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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 marketing

How to coin brand names and product narratives which leaves your brand memorable

How to pitch your product to customers in a way you never had thought of before

How to use business card for content marketing

Why category creation is fascinating and scary at the same time

Context Marketing : A secret sauce that many don’t share

Best practices to work with PR agencies

Using 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 you

How 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 experts

What’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 $300-400k

Tune 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 episode

Category awareness and urgency matrix

Why buy - why buy now - why buy us - matrix

Secret sauce of content marketing for enterprise SaaS

How did they get million dollar deals via inbound marketing

Winning the whales: Hacks to build credibility and close large deals

Building website that speak enterprise SaaS

3 content types that your marketing funnel shouldn't omit

Website design as an edge in enterprise SaaS

Winning the whales: Hacks to build credibility and close large deals

Cracking million dollar deals with inbound marketing

Cracking the ICP identification framework

Acquiring the first 10 enterprise customers

Tune 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!

HRM is a crowded space with 200+ companies out there and has many one trick pony solutions like Performance management system, Payroll, ATS, Goal management, OKRs, Timesheets, Attendance check-in, check-out etc. Venturing into such a market in itself is challenging, and to add on to it, imagine if you're building a full stack HRM product. David versus Goliath is of the past, here we have Darwinbox versus Goliaths. Darwinbox is a Hire to retire HR tech product used by an intern to CEO of a company. They have 600+ enterprise customers including more than 35 unicorns, 1.2 million end users or employees who use the platform day in and day out for different HR aspects across multiple sectors across Asia. In this episode explore with Rohit of Darwinbox as Suresh unravels their journey of slowly and steadily replacing legacy HRM systems in enterprises. Here’s more on what you can learn from this episode. - How Asian market makes you efficient and gets you ready for the world? - How to structure a SaaS lead generation engine for the SEA market? - What're the market characteristics of Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore in terms of deal size, closing duration, pricing multiples? - Why is South East Asia better paced than India as a market? - What're the local companies in SEA focused at? - What’re the two critical weaknesses of legacy systems that you can leverage on? - How has India made them extremely efficient? - What's the story with SBI which got them international customers? - What’s the ideal sales strategy for enterprise SaaS? - How to take care of SaaS customizations versus scalability using products? - How is SEA different from India as a SaaS market? - How to compete against legacy SaaS players? - Early-stage sales playbook for enterprise SaaS - How to scale an enterprise SaaS product? - The SaaS advantage in SEA

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 episode

Org structure

Structuring a global enterprise sales team  - Insights into org structure, traits to look for, compensation structure, targets & metrics

What’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?

Metrics

Segment - 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?

Marketing

How to think about GTM to get into enterprises

How to continue building a new category of ‘Digital Adoption Solutions’ for 6-7 years before the magic quadrants got introduced

What’re the pros and cons when you create a new category?

Sales

How 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?

Expand

What’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!

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.