Goodbye, Khadim Batti: The Founder Who Gave Luck a Chance

“Luck will not work unless you give luck a chance.”

Khadim Batti smiled as he said it.

It was February 2023, and I had just asked the cofounder of Whatfix one final question. We had travelled through more than a decade of his entrepreneurial journey: a product that could not find its market, customers who came and left with equal speed, savings that disappeared, a provident fund that had to be withdrawn, an expensive journey to America, a humiliatingly low price quoted to a potential customer and a company that had once been given until December to live.

Luck had repeatedly arrived in Khadim’s story.

But it had never found him waiting. He had walked towards it, often with very little money and even less certainty. He had remained in the arena long enough for luck to notice him.

Three-and-a-half years after that conversation, Khadim Batti is gone.

Whatfix announced the sudden death of its cofounder and CEO on September 1. India’s SaaS community has lost one of its most compelling builders. Vara Kumar Namburu has lost the friend with whom he spent more than two decades working, arguing, failing, pivoting and building. Thousands of people have lost a leader. His family has lost someone whom no valuation, company milestone or tribute can begin to replace.

And I have returned to our conversation.

The words sound different today. They also reveal the part of entrepreneurship that disappears once a company becomes successful. We see the funding rounds, global offices, enterprise clients and valuations. We rarely see the two founders sitting with a dying idea, terrified that the next decision could bury everything they have built.

Khadim allowed me to see that story.

The 100 Hours That Changed Everything

In June 2013, Khadim and Vara stopped working for almost four days.

For close to 100 hours, the two friends debated a question that could destroy their company. “Is it time to dump it? Shall we continue with it? What if the new thing doesn’t work?”

They had met at Huawei Technologies in 2001. After working together for close to eight years, they decided in 2010 to exchange the safety of their jobs for the uncertainty of entrepreneurship.

Their first company was SearchEnabler. The idea appeared persuasive. Small businesses wanted to go online, attract customers and become more visible. SearchEnabler would crawl the web, collect signals and recommend ways in which these businesses could improve their presence across search and social media.

Customers began subscribing. Then they began leaving.

The rate at which users abandoned the platform was almost as high as the rate at which new ones arrived. The founders had built a product for small-business owners, but the people who benefited most from it were SEO professionals. Business owners needed far more assistance than Khadim and Vara had anticipated.

The founders responded by adding a button called “fix it”. When users clicked it, the product showed them what needed to be corrected on their websites or social-media pages. Support requirements fell. Engagement rose. Customers loved the button.

That created an excruciating problem. “Fix it” was only one feature inside SearchEnabler. It was also becoming the only feature users truly wanted. Three years had already gone into building the original company. SearchEnabler had paying customers. Abandoning most of the product meant walking away from revenue when Khadim and Vara could least afford to lose it. Continuing with the old model meant protecting a struggling present by possibly sacrificing the future. “We debated for almost four days,” Khadim told me. “It was not an easy thing to do.”

They finally chose the frightening option. SearchEnabler would give way to Whatfix. The pivot that would eventually define their lives began when their personal finances were close to breaking.

The Provident Fund Bet

By 2013, the savings Khadim and Vara had brought into entrepreneurship were vanishing. They cut their expenses. They moved into smaller homes. They worked with a lean team. They stopped taking autos and travelled on Bengaluru’s buses. Eating at a restaurant became a once-in-three-months indulgence.

None of it was enough. “When we pivoted, I ran out of money,” Khadim recalled.

He withdrew his provident fund. Vara had approximately ₹15 lakh left in the bank. The cofounders placed almost everything they still possessed behind Whatfix, while giving themselves one final boundary. “If this doesn’t work by December,” Vara told Khadim, “then let’s shut it down.”

This is the part of a founder’s journey that the mythology of entrepreneurship cleans up later. Once the company succeeds, every decision looks farsighted. The pivot becomes visionary. The sacrifice becomes heroic. The uncertainty is edited out because the ending is already known.

Khadim and Vara did not know the ending in 2013. They knew that three years had passed. They knew that one business had failed to find product-market fit. They knew the money was running out. They knew that their new company had until December to justify their faith in it.

Helion Venture Partners gave Whatfix a term sheet in November. One month before the deadline. Luck had arrived. Khadim and Vara were still there to receive it.

Funding, however, did not fix the company. It merely bought the founders another set of problems.

Whatfix initially continued to serve small businesses and reached approximately $130,000 to $150,000 in annual recurring revenue. The numbers appeared encouraging, but churn remained painfully high at around 15 to 20 per cent.

The product could help small businesses with onboarding, training and support. It could not solve the problem that mattered most to them: growth.

Whatfix had to enter the enterprise market. Almost everybody Khadim consulted told him that enterprise sales could not be built from India. The company needed an operation in the United States. Whatfix had fewer than 10 employees and less than $1 million in the bank. “There was no choice,” he told me. “US was the way out.”

Once again, the absence of a safe option became his strategy.

The $8,000 Mistake

Khadim and Vara spent $30,000 to attend Dreamforce, Salesforce’s enormous annual conference in the United States. For a young company with limited capital, it was an intimidating amount of money to spend on an event whose returns were impossible to predict. “I didn’t know if it was worth it,” Khadim said. “I went in half-hearted.”

Then an executive from a large enterprise showed interest in Whatfix and asked for the price. “Okay, this will cost you $8,000,” Khadim replied.

He believed he had quoted boldly. Until then, the highest amount Whatfix had charged a single customer was approximately $2,000 for an entire year. The executive agreed to $96,000. Khadim panicked. There had clearly been some misunderstanding. He hurriedly clarified that the $8,000 price was annual.

“Man, that’s cheap,” the executive replied. “It’s damn cheap.”

The customer had assumed Khadim meant $8,000 a month. For a founder accustomed to selling to small businesses, $8,000 felt audacious. For an enterprise spending millions on software, it suggested that Whatfix itself did not yet understand the value of what it had created.

Dreamforce produced hundreds of leads. Khadim and Vara emerged from the conference intoxicated by possibility. “We felt like tomorrow it’s going to be a $1-billion company,” he recalled. “Everybody wants this.”

For the next three months, nobody bought it. The pipeline eventually began to move, but another customer soon gave Khadim a harsher lesson. One of America’s largest banks liked the Whatfix product and asked for a commercial proposal. The biggest annual contract the startup had signed at the time was worth roughly $20,000. Khadim’s mind moved between $40,000, $50,000 and $60,000.

He eventually sent a quotation for $75,000. The bank disappeared.

Months later, Whatfix learnt that the winning competitor had quoted $300,000. Khadim had lost the contract by being too cheap. The bank feared that a company offering such a low price might lack the scale and support required for the assignment. It worried that Whatfix could go bankrupt within a year.

For Khadim, the episode completely reordered the mathematics of selling. “It must be more value-based pricing rather than being fixated with the price to be quoted,” he told me. Six months later, the customer returned. The competing product had disappointed it. Whatfix won the contract at a substantially better price.

Khadim kept learning. More importantly, he was willing to be embarrassed by what he did not know.

That quality is easily overlooked in successful founders. We admire conviction, as though great companies are built by people who always possess the answer. Khadim’s journey was powered by something more valuable: the ability to discover that yesterday’s answer was wrong without allowing the discovery to destroy tomorrow’s ambition. “Don’t try the same thing again and again and again,” he told me. “It’s not going to change the outcome.”

Then he distilled the principle into one line. “Keep trying, but not the same thing.”

The Friend Beside the Founder

There was another person present at almost every dangerous turn in Khadim’s story: Vara.

They met as engineers. They became friends. Then they became cofounders, perhaps the most demanding test to which a friendship can be subjected.

Together, they watched their first hypothesis fail. They endured the disappearance of their savings. They debated the pivot for 100 hours. They set the December deadline. They entered the United States when experienced voices told them it could not be done from India.

Khadim regarded having a terrific cofounder and good people around him as one of the great advantages of his life.

“When you have people who believe you can pull it off no matter what the odds are, then it works,” he said.

That sentence deserves to survive alongside the funding figures and the story of Whatfix’s global ascent.

Companies are eventually described through categories, capital and customers. Those things matter. Yet Whatfix began with two friends choosing to believe each other when the evidence available to them offered very little encouragement.

Khadim was also generous with what the journey had taught him. People across India’s SaaS and AI communities remember a founder who made time for other founders, offered counsel and showed up when he was needed. He served on SaaSBoomi’s governing council and was among the founding members of AIBoomi.

He had learnt entrepreneurship through bruises. He did not hoard the lessons.

His advice was practical because his journey had punished abstraction. Founders had to think from first principles. What worked for somebody else might fail for them. Go-to-market deserved as much attention as product-market fit. Designations should not be distributed casually because companies could outgrow people and roles with startling speed.

“You can’t fix it after the damage has been done,” he said.

Khadim knew something about damage. He also knew that most damage need not become destiny.

Give Luck a Chance

By the time we spoke in 2023, Whatfix had travelled far beyond the two founders who once took Bengaluru buses to conserve money.

The company had established offices across major international markets and built most of its product and operations from India. A business repeatedly told that enterprise sales could not be cracked from India had become a global digital-adoption player.

The milestones were impressive. The road towards them was more revealing.

It contained a product whose most valuable feature eventually consumed the product. A founder who emptied his provident fund into a company with a shutdown date. A $30,000 conference ticket purchased without certainty. An $8,000 quotation that exposed how little the seller understood his own value. A $75,000 proposal that lost a customer for being too modest. A funding term sheet that arrived one month before time ran out.

This was why I asked Khadim about luck. How much of Whatfix was hustle? How much was timing? How much belonged to those inexplicable moments when the right person, cheque, customer or revelation arrived just before the door closed?

His answer contained neither false modesty nor the vanity of the self-made founder. “Luck will not work unless you give luck a chance.”

Khadim Batti gave it a chance.

He gave it four days of argument in 2013. He gave it his savings. He gave it his provident fund. He gave it one final December. He gave it a flight to the United States, a frightening conference bill, a succession of mistakes and the humility to learn from each one.

Above all, he gave it time. Time to turn two friends into cofounders. Time to turn SearchEnabler into Whatfix. Time to turn a useful button into a global enterprise software company. Time to demonstrate that a company conceived and built in India could compete for some of the world’s largest customers.

His own time has ended with devastating suddenness.

The company will continue. The category he helped build will grow. The people he mentored will carry fragments of his wisdom into companies that may not yet exist. Somewhere, another founder will be one month away from shutting down. Another will quote too little, lose an important contract and wonder whether the humiliation can be survived. Another pair of friends will spend four days deciding whether to abandon three years of work.

I hope they encounter Khadim’s story. I hope they understand that grit is not the refusal to change. It is the courage to change while there is still something left to lose. And I hope they remember the founder who kept fixing his mistakes, kept giving uncertainty another day and remained in the game long enough for luck to find him.

Goodbye, Khadim. You gave luck a chance. Then you showed the rest of us what to do with it.