How This Chennai-Based Tech Startup, NautONE Helps You With Marketing And Increasing Sales Of Your Product

• ByStartupStory     |    August 21, 2021

“Take time to choose the right team; without them, everything looks impossible, and never try entrepreneurship without funds or a proper plan. Maybe entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and never believe those motivational quotes saying to leave your show 9-5 jobs. Think before you leap,” says Sri Ethiraj Alagananthan, CEO, NautONE in an insightful interview with Startup Story.

Beginning of NautONE

We asked Sri about the establishment of NautONE to which he replied, “I had a chance to be a consultant for an ed-tech startup; my role was to set up an entire sales and marketing channel, right from generating leads to converting them into a deal. So, I have begun to assemble the team. Here is where everything started. I got the idea of why not do this for all firms who need help, so we started our research of who needs our help? We started by poking google with the most absurd question and started to learn a lot about outsourcing, so here’s my team and I left our high-paying jobs to fuel our dreams. No one had a second thought about the things we are about to establish, and I’m very proud to this moment thinking about the sacrifice they made to make NautOne possible.” NautOne started to take shape in his apartment, where his team Andrew, Hariharan, Vijay, Shrivatsav, traveled from their hometowns. “We barely had savings nor funds, and then we requested our client to use their office space initially till we take off, so we had to bear the rent by making sales for our client, which is like a win-win for both of us; we barely ate, slept unless until we cracked our sales, but like old days my team nailed it, and sales started to come in, We were thrilled that the idea we just formed begun to work out now it’s time to look for other verticals, and we started to pull my teams expertise strings to make sure we have a perfect revenue stream.” He further added saying, “Andrew had prior experience working with Amazon, and we wanted to help brands to establish well in the marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal. Then Vijay is keen on Real Estate, so he was like, why not try for Real Estate guys and let’s help them sell their beautiful villas and plots. Then Hariharan was street smart; I mean brilliant, so we thought of helping the fintech firms to get their product and services pushed in the market, then Shrivatsav was left in his stronghold, our ‘Stronghold,’ which is ed-tech.”

What’s NautONE?

All companies are born to solve something, but unless they get clients or establish themselves well, they do not possess any value, so the startup wanted to make sure the firm gets much-needed attention. “We, loyal customers/clients moving them from point zero, i.e. (‘NAUT’) to something that has a value i.e., ‘ONE.’ Thus, the name was coined as ‘NautOne.’ From 0 to 1, we take utmost care. WE make sure the firm firmly takes ‘The Next Step’ without any hindrance and not burning cash unnecessarily, and that’s where our slogan ’The Next Step’ was born.”

Vision: Many businesses enter the market to solve a problem, and NautOne solves the problems of those businesses. It takes a significant chunk of work off their plate by taking care of their Sales, marketing, Support, Scale, or Sale (exit strategies) needs while focusing on making their product better.

Mission: “We want our clients to be at the top, and we want to take them there on a fantastic ride. Our priority has always been getting businesses from 0 to 1. To put it in numbers, we want to serve 10,000 businesses by the end of 2022 and make 100 Cr revenue,” said Sri Ethiraj.

What Makes NautOne Unique?

NautOne uses an Omnidirectional approach rather than anyone in this space. It offers more value addition to the brands right from planning to execution with global standards. NautOne focusses on ‘No Strings Attached’ promising guaranteed results; else, you get what you paid for. Moreover, it uses the 80-20 rule, automating 80% of their work with AI/ML tools and only using 20% of the human intervention.

Challenges Faced By NautOne

Sri said, “Challenges are the only thing that drives us. We’re facing a lot of turbulence with the lockdown syndrome crippling business, so we are fighting it vigorously, making our clients realize that digital transformation is much needed to make the brand stay afloat. I hope the covid waves will stop soon and let all businesses survive.”

Journey So Far

The journey had been a roller coaster for NautOne. “We never had registered the firm and just operated under someone’s business entity for a while then; we never even had a website, so we started to build on a mediocre one and reached out to businesses. We’re not just lucky but persistent, I would say; we began to reach out to many brands explaining the benefits of outsourcing and not having the pain of burning cash in their initial phase; we never spent a single dime on ads; all our clients are through word of mouth.  Finally, we bumped into an angel investor who invested $125K.So to speak, we never even had a proper website, but yet we nailed it in every possible way. Kudos to my team. We managed to do a pretty decent job in revenue; as of date, we did close to $54000 (40,00,000 Rupees). External validation is essential for startups, and we are happy to reveal that we have been recognized by Startup India,” said Sri.

Team Members & Key To Healthy Work Environment

The company has significantly expanded from 5 to 45 in 3 months. NautOne believes in maintaining a friendly environment without much of a hierarchy where anyone can talk or give suggestions to anyone. These are some perks which NautOne gives to its employees BYOP (Build Your Own Package), Appraisals for every quarter are based on the individual performance of the Nautoner. The more you sell, the more you have in your bank! Medical Cover, Insurance cover for Nautoner and their family. Nautoner can avail Work from Home option whenever required. Recreational Corners. One can rejuvenate themselves with some indoor games and have fun! Vibrant Office Space, Period Leaves can be availed by Every woman Nautoner if the team agrees to it and their performance for the rest of the month is good. Parent’s Day Out. Nautoner’s can take their parents out for a nice lunch or dinner on parent’s day, and the expenses will be taken care of by the company itself. Special Funds to Upskill Yourself, “We would like you to grow professionally along with the company. Every Nautoner can make use of a certain amount of funds to upskill themselves.”

Customer Experience

When we asked about NautOne’s customer feedback, he replied, since this is ultimately a service niche, we wanted client/customer satisfaction to be our top priority. So, we put numbers to say our NPS is at 40% with a 95% retention rate, which is high for professional services. We had onboarded 100+ clients and processed around $250K(2CR) revenue with 15,000 Units sold through us. We only practice what we preach; We break the market by promising guaranteed results; none in the segment does that; if we can’t deliver on our promises, we work for free.

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