MY BIG BREAK: ‘I convinced an IT giant I could do a better job’

When Partha Neog started his employee engagement platform Vantage Circle in 2011, his initial plan was to target small businesses. “Being a small company, I thought it would be easier to attract startups”, he says. But it did not take long for him to realise that the smaller the company, the harder it is to convince them to spend money.

Although he signed a few customers, Neog says his first big customer was to thanks to a message he sentto HCL on a networking site LinkedIn.

“This was five months into the business. I was sending cold emails to everyone about our product. Someone from HCL responded. It turned out they had planned an entire system themselves. All we had to do was convince them that it was a bad idea to do it themselves”, he says. Neog managed that and successfully applied his systems pan-India to most of HCL’s centres and its 50,000 employees.

“From then, it was easier to sign up more customers. Brands like Erricson, Wipro, and GE started approaching us.” The company has more than 1000 companies as its customers and 100 brands as engagement partner, and turned profitable last year.