going deeper into topics such as content marketing, customer support and close it out with a discussion on Bootstrapped vs Venture Funded paths of entrepreneurship. If you have any aspirations of building a technology product company, you don't want to miss this one.

Pallav's Twitter
Charts.com - Pallav's New Venture
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