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Kumar has built a bootstrapped software group from London and India, and Document360 began when his own team could not find a knowledge base flexible enough for its documentation.
Saravana Kumar is the founder and chief executive of Document360, a knowledge base platform that teams use to write and publish help centers, internal wikis and technical documentation, and of its parent company, Kovai.co. He is from India, near Chennai, and has lived in London, United Kingdom, for more than two decades.
Consulting on Microsoft BizTalk Server
From 2000 to 2010 he worked as a consultant on BizTalk Server, Microsoft's enterprise integration product, he said in a Document360 AMA. He started a technical blog in 2003 that grew to about 15,000 readers, a large audience for such a narrow field, and Microsoft gave him its Most Valuable Professional award in 2007 for his blogging and community work.
Selling BizTalk360 Without a Sales Team
He launched BizTalk360, a monitoring and management tool for BizTalk Server, around June 2011 and landed his first customer, an unknown company in Hong Kong, within a couple of months. His blog audience, his MVP standing and sales skills he taught himself brought in early customers without a sales team, and BizTalk360 grew past 600 enterprise customers.
Kovai grew without venture funding, kept at least a year of cash on hand and hired slowly. He founded it alone, and it reached about 50 people by 2019 and more than 250 by 2023, nearly all in India with about 10 in London, he said in a 2023 SaaS Open talk.
Building Document360 from a Hackathon
Document360 came out of Kovai's own trouble building good documentation and a knowledge base for BizTalk360. When he could not find a tool flexible enough, he encouraged his team to build one in a hackathon, which proved the idea, as he described on Code Story. A team of about 35 developers then built the first version from four years of their own pain points.
Document360 had about 17 customers at the time of his AMA, and he said marketing in a new category was its hardest problem. Kovai now runs four products: BizTalk360, Serverless360, Document360 and Churn360. He has set a goal of $100 million in annual recurring revenue by 2030 and says it is harder to build one $100 million product than several smaller ones.
Personal Life
Kumar lives in London, United Kingdom. He plays badminton, follows high-end cars and enjoys long conversations on social media, and his favorite foods besides Indian are Chinese and Mexican.
