Bootstrapped Warrior: How GroSum, a performance management startup, has mastered survival game

For any company, their workforce plays an important role in shaping them into a successful entity. Given the changing dynamics of the workplace, the increasing independent streak in the millennials and the growing technology intervention, managing the performance of the workforce in an inclusive manner has become crucial. It becomes a gruesome task for employers.

When organisations' world over were churning for performance management, Souvik Majumdar, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur & IIM Lucknow, in the year 2014, while consulting for a company bumped into a business opportunity for improving operation efficiency in companies. Souvik along with Goutam Sutradhar, Partha Das and Rajarshi Chakraborti founded GroSum.

Initially, they started off with paid focused clients, which later paid a good dividend for their employee performance management tech startup.

“Employers can no longer be like masters to employees as slaves and dole out increments & bonus as favors and not care about anything else,” says Souvik Majumdar.

Core problem: Helping businesses manage performance of its employees

The advantage GroSum has over other existing players is that it focuses on solving core performance problems and help improve organizational effectiveness by helping the businesses to achieve their goals.

It provides tools for employee appraisals, feedback and compensations. The startup offers Employee Performance Management tools which include, Performance Reviews & Appraisals, 360 Feedback, Continuous Feedback, Goal Management & Monitoring and Performance Analytics.

“Service quality is our differentiator,” says Souvik emphasizing on consumers loyalty to their platform. The pricing of the products is based on the number of employees in your organisation or modules you need. It also ensures customers data safety through data encryption and Backup and Restore.

Till date, it has served 20 customers more than 10000 employees. Out of which, 90 per cent are its repeat customers. Among its many customers include Titan, Aircel, Capillary, Zapr and Zeomega.

GroSum runs under TuneSpray, a technology company delivering business collaboration and productivity solutions for core processes & delivering analytics. GroSum business model is Pay as you go time-based subscription and process based fixed price.

“We are sustainable, so we manage our costs and as long as our bills are paid and there is no outstanding payable,” quips Souvik.

Growth: 100 percent year-on-year

Since 2015, the firm claims to have been growing over 100 per cent year-on-year. The company has achieved break-even and claims to be cashflow positive month-on-month.

He stresses that these businesses would continue to evolve as they try and piece together unit economics. Besides India, GroSum is finding good traction in countries like Africa.

“We are going strong and understand the unit economics. In next two years, we will hit Rs 3 crore mark in revenue,” adds Souvik.

So far, the company is completely bootstrapped. When asked why GroSum didn’t raise any funds, Souvik elucidates, “I don’t think investment is at all needed unless the sole intention is to outsmart the competitor. For us, operation sustainability is of more importance rather than discounted growth, which later becomes unsustainable”.

Furthermore, they like to scale their business through content-based inbound marketing and partnerships with HR consulting, IT Solution providers. In India, the Talent Management market is around more than 4 Billion.

In this segment, Grosum is competing with startups like Reviewsnap, SmallImprovements, Appraised and Trakstar.

Future plan

Having continued with the model for three years, Grosum has 10-member founding team, who are mostly from consulting background, while continuing to be bootstrapped.

And they are not eager for funds. “We are mastering the survival game or so we believe and that's quite a thrilling learning experience too,” declares Souvik.

In coming days, as the performance management will include more feedback and greater implementation of technology, Grosum would invest aggressively in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning for more precise results. And as employees become even better at their jobs, it will be a win-win for everyone.

GroSum: Website