SaaSBoomi

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