As we venture into 2023, our founders took some time to look back, and reflect on the key moments and learnings we had last year.
Here’s a look at what we were up to in 2022.
- Togai (derived from the Tamil word 'Thogai') has the vision to create an end-to-end metering and pricing infrastructure that businesses can leverage to turn their pricing into a growth lever. And 2022, we clearly defined the problem we were solving.
- We launched Togai’s production version in November. If you are curious and would like to take a look, sign up here. Or you can Schedule a Demo!
- The team scaled from 15 to 28 folks within 3 months. We are happy to have the support of some more brilliant people.
Now, let's hear some more from the founders, shall we?
"I spent a couple of months last year fundraising, which was a much better experience this (2nd) time around. Also, I spent lots of time on customer discovery and early sales and loved it. But the biggest new avenue for me this year has been understanding organization structures better and how to build Togai differently to our earlier company and implement that," said Abhi.
He added that on the personal front, he got to watch Liverpool FC play live and lift the FA cup at Wembley. How exciting!
On the tech side, Thols highlighted that his team was busy with doing market research and feature exploration for usage-based pricing, contemplating tech choices for Togai, and working on building product features. He also got to set up processes for frictionless execution and maintaining momentum.
What worked well for you last year? What were your most meaningful moments?
Aravind: Our biggest win in the past year has been our hiring efforts. In my experience, when companies expand quickly, they generally end up lowering their bar. We managed to double our team within 3 months without making any compromises. I can confidently say that we have assembled a superstar team to tackle this problem of metering and pricing for SaaS companies. This was possible because of a huge learning we had from our journey of running Hypto. When there is not enough conviction in the problem statement you are solving, you end up getting pulled in different directions. This often gets translated as a lack of focus to the team, and they end up getting distracted. This impacts hiring as well since the vision and story we tell would not be convincing to potential candidates. So, the first thing we did at Togai was write a vision and mission document. We shared this with everyone to whom we spoke. You don’t change the world by making incremental decisions; smart people always are looking to push boundaries and challenge the status quo. This made it necessary for us to get better at portraying the story of how we are changing the world through Togai. And we managed to do that with a core value we now have set for ourselves, which is to Think Big. Setting up a vision with conviction and clarity was something we delivered consistently last year, and this helped us build this amazing team without actually having a live product.
Thols: I spend considerable time ideating and working on engineering design while trusting the team to execute independently. As Aravind said, we wholeheartedly embraced the Togai value of thinking big. In the products that I built before Togai, the focus was predominantly on short-term wins. At Togai, the decisions were optimized for long-term success. This gave us the ability to take appropriate trade-offs, and it has worked in our favor.
Also Read: Building a usage based pricing system is hard!
Abhi: Earlier in the year, we took the hard call to shut down our previous company (Hypto) and return capital to investors. We also said no to a couple of exciting acquisition offers to build Togai. Turning down potentially life-changing money to build Togai was quite liberating. As founders, everyone starts with unbridled ambition. However, many times in the journey, you have to take a call that might curtail that ambition a little. It is not wrong. But the conviction that my co-founders had and the trust the team showed in us made this quite an easy decision. It is one to look back on a few years down the line and figure out how it meaningfully changed our lives. 🙂
What didn’t go so well? What was challenging or disappointing?
Aravind: Creating a new category is extremely hard. Today, we have a stellar team, but there was the initial friction of getting everyone on the same page. This led to some slowness in our pace of execution. We realized that every time an organization doubles in size, it’s practically a new company, and we need to adjust our systems on the fly without losing out on speed. 2023 would be the year we accelerate our pace across all fronts— product, marketing, and sales.
Thols: The team was hard at work building Togai with a microservice architecture. We implemented a robust and highly scalable product in 6 months. But the pace of execution was not to our liking and that is something I am aiming to improve.
Abhi: Our decision-making around pivoting could have been faster. I was dragging my heels on deciding because we were making money with the earlier product. But it was taking away from building something bigger or more meaningful. As a company and an individual, speed of decision-making is something you will see us be a lot better at in 2023.
What is an area where you would like to stretch, grow and learn next year (2023)?
Aravind: Assemble a team of smart people to work on hard challenging problems, and you will create an outsized impact. The goal for me is to ensure that our team is consistently motivated to drive that outsized impact by challenging them with problems that they are excited to work on. This is a continuous exercise, and 2023 is the year we need to get the team equipped to scale up from 0-1 to 1-10 and beyond next year.
Thols: Our team is expanding slowly but surely. I would like to define the role of each developer, set clear expectations, and lay out a growth path for them. We aim to take Togai to new heights and ensure we get recognition for solving tough engineering problems in an efficient, performant, and frugal manner. I have a good team and believe we can do it.
Abhi: We want to ensure everyone working at Togai ends their 2023 better than 2022. To be able to do that, we want to consciously see that our work environment is enabling and productive. I want to read more, write more and work on micro improvements toward a healthier lifestyle.
While 2022 was exciting, we are looking forward to 2023 and what we can achieve. One of our goals is to achieve product maturity and leadership amongst the direct competitors. And that's not it! We intend to hit our next business milestone—1Mn$ ARR with a double-digit MoM growth rate. Thus, leading to a subsequent capital raise to help us accelerate our profitability.
Here's to 2023! 🥂
