How Beaconstac’s founders failed for a decade before they clicked

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Editor's note: It starts like a clichéd story. Two school friends, in their late 20s, have high-paying jobs in the US but no satisfaction. They dream of going back to their motherland and starting a business. Much to their professional, middle-class parents’ dismay. But they act on their plan anyway. They come back to India, work on a tech idea, launch their product and wait for success to take over.  Sharat Potharaju and his co-founder Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty first founded a SaaS company called MobStac in 2009. The product seemed promising and venture capital firm Accel immediately took a bet. But it took more than 10 years and four pivots for Potharaju to finally catch a break in the Indian SaaS (software-as-a-service) sector.  There were years (and products) when the timing was horribly wrong, and then there were times when the product didn’t fit the market at all. Along the way, as Potharaju says, there was a lot of humble pie to snack on. Backs against the wall, in a dramatic twist in 2019, the two co-founders finally stumbled upon what has …