VM3 Celebrating 3rd Anniversary
On behalf of VM3 Tech Solutions LLP, I want to say thank you to be part of 3 wonderful years of journey.
On the occasion of the 3rd anniversary of the company, I want to spend time recalling the past which is full of enthusiasm and dream. I am deeply touched with emotions, remembering the time when I decided to start this company 3 years back after my career break for family support. I seek investment from my spouse and explored my first-level contacts and relationship to persuade people about my dreams. Eventually, I am able to build a highly energetic team delivering value to customers.
Opting for offering services was a turning point for business:
I spent the first 2 years understanding business etiquette, values, and making product: learningtelescope.com salable & scale-able. In July-19, just one month prior to the 2nd anniversary of the company, we decided to cater services in the area of Search Engine Optimization, Digital Marketing, Data Analytics, and Interactive software development. These were fields in which we got expertise and end to end exposure.
I am happy to share that we have a major portion of revenue coming from Services now. In the last 13 months, we have the following achievements from the services portfolio.
1. Served about 30 customers
2. 45+ projects completed
3. Annual engagements with 11 customers confirm customer confidence in our value-added services
It is because of our service portfolio, we transformed the company into a profit-making entity. Few of our esteemed customers in glance are as below
COVID-19 Challenges:
While we transformed the company into a profit-making entity in January 2020, the most unpredictable challenge of COVID-19 hit the boat in March-2019. As soon as the first patient detected in Pune, we got Déjà vu that lock-down is on the way (of course we did not anticipate duration). We started working on better collaboration tools, data security; while simulating work from home conditions. By 20th March 2020, we decided to explore work from home for all of the employees. It was even before the Maharashtra Government or Central Government announced the first lock-down. Initial few days were a little hectic to manage infrastructure requirements, data connectivity, and electricity challenges. Slowly we overcome these challenges to the best possible extent. The immediate decision of moving to work from conditions made me comfortable, as we saw a series of lock-downs afterward. While adopting these challenges, we made changes to the overall plan. We postponed the launching of two products "skoolrunnr" mobile app and "dureghi.com" from 25-March-2020 to 26-April-2020 as our immediate priority was to get customer's confidence that we can support effectively in work from home conditions.
'Skoolrunnr' is a mobile app targeted for 21st-century schools as a collaboration platform for School Management, Teachers, Transport services, Students, and Parents. With prolonged lock-down conditions, we received a lukewarm response, but customers opted for this app are happy and fully satisfied. We anticipate a good market across India for this product, once we have stable conditions and recovery from COVID-19 restrictions.
'Dureghi.com' is a Marathi and English literature website. We got a good response with minimal investment at this point. COVID-19 forces everyone to look only after immediate needs and everything else goes on the shelf. It applies to book publishers, the entertainment industry, and so on in the Art & Creativity field. We spent minimal on marketing costs, but we have done good efforts on reaching people organically. It helps us a lot. Dureghi’s Achievement from our point of view,
1. 30k + organic views on the website
2. Reach across different geographies of Maharashtra (considering 90% contents in Marathi, it is a good achievement)
3. Create a positive vibe through literature in the extremely negative atmosphere outside
We got a really good response from people, reader communities with whom we did not have any interaction in the past. We are hopeful to reach more and more people in the next 1 year and we will start spending more on marketing once we saw a recovery in the market.
Change in marketing plan because of COVID-19 challenges:
In the first 2 weeks of lock-down, we could anticipate projects which are likely to go on hold (e.g. hospitality segment), similarly less traction from some of the other segments. Initially, we saw a surge in the education field but it was a short term as lock-down gets extended more and more. People suddenly become cautions even on kids' education spends. We could think of very few segments, where cash flow was active (e.g. Pharmaceutical, FMCG, and E-commerce websites). We started tuning our marketing plans accordingly. It yields positive results and we won our first pharma customer and two e-commerce website customers for an annual engagement plan. It was a morale booster in extremely unprecedented conditions. It did not only compensate for our on-hold project setback but gives opportunities to grow further. It also gives us an opportunity to look beyond the education segment. We will have more focus on 3 segments: Pharma, FMCG, and E-commerce Customer base.
Message to Customers and Employees:
We are pleased to give an annual performance-based bonus (X% of revenue) to our all employees, as we promised on the last anniversary.
We might not have unlimited resources, excess of investment, and a global alumni network. But we have the passion, the dreams, and the hardships that we have passed which are also our most valuable assets. We have striven, made effort and persisted for our dream. We have proven our capability and value; we have reached the peak of ourselves. I encourage all VM3 employees, “let us stretch our arms wide for the next promising year awaits us in front.”
We are thankful to all our customers to believe in our vision, passionate employees for their extraordinary efforts and families of employees to support work from home conditions in difficult times.