SaaSBOOMi

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 Role3:40 - Ramesh's Journey: Freshworks to Google5:33 - Highperformer.ai: A Strategic Odyssey8:49 - Startup Success: Unlocking TAM13:11 - Growth Hacking with Free Tools21:07 - Scaling Up: From SMB to Worldwide23:58 - Lead Quality: Marketing vs. Sales Dynamics28:10 - The Lead Conversion Debate29:51 - The Inbound Marketing Roadmap: Strategic Insights32:06 - Advanced Tactics in Lead Generation40:39 - GenAI: Transforming Marketing Workflows43:55 - SEO Evolution: The AI Content ImpactKey Mentions:ChatGPTFreshworksGoogleAdWordsLinkedInSalesforceSora.ai

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 

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 thoughtsKey Mentions01:37 -  Numberz01:40 - ChargeBee03:18 - Intuit03:47 - QuickBooks10:36 - KissFlow12:52 - Facebook19:10 - BYJU'S21:50 - Tally32:01 - Box32:03 - Dropbox41:43 - Freshworks

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 ABM21:06 - 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 - FacebookHappy watching and listening!

“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 Takeaways02:25 – Forming strong teams04:50 – Indispensable players in a marketing team05:10 – iMocha's team structure05:45 – The dichotomy of inbound and content teams08:25 – From SMB to Enterprise11:40 – Your demand generation engine13:19 – Do you have a channel problem or a marketing problem?16:12 – Enterprise marketing tenets18:12 – iMocha's training protocols22:27 – Setting OKRs for your team30:52 – How deep is your sale?33:40 – Positioning yourself in events43:11 – Making an impression on your customer46:29 – Rapid Fire!Key MentionsiMocha - 05:09FreshWorks - 08:15 HubSpot - 27:11MS Excel - 27:14Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount - 51:08

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 10104:20 - The Revenue Partners08:04 - The Technology Partners09:58 - Owning the partner channels15:00 - A small start-up's cheat sheet for partner acquisition20:40 - Vetting a partner's account books 22:19 - SuperOps's journey with partner channels23:20 - Feeding the partner engine27:30 - Common mistakes to avoid32:25 - On the importance of PRM 33:57 - Taking MDF more seriously35:33 - A shifting market - On-prem to SaaS44:05 - Anand's message to founders Key Mentions00:38 - Salesforce00:40 - Akamai00:42, 38:41 - FreshWorks00:47 - CleverTap01:00 - Growthloop.ai06:49 - TCS, Accenture, HCL08:41 - Line Messenger08:48 - KakaoTalk09:20 - Amazon, Google, Microsoft22:20 - SuperOps22:43 - Connectwise22:43 - Kaseya

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 intro01:50 - Multiplier's value prop and its benefits16:15 - Sagar's story behind starting Multiplier and why it's a SaaS business21:14 - Sagar's vision for making payroll an employee-driven phenomenon26:02 - How Multiplier deals with legalities and potential challenges in their business model36:48 - Importance of having a strong product background for Platform dev39:27 - How AI influences Sagar's business46:10 - Role of governments in employment and the gig economy's effect on social contributions53:15 - Sagar's go-to-market strategy and their sales cycle for inbound and outbound leads56:09 - Sagar's thoughts on "The Ride of a Lifetime" by Bob Iger57:10 - What Sagar envisions for the future of Multiplier and his dream of running a public companyKey MentionsAmazon: 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.

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 Takeaways5:13 - CallHippo business model7:10 - Inception of CallHippo, founder story and current revenues11:18 - Global customer segments12:44 - Impact of inbound marketing, how to manage your budget for Inbound Marketing15:05 - SEO strategy19:15 - Exercising patience to see SEO results21:57 - Optimizing for humans not Google26:20 - Traffic to sign up rate32:23 -  Tactical hacks for increasing sign up conversion and churn rates34:59 - Marketing to Sales funnel - Handling different ticket size customer segments41:48 - Hiring strategy in a Tier 2 city45:24 - Pros and Cons of operating out of a Tier 2 city50:33 - Spouses to Co-Founders 53:52 - Developing the culture at CallHippo1:01:32 - Vision for CallHippoKey Mentions3:36 Software Suggest3:43 CallHippo3:57 Exotel8:08 Avinash Raghava8:30 Girish Mathrubootham10:55 Ozonetel18:09 RingCentral21:05 Google32:05 Mail Chimp35:48 HubSpot 

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 Takeaways3:40 - Decoy pricing plan6:05 - What's the ideal number of price plans?8:30 - Open Vs Hidden pricing14:00 - Contact us to know the pricing 16:56 - Knowing your target audience while selling21:40 - Naming the Price Plans26:10 - Deciding on the value metric 28:05 - Land and expand strategy29:55 - 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 NRR52:00 - Top 3 ways to increase NRR56:15 - Importance of revenue recognition 59:15 - Varun and Arvind's Pricing pet peevesKey mentionsAppleSuperOpsGirish MZohoFreshDeskPipeCandyWingmanIntercomSpot InstancesSpot.ioChargeBeeManage EngineHubspotIKEASequoiaFor Entrepreneurs

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/Timestamps2:37 - MSP - Managed Service Provider3:10 - Silent price hikes in the industry5:33 - 4 levers of business7:32 - Effective communication over Grandfathering10:02 - Pricing game on point11:09 - HubSpot-on pricing14:03 - Unpredictable pricing design16:17 - Don't reinvent the pricing wheel that works20:28 - Questions to ask before designing the pricing model21:41 - Who's doing the heavy lifting?22:32 - Top 3 challenges faced by Indian Saas companies24:54 - Perceived value of your product28:55 - Are you selling based on the features of your product?32:52 - Playing to the persona36:45 - Common pricing mistakes in the Indian ecosystemKey Mentions3:30 - Ninjaone7:37 - Netflix11:44 - Intercom12:04 - Hubspot12:11 - Salesforce12:13 - Pipedrive17:10 - Girish Mathrubootham 38:02 - Pipecandy38:19 - Wingman

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 M2P6:50 - Tatkal: Inventing on-tap money8:21 - M2P customer base11:18 - How does M2P charge its customers12:30 - Story behind the name M2P14:30 - Bringing the founders together20:30 - Do too many cooks spoil the broth?27:30 - Role playing between Founders29:28 - M2Ps Multi-city presence30:24 - Numbers Pre and Post Covid 34:44 - Funding, Acquisitions & Expansion40:53 - Acquisitions left, right and center43:11 - Carving a niche with no competition 44:56 - Cultural integration of multiple companies into M2P54:40 - Building a company for the next 100 yearsKey Mentions4:35 - IIFL Finance4:38 - DCB Bank9:23 - Slice  16:25 - Madhusudanan16:39 - Muthukumar16:43 - Visa  36:33 - Paytm  38:44 - Amrish Rau38:45 - Kunal Shah39:01 - 39:05             Tiger Global              Insight Partners              Mitsubishi UFJ Group of Japan  41:11 - FinFlux47:33 - Sujay Vasudevan

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 & ExtraaEdge2:59 CAGR Banter4:03 Marketing Org Chart7:17 Desi Perception of Marketing & Sales8:41 Coupling the effects of SGx and Covid10:18 Lessons learnt in SGx put to practice11:43 SGx - Growth Vipassana for entrepreneurs 12:44 Who reports to Marketing?19:58 Founder Branding21:20 Channeling one's Yoda-mindset22:49 Being the face of the brand26:55 ExtraaEdge's transformation Pre and Post SGx30:41 Apple's DRI concept 31:56 Transformation from Outbound Hustle to Inbound Marathon36:28 First International client through ABM41:57 Maximizing MarTech through ExtraaEdge Certification Academy48:46 Being synonymous with your industry49:47 Stacking Marketing Dominoes across the prospects journey52:10 The push and pull of Marketing & Sales53:39 Founder being a student of Marketing & ConclusionKey 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 Apple30:18 Steve Jobs  36:52 Ankit Oberoi & Ad Pushup  37:20 Bits Pilani Dubai39:35 Nikhil Sutar  43:46 Career Guide 48:01 Robert Cialdini  48:47 Almabase  Happy watching! 

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 Takeaways1:18 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 Mentions15:20 Suraj Sapra - Co-founder, NoPaperForms21:21 SRM University, Vellore Institute of Technology30:52 Apple31:07 Volvo, Tesla31:15 Mercedes, BMW32:47 Leadsquared32:55 Extraaedge33:40 Girish M - Founder & CEO, Freshworks40:03 Ashish Tulsian - Co-founder & CEO, Posist

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.Key take aways2:14 - A creative way of solving high college tuition fees5:15 - Building blocks of a strong marketing structure10:55 - How can sales empower marketing?14:11 - Thought leadership marketing and category creation17:27 - Getting the first US customers18:34 - Cold emailing and customer development hack21:30 - Going all out to understand your Customers25:10 - Why now is a good time to sell to US?27:20 - Customer agony to features28:47 - The Power of a rock-solid CRM30:38 - How CRM is set up differently for better?33:30 - The CRM mantra that helped us37:01 - 5x scale from ABM compared to Outbound38:25 - The Win-Win-Win Strategy39:44 - Partnering with a billion dollar company as a startup44:31 - Disengagement of Alumni48:12 - Starting up in 2023: What will you do differently?49:33 - Kalyan's biggest pet peeveHappy listening!

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 product04:09 - From London to Kovai (Coimbatore)04:52 - I see. I solve. I sell.07:04 - Leaving Microsoft for a red carpet welcome at Accenture16.56 - Building an audience before the product19:23 -Nuances of  pricing a SaaS product24:56 - The two ingredients that helped couture the enterprise market (blog and events)29:03 - Tracing the growth journey from $100k to $8 Million34:42 -Giving a Microsoft guy a deal he could not refuse36:06 - A Founder's Mindset ingrained since childhood41:47 - Coping with the challenges of a multi-product strategy47:34 - The biggest cost in building a software company49:19 - Acquisitions to fuel business growth52:46 - Building leadership talent from past network58:45 - The Culture DNA of Kovai.co1:02:03 - Kovai.co - The story behind the name1:02:34 -  Kovai Connect - A program to nurture young talent01:03:08 - The next 5-10 years for KovaiKey mentions16:42 - Sarvana Kumar wins recognition for exceptional community leadership - The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Walking buddy becomes the new COO for Kovai.co - SaaS firm Kovai.co appoints Andrew Cloke as new COO1:07:10 Saravana Kumar featured on the cover of the Latka SaaS magazineMicrosoftIIT Madras Stanford University AccentureNational Health Service Fidelity International Biztalk360Serverless360 Andrew Cloke

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 Now3:46 - The challenges that businesses face today4:35 - Optimizing costs for lead-gen7:56 - Worthy SaaS examples9:15 - Lessons learnt from experiments13:45 - Winning the confidence of enterprise customers19:19 - The Experience Roadshow26:34 - How to measure the RoI of non-standard events28:03 - Indicators of Product Market Fit and Business Market Fit33:05 - Founders should become students of sales34:35 - Indian SaaS advantage39:41 - Rapid fireResources mentioned2:34 - How Wiz reached $100M ARR in 18 months? Techcrunch8:02 - Rocketlane's Community Building | The CMO Journal29:55 - Girish Mathrubootam's first blog announcing Freshdesk as a startup in October 2010 while Freshdesk was publicly launched in June 20114 interesting campaigns discussed throughout the podcastThe van that traveled to 11 destinations | Freshworks Experience Roadshow | 2019Going on air to create virality - #Failsforce campaignReports instill confidence in buyers - Freshdesk | Forrester TEI ReportRocketlane's rap song announcing fundraisingKey mentions8:00 - Srikrishnan Ganesan of RocketLane        2. 33:00 - Rishi Kulkarni and Sameer Goel  of  Revv

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 takeaways1:35 - What is LogiNext2:45 - Dhruvil's Background9:30 - How consulting experience helped in SaaS? 13:38 - Advantages of coming from a business family21:27 - Raising funds as a new entrepreneur23:20 - 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 months42:32 - GTM Plan and Ideal ICPs46:28 - Acquisition Model47:06 - Marketing and Sales Spend49:07 - Becoming an investor52:29 - SaaS Founders that Dhruvil looks up to53:48 - 3 exciting startup investments Dhruvil has made54:09 - Thoughts on work-life balance55:23 - Advice for upcoming SaaS Entrepreneurs Key mentions Microsoft VentureReliance GenNextIndian Angel NetworkVijay Shekhar Sharma : Twitter | LinkedInSanjay Mehta : Twitter | LinkedInHappy Listening!  

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 natively11:32 - 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 1624:37 - Learning by doing 26:55 - Early days of customer acquisition 31:23 - Data comes before Analytics33:33 - Dealing with variations in data types for various clients38:39 - Learnings of a third time entrepreneur 47:48 - Defining the ideal customer50:57 - People hate outbound calls. How to crack this problem? 55:01 - Dealing with international markets57:19 - Acquisitions 1:08:15 - Organizational Structure1:25:30 - ABM at CleverTap1:35:55 - CultureHappy listening!

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 intro5:33 Marketing org structure and evolution10:32 Hacking SEO with 200 web pages15:22 Inflection point in restaurant tech17:21 The secret to hiring content writers18:57 Marketing to a diverse customer persona20:01 Cracking distribution when the persona is fuzzy21:02 Content marketing - growing ‘Restaurant Times' to 3.5M views per year21:52 Benefits of avoiding clickbait-y blog titles25:27 Evolution targeting SMB to Enterprise26:35 Best way to go global29:02 Why didn't we raise VC capital?31:32 The unthinkable ABM campaign44:04 The forgotten aspect in marketing and advertising47:21 How Posist have perfected event marketing?1:00:32 The Playbook for B2B conferences1:00:4:38 Rapid fire

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 factors3:22 - Figuring out the valuation 4:32 - Valuation multiples by Private Equity companies7:15 - Valuation multiples during fundraising versus acquisitions10:03 - VC valuation v/s PE valuation12:19 - 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 Wingman24:55 - Funds raised and investors25:31 - Rationale for high pricing, is it a sales barrier?29:18 - ICP of Wingman30:56 - SaaS pricing insights for Indian market31:31 - Change in org structure after acquisition34:45 - Wingman's go-to market model35:50 - Creating proxies of trust - personal branding as a founder36:40 - How to increase average ticket sizes 39:46 - OTE v/s sales quota

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! 

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!

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.ai6:40 - 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 Combinator25:08 - 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! 

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 & Valuation8:55 Directly reaching out to the media v/s working with a PR agency10:20 The Why now & Who cares factors12:51 Right time to start PR17:40 Breaking down PR : Signalling19:50 Trendjacking20:20 How do you consistently get covered in the press?25:17 PR for Organic Lead generation27:30 Levers of PR31:32 How do you measure PR37:55 How to work with PR agencies the best way?42:22 Biggest peeve in PR42:38 Favourite PR agency43:31 Favourite PR hack43:41 Top 3 media information sources44:10 One advice to startup foundersHappy listening! 

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 leaderKey take aways5:51 - Genesis of RFPIO9:57 - Founding team formation11:48 - Deciding who to be the CEO15:57 - Product pricing19:51 - GTM approach22:05 - ICP & Outbound sales23:51 - Funds raised26:46 - Org structure27:36 - Hiring scene in US & India28:08 - Customer funded business33:16 - Getting the first customers, the journey from SMB to Enterprise, price evolution35:42 - No concentration strategy36:52 - GTDDD37:26 - Sales team's influence on other teams37:59 - Sales team compensation structure changes41:14 - Customer advisory board45:26 - Sales and implementation partners47:32 - Culture building52:15 - Inputs to founders on networking and fundraising54:24 - One of the top mistakes doneHappy listening!

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 Automate10:23 - Acquisition opportunity15:23 - Team expectation management during acquisition19:16 - Duration for acquisition and competing offers21:22 - Company structure that smoothened the acquisition24:34 - Acquisition - Culture Compatibility and Adaptation26:36 - Navigating specific cultural differences 29:20 - Transition from role as a CEO post acquisition32:32 - GTM for 1st 100 customers and first 50036:39 - Pricing models39:37 - Do's and Don'ts for acquisitionHappy listening!Happy listening!

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 business16:16 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 Generation32:39 How to optimize for CAC in SEM34:43 Sales team size and structure39:46 Managing churn as OKR software requires new habits and culture change48:04 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 Staff56:55 What's a 'Modern work experience'?57:52 Insights on acquisition by Microsoft1:00:34 M&A Integration risks & cultural fit1:01:41 M&A Negotiation tips1:02:06 Choice between Independence v/s Impact as an entrepreneur1:12:14 Tips on scaling team from 15 to 250+ in 2 yearsTune in for more insights, happy listening!

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 product5:14 TAM exercise6:44 PipeCandy Before & After SaaSBOOMi GrowthX 12:08 How to communicate Trustworthy Authority?14:03 Brand Image, Brand Identity & Positioning14:57 How do we visually communicate trust?17:27 Impact of re-branding17:39 How does pricing & segmentation work?21:17 Key metrics for website23:46 Pricing Evolution24:49 Pricing considering competition26:20 Opportunities to increase your revenue28:28 API pricing33:37 What's the value in the case of software?35:22 Rapid fire38:10 Your biggest marketing challenge?Happy watching!Bonus:Don't miss the Insight Cards hidden inside the episode.

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 ideas13:17 Why they raised funds after 11 years of bootstrapping17:20 The 4 year pattern for entrepreneurs20:22 How to claim premium valuation?22:02 Unconventional approach to  team building & culture29:48 How to do premium pricing in style?41:51 The 3 Dimension Framework for Sales46:08 Finding investors who have an unlimited time frame50:20 Advice to founders in the $500K – $5M rangeTune in for more insights, happy listening!

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 marketingHow to coin brand names and product narratives which leaves your brand memorableHow to pitch your product to customers in a way you never had thought of beforeHow to use business card for content marketingWhy category creation is fascinating and scary at the same timeContext Marketing : A secret sauce that many don't shareBest practices to work with PR agenciesUsing Data & Art for Brilliant Storytelling Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

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 youHow 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 expertsWhat'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 $300-400kTune in, Happy Gaining more Insights!

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.The SaaS behind services like Netflix, Prime and other streaming servicesHow do the metrics differ for vertical & horizontal SaaS?How to serve when the customers ask for SLA of 99.9999% ?How to choose the right market so that you can leverage the market dynamics?Insights on product stickiness and lock-inGlobal consumer behavior on new content consumptionHow do media tech companies operate?Why did they go ahead with a multi cloud strategy?How do they manage good numbers with a 16 member sales team?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!

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 episodeCategory awareness and urgency matrixWhy buy - why buy now - why buy us - matrixSecret sauce of content marketing for enterprise SaaSHow did they get million dollar deals via inbound marketingWinning the whales: Hacks to build credibility and close large dealsBuilding website that speak enterprise SaaS3 content types that your marketing funnel shouldn't omitWebsite design as an edge in enterprise SaaSWinning the whales: Hacks to build credibility and close large dealsCracking million dollar deals with inbound marketingCracking the ICP identification frameworkAcquiring the first 10 enterprise customersTune in for more insights, happy listening!

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!

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

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

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 episodeOrg structureStructuring a global enterprise sales team  - Insights into org structure, traits to look for, compensation structure, targets & metricsWhat'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?MetricsSegment - 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?MarketingHow to think about GTM to get into enterprisesHow to continue building a new category of ‘Digital Adoption Solutions' for 6-7 years before the magic quadrants got introducedWhat're the pros and cons when you create a new category?SalesHow 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?ExpandWhat'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!Start streaming!

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

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. Start streaming!

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. Start streaming!

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!

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

Pankaj MishraKumar 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.

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 MishraSounds 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. 

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 IannoneEntrepreneurial 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. 

Pankaj MishraIt'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.”