The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, or Grow Your Company with Your Customers' Cash

1Craving Crowdfunding? Pandering to VCs? Groveling to Your CFO?: The Magic of Traction and the Customer-Funded Revolution

Imagine this. It was 1995, and the Coca-Cola Company had just reentered India after an aborted earlier effort, this time by acquiring the maker of Thums Up, India's leading cola. Along with the deal came a thick book describing each of the Thums Up bottlers' territories in plenty of legal jargon, but without a single map. Coke needed a way to find and understand its newly acquired territories.

Alas, no one had maps that could show Coke where its bottlers were located. Until the mid-1960s, maps had been largely unavailable in India, at least for anyone not in the military. Even 30 years later, a mapping culture and map-reading ethos simply did not exist, perhaps in part because there were very few accurate Indian maps.

Into the breach stepped Rakesh and Rashmi Verma, who had started a small IT training business in India, CE Info Systems, serving blue-chip clients like IBM. Their company also licensed American digital mapping software to aid India's nascent mapmaking industry.¹ Saying to Coke, “We can give you the maps you need” (even though they had not actually ever produced a single map!), the Vermas began to build a digital mapping business. First, they bought an ordinary office scanner and took out the kitchen scissors. Next, using their native Indian ...