SaaSBoomi

Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan is an Author, TED speaker, marketer and a SaaS entrepreneur.After his stint in advertising, Lux joined Sekhar Vembu as a co-founder at Vembu Technologies, leading sales and marketing and thinking of ways to market ‘a data backup software company’ in a cool way.  They went on to create probably the first rap song on SaaS, by the name Cloud, Cloud Baby. Lux later went on to start ‘Eyes and Feet’ – ‘From online eyeballs to offline footfalls’, a social media analytics firm with Joseph Varghese and Kumar Krishnasami, which then got rebranded as Unmetric,  a social media benchmarking company for brands – ‘It will tell you right now, what five people need five days to do’. Unmetric provides competitive intelligence, based on the 150k brands which they index. Unmetric ended up creating the category of Social Analytics in the otherwise crowded space of  Social Publishing and Social Listening tools. They eventually got acquired by Falcon.io.In his words ‘From the beginning of October, to the end of October, we moved from being an independent company to having a parent, grandparents, and great-grandparents in one stroke’Tune in to this episode to learn the Journey of Unmetric from a Bedroom in Chennai to Boardroom in Copenhagen.Here are other key takeaways from this episode.Cognitive dissonance and marketingHow to coin brand names and product narratives which leaves your brand memorableHow to pitch your product to customers in a way you never had thought of beforeHow to use business card for content marketingWhy category creation is fascinating and scary at the same timeContext Marketing : A secret sauce that many don’t shareBest practices to work with PR agenciesUsing Data & Art for Brilliant Storytelling Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

You finish your exit, you get financial security, you hang up the boots and go on a vacation. With each company you’re on a treadmill, no - you’re on a conveyor belt, for another 7-10 years. What if you have already exited two businesses, will you do it again?If you have to do it again, what’ll be the motivation behind it?From being a pioneer in the ‘on-prem to cloud journey’ with his first startup Host Analytics, and a category creator of Customer Success Platform with Gainsight, Sreedhar is now on to a category disruption play in his 3rd start up GTM Buddy.Gainsight was the world's very first company to have launched as a customer success platform, when customer success as a function didn’t exist.  Why did they proceed building it when there was no buyer in place? Today as you know even a 10 member startup will have someone looking after customer success. That was not the case when they started. Gain more insights on category creation, category disruption, a serial entrepreneur’s perspective on building a world class team of experts and how to look at industries for insights that you may otherwise miss and more wisdom in this episode.Here’s more on what’s in store for youHow much investment is required if you're venturing into category creation?How to build a 100M ARR company, Gainsight style?How to sell to the leading SaaS businesses in the world, predominantly in the Bay area.Scaling too fast, too soon can be counterproductive, why?How do you decide on the right pricing, that you don’t sell at $4k price point to a customer when they could actually be paying a few $100k conservatively?3 years into building the business, their ARR is under a million -  What’re the 2 factors which kept them going?Insights on product led category creation. Which are good examples of companies which have done cost-effective product led category creation?How to go about investing in a world class team of expertsWhat’re the nuances to look for when you build a sales team who can sell $1M+ compared to selling $100k+How to analyze an industry  - from a serial entrepreneur's perspective?Imagine your product pricing is $19 per user presently, when you launched it years back it was $3. How will you migrate the old customers to the higher price band?Early stage ACV movement from $12k price point to now $300-400kTune in, Happy Gaining more Insights!

If you’d like to start a streaming TV channel, how will you go about it?Amagi has a suite of solutions for you to get started and scale a TV channel. There are only a few companies that build products to help media houses, global OTT players. Amagi Media Labs is a global leader pioneering cloud solutions for the media & entertainment industry, providing end-to-end cloud managed live & on demand video infrastructure for TV & OTT. In a decade old journey of ups & downs, Baskar Subramanian (Co-founder & CEO, Amagi) has built some of the most disruptive tech solutions. Here’s more on what you can learn from this episode.The SaaS behind services like Netflix, Prime and other streaming servicesHow do the metrics differ for vertical & horizontal SaaS?How to serve when the customers ask for SLA of 99.9999% ?How to choose the right market so that you can leverage the market dynamics?Insights on product stickiness and lock-inGlobal consumer behavior on new content consumptionHow do media tech companies operate?Why did they go ahead with a multi cloud strategy?How do they manage good numbers with a 16 member sales team?Bonus: Learn more about the heavy tech involving satellites and software that went into building location specific advertising solutions in India.Tune in to the full episode, Happy learning!

When you’re in enterprise SaaS and your target customers are not mainly online, how will you go about setting up an inbound marketing engine?Facilio operates in a multibillion dollar facility management industry & has operations across continents, serving customers from small real estate groups to conglomerates. Its solutions are flexible & modular to improve margins across real estate verticals. The role of marketing in enterprise SaaS is very underrated. It requires a lot of understanding of the market dynamics, identifying key players, getting the messaging right & communicating the value proposition of the product. Since, sales muscle is often used as a GTM strategy, subtle marketing can add a lot of value & complement it with a soft push. Tune in to BTS podcast E4 with Nivedha Sridhar (Director - Marketing, Facilio) who also had joined them as their founding marketing team member.Here’s more takeaways from the episodeCategory awareness and urgency matrixWhy buy - why buy now - why buy us - matrixSecret sauce of content marketing for enterprise SaaSHow did they get million dollar deals via inbound marketingWinning the whales: Hacks to build credibility and close large dealsBuilding website that speak enterprise SaaS3 content types that your marketing funnel shouldn't omitWebsite design as an edge in enterprise SaaSWinning the whales: Hacks to build credibility and close large dealsCracking million dollar deals with inbound marketingCracking the ICP identification frameworkAcquiring the first 10 enterprise customersTune in for more insights, happy listening!

5 minute or 10 minute grocery deliveries?Wait, let’s hear about the magic that happens behind all types of deliveries – be it a pizza delivery in < 30 minutes or bikes and cars delivered at your home.Delivery service companies have been spending millions of dollars every single year to serve their customers better & make the last mile delivery as quick as possible. Thanks to the explosion of e-commerce, grocery deliveries around the world, routing solutions have emerged as a huge white space in the logistics industry.FarEye has emerged as a leader in this category, leveraging on top-notch domain expertise in delivery & logistics with a highly configurable product. Their no code/low code enterprise SaaS product has capabilities which allow platforms to integrate with their upstream & downstream logistics system & get better predictability. They even provide the ability to add returns to delivery routes in real-time. In this episode explore with Kushal Nahata – CEO & Co-founder of FarEye as Suresh unravels their journey of creating a world-class enterprise SaaS product to reimagine the logistics industry. Here’s more on what you can learn from this episode.Your customers are getting out of business, shutting down or not having capital to pay. You have 20% enterprise customers and 80% SME customers. You’re losing 80% of your customers and you’ve recently raised a Series A, things are a little tricky. How’ll you navigate this?How do you split US regions and how do you allocate accounts to AEs, how much is AE’s quota,  what’re typical OTEs?When each of your accounts is $1mn+, how do you structure your sales org? Should it be marketing driven or sales driven?How do you work with an NGO-like organization to hire a good BD?How to get a customer without a product?How to close a sale without a full fledged pilot?How to tailor your pitch in order to achieve a shorter sales cycle?How’s the enterprise software purchase process if there’s no Gartner quadrant available?How to hire and how much to pay senior enterprise sales executives? How to set up a hiring & evaluation process for them? How to identify candidates with a startup mindset?How to measure the learnability index?Why would somebody leave an established supply chain and logistics brand and join a startup?Is it effective to hire sales consultants or freelancers?What’s the closure ratio of the pipeline, what’s the ratio of pipeline coming from marketing, BDR and sales team?Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

Dive into the crowded landscape of HR technologies, where innovation meets competition. Discover how Darwinbox is challenging legacy systems and why Southeast Asia is a promising market for growth. Learn about the unique go-to-market strategies that enhance efficiency and deal closing times. Explore how local adaptability allows agile companies to outsmart industry giants. Finally, hear how a title-free leadership structure in startups fosters collaboration and drives success.

Raghu's yellow.ai is a story of beginner's mindset and breaking the mould continually. He has been to chip design and semiconductors not into software domain for 15, 16 years and haven't heard of the word CX till 2016. Learn more on how Yellow is creating a leading international brand in the intersection of messaging, CX and AI. Here are the other key take aways from this episode. -Find out how they came up with the name Yellow despite its SEO implications? -How they got enterprise customers when they were a 4 member team -What does the marketing org chart look like today considering teams in India, SEA, NA, LATAM? -Nuances in positioning and messaging for each of the markets, how they're different for emerging markets and western markets -How the organizational structure in a company is never fixed but fluid? -What're the two sides to product marketing? -In SaaS marketing org, who should PMM report to - CPO or CMO? -How to stand out in a commoditized market and build trust? -What's the paradigm shift in new age CRM? -How Microsoft accelerator helped in getting more enterprise customers? -Are Indian enterprises laggards or innovators in terms of software adoption? -What're the aspects to keep in mind while changing your positioning? What're its impacts? -The step by step process of getting into Gartner Magic Quadrant and the team structure

Did you know that large enterprises are using 900+ software applications, and spending $100M+ on it?As per Gartner, $600bn dollars worth of enterprise software spend is going to be this year.Companies won't see an RoI if employees are not utilizing these software efficiently. This is where Whatfix comes into picture, creating a layer of adoption on top of these software products, helping employees to adopt these software.Whatfix serves 500+ customers worldwide, with 100 of top 1000 companies using Whatfix. They have a team strength of ~600 employees with $140 mn funds raised.   In this episode Suresh deep dives with Khadim into the Land and Expand strategy which is unique to Whatfix.  Learn more about how to build a new category, what the trigger at each stage for the company was to move from SMB to Midmarket to Enterprise, how org structure and approaches changes for these segments, how to address churn rate, on metrics , numbers and more numbers.  It’s insightful to listen to how you can get creative on pricing when you have multiple variables - customer segments, number of users, number of applications, frequency of usage, departments and more. It also covers some of the mistakes made in Land & Expand, which other founders can probably learn from.Here’s more what you can learn from this episodeOrg structureStructuring a global enterprise sales team  - Insights into org structure, traits to look for, compensation structure, targets & metricsWhat’s the typical BDR to SDR ratio?How does the role for Account Managers and BDRs differ?Is it better to attach SDRs to the demand gen team or to the regional sales team? What’re the pros and cons?How’s hunting, landing, mining and expanding linked?What’re the characteristics, mindset and experience to look for when hiring for SDRs, AEs, CS and expansion teams?MetricsSegment - Geography - Conversion’ framework - How to look at the conversion metrics for inbound & outbound sales team?What’re the metrics to be tracked for SDRs, AEs, BDRs‘How much is the land to conversion ratio, the expansion conversion ratio?MarketingHow to think about GTM to get into enterprisesHow to continue building a new category of ‘Digital Adoption Solutions’ for 6-7 years before the magic quadrants got introducedWhat’re the pros and cons when you create a new category?SalesHow do you sell to enterprises early on?How will procurement happen in large enterprises? If they have to remove a legacy CRM how will they go about it?ExpandWhat’s the average duration it takes from landing at say $50k ACV and to expand to $500k?Growth from $50k to $200k ACV takes time. $200k to $500k it’s faster, and $500k to $1M, it’s even faster - Why?What % of revenues come from expansion versus new logos and how they affect LTV?Hope this will be exciting for you!Start streaming!

Welcome to the second episode of BTS Podcast - Experiments-led Business Building In this episode we have Laxman Papineni - CEO & Co-founder, Outplay joining as guest. SaaSBOOMi BTS podcast is hosted by Arvind Parthiban (Co-founder & CEO, SuperOps.ai) and Varun Shoor (Founder, Kayako). Here's what you'll learn from this episode. - What's the secret ingredient to making half a million dollars with a Gmail, spreadsheet and a network of bloggers? - How to growth-hack side hustles into full blown businesses? - Secrets of building trust and relationships - How do you decide to let go of fantastic revenue generating businesses to focus on something new? - Why did they decide to hit $20k ARR before fundraising? - Why did they get bored of making enough money? - How to make money while you sleep? - How do you make people refer more? - How to generate limitless customer generated content? - How to leverage case study marketing? - Why will someone shut down a business that has a revenue of $2-3mn? - What're the classic items which first time founders overlook? - How to go about building a business in a crowded market? - Signals to look for when evaluating a new business : hard lessons from 5 years. - Checklist to pick up an idea for a startup - Why Outplay and what's the strategy when you're going behind big players? - How to do investor marketing and raise funds in 6-7 days? - How to hack and get CXOs attention? - What's to be the no.1 goal for all pre-PMF and just after PMF companies? - What's the advice to an entrepreneur setting up their marketing engine? - What's one go to source on learning more on marketing? #SaaSBOOMi #Marketing #Podcast #SaaS

SignEasy helps companies to sign, send and manage all sorts of documents and is being used by over 8 Million users (out of which 150K are paying customers) and 35,000 Companies spread across 100 Countries. Millions of users and downloads is quite usual in game apps and other consumer apps. Listen to Sign Easy’s story of millions of users and downloads as a B2B app, how they started providing a SaaS product as a mobile app, instead of as a web app. Pick up interesting insights on consumer behaviour as Suresh explores the idea behind SignEasy and go deep into thoughts shaping the product - on why someone will pay to sign on a document, the connection between mobile and documents which is non obvious, the conviction behind it, the dynamics involved considering document signing has to be accepted by two parties, the distinction between iOS and android users and more. Sunil also shares his thoughts on how they leveraged mobile app stores ecosystem, developer relations, on bootstrapping and fundraising. Tune in to learn on how they're generating 100k+ downloads per month, how their pricing evolved via lifetime deals, free trials, freemium, and more. Start streaming!