A Day at Startup Bridge – Crafting Strategic Partnerships

For our most recent Startup Bridge Salon on May 9th, we had planned for sixty 1-1 strategic partnership meetings between 11 B2B startups and 35+ US corporates. In the weeks leading up to the event and the week post-event, we clocked 115 meetings. Read more to learn about the event & program, and how you can participate or get involved.

I got 10 meetings with decision makers through StartupBridge which is worth 1000 business cards at a trade show. (Raviteja, CEO @Moengage, May 2019)

I made 18 connects out of which 11 are of extremely high value. (Aditya, CEO @FirstHive, May 2019)

History of StartupBridge, M&A/PSP Connect

In 2013-14 the M&A Connect (and Business Exchange BEX) program was established as part of iSPIRT’s Market Catalyst pillar to help solve the problem of extremely low “exits” to “investment” ratio for startups in India. Strong “exits” are healthy markers of a mature startup ecosystem, closing the cycle of capital flows. The program consisted of developing a strong match between the global corporates interested in acquisitions (buy-side) and Indian startups (sell-side).

The initial problem was a discovery issue where Indian startups were not on the radar of these potential acquirers. The M&A connect program activated the India radar, by engaging the buy-side to collect deep virtual mandates, and use it to match and make warm connects with the sell-side, at times hand-holding the connect process to several favorable outcomes.

In this program, we found that our startups were not effective at pitching their story to a potential acquirer. This resulted in a few aborted connections. Additionally, it became clear that the path to an effective M&A lay in facilitating potential strategic partnerships (PSP), which if nurtured has the potential to blossom into investments or acquisitions. Strategic partnerships can surface in the form of technology or GTM/distribution level enfgagement between startups and larger corporates. It can open several doors instantly, making distribution easier, revenue growth faster and gives the startup multiple options.

The M&A Connect program morphed into PSP Connect (Dec 2016 onwards) and the program goals moved from pure M&A to building strategic partnerships. iSPIRT partnered with TiE leaders in Silicon Valley to create the Startup Bridge India initiative (SBI), where many buy-side companies were invited to meet and explore strategic level engagement with highly curated sell-side startups.

The Startup Bridge Approach

Over the last 3 years, the SB team, iSPIRT volunteers and TiE partners, have helped B2B SaaS/enterprise startups refine their air-game, and engage in partnership discussions with high conversion outcomes.

We have connected 45 startups to Fortune 1000 corporations and in the process catalyzed $200M+ of value in terms of PSP (potential strategic partnership), customers and M&A. (Manu Rekhi, Inventus Capital & Startup Bridge)

The key value proposition is to help startups scale revenue by 10x in 2 years through meaningful PSP connects with decision-makers at global Fortune 1000. In turn, these corporations leverage SB to engage with highly curated startups to get access to technology and product gaps.

We are effectively the bridge over the chasm that most startups struggle with, and the potential disruption that many corporates are worried about.

Startup Selection

Did you know that ~50% of Unicorn enterprise startups in the Silicon Valley have an Indian founder or co-founder and had origins or back-offices in India?

Our stringent startup selection process is essential for matching the “Who in India” with the “Who in USA”. Data from the program over the years have shown that the startups which stood to leverage the program effectively and benefited the most were in the ARR range of $500K to $5M. Hence SB’s high-level criteria for inducting B2B enterprise/SaaS startups into the program focus on a) having a global product-market fit, preferably in the US, with b) a strong footprint & revenue (~$1M ARR), and c) bringing deep technology, high revenue potential and/or a high growth momentum.

PSP Wishlist

Karthik & Vinod discuss their key partnerships approach

On the buy-side, it is critical to engage corporates who can enable the 10x growth for these startups. Most startups see partnerships as tactical like with a reseller, system integrator (SI), channel/OEM partner… A strategic partner goes beyond tactical value. A startup can explore and collaborate with a PSP to accelerate its strategy in the emerging focus area. In return, the PSP provides a rocket boost to the startup’s customer acquisition, distribution, branding, and/or a holistic product strategy. Having such a partner can also significantly impact startup valuation.

As a startup, you need to think about a PSP early in the game at the ‘Flop’ and not at the ‘Turn’. You need time to develop a PSP and you need to start early. (Vijay Rayapati, Nutanix, Jul 2018)

If you think of the value chain of your customers, their vendors, integrators, solution & platform providers, a strategic partner may lie above you and your peers, and a level or two above your target customer. Often high growth customers can transform into strategic partners. We help the startups think through their PSP wishlist and make relevant recommendations.

Startup Air Game

Pitching to a PSP company is very different from the pitching to a customer or to an investor. A well-articulated pitch can make a difference between a yawn and a wow! A great startup pitch highlights their Mission, problem statement, their solution & approach, the product/platform overview, key metrics & traction, unit economics of growth & acquisition, testimonials, market size & drivers, and finally their ask.

I thought I knew my pitch and had the details at my fingertips. But then I started getting really valuable, thought-out feedback…I had to focus on pitching to partners, not customers. (Pallav Nadhani, FusionCharts, Dec 2016)

Mentor feedback sessions during the boot camp

It takes 100 hours per startup to articulate their value proposition into a pitch deck of only 10 crisp slides. The initial hours creating & refining their pitch deck with assigned mentors. It is followed by a day-long boot camp before the event where they are grilled through their pitches by the SB team, startup & corporate mentors from the industry, and successful entrepreneurs.The multiple rounds of feedback not only cover their proposition, but also helps weave in the founders’ story, and develop their stage presence, and tonality. Post boot camp they work on the critical feedback with their individual mentors, sometimes even redefining their models & assumptions, and final dry runs with the SB team. The results at every SB event have been astounding 7-min founder pitches amazing every attending corporate and industry leader.

Tapesh and his amazing 7-minute “technicolor” pitch deck

PSP Virtual Mandates & Exclusive Connects

Vamshi 1-1 connects over the roundtable.

We have found that startups require 2 points of support for effective partnership outcomes. First, crafting warm connects based on virtual mandates. Second, prime focus on shepherding the startup-partner conversations on a rolling basis. The unmet need is to have 1-1 connects with the right person on common ground.

I went from first discussion into pricing in one week with a Fortune 10 company. Getting in front of the decision maker is all the difference. As a founder/CEO I can close the sale without the long drawn out sales process. (Sanjoe Jose, CEO @Talview, May 2019)

Bringing PSP companies into our network, we connect with key profiles within the company on their build-buy-partner outlook. This helps in surfacing several latent areas of focus for partnerships, investments or acquisitions. Constructing the virtual mandate out of these relations is key to recommending a high-potential match between the startups and corporates.

All startup bridge sessions and introductions are curated and by invite-only.

Exclusivity made the quality of event and connections even more important. I attended because of an impressive amount of my peers from other Fortune 1000 companies. (Rahul Kamath, VP Oracle, May 2019)

Impact to Date

The stringent startup curation criteria ensure high potential innovation & growth partnerships for corporates. The intense boot camp and mentoring hours help startups develop highly effective positioning in the market. The latent virtual mandates enable effective match-making resulting in extremely relevant growth opportunities for the startups.

If I had to do this on my own each of these connections would have taken 8-12 weeks of effort.

Though these events get significant attention & traction, the goal of the SB program is to deliver these connections on a rolling basis. Here are some stats and anecdotes across the years:

19 out of the 45 startups in the SB cohorts have grown 10x in the past 2 years.
749 connections to decision-makers have been made to-date with >$200M of value creation in terms of partnerships, customer purchases, and M&A.
121 PSP connections from the May 9th event and beyond.
3 exits and 1 more on the way.
Focus on quality and value creation has resulted in consistent high NPS 56-81. This focus on quality is the core principle of this community lead effort and the hallmark of success so far.

What can you do?

Shifting from its pro-bono, volunteer-run orbit, Startup Bridge is transforming into a mature, scalable global program. By broadening the corporate network reach beyond Silicon Valley, and expanding support to startups of Indian origin regardless of domicile, the program is poised to benefit startups and corporates at scale. Upcoming SBDays are being planned for New York, Bay Area, Japan. Startup Bridge continues to be mission-driven, helping fill a critical gap in strategic partnership building for Indian origin startups.

If you are a startup or would like to refer a startup to be part of the SB program please fill the partnership application form. Alternately you could email us at [email protected].

If you are a corporate exec and/or can help us with decision-makers (CXOs, EVP/SVP, GM), or key influencers (VP/Director of Partnerships, Corporate Development) please email us at [email protected].

[This post could not have been possible without inputs from the SB Team & iSPIRT volunteers, Dipty Desai, Jibin Jose, Manu Rekhi, Raju Reddy, Sharad Sharma, Sijo George, Rajan Thiyagarajan, Vrushali Malpekar, and volunteers from the previous Startup Bridge/PSP Connect program. Also, personal thanks to all the volunteers, mentors, and the participating startups for making the SB Salon on May 9th successful.]

Some more photos from the salon

Hitachi giving feedback on Startup Bridge

Moengage at boot camp – stage presence feedback

28/01/201907/02/2019

SaaS 3.0 – Data, Platforms, and the AI/ML gold rush

An impending recession, the AI/ML gold rush, Data as the new oil, SaaS Explosion…
The SaaS landscape is changing rapidly and so are the customer expectations!

18 months ago, I came across a message that India is a premier hub for global B2B SaaS, just like Israel is a hub for cybersecurity. At first, I did not think much of it, but after having interacted with many SaaS founders and observing their painful growth journey, I realized the potential in these words. Yet, a series of market shifts are changing the world order of SaaS putting at test India’s position as a premier hub for SaaS.

TL;DR

The SaaS 3.0 market shifts are changing how global customers perceive value from SaaS products:

Tools which provide higher levels of automation & augmentation are valued more.
Comprehensive solutions in place of single point products is a preference.
Interoperability across the gamut of systems is an expected norm.

Startups, you have to build your new orbit to solve for these evolving needs. First, focus on delivering a 5x increase in customer value through an AI-enabled proposition. Next, build your proprietary data pot of gold, which can also serve as a sustainable moat. Lastly, leverage platforms & partnerships to offer a suite of products and solve comprehensive customer scenarios.

Read more on how the convergence of market shifts are impacting SaaS 3.0.

Quick background

While the SaaS industry began over 2 decades ago, many say it is only now entering the teenage years. Similar to the surge of hormones which recently brought my teenage daughter face-to-face with her first pimple. And she is facing a completely new almost losing battle with creams and home remedies. In the same vein, convergence of several market shifts – technology, data, economics, geopolitics – combined with deep SaaS penetration is evolving the industry to a new era. This rare convergence – like the convergence of the nine realms in Thor Dark World – is also rapidly changing how customers perceive the capability of SaaS products.

Convergence #1 – SaaS penetration is exploding!

I learned from Bala at Techstars India that they received a record number of applications for their first accelerator program. 60% of these were building or ideating some form of B2B SaaS offering. It would seem to justify the message above, that SaaS in India has grown legs, building a true viral movement, replicating momentum. Yet in these large numbers, there is also a substantial ratio of repetitive products to innovations. Repetitive in say building yet another CRM, or mindlessly riding a trend wave such as chatbots. Without an increased pace of innovation beyond our existing successes, we cannot continue to be a premier hub.

In 2018 SaaS continued to be the largest contributor to cloud revenue growth at 17.8% (it was down from 20.2% in 2017). Competition is heating up in all categories of SaaS. 10 years ago, an average SME customer was using 2 apps, now it averages at 16 apps. 5 years ago, a SaaS startup had on average 3 competitors, now a SaaS startups averages at 10 customers right out the door. Many popular SaaS categories are “Red Oceans”. Competing in these areas is typically on the basis of features or price, dimensions which are easy for any competition to catch up on. There is a need for startups to venture deeper into the sea and discover unserved & unmet customer needs in a “Blue Ocean” where they have ample opportunity to fish and build a sustainable moat.

AppZen started with an opportunity to build conversational chatbots for employees, helping them in an enterprise workflows on various aspects like sales & expenses, and several other companies are doing the same. But as they went deeper to understand the customer pains, they were able to identify an unserved need and pivoted, leveraging the same AI technology they had built, to solve for T&E expense auditing. Being a first mover to solve this problem, they are carving out leadership in this underserved space and is one of the fastest growing SaaS startups of 2018.

Convergence #2 – Impending recession in 2019/2020!

On average recessions come every four years and we are currently 9 years from the last recession. The war between the Fed vs the US govt on interest rates, the recent US govt shutdown on a frivolous $B wall, the tariff and trade war between the US and China, are all indicative reasons for an upcoming recession. In such an uncertain economy, customers experience reduced business activity and alter their behavior and preferences:

Customers will become crystal clear about satisfying their core needs versus nice-to-haves.
They will seek high automation tools to help not only cut costs but also to make strategic decisions for an upside.
Many will prefer a suite of tools instead of buying multiple single point products.
They will also slow down POC, investment, partnership activities.

In a way, this is mixed news. Companies often pursue low-cost digital products with SaaS being a natural choice. However, combined with the competitive SaaS landscape, businesses become very selective. To be recession-proof startups must:

Collaborate and partner with other vendors to build a shared view of the larger customer scenarios. Innovate to share (anonymized) data/intelligence.
Partner to deliver a comprehensive solution instead of solving for a gap.
Invest & experiment in building solid AI-enabled automation for improving efficiency and decision making.

E.g. Clearbit’s approach to provide API and allow customers to leverage the value it provides, by integrating with common platforms such as Slack or Gmail which customers frequently use. In this approach they are reducing app switching and embedding the niche usecase into the larger customer workflow environment.

Another e.g. Tact.ai is helping increase sales team efficiency and bring visibility of field data to the leadership team. They are not only solving the core salesforce data entry problem for field sales, but with better data in the system, businesses now get better visibility about sales activities and can take effective strategic decisions.

Convergence #3 – the AI/ML gold rush!

During the dot com & mobile rush in early 2000, I watched many a friend jump ship to build a startup. At that time the web was flush with rich content, but the mobile web was in its early growth and innovative ways to bring web content onto mobile phones were being explored. Automated conversion of HTML to WML was a hot topic. But the ecosystem conditions were not aligned for completely automated WML transformations. Several startups in this space including my friend’s startup shut for such reasons.

More recently in 2016-17 Chatbots were projected to be the next big thing and it too suffered from similar misalignment. Chatbots were the first attempt to bring AI/NLP for customer interaction. However, they lacked the depth of ecosystem conditions to make them successful.

Bots were treated as a panacea for all kinds of customer interactions and were blindly applied to problems. 70% of the 100,000+ bots on Facebook Messenger fail to fulfill simple user requests. This is partly a result of not focusing on one strong area of focus for user interaction.
Bots were implemented with rule-based dialogues, there was no conversational design built into it. NLP is still in its infancy and most bots lacked data to provide meaningful interactions. They were purely a reflection of the level of detail and thought that went into the creation of the bots.

AI/ML, however, is suffering from the “hype” of an “AI/ML hype”. There is a considerable depth within the AI/ML ecosystem iceberg. Amazon, Google, Microsoft…OpenSource are continuously evolving their AI stack with higher and higher fidelity of tools & algorithms. You no longer need fancy degrees to work the AI tools and automate important customer workflows or scenarios.

Yet it is easier said than done. Most startups on the AI journey struggle to get sufficient data to build effective ML models. Further, data privacy has increased the complexity of sharing data, which now resides in distant silos. While internal proprietary data is a rich source of patterns, often times it is incomplete. In such cases, entrepreneurs must innovate, partner, source to build complete data as part of their data collection strategy. A strong data collection strategy allows for a sustainable moat.

AIndra multiplied 7000 stains into 7M data points by splitting into microdata records. DataGen a startup in Israel, is generating fake data to help startups train models. The fake data is close enough to real data that the use is ethical and effective. Startups like Datum are building data marketplaces using blockchain to democratize data access.

As mentioned many of the AI tools are limited in their constraints. Meanwhile, getting familiar with the capabilities and limitations of the necessary tools will help form a strategy path to solving the larger customer scenarios.

Tact.ai faced the constraint by the limitations of the Alexa API. However, instead of building their own NLP they focused on working around the constraints, leveraging Alexa’s phrase based recognition to iteratively build value into their product. During this time, they continue to build a corpus of valuable data which will set them up for high growth when the NLP stack reaches higher fidelity.

Solving for the Hierarchy of Customer Needs

The convergence of SaaS penetration, AI/ML, data & privacy, uncertain economy & global policies… the customer expectations are rising up the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. SaaS 1.0 was all about digital transformation on the cloud. SaaS 2.0 focused on solving problems for the mobile first scenarios. In the SaaS 3.0 era, the customer expectations are moving to the next higher levels. They will:

Prefer comprehensive solutions in place of single point products.
Expect interoperability across the gamut of systems.
Need tools which provide higher levels of automation & augmentation.

For startups who want to fortify their presence in the SaaS 3.0 era :

Begin with a strong AI value proposition in mind, regardless if it is AI-first or AI-second. Articulate the 5x increase in value you can deliver using AI, which wasn’t feasible without AI.
Build your proprietary data pot of gold. And, where necessary augment with external data through strategic partnerships. A strong data lever will enable a sustainable moat.
Leverage platforms & partnerships to offer a suite of products for solving a comprehensive customer scenario.

Remember it is a multi-year journey, Start Now!

I would like to acknowledge Ashish Sinha (NextBigWhat), Bala Girisabala (Techstars India), Manish Singhal (Pi Ventures), Suresh Sambandam (KiSSFlow), and Sharad Sharma (iSPIRT) who helped with data, insights and critical feedback in crafting this writeup. Sheeba Sheikh (Freelance Designer) worked her wonderful illustrations which brought the content to life.

Interesting Reads

Our upcoming entrepreneur roundtables on Platforms, AI Teardowns, Partnerships and more.
Some startups use fake data to train AI.
Democratizing datasets for AI startups.
AI maturity curve for startups.
Build powerful chat experiences by focusing on Data.
Delta-4 model framework to determine whether you are effectively solving an inefficiency.

04/10/201810/10/2018

AI/ML is not Sexy

One would think that the new sexy in the startup capital of the world is self-driving cars, AI/ML… I got news for you! AI/ML (esp. Machine Learning) is not listed in Gartner’s hype cycle for 2018.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hype-Cycle-General.png

This was corroborated on my recent trip to the valley and the US east coast, where I met several investors, founders, corp dev and other partners of the startup community. It was evident that the AI/ML hype which peaked in 2016 & 2017 is no longer considered a buzzword. It is assumed to be table stakes. What you do with AI/ML is something everyone is willing to listen to. Using AI/ML to solve a high-value B2B SaaS problem is Sexy! (Gartner trends for 2018).

As the hype with AI/ML settles down, B2B startups across the globe are discovering the realities of working the AI/ML shifts for SaaS. Many AI tools & frameworks in the tech stack are still evolving and early pioneers are discovering constraints in the stack and creatively building workarounds as they build their products.

Many entrepreneurs are watching from the sidelines the unfolding of the AI/ML hype, wondering on many valid questions like these (and more):

Q: Do I have to stop what we are building and jump onto the AI bandwagon? No.
Q: Are the AI/ML resources mature & stable to build better value products? No, they are still evolving.
Q: Do I need expensive investments in constrained resources? No, not until you have a high-value problem to solve.

B2B SaaS startups go through 2 key struggles. How to find market-fit and survive? And how to stay relevant and grow. And if you don’t evolve or reinvent as the market factors change, there are high chances for an upstart to come by and disrupt you. The iSPIRT entrepreneur playbooks look to help entrepreneurs get clarity on such queries and more. Our goal is to help our startups navigate such market shifts, stay relevant and grow. Our mini roundtables Playing with AI/ML are focused on WhyAI for SaaS discussions in multiple cities. If you or a startup you know may benefit do register

The MiniRT Agenda

Seeding & creating an active discussion on Why AI/ML? What is the higher order value being created? How to identify the value & opportunities to leverage AI? How to get started with an AI playground (if not already running)? How to think of data needs for AI/ML investments, How to address the impact on Product & Business… Insights from these sessions are meant to help refine our approach & readiness to leverage AI/ML for building higher order value products. And in doing so building a vibrant community focused around navigating this shift.

Upcoming PlaybookRTs on AI/ML

6-Oct (Chennai) 10 am – 1 pm – MiniRoundTable on WhyAI for B2B SaaS – Shrikanth Jagannathan, PipeCandy Inc
18-Oct (Bangalore) 6 pm – 8 pm – MiniRoundTable with Dr Viral Shah on AI/ML Tools & discuss your ML/DeepLearning challenges
27-Oct (Delhi/Gurgaon) 2 pm – 6 pm – MiniRoundTable on WhyAI for B2B SaaS, Adarsh Natarajan, CEO & Founder – Aindra Systems
TBD (Bangalore) – MiniRoundTable on WhyAI for B2B SaaS, (based on registered interest)
TBD (Mumbai) – MiniRoundTable on WhyAI for B2B SaaS, (based on registered interest)

The AI+SaaS game has just begun and it is the right time for our hungry entrepreneurs to Aspire for the Gold, on a reasonable level playing field.

Click to Register for the AI/ML Playbooks Track.

Please note: All iSPIRT playbooks are pro-bono, closed room, founder-level, invite-only sessions. The only thing we require is a strong commitment to attend all sessions completely and to come prepared, to be open to learning & unlearning, and to share your context within a trusted environment. All key learnings are public goods & the sessions are governed by the Chatham House Rule.

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hype-Cycle-General.png

Interesting Reads

https://factordaily.com/indian-saas-ai-hurdle/

05/07/201805/07/2018

The Second 20 Confirmed Batch at #SaaSx5

2 days to go for #SaaSx5 and we are reaching our limits for this year. I had missed a few folks in the first batch of 50 announced, so including them along with the next 20+ (in no particular order).

There will be one last list sent out tomorrow of confirmed participants. Really excited about the sessions which are shaping up at #SaaSx5

01/06/201809/06/2018

SaaSy bear SaaSy bear what do you see?

I see 3 shifts critical for me!

Taking a line from the popular Brown Bear children’s book, I believe that our SaaS startups have a real opportunity to leverage some leading shifts in the global SaaS evolution. While there are many areas of change – and none less worthy than the other – I am highlighting 3 shifts for SaaS (tl;dr) which our entrepreneurs can actually work with and help change their orbit:

Market shifts with AI/ML for SaaS to build meaningful product & business differentiation,
Platform Products shift to transform into a multi-product success strategy,
Leveraging Partnerships for strategic growth and value co-creation.

Some background

I joined iSPIRT with a goal to help our community build great global products. I believed (and still do) that many entrepreneurs struggle with the basics of identifying a strong value proposition and build a well thought out product. They need strong support from the community to develop a solid product mindset & culture. My intent was to activate a product thinkers community and program leveraging our lean forward playbooks model.

I had several conversations with community members & mavens on playbooks outcomes and iterating our playbook roundtables for better product thinking. I realized that driving basic product thinking principles required very frequent and deeper engagement with startups. But our playbooks approach model – working in a distributed volunteer/maven driven model – is not set up to activate such an outcome. Through our playbooks model, our mavens had helped startups assimilate best practices on topics like Desk Sales & Marketing, something that was not well understood some years back. This was not a basic topic. The power of our playbook RTs was in bringing the spotlight on gaps & challenges that were underserved but yet highly impactful.

As a product person, I played with how to position our playbooks for our entrepreneur program. I believe our playbooks have always been graduate-level programs and our entrepreneurs are students with an active interest to go deep with these playbooks, build on their basic undergraduate entrepreneurship knowledge, and reach higher levels of growth.

The product thinking and other entrepreneurial skills are still extremely relevant, and I am comforted by the fact that there are many community partners from accelerators like Upekkha to conclaves like NPC and event-workshop formats like ProductGeeks which are investing efforts to build solid product thinking & growth skills.

As the SaaS eco-system evolves, and as previous graduate topics like desk sales & marketing are better understood, we need to build new graduate-level programs which address critical & impactful market gaps but are underserved. We need to help startups with meaningful & rapid orbit shifts over the next 2-3 years.

Discovering 3 Shifts for SaaS

Having come to this understanding I began to explore where our playbooks could continue to be a vibrant graduate-level program and replicate our success from the earlier playbooks. Similar to an entrepreneur’s journey, these three shifts became transparent through the many interactions and explorations of SaaS entrepreneurs.

Market Shift with AI/ML for SaaS

There is no doubt that AI is a tectonic shift. The convergence of big data availability, maturity of algorithms, and affordable cloud AI/ML platforms, has made it easy for SaaS startups to leverage AI/ML. During a chance roundtable learning session on Julia with Dr. Viral Shah & Prof Alan Edelman, it was clear that many entrepreneurs – head down into their growth challenges – were not aware of the realities behind the AI hype. Some thought AI/ML should be explored by their tech team, others felt it required a lot of effort & resources. The real challenge, however, is to discover & develop a significantly higher order AI-enabled value to customers than was feasible 2 years ago. While AI is a technology-driven shift, the implications for finding the right product value and business model are even greater.

As I explored the AI trend I saw a pattern of “gold rush” – build a small feature with rudimentary AI, market your product as an AI product… – making early claims with small changes which do not move the needle. It became clear that a step-by-step pragmatic thinking by our SaaS startups was required to build an AI-based leapfrog value proposition. This could help bring our startups to be at “par” and potentially even leap ahead of our global brethren. Here was an opportunity to create a level playing field, to compete with global players and incumbents alike.

To validate my observations, I did quick small research on SaaS companies outside of India on their approach with AI. I found quite a few startups where AI was already being leveraged intrinsically and others who were still trying to make sense. Investments varied from blogging about the AI trend, branding one as a thought leader, to actually building and delivering a strongly differentiated product proposition. E.g.:

Chargebee rivals Stripe & Recurly, are experimenting with ML for fraud detection and for predicting subscription cancellation.
InstaSafe (cyber security for cloud) rivals Centrify, OneLogin… have been researching AI for authentication & security.
SignEasy rival DocuSign acquired Appuri for integrating ML into their product value.
Nintex and AgilePoint are exploring how engaging ML bots will help understand and improve processes in the BPM space.

There are no successes, yet! Our startups like Eka, Wingify, FreshWorks, WebEngage… have all been experimenting with AI/ML, stumbling and picking themselves up to build & deliver a higher level of value. Some others are setting up an internal playground to explore & experiment. And many others are waiting on the shore unsure of how to board the AI ship.

How do we enable our companies to create new AI playgrounds to analyze, surface, validate and develop higher order customer values & efficiencies? To chart a fruitful journey with AI/ML there are many challenges that need to be solved. And doing it as a group running together has a better chance of success.

The AI+SaaS game has just begun and it is the right time for our hungry entrepreneurs to Aspire for the Gold on a reasonable level playing field.

Shift to Platform Products

As market needs change, the product needs a transform. As new target segments get added different/new product assumptions come into play. In both these scenarios existing products begin to age rapidly and it becomes important for startups to re-invent their product offerings. To deal with such changes startups must experiment and iterate with agility. They require support from a base “internal” platform to allow them to transform from a single product success strategy to scaling with multiple products strategy.

This “internal” base platform – an infrastructure & layout of technology components to interconnect data & horizontal functional layers – would help to build & support multiple business specific problem-solution products (vertical logics). The products created on such a platform provide both independent as well as a combined value proposition for the customers.

Many startups (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Eka, WebEngage…) have undertaken the painful approach of factoring an internal platform to transform their strategy & opportunity. Zoho has been constantly reinventing itself and launching new products on a common platform, some of which are upending incumbent rivals in a very short period of time. WebEngage transformed itself from a “tool” into an open platform product.

“As the dependency on our software grew, customers needed more flexibility to be able to use their data to solve a wide range of business problems…significant difference in the way we build products now. We have unlocked a lot of value by converting ourselves into an open platform and enabling customer data to flow seamlessly across many products.” – Avlesh Singh, WebEngage

The effort to build an internal platform appropriately architected to support growing business needs (many yet unknown) is non-trivial and requires a platform thinking mindset for increased business development. It must be architected to allow rapid co-creation of new & unique product values in collaboration with external or market platforms. This can help the startup be a formidable player in the growing “platform economy”.

Leveraging Potential Strategic Partnerships

A strategic partner offers 2 benefits for startups. First is the obvious ability to supercharge the startup’s GTM strategy with effective distribution & scale. How does one make a strategic partnership? Pitching to a strategic partner is very different from pitching to a customer or investor. PSPs look for something that is working and where they can insert themselves and make the unit economics even better.

“I thought I knew my pitch and had the details at my fingertips. But then I started getting really valuable, thought-out feedback…I had to focus on pitching to partners, not customers.” – Pallav Nadhani, FusionCharts

The second leverage with a partner is the ability to innovate in the overlap of the partner’s products & offerings and the startup’s product values. A good partner is always looking for startups which can co-create a unique value proposition and impact an extremely large customer base.

“…we still have only three four percent market share when it comes to customers. So if we have to participate we have to recognize that we are not gonna be able to do it alone we’re going to have to have a strategy to reach out to the entire marketplace and have a proposition for the entire marketplace…you need to (do it) through partnerships.” – Shikha Sharma, MD Axis Bank

Both these partnership intents if nurtured well can bring deep meaningful relationship which can further transcend scale into a more permanent model (investment, M&A…).

Working with the 3 Shifts of SaaS

While each shift is independent in its own importance, they are also inter-related. E.g. an internal platform can allow a startup to co-create with a partner more effectively. Partners are always interested in differentiated leading-edge values such as what is possible with leveraging AI/ML. Magic is created when a startup leverages an internal platform, to co-create a strong AI-enabled value, in the overlap & gap with potential strategic partners.

And that’s what I see

I see a vibrant eco-system of SaaS startups in India working on creating leading global products. Vibrancy built on top of the basic product thinking skills and catapulted into a new orbit by navigating the 3 shifts.

“Reading market shifts isn’t easy. Neither is making mindset shifts. Startups are made or unmade on their bets on market/mindset shifts. Like stock market bubbles, shifts are fully clear only in hindsight. At iSPIRT, we are working to help entrepreneurs navigate the many overlapping yet critical shifts.” – Sharad Sharma, iSPIRT

Through our roundtables, we have selected six startups as the first running group cohort for our AI/ML for SaaS playbooks (Acebot, Artoo, FusionCharts, InstaSafe, LegalDesk & SignEasy).

If you are hungry and ready to explore these uncharted shifts, we are bringing these new playbooks tracks for you.

Please let us know your interest by filling out this form.

Also, if you are interested in volunteering for our playbook tracks, we can really use your support! There is a lot to be done to structure and build the playbook tracks and the upcoming SaaSx5 for these shifts for SaaS. Please use the same form to indicate your support.

Ending this note with a sense of beginning, I believe that our startups have a real opportunity to lead instead of fast-follow, create originals instead of clones. They need help to do this as a running group instead of a solo contestant. It is with this mission – bring our startups at par on the global arena – that I am excited to support the ProductNation.

I would like to acknowledge critical insights from Avlesh Singh (WebEngage), Manav Garg (Eka), Shekhar Kirani (Accel Partners), Sharad Sharma (iSPIRT). Also am thankful for the support from our mavens, volunteers & founders who helped with my research, set up the roundtables, and draft my perspective with active conversations on this topic: Ankit Singh (Wibmo/MyPoolin), Anukriti Chaudhari (iSPIRT), Arvi Krishnaswamy (GetCloudCherry), Ganesh Suryanarayanan (Tata GTIO), Deepa Bachu (Pensaar), Deepak Vincchi (JuliaComputing), Karthik KS (iSPIRT), Manish Singhal (Pi Ventures), Nishith Rastogi (Locus.sh), Pallav Nadhani (FusionCharts), Praveen Hari (iSPIRT), Rakesh Mondal (RakeshMondal.in), Ravindra Krishnappa (Acebot.ai), Sandeep Todi (Remitr), Shrikanth Jangannathan (PipeCandy), Sunil Rao (Lightspeed), Tathagat Varma (ChinaSoft), Titash Neogi (Seivelogic), and many other volunteers & founders.

All images are credited to Rakesh Mondal

18/05/201825/05/2018

India SaaS Survey 2017 – Results

Welcome to the Third edition of the India SaaS Survey by DCS Advisory, India’s largest software investment banking advisory practice, in partnership with iSPIRT Foundation.

What is the survey about?

The survey aims to anonymously benchmark Indian SaaS companies to better understand the unique challenges they face and the unique advantages they leverage, creating a single reference point updated annually.

What’s New?

In-line with our goal of constantly improving the quality of our survey we have added two new sections this year, one covering Inside Sales and the other looking at Product Market Fit. Our interactions with SaaS founders and various other stakeholders in the ecosystem clearly identified these topics as the most valuable for the founders of our young ecosystem. We have also added new analyses to previous sections which we hope will further enrich the survey.

Decoding the Results

This year, we have received responses from 59 respondents with an aggregate ARR of ~$175Mn, including some of the most prominent SaaS companies operating in India. We sincerely thank all participants for their time and effort in completing this survey and look forward to ever-increasing participation every edition going forward.

India SaaS Survey Results 2017 in partnership with DCS Advisory from ProductNation.in

Some key takeaways from the survey are:

Our typical (median) respondent this year is at $0.75M in ARR, likely to be Bangalore or Chennai headquartered (58%) and was founded in 2014 or later
Whereas last year we noted a ‘paucity of machine focused SaaS’, this year infrastructure SaaS made it into the top 3 amongst horizontal focus areas (and took in >50% of horizontal funding)
Overall our respondents grew faster than last year and continue to be bullish on the future, looking towards North America for growth
Inside sales is now the most popular sales channel in our ecosystem but, based on our data, does not yet conclusively outperform the more established FoS channel. In the years to come, particularly for startups selling overseas, we expect this to change
~50% of our respondents that focus on Inside sales boast a conversion rate of 10-25%. We look forward to tracking this metric in future editions of this survey
92% of our respondents believe they have achieved product market fit, further indicating that it takes a period of 12-24 months with about 3 product releases to get there (see commentary below).
Across the board our respondents typically earn gross margins in the range of 60-70%, with R&D being the largest expense post gross margins
Our typical respondent reported ~10% annual churn (which may be under reported). We believe the customer lifetime is likely somewhere in between at 5-6 years
Over a third of our sample has never raised external capital. Those that have, have raised $1-5Mn (median) at 7.5-10.0x of ARR (median).

Commentary on PMF

Additional correlations which cannot be derived conclusively from the collected data but I still believe to be relevant so highlighting here as a commentary:

Quicker product-market fit seems like a major factor in reaching >$1M ARR .
Startups who reached product-market fit in <1 year are more likely to hit > $1M ARR in < 2 years.
Approximately 50% of startups who took longer to reach PMF have not yet reached $1M ARR.
While Sales & Marketing was clearly listed as the top challenge on the journey to $1M, PMF was more of a challenge for startups who took longer to reach market-fit.

As before, we remain committed to refreshing the survey results on an annual basis. As the India SaaS ecosystem continues to grow, we fully expect to increase overall survey participation, as well as the insights and bench marking data provided. You can also read the results of the previous 2016 SaaS survey and the 2015 Survey results.

Note: Feature image original source – Nick Youngson

25/03/201807/04/2018

Are you ready to Jump with AI/ML? [Updated Session Dates]

[Update 6-Apr] New April Session Dates – Symposium RT is being scheduled on Saturdays for Bangalore & Chennai (21st & 28th April).

Playbooks for Electrifying SaaS and more.

This is what we call the fourth industrial revolution…And companies are really transforming and bringing all these new technologies to connect with their customers in new ways.
– Dreamforce 2017 Keynotes, Marc Benioff.

There is no doubt that Artificial Intelligence (AI), is one of the recent “tectonic” market shifts, creating a change in landscape, market, and opportunity. AI and Machine Learning (ML), now in its eternal spring, has a deep impact on SaaS evolution. While the incumbent companies like Salesforce, Zendesk, Workday, have all invested heavily in AI, also global challengers across many verticals from Sales, BPM, CRM… to Security are focused on building higher order efficiencies and automation through AI/ML.

Over the last few years, our Indian SaaS entrepreneurs trumped the global SaaS growth by leveraging mobile first as there was no baggage of desktop, reduced sales & onboarding cost by perfecting the art of Inside Sales & Inbound Marketing, and efficient after sales support & service by leveraging remote success representatives. Our SaaS Mavens helped disseminate these leverages by sharing the best practices & modeling internal flywheels & experimentations. Many SaaS entrepreneurs successfully assimilated and got a significant boost in their growth journey. These levers are now basic table stakes for most SaaS startups.

AI has no breakthrough success stories, but it is helping create a level playing field – especially for our Indian entrepreneurs – to compete with global players and incumbents alike. Startups willing to make the jump, adapt AI into their products & business models to create meaningful differentiation, will experience a strong wind in their sails to leapfrog over the players who don’t.

Our entrepreneurs have a rare opportunity to be early adopters & global trailblazers.

To take advantage of this our entrepreneurs ask very valid questions.

Q. Why & How should we entrepreneurs navigate this AI market shift?
Q. How should we, given that we are untrained in AI, grapple with the 360° impact of AI on product, business, and technology?
Q. What AI leverage can we develop without requiring expensive investments for constrained resources?

How do we enable our companies to create new AI playgrounds to analyze, surface, validate and develop higher order customer values & efficiencies?

AI Playbooks

Since adapting to the AI “tectonic” shift requires a new paradigm of thinking, we have launched a multi-step playbooks track focused on Playing with AI/ML for Indian entrepreneurs. In line with iSPIRT’s mission, our playbooks purpose is to help market players navigate market shifts. The goal is to bring the practitioner knowledge from AI Mavens – AI-first entrepreneurs who are further ahead in their AI journey – to the AI-hungry startups and help them perfect the model of working with AI, get traction towards a meaningful AI-enhanced value, and become trailblazers for the community. If you are an AI-hungry startup who has either taken the plunge with AI/ML but early in your journey, or are actively looking to leverage AI/ML for your current products, then following the stepped approach below may help:

Step 1 – Attend an AI/ML Symposium RT – Getting prepared with Why AI and How AI. In our first kickoff session on 10-Mar, we had great discussions on AI data maturity, what can drive your AI approach, and more with our AI Mavens and ten startups (read more).

Step 2 – A cohort of startups from step 1 will be taken through multiple AI/ML Playbook RT for How AI – deep dives on topics to help with structuring an internal AI playground, competency with data product management, product positioning & branding, business model shifts, and more.
• These playbook RTs will help the startups carve out a lean playground for rapid experimentation and analysis, with a 3-4 person team of a data PM, & engineers. The team, actively lead by the founder, runs regular sprints (business/product/engineering sprints) of experimentation and validation, and have review touchpoints at intervals with AI-Mavens and the cohort as a running group.
• There is also an optional Tech Training Lab to build internal ML competency with a multi-day workshop with Julia experts.

Four startups have been initially selected for the cohort for the step 2 AI playbook RTs (Acebot, FusionCharts, InstaSafe & LegalDesk).

SaaSx5 – June 2018

We are working to set up the 5th version of our marquee SaaSx to engage with the larger SaaS startup community. We will definitely focus on the impact of AI/ML on SaaS and have workshops based on our momentum of the playbooks track on various topics above. Date & details to be announced shortly.

The AI+SaaS game has just begun and it is the right time for our hungry entrepreneurs to Aspire for the Gold, on a reasonable level playing field.

Click to Nominate or Register a startup for the AI/ML Playbooks Track.

Dates & Venue

~~AI/ML Symposium RT #1 – 10th Mar (Sat) 2p – 5p Done~~ (read more)
AI/ML Symposium RT #2 – 21st Apr (Sat) 11a – 2p @ Bangalore TBD
AI/ML Symposium RT #3– 28th Apr (Sat) 10a – 1p @ Chennai TBD

May the force be with you!

* All iSPIRT playbooks are pro-bono, closed room, founder-level, invite-only sessions. The only thing we require is a strong commitment to attend all sessions completely, to come prepared, to be open to learning & unlearning, and to share your context within a trusted environment. All key learnings are public goods & the sessions are governed by the Chatham House Rule.

Featured image modified from source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jedimentat/7557276684

27/02/201807/04/2018

Playing with the new Electricity – AI/ML Playbook Sessions [March Update]

[Update 29-Mar] New April Session Dates – Symposium RT is being scheduled for Bangalore & Chennai (21st & 28th April).

“Tectonic” market shifts happen every few years creating a change in landscape, market and opportunity. The most recent “tectonic” shift is the emergence of the Artificial Intelligence era. In just the same way electrification in the early 1900s transformed major industries globally, AI, Machine Learning & Deep Learning are poised to transform a multitude of industries, services & products.

It took 100 years from the discovery of electrical generator to electrification of industries. AI is doing this in a span of 70 years (from the time of the Turing Test).

AI/ML has gone through many winters and is now in its eternal spring. It portents a new framework for startups to navigate and evolve from an internet era startup into an AI era startup.

Every new era shift begins with a lot of smoke and hype before it is well understood. iSPIRT ProductNation & Julia are launching a set of AI/ML playbook roundtable & workshop sessions to dispel the hype around AI, and help bring a pragmatic mindset & process change necessary for product startups to leverage AI/ML. We believe AI is not just a technology shift. It is a combination of product, business, and technology shift. Adapting to it requires a new paradigm of thinking to build a viable value strategy. This needs to be done mindfully and in context of the value you offer to the customer, do not rush in with the AI hype.

These multi-step playbooks are for all categories of startups regardless whether they are AI-First or SaaS, and MarTech, FinTech, HealthTech or any other <Domain>Tech category, startups who are looking to deliver a higher order value to their customers by leveraging and applying AI models with their data.

Since AI/ML is still in its early years there aren’t any proven success playbooks. Hence these deep sessions will bring together AI experts, AI Mavens (entrepreneurs who are more ahead in their AI journey), iSPIRT Mavens, and selected startups, to discuss & share their insights, challenges & learnings on the mindset shifts outlined above and best practices adopted. The 2-step playbook roundtable sessions focused on founders (+1 typically CXO) and a hands-on lab workshop are a sequence of:

- AI/ML Symposium RT (step 1) – An invite-only 3 hour mini-symposium playbook with AI/ML experts, first mover AI leaders & Mavens from our startup community and 10-15 invited startups, focusing on Why AI/ML? What was the higher order value being created? How to identify the opportunities to leverage AI? What do you need to get started with AI (if not already running)? Data needs for AI/ML investments… The shared awareness created in this session, combined with the commitment by startups to articulate their AI/ML opportunity, and detail their approach will lead to the next AI/ML roundtable.
- AI/ML Playbook RT (step 2) – Startups at similar AI readiness from the Symposium will be invited for a 5-hour deep-dive roundtable discussion on the AI/ML challenges in the context of the startup domain, effectively going through their AI/ML readiness & approach (a review & teardown). Topics would emerge from the Symposium RT and could cover data collection & modeling strategy, AI transformation algorithms, Business model innovation, Success metrics… This session is restricted to 5-6 startups (having similar AI needs) per roundtable and an AI Maven to facilitate the topics & discussion. Possible outcomes for each startup would be to develop an action plan/checklist for next few months of execution. Additionally, startups can identify a tiger tech team to go to the AI/ML Training Lab to get traction for their checklist…
- AI/ML Training Lab with Julia Sandbox (optional) – A 3+ day workshop intended for the 3-4 person tiger tech teams (CTO, Engg, Data guy, PM…) from each startup. The workshop will help focus on building competency, getting traction & executing implementations related to the checklist developed at the roundtable.

For the first set of these playbooks, we are inviting nominations/applications for startup founders (+CXOs) who are either directly focusing on AI-based opportunity or have started integrating AI/ML as a core strategy for their product growth/success. Please provide your nomination for startups you believe should be part of the first series of the AI/ML playbooks. If you are a startup and interested to be part of this please register below. On final approval, an invite confirmation will be sent via email.

Please submit your nominations here. A registration link will be sent to your nominee.

Dates & Venue for the first of the series:

~~AI/ML Symposium RT #1 – 10th Mar (Sat) 2p – 5p Done~~
AI/ML Symposium RT #2 – 21st Apr (Sat) 11a – 2p @ Bangalore TBD
AI/ML Symposium RT #3– 28th Apr (Sat) 10a – 1p @ Chennai TBD
AI/ML Playbook RT – Apr-TBD (Sat) 11a – 5pm @ Bangalore TBD
AI/ML Training Lab w/ Julia – Apr-TBD @ TBD (Bangalore)

While the sessions are in Chennai/Bangalore, we believe this topic is of emergent interest to startups across the country and would invite all to register.

AI Mavens

Ashwin Ramasamy – PipeCandy
Manish Singhal – pi Ventures
Nishith Rastogi – Locus.sh
Shrikanth Jagannathan – PipeCandy

Cost

All iSPIRT roundtables are pro-bono (read below for how that works)

This series of playbooks is being setup by active support from our Mavens & Volunteers – Ankit Singh, Deepak Vinchhi, Karthik KS, Praveen Hari, Ravindra Krishnappa, Sandeep Todi.

P.S. Some great material for pre-reading

I strongly recommend all to go through many of these.

- AI Startups Market Map – Top 100 AI companies mapped/categorized to domains & functions.
- Classifying AI Companies – https://startupsventurecapital.com/what-it-means-to-be-an-ai-company-45bc7bc55750
- Have Data? Get Intelligence! – Manish Singhal from pi Ventures on why mining data intelligence is critical for all startups.
- This can’t be overemphasized: good AI depends upon good data.
- AI is the new Electricity – Awesome video session by renowned Stanford Prof Andrew Ng (90min full session) – Salient points from both videos summarized below (with a hotlink to the time in the full video):
  - - Most of the current AI is based on Supervised Learning – Input A → Output B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EiKfQYZXc&t=7m17s
    - AI can very easily automate what humans do. It is very difficult for AI to automate what humans cannot do. AI rule of thumb Feasible – Data – Insights (by humans). https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=15m30s
    - Neural nets are no longer analogous to brains. In Supervised learning Input A → Output B, neural nets can make inferences within the A → B path by finding C as a data point between A & B e.g. A → C → B https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=24m19s
    - The positive feedback of the Virtuous cycle of AI DATA → (better) PRODUCT → (more) USERS → (more) DATA… https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=34m46s
    - There is no clear path to an evil (killer) AI or sentient AI. “Worrying about evil AI killer robots today is a little bit like worrying about overpopulation on the planet Mars.” https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=37m19s
    - A more serious issue is the job displacement AI will drive and as leaders promoting/enabling AI we have a responsibility to think about how to help displaced people reskill for new jobs. https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=60m53s.
- A shorter (30min) State of Artificial Intelligence by Andrew Ng:
- What can AI automate? AI rule of thumb for product managers “Look for things a person can do in < 1sec”, AI can automate that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKpuX_yzdYs&t=4m30s
- Great infographic illustration in this tweet https://twitter.com/TessFerrandez/status/953334000311029766
- “How did you go Bankrupt… Gradually and then Suddenly” – Anand Sanwal (cbinsights).

* All iSPIRT playbooks are pro-bono, closed room, founder-level, invite-only sessions. The only thing we require is a strong commitment to attend all sessions completely and to come prepared, to be open to learning & unlearning, and to share your context within a trusted environment. All key learnings are public goods & the sessions are governed by the Chatham House Rule.

* The Julia team is on a social mission to train a large number of people in India to develop grassroot skills and competency with AI & ML.

+Feature image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/gleonhard/34046647175/

03/02/201806/02/2018

Hungry like a Dog, Running like a Cat

Have you seen the recent movie Queen of Katwe? In one of the scenes, when the talented chess prodigy Phiona (a child from the slums) is afraid to play in her first tournament against rich kids from other schools, the coach Robert tells his students a fable.

There was a dog who sees a cat and he thinks would make a very tasty lunch. The dog goes after the cat, chasing it all over the place, but the cat gets away. Why? “I was running for my lunch” the dog says, “but he was running for his life.”

Recently I happened to be part of a couple of invite-only iSPIRT sessions for the Financial Inclusion Challengers Circle (FICC). The FICC sessions are targeted at the FinTech/Banking corporates in India to raise awareness of and navigate the emerging digital revolution for financial products in India. There were 2 levels of sessions, the first was a kickoff for companies that were interested to know more about the market shift, and the second was for companies that were already part of the program and were presenting their approach. Both the sessions were attended by the CEOs & MDs of the payments and banking corporates in India. One of the CEOs said

“ Despite no background in banking, you are speaking about the imminent shift in the bankers language we understand!

The rabid hunger displayed by the CEOs was astonishing. These executives were not only actively listening to the digital transformations happening in India, they absorbed the market shifts (and some also validated them) and the potential impact on their industry. At the end of the first session, these leaders left with a conviction to return with a clear thought process on how they planned to navigate the market shifts and where they needed help.

The second session was even more interesting because these were the MDs who had formed a conviction from an earlier session and had returned a few of weeks later with an extremely articulate approach. The approach was very well structured, backed by good data insights, had a sharp focus on creating a winning product for a well defined narrow yet large size market. I can say that the hunger, the conviction and the metaphor running for life seemed evident as the CEO (and their team) were well prepared and vulnerably open for help.

In both these sessions, I glimpsed the hunger of the dog as well as some of the urgency of the cat with these leaders. Yet I do question whether these companies will be able to bring the urgency as well as the agility of the cat in their established organization and whether they will be able to shed their heavy & arcane investments (tech, model & mindset). It will surely be an extremely uphill battle for them to navigate the gradual and sudden¹ onslaught from the natively digital global invaders entering this market.

However, I believe that successful startups embody both, the rabid hunger of the dog and the agile urgency of the cat. This attitude which easily permeates down into their lean organization provides them an inherent advantage that neither the big Indian companies nor the global digital invaders have. I strongly urge our ProductNation startups, insurgents, to imbibe & manifest this hunger, agility & urgency, to leapfrog over both the incumbents and the invaders, and to be aware and adapt to gradual & sudden market shits, be it FinTech, SaaS or any other category.

While Rashmi Bansal encourages entrepreneurs to Stay Hungry Stay Foolish, I would additionally like to encourage our product startup founders to be Hungry like the Dog and Run like the Cat.

P.S.

¹ A great read on Gradual & Sudden shifts. Do also go through the keynote presentation for the same.

18/01/201818/01/2018

Deep Learning Session with Julia Computing

An evening with Julia

iSPIRT, in association with Julia Computing, is proud to announce an open-session with Prof. Alan Edelman and Dr. Viral Shah, co-creators of Julia, an open source programming language, and co-founders of Julia Computing Inc.

The event will be hosted in Koramangala, Bangalore, on the 22nd of January 2018, from 5 – 7pm. Register now for an invite to the session or to join the live cast (venue details will be shared along with the invite).

What is Julia?

Julia is a modern, high-level, high-performance programming language for numerical computing, data science and AI. With syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments, Julia solves the eternal two language problem, by providing productivity similar to Matlab or R, and performance similar to C for writing mathematical and statistical software. Julia is open source, its research is anchored at MIT since 2009 and is growing very rapidly in its adoption across industries, from Finance to Life Sciences.

Julia … can even be used by those who aren’t programmers by training

Why Should You Care?

Julia’s deep mathematical roots and comprehensive customizability make it very friendly to work with for data scientists, who are generally limited with popular Machine Learning approaches due to their issues with customizability and efficiency.

This 90 minute session will cover a quick introduction to Julia, showcase a few challenging and compute-intensive case studies that Julia has helped solve across domains, and demonstrate how Julia as a framework is used to enable nextgen AI & ML modeling & computing with the AI tools of your choice, including popular libraries like Mocha, MXNet and TensorFlow. This will be a great opportunity to interact with Prof Alan and Dr. Viral on best ways to approach an AI/ML strategy.

About the Speakers:

Prof. Alan Edelman is a Professor of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science and AI at MIT. He is a co-creator of Julia language, and a Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Julia Computing, Inc.

Dr. Viral Shah is a co-creator of Julia language, and a Co-founder and CEO of of Julia Computing, Inc. He has been an important part of Aadhaar team from 2009 to 2014, and has co-authored a book called Rebooting India with Nandan Nilekani.

Julia Computing was founded in 2015 by the creators of the open source Julia language to develop products and provide support for businesses and researchers who use Julia.

Register now for an invite to the session or join the live cast.

Also, Workshop will be streamed on Youtube live for those who can join us virtually. The Invite will be shared on 21st Jan 2018 with the registered participants.

15/11/201715/11/2017

Launching the SaaS Survey 2017 – by SignalHill and iSPIRT

The third edition of the popular India SaaS survey is here.

As always there are 2 parts, Form A, a 100% anonymous survey, and Form B, a distinct & separate form capturing company details for us to share the final report. Please note that forms A & B are kept distinct to protect your privacy. Both together take about 10 minutes to complete. Scroll down to read more about the survey.

image credit – Nick Youngson

What is the survey about?

Every burgeoning ecosystem requires a robust set of benchmarks to compare itself against and reach better levels of performance. Signal Hill and iSPIRT Foundation have been at the forefront of addressing this need for the Indian SaaS ecosystem. The survey aims to anonymously benchmark Indian SaaS companies to better understand the unique challenges they face and the unique advantages they leverage, creating a single reference point updated annually.

If you found the results of the 2016 SaaS survey valuable, please help us make the third version of this survey the most meaningful and relevant. It is a marker of the maturity of our Indian SaaS ecosystem.

What’s New?

What sets this survey apart from the previous two editions is the addition of two new sections to better understand, (a) how SaaS product companies achieve Product-Market Fit and (b) the effective metrics behind successful Inside Sales engines. With the addition of these 2 sections, the survey is poised to provide a complete analysis of the India SaaS advantage covering the product, market, sales & customer support.

Here are the takeaways from the 2015 & 2016 India SaaS Surveys:

2015: Horizontal applications dominated vertical specific ones
2016: Vertical focussed SaaS players occupy majority share of the scaled and funded respondent pie.

2015: 84% of respondents reported looking overseas for growth, ranking North America as their #1 target geography
2016: Unchanged, the US is the most favoured destination for Indian SaaS startups. With that said, whilst companies are building for global markets, the first market for companies to get traction in is typically India.

2015 & 2016: The median CAC payback period (for >$1Mn ARR) is 6-12 months.

Staying Focused And Achieving The Product-Market Fit Are Key To Managing CAC.

It takes 10 minutes to fill the Survey

To participate in the 2017 survey, respondents will need to fill in two simple forms:

Form A, a 100% anonymous survey, 100% multiple choice, and
Form B, a distinct & separate form capturing company details for us to share the final report.

Please note that forms A & B are kept distinct to protect your privacy. Your 10-minute contribution to this effort will be hugely useful in helping the Indian SaaS ecosystem benchmark itself.

Some highlights from the web

ET Tech, 2018 is poised to be the year of Indian SaaS explosion.

An anticipated increase in global spending on information technology over the course of this year will be a big driver for SaaS companies, even after factoring in changes in political climate such as Brexit and churns in global markets.

Tracxn Report for India SaaS (2017)

The growth in SMEs and their increased cloud adoption and government initiatives such as Digital India are also expected to drive the SaaS market. Increasingly mobile workforces are also pushing the adoption of SaaS with startups and companies providing mobile-first applications.

09/11/201709/11/2017

Is your SaaS product ready for GDPR?

What is GDPR you ask? and Why should you care?

Some of you may know about the upcoming rollout in EU of the General Data Protection Regulation. GDPR is a regulation that requires businesses to protect the personal data and privacy of EU citizens for transactions that occur within EU member states. GDPR implementation date is 25 May 2018, but do not get complacent by the date, it requires reasonable effort and time for companies to become ready & compliant. And there are significant penalties for not being compliant.

If you are operating in the EU or if any of your customers are operating in the EU, GDPR applies to you.

Who?

Customers in EU – YES
Employees in EU – YES
Vendors or partners in EU – YES

GDPR Workshop / Webinar

iSPIRT and Microsoft are conducting a GDPR workshop for founders to demystify the GDPR and help understand the steps required towards compliance. This will be a mix of in-person and webinar session (choose when you register).

The session will cover among many topics, clarity on the impact of GDPR, application to organizations in India, additional responsibility about controls, notifications and data governance for managing and tracking personal data, and how organizations need to start thinking about GDPR compliance. There will be presentations by both Legal teams from Microsoft India and the CTO of Microsoft Accelerator.

Apply here using the Registration Form

Date & time: 16-Nov, 3-5pm

In-person Venue: Microsoft Accelerator – JNR City Centre, IBIS Hotel Annexe ,Raja Ram Mohan Roy Road, Bangalore.

Webinar: Link will be sent to those who choose to attend the webinar.

Session Scope:

GDPR & Data Privacy, and its growing importance
A Risk assessment Checklist – Go to https://www.gdprbenchmark.com/ to access a quick, online self-evaluation tool available at no cost to help your organization review its overall level of readiness to comply with the GDPR
Data Privacy Business Scenarios – Technical Demos

Registration

If you are keen to attend the workshop please apply using the Registration Form. Since seats are limited for both in-person and webinar, please register ahead of time. We will confirm with an invite subject to availability. There is no cost to attend. We start sharp at 3 pm.

Strongly recommend going through the Risk Assessment Benchmark Evaluation.

The checklist will help you prep for the workshop and get the most out of it.

Some sources for pre-reading:

What is the GDPR, its requirements and deadlines? – CSO Online

GDPR in the age of SaaS: One SaaS vendor’s journey to compliance …

If You Use SaaS Products, You Need To Prepare For GDPR. Here’s How

Are you ready for the GDPR? A quick, no-cost, readiness self-evaluation tool.

The Global Impact of GDPR on SaaS Providers – Spanning Backup

Home Page of EU GDPR

Coming soon – 2017 SaaS Survey

BTW did you know the new SaaS survey is coming? We are excited to announce that we would be launching the third edition (2017) of the India SaaS Survey in a week from now. This survey is an annual exercise conducted jointly by SignalHill and iSPIRT to gather valuable data for drawing insights which help various stakeholders in the ecosystem understand this space better.

Please click on the following link to access last year’s survey results

Please stay tuned to this space. We will be providing a link to this year’s survey very soon in an upcoming blog post.

Product Teardown Roundtables are coming to your city.

Read more details on the teardown sessions, and preview the teardown format. If interested please apply here (Limited Seats).

07/11/201708/11/2017

Product Teardown explained in 10 minutes (well almost!)

Last Saturday we had an awesome teardown roundtable in Chennai moderated by Suresh (KiSSFLOW) and Bharath (FreshDesk) 🙇🏻.. This was my first direct experience with the teardown. Six companies participated (PickYourTrail, FoodEngine, SysCloud, CustomerLabs, Tagalys, and ManageArtworks). While the entire session of 4+ hours was extremely intense, I want to quickly share with you in 10 minutes (almost) of what happens in a Product Teardown.

Teardowns are coming to your city. Please apply here (Limited Seats).

Product Teardown Framework

The iSPIRT product teardown (esp. for SaaS websites) is primarily structured around 5 key principles outlined below.

Idea 💡

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who is your target user? It is critical to have a clear picture of your target user persona, their problem and how your solution solves their pain point. Essentially establish your problem-solution fit and articulate it for the customer journey from Discovery → Conversion.

Discovery 🔍

How do customers find your product? Is it through google search? Is there a channel they frequent? Have you identified your TAM (total addressable market), SAM (serviceable addressable market) and SOM (serviceable obtainable market)? Use this model to help identify strategies to have your SOM discover your product.

Website 🕸

Your website is the first & most important way to establish trust & relationship with your customer. This is true even if you don’t use inside sales. What is your first message or hook for your target user persona? Are they able to connect your product with their problem and the path through which they discovered your product? Are they able to understand how your product solves their problem, and why they should use it? Once they identify with your message and establish trust & credibility the rest becomes easier.

Sign up 💰

If the customer has understood your solution and found it fit for their needs, the last purchase decision is the cost. As Suresh said

If the cost connects, signup happens!.

WoW! reaction 🌅

Post signup, is there a WoW first experience? Whether it is a try & buy experience or a first purchase onboarding, it is important for customers to experience some instant gratification for the grueling journey they just went through. Believe me, making a purchase decision can be taxing. If you can make this journey pleasant and the final destination fantastic, you have a winning product 🏆.

Do go through the video above and hear Suresh’s simple explanation. And if you like what you hear remember you can apply here for a teardown in your city.

Coming soon – 2017 SaaS Survey

While I still have your attention, we are excited to announce that we would be launching the third edition (2017) of the India SaaS Survey in a week from now. This survey is an annual exercise conducted jointly by SignalHill and iSPIRT to gather valuable data for drawing insights which help various stakeholders in the ecosystem understand this space better.

Please click on the following link to access last year’s survey results

Please stay tuned to this space. We will be providing a link to this year’s survey very soon in an upcoming blog post.

PS

The amount of time & effort Bharath & Suresh provided to review and analyze each product before the actual teardown is simply inspiring. 🙇🏻. to their commitment to the community.

25/10/201709/11/2017

Guiding the customer journey from Discovery → Signup → Onboarding for SaaS Startups

Are you ready for the product teardown roundtable in your city

As Diwali marks a Joyous celebration and heralds a Prosperous New Year for all, we kick off a series of Product Teardown Roundtables to help our SaaS startups prepare for a successful year ahead. This series of PlaybookRT will focus on Guiding the customer journey from Discovery to Signup & Onboarding. The teardowns are being planned across our startup cities in quick succession (see tentative schedule below). We kickoff with a teardown RT in Chennai which will be facilitated by Suresh Sambandan (KiSSFLOW), Bharat Balasubramanian (FreshWorks).

Apply to get your slot here. (Limited seats).

Why are product teardowns important? For Explosive Growth!

Explosive growth is a common pain point for founders across startup stages, be it an early stage startup or a late stage startup. One key attribute to explosive growth is to make your customers market for you. Quoting from the article Six attributes of Explosive Growth Startups,

Nothing parallels word-of-mouth marketing

Why? Because the customers do this work for the startup. If this is to happen for your product it is important for your customers to have a clear-cut understanding of your product proposition, discovering it’s ROI and a WOW no-brainer experience of signing up and using it.

Our product teardown session is focused on exactly this evaluation for your product. Using our community of peers and leading practitioners, you would go through an intense journey and visualize how your potential customer discovers, understands, signs up and connects the product proposition and ROI to their needs. If you do a damn good job about this, you gain a big advantage because you don’t have to work so hard for marketing leads, getting you further on the path to explosive growth.

The teardown model

In this playbook series, we look at how to get your messaging right, and building a website and signup/on-boarding flow that converts with very little human intervention. This roundtable would begin with a deep dive into the company’s Idea, Discovery Process and navigate through the Landing Page, Sign Up, and its “Wow” experience. The format of the playbook is built around quick 10 minute demos, followed by peer-feedback moderated by SAAS founders & experts who have already built successful SAAS businesses.

Past teardowns

You can read some of the previous teardown experiences from the founders who participated.

Registration and Pricing

If you are keen to attend this RoundTable, do let us know by filling in your details here. We will confirm your seat subject to availability. All RoundTables are conducted pro-bono. The only payment you have to make is to provide your undivided attention and active involvement in the process. Playbook-RoundTables are a dialogue and there’s no monologue. None!

Teardown Roundtable Schedule (tentative)

City	Date	Time	Register
Teardown RT in Chennai	4-Nov-2017 (Sat)	11am – 4pm	Register
Teardown RT in Bangalore	11-Nov-2017 (Sat)	11am – 4pm	Register
Teardown RT in Delhi	18-Nov-2017 (Sat)	TBD	Register
Teardown RT in Hyderabad	25-Nov-2017 (Sat)	TBD	Register
Teardown RT in Pune	TBD (Dec)		Register (if interested please apply)
Teardown RT in Mumbai	TBD (Dec)		Register (if interested please apply)

Notes

These are founder invite only events. Date, Time & Venue details will be sent along with the confirmation.
Since there are limited seats, we would request you to kindly apply at the earliest.

Playbook-RoundTable is one of the most sought after community events of iSPIRT. It’s a gathering of 12 like-minded product startups who are beyond the early stage. RoundTables are facilitated by an iSPIRT maven who is an accomplished practitioner of that Round-Table theme.

27/05/201426/05/2014

Thinkflow Software – Keeping up with changing markets

I recently met with Thinkflow founder Praveen Hari and heard first hand their growth story of building a platform capable of powering business applications and services on the cloud. I specifically focused on learning how they accelerated their growth and scale phase, wanting to hear a few stories that could inspire other budding ventures on this path.

Handful of stories below highlight some points as key to the growth strategy they adopted and experienced.

Threat from Big Companies

Early on they realized that several bigger companies in the value chain of BPM applications began to change the game and build a larger product offering by acquiring small product companies in the chain. They researched this trend and began to use their insights of this industry and the trends that big companies were focusing on to pivot into a PaaS company.

Price point

First, they evolved the product offering from BPM to PaaS with better price point and working with smaller vendors / partners to build solutions and package professional services in much shorter timelines than bigger companies could offer.

Customer understanding

Next, having great customer insights was key to working this model. Solving customer’s business problems were paramount. As an example they realized the importance of Single Sign-on as a value point for customers and identified a way to implement this on top of the Microsoft Azure platform, which already supported multiple authentication modes. Using existing technology and simply working the core customer pain point was valued highly and resulted in building customer loyalty.

Multi-tiered approach & Partner with experts

Additionally they realized a need to build solutions that encompassed several domains. As they did not have all the domain knowledge and the best way to address was to partner with experts who had domain knowledge and have them build solutions on top of their platform. They focused on building a platform that could serve direct customers as well as application developers and enterprise developers. One such story began with a partner who realized the power of the platform and inquired whether they could build a workflow in the GRC space (Governance, Risk & Compliance). The partner ended up using 40% of the Thinkflow system to build this application.

Partnering with core platform

Being a Microsoft Preferred Partner definitely helps in continuing to evolve the platform and systems. One day Microsoft partner contact mentioned that there was a need to have a Document Scan & Capture capability that could help several enterprises. They rapidly implemented this functionality on their existing solution. It’s a win-win situation as Microsoft partnership provides them with insight that allows Thinkflow to add capabilities into their platformised workflow and potentially draw new clients.

Follow competition and trends very closely

The triad has continually encouraged teams to explore and record competitive and industry trends. They also attend the open webinars to learn about other products and solutions to discover trend patterns.

In addition to this Thinkflow constantly promotes its solutions and workflows through regular webinars they setup and also other forums. They find great value in events like the PNCamp, CIO meets, Tech50… Their belief is that such forums will help growth and visibility for startup ventures.

Summary of key takeaways

Use data insights for staying on top of market trends. Business environments change faster than you think.
Partner with vendors who can provide solutions at better price points.
Match customer pain points with existing technologies to build lasting solutions. Customer development is critical to building world-class products.
Scale multiple domains with expert partners to offer a plethora of solutions. Open your platforms to other solution vendors.
Form preferred partnership with large base technology vendors. The partnerships can provide great insights and leads to convert.
Promote your technologies & solutions in open forums. Attend other open webinars to research competition, trends and potential partnerships.

History of StartupBridge, M&A/PSP Connect

The Startup Bridge Approach

Startup Selection

PSP Wishlist

Startup Air Game

PSP Virtual Mandates & Exclusive Connects

Impact to Date

What can you do?

TL;DR

Quick background

Convergence #1 – SaaS penetration is exploding!

Convergence #2 – Impending recession in 2019/2020!

Convergence #3 – the AI/ML gold rush!

Solving for the Hierarchy of Customer Needs

Interesting Reads

The MiniRT Agenda

The AI+SaaS game has just begun and it is the right time for our hungry entrepreneurs to Aspire for the Gold, on a reasonable level playing field.

Interesting Reads

I see 3 shifts critical for me!

Some background

Discovering 3 Shifts for SaaS

Market Shift with AI/ML for SaaS

Shift to Platform Products

Leveraging Potential Strategic Partnerships

Working with the 3 Shifts of SaaS

And that’s what I see

What is the survey about?

What’s New?

Decoding the Results

Commentary on PMF

Playbooks for Electrifying SaaS and more.

This is what we call the fourth industrial revolution…And companies are really transforming and bringing all these new technologies to connect with their customers in new ways. – Dreamforce 2017 Keynotes, Marc Benioff.

AI Playbooks

The AI+SaaS game has just begun and it is the right time for our hungry entrepreneurs to Aspire for the Gold, on a reasonable level playing field.

Dates & Venue

It took 100 years from the discovery of electrical generator to electrification of industries. AI is doing this in a span of 70 years (from the time of the Turing Test).

Dates & Venue for the first of the series:

AI Mavens

Cost

P.S. Some great material for pre-reading

There was a dog who sees a cat and he thinks would make a very tasty lunch. The dog goes after the cat, chasing it all over the place, but the cat gets away. Why? “I was running for my lunch” the dog says, “but he was running for his life.”

“ Despite no background in banking, you are speaking about the imminent shift in the bankers language we understand!

P.S.

An evening with Julia

What is Julia?

Why Should You Care?

About the Speakers:

Register now for an invite to the session or join the live cast.

The third edition of the popular India SaaS survey is here.

What is the survey about?

What’s New?

It takes 10 minutes to fill the Survey

Some highlights from the web

What is GDPR you ask? and Why should you care?

Who?

GDPR Workshop / Webinar

Apply here using the Registration Form

Registration

Strongly recommend going through the Risk Assessment Benchmark Evaluation.

Some sources for pre-reading:

Coming soon – 2017 SaaS Survey

Product Teardown Roundtables are coming to your city.

Teardowns are coming to your city. Please apply here (Limited Seats).

Product Teardown Framework

Idea 💡

Discovery 🔍

Website 🕸

Sign up 💰

If the cost connects, signup happens!.

WoW! reaction 🌅

Coming soon – 2017 SaaS Survey

PS

Are you ready for the product teardown roundtable in your city

Apply to get your slot here. (Limited seats).

Why are product teardowns important? For Explosive Growth!

Nothing parallels word-of-mouth marketing

The teardown model

Past teardowns

Registration and Pricing

Teardown Roundtable Schedule (tentative)

This is what we call the fourth industrial revolution…And companies are really transforming and bringing all these new technologies to connect with their customers in new ways.
– Dreamforce 2017 Keynotes, Marc Benioff.