The Neon Show From Scratch to Success: Whatfix Founders Khadim Batti & Vara Kumar Namburu Share Struggles and Insights on building a Multi-Million Dollar SaaS Company
Whatfix has a user base of over 10 million people and has been used to create over 1.5 million digital walkthroughs and tutorials. It has 500+ enterprise customers worldwide, including companies like HP, Schneider Electric, and Autodesk. Since its launch in 2014, Whatfix has become a go-to solution for businesses across multiple industries.
The platform has also received the "Best SaaS Product for Web/App Development" at the 2021 SaaS Awards.
In this episode, we have Whatfix founders Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar Namburu share the journey of Whatfix from their first offline Dreamforce event to reaching 10 Million people, their vision, clients, scale, culture and more.
Notes -
00:00 - Highlights of the conversation
02:06 - What’s Whatfix and how it’s unique
04:07 - Strategy of CTO moving to the US and CEO being in India
06:31 - Bringing Vispi Daver as an Angel Investor
10:18 - Avoid falling into the trap of following someone else’s playbook as a first-time founder
14:13 - Getting the first few Enterprise customers
15:57 - Taking Counter-intuitive bets
19:40 - Their first big event Dreamforce
25:02 - Going one step back, would they do a 10-15 member round table for their most interested CIOs post Dreamforce event?
26:49 - Focusing on farming with Account Managers
31:36 - Advice to SaaS founder: When to focus on Brand?
34:10 - Brand-building after their first Dreamforce
36:45 - Their initial Ideal customer profile
37:58 - Challenges & Hurdles in their 1 to 10 journey
39:23 - Examples where the deal got stuck at IT Security or CFO-level
43:55 - Enabling multiple stakeholders in a sales decision
46:30 - Traditional profile of a sales person
47:24 - Hiring profile of their initial senior sales team
49:28 - How to deal with people’s Title expectation?
54:23 - Building their culture early-on
56:28 - Mistakes in their early journey
58:06 - Guiding the early team in current journey
1:00:05 - Time & efforts in recent rounds of fundings
1:04:27 - Raising from Stellaris Venture Partners
1:05:32 - Changing path amongst the founders
1:06:59 - Account plan review with customers
1:08:50 - Having set accounts with every leader to help the customers succeed