0 – 100 customers! How fast can your SaaS startup accelerate?

The toughest challenge in your startup journey is getting to the milestone of first 100 customers. iSPIRT’s 97th PlayBook RoundTable, ‘Zero to One’ was held last Saturday in the hot and humid city of Chennai.

Ankit Oberoi from AdPushUp moderated the RoundTable which was attended by 13 other startup founders eager to know how to crack this. The PlayBook didn’t have formal presentations but rather involved everyone into an engaging conversation that was both informal as well as informative.

First things first, as early stage SaaS startups, “Kneel down and build your product well, when bootstrapped” was Ankit’s advice.

Identifying Target Customers

Emphasis was made on identifying your target customers to help you build the right inbound and outbound strategies. Ankit mentioned that a good way to find your target customer type is to look at your top ten customers. Few entrepreneurs looking to generate quick revenue might tend to drift towards a service model.

Arvind Parthiban, CEO of Zarget had an insight on this trend — “Going the service way will work only if one can scale up right and maintain profitability in the longer run”.


Inbound Marketing Tactics

A majority of the discussion was about inbound procedures. 3 simple things should make up your Content Marketing strategy –

  1. Identifying your target persona
  2. Creating quality content
  3. Setting up distribution channels

Just creating content will not cut it! You need to market it right to do justice to its quality.

Though it is a painfully long process, bootstrapped startups have the luxury of time and they should invest in building on content strategies around long tail keywords. Much emphasis was given as to why content should be created for personas. An example that was pointed out for this was Groove’s blog where the focus is exclusively on founders.

It is right for early-stage startups to focus on generating traffic through content but the real focus should be on giving value to the readers. Conversions can happen even later and not necessarily while reading your content. Growing a subscription list through your blog is not only a no-brainer, but a must have item in your growth stack .

Ankit stressed on how Neil Patel talks about why you need to urge your readers to subscribe right from the start. When you have a subscribers list, you can nurture them to share your content and build a bigger subscribers list which will ultimately increase your brand value and improve your customer base. Initial days of your startup journey are when you can do such things that take time to scale.

Intent Defines Inbound

Categorize your efforts based on intent when you are going all out on inbound marketing. Content writing has to be segregated widely into two types –

  1. Buyer Intent
  2. Value Intent

Buyer intent content are the ones written with the focus on ranking higher on search engines. These should have focus on keywords and the main objective of these content pieces are to sell your product.

Value intent is when you become a Thought Leader of the industry you are in. Helping your customer persona should be the name of the game when you generate such content. At times, you don’t even have to put a link back to your product when you write such content. Educative long form content with simple writing works best.

Just like content writing, content distribution too has to be categorized based on intent.

  1. SEO intent — You share the article/blog with search engine ranking in mind
  2. Sharing intent — You find avenues where people are bound to share the post more
  3. Distribution intent — Sharing in one place that sets off a chain of shares

Be spot on with your content!

Creating a content calendar is a must! Knowledge sharing on this topic pointed out that the calendar should be finalized, ideally, in the first few days of the month. Decide on buyer intent topics with the help of keyword planners. Thought leader articles can be written with the help of community platforms — find answers for the most-asked questions. Quora is a gold mine to search for blog ideas.

The consensus from the more experienced entrepreneurs at the RoundTable was that content has to be tested too. The headline is the most important bit of your article/blog. Ankit spoke about how 75% of your readers don’t actually read your content but rather scan for information. He shared a personal insight on how just a headline change helped AdPushUp make an article go viral overnight! Check out this article here.

As much as headlines, the first few lines matter too! In fact, most people who share an article actually read the intro and then skim through the article. Sharing happens not because people read it fully but because they feel it is relatable to something they would read and want to express to their circles about the type of content they would read. Your formatting should be spot on to help them digest your post in just a few seconds!

Headlines need to be tested extensively. Vengat from Klenty stressed on how testing one variable at a time is imperative for success. Ankit talked about how he narrows it down from a couple dozen headlines for their blogs. A/B test between the best ones to ensure you get the best variation.

Types of articles to try…

The Zero to One #PlayBookRT stressed on a few interesting article types startups should try –

  1. Summarizing Comprehensive Blogs — Found something useful? Write a brief, original summary of the blog. This will rank organically. Ensure author credits are given.
  2. Roundups — Take a pick of useful tips, quotes, tools etc., and do a roundup. Reach out to the people/products/companies you mentioned and they will share it to their followers
  3. Skyscraper Technique — Find an awesome content and piggyback on it. Find linkable assets, make it better by adding in your thoughts or collating ideas. Reach out to the authors of the post and share it on social media.

While on the topic of Content Marketing, the topic of paid promotions came into play and it was agreed upon that paid promotion for articles should be done with the intent only to hit a critical mass. With paid promotions, readership is not improved but only the views are artificially increased. A good insight from one of the attendees was to try and push notifications about blogs through live chat platforms like Intercom.

Hiring your inbound team

There are two types of talent you need on your inbound team for achieving success in your content marketing endeavours. The hustlers & the experts. Hustlers are those who understand the market and the distribution channels while the experts should be the ones strong in content.

AIESEC is one hiring venue that you should consider for smart and affordable talent.

You need to break down your web analytics — group traffic sources and optimize for each and every source. Ankit explained how Google not only ranks posts but also pulls down posts with the help of Ryan Fishkin’s social experiment. He urged people to open a top ranked post and immediately go back to the search results page. The search engine bots picked this up and realized people no longer find the post valuable and dropped it by one position!

We live in a smart world! And to outsmart Search Engines, you need smarter content tactics.


Quick look at a few other learnings

  • Arvind and Ankit then shared their experiences with events generating brand value and how that indirectly helps your inbound conversions.
  • PR is yet another way of getting social approval. It reduces sales cycle as well as helps with search engine rankings.
  • Vengat shared his learnings from Prodpad’s gamification for trial users that kept urging for additional actions for trial extension. This would inevitably lead to more activation.
  • There was a brief session on PPC campaign optimization and how Google’s Quality Score is important

Out-take on Outbound

Ankit stressed on the fact that if a startup concentrates well on inbound tactics and is all set for the long run, outbound becomes considerably easier. Most US companies go all out on inbound tactics. Being in India, we have the luxury to work on outbound marketing at relatively cheap costs.

Tools like BuiltWith, Datanyze, SimilarWeb are in this space. The problem to be addressed would be scaling the process without expanding the existing team. As you reach out to more and more people, the data bulk can be huge to handle if you don’t automate/semi-automate the process.


An entrepreneur’s journey is one to be cherished and the initial acceleration from 0–100 customers is enjoyable though dotted with challenges. The 97th Product Nation PlayBook RoundTable turned out to be a learning experience for everyone who attended and hope this article threw light on what was discussed to those who weren’t lucky enough to be part of it.

Never miss an iSPIRT event again — stay tuned to this page for updates on upcoming Product Nation events. Guest blog post by Kingston David, Zarget

The curious case of B2B SaaS Startup’s inside sales and marketing

Amazing but how? This question pops out of every startup founder’s mind while reading success stories. Persistence, determination & hard work, great to know, but nobody tells the real thing. Where are the techniques? With any magic, the logic behind is what a technician always looks for. So, where is the secret formula of startups having millions of dollars of revenue in SaaS?

‘XYZ’ startup got Series A $3M from ‘The one who every founder dreams of’ 10K Signups in a month (What were you doing? Tell me NOW!) $1M ARR in just 4 months of product launch (Who are these rich kids?)

These stories are highly inspiring, and to achieve such fabulous growth you need experience, the right product and perfect techniques of sales and marketing (Yes, funds could wait!). Being an early stage startup founder and that too into SaaS B2B, also an engineer who codes. I personally feel this is a deadly combination, where people like us know EVERYTHING when we start out BUILDING and half the way we realize about SELLING(hopefully we do!), the path to revenue, well the only reason we could be SUCCESSFUL.

The Invitation

While I was looking for my answers reading the book traction, building flows and learning by experimenting different traction channels, SaaSx happened (SaaSx was not like any other conferences or meetups, but really an experience to cherish, I now literally wait for the next one to happen) and there I met Avinash, he invited me to the PlayBook RoundTable Zero to One — Marketing and Inside Sales — SaaS happening in Delhi.

The invitation looked something like this..

Roundtable Focus Areas
– The PlayBook Roundtable will focus on how Early stage SaaS startups can get their first 10 and then the first 100 customers.
– The founders will share their experience of the initial steps to be taken, key metrics to focus on and the team structure for inside sales and marketing.

Facilitators
1. Sachin Bhatia (Ameyo/Inside Sales Box)
2. Ankit Oberoi(AdPushUp)

Bang On! it is very few times when you get the opportunity to hear from those who are just steps above you in the ladder, their learning from successes and failures could help you make the most out of your current situation.

Hops and Drops

11 founders at different stages of their startup journey in one round table conference hitting the bottom line with the right questions and right people to answer them.

  1. First 10 Customers, hacks to reach them? (Ankit’s hacks make you realize it is not that difficult)
  2. When to start marketing and help generate leads even before the product launch? (Conversations, Sachin even mentioned how first 100 conversations helped him get the Product Market fit)
  3. What is the actual Traffic / Conversion / Cost per lead from their experience? (These numbers helped to validate stuff you dream of)
  4. Initial Teams, Hiring Experiences and Compensation plans? (Most of us, funded or bootstrapped are struggling with this)
  5. Key learning in the initial lead generation and sales efforts?
  6. Content Marketing Strategy, to build for Google or Readers?
  7. Medium vs WordPress vs Your Own Blog? (It is not good for me to answer this here!)
  8. Launching product in the foreign market, the Hows of it? (SaaS businesses largely aim countries outside India)
  9. How to make your website the best marketing tool? (The number of leads generated from there, some mind boggling statistics we went through)
  10. To put pricing or not? (A million dollar question in itself)
  11. Hacks around Adwords and minimizing cost per click
  12. SEO, Keywords, On Page, the real metrics, and the lead generation techniques
  13. Tools to trigger drip marketing campaigns
  14. Social Platforms their reach and how to maximize with minimum efforts and cost
  15. The strategies worked for DIY tools
  16. Lead tracking, Website Chat
  17. Content — Blog / Ebooks / Video
  18. To go for PR or not?
  19. How to experiment more with current traction channels?
  20. Mistakes which led them to lose customers, and how reduce churn rate?

And much more.. A day full of insights, no presentations, no mind-boggling figures but real conversations based on the real fears we as founders and startups face everyday.

To not let go..

The journey of a founder has lots of ups and downs, engaging with the right people who could help you in a way you just imagined could be a path breaker.

Thanks a lot to the team at iSPIRT — Avinash and Rajat for making it accessible to the community.

Ankit and Sachin were as candid as they could be, the secrets of their business are going to help us take leaps with our startup.


If you wish to know the answers to the above asked questions, reach out to iSPIRT. I’d love to hear from all of you who are at different stages and learning like all of us in the space.

Guest Post by Anshuli Gupta, Co-Founder @WidelyHQ, My twitter handle @anshulix

How AdPushup Uses Content Marketing To Power Growth #PlaybookRT

Close to about 15 founders gathered on 1st October at the small and cozy office of AdPushup to participate in a Playbook Roundtable on Content Marketing. This was Ankit’s first playbook with iSPIRT and he did a phenomenal job.

AdPushup is a SaaS company that helps web publishers increase their ad revenue by letting them test and optimize their website’s ad layout. Their expertise has been content marketing, and Ankit shared several details of their experience, learning and strategy which have helped AdPushup become a leader in content marketing in the AdTech software space.

Inbound is a Culture

Ankit stressed upon the fact that when starting in inbound practice, founders themselves need to get involved. Inbound is a long term game and requires a lot of patience and perseverance. By getting their hands dirty, founders understand the intricacies involved in inbound and thereby are build the right team and culture.

Buyer Persona

The first step in building your inbound strategy is to put together a buyer persona.  It is basically a description of your ideal customer – someone who will directly benefit from your product or service. Creating content around and for them is what will get you more traffic, engagement and a sustainable growth. You could identify buyer persona by:

  • Interviewing Prospects
  • Feedback from your sales team on the leads they’re interacting with most
  • Looking at your Top 10 customers

A typical buyer persona will consist of the following:

  • Job Role/Title
  • Job Skills
  • Performance KPI
  • Tools used
  • Goals
  • Challenges
  • Personal Demographics (if appropriate)
  • Recent purchase and the decision tree
  • Online communities/websites they use to consume content

A buyer persona will help you identify the kind of content and channels you need to focus on in your inbound strategy.

how-adpushup-uses-content-marketing-to-power-growth-playbookrtContent Creation

There are two types content that founders can focus based on their industry and product:

  • Relevant to business or industry ( informative)
  • Relevant to the Persona (targeted and actionable)

The tone of the content should be educational and non promotional. Create content only keeping in mind – “is this helping someone solve a problem?”. At AdPushup, their target audience is long form bloggers and large web publishers. They write content which either informs them or helps in dealing with a painpoint (e.g. blogging tips, how to get more subscribers, how to get more traffic, user psychology, increasing user engagement, among others).

Each content piece should be:

  • Thorough and meticulously researched
  • Up-to-date
  • Well designed

Content should have:

  • Scannable text – bullet points, sub-headings, short paragraphs, images. Remember bulk of readers do not read but scan the content.
  • Actionable Insights
  • Content Frameworks
  • Citations and sources

Content ideas mostly come from:

  • Keyword research
  • What topics your competitors are writing about
  • Evergreen content (guides, tutorials, how-tos, best-practices)
  • What the industry experts are tweeting, sharing on social media
  • Comments on blogs and from relevant communities
  • Round-up posts

Nail the headline of every post that you publish and you will have won 70% of the battle. If your headline doesn’t inspire confidence, interest, excitement or any sort of emotion then readers wont click on it. Then even though your content might be brilliant and relevant, it will just not get the importance it deserves.

Content Distribution

An important rule of thumb to remember is that whoever is the content creator – allocate 50% of time in creating content and the rest 50% in distributing it.

Some of the channels for content distribution include:

  • Relevant Subreddits
  • Google+
  • FB Groups
  • LinkedIn Groups
  • Pinterest
  • Hacker News
  • Forums
  • Influencer outreach
  • Syndicate/Guest Post
  • Article that will rank on SERP
  • Refurbish for Infographics, SlideShare, etc
  • Competitor URL outreach

When you join communities on social networks, regularly engage with their members. This helps when you have to share your content there and not come across as a spammer.

Reddit is infamous for being ruthless with spammers and self promoters. So the only way you come across as neither is by providing all the value right there in the community post and add a small link in the end which says something like – “to read the full post, here’s the link” (and provide the exact url, not bitly or any short links). Provide the entire outline right there. Anyone reading it should only click on your post when they know exactly what is in the content and they would still want to read it.

Whoever you mention in our post, product or person, make sure to send them or the relevant team members an email telling them about the mention and encourage them to share it on their social media. Most people do actually share if you ask them. Also, it helps if you are relatively well known and the content is really well written.

Look for guest posting opportunities because they are an effective way to make your presence in the industry. And guest post only on sites that are relevant to your audience, have a very high volume of traffic and well respected (e.g. HubSpot, KISSmetrics)

Generating Leads

Once you have created content and distributed, it is imperative you capture details of the readers. You could devise several ways to do that:

  • Opt-in Subscription Forms
  • Banners
  • Email courses via drip campaigns
  • HelloBar
  • Native mentions (with disclosures)
  • eBooks, reports and whitepapers

Make sure your email marketing is sorted out. Put pop-up email capture boxes (and similar lead capture forms/boxes) in your blog to encourage visitors to convert into subscribers. Once you have a decent number of subscribers (300+) and are pushing content out regularly, start rounding them up and email them to your subscribers in the form of a ‘weekly newsletter’.

Here is a screenshot of how AdPushup uses its content to capture user details.

adpushup-blog

Measurement and Analytics

Finally it is important to measure and analyze your inbound activities. As Ankit puts it, “Inbound is a continuous rinse and repeat process”. Few key metrics to track include:

  • The channels that are giving more traffic
  • Channels that are converting better
  • Type of content that gets more organic reach
  • Statements/Emotions in the headline that perform better (e.g. questions, negative statements, suspense, informative etc)
  • Reader Demographics
  • Best time to publish
  • Best channel to distribute for every topic

Once you have a sufficient success in measuring ROI – cut out what is not working and concentrate only on what is getting results. And always keep creating hypotheses and rigorously testing them. You never know what product or customer insight you might stumble across.

Guest Post by Rajat Harlalka, Bellurbis

Product Teardown at the “SaaS”y Day at Chennai: Chapter 2 on SaaSx3

The sea breeze was cool. And the SaaSy people went cool as well. Kiruba unleashed some tricks for networking that had the participants engaging in banter, fun and games on the lawn. It also wore off the participants from postprandial somnolence (carb coma) after lunch. The SaaSy bus by then had arrived from Bengaluru, and the participant number swelled to 150 or so.

Using your product as a marketing tool

Pallav Nadhani set the theme for #OneThing discussion involving of Siddharth of Practo, Nemesh of Appointy, and Ankit of AdPushup. He cited examples of MailChimp, which sends annual reports about the number of mails sent through its service, and Rancore, a research organisation that sent reports about Share Point, a Microsoft product for developers. He said that research reports set benchmarks for what works. He spoke of referral marketing and commission paid on referrals to existing customers as strategies to acquire customers without much of a marketing spend. Avlesh of WebEngage said that marketing does not exist in silos away the product. He spoke of incorporating the marketing element inside the product itself.

webengageOne strategy is using the “powered by *product logo*” inside the product to attract more prospects. This was especially used in a novel way. WebEngage chose a customer (of course, after a due diligence) to sell its low-priced product in an unpresent geography. Then the logo was added in the product to attract more customers in the region. The customer acquisition cost is reduced as a result. Nemesh of Appointy (which helps businesses to schedule appointments) has 118,000 customers, all of them acquired at zero cost of marketing. This was done through backlinks (two lines of codes in the product), which would indirectly show up in the Google search when someone searched for a tool for appointments. Ankit spoke of four strategies to customer acquisition without much marketing spend.

The VC speak

Mohan from Norwest said the SaaS multiples have compressed in the United States – it’s five times the revenue now rather than the 10x number that was the norm until sometime ago. He also said that SaaS companies have a history of not making a profit but was confident that it is possible to build a profitable SaaS company in India, which is capital-efficient.

Tarun of Matrix Partners clarified that now the focus has shifted to profitability of SaaS companies rather than growth. He said that growth expectations are tempered according to existing market conditions. Now, liquid capital is not available easily. He agreed that there was a time when growth was the focus when the capital was easily available. Now that capital has shrunk, it’s difficult to have a growth at the cost of profit strategy but the one focused on profits is the best.

Tearing down the product

Frictionless sign-up, a clutter-free website and a shortest path to functional wow! are some of the elements of the SaaS product that is self-serving and sold to remote customers. Three products were at the receiving end … er … learning end from Suresh Sambandam of KissFlow, Bharat, head of UX at Freshdesk, and Shekar Kirani of Accel. While Suresh focused on the sign-up aspects, Bharat gave feedback on design whereas Shekar pinpointed the market focus. Zipboard, Hummingbill and Canvas Flip were the three products that were reviewed on stage.

product etear down

This was easily the most popular segment of the day. There was laughter, there were learnings, there were moments of revelation, and on top of it, the three products wouldn’t have received such an honest feedback elsewhere. Shekar’s advice was worth a weight in gold especially for Zipboard and CanvasFlip. He was laser sharp in identifying the right customer segment and market and the entrepreneurs in the audience were overawed by his clarity.

The audience felt that Product Teardown deserves to be expanded in future editions of SaaSx. Peer feedback is valuable and helps to refine the product to make it efficient to acquire more customers.

The grand finale of the day was Girish making a fantastic presentation on his journey – from $1 million to $5 million. At each stage in the presentation, he called in the team members who worked on identifying a specific problem and explained what worked and what didn’t. What came through was the endeavour that propelled everyone at Freshdesk to work towards a common goal. What made these young guys work like men (and women) possessed is the specialty of the Freshdesk culture. Not much detail can be revealed, as we have to respect the fact that Freshdesk is a funded company. But what Girish said at cocktail was taut: “When I am on stage, if some guy thinks if he can do it, I can also do it, I am happy about it” It is suffice to say those who were at the hall were pumped with inspiration by Girish to think big and if you need that, you have to make it to SaaSx. See you there!

Announcing the first 25 successful companies attending #PNgrowth

Right. So the first batch of #PNgrowth companies is here. It has been a slog for us going through all the applications we received, and we have made sure that we are extremely fair in the way we are allocating places for our already over-subscribed program.

If you don’t know what this is about, you go here, and if you want to apply, here, better late than never.
                                25-founders-collage-1
We are going to announce the companies finalised as we go along, so they can start preparing for what will possible be a non-stop knowledge ride.
So here we go, the first 25 companies for the inaugural #PNgrowth program
    1. Ahimanikya Satapathy of Docengage,  Healthcare CRM
    2. Akshat Choudary of Blogvault, WordPress backup service
    3. Anand Krushnan of Exclusife, offers app
    4. Ankit Oberoi of Adpushup, online ad optimizer
    5. Arastu Zakia of Collegebol, education/students forum
    6. Ashwin Ramaswamy of ContractIQ,B2B Outsourcing Marketplace
    7. Dhruv Gupta of Valuehire.com, recruitment software
    8. Elvis D’Souza of Sensara, TV search app
    9. Jaineel Agarwal of Planet Superheroes, Superhero merchandise store
    10. Jofin Joseph of Hello Vibe, contact management app
    11. Koushik Shee of Effia Soft , cloud ERP
    12. Krish Subramanian of Chargebee , billing software
    13. Kumar Abhishek of ToneTag, payment app
    14. Laxman Papineni of AppVirality, growth toolkit
    15. Mrigank Tripathi of Qustn, training and assessment company
    16. Nityananda Rao of Actouch Technologies Pvt Ltd, accounting software
    17. Pritesh Vora of Uninstall.io, app analytics provider
    18. Priyanka Agarwal of Wishberry, crowdfunding platform
    19. Rahul Bhalla of Zenatix, energy hardware company
    20. Rohit Bagaria of Budli.in, used gadgets marketplace
    21. Sanjay Sahani of Optimizory, management tool
    22. Shameel Abdulla of Jiffstore, grocery supermarket
    23. Sonal Goyal of NubeTechnologies,data analytics company
    24. Srikanth Adiga of Open Specimen, biobanking informatics
    25. Vijay Mane of Albumizer , album designer
Congratulations to the startups who made it. They will receive further information in their mailboxes.