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Step into the intersection of technology and marketing with the latest episode of the Marketing Nation SaaS podcast. Hosted by Arvind Parthiban, the Co-Founder & CEO of SuperOps.ai, this episode welcomes Ramesh Ravishankar, Co-Founder and CGO of Highperformer.ai, whose previous stints at Freshworks and Google have armed him with unparalleled insights into the digital marketing world.

This conversation delves into the evolving landscape where AI meets content creation, debunking myths about AI's role in the future of marketing jobs by highlighting its potential to enhance human creativity and efficiency. Ramesh shares his journey with Highperformer.ai, offering a unique perspective on leveraging AI to build a robust social presence and the strategic importance of identifying your Total Addressable Market (TAM) early on.

Get a glimpse into product-led growth strategies that attract leads organically, and the critical decision-making between inbound and outbound marketing based on the stage of your company and the current market demands. The episode draws inspiration from Freshworks' success, showcasing how optimizing AdWords strategy and managing lead quality can scale a business from serving SMBs to mid-market enterprises.

Join us for this engaging and insightful session, designed for both budding entrepreneurs and seasoned marketers looking to navigate today's dynamic digital landscape with confidence and creativity.

Key Takeaways:

1:13 - Content Marketing Revolution: AI's Role

3:40 - Ramesh's Journey: Freshworks to Google

5:33 - Highperformer.ai: A Strategic Odyssey

8:49 - Startup Success: Unlocking TAM

13:11 - Growth Hacking with Free Tools

21:07 - Scaling Up: From SMB to Worldwide

23:58 - Lead Quality: Marketing vs. Sales Dynamics

28:10 - The Lead Conversion Debate

29:51 - The Inbound Marketing Roadmap: Strategic Insights

32:06 - Advanced Tactics in Lead Generation

40:39 - GenAI: Transforming Marketing Workflows

43:55 - SEO Evolution: The AI Content Impact

Key Mentions:

ChatGPT

Freshworks

Google

AdWords

LinkedIn

Salesforce

Sora.ai

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Welcome to another episode of Founder’s Deep Dive! Join our guest, Sachin Bhatia, and our host, Suresh Sambandam, as they delve into several topics, including the formula for happiness, expanding into a global market, and all the challenges and wins that come along the way. It’s a very intellectual conversation where they talk about very abstract and high-level concepts using anecdotes from their own lives. Enjoy the episode!

Key Takeaways

02:00 - Meet the Players!

03:24 - Success vs Happiness

06:50 - Are You an Architect or a Contractor?

10:00 - Early 2000s - A Changing India

12:05 - Moving from BPO to Enterprise Segment

17:30 - Ameyo’s First Enterprise Customer

19:55 - Inside Sales and Sales Development

22:20 - Can SMB SaaS Survive?

24:19 - Global Emerging Markets

27:07 - Different Countries and their Ticket Sizes

31:30 - Doing Business in Dubai

35:35 - Team Distribution for International Markets

37:26 - Relationship Building in Emerging Markets

40:20 - Generating Pipelines for Enterprises

45:58 - Ameyo’s Secret Sauce

51:28 - Successful Marketing Strategies

56:18 - Final Words of Wisdom Key Mentions

02:59 - OrangeScape (KissFlow)

05:30 - Freshworks

05:40 - Drishti (Ameyo)

06:35 - HP, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, IBM

06:30 - Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, HCL

11:45 - ZOHO

14:45 - Helion

14:49 - Daksh

15:44 - Ameyo

15:59 - Peppertap

15:59 - Meru

16:00 - UrbanCompany

16:38 - Ola

17:40 - Motilal Oswal

19:36 - HubSpot

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Welcome to another episode of Deep Dive! Suresh, our host, and Aditya Tulsian, our guest, delve into the critical role of ICPs and how organizations deal with acquisition journeys.

Aditya is a seasoned entrepreneur who founded Numberz, which was acquired by Chargebee, prior to which he held a very important role at Intuit. After an MBA at ISB Hyderabad, launching QuickBooks in India was the experience that revealed a universal truth to him: businesses worry about cash flow, not accounting. In 2016, inspired by these insights, Aditya co-founded Numberz, initially for Indian small businesses, later expanding globally. The company recently got acquired by Chargebee, uniting visionary forces.

In the world of startups, understanding the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is like holding the compass that guides the business. The success, failure, or struggles of any company can be traced back to the clarity or confusion they have about the ICP. Aditya and Suresh nail down what it takes to find your perfect ICP, and the struggles and pressures of navigating an acquisition conversation with both the buyer and the team.

Key Takeaways:

00:00 - Meet Aditya Tulsian!

07:00 - Finding the perfect ICP - Problem first or person first?

08:13 - Mr. Cook’s billionaire’s business blueprint

09:15 - When Suresh narrowly missed meeting Mr. Cook

11:13 - Nuances of B2B and B2C with ICP

15:15 - Narrowing down customer segments to ICP

17:54 - Your ICP is actually a combination of 3 people

19:09 - How BYJU’S missed the ICP

21:50 - Tally vs Intuit

22:37 - Numberz’s journey with ICP

27:42 - The buyer, user and influencer of Numberz

30:20 - Repercussions of a vague ICP

32:00 - The fundamental difference between Box and Dropbox

33:46 - Product team’s role in finding the ICP

35:00 - The impact of the right ICP on marketing

38:53 - A leader’s job in the organization

39:45 - Critical points to keep in mind during an acquisition

44:16 - Handling uncertainties like a pro during acquisitions

48:44 - Managing your team’s concerns around an acquisition

52:45 - Closing thoughts

Key Mentions

01:37 - Numberz

01:40 - ChargeBee

03:18 - Intuit

03:47 - QuickBooks

10:36 - KissFlow

12:52 - Facebook

19:10 - BYJU’S

21:50 - Tally

32:01 - Box

32:03 - Dropbox

41:43 - Freshworks

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Enjoy this 50-minute podcast where Arvind and Varun get on a call with Ankit Oberoi to decode the dilemma of ABM, or Account Based Marketing. Ankit, being a proponent for documentation and structure, talks about his journey with AdPushup and how they discovered the untapped potential of ABM in a world filled with inbound marketing companies. Having cracked the ABM playbook methodically, Ankit shares some gems of wisdom with Arvind and Varun as the three of them nail down the specifics of what ABM is and how to leverage it to engage prospective clients in ways that really matter.

Key Takeaways

01:45 - Meet Ankit Oberoi!

03:50 - The Power of ABM

05:52 - Ankit’s tryst with ABM

08:42 - Big companies are intimidating!

11:38 - Identifying the right ICP for you

14:49 - Pick an ICP for your roadmap or pick a roadmap for your ICP?

18:38 - Outbound vs ABM

21:06 - Structuring the Organization for ABM

25:12 - SuperOps’ journey with ABM

27:28 - Using a RevOps team

33:48 - Building the ABM machine

35:35 - Database Management at AdPushup

39:45 - AdPushup’s channels beyond ABM

45:48 - Planning for Zelto’s acquisition

Key Mentions

01:16 - Zelto

02:04 - AdPushup

03:39 - SGx

08:41 - Kayako

39:05 - Almabase

41:32 - Microsoft Azure

41:42 - Google

44:05 - Facebook

Happy watching and listening! 🎧

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“Never change your SEO team while shifting from SMB to enterprise, because once lost, never regained.” Join Maansi Sanghi and Arvind for more such knowledge bombs as they deep-dive into the world of product marketing.

Maansi takes us through her journey of product marketing, and how the team at iMocha braved the tumultuous shift from an SMB model to an enterprise model of marketing. You’ll also find a lot of tips and tricks on how to refine and hone your processes and your pipelines inside your organization.

Tune in with Maansi and Arvind as they break down and examine the bare bones of a business and the best practices for marketing teams.

Key Takeaways

02:25 – Forming strong teams

04:50 – Indispensable players in a marketing team

05:10 – iMocha’s team structure

05:45 – The dichotomy of inbound and content teams

08:25 – From SMB to Enterprise

11:40 – Your demand generation engine

13:19 – Do you have a channel problem or a marketing problem?

16:12 – Enterprise marketing tenets

18:12 – iMocha’s training protocols

22:27 – Setting OKRs for your team

30:52 – How deep is your sale?

33:40 – Positioning yourself in events

43:11 – Making an impression on your customer

46:29 – Rapid Fire!

Key Mentions

iMocha - 05:09

FreshWorks - 08:15

HubSpot - 27:11

MS Excel - 27:14

Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount

• 51:08

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For the next 45 minutes, join our guest Anand Venkatraman as he and Arvind dive deep into the murky waters of partner channel marketing. It's a power packed episode filled with gems of knowledge and wisdom that could substitute for an MBA lecture.

Anand introduces the world of partner channels (yes, it's non-MBA friendly), and then goes into the nitty gritties of how to cultivate that side of the business, the best practices while working with partners and the most common mistakes you're better off avoiding when it's your turn.

Tune in and listen to Anand and Arvind dissect some really abstract concepts with crystal clear insights—on the very first episode of Marketing Nation!

Key Takeaways00:00 - Intro

03:25 - Partner Channels 101

04:20 - The Revenue Partners

08:04 - The Technology Partners

09:58 - Owning the partner channels

15:00 - A small start-up’s cheat sheet for partner acquisition

20:40 - Vetting a partner’s account books

22:19 - SuperOps’s journey with partner channels

23:20 - Feeding the partner engine

27:30 - Common mistakes to avoid

32:25 - On the importance of PRM

33:57 - Taking MDF more seriously

35:33 - A shifting market - On-prem to SaaS

44:05 - Anand’s message to founders

Key Mentions00:38 - Salesforce

00:40 - Akamai

00:42, 38:41 - FreshWorks

00:47 - CleverTap

01:00 - Growthloop.ai

06:49 - TCS, Accenture, HCL

08:41 - Line Messenger

08:48 - KakaoTalk

09:20 - Amazon, Google, Microsoft

22:20 - SuperOps

22:43 - Connectwise

22:43 - Kaseya

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This episode is special because its the first time we are having a founder from Singapore join the SaaSBoomi Podcast!

Suresh Sambandam, CEO of KissFlow has a virtual sit down with none other than Sagar Khatri, the founder of Multiplier, a Sequoia surge backed SaaS business that helps business hire talent globally. We dive deep to talk about Sagar’s motivations to start Multiplier, how AI disrupts his offering and his dream of running a public company.

Key Takeaways00:19 - Multiplier and Sagar’s intro

01:50 - Multiplier's value prop and its benefits

16:15 - Sagar's story behind starting Multiplier and why it's a SaaS business

21:14 - Sagar's vision for making payroll an employee-driven phenomenon

26:02 - How Multiplier deals with legalities and potential challenges in their business model

36:48 - Importance of having a strong product background for Platform dev

39:27 - How AI influences Sagar's business

46:10 - Role of governments in employment and the gig economy's effect on social contributions

53:15 - Sagar's go-to-market strategy and their sales cycle for inbound and outbound leads

56:09 - Sagar's thoughts on "The Ride of a Lifetime" by Bob Iger

57:10 - What Sagar envisions for the future of Multiplier and his dream of running a public company

Key Mentions Amazon: Sagar mentioned employment use cases with companies like Amazon and Orange. * Orange: Sagar mentioned employment use cases with companies like Amazon and Orange. * Sequoia: Sequoia has been an investor in Sagar's previous startup and was indirectly involved in his experiences that led to the founding of Multiplier. * GCP: Sagar talked about the shift from having server rooms to using cloud solutions like GCP. * Azure: Sagar discussed the shift from having server rooms to using solutions like Azure. * Kissflow: A platform that Sagar mentioned his company Multiplier uses for their backend. * ADP: ADP was mentioned as a traditional payroll processing company that Multiplier aims to outpace with its more modern, employee-driven approach. * Tiger Global Management: Tiger Global Management is an investor in Multiplier for their Series B round. * DST Global: DST Global is an investor in Multiplier for their Series B round. * Pine Labs: Pine Labs is another investor in Multiplier. * IIT Bombay: The co-founders of Multiplier are both alumni of IIT Bombay. * Kelly Services: Kelly Services was mentioned as a traditional staffing services firm similar to what Multiplier aims to disrupt with their platform. * Talent Wiki: Sagar mentioned that they have created a Talent Wiki of 150 countries to help customers with labor law information. * Ranstad: Ranstad was mentioned as a traditional staffing services firm similar to what Multiplier aims to disrupt with their platform. * Robert Walters: Robert Walters is a recruitment agency where Am Paul Sing, Co-founder of Multiplier, previously worked. * Lazada: Lazada is an e-commerce company in Southeast Asia where Multiplier’s CTO previously worked as SVP of Engineering. * Freshworks: Sagar compared his company's go-to-market model with that of Freshworks. * MTR: A restaurant in India that Sagar loves, mentioned while discussing a meeting in Chennai with Suresh. * Sangeetha Restaurants*: A restaurant in Chennai that Suresh suggested Sagar visit when he comes to the city.

Multiplier is a platform that allows companies to hire talent globally without the need to set up legal entities in each country. With coverage in 150 countries, Multiplier handles all aspects of employment such as contracts, payroll, benefits, taxes, and social contributions, allowing companies to focus on sourcing the right talent. Although Multiplier itself does not do recruitment, it provides the infrastructure necessary for a company to hire globally.

The employee is technically on Multiplier's payroll since the legal entity belongs to Multiplier. What seems to matter more is the work relationship and the emotional connection that employees have with their team and their work, not the legal specifics.

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Suresh Sambandam, CEO of KissFlow has a virtual sit down with not one but two co-founders, who also happen to be a married couple. Besides finding out about how they set out on founding their respective companies, Suresh also explores their unique working dynamics and relationship, the ups and downs of doing business together, the pros and cons of operating out of a Tier 2 city and of course their secrets to building a successful business model with CallHippo and SoftwareSuggest. Enjoy this first of its kind episode!

Key Takeaways

5:13 - CallHippo business model

7:10 - Inception of CallHippo, founder story and current revenues

11:18 - Global customer segments

12:44 - Impact of inbound marketing, how to manage your budget for Inbound Marketing

15:05 - SEO strategy

19:15 - Exercising patience to see SEO results

21:57 - Optimizing for humans not Google

26:20 - Traffic to sign up rate

32:23 - Tactical hacks for increasing sign up conversion and churn rates

34:59 - Marketing to Sales funnel - Handling different ticket size customer segments

41:48 - Hiring strategy in a Tier 2 city

45:24 - Pros and Cons of operating out of a Tier 2 city

50:33 - Spouses to Co-Founders

53:52 - Developing the culture at CallHippo

1:01:32 - Vision for CallHippo

Key Mentions

3:36 Software Suggest

3:43 CallHippo

3:57 Exotel

8:08 Avinash Raghava

8:30 Girish Mathrubootham

10:55 Ozonetel

18:09 RingCentral

21:05 Google

32:05 Mail Chimp

35:48 HubSpot

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In Part 2 of Getting SaaS Pricing right, Arvind and Varun bump it up a notch. They discuss key features of a pricing plan like Naming of plans, the ideal number of plans to go with, Add-ons, Discounts, cost-based pricing and value-based pricing.

Listen on as the duo share insights from their own experience of having worked for and mentored other companies and of course getting the price right in their own respective startups. Enjoy the show!

Key Takeaways

3:40 - Decoy pricing plan

6:05 - What's the ideal number of price plans?

8:30 - Open Vs Hidden pricing

14:00 - Contact us to know the pricing

16:56 - Knowing your target audience while selling

21:40 - Naming the Price Plans

26:10 - Deciding on the value metric

28:05 - Land and expand strategy

29:55 - What is value and value-based pricing?

35:43 - Is there room for Add-ons?

42:12 - How often do we change pricing?

44:23 - Open Vs Closed pricing verdict

46:05 - Dishing out Discounts

49:15 - Importance of pricing in NRR

52:00 - Top 3 ways to increase NRR

56:15 - Importance of revenue recognition

59:15 - Varun and Arvind’s Pricing pet peeves

Key mentions

Apple

SuperOps

Girish M

Zoho

FreshDesk

PipeCandy

Wingman

Intercom

Spot Instances

Spot.io

ChargeBee

Manage Engine

Hubspot

IKEA

Sequoia

For Entrepreneurs

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In this episode of the BTS podcast, our hosts Arvind and Varun introduce a new format of discussion to the show and decide to pick each other's brains to go deeper into topics that are pertinent to founders and marketeers.

They explore the various aspects of designing the perfect pricing plan for your business keeping in mind various aspects such as the product, the perceived value, the market segment, the industry and the buyer persona.

Listen on as they explore pricing strategies of various companies who’ve done it right from the get-go and others who’ve got it right through trial and error, in effect showcasing how setting a pricing plan for your SaaS product may not always be the simplest or most straightforward exercise.

Key Takeaways/Timestamps

2:37 - MSP - Managed Service Provider

3:10 - Silent price hikes in the industry

5:33 - 4 levers of business

7:32 - Effective communication over Grandfathering

10:02 - Pricing game on point

11:09 - HubSpot-on pricing

14:03 - Unpredictable pricing design

16:17 - Don’t reinvent the pricing wheel that works

20:28 - Questions to ask before designing the pricing model

21:41 - Who’s doing the heavy lifting?

22:32 - Top 3 challenges faced by Indian Saas companies

24:54 - Perceived value of your product

28:55 - Are you selling based on the features of your product?

32:52 - Playing to the persona

36:45 - Common pricing mistakes in the Indian ecosystem

Key Mentions

3:30 - Ninjaone

7:37 - Netflix

11:44 - Intercom

12:04 - Hubspot

12:11 - Salesforce

12:13 - Pipedrive

17:10 - Girish Mathrubootham

38:02 - Pipecandy

38:19 - Wingman

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In this episode of the Founder’s Deep Dive Podcast, Suresh Sambandham CEO and Founder of KissFlow has a one on one with Prabhu Rangarajan, Co-founder of M2P Fintech.

M2P is an API infrastructure giant delivering futuristic and customer-centric fintech solutions through cutting-edge technology with a wide range of solutions across Payments, Lending, and Banking.

Suresh and Prabhu get into the juicy details of how M2P was founded and how they grew from a 60 member company pre-pandemic to a 1200 member company now. Prabhu also shares his journey of founding M2P along with his co-founders Madhu and Muthu and now acquiring 8 other companies and in effect running M2P with 20 co-founders who became the founding team.

Listen on to hear more about the exciting success story of M2P!

Key Takeaways

2:46 - Inception of M2P

6:50 - Tatkal: Inventing on-tap money

8:21 - M2P customer base

11:18 - How does M2P charge its customers

12:30 - Story behind the name M2P

14:30 - Bringing the founders together

20:30 - Do too many cooks spoil the broth?

27:30 - Role playing between Founders

29:28 - M2Ps Multi-city presence

30:24 - Numbers Pre and Post Covid

34:44 - Funding, Acquisitions & Expansion

40:53 - Acquisitions left, right and center

43:11 - Carving a niche with no competition

44:56 - Cultural integration of multiple companies into M2P

54:40 - Building a company for the next 100 years

Key Mentions

4:35 - IIFL Finance

4:38 - DCB Bank

9:23 - Slice

16:25 - Madhusudanan

16:39 - Muthukumar

16:43 - Visa

36:33 - Paytm

38:44 - Amrish Rau

38:45 - Kunal Shah

39:01 - 39:05

Tiger Global

Insight Partners

Mitsubishi UFJ Group of Japan

41:11 - FinFlux

47:33 - Sujay Vasudevan

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ExtraaEdge is an early start-up founded in 2016, currently powering 350+ Educational Institutes with the cloud computing solution. Founded by Abhishek Ballabh (ex. HSBC Data Scientist) & Sushil Mundada (ex. HSBC - Lead BA & CRM Architect) ExtraaEdge delivers all the required tools for End-to-End automation of admissions processes. With their combined passion for education and knowledge expertise in Data and CRM, they contribute by developing ExtraaEdge.

In this episode, Varun and Arvind explore Abhishek Ballabh’s journey of founding ExtraaEdge and his experience of SaaSBOOMi’s SGx program. Abhishek shares various marketing insights and anecdotes about his journey so far and how his new found “yoda-mindset” has taken him and his company from a primarily hustle-driven outbound sales company to now being predominantly inbound marketing-driven organization.

Listen on as this trio share some great insights and banter.

Key Take aways0:41 Welcome and Introduction to Abhishek Ballabh & ExtraaEdge

2:59 CAGR Banter

4:03 Marketing Org Chart

7:17 Desi Perception of Marketing & Sales

8:41 Coupling the effects of SGx and Covid

10:18 Lessons learnt in SGx put to practice

11:43 SGx - Growth Vipassana for entrepreneurs

12:44 Who reports to Marketing?

19:58 Founder Branding

21:20 Channeling one’s Yoda-mindset

22:49 Being the face of the brand

26:55 ExtraaEdge’s transformation Pre and Post SGx

30:41 Apple’s DRI concept

31:56 Transformation from Outbound Hustle to Inbound Marathon

36:28 First International client through ABM

41:57 Maximizing MarTech through ExtraaEdge Certification Academy

48:46 Being synonymous with your industry

49:47 Stacking Marketing Dominoes across the prospects journey

52:10 The push and pull of Marketing & Sales

53:39 Founder being a student of Marketing & Conclusion

Key Mentions1:48 HSBC

2:09 Mindtickle

4:41 Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, Y Combinator

6:30 Sushil Mundada

6:43 SaaSBOOMi Growth X program

8:25 Sachin Bhatia

20:20 Niti Ratnaparkhi

20:58 Yoda (Star Wars)

30:16 Apple

30:18 Steve Jobs

36:52 Ankit Oberoi & Ad Pushup

37:20 Bits Pilani Dubai

39:35 Nikhil Sutar

43:46 Career Guide

48:01 Robert Cialdini

48:47 Almabase

Happy watching!

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In this Episode, our hosts Varun and Arvind have a virtual sit down with Naveen Goyal, CEO and Founder of NoPaperForms. 

NoPaperForms is the India’s largest and most advanced SaaS based Enrolment Automation Platform enabling educational institutions to unlock their potential i.e. Attract, Engage, and Grow their Enrolments. Serving 1000+ customers, NoPaperForms, today, is the de facto choice for anyone in education, looking to grow - be it Preschool to K-12, Higher Education to Online Degrees, Coaching & Training Institutes to EdTech. 

Varun and Arvind explore Naveen’s journey of founding NoPaperForms and his insights on the way he’s structured his marketing org, unifying sub-functions, de-positioning the CRM viewpoint and addressing the problem statement head on. Naveen also shares why and how he went about commencing the 100 day challenge across the firm.   

Listen on as this trio share some valuable insights and learn from each others experiences.  

Key Takeaways

1:18 Welcome and Introduction to NoPaperForms

3:23 NoPaperForms Marketing Org Chart 

7:54 Aligning Product, Marketing & Sales

9:06 One-man marketing magician? 

11:53 100 people in 100 days challenge

18:06 De-positioning the CRM and addressing the problem statement

20:34 Positioning the enrolment process

24:08 Unification of the product

26:49 Introducing the enrolment cloud to the market

30:14 Brand Identity and positioning

34:20 Newspaper campaign through Covid

39:27 NoPaperForms uses Paper

46:25 Psychology, brand retention & conversion

49:10 Rapid fire round

54:19 Conclusion

Key Mentions

15:20 Suraj Sapra - Co-founder, NoPaperForms

21:21 SRM University, Vellore Institute of Technology

30:52 Apple

31:07 Volvo, Tesla

31:15 Mercedes, BMW

32:47 Leadsquared

32:55 Extraaedge

33:40 Girish M - Founder & CEO, Freshworks

40:03 Ashish Tulsian - Co-founder & CEO, Posist

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Kalyan Varma is the Co-Founder & CEO of Almabase. Before solving the alumni fundraising problem, Kalyan worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, just as he moved to start an online marketplace which couldn’t scale, yet he kept trying new things to eventually stumble upon the gap in the education system to eventually start Almabase. 

Kalyan is an alumnus of NIT Warangal and cites BITS Pilani as the foremost institution in the country with the strongest alumni relations. 

In this episode, as we dug deeper into the idea in this unconventional space, Kalyan breaks down the idea by sharing memorable experiences from some of the big institutions around the world; the challenges he faced in US trying to learn more about the disorganized space, in a bid to fix the broken relationship between the alumni and the colleges to create a win-win situation for both around the world. 

Tune in to watch an insightful conversation brew among the trio.

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Saravana Kumar, the founder of Kovai.co is a techie, a marketer who was ahead of the curve, a and maverick salesperson.Even during his early career, he has done the unthinkable of switching from a product company like Microsoft to consulting company like Accenture.

While at Accenture, he continued working with Microsoft products, he spotted gaps that left enterprise clients in the lurch. The techie and entrepreneur in Saravana Kumar built a product to address the challenge and managed to sell it to an enterprise market successfully. All this while working part-time for Fidelity International and moonlighting on his idea during 2 weekdays and the weekend.

During the initial days of Kovai.co, Saravana Kumar was able to win 30 enterprise clients clocking in $300k in revenues. Saravana Kumar also had the sales and marketing acumen that made him run content marketing when the term itself was known only to a handful.

He built an audience for his idea by writing 600+ articles about the Microsoft BizTalk server which created the initial buzz and demand for the product even before it its launch. This also led to Microsoft recognizing him as the ‘Most Valuable Professional’ in BizTalk Server, a credential he has held for the past 15 years.

To further build the sales pipeline, he also attended user group events across Europe and succeeded at winning at least 10 leads from every event.

As a SaaS brand’s leader, Saravana Kumar is also adept at doling out deals that others cannot refuse. A skill that came in handy in building a leadership team consisting of ex-Microsoft employees among many others.

Tune into our latest episode where Saravana retraces Kovai.co’s journey from being a one-person company to a multi-product SaaS company that is now 250+ people strong.

Key take aways:02:13 - Introduction/Who is Saravana Kumar?

03:18 - The birth of BizTalk360, the first product

04:09 - From London to Kovai (Coimbatore)

04:52 - I see. I solve. I sell.

07:04 - Leaving Microsoft for a red carpet welcome at Accenture

16.56 - Building an audience before the product

19:23 -Nuances of pricing a SaaS product

24:56 - The two ingredients that helped couture the enterprise market (blog and events)

29:03 - Tracing the growth journey from $100k to $8 Million

34:42 -Giving a Microsoft guy a deal he could not refuse

36:06 - A Founder's Mindset ingrained since childhood

41:47 - Coping with the challenges of a multi-product strategy

47:34 - The biggest cost in building a software company

49:19 - Acquisitions to fuel business growth

52:46 - Building leadership talent from past network

58:45 - The Culture DNA of Kovai.co

1:02:03 - Kovai.co - The story behind the name

1:02:34 - Kovai Connect - A program to nurture young talent

01:03:08 - The next 5-10 years for Kovai

Key mentions

1. 16:42 - Sarvana Kumar wins recognition for exceptional community leadership - The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional
2. Walking buddy becomes the new COO for Kovai.co - SaaS firm Kovai.co appoints Andrew Cloke as new COO
3. 1:07:10 Saravana Kumar featured on the cover of the Latka SaaS magazine
4. Microsoft
5. IIT Madras
6. Stanford University
7. Accenture
8. National Health Service
9. Fidelity International
10. Biztalk360
11. Serverless360
12. Andrew Cloke

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Pranay is a SaaS investor at Matrix Partners India. Before moving to investing, Pranay played several key roles at Freshworks including the Director of Growth Marketing at Freshworks, and managed to ramp up the marketing machinery. 

He has also worked with the CEO’s office at Freshworks where he was responsible for ramping the revenues from 5 Million to 100 Million. 

He comes with tons of knowledge on how marketing used to work in the past, how it works today, and how SaaS businesses should think about marketing for the future. 

Pranay recommends SaaS businesses find new channels where their target audience hangs out as early as possible. There is no single marketing strategy or channel that will always work. It is necessary for businesses to find their “distribution edge”. 

The BTS Podcast Episode 10 has Pranay sharing several nuggets of marketing wisdom.

Tune in to watch the full podcast.

Key takeaways:

1:24 - Building a SaaS company: Then and Now

3:46 - The challenges that businesses face today

4:35 - Optimizing costs for lead-gen

7:56 - Worthy SaaS examples

9:15 - Lessons learnt from experiments

13:45 - Winning the confidence of enterprise customers

19:19 - The Experience Roadshow

26:34 - How to measure the RoI of non-standard events

28:03 - Indicators of Product Market Fit and Business Market Fit

33:05 - Founders should become students of sales

34:35 - Indian SaaS advantage

39:41 - Rapid fire

Resources mentioned1. 2:34 - How Wiz reached $100M ARR in 18 months? Techcrunch 2. 8:02 - Rocketlane’s Community Building | The CMO Journal 3. 29:55 - Girish Mathrubootam’s first blog announcing Freshdesk as a startup in October 2010 while Freshdesk was publicly launched in June 2011 4. 4 interesting campaigns discussed throughout the podcast 1. The van that traveled to 11 destinations | Freshworks Experience Roadshow | 2019 2. Going on air to create virality - #Failsforce campaign 3. Reports instill confidence in buyers - Freshdesk | Forrester TEI Report 4. Rocketlane’s rap song announcing fundraising

Key mentions1. 8:00 - Srikrishnan Ganesan of RocketLane

2. 33:00 - Rishi Kulkarni and Sameer Goel  of  Revv

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Dhruvil Sanghvi is a tech-savvy engineer who began his career as a consultant before taking up the entrepreneurial journey in 2015. Today, he also invests in startups. Coming from a multi-generational business family, Dhruvil believes that launching and running a successful business is the best way to create a big impact on society and economy. His journey of kickstarting LogiNext with his own savings, raising 10 Million dollars in funding within a short span of 9 months after the seed round definitely has lessons for every SaaS founder.

LogiNext is a global technology and automation company with a focus on the transportation, home deliveries, omni-channel fulfillment, and B2B distribution market.

Founded in 2015, LogiNext can be rightly called one of the early entrants into the Indian SaaS space. LogiNext entered the market during a period when Amazon and several other startups were setting up the rapidly growing startup scene.

This episode will unravel the growth journey of LogiNext and how it went on to global brands like McDonald’s, Mahindra, PayTM, Myntra, Decathlon & Domino’s among many others as its clients. As a bonus, Dhruvil will also share the lessons he learned from the mistakes he made as a founder and how LogiNext managed to bounce back from them. The lessons helped them scale 150 clients across SEA, the Middle East, India, the US, Europe, and Latin America.

Key takeaways

1:35 - What is LogiNext

2:45 - Dhruvil’s Background

9:30 - How consulting experience helped in SaaS?

13:38 - Advantages of coming from a business family

21:27 - Raising funds as a new entrepreneur

23:20 - How did he spend the first $100k on the company?

28:26 - What did it take to raise the first $500k?

30:05 - Going from $500k to $10 Million in funding within 9 months

42:32 - GTM Plan and Ideal ICPs

46:28 - Acquisition Model

47:06 - Marketing and Sales Spend

49:07 - Becoming an investor

52:29 - SaaS Founders that Dhruvil looks up to

53:48 - 3 exciting startup investments Dhruvil has made

54:09 - Thoughts on work-life balance

55:23 - Advice for upcoming SaaS Entrepreneurs

Key mentions

Microsoft Venture

Reliance GenNext

Indian Angel Network

Vijay Shekhar Sharma : Twitter | LinkedIn

Sanjay Mehta : Twitter | LinkedIn

Happy Listening! 🎧

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From Pigeons, to Food to User Retention - A journey of tinkering, grit and innovation.

Anand Jain is a serial entrepreneur, who started his entrepreneurial journey as a 16 year old in college by fixing computers and selling softwares to lawyers. In this episode he talks about his upbringing, early ventures, and his current startup CleverTap. 

CleverTap is a user retention platform that helps companies retain users for life, with clients like Jio, Times Group, Swiggy, PayTM, and Dream 11. 

Patented Database Technology 

50 petabytes of data currently stored by CleverTap 

DIY approach in his early college years, learning to repair electrical and electronic appliances in his neighbourhood. Bicycling to the ISRO’s computer lab in his 10th grade in the early 90s to interact with computers and spend the whole night programming. 

Side Hustle during college; 

Selling software to advocates when he was 16 years old in floppy drives. 

Having a roofing startup that helped the problem of pigeons in cities. 

Database that runs on user actions or verbs 

Key Takeaways: 

2:16 - What is CleverTap?

3:57 - Which companies use CleverTap? 

6:22 - CleverTap’s USPs and why companies prefer using CleverTap over building the feature natively

11:32 - Suresh and Anand find out that they have similar origin stories 

14:22 - Anand’s early years in school and college 

20:53 - Side hustles in college at 16

24:37 - Learning by doing 

26:55 - Early days of customer acquisition 

31:23 - Data comes before Analytics

33:33 - Dealing with variations in data types for various clients

38:39 - Learnings of a third time entrepreneur 

47:48 - Defining the ideal customer

50:57 - People hate outbound calls. How to crack this problem? 

55:01 - Dealing with international markets

57:19 - Acquisitions 

1:08:15 - Organizational Structure

1:25:30 - ABM at CleverTap

1:35:55 - Culture

Happy listening!

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Ashish Tulsian ran a restaurant before building Posist, a software which runs restaurants.

Ashish and his stories go a long way. 

Watch this episode for unheard stories and insights like ‘ThugTales of Restaurantpur’ - an unthinkable ABM campaign, marketing to Lawyer, Doctor, CA & Engineer at once, how Posist has perfected event marketing, playbook for B2B conferences, why they didn’t VC capital and more.

Key take aways:1:04 Posist intro

5:33 Marketing org structure and evolution

10:32 Hacking SEO with 200 web pages

15:22 Inflection point in restaurant tech

17:21 The secret to hiring content writers

18:57 Marketing to a diverse customer persona

20:01 Cracking distribution when the persona is fuzzy

21:02 Content marketing - growing ‘Restaurant Times’ to 3.5M views per year

21:52 Benefits of avoiding clickbait-y blog titles

25:27 Evolution targeting SMB to Enterprise

26:35 Best way to go global

29:02 Why didn't we raise VC capital?

31:32 The unthinkable ABM campaign

44:04 The forgotten aspect in marketing and advertising

47:21 How Posist have perfected event marketing?

1:00:32 The Playbook for B2B conferences

1:00:4:38 Rapid fire

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Sales team is closer to the customer's problems.

How do we bring the marketing and product teams closer to customer problems, so that they feel the voice of the customer?

Voice of the customer is really valuable. It's very hard to get access to it, and even if you get access to it, it's a pain to gain insights from it, and then scale it up.

This is the pain point which led Shruti Kapoor and her co-founders Muralidharan Venkatasubramanian - Head of Product and Srikar Yekollu - to start Wingman, a conversation intelligence SaaS.

Wingman acts as the single source of truth for all types of interactions between sales teams and buyers including emails and calls.

It analyzes them and it gives the ability to deep dive into these conversations and provide the larger analytics and intelligence, to improve revenue.

Their 1st million revenues came in around 2.5 years, and 2nd million in the next 6 months. They’ve also been part of Ycombinator and SaaSBOOMi GrowthX.

Wingman recently got acquired by Clari.

Tune in to this episode to gain insights on right time to get acquired, nitigrities of valuation from the standpoint of acquisition and fundraising, the AI piece on strengthening revenues, how personal branding for you as a founder helps and more.

1:31 - What’s Wingman?

3:07 -Why Wingman welcomed the early acquisition by Clari - 3 key factors

3:22 - Figuring out the valuation

4:32 - Valuation multiples by Private Equity companies
7:15 - Valuation multiples during fundraising versus acquisitions

10:03 - VC valuation v/s PE valuation

12:19 - What does it mean if a VC is giving a 20x valuation multiple?

15:43 - The idea of Wingman and how did the founding team come together?
21:06 - Using AI to gain sales intelligence from sales calls using Wingman

24:55 - Funds raised and investors

25:31 - Rationale for high pricing, is it a sales barrier?

29:18 - ICP of Wingman
30:56 - SaaS pricing insights for Indian market

31:31 - Change in org structure after acquisition

34:45 - Wingman’s go-to market model

35:50 - Creating proxies of trust - personal branding as a founder
36:40 - How to increase average ticket sizes
39:46 - OTE v/s sales quota

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Channel Partner-led GTM is one of the strong pieces in SaaS customer acquisition. Unlike the digital marketing and sales driven customer acquisition, this mode is under leveraged.

Find out how Shruti Ghatge (Co-founder & CEO, Zomentum) and her team is flipping Partner Relationship Management, and adding more power to the Channel Partner-led GTM with Zomentum.

Zomentum's end-to-end Revenue Platform enables both Channel Partners and SaaS vendors to earn, grow, and manage revenue quickly and cost-effectively. From finding Partner customers on Reddit forums in its early days, Zomentum has grown into a company with almost 3500 partners. In 2021, they raised $13 Million in Series A funding.

Shruti speaks to us about Zomentum’s founding philosophy, navigating early product market fit challenges, some very interesting ‘guerrilla research tactics’ like eavesdropping on office conversations, meeting geeky customers on Reddit forums, and requesting Partner customers if they could work from their offices, and how her experience as a VC investment analyst came as a leverage.

Tune in for an entertaining and unusual conversation.

Key Takeaways:

2:03 - What is Zomentum and what is its role in the SaaS world?

2:42 - Where did the idea for Zomentum originate?

4:56 - Shruti’s early days of building the company and its founding philosophy

6:21 - Ideal customer profile.

10:53 - What are some examples of a 100% channel-driven sales motion?

12:51 - How does Zomentum recruit partners for the marketplace and what is its value proposition?

13:04 - How do you solve the chicken egg problem?

18:20 - Navigating product-market fit and challenges.

24:49 - What is their go-to-market strategy and how does it reflect on their organizational structure?

26:03 - Unconventional Wisdom - Reddit threads and Facebook communities to find customers.

33:09 - Why did Zomentum choose to acquire a company in its early days?

36:15 - Fundraising journey.

37:53 - Tips on recruiting and retaining talent.

39:22 - Managing a cross-geographical team and shaping culture.

40:33 - Practical tactics and takeaways in the area of sales and marketing.

42:40 - Hiring practices in Zomentum’s early days.

43:06 - Meeting her co-founder, Rahil Shah, and deciding on equity.

45:51 - Learnings for founders about dealing with investors/board in the early days of the company.

Happy Listening!

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Yasasree Nerayanuri is the Vice President - Customer Marketing at Sprinklr. She used to be the Director of Customer Marketing & Community at Freshworks before joining Sprinklr.

In this episode Arvind Parthiban and Varun Shoor explores in depth various aspects of Customer Marketing with Yasasree. Tune in! 👇

SaaSBOOMi BTS Podcast brings insights into what goes on Behind The Scenes in the making of some of the successful marketing campaigns, and shine the light on how marketing is done, what works, and what doesn’t, and let the audience learn from the experience of the country’s best marketers

⭕ Episode 8: Customer Marketing : A New Frontier in SaaS Marketing ⭕ Guest: Yasasree Nerayanuri (VP Customer Marketing, Sprinklr) ⭕ Hosts: Arvind Parthiban (Co-founder & CEO, SuperOps.ai) & Varun Shoor (Founder & Ex-CEO, Kayako)

Also available to be streamed on: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3S3vX9U Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3zzmwI1 Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/btse8-go

🔔 Get notified when new episodes drop: https://bit.ly/sbpodsubscribe

customermarketing #customersuccess #community #SaaS

2:00 Genesis of customer marketing function

5:00 Scaling beyond $10M ARR

6:14 Marketing org structure evolution at Freshworks

8:48 How to measure and attribute NRR?

12:52 Org structure at Sprinklr v/s Freshworks

15:17 Making the best RoI from networking dinner events

16:41 Difference between community marketing and customer marketing

23:12 KPI for customer marketing

26:41 Customer communities

30:58 Playbook to get ~500 event registrations in a month

32:56 Customer success and customer marketing in action

34:42 Overlaps in customer marketing & product marketing

37:37 Optimizing customer communication at scale

39:35 The need for brand voice

41:23 Overlap between customer marketing and brand marketing

41:43 Customer marketing for single product v/s multi product company

45:12 Microevents marketing

47:40 Customer marketing components

49:51 Pillars of Customer marketing

51:29 How to engage with your advocates

53:22 How do you know a customer is a champion?

55:07 CRM is not a tool, it's a discipline

58:07 Advice to someone starting in customer marketing

58:58 One quality to look in hiring in customer marketing

Happy watching!

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After landing a dream internship at Google while studying at IIT Delhi, Swapnil Jain moved to San Francisco to work with Twitter for 3 years. His startup journey, according to him, was a result of FOMO. Seeing his contemporaries back in India starting their own companies with the influx of venture capital in India, Swapnil decided to move back to India and start Observe.ai. 

In 2022, Observe.ai raised $125 Million in its Series C Funding led by SoftBank. Observe.AI is an Intelligent Workforce Platform that transforms contact centers by embedding AI into customer conversations, optimizing agent performance, and automating repeatable processes that drive revenue and retention.

Tune in to listen to his journey from being an engineer to first getting rejected and then getting accepted by Y Combinator and the challenges of running a multinational organization, with offices in the US and in India. 

Key Takeaways: 

1:47 - What is Observe.ai?

5:43 - Moving from Google to Twitter and starting Observe.ai

6:40 - How Swapnil came up with the idea for Oberserve.ai? 

10:04 - Swapnil’s initial days of shifting from the US to India, seeking inspiration for a business idea 

11:55 - How Swapnil found his co-founders?

14:48 - Tips on how co-founders negotiate ownership and equity? 

19:23 - How did they choose the name Observe.ai and how did they navigate the challenges around copyrights? 

22:06 - Swapnil’s journey with Y Combinator

25:08 - Insights on the funding journey of the organization 

27:19 - What do pre-seed investors bet on? 

28:13 - Benchmarks of investments for SaaS startups 

31:07 - What is the difference between seed and pre-seed funding? 

32:40 - How does the leadership manage a multinational team and what is the role distribution between the US and India? 

36:53 - What was Swapnil’s process for hiring C-Suite and VP-level leadership?

39:11 - Swapnil shares with the SaaSBooMi community the names of C-Suite agencies he’s worked with in the US to hire for leadership  

40:47 - What are the costs of working with these agencies in the US?

43:33 - How does Observe.ai stand out in the market?

45:31 - Why collaboration rather than competition worked for Observe.ai in the market? 

46:35 - Hiring and retention during The Great Resignation 

49:57 - How did they build culture as the foundation of everything at Observe.ai?

53:34 - Swapnil’s invitation to the SaaSBooMi community 

Happy Listening! 

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Aakriti Bhargava is the co-founder of Wizikey, an expert at PR & Communications, and a SaaSBOOMi volunteer. Aakriti has been into PR for 16 years, worked with Naukri.com learning the ropes of PR and has run an agency helping 300+ entrepreneurs, before starting Wizikey, a media intelligence platform.

In this episode Arvind Parthiban explores all things PR for a startup with Aakriti. 

Here are the key take aways.

2:55 How PR agencies work?

6:13 PR’s impact on Cost of Acquisition & Valuation

8:55 Directly reaching out to the media v/s working with a PR agency

10:20 The Why now & Who cares factors

12:51 Right time to start PR

17:40 Breaking down PR : Signalling

19:50 Trendjacking

20:20 How do you consistently get covered in the press?

25:17 PR for Organic Lead generation

27:30 Levers of PR

31:32 How do you measure PR

37:55 How to work with PR agencies the best way?

42:22 Biggest peeve in PR

42:38 Favourite PR agency

43:31 Favourite PR hack

43:41 Top 3 media information sources

44:10 One advice to startup founders

Happy listening! 

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Ganesh Shankar started RFPIO scratching his own itch along with A J Sunder(Co-founder & CPO) and Sankar Lagudu (Co-founder & COO). During his stint as a product manager Ganesh had to fill out responses to the RFPs which ended up as a time consuming and frustrating process. When the trio looked out for solutions they found out that it’s a broken process and that there are no solid solutions existing in the market which got them to start RFPIO.  

What started as a niche product addressing one particular process later goes on to become a category leader in RFP management used by 250k+ users.

Tune in to the episode with  Suresh and Ganesh to take a journey on RFPIOs growth from serving SMBs to Enterprises, No Concentration Strategy, leveraging Customer Advisory Board, a peek into the interesting culture at RFPIO which includes GTTTD, S4, GIT and the like, and how all these comes into play in building a category leader

Key take aways

5:51 - Genesis of RFPIO

9:57 - Founding team formation

11:48 - Deciding who to be the CEO

15:57 - Product pricing

19:51 - GTM approach

22:05 - ICP & Outbound sales

23:51 - Funds raised

26:46 - Org structure

27:36 - Hiring scene in US & India

28:08 - Customer funded business

33:16 - Getting the first customers, the journey from SMB to Enterprise, price evolution

35:42 - No concentration strategy

36:52 - GTDDD

37:26 - Sales team’s influence on other teams

37:59 - Sales team compensation structure changes

41:14 - Customer advisory board

45:26 - Sales and implementation partners

47:32 - Culture building

52:15 - Inputs to founders on networking and fundraising

54:24 - One of the top mistakes done

Happy listening!

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During his stint as a product manager at 2014, the time when SaaS was booming, Ashok noticed that there’s a high demand for complex workflow automations from customers. This got him to start Automate.io, and they would later go into head on competition with Zapier.

Fast forward, Ashok was getting inbound interests for acquisition left, right and center. But he and his team kept their heads down and kept on building.

But one inbound interests for a partnership got his attention, which eventually got them acquired by Notion.

Tune into this episode to gain insights on how they powered automations at 30,000+ organizations and the A-Z journey of getting acquired by Notion.

Key take aways:

8:11 - Scale of Automate

10:23 - Acquisition opportunity

15:23 - Team expectation management during acquisition

19:16 - Duration for acquisition and competing offers

21:22 - Company structure that smoothened the acquisition

24:34 - Acquisition - Culture Compatibility and Adaptation

26:36 - Navigating specific cultural differences

29:20 - Transition from role as a CEO post acquisition

32:32 - GTM for 1st 100 customers and first 500

36:39 - Pricing models

39:37 - Do’s and Don’ts for acquisition

Happy listening!

Happy listening!

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💡 Learn what it takes to stand out in Content Marketing in this age of information overload from someone who has gone from 0 to 1 on Content Marketing.

Tune in our latest #BTSpodcast episode 👇

⭕ Episode 6: The Ins and Outs of Content Marketing ⭕ Guest: Akshatha Kamath (Head of Content Marketing, MoEngage) ⭕ Hosts: Arvind Parthiban (Co-founder & CEO, SuperOps.ai) & Varun Shoor (Founder & Ex-CEO, Kayako)

Also available to be streamed on: https://spoti.fi/3LLJAaC https://apple.co/36uzNWl https://bit.ly/sbpodgoogle

🔔 Get notified when new episodes drop: https://bit.ly/sbpodsubscribe

contentmarketing #media #marketing #SaaS

Key take aways: 4:04 The Evolution of the Org Chart 6:32 Content Creation Mix 8:46 Org Chart - Content Team 10:53 Customer content & Vertical content 12:51 OKRs and KPIs for Marketing Org 13:54 Content Metrics 16:10 Overall Marketing Team Structure 24:34 Content Cadence 26:05 Practice of Listening to Sales 30:39 Earned Media by World Economic Forum, NewYork Times, and Forbes 37:36 Thought Leadership Content Team 38:49 Thought Leadership Pillars 39:25 Data Stories 43:40 Magic of combining Product Marketing + Content Marketing 46:24 Standing out as a startup in the world of information overload 54:11 Your One Marketing Challenge 54:45 Rapid Fire

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Vetri Vellore is a seasoned entrepreneur. After his 14 years career with Microsoft, Vetri Vellore started Chronus, an enterprise mentoring platform which got acquired by a PE firm. He later started Ally, an OKR software provider, which he scaled from a team of 15 to 250+ in 2 years, helping 1000s of customers in bringing purpose, focus and happiness to work and unleash productivity gains of 2x to 4x. Ally had raised series C funding and and was on the path to scale up when Microsoft approached them, resulting in an acquisition that yielded great results for team members and investors. 

Tune in to this episode to learn more on 

• 9:23 Advice for hardcore engineering background on how to become great at business
• 16:16 Why he decided to build an OKR software?
• 17:39 How Ally helps companies unleash productivity gains of 2x to 4x?
• 19:24 What is a modern operating system for running a company?
• 20:33 How they framed ICP and how did it change over time?
• 24:50 How customers and investors think of product category?
• 28:26 Leveraging customer interviews to sharpen Demand Generation
• 32:39 How to optimize for CAC in SEM
• 34:43 Sales team size and structure
• 39:46 Managing churn as OKR software requires new habits and culture change
• 48:04 How to hire super human senior talent in customer success?
• 50:17 How to set a change management practice to success?
• 53:51 Role of Chief of Staff
• 56:55 What's a 'Modern work experience'?
• 57:52 Insights on acquisition by Microsoft
• 1:00:34 M&A Integration risks & cultural fit
• 1:01:41 M&A Negotiation tips
• 1:02:06 Choice between Independence v/s Impact as an entrepreneur
• 1:12:14 Tips on scaling team from 15 to 250+ in 2 years

Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

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PipeCandy is the industry standard data set that tracks 5 million plus e-commerce & DTC brands across hundreds of data points & markets.

They transformed from a single to a multi product SaaS company without building new products.

They became industry standard by calling themselves industry standard.

They 2x-ed their revenue in 4 months with no engineering changes.

They called out their USP and gave it a name which not many companies do.

They gained the confidence to price higher despite previous battle scars from pricing experiments.

How did they do this?
What’s the secret ingredient that went into this?
What’s the link between PipeCandy and SaaSBOOMi GrowthX?

Find answers to these and more in our latest #BTSpodcast E5 feat. Ashwin Ramasamy (Co-founder, PipeCandy), hosted by Arvind Parthiban and Varun Shoor.

Key take aways:

1:48 Marketing Org Chart
3:39 Push v/s pull driven product
5:14 TAM exercise
6:44 PipeCandy Before & After SaaSBOOMi GrowthX
12:08 How to communicate Trustworthy Authority?
14:03 Brand Image, Brand Identity & Positioning
14:57 How do we visually communicate trust?
17:27 Impact of re-branding
17:39 How does pricing & segmentation work?
21:17 Key metrics for website
23:46 Pricing Evolution
24:49 Pricing considering competition
26:20 Opportunities to increase your revenue
28:28 API pricing
33:37 What's the value in the case of software?
35:22 Rapid fire
38:10 Your biggest marketing challenge?

Happy watching!

Bonus:
Don’t miss the Insight Cards hidden inside the episode.

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Highradius provides the Power of Humans + Machines for the Office of the CFO, and is trusted by 200+ Global 2000 companies.

In this episode Sashi Narahari – President & CEO, HighRadius talks on how he set out to build an Autonomous Software for Order to Cash, Treasury & Record to Report Software with no background in finance, how they bootstrapped for 11 years before raising first round of funds and his unconventional approach to team building and company culture. 

Deep dive with Sashi as Suresh Sambandam explores his journey of ‘Building to Last’

Here’s more on what you can learn from the episode. 

• 7:53 Framework to shortlist from a list of ideas
• 13:17 Why they raised funds after 11 years of bootstrapping
• 17:20 The 4 year pattern for entrepreneurs
• 20:22 How to claim premium valuation?
• 22:02 Unconventional approach to  team building & culture
• 29:48 How to do premium pricing in style?
• 41:51 The 3 Dimension Framework for Sales
• 46:08 Finding investors who have an unlimited time frame
• 50:20 Advice to founders in the $500K – $5M range

Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

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Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan is an Author, TED speaker, marketer and a SaaS entrepreneur.

After his stint in advertising, Lux joined Sekhar Vembu as a co-founder at Vembu Technologies, leading sales and marketing and thinking of ways to market ‘a data backup software company’ in a cool way.  

They went on to create probably the first rap song on SaaS, by the name Cloud, Cloud Baby. 

Lux later went on to start ‘Eyes and Feet’ – ‘From online eyeballs to offline footfalls’, a social media analytics firm with Joseph Varghese and Kumar Krishnasami, which then got rebranded as Unmetric,  a social media benchmarking company for brands – ‘It will tell you right now, what five people need five days to do’.

Unmetric provides competitive intelligence, based on the 150k brands which they index. 

Unmetric ended up creating the category of Social Analytics in the otherwise crowded space of  Social Publishing and Social Listening tools. They eventually got acquired by Falcon.io.

In his words ‘From the beginning of October, to the end of October, we moved from being an independent company to having a parent, grandparents, and great-grandparents in one stroke’

Tune in to this episode to learn the Journey of Unmetric from a Bedroom in Chennai to Boardroom in Copenhagen.

Here are other key takeaways from this episode.

• Cognitive dissonance and marketing
• How to coin brand names and product narratives which leaves your brand memorable
• How to pitch your product to customers in a way you never had thought of before
• How to use business card for content marketing
• Why category creation is fascinating and scary at the same time
• Context Marketing : A secret sauce that many don’t share
• Best practices to work with PR agencies
• Using Data & Art for Brilliant Storytelling

Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

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You finish your exit, you get financial security, you hang up the boots and go on a vacation. 

With each company you’re on a treadmill, no - you’re on a conveyor belt, for another 7-10 years. 

What if you have already exited two businesses, will you do it again?

If you have to do it again, what’ll be the motivation behind it?

From being a pioneer in the ‘on-prem to cloud journey’ with his first startup Host Analytics, and a category creator of Customer Success Platform with Gainsight, Sreedhar is now on to a category disruption play in his 3rd start up GTM Buddy.Gainsight was the world's very first company to have launched as a customer success platform, when customer success as a function didn’t exist.  Why did they proceed building it when there was no buyer in place? Today as you know even a 10 member startup will have someone looking after customer success. That was not the case when they started. 

Gain more insights on category creation, category disruption, a serial entrepreneur’s perspective on building a world class team of experts and how to look at industries for insights that you may otherwise miss and more wisdom in this episode.

Here’s more on what’s in store for you

• How much investment is required if you're venturing into category creation?
• How to build a 100M ARR company, Gainsight style?
• How to sell to the leading SaaS businesses in the world, predominantly in the Bay area.
• Scaling too fast, too soon can be counterproductive, why?
• How do you decide on the right pricing, that you don’t sell at $4k price point to a customer when they could actually be paying a few $100k conservatively?
• 3 years into building the business, their ARR is under a million -  What’re the 2 factors which kept them going?
• Insights on product led category creation. Which are good examples of companies which have done cost-effective product led category creation?
• How to go about investing in a world class team of experts
• What’re the nuances to look for when you build a sales team who can sell $1M+ compared to selling $100k+
• How to analyze an industry  - from a serial entrepreneur's perspective?
• Imagine your product pricing is $19 per user presently, when you launched it years back it was $3. How will you migrate the old customers to the higher price band?
• Early stage ACV movement from $12k price point to now $300-400k

Tune in, 

Happy Gaining more Insights!

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If you’d like to start a streaming TV channel, how will you go about it?

Amagi has a suite of solutions for you to get started and scale a TV channel. There are only a few companies that build products to help media houses, global OTT players. 

Amagi Media Labs is a global leader pioneering cloud solutions for the media & entertainment industry, providing end-to-end cloud managed live & on demand video infrastructure for TV & OTT. 

In a decade old journey of ups & downs, Baskar Subramanian (Co-founder & CEO, Amagi) has built some of the most disruptive tech solutions. 

Here’s more on what you can learn from this episode.

1. The SaaS behind services like Netflix, Prime and other streaming services
2. How do the metrics differ for vertical & horizontal SaaS?
3. How to serve when the customers ask for SLA of 99.9999% ?
4. How to choose the right market so that you can leverage the market dynamics?
5. Insights on product stickiness and lock-in
6. Global consumer behavior on new content consumption
7. How do media tech companies operate?
8. Why did they go ahead with a multi cloud strategy?
9. How do they manage good numbers with a 16 member sales team?
10. Bonus: Learn more about the heavy tech involving satellites and software that went into building location specific advertising solutions in India.

Tune in to the full episode, Happy learning!

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When you’re in enterprise SaaS and your target customers are not mainly online, how will you go about setting up an inbound marketing engine?

Facilio operates in a multibillion dollar facility management industry & has operations across continents, serving customers from small real estate groups to conglomerates. Its solutions are flexible & modular to improve margins across real estate verticals.

The role of marketing in enterprise SaaS is very underrated. It requires a lot of understanding of the market dynamics, identifying key players, getting the messaging right & communicating the value proposition of the product. Since, sales muscle is often used as a GTM strategy, subtle marketing can add a lot of value & complement it with a soft push.

Tune in to BTS podcast E4 with Nivedha Sridhar (Director - Marketing, Facilio) who also had joined them as their founding marketing team member.

Here’s more takeaways from the episode

• Category awareness and urgency matrix
• Why buy - why buy now - why buy us - matrix
• Secret sauce of content marketing for enterprise SaaS
• How did they get million dollar deals via inbound marketing
• Winning the whales: Hacks to build credibility and close large deals
• Building website that speak enterprise SaaS
• 3 content types that your marketing funnel shouldn't omit
• Website design as an edge in enterprise SaaS
• Winning the whales: Hacks to build credibility and close large deals
• Cracking million dollar deals with inbound marketing
• Cracking the ICP identification framework
• Acquiring the first 10 enterprise customers

Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

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5 minute or 10 minute grocery deliveries?

Wait, let’s hear about the magic that happens behind all types of deliveries – be it a pizza delivery in < 30 minutes or bikes and cars delivered at your home.

Delivery service companies have been spending millions of dollars every single year to serve their customers better & make the last mile delivery as quick as possible. Thanks to the explosion of e-commerce, grocery deliveries around the world, routing solutions have emerged as a huge white space in the logistics industry.

FarEye has emerged as a leader in this category, leveraging on top-notch domain expertise in delivery & logistics with a highly configurable product. 

Their no code/low code enterprise SaaS product has capabilities which allow platforms to integrate with their upstream & downstream logistics system & get better predictability. They even provide the ability to add returns to delivery routes in real-time. 

In this episode explore with Kushal Nahata – CEO & Co-founder of FarEye as Suresh unravels their journey of creating a world-class enterprise SaaS product to reimagine the logistics industry. 

Here’s more on what you can learn from this episode.

• Your customers are getting out of business, shutting down or not having capital to pay. You have 20% enterprise customers and 80% SME customers. You’re losing 80% of your customers and you’ve recently raised a Series A, things are a little tricky. How’ll you navigate this?
• How do you split US regions and how do you allocate accounts to AEs, how much is AE’s quota,  what’re typical OTEs?
• When each of your accounts is $1mn+, how do you structure your sales org? Should it be marketing driven or sales driven?
• How do you work with an NGO-like organization to hire a good BD?
• How to get a customer without a product?
• How to close a sale without a full fledged pilot?
• How to tailor your pitch in order to achieve a shorter sales cycle?
• How’s the enterprise software purchase process if there’s no Gartner quadrant available?
• How to hire and how much to pay senior enterprise sales executives? How to set up a hiring & evaluation process for them? How to identify candidates with a startup mindset?
• How to measure the learnability index?
• Why would somebody leave an established supply chain and logistics brand and join a startup?
• Is it effective to hire sales consultants or freelancers?
• What’s the closure ratio of the pipeline, what’s the ratio of pipeline coming from marketing, BDR and sales team?

Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

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HRM is a crowded space with 200+ companies out there and has many one trick pony solutions like Performance management system, Payroll, ATS, Goal management, OKRs, Timesheets, Attendance check-in, check-out etc.

Venturing into such a market in itself is challenging, and to add on to it, imagine if you're building a full stack HRM product.

David versus Goliath is of the past, here we have Darwinbox versus Goliaths.

Darwinbox is a Hire to retire HR tech product used by an intern to CEO of a company.

They have 600+ enterprise customers including more than 35 unicorns, 1.2 million end users or employees who use the platform day in and day out for different HR aspects across multiple sectors across Asia.

In this episode explore with Rohit of Darwinbox as Suresh unravels their journey of slowly and steadily replacing legacy HRM systems in enterprises.

Here’s more on what you can learn from this episode. - How Asian market makes you efficient and gets you ready for the world? - How to structure a SaaS lead generation engine for the SEA market? - What're the market characteristics of Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore in terms of deal size, closing duration, pricing multiples? - Why is South East Asia better paced than India as a market? - What're the local companies in SEA focused at? - What’re the two critical weaknesses of legacy systems that you can leverage on? - How has India made them extremely efficient? - What's the story with SBI which got them international customers? - What’s the ideal sales strategy for enterprise SaaS? - How to take care of SaaS customizations versus scalability using products? - How is SEA different from India as a SaaS market? - How to compete against legacy SaaS players? - Early-stage sales playbook for enterprise SaaS - How to scale an enterprise SaaS product? - The SaaS advantage in SEA

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Raghu's yellow.ai is a story of beginner's mindset and breaking the mould continually. He has been to chip design and semiconductors not into software domain for 15, 16 years and haven't heard of the word CX till 2016. Learn more on how Yellow is creating a leading international brand in the intersection of messaging, CX and AI.

Here are the other key take aways from this episode.

-Find out how they came up with the name Yellow despite its SEO implications? -How they got enterprise customers when they were a 4 member team -What does the marketing org chart look like today considering teams in India, SEA, NA, LATAM? -Nuances in positioning and messaging for each of the markets, how they're different for emerging markets and western markets -How the organizational structure in a company is never fixed but fluid? -What're the two sides to product marketing? -In SaaS marketing org, who should PMM report to - CPO or CMO? -How to stand out in a commoditized market and build trust? -What's the paradigm shift in new age CRM? -How Microsoft accelerator helped in getting more enterprise customers? -Are Indian enterprises laggards or innovators in terms of software adoption? -What're the aspects to keep in mind while changing your positioning? What're its impacts? -The step by step process of getting into Gartner Magic Quadrant and the team structure

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Did you know that large enterprises are using 900+ software applications, and spending $100M+ on it?

As per Gartner, $600bn dollars worth of enterprise software spend is going to be this year.

Companies won't see an RoI if employees are not utilizing these software efficiently. This is where Whatfix comes into picture, creating a layer of adoption on top of these software products, helping employees to adopt these software.

Whatfix serves 500+ customers worldwide, with 100 of top 1000 companies using Whatfix. They have a team strength of ~600 employees with $140 mn funds raised.

In this episode Suresh deep dives with Khadim into the Land and Expand strategy which is unique to Whatfix. Learn more about how to build a new category, what the trigger at each stage for the company was to move from SMB to Midmarket to Enterprise, how org structure and approaches changes for these segments, how to address churn rate, on metrics , numbers and more numbers.

It’s insightful to listen to how you can get creative on pricing when you have multiple variables - customer segments, number of users, number of applications, frequency of usage, departments and more. It also covers some of the mistakes made in Land & Expand, which other founders can probably learn from.

Here’s more what you can learn from this episode

Org structure

• Structuring a global enterprise sales team - Insights into org structure, traits to look for, compensation structure, targets & metrics
• What’s the typical BDR to SDR ratio?
• How does the role for Account Managers and BDRs differ?
• Is it better to attach SDRs to the demand gen team or to the regional sales team? What’re the pros and cons?
• How’s hunting, landing, mining and expanding linked?
• What’re the characteristics, mindset and experience to look for when hiring for SDRs, AEs, CS and expansion teams?

Metrics

• Segment - Geography - Conversion’ framework - How to look at the conversion metrics for inbound & outbound sales team?
• What’re the metrics to be tracked for SDRs, AEs, BDRs
• ‘How much is the land to conversion ratio, the expansion conversion ratio?

Marketing

• How to think about GTM to get into enterprises
• How to continue building a new category of ‘Digital Adoption Solutions’ for 6-7 years before the magic quadrants got introduced
• What’re the pros and cons when you create a new category?

Sales

• How do you sell to enterprises early on?
• How will procurement happen in large enterprises? If they have to remove a legacy CRM how will they go about it?

Expand

• What’s the average duration it takes from landing at say $50k ACV and to expand to $500k?
• Growth from $50k to $200k ACV takes time. $200k to $500k it’s faster, and $500k to $1M, it’s even faster - Why?
• What % of revenues come from expansion versus new logos and how they affect LTV?

Hope this will be exciting for you!

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Welcome to the second episode of BTS Podcast - Experiments-led Business Building

In this episode we have Laxman Papineni - CEO & Co-founder, Outplay joining as guest. SaaSBOOMi BTS podcast is hosted by Arvind Parthiban (Co-founder & CEO, SuperOps.ai) and Varun Shoor (Founder, Kayako).

Here's what you'll learn from this episode.

• What's the secret ingredient to making half a million dollars with a Gmail, spreadsheet and a network of bloggers?
• How to growth-hack side hustles into full blown businesses?
• Secrets of building trust and relationships
• How do you decide to let go of fantastic revenue generating businesses to focus on something new?
• Why did they decide to hit $20k ARR before fundraising?
• Why did they get bored of making enough money?
• How to make money while you sleep?
• How do you make people refer more?
• How to generate limitless customer generated content?
• How to leverage case study marketing?
• Why will someone shut down a business that has a revenue of $2-3mn?
• What're the classic items which first time founders overlook?
• How to go about building a business in a crowded market?
• Signals to look for when evaluating a new business : hard lessons from 5 years.
• Checklist to pick up an idea for a startup
• Why Outplay and what's the strategy when you're going behind big players?
• How to do investor marketing and raise funds in 6-7 days?
• How to hack and get CXOs attention?
• What's to be the no.1 goal for all pre-PMF and just after PMF companies?
• What's the advice to an entrepreneur setting up their marketing engine?
• What's one go to source on learning more on marketing?

SaaSBOOMi #Marketing #Podcast #SaaS

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SignEasy helps companies to sign, send and manage all sorts of documents and is being used by over 8 Million users (out of which 150K are paying customers) and 35,000 Companies spread across 100 Countries.

Millions of users and downloads is quite usual in game apps and other consumer apps. Listen to Sign Easy’s story of millions of users and downloads as a B2B app, how they started providing a SaaS product as a mobile app, instead of as a web app.

Pick up interesting insights on consumer behaviour as Suresh explores the idea behind SignEasy and go deep into thoughts shaping the product - on why someone will pay to sign on a document, the connection between mobile and documents which is non obvious, the conviction behind it, the dynamics involved considering document signing has to be accepted by two parties, the distinction between iOS and android users and more.

Sunil also shares his thoughts on how they leveraged mobile app stores ecosystem, developer relations, on bootstrapping and fundraising.

Tune in to learn on how they're generating 100k+ downloads per month, how their pricing evolved via lifetime deals, free trials, freemium, and more.

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In this episode we have Arun Pattabhiraman - Chief Growth Officer, Freshworks and Noel Wax - President and Co-founder, GroundSwell Group joining as guests.

Tune in to this episode to learn more on physical to virtual to hybrid events - how to drive registrations for a live event amidst the digital fatigue, how to leverage not just your marketing team but the other critical levers, on interesting event formats and more.

You'll hear more on what event organizers can learn from Netflix series, if events are for demand generation or brand marketing, 3 must haves for a great event, key difference maker for an event.

All these insights coming from the lens of Arun with his experience across Freshworks and Noel whose company is into events business with Arvind and Varun getting into the finer details.

And wait for the rapid fire in the end on more of tactics and tools.

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Vymo is one of the first enterprise SaaS companies in India with a different sales and marketing motion compared to typical horizontal SMB SaaS.

Vymo started building an enterprise SaaS startup when SaaS in India was all about SMB.

Learn more about the founding story of how Yamini Bhat and Venkat Malladi chose the name VYMO to avoid brand clutter, how they set out to solve a problem in the domain of sales, while providing a  high quality user experience journey for enterprise users, to finally build a multi-tenant, single code base, 70-80 use cases, multi vertical product deployed across 60+ enterprises across 7 countries and used by 200,000+ sales reps! 

When the usual advice is to start small, their initial set of customers were all large enterprises. Why did they choose that way?

When you pitch investors and they say, mobile first, Asia first, distributed and verticalization are all not hot, how do you continue to believe in your conviction?

It’s interesting how they worked with customers, product champions, and influencers while creating a new category in the world of CRM.

And they achieved all this when there was no playbook available on deers and whales as is today.

“It took us 8 years back then to do it, now we’ll only take 3 years to do it.” says Yamini.

Download all the wisdom, on strong outbound engine, SDR cadence, customer marketing, value selling, hiring senior positions, managing the board, culture at more in this episode!

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It’s refreshing to track a new breed of India SaaS companies focused on building tools for software developers and programmers globally. While BrowserStack is on track to achieve $100 million ARR soon, there’s Postman, and then, there’s Hasura.

This is what makes tracking India SaaS so fulfilling and thrilling for storytellers like me.

Unlike the past waves of IT outsourcing and the rise of India’s e-commerce startups, the country’s SaaS ecosystem offers variety and there are so many potential winners.

Hasura’s founders Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh combine their passion for deep engineering with their ability to build great products. Launched in 2017, Hasura already counts SoftBank Robotics, one of Spain’s largest banks--BBVA, and several global companies among its top customers.

Early in the journey, they made a bold pivot by killing the cash-rich consulting business to build a product.

With Hasura, Tanmai and Rajoshi are also riding an early wave.

“It’s like when Mongo was starting and people were like, well this doesn’t make any sense, but you know, Mongo became popular or when virtualization was happening and AWS was happening, it was like the cloud doesn’t make any sense but it happened,” Tanmai tells me in this podcast.

“Hasura is in that kind of exciting but scary class of things that it can be category creating. A product like Hasura has not existed before. It is a weird product. It makes you hyper productive, but it is a shift in architecture and that means that when Hasura is everywhere, people will assume that it is the right way to do things, but the journey to doing that is obviously the most painful journey in the world.”

In this episode of SaaSBOOMi Podcast, Tanmai shares the backstory, and how they are building Hasura, tool by tool.

Listen to this podcast to learn more about how Hasura is helping developers make sense of big data and preparing for a world where programming will go mainstream in schools. This conversation also offers insights into building a deep engineering startup and catching a wave early on.

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Sometime during the year 2017, Ankit Oberoi, the founder of AdPushup, was staring at a potential failure. With $1 million in ARR after a journey of three years since he started, Ankit was struggling to find the growth levers for AdPushup, which had a 25-members team back then.

“We lost about half the team, we were at a low point, and it was a do or die. There’s something we haven’t shared publicly ever, is that we were almost ready to go for an acqui-hire,” Ankit tells me in this podcast. "We were on a ventilator, not just a startup valley of death."

Over the next two years, Ankit hustled through the market to achieve $10 Million ARR in recovering from that stage. This didn't just mean survival, but the experience helped AdPushup create a blueprint for creating a scalable enterprise model.

How did he do it?

It all started with the simple idea of giving it “one last push” as Ankit recalls, this time, moving the entire company towards the enterprise market opportunity. The product changed too, from being SMB-focused to more mid-market customer segments and large enterprises.

AdPushup’s journey from $1 million in ARR to $10 million gross revenues happened in 12-13 months after this pivot.

Listen to this podcast with Ankit Oberoi of AdPushup to learn from his playbook of $1 million to $10 million in ARR, and what it takes to create a product, sales, and organizational building blocks for the journey through crises and beyond.

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Hindsight isn’t just a luxury, as many believe. For founders, hindsight or the ability to look back at the events and learn from them with blunt honesty, is priceless. Just ask the second-time founders such as Ketan Kapoor, the co-founder of Mettl, who sold his startup to Mercer after a long, slow burn. Mettl is a SaaS platform for online assessment.

“If I start something again, I will not raise money for the first three years, not because I can afford it, but because I can run it that way,” Ketan tells me in this conversation.

“The more you can push it out (the funding), the more you can set up a business, which looks solid and sustainable.”

There’s too much focus on the ongoing entrepreneurial journeys. Don’t get me wrong. It’s absolutely needed to keep bringing learnings from the journey as it evolves. What needs to be unlocked more is a goldmine of candid insights from founders after they have completed their entrepreneurial journeys.

“There are moments in every entrepreneur’s journey when you just want to be alone and want to cry, and not share anything with even your family or co-founders.”

This quote from Steve Jobs captures the amazing power of hindsight well:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Listen to this conversation with Ketan Kapoor of Mettl to learn from his entrepreneurial journey that offers honest insights about building, failing and finding an exit for founders, employees and investors.

Ketan is now preparing to become an entrepreneur again, and is looking to apply all the learnings from the Mettl journey.

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What’s the first thought that gets triggered when you hear a mention of Coimbatore? For me, it’s always been the city’s entrepreneurial spirit. Much before startups became a cool word to go around, Coimbatore’s entrepreneurs have been busy creating enterprises, failing, learning and growing. It’s called “the Manchester of South India” for a solid reason.

So it was a delight to record this conversation with Ganesh Shankar, CEO of RFPIO and Saravana Kumar, co-founder of Kovai.co--the two entrepreneurs who hail from Coimbatore, and who are now working relentlessly to make the city a next-generation SaaS hub.

What’s even more heartening is to learn how India SaaS pioneer Zoho and poster child Freshworks are inspiring this new wave.

“The confidence that they gave us (Zoho and Freshworks) is amazing because even we now have 15 of the Fortune 500 companies as customers. Both Zoho and Freshworks have delivered quality products globally from India, and that’s the key motivation,” Ganesh tells me in this podcast.

For a long time, Zoho remained an inspiration for a generation of SaaS startups founded by its former employees. Then came Freshworks; a complete breakaway from the Zoho’s bootstrapped model, fast-growing and nourishing an amazing product-design culture. And while both Zoho and Freshworks continue to be the role models for most SaaS companies, it’s amazing to watch the rise of another generation led by the likes of Postman and Browserstack.

“What Freshworks has done to Chennai is what we want to do to Coimbatore because that spot is still available,” Saravana tells me in this podcast. Kovai.co now has its own campus in Coimbatore, built with an investment of over $1 million.

Chargebee, co-founded by Krish Subramanian, is another inspiration for startups such as Kovai.co

“They are coming in and proving that you can build world-class products and scale,” adds Saravana.

Startups such as Kovai.co, which is at almost $10 million ARR, and RFPIO that counts Zoom, Microsoft and Adobe among its customers, are beginning to democratise the India SaaS story by looking beyond the traditional IT hubs of Chennai and Bengaluru.

Listen to this podcast to learn from the entrepreneurial journeys of RFPIO and Kovai.co, and how the startups’ founders, Ganesh and Saravana, are on a mission to make Coimbatore the next SaaS hub.

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Abhinav Shashank pitched a 400-pages report as a trainee inside a Fortune 500 company and managed to get $20 million funding for the same, much before he actually became an entrepreneur. After getting his idea approved, Abhinav worked on building the product in Bangalore, scoped out manufacturing in Shanghai apart from spending time in Dallas, U.S., giving him an overall experience in building a truly global product.

“By the time I left, it was already a $40 million revenue business,” Abhinav tells me in this podcast.

Is there a path to doing this on my own, he remembers asking himself around that time.

For Abhinav, it was almost like doing a startup again, this time, however, without the protection of a Fortune 500 company. Clearly, there is a lot of value in being entrepreneurial, which is mostly underrated.

An IIT Kharagpur alumni, Abhinav and his batchmates earlier planned to build “a Kharagpur Consulting Group”, on the lines of the famous consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group, he recollects jokingly.

On a more serious note, Abhinav started looking at the world of big data, which is mostly unstructured, and how to make sense of it for customers.

“How do you manage this explosion of information for innovation?”

The early prototype for Innovaccer was aimed at helping academic institutions such as Harvard make sense of information. But when he met Rajan Anandan of Sequoia, thanks to the connection made by Aneesh Reddy of Capillary, the first pivot happened.

“Why don’t you build this for the enterprise?”

Since then, Innovacer has been growing its revenues at over 100% annually and is set to cross the $100 million ARR mark by sometime next year.

The big opportunity has been to tap into the U.S. healthcare market, which is almost like the fifth largest economy in the world, according to him. And the quality of healthcare data continues to be patchy.

“The person you’re trusting with your life knows less about you than your retailer does.”

Before Innovaccer made its second pivot to focus entirely on the healthcare market, the startup was already doing $4 million in ARR.

“We decided to shut down the existing $4 million business, right after the $12 million fundraise from Westbridge,” he recalls. That happened at the first board meeting with Innovaccer’s new investors.

There are broader entrepreneurial lessons too.

“As an entrepreneur, most of your days have their lows. There are only a few of those elusive high points that you are living for that carry you through all the lows,” he says.

Listen to this podcast with Abhinav of Innovaccer to learn more about managing bold pivots, almost like changing the engines of a plane while still in the flight, and staying bluntly honest to create a $100 million ARR business.

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Pankaj Mishra

Kumar Vembu’s journey with Zoho during its early foundational years and later building his own startup, GoFrugal, offers some deep insight into India SaaS’ building blocks. Kumar's ability to spot and mentor talent such as Girish Mathrubootham, who is now the founder of Freshworks, India’s most valuable SaaS company, offers lessons in grooming leaders.

In this episode of SaaSBOOMi podcast, I am thrilled to share this masterclass with Kumar in bootstrapping, spotting talent and matching them with their true purpose, and lessons from three different entrepreneurial journeys--Zoho, GoFrugal and Freshworks.

“I used to be a very mischievous and a happy-go-lucky kid. Whenever teachers tried to be strict with me, I became more unmanageable. But whenever a teacher trusted me, I became easy to manage,” Kumar recalls.

“One of the early lessons for me was when you respect and trust people, you get their cooperation, much better than using brute force.”

Over the years, Kumar has watched three different entrepreneurial journeys, starting with his own startup focused on the India market, Zoho before that, and Freshworks’ Girish. You can also watch this video interview I had done with Kumar explaining “the Zoho way and the Freshworks way.”

So what does he think about these different models and what can we learn from each of them?

“Whether to bootstrap or take funding should not be the first question. Building the product, achieving product-market fit and growing the business are more important questions at the start,” he tells me in this podcast.

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What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better—and smarter—solution is simply to remain small? via Company of One”

Pankaj Mishra

Sounds quite a playbook, doesn't it? Amid all the talks of finding a product-market fit, growth hacking revenues from $0 to $1 million, $10 million and beyond, a rare breed of entrepreneurs are finding a path to inner peace.

Aditya has spent the past decade working across fast-growing startups, being an entrepreneur himself and failing too. He is now applying all the lessons and realisations he has gathered over the years to redefine his life and work.

I was amazed to read his blog “Our Hardcore Year - getting to 1000$ MRR” for its blunt honesty and refreshing insights.

In this podcast, Aditya shares why it makes sense to get off the funding and growth treadmill and find a way to staying sane apart from a sustainable livelihood.

After raising around $5 million, kind of failing later with his startup, Aditya started realising he wasn’t enjoying it much. Entrepreneurship had started feeling like a burden for him.

“I was 4 years into it and really burnt out. I just couldn’t carry on….it kind of started feeling that I was doing it just for the sake of it. Because I was supposed to be an entrepreneur and keep going….I just couldn’t do it.”

Listen to this podcast to learn from Aditya’s playbook of the path to $1000 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), and also, why it makes sense to stay small and stay sane.

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By Pankaj Mishra

"These are not days for unbridled optimism, but this is the perfect time to allow hope to arise in our spirits.”

Donald T Iannone

Entrepreneurial optimism can be dangerous and suicidal. Overconfidence and confirmation biases can blind founders from getting a realistic assessment of any situation. But the undying sense of chasing the glimmer can also be inspiring, and perhaps the single biggest source of strength for surviving an existential crisis like the ongoing pandemic. 

When the first wave of Covid pandemic hit India in early March this year, Sakshi and Ashish Tulsian, the husband-wife duo and founders of POSist, thought things would return to normal soon. They announced work-from-home starting 14th March thinking it would last for a week at the most. 

Sakshi still remembers different signals leading up to the deadlock, starting February this year, all in the hindsight though. 

“I remember we were doing a deal in Indonesia during January/February, which was the single biggest contract for us and it was going well. We signed the contract .End of february is when we started experiencing delays in getting the money. Similarly, we started seeing delays in closing the deals in the Middle East,” she tells me in this podcast. 

Looking back, from the end of February to the first two weeks of March, many deals POSist sales team was working on for the past two quarters did not close. 

“On March 3, we witnessed the second signal when an annual event we have been participating in for the past six years in Delhi with hectic schedules, appeared to be going empty. We used to collect around 250 leads daily over the past few years, and this year we were barely managing around 22 leads on a daily basis.”

We receive money everyday. Revenues hit our bank account everyday. Our forecast to reality differential isn’t very high, normally. I remember the March 18 announcement of “Janata Curfew.” And we saw revenue zero from that day till April 15. 

Ashish also remembers a call from Aneesh Reddy, the founder CEO of Capillary and a fellow SaaS entrepreneur, around that time.

“How’s it going?” Aneesh asked. “How bad do you think this is going to be?”

“Probably a quarter?” Ashish remembers telling Aneesh

“And Aneesh was like, dude, you need help.”

“You will not have time to react if you don’t overreact now,” Aneesh told him. “Start planning for zero revenues.” 

Since then, Sakshi and Ashish braced themselves for the worst. POSist used to do around Rs. 40 crore worth of billing daily before the pandemic hit. “By April, we were looking at less than a crore everyday,” says Ashish. 

“We can’t thank him (Aneesh) enough for this,” says Sakshi. 

Since then, Sakshi and Ashish had to lay off their staff, cut all expenses, and live with zero revenues. 

Listen to this podcast to learn more about how the POSist founders regained growth, tapped markets, changed their revenue mix and of course, also hired back the staff they had to let go. 

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Pankaj Mishra

It’s amazing how just this one question can make or break a company. What makes it even more frustrating is that there’s already too much noise and clutter of answers on this question. From founders, investors, to startup mentors, media and so on, almost everyone has their perfect answer to this question.

And still, many founders hire VP sales too early, or too late. A rare few, Google for instance, get it right. Many others including GitHub, which got acquired by Microsoft eventually, didn’t get it right.

So how to separate noise from signals that matter?

Enter Elad Gil, a serial entrepreneur and the author of “High Growth Handbook”, a book that combines practical insights from practitioners with some of the most visionary playbooks around the world. Over the years, Elad has been an entrepreneur, investor and advisor to companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, and many others.

In this podcast, the first in a series of deep conversations with him on organisational building blocks, Elad offers practical insights into some of the most common mistakes founders make.

When to hire your first vice president of sales, is among just one such existential questions.

“Some companies hire a vice president of sales too early because they see that the market exists already. In other circumstances when there is uncertainty, you start doing founder-driven sales,” Elad says. “Many founders today, particularly product and technical founders, end up adding sales and a VP sales much too late in the life of a company.”

“What you’re increasingly seeing is that people are getting “pre product market fit” advice to “post product market fit” their companies. If you go back 5 or 10 years, it was the opposite--people were given very bad advice. There was post product market fit advice to a company that just didn’t have any traction yet,” he adds.

As you will discover after listening to this conversation with Elad, there’s so much to learn from the playbooks of Google, Stripe, Github and others. Elad also warns against learning from the playbooks without understanding the contextual setting for each of them. One size doesn’t fit all, indeed.

So why do companies fail?

“The number one reason companies fail is because of the “co-founder complex.”There’s always this advice that you need an equal co-founder. I think people need to divorce equality in terms of equity, from equality in terms of decision making,” Elad tells me in this podcast.

“For late stage companies, the common mistakes are very different. Not building an executive team early enough, is the first such mistake. That’s why when you see second time founders start a company, among the first 15 people 3-4 of them are VPs and CXOs.”

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Pankaj Mishra

Over 30 million kids use SplashLearn to play games that help them learn math, practice better.
Arpit Jain, Umang Jain, Joy Deep Nath, and Mayank Jain, the co-founders of SplashLearn, were batchmates at IIT Kharagpur.

The biggest tipping point for SplashLearn was when it decided to shift from $10 as a lifetime fee for using the app, to $10 as a monthly fee.

"We were nervous," Arpit tells me in this podcast.

Today, with over 100K+ paid members, SplashLearn has navigated that transition well.

As Umang adds, listening to the users relentlessly and shaping the product with them has been the key. "You co-own the product with your users."

SplashLearn's journey of building a product, acquiring the product-market fit, and transitioning to the SaaS model, offers deep insights about what works and what doesn't. Their early bet on iPad in 2010 as the learning device to be used by the schools, didn't work out well. But they transitioned away quickly and learned from things that didn't work out.

"Startup is a rollercoaster ride, your team is the seatbelt," says Arpit.

Listen to this podcast to learn about the edtech industry, product building blocks, and managing co-founder relationships.

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The first time I heard of Icertis was when it closed its billion dollar valuation funding round last year. I wasn't alone to discover Icertis back then. Many people in the ecosystem, including some of the top investors had the same question, what does Icertis do and why is it valued at over a billion dollars?

In this episode of SaaSBOOMi podcast with its co-founder Monish Darda, we don't just answer the questions about what makes Icertis a unicorn, but also trace the journey from the early building blocks.

As I discovered in this conversation, Icertis isn't just a SaaS unicorn. It's clearly among the companies out there who have the potential to go all the way to become what they call "BuiltToLast."

"If you're building the company for the long term, you really have to think about your values....giving people a framework and giving yourselves a framework on how you behave," Monish tells me in this podcast.

Monish and Samir Bodas, the co-founders of Icertis, applied all the learnings from their past failures to build a culture that lasts.

"After every meeting, and during the meetings, we always ask ourselves, what if we walk out now."

The culture of learning from failures is helping Icertis avoid existential failures in the future. During every company meeting, both Samir and Monish talk about their failures over the past six months.

The story of Icertis reminds me of Ben Horowitz's famous book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." Icertis' journey so far, and the potential ahead, underscores what it really takes to build a company that matters, not just for the next funding rounds, but a true "BuiltToLast."

Please tune in to learn from Icertis' journey.

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Pankaj Mishra

Great ecosystems are built on building blocks that are diverse and bring different communities and ideologies together. Homogenous building blocks create commoditised environments with absolutely short-lived differentiation and a common race to the bottom.

India's SaaS ecosystem brings enough diversity in terms of business models and products, even ideologies, to keep storytellers like me excited and interested in people who make it.

Rushabh Mehta, this week's guest on the SaaSBOOMi podcast, underscores the diversity in India SaaS as I mentioned above. In a world focused on B2BSaaS products joining the battle of the proprietary platforms, ERPNext, offers one of the world's only open source ERP.

It's a path not many have taken because it's not financially rewarding and bootstrapping isn't a choice--there's no other way.

Rushabh and his company Frappe Technologies have some amazing insights about building a company based on the First Principles.

Listen to this podcast to learn from ERPNext and Rushabh's journey how to build a community and not just a company. And doing all that based on the First Principles that include no sales targets or incentives, and a truly non-hierarchical organization.

The following blogs make for deep, additional read on what makes Frappe an amazing culture that's #BuiltToLast

A 40 Person Company That Runs Without Spreadsheets

Performance and Compensation

Towards Collective Decision Making: From a team without managers to a team with collective leadership

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Wingify founders on a decade of bootstrapping, surviving profitably and staying together

Pankaj Mishra

What makes a company great?

What does it take to build companies that outlive "startup valleys of death"?

In this episode of SaaSBOOMi podcast, Paras Chopra and Sparsh Gupta share candid lessons on not just survival but building a culture that lasts, profitably. 

"We've been lucky to share a substantial part of our value system, together. There are fundamental values that we both agree together, and that helps us have a lot of disagreements. But because we share the value system, we know whatever disagreements we're having are towards the same end goal," Paras says in this podcast. 

"I actively look forward to Sparsh's disagreement rather than just agreement, to ensure that I am not stuck in some cognitive bias in my own ego."

"In the last ten years, I and paras have had disagreements when we entered into a room, but every single time when we went out of the room, we both believed that our individual ideas got groomed, became better," Sparsh adds in this podcast.

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A lot of spotlight continues to be on India SaaS companies such as Zoho and Freshworks, and rightfully so.

But that’s not what’s shaping the future of India’s multi-billion SaaS industry alone.

It’s the startups such as Atlan, and its young founders like Prukalpa Sankar who are creating the building blocks of a massive industry, learning from the playbooks of their larger peers, and applying their own lessons from the journey.

Tune in to this podcast to learn how Prakulpa and her founding team applied lessons from their earlier startup in building Atlan, their journey from $0 to $1 million, and so on.

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Suresh Sambandam, the CEO and founder of Kissflow, is a quintessential entrepreneur. And that's not just because he can hustle his way out of any crisis, but more because of the way he applies all his learnings egolessly in moving his startup forward.

Suresh talks about "the HP Way" he discovered while working at Hewlett Packard early in his career, and the way the company puts trust in its people.

"Trust isn't just about honesty or competency. It's a two-sided coin; you need to have competence and character. You won't trust anyone who doesn't have competency. You can't trust a doctor who is not a good doctor. "

In this podcast conversation, Suresh also opens up about two of the toughest challenges he faced in his career--the 2008 financial crisis, and losing his cofounder during 2013, which triggered a deep introspection and challenged his beliefs, moulded him forward.

Suresh recommends several books, including "the Fifth Discipline", which is about building a learning organisation.

Please tune in to this episode of the SaaSBOOMi podcast to learn how Suresh is applying best practices from across the world in building a learning organisation that survives the test of crises.

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In our maiden episode of the SaaSBOOMi podcast, we bring you a deep conversation with Manav Garg, the founder of Eka. 

“What we are facing today is unprecedented. The degree of unexpectedness is massive. Now, it’s no more about a business--it’s about human lives, human existence and the human way of life going forward,” Manav tells me in this podcast. 

“I would advise taking care of physical and mental health as top of the agenda. Second is to ensure that your employees aren’t stressed because they help us build long term companies. And the third thing is to keep a tab on the cash flow on a daily basis.

”Earlier this month, Manav also asked India’s SaaS ecosystem to “Brace for impact, huddle and let’s build great Global SaaS companies, together.” Please do read the blog to understand how Manav and other leaders in India’s SaaS ecosystem are preparing to navigate the pandemic as a community. 

“If you show your vulnerabilities, other people also talk about their problems. And then you find out, everybody is in the same boat with some degrees of differences. If you know everyone is in the same boat, it will make you feel better.”

So how will this pandemic affect India’s SaaS industry?“

I think SaaS waves will accelerate going forward, of course not in the industries that are deeply impacted. After every crisis, the automation increases because you want to have self-reliant systems and lower your costs,” he says. 

“The question you should ask is--is your business relevant anymore? If you are in an industry, which is not going to come back (for a long time) such as travel, then there’s no point wasting your time,” Manav says. “There’s going to be a shift from mad growth at all costs, to sustainable and profitable growth. Sustainability and longevity of the company will have a far greater role to play than anything else,” Manav adds.