An online scheduling firm after two bankruptcy without external support now has customers in more than 110 countries. The software helps in scheduling online appointments for SMBs. Appointy was launched in 2007 by Nemesh along with the team that included Khushal Patel, Sarang Verma, Puneet Pathak and Rajesh.

Nemesh is a Mechanical Engineer from Oriental Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). Unable to get any job after graduation, he worked as a freelancer making websites for three years with his friends.

 

Flashback

The four-member team left website development and built their first product in CRM software Salesforce called as Extreme Call Manager. Unfortunately, no one bought the product except one client that paid 19k for it. Soon then, the team realized the need for their market extension and hence tried pitching US outsourced clients. Template making was their first project for which they received a full advanced payment.

Nemesh shares that they started bidding their projects on the website. During that time working on WordPress, the team developed a plugin for appointment scheduling as a side project. Out of which an online scheduling software, Appointy was born. Appointy serves businesses to reach their customers faster with features like pre-payment, send reminders, social network update, personal calendars, coupons and promotion creation. This plugin became a hit advertisement for Appointy for being the first free plugin that uses Facebook ‘like’ support on a site.

Their first bankruptcy made them start pricing the plugin at minimum $10 per month. $10k was the amount the firm received within six months from pricing.

Recognition

Without sales and marketing, Appointy survived all by itself. Later on, in 2013, they identified as one of the top emerging companies by NASSCOM. Also, they got selected for 2014 summer batch of Microsoft Accelerator programme in India. 100 customers a day was the sign-up rate of the firm then.

They have been in Bengaluru’s 200 square feet office for 14 years and therefore, started building a big one in Bhopal, which was 3000 square feet.

Delighted Today

The firm has come a far way without any marketing spend. Currently, the company is serving more than 100k over 110 countries. An appointment in every 5 seconds and nearly 20,000 appointments every day are made through Appointy with its tickets conversion of $450 million. There are more than 2000 paying customers of Appointy.

Their competitor’s list includes MindBodyOnline, Schedulicity, and Genbook. However, their market strength is the service they offer to small businesses rather than enterprises. Moreover, its low-targeted fees attract more vendors for them. Nemesh believes that time is money for business, and they help businesses to make money by managing their time better and reaching more customers faster.

Appointy is Singapore-based for now with 20 full-time employees and 44 interns. The diversity of company proves as it makes sales from the US, manages tech from India, and call center outsourced to Ukraine.

Goals Ahead

They are planning to increase their office size within next three months. The firm is looking to provide more valuable product in which any business will be able to receive customers from the web, social media or emails. The upcoming plans include AI implementation in the product.

The efforts of Appointy is worth appreciation as without any sales team and surviving two bankruptcies; the firm has been able to stand its mark in 100 countries. Taking the example of Appointy, the market for SaaS-based startups in India has the potential to reach globally.