Today, Knobly completes 14 years as a business idea. When I said this to a friend, he asked me, "What is your turnover now." Well, I said, don't ask me that one thing. We are not big. It's not that we didn't try to be big. Every year, on every occasion we did put revenue goals but never got to achieve them. Is this a solopreneurship then? No, we have a team. Then what is the issue? We climbed most mountains technology-wise, delivery-wise but we didn't scale the revenue mountain.
We ran on projects. We built teams around projects. Somewhere all of us would get caught up in that one big project delivery. We offered products, home made, and ran around to satisfy one client who put money on the table. That's how we have been operating. We missed the scaling.
It appeared that either we lacked an internal gavel of revenue and scale but we never set out to achieve those in any seriousness. We were happy picking up a project and delivering it. I would be asked in a business group, "What's new this time, Prashanth", "Sir, you always have something new every time," and similar. A close friend once said, "Prashanth you are actually a problem solver. In order to make that work for you perpetually try to see if you can make a unit of it which can roll on its own every time." Sound advice and I respect my friend for it. However much we tried to find that unit, the roll would evade us.
In all the years, it appears that the problem solving diagnosis is true. When I see something not working, I think, "why". When someone says its not solvable, my mind goes, "why not". In the last 14 years, I am really proud of the problems (business cases) we have solved or helped our clients to solve. We have been instrumental in finding and executing unique solutions which have delivered multi crore returns to our clients. I can safely say this.
So, early this year, we started on a journey to put "Consulting" in Knobly Consulting LLP in the front. We are also acutely aware how the word "consulting" is looked down upon by every businessman/businesswoman. We are big believers of the power of 'execution" and Mr Ramcharan is our go-to philosopher to learn from. So, we said we will build business practices that will help our clients reach their business outcomes. Be it Project Management for executing a complex business on the ground or building an elaborate enterprise software application, we have the capability. In order to extend our internal strength, we are now building our consulting capability by partnering with experts and specialists.
The world today is moving around AI. We can proudly say that we are among the companies out there who have figured out how to make AI work for enterprises. We are making it work for us though. Given the hype and anti-hype around AI, it's tough to get clients to agree to our approach. Some have taken the plunge and they are happy with it so far. We will stand by them to ensure they achieve their outcome.
We believe the world is on the threshold of a massive change in how businesses work as the economic cogs are reshaped. So we are investing heavily on understanding the nature and impact of LLMs and other AI models. Most of our mindshare is going into peeking into the future and making sense of it so that our clients can benefit.
Alongside the AI work, we also realize the importance of how people are going to become important influencers in this bold new world. It's not what they know that is important to a business, its what they perceive and judge that will be most valuable. So we are hiring people who can learn alongside us to decipher the new way.
In the last 6 years, we have built two large product portfolios. CREAM (https://knoblycream.com), our content marketing SaaS product today has its own fan following. We have added Creambot (https://knoblycream.com/creambot), an AI bot which takes in a marketing goal and goes out and executes to a plan which it largely creates with user inputs. Our new platform is Matsya (https://matsyaai.com), an AI driven business platform which allows a business to run most of its operations from accounting and finance to project management. This platform is getting a lot of traction.
Together with CREAM/Matsya and our Consulting practice, starting this year we are already scaling the revenue mountain. More importantly, we are scaling the technology and people mountains. We believe that we are now a company which understands the new DNA of business.
I take this opportunity to thank each and everyone of you for having trusted us, stood by us and motivated us to be what we are today. Please join us in our next innings.
Happy Independence Day to all.
Prashanth Hebbar
Founder - Partner
Knobly Consulting LLP