Tag: SaaS based

When we as a ecosystem try to help our entrepreneurs, we make the mistake of always focussing on the mistakes others have made, and trying to steer away from those. This is evident even from the stuff we write on blogs and platforms with the specific purpose of helping others.
Maybe it’s time we step away from that.

In this new blog series from #PNgrowth, we are going the other way. Our best product people will be asked a simple question – what is the one thing that worked best for you when you were trying to scale your company? These answers will be insightful partly as success stories and partly as guides for other startups looking to scale. In the third blog of the series, we talk to Sudarshan Ravi, the CEO of Mumbai based RippleHire, a SaaS based gamifed employee referral product. 

Sudarshan Ravi, CEO of RippleHire

RippleHire helps you engage your workforce, leverage their network and benefit from automatic sourcing. You make great hires and distribute more wealth within the organisation. I first met Sudarshan and the company when they had a table next to Freshservice at the inaugural InTech50 last year. We talked about a lot of things in the intermittent gaps we had when we weren’t selling our own products to other people.

Sudarshan and RippleHire have come a long way since then, raising funding and grabbing a lot of key customers along the way, including a huge Capgemini account. When I talked to Sudarshan, and put to him the question we want answered, he prefaced his answer with something modern startup founders can easily forget.

“I didn’t look at it that way. For me, I had to make sure that the foundations of what we were trying to do was well laid. Only after that did we get to scaling, and even in that, we were slow and steady.”
Fair enough, I thought. And the Sudarshan moved on to his answer itself.

“One, we listened to users when we created the product, building and validating as we went on, in a process which some would call crowdsourcing. We asked potential users what they would like to see in a product like this, tested it and again brought it in front of them. This ensured that our product, though, slow in development, was almost perfect for our market. Second, we simplified our outbound process. We simply went after the big fish, and sold it to them. Capgemini started using us in this way. Sometimes we can’t wait for customers to come to us. We have to show them what they are missing, and go from there.”

We asked for one answer, and got two. Perhaps that’s how RippleHire go about things, and perhaps that’s exactly why they are so successful.