Just Go Grind #146: Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, Co-Founder and Partner of Upekkha, a B2B SaaS Accelerator, on Helping Startups Achieve Meaningful Financial Outcomes and Profitable Scalable Growth, Creating a Flywheel, and Navigating COVID
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy is a co-founder and partner at Upekkha, a Value SaaS Accelerator working with B2B SaaS startups to get through the valley of death, to a place with predictable, scalable, profitable growth. Whether you want to build a $10M revenue business or the next $1B SaaS unicorn, Upekkha helps you accelerate.
Prasanna previously worked intensely with 120+ startups to make them LARGE at Microsoft Accelerator India and picked the right startups for Investors & Microsoft. As a founder going through his own ups & downs, he helps other founders push through, and has been an angel investor in a couple of startups along the way.
With every startup, Prasanna helps as a full-stack growth driver: from business planning for growth, frameworks for growth, aligning engineering for traction, innovating on product, marketing & sales plans to tactically crafting pitches & one-liners, & reviewing ads. Growing startups is everything he looks to do. In his own startups, he has done everything that needed to get done - development, testing, support, product management, sales, marketing, customer interaction, integration. Prasanna knows a little about a lot of things - technical and non-technical, and knows a lot about a few things - technology, growth, product, and the difficulties of starting up.
Connect with Prasanna Krishnamoorthy
Some of the Topics Covered by Prasanna Krishnamoorthy in this Episode
- How Prasanna was inspired to become an entrepreneur and work in B2B
- The early ventures Prasanna worked on
- Working for Amazon and the Microsoft Accelerator
- How Prasanna founded Upekkha
- The original business model for Upekkha
- Developing a brand and getting their first cohort of startups
- The original 2-year structure of the program
- The theory of constraints and the guidance Upekkha gives their startups
- How the program has changed to focus on the initial flywheel construction and building scalable growth
- The cognitive biases of founders and some inflection points for startups
- What Prasanna has learned about the B2B SaaS industry while building and growing Upekkha
- Prasanna's advice for customer acquisition
- The importance of referrals
- Determining pricing
- Upekkha's team
- Prasanna's role at Upekkha and how it's changing during COVID
- How Upekkha's participating startups rallied together to help each other during COVID
- Prasanna's vision for Uppekha's growth
Links from the Episode