From sleeping on the streets to a tech IPO

Mr Kumar in downtown Auckland yesterday, recreating his early-career sleeping arrangements for NBR.

Things started badly for Manas Kumar after he arrived from India in 2002.

After playing top-level cricket in India and South Africa, he hoped to establish a professional cricket career in New Zealand.

But complications from a motorcycle accident scuttled his plan

Dreams turned to dreck, with Mr Kumar ending up working two dead-end fast food jobs.

He told NBR he would finish a shift at Oporto in Auckland’s CBD at midnight. Then, with no buses running at that hour, and no money, he would wander down Queen Street to sleep on the steps outside Starbucks at entranceway to the Westfield downtown mall. At 6.30am, he would catch a bus home to change, then start his second job at McDonalds.

The Starbucks is now gone, but Mr Kumar sportingly recreated his on-the-street kip for NBR yesterday on some stairs just a few metres away.

Nek minnit: still broke
Five month of hard graft and harder sleeping didn’t pay off. Mr Kumar said pay was so miserable at both jobs he saved next to nothing.

But the maths and economics grad did eek out enough to buy a domain name, and started his own web design company in 2003.

His company, Optimizer HQ switched focus to email marketing services, and today employs 11.

In November it listed $5 million shares (currently trading at 0.55 Euro) on the Deutsche Bourse - albeit on the exchange's First Quotation Board, with no financial information. Mr Kumar said he turned to the German exchange after local investor interest was lacking. So far, interest isn't great in Euro, with a surge on its first day of listing followed by zero trades.

This isn’t quite a rags to riches story yet, but Mr Manas said Optimizer had been profitable for the past two years.

Local clients who have used Optimizer’s services for campaigns (via agencies) include the NZ Police, Pak-n-Save, Dulux and Pfizer, NZ Post. (I spokesman for NZ Post said Optimizer were used a couple of years ago in connection with our 'Loaded' product.")

In the US, Burger King, Best Buy, Harvard University and Footlocker have used Optizer’s services.

All up, the company is managing around 400 million marketing emails per month.

Bangalore calling, Kumar not answering
Mr Kumar is looking to more than double staff numbers to 24 by the end of March, but so far is finding it hard to fill all the going positions in mobile development and sales.

He  said he received daily calls from outfits in India and elsewhere offering development services for $5 an hour.

But despite the tight local labour situation, the entrepreneur wasn’t interested in outsourcing.

It was better to control our own intellectual property, Mr Kumar said.  All-local staff also made it easier to achieve quality control, and allowed for faster customisation.

Mr Kumar said all of its products were run over the internet, and marketed online, allowing Optimizer to tackle global markets from Auckland.

It has just launched a new txt marketing service (textahq.com), which it says offers a higher level of automation for sending and receiving marketing messages to mobiles.

Mr Kumar is also in talks with a hedge fund about a “major” capital injection.

Read more about Optimizer, and its recent acquisition, in today’s print edition of NBR.