SaaSBoomi Archiv

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 Now

3:46 - The challenges that businesses face today

4:35 - Optimizing costs for lead-gen

7:56 - Worthy SaaS examples

9:15 - Lessons learnt from experiments

13:45 - Winning the confidence of enterprise customers

19:19 - The Experience Roadshow

26:34 - How to measure the RoI of non-standard events

28:03 - Indicators of Product Market Fit and Business Market Fit

33:05 - Founders should become students of sales

34:35 - Indian SaaS advantage

39:41 - Rapid fire

Resources 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 takeaways

1:35 - What is LogiNext

2:45 - Dhruvil’s Background

9:30 - How consulting experience helped in SaaS? 

13:38 - Advantages of coming from a business family

21:27 - Raising funds as a new entrepreneur

23:20 - 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 months

42:32 - GTM Plan and Ideal ICPs

46:28 - Acquisition Model

47:06 - Marketing and Sales Spend

49:07 - Becoming an investor

52:29 - SaaS Founders that Dhruvil looks up to

53:48 - 3 exciting startup investments Dhruvil has made

54:09 - Thoughts on work-life balance

55:23 - Advice for upcoming SaaS Entrepreneurs 

Key mentions 

Microsoft Venture

Reliance GenNext

Indian Angel Network

Vijay Shekhar Sharma : Twitter | LinkedIn

Sanjay Mehta : Twitter | LinkedIn

Happy 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 natively

11:32 - 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 16

24:37 - Learning by doing 

26:55 - Early days of customer acquisition 

31:23 - Data comes before Analytics

33:33 - Dealing with variations in data types for various clients

38:39 - Learnings of a third time entrepreneur 

47:48 - Defining the ideal customer

50:57 - People hate outbound calls. How to crack this problem? 

55:01 - Dealing with international markets

57:19 - Acquisitions 

1:08:15 - Organizational Structure

1:25:30 - ABM at CleverTap

1:35:55 - Culture

Happy 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 intro

5:33 Marketing org structure and evolution

10:32 Hacking SEO with 200 web pages

15:22 Inflection point in restaurant tech

17:21 The secret to hiring content writers

18:57 Marketing to a diverse customer persona

20:01 Cracking distribution when the persona is fuzzy

21:02 Content marketing - growing ‘Restaurant Times’ to 3.5M views per year

21:52 Benefits of avoiding clickbait-y blog titles

25:27 Evolution targeting SMB to Enterprise

26:35 Best way to go global

29:02 Why didn't we raise VC capital?

31:32 The unthinkable ABM campaign

44:04 The forgotten aspect in marketing and advertising

47:21 How Posist have perfected event marketing?

1:00:32 The Playbook for B2B conferences

1:00:4:38 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 factors

3:22 - Figuring out the valuation 

4:32 - Valuation multiples by Private Equity companies

7:15 - Valuation multiples during fundraising versus acquisitions

10:03 - VC valuation v/s PE valuation

12:19 - 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 Wingman

24:55 - Funds raised and investors

25:31 - Rationale for high pricing, is it a sales barrier?

29:18 - ICP of Wingman

30:56 - SaaS pricing insights for Indian market

31:31 - Change in org structure after acquisition

34:45 - Wingman’s go-to market model

35:50 - Creating proxies of trust - personal branding as a founder

36:40 - How to increase average ticket sizes 

39:46 - OTE v/s sales quota

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.ai

6:40 - 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 Combinator

25:08 - 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 & Valuation

8:55 Directly reaching out to the media v/s working with a PR agency

10:20 The Why now & Who cares factors

12:51 Right time to start PR

17:40 Breaking down PR : Signalling

19:50 Trendjacking

20:20 How do you consistently get covered in the press?

25:17 PR for Organic Lead generation

27:30 Levers of PR

31:32 How do you measure PR

37:55 How to work with PR agencies the best way?

42:22 Biggest peeve in PR

42:38 Favourite PR agency

43:31 Favourite PR hack

43:41 Top 3 media information sources

44:10 One advice to startup founders

Happy 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 leader

Key take aways

5:51 - Genesis of RFPIO

9:57 - Founding team formation

11:48 - Deciding who to be the CEO

15:57 - Product pricing

19:51 - GTM approach

22:05 - ICP & Outbound sales

23:51 - Funds raised

26:46 - Org structure

27:36 - Hiring scene in US & India

28:08 - Customer funded business

33:16 - Getting the first customers, the journey from SMB to Enterprise, price evolution

35:42 - No concentration strategy

36:52 - GTDDD

37:26 - Sales team’s influence on other teams

37:59 - Sales team compensation structure changes

41:14 - Customer advisory board

45:26 - Sales and implementation partners

47:32 - Culture building

52:15 - Inputs to founders on networking and fundraising

54:24 - One of the top mistakes done

Happy 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 Automate

10:23 - Acquisition opportunity

15:23 - Team expectation management during acquisition

19:16 - Duration for acquisition and competing offers

21:22 - Company structure that smoothened the acquisition

24:34 - Acquisition - Culture Compatibility and Adaptation

26:36 - Navigating specific cultural differences 

29:20 - Transition from role as a CEO post acquisition

32:32 - GTM for 1st 100 customers and first 500

36:39 - Pricing models

39:37 - Do’s and Don’ts for acquisition

Happy 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 business

16:16 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 Generation

32:39 How to optimize for CAC in SEM

34:43 Sales team size and structure

39:46 Managing churn as OKR software requires new habits and culture change

48:04 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 Staff

56:55 What's a 'Modern work experience'?

57:52 Insights on acquisition by Microsoft

1:00:34 M&A Integration risks & cultural fit

1:01:41 M&A Negotiation tips

1:02:06 Choice between Independence v/s Impact as an entrepreneur

1:12:14 Tips on scaling team from 15 to 250+ in 2 years

Tune in for more insights, happy listening!

PipeCandy is the industry standard data set that tracks 5 million plus e-commerce & DTC brands across hundreds of data points & markets.

They transformed from a single to a multi product SaaS company without building new products.

They became industry standard by calling themselves industry standard.

They 2x-ed their revenue in 4 months with no engineering changes.

They called out their USP and gave it a name which not many companies do.

They gained the confidence to price higher despite previous battle scars from pricing experiments.

How did they do this?

What’s the secret ingredient that went into this?

What’s the link between PipeCandy and SaaSBOOMi GrowthX?

Find answers to these and more in our latest #BTSpodcast E5 feat. Ashwin Ramasamy (Co-founder, PipeCandy), hosted by Arvind Parthiban and Varun Shoor.

Key take aways:

1:48 Marketing Org Chart 

3:39 Push v/s pull driven product

5:14 TAM exercise

6:44 PipeCandy Before & After SaaSBOOMi GrowthX 

12:08 How to communicate Trustworthy Authority?

14:03 Brand Image, Brand Identity & Positioning

14:57 How do we visually communicate trust?

17:27 Impact of re-branding

17:39 How does pricing & segmentation work?

21:17 Key metrics for website

23:46 Pricing Evolution

24:49 Pricing considering competition

26:20 Opportunities to increase your revenue

28:28 API pricing

33:37 What's the value in the case of software?

35:22 Rapid fire

38:10 Your biggest marketing challenge?

Happy watching!

Bonus:

Don’t miss the Insight Cards hidden inside the episode.