PLG & Growth·Sufian Chowdhury, Kinetik

Kinetik: From Failed Software to a $10M ARR SaaS Company

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Sufian Chowdhury is the co-founder and CEO of Kinetik, a company that's built the first integrated software for non-emergency medical transportation.

Back in 2016, while working on a different startup idea, an old buddy of his, who was running a transportation business, came to Sufian in a panic about a database problem, which was really just a huge out-of-control Excel spreadsheet.

While trying to fix the 'database' problems, Sufian discovered a whole bunch of problems with the actual transportation business that was helping Medicaid patients get to their medical appointments.

Growing up in a low-income family that relied on Medicaid, Sufian felt an instant need to jump in and solve these problems with his friend's business.

Together with a couple of other friends (who later became his co-founders), they started hanging out in the back office of the transportation business.

They wanted to get a handle on how the business worked and wondered if they could develop software to replace the Excel spreadsheet.

In time, they figured they'd also be able to help other businesses dealing with the same issues. But, 6 months later, they realized they'd built the wrong software.

Worse still, Sufian had already burnt through $80,000 of his own money on this venture.

So, they had to hit reset and start from scratch on the product.

But this time they decided to talk to folks in transportation companies, ensuring they got what was needed and could build the right thing.

Fast forward 18 months, and they finally launched their product and started getting paying customers. Things were looking up.

But then, the pandemic hit and they lost a whopping 70% of their customers.

Instead of giving up, Sufian decided to double down on the software business with an even bigger and bolder vision of what they were going to do.

This episode is part of our PLG & Growth series.

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