Liqwid Krystal has a long way to go

STILL IN THE GARAGE/ Product falters without marketing

Liqwid Krystal has put the horse before the cart, where it ought to have been all along.

Last week it signed up its first deal with a teaching institution, Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU). With this, its e-learning product CodeSaw will be available for final year software engineering students from the next academic year for five years.

The total initiative is called GyanX, a learning process. It will contain e-learning material from foreign publishers who are yet to enter India (the deals for this have been signed) along with CodeSaw, which helps software engineers learn faster, for Rs 1,000 per student per year.

Since 2001, when Liqwid Krystal's e-learning tool CodeSaw was ready and the patent application for it filed (the patent may be granted this year), it has been selling its product to foreign publishers.

They have been adding the e-learning tool to their e-books and selling the learning product without any branding. Naturally, few people know about CodeSaw and it is a long way from takeoff despite being around for four years.

As the next marketing step "we plan to hit the Indian recruitment market seriously," says Anand Adkoli, the intrepid CEO of Liqwid Krystal. "Our product has a lot of potential in both the international as well as Indian markets. And I don't see any reason why we should not achieve that potential in the next few years."

The story of Liqwid Krystal is like many other small product companies that have remained small. Started in 1999 with an initial seed funding of $2 million from Global Technology Ventures by Ramana Gokula and Anand Adkoli, an ex-Oracle employee, the company spent the entire seed funding on developing its single product CodeSaw.

It has been running on its own revenues since then, according to Adkoli, but the product is yet to arrive in the public eye.

"CodeSaw started with the seed (initial idea) of making learning and training easier and more interactive for software programmers and others working in the technical space. The product makes basic information that most people need easier to learn as it is capable of running any code in various environments within seconds," says Adkoli, adding that it is "a simple, stupid tool".

When you are writing a programme, codes (instructions in a programming language), you need a working environment, a language and a platform (computer) to run it. With CodeSaw, one just needs key in the code and bingo, it works across languages and over various environments.

In the basic stages of programming, this reduces the need for developer kits and also makes learning easy and interactive. "With CodeSaw, when someone sees a code or a function in the curriculum (e-book), they can just click on it and it will work. They can also try modifications on the code to try out other possibilities," says Adkoli.

The lack of branding was worsened by Adkoli being more or less a one man marketing team. All the more so after his partner, Gokula, left the company for "personal reasons" in March 2003.

"In the next few years, I see the network of universities using our tool expanding. By covering more students, CodeSaw will help create a recruitment channel and decrease the gap between industry needs and the academic syllabus (speed up learning).

"When we have enough of a student body on CodeSaw, I will begin approaching corporates to get the product installed as part of their inhouse testing and training facilities," says Adkoli.

Adkoli wants to increase revenues to $15 million in the next two years. The company brought in $1 million in 2003 and $2 million last year. It hopes to clock $5 million by end of this fiscal. It must be noted though, that an incubation services division, which was started in September 2003, contributed 50 per cent of revenues in 2004 and is expected to bring in nearly 40 per cent this fiscal. Around 40 of the total 90 employees are dedicated to services.

Nevertheless, Adkoli says that he has no plans to expand the services segment. A four member marketing team has been put in place to address GyanX alone. He also plans to begin scouting for more funding in the next six months. Never say die!