Umesh Vaidyamath, CEO, INSZoom: How a FedEx box led to the world's biggest immigration tech company

hey everybody what is going on um we are on episode number seven of the gmi rocket show where we talk to immigration tech founders entrepreneurs executives

marketing experts people who are growing the immigration space i'm roman zelchenko your host the founder of labourless and the founder of gmi rocket

and i'm so so excited to have my guest today um who is the ceo of ins zoom you've probably heard of ionizoom if you've been to any immigration law event

especially an ayla event in the past i don't know 20 years so i'm really excited to talk to emesh about you know everything he's learned over two decades of building and growing

an immigration tech company what he's seen across multiple you know decades of fluctuation immigration law and you know where ayna's zoom is where it's heading and

really what umesh thinks is the future of immigration tech especially from his point of view so please welcome umesh thank you so much for for joining us

uh good afternoon everyone first of all thank you roman for hosting this wonderful event i think the story of uh immigration legal tech was never told

i'm ready would like to congratulate you on this uh initiative uh from uh probably on behalf of entire immigration legal tech community i would like to really thank you for uh

putting an effort in bringing everyone together thank you i appreciate that too i mean it was one of those things you know for me the reason i really wanted to even start

this podcast or this show and and you know podcast is because we chatted about this a little bit earlier but when i was building labor-less and i really had ideas about immigration

technology and i was starting to think about you know how do i do this where do i go i didn't really have anywhere to turn to there are so many amazing podcasts out there you know npr one of my favorites is npr's how i built this

i'm sure a lot of people listen to that one there are a lot of really good business podcasts but of course none of them were ever about the immigration space and so what i had to do was listen to the podcasts and try to relate everything

back to immigration and but at the same time there are people like you and others who just have built it have done it you have all the insights you have so much amazing information such a great story so i'm so

excited to you know to dive into that um and and so obviously especially the immigration space obviously people know you as the ceo of of ins zoom um but obviously what's fun for me is to think

about always how did you get to the point of of starting the company and i'll get to this later but as a sneak peek you started it in your garage so very much the apple you know story of tinkering in your

garage and you know in your home in california and turning it into what it is today um but i you know before going back a little bit you know before you

even started ins zoom how did you you came to america as you know a foreign national on an um on an h-1b visa is that right and so basically you were

the person that now your clients are servicing so what was that experience like and what was it like for you to come to the us um for the first time sure

i graduated in india in 1989 and arrived in the united states in 1990 i was working for a company that's based out of mumbai

also they had operations in the united states so i came here as a software engineer working with them and i was posted in kansas city so for me when i came

i didn't know anything about immigration or visas so it was a very interesting experience i didn't even know what h1 was what a business visa was what a green card was

i had no idea so i just come to this country and on my h1 got to be transferred from one company another company during those days like it would take literally a week or

maybe maximum two weeks and you just had one farm you had to fill it up and uh immigration is never a challenge that time and all you have to fill up the form and it's done

and you would get to reach one transfer there's no quota and everything was just easy that time as far as i remember so that's amazing it's so it's crazy to

think about how different it was back then what was it like what was it like to go to kansas city was that well actually let me back up was that your first time in the u.s when you came to kansas city or did you come here before

no that was my first time in the united states for that matter leaving my home country india okay what did you what did you think when you

got to kansas city interestingly i landed in the united states on july 4th evening and uh i didn't know that uh that day was the

americas independence day so when my flight is landing and i could see firecrackers uh litting up the sky in kansas city i was looking yeah

you didn't know that but that was your welcome party from the company welcome party that's so cool no way that's so funny were you flying above the fireworks or was it just because that would be i've never seen that it

probably looks really cool from above right now when i was about to land i could see there was a fireworks happening in the city then i then i asked a hostage you know what's happening then

she said today is america's independence day wow so that is a great day for me to come to this country what an introduction that's amazing um so okay so you came here in

an h-1b and you were working with you know you were working with a company that what for initially sponsored you then you said you had an h1b transfer um what you know how long did it take for

you to i guess become you know get your green card and go through that whole process and and sort of at what point did you start thinking about immigration as you know

in industry as something that presents challenges that maybe needs a solution like how did those how did those things happen [Music] oh for me

right along when i was in college when i was doing my computer science engineering i always wanted to build a software product that was my passion so it was basically what i'm gonna build so

first product i tried to build was when i was in college uh for a banking software built when i was in india and the product was built but i really could not sell it

to enough customers that's what basically drove me from my hometown where i was doing that to mumbai and in mumbai i got a job then i came to united states

but still the passion in me to build a product but i was still you know very much alive inside me so i was just thinking of different ideas so in 1992

i built another product in the united states uh when i was working so again the same challenge i didn't know how to sell a product i didn't know

whom to approach so i built a product because i was an engineer so it is easy to build things for me and i was great to come up with ideas and uh even that productivity i could not really put it to the market

so that way iron zoom is my third attempt at uh there's another first one what are the first can you do you remember what the first two products

were yeah first product was in 89 when i was in college it's called it's called share accounting uh software for uh credit unions in india

so that's the first one second one was in 92 i built uh that is uh it would generate a code uh if you put few parameters it could

generate uh cobalt code for uh uh large enterprises so that is the second product that i built and the third product is uh an ionozoom so

it's just for like for me that passion was okay i wanted to build a product i wanted to offer uh those uh my innovation my ideas to the larger audience

so the third product was basically a zionism data and how did you come to think of i and assume i mean i imagine it's because of your own immigration process was it because you were working with an

attorney and you saw that the attorney had a lot of paperwork or you know what kind of release what's part that idea versus really anything else

um it is interesting uh during uh late 90s america was going through dot com boom so everybody in silicon valley for a

software engineer and you wanted to build a product and for me i wanted to build something so i was looking for ideas okay hey what is that we could do and i had another one on my brother his

name is shiva vaidhammad he's also an entrepreneur and right now he's in india he uh runs his own staffing business in bangalore so he was in the united states and me and him would always

brainstorm ideas okay what is that we can build what are the problems we can solve so one fine day he comes to me and he says hey there's an immigration attorney in san francisco and he wants

a website to be built come with me maybe we can go and talk to him maybe we'll find a problem to solve there or maybe you can help him so i had no interest in building a

website because my passion was building a product then i just wanted to help my brother out i said okay let me come with you let's see what's out there one who went back and we started speaking to this

immigration attorney my first question was tell me why do you need a website and his answer was i see there are two law firms like one was you mentioned had become super amurti.com successful

with a great website then he talked about greg's scandal he also had on a website and one more call system and i believe the folks where that build their business on immigration

start building immigration websites and providing free legal content to consumers so that's a huge that time so they said look i want to have a website

and where i would like to attract the new customers then i told him you already they already built so you will be copying you are not going to get attraction like the way they did so we need to come up with something else for

you if we if your intention is to do a business uh development we need to come up with a different idea then a couple of days back i had seen a fertile express

a package that came to my house and it had a tracking number on the shipment and it would give you the status on fertile express website if you go to fedex.com and put a ranking number

they'll tell you where exactly what a case status where a shipping status was so during the conversation i told this attorney instead of doing that how about one of the problem i see with immigration law firms is i have gone

through the same process where our green cards are being applied our h1 is being applied there is a it's almost like it goes in our dark hole we don't know what is happening with our sky case status we

call you you guys are busy so why don't you provide a case status to your customers so that they know exactly where their hmd case status is where their green

card case status is or even their label certification statuses right so that is that really got him excited so then he said yes i think that's close

sounds a great idea how can you do this i said okay you know what i can build a a module and it's going to cost you thirty thousand dollars and uh if you are willing then we'll get

that built for you in a couple of weeks that's what i told him then he said yeah i would love to do that so me and my brother will come home then we thought we'd just build the city some

money that will do it on the side so along with the full-time jobs so when i was doing that after a week i started realizing huh maybe this something we can turn this into a product we don't have to just

make it this is gonna give to one law firm so when i went to meet him next time i said you know what how about we basically build this product uh make this a product and you

can be our customer too and uh uh you don't need to pay anything for this and i will take all the expenses then he said no uh i would like to be a partner in this

venture that's another thing he offered then i wasn't sure whether it is a right partnership for us because he's an attorney he's busy i'm an engineer so i said okay we can talk about it but would he be interested in being my first

customer he said yeah he will be interested so that's how ionoswim was born so initial idea for ionizing was not a case management what you think of today

it was just supposed to be a foreign national portal where foreigners come they check their case status and see where it is that's it nothing else

so the first version for iron zoom was just uh two modules one for the foreign nationals another module for allah immigration attorneys and powers

he did not do anything else that was as simple as that and interestingly i spoke to several other immigration attorneys in san francisco about this idea while i was still building it

because i had learned with my past two experiences where i had built the product tried to sell this time while i was building i started speaking to customers prospects hey would you be interested in this idea so

i started validating my idea whether it's something they're willing to pay for it so i had another four or five law firms who are interested in this module so in three weeks i was able to get this

product out then connected with these customers and even another change we did was we didn't want to sell the software those days remember sas was a very new concept

so salesforce had started uh their services it was 99 2000 time so we made ionozoom also as an uh sas product

where you pay a monthly subscription fees and i use it and it's always available to you and it is not given by license you don't have to pay a maintenance fee or anything it is

is always available on the internet on the cloud so that's how ions was born as a simple case tracking software with i had around 25 screens that's it

uh the first module that was released to the customer and the best part is we had paying customers so we did not offer the product for free

it was a paying prop and a service that uh when we charged to our customers that that's so i mean there are so many lessons there the first thing that i thought about was how you came up with

the idea or at least you were inspired by the fedex tracking number you know to me that's such a lesson of um getting inspiration from other places

no idea no idea is ever purely from nothing it's always a combination of different things so you combine your experience in immigration what you heard from this lawyer what fedex was doing in

a totally different industry and you said why don't we put some of these things together and create something new out of it so you know i think from maybe this is for i'm saying this for myself but i think a lot of people who start

businesses think that they have to build something completely radically new but the reality is a lot of times it's combining things that work in other different places together in into a place where it doesn't exist yet

um you know i to me that that was such an interesting interesting thing but the other thing is to your point you had i love the idea of before this you built everything and then started to sell it

but now common you know business practice says validate validate validate from day one if you just have the idea on paper validate it just to think it's here it's not crazy and then as you're

building it start validating more and get interest and things like that um do you think because you know you guys have never raised any money and obviously you had paying clients

i suppose from day one do you think that this is something that you but there are a lot everyone now gets venture capital so i guess this is jumping ahead a little bit but you know what are you what are your thoughts

about building a business kind of how you did it where you incrementally build something that people are interested in paying for versus getting a ton of money right away building something and then

kind of figuring it out i think it depends on the product and the market i mean i would say i was lucky enough i was able to bootstrap the product

without taking any money from outside because i myself was an engineer and uh the best part is uh my wife also was a software engineer

so i had an additional resource then my brother elder brother who works with me in ionism right now his name is raj vaidham but he's also an engineer so they all contributed to my initial ideas

so i had this i would say family resources that pushed in for me to build my initial code so i didn't have to really focus on

getting any funding from anywhere else but along with that this idea of that something we started as a small it really did not require additional funding what i was doing so i

was able to reach out to the customers then able to basically and make some calls and visit them in san francisco downtown some of these prospects were in the right hand of the city so i started

validating with them what they like whether they are happy with what i'm proposing or listen to them others anything else they would need so

depending on the product that you're building and you may have to take funding because if you take the funding the biggest advantage is you will go to scale faster

all right so for us again you have to look at your competitive landscape and if you think that you can do without the money then i would my do without the money

right because you don't want to dilute your uh shares and stocks in the company but if you think you really need to do it because your competition is basically going

much ahead of you without those dollars you cannot compete then i would recommend you getting some money uh from seed investors or maybe from uh

private equity or even the vcs so but i would not recommend just go and get the money because that's for the sake of it you have to basically have a plan otherwise you are going to just dilute

your uh um you know he was equity in the company i know a friend of mine he kept on taking funding again and again then

after seven and eight years he had left so less equity when he had an exit and it wasn't even worth it for him wow so you have to be very careful when you

liquidate your equity it's very important so i mean if you have to do it i'm not saying we should not do it it really helps so but for early years of ionosome the

competence we had some of them were well-funded and some of them were not uh but uh the rate at which we were able to grow the rate at which we were able to sign

up customers and i realized i don't really really need money from anywhere else but if i've seen that i'm struggling because i lack funds then out i reached out to

someone to uh give me funds but i was able to really look at my competition and look at how ios was doing then i decided you know what i know we can do well without taking any money from

outside and probably and probably as you're building a company if you can get to at least some level of growth on your own that looks really good for when you're going to go out to get money because they know that you can be very

resourceful versus you know people who get funding immediately from day one you've heard there are success stories but there are of course also stories where you know they blow their money on

things that was unreasonable but anyway i just think that's interesting because as obviously we're seeing more immigration companies taking outside funding which i think is great be on various levels but obviously it's

just a different way of operating the business um okay but i want to i want to kind of scale it back a little bit again uh because you okay so you launched aina zoom it was a family business i guess it kind

of still you know you're still working with some folks in your family uh which is really really nice um you know you had your first few clients they were paying as they were as you were building for them you were trying to you were

getting interest from other clients and so aina zoom was slowly taking step after step after step but then of course or this probably was during the dot

bubble bursting and then and then after that i mean now it's 20 20. so you you went through that and you continued to grow um how did you get through that first

sort of recession you know as a very young company i guess and then maybe if you can walk me through a little bit what that next decade was like until we hit 2008 uh

where there was another recession sort of how did you get through that i think it's a great question if i remember when 2000 these ones were really

making some noise in the market and i were able to get some customers and dot com first happened and research and started hitting in so we faced two challenges that time one

was uh since most of the dot-com companies were going out of business which are basically cloud-based just like ionozo so customers were questioning me

hey how do i know that iron is going to be around a year from now right that's one then um second challenge that also we faced was uh

getting uh enough having the prospect to trust ionosome that will save keep their data safe so there is no magic

that i could do to make them trust me but i was able to talk to this law from saying listen the future is going to be the cloud all that

your computers and your software all of them in the future they'll be offered on the cloud and this is the future what we're offering at iron zone is the future so some of the law firms basically

who were able to see the future they started signing up to tiny zone so though there was a money was tight remember the first two years i knew that

i would not be able to make enough money to pay for our expenses and everything so i was not making any salary anything over the company this is something that i am doing on my own so

for two and a half years is one we were able to hit the uh break even a point so all i had to do was to stay around focus on the customers

and uh spend more time knowing what they're looking for so there's a time when i started with just a case tracking software and to slowly start expanding

into adding other features into the product so customers are still willing to pay and buy the software because they realize that they need to have software to improve the efficiency [Music]

so we're able to basically keep on adding more features to the product and having uh listening to the customers and again these customers are paying customers

it's not that you know we're giving a trial software to anyone so from day one every customer that we had we never gave anyone free we always made sure that we charged the customer and a monthly

subscription price then when they wanted some feature to build since he was a paying customer and we were able to go back and keep adding those features so

it's just our philosophy of ionozoom and listen and deliver so i think that really helped us to get through our

uh initial uh first recession so we added the new features and uh we added the new modules to the product and that really helped us to continue to

add more customers i think most important thing is during recession is a time when that happens things may slow down but everyone at that time would like to

tighten their belt they like to improve efficiency that's where i think software firms can really play an important role you know what if you use technology you can improve your efficiency so if you can basically

offer solution that will truly solve the customer's problem they'll pay and they'll come on board yeah i mean we're we're seeing that now

too right and during uh the covet crisis where some of the companies that are the most successful are companies like slack you know microsoft they upped their game

with teams zoom obviously zoom is has become a verb it's not just the name of a company so you know to your point it's enabling what uh perhaps the company wanted to work on

earlier but wasn't able to because they were so busy and they were doing you know one thing or another um so so once you got so you know eight years later we hit 2008 and there's another

there's a financial crisis you know there's the great recession as they as they call it uh so obviously that was another challenging time do you think that you took the same approach at that time and you just you know you kept going at it in terms of that philosophy

or did you do anything different at that point because now it's your second rodeo so you kind of know what to deal with and how to look at right we kept focused on our customers i think that's where we

never took our eyes off our customers so being actively involved with our customers understanding what they're looking for and uh adding those uh modules to your

customers it basically helps you succeed it is basically your innovation so during that time is when ion zoom we started pushing more on our enterprise edition of the product

so we built in uh modules and features that larger law firms and uh law firms who are very uh who would like to adopt technology to

the next level so we we basically built we invested in our enterprise education of ionozor that's what basically helped us to push through the second recession

so we didn't even feel that it was a recession because though some of our customers were reducing their licenses but along with that there's still a market out there

bigger firms that are out there and they wanted to increase the efficiency even their corporations they wanted to put a system around their immigration processes

so we're able to go after uh bigger law firms and as well as bigger corporations to adopt technology so that is the time where it's again innovation that basically

helped us to weather the our session again same thing applies to my customers as well some of them were you know it hit them but they took that

opportunity to figure out retool themselves come up with a different marketing strategy and come up with a different way of telling their firm story and

adopting better technology adopting a better practice in the firm so they all one thing slow down it gives an opportunity for you to sit back and think through hold on a

minute now i don't i don't have to run let me see what is the best i can do to help our customers and what is that is uh hurting my customers today so that i can take those problems and solve them and

at that time if you want build those tools and features customers will still uh uh buy them i mean if you look good example is with the code 19 happening

i think some of the companies who are reluctant to adopt your label less i'm sure they jumped on right though things are uncertain but if there is a value for a product

customers would buy and they will invest in it go ahead so it's all about basically solving a customer's problem

what gave you the confidence you know to go for the first time to the that bigger that next big client or the first big client you know you've worked with let's say you're working

with a lot of smaller clients you know i'm curious kind of maybe from a mindset perspective because i think a lot of startups in any industry would be interested how do you approach that first big client you know you kind of

have to put on your big big boy suit and say i can play with the wolves just curious if you if you have any thoughts on that one of the marketing strategy we had at

ionosome was a happy customer he's our slogan for marketing so we never had a marketing person and we just wanted to make sure every customer to sign up is a

happy customer that's why and some of these customers that were working our our client side they started moving to a larger law firms so they became our

brand ambassadors so that's how we start getting uh recognition from the bigger forms number one second one is we used to go to a lot of iowa conferences and in ila conference you know we have

booth we do a demo for product and so that also gave us a traction with uh some of the bigger players in them in the market so they would stop by our

booth or i would i knew that hey here's a certain law firms that were bigger firms in the country so and if i saw them in the ila conference with

their name batch then i would try to go back and strike a conversation and speak to them about how what amazon can do how it could help so this is the

what i was doing in the early days but after 20078 it became much easier because we had well established in the market and customers knew about it and even the larger many large law firms they were

knocking on our doors and many of the law firms that we have as a customers today were really big they weren't big in those days i mean

were very instrumental in their success we worked with them hand-to-hand when i talked about we built an enterprise edition in 2018 it is because some of these law firms custom that i had they were

growing and they are looking for newer features to win the new rfp or they were working to get a new uh large corporate

customer so we're helping them to building tech technology tools so that they come across much stronger in their pitch to the

corporate customer in many of those situations i have personally gone and drilled a term of iron zoom on bay of my customer and we have won many of those deals and some of these large law firms

we have as a customer today and they are with us even till today because we help them win those deals and help them stay

uh keep those accounts by constantly innovating with technology so it is just an uh book our

philosophy is to basically ensure that our customers succeed if they succeed then we succeed and even today and it works and for any

business to succeed or any idea to succeed if your customers succeed they're going to grow when they grow and you go along with them some platforms i know today

and they had only 10 user license one this i signed up in 2002 and today they have 170 iron users in the diana zone

so and i'm very proud that this is just one example there are many firms that we work with who have been success story for them we worked hand-to-hand and uh and again i would

like to thank my customers because one who built these modules when you introduced enterprise edition though fees were much higher and they were basically supporting us they did not try to come back oh you know

what i'm not going to pay that kind of money they said oh my if you can build it it definitely adds a value to my practice and we're good so this constant support from uh immigration law firms and some of the

corporation that i was working with it helped us to build our enterprise edition of the product then and that helped us to increase our

revenue and still stay profitable so that wouldn't have to go and raise funds at all it's a really good lesson also to think about how if a startup

has clients that are smaller because you know typically it really large enterprises are there they don't very often go with a very very small startup just for various reasons

but it's important to think that if you know just if you keep at it your clients will grow and as your clients grow you will just grow with them and so to your point and if you can help

them grow that's even better because that's more of symbiosis in that relationship that's a really really good lesson you know i think to that to that question to bring it kind of into and we're having some questions

coming in too and for other folks if you're watching if you have some other questions please drop them in the in the comments i obviously can't get to we can't get to every question but um we'll get to at least some and uh in a little

bit once we kind of move over to them but please keep asking questions i'm seeing all of them even though they're not on the screen i do see all of them um you know coming to where we are today

after the last recession and obviously since then we've had different presidential you know we've had different presidents now we have the trump administration which has been presented challenges to the immigration

industry um you know during the obama and previous to that they're always some pull and tug of uh push and pull in the immigration space one thing that i obviously we are all hearing because

we're in the industry is people are worried and people who don't know what's going to happen and even with what's already happened there's i've talked to immigration lawyers who are thinking about leaving the practice because

either they're frustrated or they're really losing business etc um what like what's what are some you know thoughts that you have or some recommendations

seeing having gone through different um political parties and maybe past challenges to the immigration space if you have any what do you think these folks should be thinking about in terms of what immigration is going to look

like [Music] i've been in last i mean i've been this country for the last 30 years and in 1992

uh george bush senior uh he expanded green card quota for software professionals and i was able to get my green card within actually nine months and uh that would typically take around

three years during that time for our engineers either software engineer engineer in silicon valley that's how it was and uh that's how quick when we were able to get green cards during those days and today

and people are waiting for a green card for even 15 years right now and it's crazy but one thing that i have seen is uh

immigration is so natural to this universe everything is moving so nobody can really stop immigration migration immigration is how

this entire universe and the nature operates so that i'm a very firm believer in that and uh today in the last 20 years yes there have been a talk of changing

immigration laws and immigration in the country but what has really done in my opinion is it actually increased the market size for immigration it has

brought more education at every level the i remember in 1992 when i was getting my h1 and green card on hr manager didn't even know

what green card meant what is the label stratification was and today you'll see there are more folks in um most of the companies who understand what this immigration means

and what a perm process is what i want for it is right and what a green card is and what hmd is what lca is what an ones are right that people are learning about this more than ever before

so i don't think if someone is struggling today for immigration because of the rules there are other opportunities are coming up

in this industry so that's something that we have to look out there is always something that can be done we need to get more creative if we're doing the same thing for too long you will not succeed

we have you have to keep changing the way you operate and we have to be innovative i mean just leave uh immigration law firms are even iron zone let's look microsoft such a successful company ten

years back they were i thought they were going to go down i literally i thought that's going to happen in last five years and they changed the whole thing what did they do right they are in cloud

today they brought a goal right so any company or any business or any individual we have to innovate innovation is a way for us to be relevant and stick around things are

going to change like for us all the change that they came in immigration i always looked at is an opportunity like trump's immigration bans all of this it is basically an opportunity for

us to solve the problem so that we have to help our customers so that our customers can help the foreign nationals and others this is a challenge going to come they are not going to stop

and uh in the market for immigration itself is growing worldwide like let's take in india itself and 15 years back you go to india india and

immigration was handled by cops created by cops and uh they didn't even know how to deal with the people visiting

and today india has a formal immigration department there are people who are trained in immigration there are visas for a business there's a visa for short term work permit there are visas again

indian government is planning for a citizenship amendment what are the shoes so immigration is going to become a huge opportunity as a time passes every country is going to formalize

these processes in their country to make immigration better for their improve their economy and as well as the success of their own countries so

i see that immigration markets will grow let's look at ili itself one who started iron zoom in 2000 the membership was around

6500 people uh i would say around that or maybe less and today ila membership is an over 15 000

attorneys right so it's almost close to three times in three in uh 20 years so it's growing so anybody who's struggling i would look at it is a small tip they're going to go

through but use this time to re-innovate and do something different that's going to basically make your firm look stand up are different from the rest of the competition

one thing i was thinking about too you know i'm very big on marketing and i love doing different things in industries even this in this show this podcast being one of them

um i think for for immigration law firms or any industry right now it's also a really good time to just try something new and different and almost

wacky and crazy because everything is so different right now that if you come up with you know if you're a traditional immigration law firm and all of a sudden you're doing webinars or you have an ebook or you're doing some kind of a you

know an online game show where somebody wins a 15-minute consultation with you if they get all the points you know something totally not normal for our industry it would be

taken right now in stride because there are so many changes happening and everyone recognizes that because it's a there's an economic downturn and because it's challenging people recognize that

businesses are trying new things um but i think because they recognize that they're more forgiving for something new and different and out of the box and it's really interesting i think it could be a really good time for

creative people to you know who run businesses or or even who are supporting businesses in a marketing role or business development role to just go out there and do something crazy uh and

and see what sticks and i think that to me is part of the retooling process automation for sure right go and look at your process and if you've been go go this whole time now all of a sudden

things have slowed down you could go back and clean up your folders get rid of that paperwork put it on the cloud look at what what process you've been handling on a spreadsheet and see if there's a tool that can help you handle

that that's all for sure and then the second thing for me that's interesting is this marketing piece right how do you brand yourself how do you show the world who you are and how you're different

from your competitors in a really new and innovative way um so i think to me this is also an opportunity for that but it requires you to believe that you will

come out of this with the business remaining so i think that's the first thing people have to realize that if you're really hanging by a thread you know and your business wasn't going well beforehand then right now it's not

going to be a happy time but if you've just slowed down but you know you'll make it over the next half year one year maybe two years on a slower pace but you know you'll come out of this um yeah

it's a really really interesting time what i would recommend is uh who should i when you run a business always anticipate they're going to slow down

there's going to be a recession as long as you keep your costs down and always keep focusing on the efficiency within the company by using the best way to increase efficiency the firm is

technology that is a best friend for you to increase efficiency as long as you are always keep in mind hey your shin can't hit any time or i might lose one of my big

customer just keep that in your mind you don't want to lose the big customer but it can happen so as long as you keep planning that it could happen then you can really

will be around forever you don't need to worry about it so anticipate slow down to happen second was innovate and focus on efficiency and again you

brought up in a good point of marketing so you you have to have a good marketing engine to basically i'm not saying that you need to put hundreds of thousands of dollars i'm

saying put a focus on using technology to market your forms because most of the time today people are going to find you on the internet they are going to look at your website they are going to your website is what they are going to pursue

who you are and very rarely people will come in person see you so it's important to have a good marketing i would say storefront for your business whether it's a technology or even

immigration law firm it's very important that's how you tell your story who you are so i think aslan is done you anticipate i think we shouldn't have a poop and anybody business should be able

to thrive and survive yeah and and even even more so right now than before linkedin youtube all these platforms because we can't go to in-person conferences we

can't go to in-person coffee meetings you know have your coffee meetings virtually kind of like you and i are having right now um so you know it's a really good segue i

wanna i wanna kind of jump into one of the questions that have come out uh looking forward right i'm really interested in the future of the immigration space we've talked a little bit about how people can think

about the future you know getting over this hump right but what if we look five or ten years down the line and i'm asking this because

uh one of our viewers abhi chala asks um generally he has specifically so another company recently called immigration tracker there was an acquisition what do you make of the tracker acquisition you know to me it's

a little bit more of an even general question of what are your thoughts on and i'm curious too what are your thoughts in general of m a or just these kind of corporate

events in the immigration space you know do you think that it'll happen more in the future do you think there's a place for it if the immigration market is growing that means that and you know we're seeing more entrants

coming in doing different things um where do you think acquisition or mergers come into play going into into the future ten years back

there was literally no one to acquire immigration law firms sorry immigration tech companies i mean based on the market and what would and

the legal tech was almost non-existent but today even in immigration itself there are a lot of companies coming up that's very promising which means there's a lot of innovation happening

and uh this market is gonna grow so which means the m and a will start happening now so

and a tracker got acquired recently by mithra tech so it is an example so means investors are watching uh

uh what's happening in immigration legal tech that's a great sign so anybody out there who's planned to build their own immigration legal tech product i think you are on the right time right now so

in pretty soon in a few years there are going to be a lot of mna is going to happen in this space because this global immigration market itself is going to grow and what we have today and another fire

spun now 10 years tomorrow it's only much much huge and definitely there's going to be space for uh innovation for new ideas and new product companies and opportunity for m a

so that's what i see in a coming soon i you know i i agree and and i think whether it's an acquisition or even a vc investment where somebody from

outside the immigration industry is looking at putting their money into and putting trust behind an immigration tech company that means they're seeing their first of all that they're paying attention that's number one but number

two they've noticed it and they also think that there's some promise that there's some growth to it you know i think it's one thing to say that somebody who is not in the immigration space might not exactly know the nuances

but on the other hand a venture capitalist sees the world at an even higher level and so if somebody like that has at least some trust in the project in the trajectory of this

industry um i i think it's a good sign for everyone whether or not someone is looking to be acquired or and get investment dollars just the idea is that it is growing and everyone is growing together

um i i i it also kind of this kind of goes into another question because you know obviously acquisition typically comes from

the value that you bring to another organization how much you've been scaling how quickly you've been scaling et cetera um you know this question is what has been your

biggest life lesson scaling ins zoom [Music] the biggest life lesson as uh i was saying to you before if you have an idea

before a build it validator with potentially who's willing to pay for it remember the first two products are built i did not talk to anybody who

would pay for me i just built the product that is the easiest part the getting customers is the hardest part so best way to do is going to be have a conversation with some prospects and listen to them it is something that

they will be willing to buy if you basically build that and if the customer if the prospect or whom you're speaking to if he says look i'm not he doesn't want to pay give me

for free then you are speaking to a wrong prospect because if your solution does not solve a problem for him then he's not going to pay for it

so find a customers who are struggling with the problem and your solution if it can solve the problem then work with them and uh you don't need to offer your services for free

that's something that we did from day one our service was never offered free even today one customer so give me free for this i would tell them listen i will solve problem for you i will make you more efficient i will increase your

efficiency by 10 20 30 look at how much money you are saving and my software cost is almost very little if you compare with that

so we focus on and truly solving the customer i think if we can go on solving custom problems don't worry about the discounting your product

so i think if this is done i think you can always grow and be around in the industry for a long time yeah that's a it's it's a great you know the

way to scale is scale sustainably i guess yep you know i had a friend of mine just to you know he built a product and he didn't succeed i asked him what happened

then when he was building the product he was speaking to subject matter experts in that industry as opposed to to the prospects so that's why i told him why did you

spoke to sme because he's going to just keep on telling his ideas but you need to speak to someone who is going who is struggling with that problem so i think that's where you know if we

can identify our customers who have a challenge you build a solution and they'll pay and you'll be able to grow along with them it's as simple as that yeah and sometimes people don't even

realize a subject matter expert might be so technically minded that the problems they think exists don't actually exist in the world and something that exists is something that the sme wouldn't even

have noticed i think about from the user experience perspective too you might build something assuming that a user is going to use your product a certain way and then you give it to them and they do something completely differently and

then you're thinking to in your head but this doesn't make sense the button clearly is here but for some reason they go there um and and yeah i mean to your point you can never really know if you're

operating on assumptions you're going to lose at some point but if you're operating on actual information even if it's a slower process maybe and it's more incremental every step of the way

you know you're taking um with sort of validation behind it um yeah i i love that it's a really interesting juxtaposition uh what is that person doing now are they still do they have another company

or do they work somewhere i'm just curious he's right now working somewhere else okay okay i think when you are passionate about building a new product

right it's very important that you know we speak to folks who are uh entrepreneurs in the past you learn a lot i mean reason how i learned that i

should speak to a prospect uh there was a while i was working on a job and a company and that company sold a software to

the corporation that i was working for so since it was their second customer i was had the opportunity to i was on the project so i had the opportunity to work with that company founder and ceo so

when mid 90s so i asked him how did you come up with the idea how did he get these customers and he told his story that when they had an idea they went back and

talked to one this large corporate corporation in the east coast and the company liked their idea and these folks went back in their house they built it with literally no funding

and went back and gave the product and that was their first 2 million order then they came to the company that i was working for and our company was a three million

dollar order for them wow oh our second customer right so that actually inspired me that hey that's what i read about man what i did wrong was i was not speaking to paying prospects i was just imagining

things i was just building products so i have to speak to people who are willing to pay and build what they are looking for so that is basically where my inspiration comes from

and that company is publicly traded and you must have heard about microstrategy yeah yeah so it is in uh

east coast and washington dc area so i had the points to work with the founder and ceo of uh uh michael strasse so when you were working you were micros

your com the company you're working at was microstrategy's second client ever yep wow that is cool yep you know it it's also interesting because i think sometimes with pricing

you know because there are always going to be clients or prospects that want something for free or for much cheaper i think uh especially lawyers you know i say that as a lawyer myself

but you know lawyers want a process but we also are a service industry and so we need to make sure that financials are being managed correctly but i think with software

we get what you pay for in a way if you want something that's cheaper free how do you expect the com the people on the other end to support your use of the software and to give you the you know

the bug fixes and to give you the new features that that you want if you don't pay i think there's a disconnect you know i think with a service industry you say umash paint me a paint me a painting

and i'll give you a thousand dollars i gave you a thousand dollars and you give me a canvas with oil on it and so i i know what you what i paid for with software on the one hand the product itself is scalable you can have

one user you can have a million users you know generally speaking it's kind of the same thing so but but the business of software is the support it's the continuous innovation and the

continuous fixing and the continuous addition of things and the the um you know kind of r d the research and development so i feel like part of the conversations that i like to have is

just reframing the mind of the immigration industry to say look if we don't invest in technology we're not going to get good technology um we want we need to be able to say

this is not a um you know forgotten about expense this should be something at the top of my list to really put my resources behind because if i do that i'm going to have

really really good results uh everyone all of us will want things free right but uh right there's there's no doubt but uh

when you have a product or a feature that you want to sell additional price to that you we need to be able to convince the customer that really solve the problem if it cannot solve the problem then they

will not value it they will not pay so we we need to focus on solving the problem and educating the customers so the biggest challenge that we had for ions in the early days was

we were in the cloud and uh all the software that had been sold on the market that time was in a desktop-based software and uh even our competition was trying

to tell a story that hey having your data on the cloud is uh you know you have a risk of losing your data could be could get hacked or whatever it is right so we had to

educate our customers saying that listen cloud is the future and our software is the future having a software or desktop is more expensive for you to upgrade you will

not get the latest updates on time and you don't you have to deal with the software maintenance you don't have to do any of this stuff right so you need to be able to really educate your customers if you educate them enough

then when they see a value and they'll come on board it's very important that you educate them customers as much as you can if the education doesn't happen then it

would impact the value of your product and the customer will not willing to pay the price that you're asking for so if i can have if i can ask a follow-up question how do you recommend other companies educate their clients

i think that's uh i would say biggest challenge every entrepreneur has to solve so you need to know your customers and find out what is the best

way to convey the message to them so how do your customers respond better right is the webinar a good option is it a newsletter that you're going to question or do you have to do small you know tick-tock videos

or have things on a facebook advertisement right so you need to know your customers worry about where you are going to get good roi on what you do and that's what we did in early days for ionozoom

we invested a lot with ila ils uh trade shows ilr conferences and ila magazines so we were there and we talked

about it then we had our customers and talk about the value that a sas product would bring to the table so to each other right so it's just a

combination of thing that will have to do creatively to figure out how do you make that impact to your prospects so that they understand what you bring to the table it's it's it's hard i'm not saying but

you need to walk the creative ways that's what i'm saying if you just keep on doing the same thing you might not get story but you have to just put a focus on understanding your customers better and

come up with solution um i want to ask you one more question question sure if you could do it open

what would you have changed and why if i could do a tour again um [Music] powder probably scores scaled much faster than what were done

i would have basically uh probably been in more countries than what were today so i think we could have scaled much faster and much more aggressively

um for ionizone i mean we're doing well and we're the uh leading provider of case management in the united states but there are other

countries they still are not solution which are as strong as the products that are out there in the u.s

market so if i had really have to look back i think our goal is to basically i would have been when i would have been more aggressive in the international market that is exactly what we are focusing right now we are looking at

how do we take our solution while we continue to stay focused on our u.s immigration we are looking at how do

u.s immigration we are looking at how do we scale ourselves to other parts of the world offering immigration solutions yeah

as i meet more people and talk to more people on the international space you realize that a lot of what we think about is very inbound focused and u.s focused and maybe let's

say north america focused now canada is very much on the map um you know uk is always you know with brexit uk immigration was on but every country to

the point you made earlier every country has an immigration system whether it's really uh sophisticated and has real automation government automation or it's you know or it's something where every

day you come into the regional government office and something changes uh whatever it may be everyone has an immigration system and really the question would be in my vision sometime

down the future the ideal world would be a single singular platform maybe multiples of them because you know we do we need some competition but you know platform where people from anyone in the

world doing inbound outbound etcetera immigration can really put all the resources into that um you know into that platform and have everything that they need in their at their fingertips um so yeah

i think i don't agree with what you're saying with uh influx of lot of tech products in legal tech as well as immigration i think we'll get there

i think legal tech and immigration tech will go much faster in next 10 years than it did in last 20 years and yeah i think you know legal tech is going to have a

great future next 10 years i'm i'm formulating that just look at what else is happening around us it's amazing i agree with you 100 so for anybody out there listening who is uh you know

building an immigration technology or legal tech startup or a company keep going you'll get there we'll all get there together so umesh thank you so much for your time i want to ask you one fun

question to join you know you're you're a tinkerer you're a builder you you know you built two companies before you really landed on ins zoom and took it to where it is today um

if ina zoom wasn't in your life and you had unlimited resources what kind of solution would you solve with technology in the world and why and it could be really serious or it could be as

interesting and silly as you want i think as i said i've been always passionate about software and building a software product so

i mean if i if it's not immigration what is that out or done uh i don't have an answer because i promised a talk thought of at least 100

ideas between 96 through 99 to figure out which one we want to do what just like i never zeroed on anything unless i met the prospect who's willing

to buy or who believes in the solution that i'm providing so even today if i do something else i'm going to look for someone and

there's a problem and if you can find a solution if they're willing to pay then i get my uh match then i'll move on that's how i look at it true business man answered as a true

businessman um well um thank you so so much for your time and you know um we've got a bunch of uh just as a shout out we have shiv here

who says hi mesh great to hear the anus zoom journey very inspiring thank you shiv yeah so what what a great story and and so cool too right to hear the fact that um again

you were a startup everyone was a startup if we want to use that word everyone started somewhere and i think to hear those initial stories just reminds us that anyone else could get there whatever industry they're in or

whatever they're trying to do so you know thank you for sharing thank you for your time really appreciate your insights i have a lot of homework to do based on what we've talked about so um

really uh yeah thank you so much thank you thanks ramon thanks everyone who's listening to this uh podcast again i really appreciate your time thank you

so thank you everybody so much i know today was a thursday episode and not the usual friday but i am taking tomorrow off as a friday you know the perks of being your

own boss you could give yourself a friday off but i will be back next friday with another really really great guest to talk more about the immigration technology and growth space so thank you

so much for tuning in thank you for listening thank you for watching whatever you're listening on make sure to subscribe or follow and reach out to me if you have any questions about it so

thank you everybody peace out