Practical Founders Podcast #149: How Partner-Led Sales Built A $7M Bootstrap SaaS Business - Sameer Narkar
Sameer Narkar is the founder and CEO of Konnect Insights, a global SaaS company based in Mumbai that provides an omnichannel customer experience platform to consumer brands in 100 countries. Sameer created Konnect Insights in 2015 to help customer service teams respond to customers who mention their brands on social media.
The product and company have expanded from a slow start working through marketing agencies in India to now distributing through ISV partners in all major global regions. The Konnect Insights product includes social listening, ticketing, reputation monitoring, and social media analytics. They have grown to 140 employees, hundreds of customers, and $7 million ARR--without any outside funding.
In this episode, Sameer talks about:
- Selling through agency and ISV partners to grow efficiently
- Competing with large, well-funded software companies
- How he thinks about how AI can help them compete
- Why he hasn’t sold the company or raised outside funding
Quote from Sameer Narkar, founder and CEO of Konnect Insights
“When you start a software company, you have all odds against you. You don't have enough money. There's no reason why customers would trust you against the established products. There is a 99% chance that you'll fail.
“But if you're really passionate about what you're building, then don't look too far ahead. Try to achieve your smaller goals or get from zero to one. So just build something and get some early customers. We figured out a way for agencies to be interested in selling our solution to bring it to market.
“Then meet directly with your end customers. It's very easy for tech founders to sit in the office and build a product the way they think. That doesn’t work. Many founders think that if they take a half-baked product, they won't get another chance. But that's not the case. You need to build relationships to help you improve and grow..”
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