January - 2003 issue > Entrepreneurship

By Pradeep Shankar

WHAT DO SANJIV SIDHU, CHAIRMAN AND CEO of i2 Technologies, and Manu Das, President and CEO of Soffront, have in common? Both started their companies by writing product code at home. While Sidhu took his company public, yet retaining a majority of his stake in the company, Das built his company in the old fashioned way and has managed to keep it profitable for almost a decade now, remaining private.

Das has built his product company—Soffront—without any venture funding. An early runner in the CRM industry, Soffront was founded in 1992 creating the first customer support product in the Windows platform. Today, with more than 500 product installations worldwide, Soffront's installed base includes several Fortune 500 companies and small-to mid-sized businesses across many industries.

During the early part of 1992, Das developed interest in building commercial software for Windows 3.0 platform. At that time, there was no software for customer call tracking or defect tracking on the Windows platform.

Seeing this as an opportunity, Das decided to build the first such tool on the Windows platform. “I bought a copy of Borland C++ and Windows 3.0 SDK, a few books on how to trademark and incorporate a company, a computer, a fax and a printer—about a $6K investment—and started Soffront,” recollects Das.

Das spent several months coding his product, TRACK, for Windows. The product had many capabilities such as tracking customers and the products they bought, tracking product defects and the calls from the customer, and logging the customer call history. Das' TRACK was the first customer relationship management tool for small companies on Windows platform. “Even though I intended to sell TRACK for Windows to the smaller companies, my goal was to make it easy to customize from the outset, and to attract medium size companies,” Das adds.

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