SaaSBoomi

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! 👇 SaaSBOOMi BTS Podcast brings insights into what goes on Behind The Scenes in the making of some of the successful marketing campaigns, and shine the light on how marketing is done, what works, and what doesn’t, and let the audience learn from the experience of the country’s best marketers ⭕ Episode 8: Customer Marketing : A New Frontier in SaaS Marketing ⭕ Guest: Yasasree Nerayanuri (VP Customer Marketing, Sprinklr) ⭕ Hosts: Arvind Parthiban (Co-founder & CEO, SuperOps.ai) & Varun Shoor (Founder & Ex-CEO, Kayako) Also available to be streamed on: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3S3vX9U Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3zzmwI1 Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/btse8-go 🔔 Get notified when new episodes drop: https://bit.ly/sbpodsubscribe #customermarketing #customersuccess #community #SaaS 2:00 Genesis of customer marketing function 5:00 Scaling beyond $10M ARR 6:14 Marketing org structure evolution at Freshworks 8:48 How to measure and attribute NRR? 12:52 Org structure at Sprinklr v/s Freshworks 15:17 Making the best RoI from networking dinner events 16:41 Difference between community marketing and customer marketing 23:12 KPI for customer marketing 26:41 Customer communities 30:58 Playbook to get ~500 event registrations in a month 32:56 Customer success and customer marketing in action 34:42 Overlaps in customer marketing & product marketing 37:37 Optimizing customer communication at scale 39:35 The need for brand voice 41:23 Overlap between customer marketing and brand marketing 41:43 Customer marketing for single product v/s multi product company 45:12 Microevents marketing 47:40 Customer marketing components 49:51 Pillars of Customer marketing 51:29 How to engage with your advocates 53:22 How do you know a customer is a champion? 55:07 CRM is not a tool, it's a discipline 58:07 Advice to someone starting in customer marketing 58:58 One quality to look in hiring in customer marketing Happy watching!

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!

💡 Learn what it takes to stand out in Content Marketing in this age of information overload from someone who has gone from 0 to 1 on Content Marketing. Tune in our latest #BTSpodcast episode 👇 ⭕ Episode 6: The Ins and Outs of Content Marketing ⭕ Guest: Akshatha Kamath (Head of Content Marketing, MoEngage) ⭕ Hosts: Arvind Parthiban (Co-founder & CEO, SuperOps.ai) & Varun Shoor (Founder & Ex-CEO, Kayako) Also available to be streamed on: https://spoti.fi/3LLJAaC https://apple.co/36uzNWl https://bit.ly/sbpodgoogle 🔔 Get notified when new episodes drop: https://bit.ly/sbpodsubscribe #contentmarketing #media #marketing #SaaS Key take aways: 4:04 The Evolution of the Org Chart 6:32 Content Creation Mix 8:46 Org Chart - Content Team 10:53 Customer content & Vertical content 12:51 OKRs and KPIs for Marketing Org 13:54 Content Metrics 16:10 Overall Marketing Team Structure 24:34 Content Cadence 26:05 Practice of Listening to Sales 30:39 Earned Media by World Economic Forum, NewYork Times, and Forbes 37:36 Thought Leadership Content Team 38:49 Thought Leadership Pillars 39:25 Data Stories 43:40 Magic of combining Product Marketing + Content Marketing 46:24 Standing out as a startup in the world of information overload 54:11 Your One Marketing Challenge 54:45 Rapid Fire

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!

Ashwin Ramasamy from PipeCandy shares insightful tips on transforming a single to a multi-product SaaS company, pricing strategies, website metrics, API pricing, and the impact of re-branding. Learn about marketing org chart, push vs pull-driven product, building trust, and increasing revenue opportunities in this engaging podcast.

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!