In the Business of Optimism

Startups can pivot on their idea and the market, but as an investor, I can’t pivot on founders. That’s why in early-stage investing, when there isn’t much data, it’s super important to find the right founders at the right time in their journey. Vishwa & Ankur, the co-founders of Zenduty, are two such founders who I met at the right time.

When I first met them, they had been running Zenduty for two years in bootstrap mode, were profitable, and growing at a pace many VC-backed startups wish for.

What makes them best suited to solve this problem is that between them they have 30 years of experience in this category, they care deeply about the problem, were their own first customers, have access to thousands of people to get pointed feedback. And last but not least they have experienced failure in the past.

But being an entrepreneur means being in the business of optimism. While failures leave scar tissue for others, they leave deep insights for entrepreneurs. Their previous product didn’t find product market fit but they discovered a surprising insight based on how people were using it.

This insight led to the birth of Zenduty, which today is used by 80% of the top 10 Indian e-commerce companies and half of the top 20 Indian tech companies.

Making Businesses Reliable

Zenduty is an incident management platform designed to help organisations respond to and resolve incidents quickly and efficiently. They help production engineers minimise downtime by centralising alerts, notifying the right people, surfacing playbooks and enabling collaboration for rapid resolution. By unifying the major incident response process into a single solution, Zenduty addresses a gap left by existing solutions that only solve small parts of the overall incident management process.

In simpler terms, they help businesses become more reliable. Because in today’s world, where consumers can stream services like Netflix for hours without interruption, expectations of reliability have skyrocketed. The rules of the game have changed.

If customers are not getting reliable digital service from a business, then they’re very likely to open a new tab or install a new app. And any business which is serious about digital customer experience can’t not have an incident management solution.

Alert, Now What?

You installed a CCTV camera, you feel secure. Now a thief comes and you get an alert. Congratulations, you now know you are getting robbed.

When they looked at existing solutions Vishwa and Ankur noticed that this is pretty much how incident management solutions used to work.

“Let’s assume that a service fails. The existing tool before us, they will just send you alerts saying, ‘Hey this is broken, figure it out.’ Now an engineer will need to check the metrics, see if there was any change in configurations. If someone pushed some code or some release that broke. There are like 10 different places where an engineer will have to see exactly what would have possibly caused the downtime. This whole process of diagnostics, investigation and managing the overall incident response was very chaotic.”, Vishwa shared with me during our first discussion.

To address these problems, they built Zenduty to be an end-to-end incident management and response orchestration platform. While others focused on reducing MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) – the time between when something broke to when it got detected – Zenduty takes it further by helping organisations reduce MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) – the time between an incident being detected and being resolved.

They achieve this by centralising alerts, enabling rapid notification and collaboration, and integrating with a wide array of application performance, log monitoring, error monitoring, server monitoring, ITSM, support, and security applications. They also streamline incident communications by automatically creating communication channels and integrating with tools like Slack, Teams, Zoom, Webex, and Jira.

Neon is Proud to Back Zenduty

Zenduty is changing how production engineers manage downtime across various industries, including SaaS, Healthcare, BFSI, and e-commerce. With the complexity of production operations increasing every day, the demand for incident management solutions like Zenduty is only going to go up. We believe Zenduty is well-positioned to become a major player in incident management and site reliability, offering unique value to its customers and setting new standards for the industry.