As a young student during her engineering days, Sonia Sharma always dreamt of creating jobs rather than working for an organization as an employee. She never gave up on this dream and went on to create GoodWorkLabs, a multi-million dollar outsourced product development company.

Sonia is one of the leading women technopreneurs in the IT industry. She wanted to create a world-class product development company to build high-end products, mobile apps and games for leading companies. She sensed a dearth for qualified ‘product development’ companies and thus she established GoodWorkLabs in January 2013. Today, GoodWorkLabs is noted among the top outsourced product development companies and has recorded a 500%  revenue growth year-on-year.

Today on the occasion of Women’s Day,  we would like to celebrate and share her inspirational journey with the world and motivate every woman who dares to dream and make a difference!

Read this exclusive coverage on Inventiva that showcases how women like Sonia Sharma are breaking all prejudices and establishing themselves as leaders in the Technology industry!

In a one-on-one interview with Inventiva:

1) Share the idea or story behind the venture – How did it come to an existence? How did you identify your co-founder?
I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. At an age of 21, during my engineering college days in a laid-back city of Shimla, my dream was to create jobs and become an entrepreneur, rather than just become another brick in the wall. I’m glad I have realized my dream by founding GoodWorkLabs.

After working for couple of startups and witnessing ‘how it’s done’ I started GoodWorkLabs in January 2013. By positioning ourselves as the ‘product’ guys in the IT services industry, we were able to bag couple of marquee clients at the very outset.

This helped us establish our credibility and there was no looking back since then. Later that year, serial entrepreneur Vishwas Mudagal also joined GoodWorkLabs which further fuelled our growth. Thus began the journey of a solid company, which has grown 500% year-on-year since its inception.

2) What were the problems you faced during the starting days and how did you resolve them?
When we were starting out, finding and hiring the right kind of talent was the biggest challenge we faced. It is ‘the’ most critical factor as it makes or breaks the company’s growth. The talent pool in India is big in terms of numbers but finding good talent is difficult. A part of it is to be blamed on our education system.
But we have created a ‘hiring philosophy’ in accordance with our objectives and growth plans. At GoodWorkLabs, we focus on hiring candidates with two qualities. One is passion – we look for people who are eager to learn, contribute and grow with a positive attitude. The second is – we look for problem solvers!

Both these philosophies together have helped us set a positive work culture and attract a crowd of like-minded people. As the saying goes, ‘birds of the same feather flock together.’

3) Where do you want to see yourself in next 5 years?

As part of future road-map for GoodWorkLabs 2.0, productizing our services was critical. We spent a lot of time brainstorming with our clients, industry experts and our internal teams and what we realized was that in order to reach out to a larger audience across the globe, we would have to build a robust and scalable platform which both customers and businesses could use to launch their mobile applications, to automate work-flow processes and to integrate their business solutions.

This led us to build a phenomenal enterprise mobility platform called GoodWorks Mobility.
We will be launching GoodWorks Mobility shortly. What’s amazing about this launch is that we have already successfully signed up marquee clients for pilots and have further tied up with industry biggies to take our product to the market with several partnerships. That’s a super validation that the product will succeed because we have been very practical in our approach.We are very excited about this launch and this product will be most probably handled by a separate entity. With this move, we will become a group of companies.

Promoting Growth in 2017: Turning into Angel Investors

In January, 2017 Vishwas and I decided to become Angel Investors. We are all set to mentor upcoming startups and extend our expertise and thought Leadership to help businesses grow. Money is just one of the many benefits that startups would get under our mentorship. Startups would also get access to a bunch of other benefits such as valuable network, free office space, technology and design consulting, PR and marketing.

Bangalore is a breeding ground for startups and both Vishwas and I have been enthusiastic about creating an ecosystem for startups to succeed. So anyone who is a startup or is someone with an idea but unsure if it is business worthy, then GoodWorkLabs is offering them an opportunity to begin through our coworking venture GoodWorks CoWork

Five Years down the line:

GoodWorkLabs is striving to become the global leader in the innovation outsourcing space as we continue to take up complex technology and design work on outcome basis for customers worldwide. As part of our expansion plan, we will increase the headcount in our US office in the San Francisco bay area. We have significant demand for our services in that area. Also, we will continue to expand in key geographies around the world including Europe and APAC, and by bringing out products and solutions for different industry verticals. We intend to scale by keeping our DNA intact.

4) What do you feel is the major difference between entrepreneurs and those who work for someone else?
Passion and perseverance are the two traits that differentiate entrepreneurs from the rest. We end up looking out for the same in our employees also but it’s very hard to find.

5) If you had the chance to start your career over again, what would you do differently?

I don’t think I’ll do anything differently. I have enjoyed my journey so far… I have experimented and failed before finding success in GoodWorkLabs. I feel that failures are very important as they make you who you are. Even if I had started off my career differently, I am sure I would have experimented and would have had my share of failures before finding success.

6) Anything, you would like to say to our readers or upcoming entrepreneurs?

In my industry, quality and on-time delivery is very important, which translates into the trust (or lack of it) your customer has in your company.
Always ensure that your processes are in place and that you invest in a team, which can deliver. No matter how unique your idea may look like, no matter how much funding you have raised, no matter how much user base you have, if you are not clear about how you are going to make money, you cannot sustain yourself.
Once your idea goes through the above litmus test, it’s very important to figure out how you are going to execute it. A solid idea needs a solid team, which can execute it. It’s very important to take a calculated risk and your idea should be validated before you go full throttle about it. We have often helped many startups with their minimal viable products which they used to test the waters. Upon getting positive signals after user validation, many of our customers were able to raise funds and build the business of their dreams.

If you would like to read the entire interview with Inventiva, please click here.

GoodWorkLabs MD and co-founder Sonia Sharma was featured on Yourstory, the popular blog that covers journeys of entrepreneurs. The story covered how Sonia Sharma went on to create the leading Outsource product development firm GoodWorkLabs in just 3 years making it a multi-million-dollar company creating products that touches millions of lives globally. Take a look at the complete story of Sonia Sharma and GoodWorkLabs here on Yourstory/ HerStory.

Nagpur Entrepreneurs, a popular blog, covered an interview of Sonia Sharma, MD & Co-Founder of GoodWorkLabs. Here are excerpts from the featured interview–

Women Entrepreneurship in India Needs a Strong Ecosystem to Thrive

Women entrepreneurship has been recognized as an important function for driving development and economic growth. Right at this moment, there are several women entrepreneurs who are starting businesses and changing the world with their unique solutions to business and management problems.

In India, we do not have many women-led businesses that have grown beyond a certain scale. Did you know: the four southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala account for over 50 percent of all women-led SSI units in India, which pretty much gives us a clear picture of the current state of women entrepreneurship in India.

In today’s entrepreneur interview, we’re featuring Sonia Sharma, MD and co-founder of GoodWorkLABS, a software startup. While explaining the benefits of lean methodology in software development, she also opines that for women entrepreneurship to thrive in India, a strong ecosystem must be created.

Q: Briefly tell us about your background.

I am a techie at heart and will always be one. I started out as a software engineer after graduating from UIIT, Shimla. Since then it has been a memorable journey. I love working with startups and after nearly a decade of startup experience in working with high-tech startups such as Arcot and Aveksa, I went on to start my own firm, GoodWorkLabs. Planning new products, identifying roadmaps, working with customers to solve their technology /business problems and creating winning partnerships are my passions.

Q: GoodWorkLABS is a new-age software lab. How does it solve challenging software problems in the business world?

We are the best at what we do, that’s the key difference. We started GoodWorkLabs with an idea to help companies globally and locally build products, take them to the market and scale them. Our quality is exceptional because we know what it takes to build world class products. The core team has built several products during the last decade, essentially helping us understand what fails, what works and how to scale. The market is crowded with many IT services companies (big and small), which are no different from each other, and there is gap in terms of expertise required to build products end to end. That’s where we come in and can make a huge difference to our clients.

We help firms in technology, UX, pricing strategy, marketing and beyond. Our aim is to solve complex problems of our clients and we are proud to have passionate and awesomest programmers. Our customers are typically firms that need high-end talent and who are ready to pay extra to get quality. It was a risky proposition to position the company at the top of the pyramid, but we knew there was a space for it. And we were right. Within 9 months, we have grown tremendously, adding clients from Fortune 500 companies to top-notch startups. We are now hiring aggressively to cater to the need and our hiring is painful because we hire the best.

Our other forte is our eye for perfection and attention to detail. Everything we do has to be beautiful and have great user experience (UX). We help customers in mobile apps for iPhone and Android, Games, Custom Software, Enterprise Software, Ruby on Rails projects, Java, .NET and UX/ UI.

Q: You’ve spent a decade in the IT industry before starting GoodWorkLabs. How important is work experience for an aspiring entrepreneur?

Experience is important because it makes you what you are. Failures are more important than successes. Learning what not to do is the best learning. Having ambition is good but ambition along with experience is better. After having spent almost a decade in the IT industry and tasted success and failure, I am able to add a ton of value to our customers and our teams. My suggestion to aspiring entrepreneurs is to get some relevant experience before starting your own. But if you have a killer idea, then nothing should stop you from implementing it.

Q: What qualities should one look out for while finding a business partner / co-founder?

Well, 1st thing I look for is trust. Businesses cannot be built without trust. Rather than bringing in a total stranger, I would prefer to team up with someone I have a history with. Also, you need to question as to what the other co founder will bring to the table. The way I look at it, co founders should complement each other as far as their skills and capabilities are concerned.

I was lucky that GoodWorkLabs was funded by industry leader Vishwas Mudagal, who not only invested time and money but brought along with him many top client connections, execution experience and credibility. One of the accomplishments for the firm is that we grew so fast that Vishwas has now joined us as the CEO of GoodWorkLabs.

Q: Do you believe in lean/agile software development? What are its advantages?

We live, breathe and dream Agile Software Development. At GoodWorkLabs, we always follow Agile Methodologies of SCRUM and Extreme Programming for all our projects, where we iteratively build a product. It gives our customers a number of benefits that include quick time-to-market window, saving costs building only essential features to go to market, control of the roadmap and ability to change the direction of the project every sprint, measure quality at the end of every sprint, better risk management because you see a potential deployable product every sprint and so on.

Q: How would you describe the current state of women entrepreneurship in India? What can be done to grow it further?

This topic is very close to my heart. I think we have a very fundamental problem…I see a problem in the way we raise our daughters. We treat them second to our sons and they grow up accepting that. As a result, there is a lack of self respect and self belief in most of them. A trait every entrepreneur should possess is belief in self and our upbringing doesn’t give a chance to this trait to get inculcated in our daughters.

We Indians need to change that mentality and need to give our daughters a better environment to grow up in. Parents need to have a belief in them.

I was lucky having to born into a very progressive family. There was not even a single moment where I felt that I got any lesser treatment and encouragement than what my brothers received from my parents. My parents were always very proud of me, had belief in me and encouraged me a lot. And I was lucky again to get married to a man who respected me as an individual and ambition and supported me unconditionally.

Much needs to be done in India to encourage women entrepreneurship. We need an ecosystem that needs to evolve, both at grassroot level and the corporate / startup levels. We need to encourage hiring women in our workforce, come up with women friendly work policies, give them safe environment to succeed. When more women enter the leadership brass, they go out and start more companies (like the way I did), which is good for the economy.

Read the complete interview here.

Check out the interview of Sonia Sharma, Co-Founder and Managing Director of GoodWorkLabs. She inspires students to pursue entrepreneurship, talks about her journey in startups, how she is helping individuals and companies globally to bring out beautiful and solid apps and products that inspire the world.

Read complete interview on the BMS College blog here

Here are the excerpts from the interview –

Tell us something about your venture.

Sonia – I head GoodWorkLabs, a high-end software product consulting & delivery firm. We help companies / startup build software, mobile apps and gaming products. We are different from the vanilla services companies as we come with solid product building experience.

Most IT services companies fail to understand the needs of product building and do not possess the nitty-gritties of product lifecycle. They also fail to deliver top-notch quality and UX. That’s when we come in. We hand hold every aspect of product building, including competitor analysis, feature set recommendation, product roadmap, technology stack analysis, identifying a team to execute, the right architecture, etc. And then we also take up an integral role in go-to market strategy, feedback loop from beta customers, fine-tuning the software / business model and ultimately helping the firm succeed.

In other cases, for bigger global clients who know what they want, we build software products and global teams for them to take advantage of talent in Bangalore and other cities in India.

What is your philosophy towards work?

Sonia – I believe in excellence and delivering the best quality and it gets reflected towards the work we take up. The name of my company “GoodWorkLabs” reflects this philosophy

Whom do you admire as your role model? And why?

Sonia – There is no particular person that I can pinpoint. I look for fine little qualities in everybody, in little moments in my life and take inspiration from people.

Name 3 qualities of prime importance that a women entrepreneur should possess.

Sonia – Man or a woman, an entrepreneur should have these qualities:

1. Belief in themselves and confidence that they can change the world.

2. Passion

3. Perseverance

Do you think today’s economy is conducive for a new venture to start upon?

Sonia – There will never be such a thing called perfect time. It’s a myth. ‘Now’ is always the best time to start your venture. Your venture needs to solve one of the zillion odd problems in the current economy.

“Earning more & more is the motive behind any business.” Is it justifiable?

Sonia – I don’t see it as a problem unless you are earning money via unfair/illegal/immoral means. After all businesses are about making money. The way I look at it—the more business and growth your company achieves, the more employment you create, the more families your support, the more contribution you make towards your country and global economy.

Share with us the most enjoyable moment you had experienced on work.

Sonia – Well, I cannot pinpoint a moment but I enjoyed setting up GoodWorkLabs. Setting up your own venture is like a journey of unknown… it’s full or anticipation, , fear of unknown, happiness and a lot of adrenaline rush

Your message to the aspiring entrepreneurs?

Sonia – Be smart while starting up. If you are building a product company, create quick prototypes and get beta customers to validate the business model and product need. Connect with angels and other entrepreneurs. Be realistic in your approach and be lean in your burn rate. But at the end, passion and perseverance prevails everything else, because you will figure out a way to make your company successful. So just go for it and enjoy the journey.