Autoninja is India’s largest Auto CRM (customer relationship management software). It is a SaaS (Software-as-a-service) product that is used by 2000 auto dealers in India to manage 200 million customers and manage 2 million phone calls every day.
My journey at Autoninja
When I joined Autoninja, we were a scrappy startup of 12 people that had recently achieved product-market fit and was just starting our sales and software adoption journey. Along the way, we raised $6 million in venture capital, became profitable, and exited the business to ICICI Lombard, one of India’s largest insurance companies for $32 million.
I joined the team initially in an operations and analytics role and quickly gained a two-pronged reputation for being meticulous as well as being calm under pressure.
Getting my hands dirty
The role required me to frequently interface with customers who were going through their own labour pains of software adoption and organisational transformation that Autoninja engendered. Managing such customers wasn’t easy – many were located in remote regions of India and had never used any SaaS ever in their life earlier! I got customers through the adoption and transformation journey by working very closely with users, understanding their pain points, traveling to remote, industrial locations in Metros, Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities and relaying feedback back to the team at Autoninja.
At the time, we did not have a proper back-office tool to manage client operations, thus requiring me to work very closely with our CTO, Rahul Bendre to manage CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete) during the software adoption journey. This experience helped me to fundamentally understand how a piece of software works.
Discovering Product Management
While working at grassroots level, I found myself deeply engaged with users training them, understanding their pain points, identifying gaps in the software, creating mock-ups of what users wanted (in powerpoint, lol) at a time I wasn’t even aware of what did a ‘mock-up’ or wireframe even mean. Jumping into the problem, tearing it apart and thinking visually came naturally to me.
Within an year after joining Autoninja, I created my own role in a mix of product management and operations consulting. Recognising my creativity and technical bent, Kshitij Saxena, co-founder and CEO, promoted me to a product management role that came with a concomitant salary increase and an additional equity grant.
Large, fragmented industry
When we started Autoninja in 2013, the state of our field (Auto Dealer operations in India) was such that all customer data was maintained by Auto Dealers on either a) Large, fragmented Excel Sheets, or b) physical records on paper. This was a large industry (~$40 Bn in annual sales) and employed millions of people. But the state of software adoption in the country was abysmal.
Autoninja’s contribution to the auto industry
In this environment, we built a CRM system that organised all customer data for our customers (Auto Dealers) and presented a 360-degree view of a customer, which was the first time that anyone in the industry was able to see all details of their customers – sales records, service records, insurance, finance etc.in a single window. This made it much easier to operate a dealership than it was earlier, and resulted in our customers re-capturing millions of dollars of sales that would otherwise have been lost to the inefficiencies of their existing processes. On average, each customer who used our CRM saw a 12% revenue uplift, which eventually resulted in the creation of thousands of CRM jobs at these dealers.
My role
As a product manager, I managed our flagship CRM product and was responsible for building several key modules within the CRM from scratch. One such module was the CRM’s reporting module. Before I joined, all customer reports in our CRM used to be generated by ad-hoc SQL queries that were run through several different schedulers – the system was an incomprehensible mess at the time. I worked for months to find structure in this chaos, wrote the product spec for an entirely new reporting module, designed hundreds of mocks, and supervised the engineering team to deliver the new module in less than a year. When I was done, we finally had a reporting system in our CRM that we were proud of and that our salespeople could demo without embarrassment! This increased our sales velocity significantly and resulted in Autoninja closing ~30 new deals every year worth ~$200k of incremental annual revenue for us. (Today, this system is used by our customers to download 3 million reports every month)
In Kshitij’s words
Himanshu has strong leadership skills, which further evidences his profile as someone of exceptional talent in the digital technology field. As a Product Manager, he worked closely with a large team of engineers and Engineering Managers, earned their respect without line authority and led them to build some of the most complex modules in our CRM product. Himanshu is also an incredibly creative person and whichever cause or organisation he decides to take up in future, he is inevitably going to create a lot of value for them through his innovation and creativity.
But reorganising all the data in the industry was no mean feat. We had to build our own custom data warehouse tailored to this specific industry to pull in millions of fragmented customer records spread across dozens of invoicing systems and integrate everything based on statistical analysis. This was the core of our product, we called it our ETL (Extract-transform-load). Himanshu had an important role to play in building this ETL – he extended our ETL tool to dozens of Automakers and made it possible for thousands of their dealers to use our CRM.
He has a lot of courage and is methodical in his thinking about risks – he left a plush consulting position at ZS to join Autoninja when we were just 12 people trying to build software for Indian SMEs (small-and-medium enterprises), something that few companies before us had tried and succeeded in.
He has worn many hats in his career already and draws insights from all of them – he joined us in Operations, excelled in his role that involved Analytics and Account Management and soon asked for a shift into Product to be able to solve the product problems he had seen first-hand.
He is a versatile talent and any organisation would benefit from having him as part of their product or innovation teams.
– Kshitij Saxena, CoFounder & CEO
(above taken from a recommendation letter Kshitij wrote for me)
Autoninja, thus was an important career move where I discovered the power of technology and a Product management career.