SaaSBoomi

In this episode we have Arun Pattabhiraman - Chief Growth Officer, Freshworks and Noel Wax - President and Co-founder, GroundSwell Group joining as guests. Tune in to this episode to learn more on physical to virtual to hybrid events - how to drive registrations for a live event amidst the digital fatigue, how to leverage not just your marketing team but the other critical levers, on interesting event formats and more. You'll hear more on what event organizers can learn from Netflix series, if events are for demand generation or brand marketing, 3 must haves for a great event, key difference maker for an event. All these insights coming from the lens of Arun with his experience across Freshworks and Noel whose company is into events business with Arvind and Varun getting into the finer details. And wait for the rapid fire in the end on more of tactics and tools. Start streaming!

Vymo is one of the first enterprise SaaS companies in India with a different sales and marketing motion compared to typical horizontal SMB SaaS.Vymo started building an enterprise SaaS startup when SaaS in India was all about SMB.Learn more about the founding story of how Yamini Bhat and Venkat Malladi chose the name VYMO to avoid brand clutter, how they set out to solve a problem in the domain of sales, while providing a  high quality user experience journey for enterprise users, to finally build a multi-tenant, single code base, 70-80 use cases, multi vertical product deployed across 60+ enterprises across 7 countries and used by 200,000+ sales reps! When the usual advice is to start small, their initial set of customers were all large enterprises. Why did they choose that way?When you pitch investors and they say, mobile first, Asia first, distributed and verticalization are all not hot, how do you continue to believe in your conviction?It’s interesting how they worked with customers, product champions, and influencers while creating a new category in the world of CRM.And they achieved all this when there was no playbook available on deers and whales as is today.“It took us 8 years back then to do it, now we’ll only take 3 years to do it.” says Yamini.Download all the wisdom, on strong outbound engine, SDR cadence, customer marketing, value selling, hiring senior positions, managing the board, culture at more in this episode!

It’s refreshing to track a new breed of India SaaS companies focused on building tools for software developers and programmers globally. While BrowserStack is on track to achieve $100 million ARR soon, there’s Postman, and then, there’s Hasura.This is what makes tracking India SaaS so fulfilling and thrilling for storytellers like me. Unlike the past waves of IT outsourcing and the rise of India’s e-commerce startups, the country’s SaaS ecosystem offers variety and there are so many potential winners.Hasura’s founders Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh combine their passion for deep engineering with their ability to build great products. Launched in 2017, Hasura already counts SoftBank Robotics, one of Spain’s largest banks--BBVA, and several global companies among its top customers.Early in the journey, they made a bold pivot by killing the cash-rich consulting business to build a product.With Hasura, Tanmai and Rajoshi are also riding an early wave.“It’s like when Mongo was starting and people were like, well  this doesn’t make any sense, but you know, Mongo became popular or when virtualization was happening and AWS was happening, it was like the cloud doesn’t make any sense but it happened,” Tanmai tells me in this podcast. “Hasura is in that kind of exciting but scary class of things that it can be category creating. A product like Hasura has not existed before. It is a weird product. It makes you hyper productive, but it is a shift in architecture and that means that when Hasura is everywhere, people will assume that it is the right way to do things, but the journey to doing that is obviously the most painful journey in the world.”In this episode of SaaSBOOMi Podcast, Tanmai shares the backstory, and how they are building Hasura, tool by tool. Listen to this podcast to learn more about how Hasura is helping developers make sense of big data and preparing for a world where programming will go mainstream in schools. This conversation also offers insights into building a deep engineering startup and catching a wave early on. 

Sometime during the year 2017, Ankit Oberoi, the founder of AdPushup, was staring at a potential failure. With $1 million in ARR after a journey of three years since he started, Ankit was struggling to find the growth levers for AdPushup, which had a 25-members team back then. “We lost about half the team, we were at a low point, and it was a do or die. There’s something we haven’t shared publicly ever, is that we were almost ready to go for an acqui-hire,” Ankit tells me in this podcast. "We were on a ventilator, not just a startup valley of death."Over the next two years, Ankit hustled through the market to achieve $10 Million ARR in recovering from that stage. This didn't just mean survival, but the experience helped AdPushup create a blueprint for creating a scalable enterprise model.How did he do it?It all started with the simple idea of giving it “one last push” as Ankit recalls, this time, moving the entire company towards the enterprise market opportunity. The product changed too, from being SMB-focused to more mid-market customer segments and large enterprises. AdPushup’s journey from $1 million in ARR to $10 million gross revenues happened in 12-13 months after this pivot. Listen to this podcast with Ankit Oberoi of AdPushup to learn from his playbook of $1 million to $10 million in ARR, and what it takes to create a product, sales, and organizational building blocks for the journey through crises and beyond.

Hindsight isn’t just a luxury, as many believe. For founders, hindsight or the ability to look back at the events and learn from them with blunt honesty, is priceless. Just ask the second-time founders such as Ketan Kapoor, the co-founder of Mettl, who sold his startup to Mercer after a long, slow burn. Mettl is a SaaS platform for online assessment. “If I start something again, I will not raise money for the first three years, not because I can afford it, but because I can run it that way,” Ketan tells me in this conversation. “The more you can push it out (the funding), the more you can set up a business, which looks solid and sustainable.”There’s too much focus on the ongoing entrepreneurial journeys. Don’t get me wrong. It’s absolutely needed to keep bringing learnings from the journey as it evolves. What needs to be unlocked more is a goldmine of candid insights from founders after they have completed their entrepreneurial journeys. “There are moments in every entrepreneur’s journey when you just want to be alone and want to cry, and not share anything with even your family or co-founders.”This quote from Steve Jobs captures the amazing power of hindsight well:“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”Listen to this conversation with Ketan Kapoor of Mettl to learn from his entrepreneurial journey that offers honest insights about building, failing and finding an exit for founders, employees and investors. Ketan is now preparing to become an entrepreneur again, and is looking to apply all the learnings from the Mettl journey.

What’s the first thought that gets triggered when you hear a mention of Coimbatore? For me, it’s always been the city’s entrepreneurial spirit. Much before startups became a cool word to go around, Coimbatore’s entrepreneurs have been busy creating enterprises, failing, learning and growing. It’s called “the Manchester of South India” for a solid reason. So it was a delight to record this conversation with Ganesh Shankar, CEO of RFPIO and Saravana Kumar, co-founder of Kovai.co--the two entrepreneurs who hail from Coimbatore, and who are now working relentlessly to make the city a next-generation SaaS hub. What’s even more heartening is to learn how India SaaS pioneer Zoho and poster child Freshworks are inspiring this new wave. “The confidence that they gave us (Zoho and Freshworks) is amazing because even we now have 15 of the Fortune 500 companies as customers. Both Zoho and Freshworks have delivered quality products globally from India, and that’s the key motivation,” Ganesh tells me in this podcast. For a long time, Zoho remained an inspiration for a generation of SaaS startups founded by its former employees. Then came Freshworks; a complete breakaway from the Zoho’s bootstrapped model, fast-growing and nourishing an amazing product-design culture. And while both Zoho and Freshworks continue to be the role models for most SaaS companies, it’s amazing to watch the rise of another generation led by the likes of Postman and Browserstack. “What Freshworks has done to Chennai is what we want to do to Coimbatore because that spot is still available,” Saravana tells me in this podcast. Kovai.co now has its own campus in Coimbatore, built with an investment of over $1 million. Chargebee, co-founded by Krish Subramanian, is another inspiration for startups such as Kovai.co“They are coming in and proving that you can build world-class products and scale,” adds Saravana. Startups such as Kovai.co, which is at almost $10 million ARR, and RFPIO that counts Zoom, Microsoft and Adobe among its customers, are beginning to democratise the India SaaS story by looking beyond the traditional IT hubs of Chennai and Bengaluru. Listen to this podcast to learn from the entrepreneurial journeys of RFPIO and Kovai.co, and how the startups’ founders, Ganesh and Saravana, are on a mission to make Coimbatore the next SaaS hub. 

Abhinav Shashank pitched a 400-pages report as a trainee inside a Fortune 500 company and managed to get $20 million funding for the same, much before he actually became an entrepreneur. After getting his idea approved, Abhinav worked on building the product in Bangalore, scoped out manufacturing in Shanghai apart from spending time in Dallas, U.S., giving him an overall experience in building a truly global product. “By the time I left, it was already a $40 million revenue business,” Abhinav tells me in this podcast. Is there a path to doing this on my own, he remembers asking himself around that time. For Abhinav, it was almost like doing a startup again, this time, however, without the protection of a Fortune 500 company. Clearly, there is a lot of value in being entrepreneurial, which is mostly underrated. An IIT Kharagpur alumni, Abhinav and his batchmates earlier planned to build “a Kharagpur Consulting Group”, on the lines of the famous consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group, he recollects jokingly. On a more serious note, Abhinav started looking at the world of big data, which is mostly unstructured, and how to make sense of it for customers. “How do you manage this explosion of information for innovation?”The early prototype for Innovaccer was aimed at helping academic institutions such as Harvard make sense of information. But when he met Rajan Anandan of Sequoia, thanks to the connection made by Aneesh Reddy of Capillary, the first pivot happened.“Why don’t you build this for the enterprise?”Since then, Innovacer has been growing its revenues at over 100% annually and is set to cross the $100 million ARR mark by sometime next year. The big opportunity has been to tap into the U.S. healthcare market, which is almost like the fifth largest economy in the world, according to him. And the quality of healthcare data continues to be patchy. “The person you’re trusting with your life knows less about you than your retailer does.”Before Innovaccer made its second pivot to focus entirely on the healthcare market, the startup was already doing $4 million in ARR. “We decided to shut down the existing $4 million business, right after the $12 million fundraise from Westbridge,” he recalls. That happened at the first board meeting with Innovaccer’s new investors. There are broader entrepreneurial lessons too.“As an entrepreneur, most of your days have their lows. There are only a few of those elusive high points that you are living for that carry you through all the lows,” he says. Listen to this podcast with Abhinav of Innovaccer to learn more about managing bold pivots, almost like changing the engines of a plane while still in the flight, and staying bluntly honest to create a $100 million ARR business. 

Pankaj MishraKumar Vembu’s journey with Zoho during its early foundational years and later building his own startup, GoFrugal, offers some deep insight into India SaaS’ building blocks. Kumar's ability to spot and mentor talent such as Girish Mathrubootham, who is now the founder of Freshworks, India’s most valuable SaaS company, offers lessons in grooming leaders.  In this episode of SaaSBOOMi podcast, I am thrilled to share this masterclass with Kumar in bootstrapping, spotting talent and matching them with their true purpose, and lessons from three different entrepreneurial journeys--Zoho, GoFrugal and Freshworks.  “I used to be a very mischievous and a happy-go-lucky kid. Whenever teachers tried to be strict with me, I became more unmanageable. But whenever a teacher trusted me, I became easy to manage,” Kumar recalls.“One of the early lessons for me was when you respect and trust people, you get their cooperation, much better than using brute force.” Over the years, Kumar has watched three different entrepreneurial journeys, starting with his own startup focused on the India market, Zoho before that, and Freshworks’ Girish. You can also watch this video interview I had done with Kumar explaining “the Zoho way and the Freshworks way.”  So what does he think about these different models and what can we learn from each of them?“Whether to bootstrap or take funding should not be the first question. Building the product, achieving product-market fit and growing the business are more important questions at the start,” he tells me in this podcast.

What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better—and smarter—solution is simply to remain small? via Company of One”Pankaj MishraSounds quite a playbook, doesn't it? Amid all the talks of finding a product-market fit, growth hacking revenues from $0 to $1 million, $10 million and beyond, a rare breed of entrepreneurs are finding a path to inner peace. Aditya has spent the past decade working across fast-growing startups, being an entrepreneur himself and failing too. He is now applying all the lessons and realisations he has gathered over the years to redefine his life and work. I was amazed to read his blog “Our Hardcore Year - getting to 1000$ MRR” for its blunt honesty and refreshing insights. In this podcast, Aditya shares why it makes sense to get off the funding and growth treadmill and find a way to staying sane apart from a sustainable livelihood. After raising around $5 million, kind of failing later with his startup, Aditya started realising he wasn’t enjoying it much. Entrepreneurship had started feeling like a burden for him. “I was 4 years into it and really burnt out. I just couldn’t carry on….it kind of started feeling that I was doing it just for the sake of it. Because I was supposed to be an entrepreneur and keep going….I just couldn’t do it.”Listen to this podcast to learn from Aditya’s playbook of the path to $1000 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), and also, why it makes sense to stay small and stay sane. 

By Pankaj Mishra"These are not days for unbridled optimism, but this is the perfect time to allow hope to arise in our spirits.” Donald T IannoneEntrepreneurial optimism can be dangerous and suicidal. Overconfidence and confirmation biases can blind founders from getting a realistic assessment of any situation. But the undying sense of chasing the glimmer can also be inspiring, and perhaps the single biggest source of strength for surviving an existential crisis like the ongoing pandemic. When the first wave of Covid pandemic hit India in early March this year, Sakshi and Ashish Tulsian, the husband-wife duo and founders of POSist, thought things would return to normal soon. They announced work-from-home starting 14th March thinking it would last for a week at the most. Sakshi still remembers different signals leading up to the deadlock, starting February this year, all in the hindsight though. “I remember we were doing a deal in Indonesia during January/February, which was the single biggest contract for us and it was going well. We signed the contract .End of february is when we started experiencing delays in getting the money. Similarly, we started seeing delays in closing the deals in the Middle East,” she tells me in this podcast. Looking back, from the end of February to the first two weeks of March, many deals POSist sales team was working on for the past two quarters did not close. “On March 3, we witnessed the second signal when an annual event we have been participating in for the past six years in Delhi with hectic schedules, appeared to be going empty. We used to collect around 250 leads daily over the past few years, and this year we were barely managing around 22 leads on a daily basis.”We receive money everyday. Revenues hit our bank account everyday. Our forecast to reality differential isn’t very high, normally. I remember the March 18 announcement of “Janata Curfew.” And we saw revenue zero from that day till April 15. Ashish also remembers a call from Aneesh Reddy, the founder CEO of Capillary and a fellow SaaS entrepreneur, around that time.“How’s it going?” Aneesh asked. “How bad do you think this is going to be?”“Probably a quarter?” Ashish remembers telling Aneesh“And Aneesh was like, dude, you need help.”“You will not have time to react if you don’t overreact now,” Aneesh told him. “Start planning for zero revenues.” Since then, Sakshi and Ashish braced themselves for the worst. POSist used to do around Rs. 40 crore worth of billing daily before the pandemic hit. “By April, we were looking at less than a crore everyday,” says Ashish. “We can’t thank him (Aneesh) enough for this,” says Sakshi. Since then, Sakshi and Ashish had to lay off their staff, cut all expenses, and live with zero revenues. Listen to this podcast to learn more about how the POSist founders regained growth, tapped markets, changed their revenue mix and of course, also hired back the staff they had to let go.