Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. It's guest time on the show, and this is one of those special interviews because I'm re-visiting with a former guest actually from October of 2009. Once again, I had this man on, Mr. Gaurav Khandelwal, founder and CEO of ChaiONE. Gaurav, welcome back to the BusinessMakers Show.

Gaurav: Thank you for having me again.

Russ: Well, here we are, like 18 months later. From what I know, you're not only still in business but growing, too, which is pretty cool. Why don't you share that with our audience.

Gaurav: Yeah, it's been a fun 18 months since the last time we talked. ChaiONE has grown almost 700 percent since then.

Russ: Wow.

Gaurav: Still "bootstrapped." We've grown from about 3 or 4 at that time full-time to about 25 full-time employees now.

Russ: That's huge.

Gaurav: Yeah, it's been great.

Russ: That must mean you're bringing in plenty of good prospects and convertin them into customers.

Gaurav: Yeah, you know, I think we kind of hit the market at the right time, as one of the first in Houston to do mobile.

Russ: Right.

Gaurav: Now, as we see, we can't spend a day without some conversation about mobile apps or tablets or devices coming out. So we only see this trend growing.

Russ: Okay. Now, you mentioned the word "bootstrapper," I have to let our audience know that at the BusinessMakers of the Year Awards and Celebration, Gaurav and ChaiONE won the Bootstrapper of the Year award, one that's kind of near and dear to my heart because, man, growing organically an emerging early-stage company can be quite challenging. You guys have done a good job there, and I don't know, are there plans yet to even go out and try to find additional funding, or are you going to keep going down this path?

Gaurav: We kind of see ourselves growing in two ways. The first way has been to first build some momentum and build a strong customer base.

Russ: Right.

Gaurav: And we've been able to do that in the last couple of years we've been in business. Now our strategy is to build a product recurrent revenue base. So with that in mind, we have built a few products, bootstrapped them again. We're a little bit ahead of the curve in what we're bringing to market, so who knows. In the near future, if we want to stay ahead of the competition that's coming not only from, you know, the Silicon Valleys and New Yorks of the world, but also from countries like Australia, China, and so forth, we may need to raise some money to stay ahead of the game.

Russ: Okay. Well, that's good. That's forward thinking. At least you're realizing what you're getting into. That's pretty cool. I want to talk about that recurring revenue idea, but before we do that, you've obviously won and built some incredible products in this last 18 months to have expanded like you did. Tell me about a couple of your favorite success stories so far along the way.

Gaurav: Two of them, I think, are in the market right now. One of them is called MobGenie. This is a mobile loyalty platform. The root of the idea came about last year when the success of Groupon and living social companies like that really caught the industry by storm.

Russ: Right.

Gaurav: You know, in some studies that we did and we read, we actually found that businesses were losing in some cases using those services, because some of these restaurants were not able to cope with the demand.

Russ: Right. Well I wouldn't doubt it from some of the stories I've heard.

Gaurav: So what we realized is some of these businesses actually wanted customer loyalty, but they weren't getting it because customers or consumers were so used to finding the best deal. So you're looking for a spa, you're looking for a massage, it doesn't matter where you go as long as you get it. So with that in mind, we said, "Let's go the other way, because eventually repeat business is what's important." Right?

Russ: Absolutely.

Gaurav: Right. Eighty percent of your business comes from twenty percent of your customers. So we built this mobile loyalty platform that replaces the ordinary punch card that you might see at Subway or Smoothie King with a mobile loyalty app. The way it works is you walk into a retail store. You scan a QR code, which gives you stamps. After you've collected x number of stamps, you get something for free.

Russ: Okay. This is not a company, MobGenie, this is ChaiONE doing this application, right?

Gaurav: Right.

Russ: That's quite different than what you normally have been doing, correct?

Gaurav: That is. Normally, we've been a projects consulting type of firm and now moving toward products.

Russ: Wow. So, MobGenie is launched and in the market today?

Gaurav: It is with three partners that we have today. We're doing testing in small markets, refining and fine tuning our product. Really, it's not public, so you really can't download it from the App Store or anything like that, but once we get it nailed, we'll take it to market.

Russ: Okay. Real cool. I assume that's kind of your recurring revenue product, right?

Gaurav: That is.

Russ: Do you have another one as well?

Gaurav: Yeah, there's one more that's in the market right now. Actually, it went live yesterday with a customer. The market is your traditional air-conditioning, cable installers, low-tech industries that employ contractors to go and do installations.

Russ: Right.

Gaurav: Let's take the example of air-conditioning companies. They make anywhere between $2 million to $50 million a year in revenue. They've discovered that a good way to generate leads is off the internet, so they're spending tons of money on Google AdWords, but they don't have a proper way of making sure those leads are managed and fulfilled.

Russ: Right.

Gaurav: So we've put together a very simple, easy to use, lead routing app that takes leads that their websites generate and routes them automatically to their contractors in the right zip codes. And it then follows up to make sure the contractors are fulfilling those leads and make sure they're calling them back. Also, when contractors do any kind of upsells or installing any kind of custom hardware in those people's homes, that stuff is documented so the company can make money off warrantees that they sell or service in the near future.

Russ: Wow. So this is another one of these products that you've come up with that sort of overlaps lots of different companies and is a recurring revenue stream. Wow. Now, to get to this point though, you were doing, you know, mainly commercial projects that fulfilled other people's visions, correct?

Gaurav: That is true.

Russ: Do you have a couple of those that you're most proud of that you can talk about?

Gaurav: Yeah. Every single one that we've done, we're proud of.

Russ: All right. That's good.

Gaurav: The clients we work with are awesome and are great. We're very happy to see them be successful. One that's relevant to the Houston market is an app we just recently did for an ____glass client of ours, which was a tradeshow app for the iPad. It allowed them to load all of their capabilities, documents, marketing documents and so forth into the iPad that their salespeople could then walk around the tradeshow show floor all day and do presentations with them. They could capture leads and put them directly into Salesforce CRMs.

Russ: You mentioned one that's Houston based, too. I remember in our interview before that you were doing projects from pretty much all over the country and all over the world. Is that still the case?

Gaurav: That is still the case.

Russ: I remember so well the project that you seemed to describe as launching the company, which was with Microsoft. Do you still do business with Microsoft today?

Gaurav: Yeah. We get calls from them to help them with their iPhone apps, believe it or not.

Russ: Oh, okay.

Gaurav: Microsoft is not an iPhone company.

Russ: Right, they're not. [Laughing]

Gaurav: In the fall of last year, they sent us some Windows 7 mobile devices before Windows 7 officially came out. We wrote some iPhone Android apps for them.

Russ: Okay. Very interesting. You know, when people talk about mobile now, it's just all over the ballpark. There's so many different Android models, and iPhone announces a new one every three months, and then the iPad sort of disrupted the world. Do ChaiONE do applications for all of those mobile devices?

Gaurav: We do. We do applications for all of IOS, so iPhone and iPad devices, as well as Android phones and tablets. That includes the new Motorola Xoom or the Samsung Galaxy Tab; we work for them as well.

Russ: Now I understand from other mobile developers that when you get into the BlackBerry world, it's quite a bit different. Is that true?

Gaurav: It sure is. You know, it's a little bit of a fight to get things done, unfortunately, on BlackBerry. Palm just doesn't have that kind of customer base, so some of them we work with our partners to get those apps done.

Russ: Okay. All right. So, Gaurav, before I let you go, let's say somebody's watching right now and for this MobGenie thing they went, "Wow, that's cool," or the contract scheduling management, how do they get in touch with you guys and check it out?

Gaurav: Well, you go to www.chaione.com, and there's a contact, Get In Touch form that you would fill out. You can also email me personally at gaurav@chaione.com.

Russ: All right. It sounds like you're doing great. Keep doing what you're doing.

Gaurav: Well, Russ, thank you for your support over the years. It's been nothing but great.

Russ: You bet. Well, that's Gaurav Khandelwal, the founder and CEO of ChaiONE. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com