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Why #SaaSx4 Product Teardown is for all SaaS startups

Whether you’re an early stage, late stage or VC funded startup (pun intended). There is one thing all of us struggle with always and that is ‘Growth’. So, how to keep this repeatable in constantly changing market dynamics?

Acommunity is a great place to learn, unlearn and grow at the pace you never imagined. For SaaS startups in India(bravery award goes to you), SaaSx is a community built by thought leaders for other builders to nail this process in and out. #SaaSx4 was a tech event that provided SaaS founders the opportunity to network and share product insights with other SaaS founders.

How we got into #SaaSx4 Product Teardown..

Widely is an early stage SaaS startup, we’re right now hustling, learning and trying to respond to the amazing traction we’re receiving. While all this was happening, we got a call from Prasanna K to attend SaaSx, that was the first time we heard about Product Teardown and horror stories around it. Imagine your product being grilled down to levels in front of the whole community.

It did seem scary, but we said YES!

Because very often when something scares you, it’s the very thing worth doing.

So, what were our asks?

Initially they were simple, to validate our thought process, marketing channels, and product roadmap, but subsequent calls and discussions with Avlesh Singh, CEO, WebEngage, Bharath Balasubramanian, Director of Design, Freshdesk, and Shekhar Kirani, Accel Partners, made us realize it is an opportunity to deep dive and their critical remarks made us rethink over pricing to customer onboarding.

#SaaSx4 Event Day: The D-Day

This was my first SaaSx & by the end of the day, I was left amused and happy to become part of the SaaSx community. It is by SaaS founders for SaaS founders, hence, the learning becomes easier & straight cut out for us.

UnConference, Product teardown & Fireside chats, also in between meeting Investors (trust me that was not the driving force for anyone joining in there), the energy was to learn and grasp as much as possible. When you hear guys like Girish, Sudhir, & Avlesh talking about their mistakes, you feel confident within.

There comes the Scary Product Teardown

So, how it began?

I was called on the stage, Bharath, Avlesh and Shekhar ready with their inputs. The hall was full of awesome SaaS founders, including those of India’s best SaaS companies, interacting constantly over the good and bad parts of products(Imagine receiving suggestions from the experienced).

Widely Product Introduction
  • Introduction: I went up and gave some context to the audience

Widely helps online businesses to acquire new mobile users, increase conversions and grow user retention with nothing but their existing website by upgrading it into a progressive web app in minutes. Introducing native mobile app features into a website, the plug and play setup with the analytics based dashboard to trigger and customize a Progressive Web App (Mobile Web App).

  • Product teardown segments & Widely’s State

Product teardown was segmented into three sections primarily, Finding Customers, Keeping Customers & What is my market.

  1. Widely’s primary traction channels are SEM and SEO,
  2. Also, our customer segment is a marketer or a product manager.
  3. For us to convert a website visitor into a customer is a simple 2 step process, a signup and then 15 minutes plug & play integration into their website.
Widely Setup Flow

These details were used in teardown, and so teardown was designed in a way to be helpful for others struggling in the similar space.

  • The Teardown began

As an early stage startup with a goal to reach the global audience, we’ve identified search and ads as great ways to go ahead. So, exactly this was the first step, Widely’s SEM at one side works great, SEO is where our keywords don’t match. That was eye opening to me as sometimes while building and selling the product we tend to forget most basic things.

Then came product landing, with few ifs and buts, here we saw our moments of wows & learning, in the form of better representation.

Product Landing Page

Bharath pointed out key areas we need to improve upon during Sign up too, although this is something we’re constantly working upon and rigorously followed making website our best marketing person, but exactly the point, improvements to become sticky for the set of next 100 customers should be the focus.

The Wow Moment

The final step to Setup!

So, out of all signups we get every day there are many who don’t integrate (A huge loss to our marketing efforts), there could be many reasons, we’re constantly using visualizations and website conversion optimization tools to see where our funnel breaks and fix those parts immediately. For us to come at something which we saw next would have taken some next 100 signups we believe,

Current State of Setup Flow using Widely
The whole process

The next step of teardown focused on our claim of no coding required, though that is not required but looking at the setup it feels a coder is required, and for us targeting product managers this doesn’t look related at all.

Suggestions by Bharath for the setup screen

Sign Up After Landing
Easy UX

The designs in themselves speak louder than words and hence, something we loved instantly, apart from great design and user experience inputs. We got great insights from,

Girish — Website landing page heading should initially focus on technicalities, then functionalities and later on the larger message when the brand is big enough.

Ex: Coca-Cola — open happiness.

Ex: We say ‘Upgrade into a Progressive Web App’, this is good for us initially as an early stage startup, segmented only for the crowd who knows.

Shekhar — Asking telephone numbers from our initial customers is a great way to increase conversions rapidly, our signup should have that one field.

The last but not the least, Product Positioning and Market

All the above insights make no sense when we don’t know our market. I did talk about the positioning of early stage startups and how we did it for widely.

As there is this increasing need of brands to be accessible by all mobile users, we get queries from enterprises, brands, services/agencies related to our solution, we’ve been on and off on where to focus and what we should leave. This also made us change our pricing many times.

The last part of teardown was a relief when the founders sitting there, Shekhar & Avlesh made us believe you don’t need to stay at one, until you get where the best market is. All this made sense, as then we could generate higher revenue by understanding our value add to the users.

At the same time, we received Girish’s point of view on growing freemium way and onboard as many users as we can,

So here is the beauty of SaaSx, you get everything, now it is going to be a tough fight within the team to choose a way.

Key takeaways..

An enthralling experience in Widely’s product journey, SaaSx, and product teardown happened to be extremely helpful. In my opinion, teardown is a great way to eliminate blockers and move faster against competition and changing market.

I’d like to end by a note I sent out to Avlesh, Shekhar, Bharat & Avinash.

Thank you note SaaSx

Definitely I’m in awe and I’d like to mention Product Teardown of Omnify & Product Teardown of 99Tests, these were our fellow product teardown startups, they have explained the process extensively to explore further. Hope it helps more SaaS startups growing and hustling.

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

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Team 99tests At #SaaSx4 Product Teardown

#SaaSx4 is a leading tech event that provides Saas founders the opportunity to network and share product insights. Product Teardown session was one of the key highlights of this year’s event held in Chennai on 17th March, 2017. The goal was to help SaaS entrepreneurs gain actionable product insights. Entries were invited from innovative SaaS products from all over the country.

When we, at 99tests got the first email invite for the Product Teardown from iSPIRT, our first thought was that, this was about UX and we might not be a good fit for the event. We then had a conversation with Prasanna who explained to us that product tear down is about Business Discovery of our Product and retention of customers. Basically, a session that will enable to understand your product from a customer’s perspective. This piqued our interest in the #SaaSx4


A panel of established SaaS founders and mentors that included Avlesh Singh, CEO, WebEngage, Bharath Balasubramanian, Director of Design, Freshdesk, and Shekhar Kirani, Accel Partners, were assigned the task of selecting the final products for the event. The first screening call with the panel was very interesting. It was a 30 minute call where we got the chance to showcase what 99tests does, and how it works. We answered questions about revenue, SaaS model, our core value proposition, and how we delivered our services.

With only three slots left, the pressure was on us as we waited for the results. After a few days, we finally got the message that 99tests was selected in the SaaSx4 Product Teardown. We were pretty excited and looking forward to all feedback on our product from eminent members of the Indian startup ecosystem. We admit that we were also a little nervous that our mistakes would be out in the open!

Key Takeaways From The Event

Software products chosen for the product tear down session were critically analysed by a team of expert SaaS mentors and SaaS founders. The aim was to understand the customer onboarding process, retention and discovery of business opportunities for the products. These insights helps entrepreneurs in answering key market questions like:

  • Who is my customer?
  • Who could have been my customer?
  • What characteristics of my customer makes them like my product?
  • If I am successful, who will come after me?

Our Experience At The Product Teardown

In the next call that we had a call with Bharath, Director of design, Freshdesk, we explained how 99tests actually works. The key questions were around customer on-boarding, understanding how much of our service was self-serve and how much was fully managed.

On D-day, we were a little nervous, wondering what aspect of our product would be showcased to a room full of SaaS founders. The first teardown by the first team did give us a hint into what would come next.

What We Learnt About Our Product

The first part of the teardown was about seeing how the search keywords map to our target personas. It was good to see one of the teardown companies having website that perfectly matched the keywords that they were targeting. In our case, we learnt that on our page, the content did not contain enough matching keywords that a customer would type in. This makes it difficult for them to find us.

The next feedback was on our homepage. We found that it was using too much of testing concepts. Moreover the Home page did not clearly highlight the functional message of Automation Testing by Crowd, our USP.

The last set of feedback was on customer on boarding. Here, we learned that our product asked too many questions that assumed that our customers would know a lot about testing. This is causing a lower sign up to the demo page. It was also great to learn that we needed focus in terms of countries, based on how customers would perceive our product. The most useful feedback that we got, is that product owners were not clear on how much time they needed to spend with 99tests on a daily and weekly basis. although they could get started in only 30 minutes.

Overall, we got the feedback, that we do have a fantastic product, but the messaging was not yet sophisticated enough for an international audience and could be improved. 99tests is very thankful to iSpirit, Bharath from Freshdesk, Avlesh from WebEngage and Shekar from Accel for the opportunity to be a part of the Product Teardown at SaaSx4. The feedback and insights we gained from the SaaSx4 Product Teardown was very helpful in identifying areas that needed improvement and also in gaining new ideas to make our products great.

Guest Post by Praveen Singh, 99tests.com

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Deep And Wide Product Adoption Are Key To Reducing SaaS Churn

Who am I writing for? SaaS product managers and founders.

We recently had someone move on from Wingify (the company that owns VWO and Pushcrew). After they were gone, admin was doing a review of our software expenses and found a line-item for Popcorn Metrics with no clear owner. The person who had left was the only one using it, and no one knew why, or what it was used for.

Removing Popcorn is as easy as removing a code snippet, so I reached out to them asking to cancel.

This is the problem when your product hasn’t been adopted widely or deeply. You might have sold the product in that a customer is paying for it, but you haven’t truly sold it until they’re using it extensively.

Width

By width, I mean that multiple hierarchies across departments in a company are using the product. Best examples would be:

  • communication platforms (Skype, Gmail)
  • HR & performance management software
  • document editing and management (Google Docs, Office 365)

If a product solves the basic needs of any workforce, it’s likely to be adopted widely. The more widely a product is used, the more value it’s providing and consequently, it’s difficult to remove.

Depth

By depth, I mean the level of dependence on a product. For me, defining features of deep adoption are:

  • the product supports a key process, eg. the company’s sales process runs on a CRM, performance & payroll management is done on an HR software, or technical support delivered through support software
  • the product has important data that companies don’t want to lose
  • the product enables, or connects with multiple other data silos to make 1 + 1 = 3
  • the product is mouldable to support the company’s workflow

Placing the products we use at VWO on a depth/width graph, here’s what I came up with:

Explaining the graph above:

  • Recruiterbox comes in the middle-ish because it’s mostly used by hiring managers and HR. It is used across all departments, but not across enough hierarchies. And the data it contains isn’t as valuable… mostly resumes/profiles of candidates who weren’t a fit.
  • Canva, the easy graphic design software for non-designers, which I put to show a product that has minimal width or depth. It mostly comes up when designers aren’t available. Going by Canva’s initial positioning, they might get slightly deeper adoption if they are able to tap into social media marketing teams.
  • Clearbit, connected to Salesforce and used for lead enrichment. We hardly ever login to the product, but I suspect we’ll keep using it until the contract renewal date rolls by and they raise prices. That’s when we’ll probably look to BuiltWith or something similar. I’ve included Clearbit to show a product that takes care of a small but important part of a business process, and as long as it does its job and the business process remains the same, it’ll keep being used.
  • I’ve put Namely in the middle because even though it is HR and performance management software, at Wingify we haven’t adopted it fully. I notice that everyone uses it, but only for a few days every quarter during appraisal time. It could have deeper adoption if we had big-company kinda HR processes, but since we don’t, maybe Namely is suited to big companies with more sophisticated HR policies and management?
  • Salesforce is probably the best example of a product completely owning a process, owning data, deep integrations and being used extensively by executives. I admire them for this, though I will never recommend them to anyone because of the painful experience it is dealing with the company and the product.

More thoughts

Not all products can have wide and deep adoption, but that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. If a product can capture even one important process for a team, the likelihood of churn reduces significantly. For example, Canva could if it targeted teams that need quick, good-looking images without relying on a graphic designer. First thing comes to my mind is social media teams in B2C businesses who are running campaigns all the time. Or take Recruiterbox from above, not widely or deeply adopted in the org but does a damn good job of streamlining the recruiting process.

Products tend to have higher a lifetime if they have some of the following properties:

  • Are the “source of truth” in an org for important process/data
  • Are in the core departments of finance, HR, sales, manufacturing/production/product and R&D
  • Are used by practitioners and executives for different purposes
  • Some or all parts of a team’s KPIs are reported by the product
  • Are heavily used by senior management
  • They are close to the value provided & realized by a company, like product, R&D or revenue/profits

Salespeople are trained to hack the selling process by reaching the highest decision maker as soon as possible. No doubt this still works, but in a world where hierarchies are flattening, practitioners who’re going to be actually using the product are becoming important factors in the buying process. Making a quick sale without adequate follow-up support from customer success managers leaves you at a risk of being upended after the contract period.

The Customer Success function can have a massive impact on increasing lifetime value if they understand that their goal in the first few months is to increase width and depth of adoption of the product, and they’re incentivized towards those goals.

Based off my Canva point, I realize that when you’re creating a product, it’s important to think of the process and data that you’re going to own, and for the teams + hierarchies that you’re going to own them. And this needs product + human effort.

I’m surprised why products don’t integrate more deeply with email. There’s this entire hullabaloo about AI and chatbots right now (early 2017). I’d instead focus energies on much a deeper sync with Gmail and Outlook. After all, that’s where the majority of decision makers spend their time.

Guest Post by Siddharth Deswal, Lead Marketing at VWO. This post originally appeared on http://deswal.org/saas/to-reduce-churn-your-saas-needs-to-be-adopted-widely-and-deeply/

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What we learned from the Product Teardown of Omnify at #SaaSx4

A week or so before #SaaSx4, I woke up with an early morning call from Prasanna (SaaSx Volunteer) to tell me that they have nominated Omnify for the Product Teardown. Honestly, I jumped out of bed and my first reaction was like Ohh sh*t.. Not the Teardown!!

But then he said that they will select three companies out of the few nominated. So I agreed for a Hangout call hoping that we will not be selected.

So, Why did we do it?

I think, as a startup it’s good to go through “Make & Break” cycles which helps building a stronger product. Incidentally, that week we were sort of doing an internal teardown of our product and our conversion funnel. After the first hangout call with Avlesh, Shekhar and Bharath, I realised that it is indeed a great opportunity to get external feedback as we will be making a lot of effort this year on Product Design and Marketing.

Also, best part about the SaaSx community is the positive environment where no one is judging others and it’s all about learning from each others mistakes. Guys like Girish, Avlesh and Sudhir openly talk about the mistakes and learnings so others can benefit.

So, in the same SaaSx spirit we decided to participate in the Teardown for the benefit of us and anyone who can learn from our mistakes.

About Omnify (to give some context)

Omnify helps small businesses to Sell and Schedule their services online through One, Simple Platform. We have built comprehensive scheduling for Group Classes, Appointments, Events, Camps, etc. which can be easily sold as Packages and Subscriptions through Omnify.

Goal of the Teardown

I had multiple calls with Avlesh, Shekhar and Bharath before the teardown. The purpose of the calls were to have better understanding about Omnify and see how they can help.

After some discussion, we decided to find gaps in our conversion funnel; right from discovery, signup, onboarding to setup.

Discovery

Our major channel for getting customers is Search. Hence this part was focussed on our SEO. Interestingly, we got a thumbs up for this part as we have already put some work into our SEO. There is so much more to do and scaling our Top of the funnel is currently our Top Priority as pointed out by both Shekhar & Avlesh.

The best part about Search is that it shows “Intent” which has a direct impact on your conversion. For SaaS startups (especially at early stages and targeting global market) this should be the most important channel for customer acquisition. Hence, my advice for anyone who has not yet worked on their SEO is to atleast get the basic On-Page optimisation, Major Keywords and URL structuring right. It is a time consuming project but it will be worth your time and effort.

Here is an old, but a simple post on this by Moz.

In case you have no clue where to start, just hire an SEO expert from UpWork for a $100 project to do an SEO Audit of your website.

Action Plan: We are now spending a lot of time on Keyword optimization, Improving on page optimization and figuring out ways to churn good quality content at scale. Will share our learnings with some data once we can.

Website

Next target for the Teardown was our Website (https://www.getomnify.com/)

Bharath did a great job pointing out few key issues in our website that may be affecting our conversion and also did a comparative analysis with our competitor’s website who has probably spent millions of $$ to optimise it for the target audience.

Although we had spent quite a lot of effort on our website as it the most important part of our company and our doorway to customers across the world.

Although, there is a lot of room for improvement but here are a few things that we already worked on.

Trust

  1. Good Design breeds trust.
  2. Simple things like SSL certificate (https) improves trust in your website.
  3. Transparency — About us page with photos and social profiles of the team.

Mobile Responsive

A big chunk of the website visitors are probably coming through mobile, so it’s super important that the website looks and works great on any mobile device.

Speed

Today, everyone has very little patience. So if it takes more than a few seconds to load a page we might lose potential customers. Simple things like image compression, lazy loading, etc can be very effective to improve speed drastically.

Visual Content

People scroll through the pages in seconds, it’s super important to have enough visual content like images and videos to grab their attention.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Our messaging on the landing page should be more targeted and simple to understand.
  2. Improve Trust on our website through customer review, case studies, etc.
  3. Learn from our competitors on targeting.
  4. Content language should be optimised for the biggest market (US in our case).
  5. We should have country specific landing pages for at least our major markets.

Action Plan: We are doing a sprint soon to optimize our landing pages with more targeted content and adding customer reviews + case studies.

We are also going to try Zarget (https://zarget.com) to experiment and improve our website conversions. Thanks for the dinner Arvind! 🍺

Customer Onboarding

This is where we already knew our funnel is broken and although we have already been working on it, we got good critical feedback and suggestions from Bharath.

Signup

Interestingly, this is one of the most ignored pages for most startups (including us).

Even small things here can increase drop-off or conversion.

In our case, I think we got away with small ux issues as Omnify is a business product and the value of a Free trial outweighs the effort of the signup. But, needless to say we are making it simpler.

Onboarding & Setup

To give more context, our current onboarding process is a wizard that appears on Home page of the Dashboard for new users and stays there until completed. One major issue with this is that once you navigate away from Home there is very little hand-holding.

This is how it works currently:

  1. Setup Business: Basic information and contact details.
  2. Setup Services: Comprehensive and a little time consuming.
  3. Website: Auto-created but valuable only after a few services are setup.
  4. Attach Payment Gateway: Connect Stripe or Paypal.
  5. Add/Import Clients

Design Suggestions

Bharath suggested a simple 2 step onboarding process for Omnify.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Our Onboarding needs more customer hand holding.
  2. Setup needs to be simpler or create Website with Sample Services for Instant Gratification.
  3. Auto-fill wherever we can.

Action Plan:

We believe in fast iteration and are already redesigning our onboarding and setup. I will share a detailed post on our Onboarding redesign later but for now, here is a Sneak peak on what we are upto (Still iterating):

Market and Positioning

Last part of the Teardown was about understanding the target market and our positioning.

There were 3 points that were discussed.

Understanding our Target Customer

Omnify can be used by anyone who provide services and scheduling is an important part of their business. Most prominent segments are fitness, wellness, sports, kids activities and recreation.

Horizontal or Vertical SaaS

This was one of the hot topics at SaaSx and I am hoping for more content on this from the community.

In case of Omnify, we started as a vertical SaaS product but went through a customer discovery process thanks to Inbound Marketing and pivoted to Horizontal SaaS.

Since we didn’t have control over who was signing up, we thought we might as well turn it into an experiment to understand demand and gaps in the market. After working with hundreds of customers across different categories and 50+ countries, we learnt that we are solving a core problem for a wide set of customers who behave very similarly.

Hence, our view of the market changed to horizontal.

Target Geography

While it’s extremely important to choose the right geography if outbound is the core channel for customer acquisition, businesses like ours who run on Inbound Marketing have an advantage of understanding different geographys at due to lower cost. Saying that, we are currently picking up few key geographies with better volume and conversion rates to put our efforts on.

Key Take-away:

Leveraging existing market segments is easier than creating new segments.

Last words..

Overall, product teardown was a great experience and we would recommend other startups to do both, internal and external teardown of your products regularly. It’s a great tool to find gaps in the product so we can iterate fast and grow faster.

Big shout to Avinash, Avlesh, Bharath, and Shekhar for putting so much effort into the Product Teardown.. taking calls at 8am on a Sunday, spending time going through our product demos, etc. Thanks guys, it was super helpful.

Also, it is truly a pleasure being part of such an amazing community of Entrepreneurs and I would like to thank everyone who worked hard for making SaaSx possible. Already looking forward to the next one.

Keep Hustling..

Manik Mehta

Founder & CEO, Omnify Inc.

Say hi @manik_me

P.S. It was the first SaaSx for my Co-founder, Kabandi and she can’t stop talking about it 🙂

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Key Take Aways from #SaaSx4

The SaaSx conference took place in Chennai on March 17th. Most top companies from the Indian SaaS space were part of the conference. I had made some notes for myself which I think might be useful for other startups as well. Many of these thoughts are not my own and may not express my views.

On marketing

– Tailor your marketing material based on your audience. For example, if you are targeting product managers, then using a term like “White-labelled Mobile Apps” is too technical. You can use something like “Tailored Mobile Apps”.
– Trust is everything
— Showing trust is extremely important. Use testimonials (with name, company name, designation, domain) to build trust.
— Having a local number increases trust among companies. Everyone prefers a company which is present locally. It’s fine if it redirects to your local number to begin with.
— Adding names & photos of your real support team helps build credibility.
– Use a keyword planner to see what kind of traffic your website is attracting. If the keywords are incorrect, then you need to tweak your copy as the traffic you are receiving is not relevant (read: will not convert).
– On your landing page, you can have three kinds of copy: Emotional, Functional, Technical. Established brands like Coca Cola can use an emotional copy like “Taste The Feeling”. For everyone else, a functional copy (i.e. talking about the benefits) along with a little technical information is the way to go. An example would be “Enable your users to collaborate with each other” or “Increase your user engagement” would be the functional copy and “Add voice, video and text chat to your site/app” or “Add chat using our simple APIs” would be the technical copy.
– If you want to target a country like USA, then your UI/UX must be absolutely perfect. If you are unable to achieve that, then targeting a country like India is easier, where UI/UX is not priority.
— For example, in a signup form, you cannot have “Create your account” as the title of the form and “Create my account” as the signup button. When a company is spending hundreds of dollars on your product, they look consistency.
– In order to be effective for enterprise sales, your complete pricing should not be available on your website. In other words, you need to have a logical separation. For example, you can have a plan which says “Enterprise” and add a “Contact Us For Pricing”. The features of this “Enterprise” plan can be those which are infrequently asked for by SMBs.
– Look at avenues like trade shows and sponsoring events. They may not provide direct leads but help in building brand value.
– Focus on a single country instead of multiple countries. You may continue to receive sales from different countries but your marketing (copy, ads, campaigns etc.) should ideally target a single country in order to be effective.
– Using media friendly terms in copy is essential. For example, Salesforce did a press release saying they launched “Lightening UI” instead of “New UI”.
– If your marketing is designed for product managers, then your on-boarding should be for product managers as well. For example, you cannot ask for API keys during signup to a product manager. Instead you can show a “Send this information to your developer” link so that a dev can input any additional information required.

On product

– How many of us are riding a wave? Are you in a good or hard market? Tweak your product to ride the wave. It’s easier. For example, if AI/NLP is in, tweak your product so that it is in line with the latest trends.
– B2B categories are very difficult to establish. Marketing automation and communication & collaboration are a new wave in B2B. Creating a new category altogether is extremely tough. It’s easier to target an existing budget.
– Even breadcrumbs are worth millions in certain categories. For example, if you build a product similar to Salesforce, then the market is big enough such that the customers that don’t end up using Salesforce will still be significant.
– The customer should be asking why they should buy your specific product versus why buy any product at all. For example, they should ask why buy a Panasonic washing machine versus why buy a washing machine. Educating customer about a whole new category is hard. It’s easier to just compete at a “mine vs yours” level.
– Customers only care for features (including price) while media cares for difference. If you have a similar product to the competitor, you can easily sell it as long as you have a better price. Media cares only if your product is different from your competitors.
– To decide what feature to add next, think if the feature will bring 2X the amount of sales. Adding customer requests is also important as you do not want to disregard your existing audience’s requests. However, do not let customers drive the road map; it is important that you stay true to your vision.

On sales

– If you plan to build an Indian sales team, it is advisable to make sure that your marketing does all the heavy lifting. Consultative selling over the phone from India is very tough. The sales team should effectively assist and not consult.
– It is easier to have local partners for non-English speaking countries. If you plan to sell to non-English speaking countries, your website/product should also be multi-lingual.
– For enterprise sales, it is better to have a separate deals team.
– A pre-sales team can be used for giving demos and technical information.
– A separate reseller team can be built if required.
– Building a customer happiness team is essential. If you are not invested in your customer’s success, you will not grow, if they do not grow.

On hiring

– Hire people who look up to their role. Do not hire people who think of it as a favour to join. Invest in freshers if you cannot afford great talent.
– For sales, it is better to hire engineers. Many fresh engineering graduates are not interested in programming and would prefer an allied job. But that gives them enough technical knowledge so it’s easy for them to handle technical products.
– For customer support, it’s easy to hire from BPOs. Most do not like BPOs due to timings and they already have the required training and empathy to speak to customers.
– If you hire a great designer to build landing pages, he will leave. You need to give employees the work they deserve. If you cannot keep them interested, they will not stay for long.
– Each team member should have a “key to respect”. In other words, every member must have a reason why his peers should respect him.
– Scale your engineering team before your scale your sales team. Otherwise, your engineering team will not be able to handle the load.

On doing business (and everything else)

– It’s very important to have a closed feedback loop between sales, marketing & product. The product team should have the capability to say no to sales & marketing (e.g. for adding X feature for a client).
– The focus of marketing should be to increase leads, the focus of sales should be to increase sales.
– If a feature request fits the overall roadmap of the product, only then undertake it. Avoid any customization which do not help the product grow. In the short term these deals may be tempting, but in the long run, they will have a negative factor on the growth of your product. You may lose business because of this, but that’s part of building a product company.
– Prioritization is a key role of product manager. He is bombarded by customer requests, investor requests etc. He needs to be able to take a call as to what fits in the product and what doesn’t.
– Celebrate each and every team. For example, your design team cannot celebrate sales/revenue. You should find something that they can celebrate, say UI. Celebrate craftsmanship in every department.
– Managers have a responsibility to understand business goals and then encourage activities which are aligned with the business goals.
– Squads give you agility and tribes give you wisdom. Squad works on a single goal. Tribe consists of members who have specialised knowledge. For example, QA, design & SEM are tribes. Putting a design team member in a development team is of no value. He should be together with other designers. A squad can move fast. A tribe is a shared resource. If product knowledge is not so important, then the member should be part of tribe. But dedicated people should be part of a tribe if the product is big. Tribe has no priority w.r.t. products. As much as possible put people in squads. Tribal members in squad can go for weekly knowledge sharing sessions.
– It’s important to focus on the problem. People in your organization will constantly have issues (with each other). It’s important that you solve the problem instead of taking sides.

On the Indian landscape

– Check out the Indian SaaS survey by iSpirt to see how your business is doing in comparison to others.
– There are approximately 750 SaaS startups in India.
– It typically takes 2–4 years for $1 million in ARR

On tools being used

– Full Contact
– Enterpriseready.io
– Prospect.io
– Hunter.io
– 99tests
– Nerdydata

Guest Post by Anant Garg, CometChat

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My first SaaS experience in Chennai #SaaSx4

My first SaaS experience and boy, amazing amount of insights and learning on what it takes to build successful SAAS companies based in India. Below are some of my notes and what I learned and observed from the entire day.

What a way to spend close to 18 hrs amidst some of the most inspiring and motivated people – Entrepreneurs and Founders .

We went in as a startup that has its product at a MVP stage figuring out a Product Market Fit.

SAASx in its 4th edition is curated and managed and executed by a bunch of volunteers with a passion to  “GIVE Back” to the ecosystem and enable budding entrepreneurs learn quickly from success SAAS entrepreneurs and thrive in the industry.

We had a SAASx bus from BLR to CHENNAI, and the journey started off by a 3 hrs introduction session of each startup and their asks from the fellow founders, this enabled starting conversations with the right people. This was held at Minjar Cloud Solutions office.

We reached Chennai the next day. The event was held at Intercontinental resort and hotel at ECR Road Chennai, had the leading SAAS founders and entrepreneurs from all over the country attend the event. The audience had over 150+ founders and investors all eager to learn and share their views on what is working and whats not working in today’s digital world.

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Some of the key themes of discussion

Money  on the table – Take it! – As a bootstrapped startup if there is a  market or customer opportunity to make money in alignment to your product, do take it as its critical for cashflow

Focus vs Diversion – Several early stage founders had this dilemma on retaining focus on their key market  & product vs diversifying to other allied sectors (where they need only a portion of their product with customisation etc), Stay focussed and learn to say NO. A key difference between gaining momentum and problem discovery. If the pond has enough fish, then continue to FISH there before you venture to a new pond. Think of Winning big in One Market and/or Sub-Market.

Co-Create products with one of your large clients. Sell First build later in such cases. Find that 1 client who believes in you and willing to wait

Niche Vs Generic – Figure out what you are building. Are you in a niche market bottom up or top down. Very important if in niche market to win big and having the ability to integrate with generic solutions to sustain and win through collaboration. Amit from Interview Mocha had some very interesting points to share and seek answers to their growth plans

Product is either Revenue Focuses or Operations Focused – Understanding this helps in messaging, positioning, pricing etc

Teardown’s

  • Website Communication – Home page – Get the messaging right for the Customer to get your message in 3 seconds.
  • Have right Call to action
  • Simplify the Signup Process
  • Avoid Tech Jargons, Keywords for Non-Tech users
  • Do basic search on Competitors website
  • Have SEO Keyword analysis to enable the revenant content to be ranked higher
  • Website homepage messages should always be an Emotional Appeal message or Functional message
  • Use tools like Hotjar/Zarget to understand where the users fall off
  • If you are collecting email id, use Frrole/Full Contact to get mobile numbers for follow up calls

Some of the key questions a startup should find answers

  • Who is my customer
  • Who could have been my customer
  • What characteristics of my customer makes them like my product
  • If Im successful, who will come after me
  • How do i Protect my business

Selling into US from India

Arun from Zarget shared his experience of selling in the US regions from India from 2003 to 2016. Few anecdotes and examples of how a single sale of USD 1.2Mn to a Customer gain 3x as the the customer kept changing jobs and kept buying the same product each – Advantage of Enterprise Sales

Transforming from SMB to Enterprises

Zenoti focused initiatively in India market and later pivoted to the US (still selling in India). Now they sell their Wellness management SAAS Platform to large wellness brands in US.

Founder doing Sales and getting all the basics right before scaling sales. US sales very different than India Sales as customers were mature to know what they want and open to experiment.

In the initial days, the founders visited several high brand wellness centres and used their services to understand the service levels, customer satisfaction levels, customer support, how data is managed, loyalty programs etc, which enabled them to understand the market, customer pain pants, workflows and more.

When reaching out to clients, they used these data points based on their experiences to the CEO’s and pitched Zenoti’s solution to solve those challenges. Invariably the CEOs would respond within a few hrs of receiving this email.

Zenith’s solution was a fully integrated system and the most expensive solution in the market. Yet the customers would buy as the competitor Mindbody would be suited up only for non-enterprises

Enterprise sales timeline 3-4 months, while data migration from existing systems was overlooked and often ran into challenges

Data migration strategy key for enterprise SAAS products and have them thought and defined over as it impacts the sales and pricing models.

Market triumphs everything

Amazing journey share by Srikrishna-Hotline on how they built a a product that was way ahead of its time and how HOPE (every entrepreneurs best friend) kept them alive which finally resulted in their acquisition by Freshdesk.

Girish from Freshdesk chipped in with some key insights and shared a key view point – In a commodity market, Innovate and create differentiator

Fresh sales is now pitched against Salesforce. For a customer evaluating solutions, its very important for the Product to be in the “Consideration Set”, else you would just loose out. Once you pitch yourself against the competitor you become a relevant alternate. Breadcrumbs of Salesforce is also worth $100mn!

Lessons Learnt

This one was one of the most passionate and an honest experience share by a CEO of a fast growing company, a startup that has made great progress and still believes that they have a long way to go and have just scratched the surface

  1. Always hire people who look up to their role
  2. Focus on the problem and not on person
  3. Prioritisation is the most important job of a Product Manager
  4. Feature based Team/Squads for executing the prioritisation
  5. Global Eagle List – Master List of priorities
  6. Unless its someone else’s job, it never gets done
  7. Everyone on the team should hold a “Key to Respect” for others to respond in an organization
  8. Sailing Sales without Scaling Engineering
  9. Squads give agility, Tribes give wisdom
  10. Making Biryani – The art of celebrating great Craftsmanship in every department, team that aligns with business goals
  11. Getting a leader to settle down
  12. Finally – Which Cow, which Ditch – Give time for a new leader to settle down and help them manage one cow and one ditch at a time

ZERO-ONE mn($) in 9 months – Synup

  • Lessons learnt from 1st 18 months critical for the next 9 months to achieve $1Mn
  • Smart use of SEO against the Leader
  • Usage of google knowledge box for SEO as well
  • Figure out the threshold to HIRE Sales Rep against the leads you have to manage your business
  • Synup figured out the magic number and helped in their Sales

Almost everyone was living their dream or were about to start their journey in building world class SaaS companies from India. Single agenda on everyones mind was How to Sell, to US/International, How to Grow from where they were, How to Scale, How to manage the org in scale

The evening ended up with a great dinner beach side sponsored by Zarget.

A day well spent at Chennai, Heart and mind goes out to all those involved in making the entire Saas Ecosystem Thrive through knowledge and embracing the new!

Cheers to these few and many more who worked hard  – Avlesh, Shekhar, Krish, Suresh S, Girish M, Prasanna, Avinash, Arvind P, Rajan, Kesava, Pritesh and many more behind the scenes

Guest Blog post by Bimlesh Gundurao, Aguai Solutions

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Key Metrics for Startups on Marketing, Sales and Customer Success #SaaSx

Most of the metrics we are going to see here will sound obvious but I’ve seen even some matured companies do not actively follow it. In a startup company discipline becomes very crucial, keeping things simple and measurable helps a lot. There are more complex metrics like Customer Acquisition cost (CAC), Lifetime value of the customer (LTV), Average revenue per customer (ARPA) etc, but I feel it’s better to have basics correct before complicating it too much.

Marketing Metric

  • Lead Quota
  • Cost of Lead Acquisition

Lead Quota: One of the common mistakes I’ve done in early stages is not setting up a lead quota for the digital marketing team. We simply allocated a monthly budget and not actively measured exactly how many leads we have generate for that month. The goal of marketing team should be increasing the number of leads (quality) we receive every month. If we can measure just this one metric then the other metrics become irrelevant from a top management perspective, example volume of visitors to the website.  The number of visitors to the site really doesn’t matter, it’s the quality of conversion that matters. This will push the marketing guy to look deep into finding new channels, tuning the existing channels, A/B testing the landing pages etc to increase the lead quota.

Cost of Lead Acquisition, this becomes the second part. How much money are we spending each month to acquire X number of leads? In an ideal situation, we wanted to generate a maximum number of leads from the minimum amount spend. Once you have a baseline number say for example 200 leads cost $20k, the cost of lead acquisition is $100 then we can push on optimizing it and bringing the expense down or increase the budget and hence the lead quota. One of the major problems in the digital marketing is if you are not careful it’s literally throwing money in the fire. PPC platforms like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook etc will all just observe it as much as you throw at them.

  • Sales Quota

Sales Quota – also termed as revenue generated per SDR (sales development rep). This will hugely vary from startup to startup, most likely in the range of $2k-$3k MRR (monthly recurring revenue) in a typical SaaS startup. It’s important to balance out the number of leads required for the SDR to achieve the assigned sales quota. The number of leads that can be handled by an SDR will be industry specific, in a B2B long tail sales pipeline typically a 1 or 2 quality lead per day is a good number, whereas in a short sales cycle SaaS startups it can go up to 8 per day. Don’t go beyond this, it’s practically impossible for the SDR to handle since you also need to consider the backlog follow-ups that add up quickly.

Customer Success Metric

  • Expansion Revenue
  • Churns

Once your SaaS startup gets enough traction and you have a handful of customers, it’s important to set up a Customer Success team to make sure the existing customers are happy and address their concerns as soon as possible before they become unhappy and start looking for alternate solutions. The startup founder should give as much importance to customer success as marketing and sales team. I’ve seen companies focusing purely on acquiring new customers and not paying attention to churns, if you think the amount of effort gone into acquiring those customers, it’s become vital to preserve them. It’s 5 times harder to acquire a new customer.

Expansion Revenue is the revenue that gets generated from existing customers. Ex: If you are help desk product,  the expansion revenue is the additional revenue generated by existing customer either buying more agents or moving all of their agents to higher tiers.  This could be one rewarding metric for CS team.

Churns: The goal of the customer success team should be predominantly reducing the churns, and any expansion revenue they generate is a bonus. The culture of the team shouldn’t be set for increasing the revenue, rather it should be set for pure customer happiness and reduce the churns.

You can monitor the expansion revenue and churns as metrics for customer success teams.

Guest Post by Saravana Kumar, Biztalk360 from SaaSx4

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SaaS: Where are you in this 2×2?

Some SaaS ventures lead to category leadership while some lead to imaginary frozen quadrants. Here’s a little 2X2 to assess where you are in your journey to SaaS nirvana. When amazing products are sold in amazing ways, it produces the almost mystical flywheel effect.

Let’s dissect this.

Red: Weak Product and a Weak/Average Sales Team

This is a highly incremental quadrant where a single provider may be serving the exact needs of a handful of customers. It’s an equilibrium that doesn’t last too long. I’ll leave this quadrant at that.

This is a highly incremental quadrant where a single provider may be serving the exact needs of a handful of customers. It’s an equilibrium that doesn’t last too long. I’ll leave this quadrant at that.

Blue: Weak Product and a Strong Sales Team

When people say “that company is sales driven” this is what they are referring to. Founders of companies in this quadrant have a knack of story-telling and projecting a product market fit before a product is actually ready. What happens next is catastrophic. Sales drives the company’s culture, narrative and product building. Both product and engineering go into a wild-balancing act of fixing the problems while trying to add features in a near random fashion.

It is unsustainable. It bloats customer service and support and pre-sales. Lack of a strong product causes politicking and confusion and populism in every department, which leads to relationship-driven rather than value-proposition driven outcomes. Unless a startup iterates on product rapidly or brings in a disciplined and creative leader, there’s a significant risk of revenues plateauing at $5m-$10m mark.

So why is it blue? Because it is fairly cushioned for a while though sales > everything is bad karma.

Yellow: Strong Product and a Weak/Average Sales Team

This quadrant probably causes hackers amongst us the most heartburn. A lot of strong products start with nobody focused on sales. They continue to write amazing code, design amazing screens, and setup amazing data pipelines, but they just don’t know how to position, craft a story people remember, distinguish themselves from 99 other guys who may have had the same idea. Many product founders suck at sales and often hires the first person who blinks.

Even for successful startups, this can be a transient stage, but successful founders realize their mistakes and then quickly hire a sales leader and move to the next quadrant. The good news if you’re yellow is that just like in real life, you can cross the traffic light before too much damage happens.

Green: Strong Product and Strong Sales Team

This is jazz improvisation zone. You can have a strong product and sales culture. It all starts with respect for both and it certainly involves finding the right talent that can craft what really works uniquely for you.

That’s why very few founders get there. A scalable sales model is crucial. A product alone can take you so far. For every Dheeraj Pandey ringing the IPO bell, there’s a Sudheesh Nair driving the quota home. For every Jyoti Bansal getting acquired at $3.7bn, there’s a Dali Rajic digging into sales capacity, and for every Jason Lemkin, there’s a Brendon Cassidy. When phenomenal founders and product builders pair up with their sales counterparts, that accomplish that sight to behold – a startup on a flywheel across the sky.

In each of these cases, the sales counterparts were able to hit their targets, because of a product which was able to either create demand or was superior to incumbents. If there was a product market fit, based on the narrative, the product scaled to bring in a perpetual stream of renewals and sources of new revenue.

Hopping in the 2×2

I hope you’ve found your color by this point. So how do we transition from a shitty part of the quadrant to an awesome one?

If you are Blue or Yellow, scale to Green quick. Here are some things that increase your chances in a hop

  • Listen to early feedback from customers and employees and suppliers. Setup key feedback loops
  • Iterate the product every week, every day, every hour. Continuous Beta. A living element.
  • Once you cross $10 million, press the gas pedal. Go. Go. Go.

Good luck and let me know if you think of additional colors.

Thanks to Leena for flywheeling this post! Reproduced from Indus Khaitan’s blog

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How Indian millennials live, work and play

“Normal is not something to aspire to; it is something to get away from”

In today’s age, almost all of you would have heard about the generation of millennials. Most of the people tend to identify them based on their years of birth, but frankly speaking it is their lifestyle that speaks much louder. Well, are you ready to go on a short tour de reconnaissance? Let me help you in decoding and simplifying how do these people (especially in India) live, work and play. But before we delve into that trinity, it is pertinent to reflect on their background and how did they evolve.

The count of Indian millennials in total would come out to be around 0.6 billion (depending on whichever approach that you take for calculating), so the question of not taking notice goes out of the window! There are a lot of factors (both internal and external) that have shaped the millennials into who they are –

They were the first ones to get personal laptops as they matured into their school days and entered college campuses

Owning personal electronic gadgets allowed them to experience and perceive the peers of other geographies via TV series like Friends, The Big Bang Theory and more.

Social networking seems to come naturally to them but in actuality, they have lived through the full spectrum starting from the basic ones like Orkut to the more mature ones like Facebook and now the downright crazy ones like Snapchat.

Living

Thanks to the low cost android smartphone boom and the perennial 3G/4G connections in the Indian urban economy, literally every one of them owns one and can’t imagine a moment without it.

This has perpetuated all parts of their daily life – from tuning the body clock to phone alarms, to booking the first cab to office, to ordering their lunches online, to casually browsing through shopping portals, to listening to music all day long, to finally ending the day with of chatting and posting.

And no surprises, that in order to save cost (primary reason), 82% of them still live in their parents’ home.

Working

Since their life is social, why should work be any different? And that is why we see almost of the organizations adopting the tools like Slack, Workspace, Skype and more.

Not only that, but most of the people are working completely on these networks alone! Their business would shut down if that social platform goes for a toss.

Another interesting fact is that they are hungry and broke a lot. And I really mean a lot. For many of the younger ones, foregoing food for a fancy purchase seems like a no-brainer affirmative. Since they have a lifestyle to portray to the society and the aspirations are pretty high, so short term urges like sleep are easily forgotten.

Playing

Since embracing the screen age, the problem of finding ‘friends’ is pretty much over. It is a different thing altogether that they may not even know the name of the person living next door.

This has also changed the spending and purchasing behavior. Around 55% of them never feel the need to own a vehicle, and in fact are counting on technology to replace the whole notion of owning a car. This goes in line with the point that earlier, young college kids (US culture) mostly bought a car in order to show off to their friends, and now those friends are mostly virtual or online.

How Indian Millennials live & spend

If you carefully observe the trends and how the age is evolving, you can see that we have now clearly entered the age of social commerce. An age where shopping and spending money is not a solitary activity (albeit in a few utility cases), but it becomes a collaborative affair. An age where peer pressure determines to a lot of extent, where we eat, drink, party, travel or live. An age where social network and payments mingle and become indistinguishable for most of the cases.

The wheels are in motion, and like we all know, the evolution cannot stop or reverse. It is bound to happen and it will be a mixture of aspects that you may come to appreciate and some that you may not.

P.S. Disclosure, I am a millennial myself, building a company in the domain of ‘Social P2P Payments’ for this generation of Indian millennials. 

Cheers, Rohit Taneja

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Indian E-commerce: Moving on from GMV

It has been a nervous month for the professionals working for internet and e-commerce companies in India. Shutdowns and layoffs have been the flavour of the month, and business models have come under scrutiny. The effects of recent events at Stayzilla and Snapdeal have not been limited to job losses only. Weighed down by these developments in the sector, Rakuten, the Japanese e-tailer, has puts its India plans on the back-burner.

Stayzilla, an alternate and homestay aggregator, has shut operations. Investors including Nexus Venture Partners and Matrix Partners have invested USD 33 million across multiple rounds in the company. The founders have promised to bounce back ‘with a different business model’.

Snapdeal, announced that it will lay-off about 600 employees from the company including from its Vulcan (logistics) and Freecharge (payments) business divisions. The company has so far raised USD 1.75 billion from investors which include global heavyweights such as Softbank, Kalaari Capital, Temasek, Alibaba Group and eBay. However, Snapdeal reportedly is left with less than enough cash to survive the next 12 months. The merger talks with Paytm, facilitated by the common investor Alibaba, are not murmurs anymore and seem to be the logical next step in many ways. A very honest and important insight on the business model emerged from this episode, in which the founders admitted to ‘doing too many things’ and ‘diversifying and starting new projects while we still hadn’t perfected the first or made it profitable’.

The above incidents highlight the fact that Indian e-commerce in 2016 has been significantly different from its ‘glory days’ in 2015. GMV growth in 2016 was flat, even though long term prospects remain intact for now. The year-end sales were also impacted due to the demonetisation exercise carried out by the government. The cash on delivery (CoD) transactions, which account for approximately 50% of total GMV, were severely impacted due to the lack of availability of the new currency notes.

Figure 1: India e-tailing GMV (USD mn)

Source: Company data, IAMAI, Euromonitor, Credit Suisse

AHHHGMV, as the supreme emperor of metrics, has lost its sheen and the challengers which have come to the fore include revenue per customer (function of number of orders per year, value per order and commission), net promoter score (a measure of customer satisfaction) and overall user monetisation (including alternative sources such as advertising as well as new service offerings such as hyperlocal services).

The sustainability of business model is back in focus as a tool to evaluate potential winners and losers. Throwing money at the customers as discounts has not worked out very well for a lot of players. There has been a definite move towards trying to find other means of retaining customers. Going forward, winners are most likely to be companies that provide a differentiated customer experience. An obvious example is Amazon Prime which now brings more personalized experience to the company’s customers. Flipkart (Flipkart Assured) and Snapdeal (Snapdeal Gold) have similar offerings to enhance the stickiness of their customers. While ‘Flipkart Assured’ has seen limited success so far, Amazon Prime, launched at a very attractive price point of INR 499 per year, seems to be more suited for success going forward. Amazon has also clubbed its Netflix challenge – Prime Video offering with Amazon Prime subscription. With these offerings, the companies are trying to take focus away from discounts and towards customisation, quick delivery, consistency and reliability of shopping experience.

The control over supply side is a key element of constructing an enhanced and consistent experience for customers. Logistics is one of most prominent cost items for ecommerce firms, and depending on the category and value of the goods being delivered, could be 10% to 20% of GMV.

In India, the number of Amazon fulfilment centres has grown to 27 by the end of 2016. Shipping from stores is less efficient than from dedicated fulfilment centres. Amazon is looking to replicate their success in North America where they have invested billions in network of fulfilment centres. It has more than 75 such centres in North America, covering 25 US states. This gives Amazon an easy two-day reach over the entire US. Snapdeal has opened 6 logistics hub during 2016, with an estimated investment of USD 300 million. Paytm, flush with a USD 200 million funding from Alibaba, is reportedly firming up plans for a significant strategic investment in a logistics firm to improve its deliveries process.

The key growth drivers for e-commerce in India remain in place. There is a large aspirational population, faster and wider internet access, a never before push on digital payments and an opportunity to further penetrate the offline organised retail market. Nevertheless, the year 2016 has been a reality check. The Indian players have had to review their business models and take some tough calls to focus on sustainability. While the market may continue to be volatile in the short term, with more potential shutdowns and/or consolidation in the offing, we can now be more confident that the firms that do survive will turn profitable soon.

arvind-yadav

This is a guest post by Arvind Yadav,

Principal at Aurum Equity Partners LLP.

 

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Going Digital – A simple framework

Today, everyone talks about going Digital. Renowned strategy and customer experience consulting firms have renewed themselves as Digital Transformation agency. Softskill trainers have become Digital marketing consultants. Large industrial conglomerates have become Digital industrial company by a creating a platform for Digital aficionados to develop custom apps.

New roles such as Chief Digital Office, Data scientist, Experience designer, Digital evangelist and many more. What are these roles to do with? Where should I start my Digital journey?

Here is a very simple framework!

Going Digital

Remember!

To keep up the Brand promise,always deliver

Speed (Adopt Agile & DevOps)

Accuracy & Authenticity ( Create Cognitive / Sentient Systems)

Codify ‘Trust’

Courtesy

1. Book titled ‘Disrupting Digital Business’ – Ray ‘R’ Wang
2. Book titled ‘Leading Digital’ – Didier Bonnet
3. eBook titled ‘Digitally Remastered’ – CA Technologies

Guest Post by R Ragavendra Prasath, a volunteer for iSPIRT. An avid reader, wannabe entrepreneur and Digital enthusiast…! He tweets @ragavendra1

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“Vertical SaaS” Deep Dive #PlaybookRT in Bangalore

If I were a Cobbler it would be my pride..

The best of all Cobblers to be..
If I were a Tinker, no Tinker beside
Should mend an old kettle like me..


The above poem defines vertical SaaS to a T!

When I got an invite from iSPIRT that there was going to be a roundtable on Vertical SaaS, I jumped from my chair with joy!

First of all I discovered only recently via iSPIRT that there’s a buzzing ecosystem of SaaS startups in India! Not SaaS enabled Marketplaces, but SaaS products that are built worldclass and sell to the world.

So when I discovered that within that little ecosystem, we can go further narrow into sharing knowledge specific to vertical SaaS, I could have given iSPIRT a bear hug!

So last Saturday, in the cosy n energetic office of Hotelogix, few of us vertical SaaS folks gathered around Sudheer Koneru – cofounder of Zenoti.

As with the iSPIRT roundtables this one was also a treasure-trove of experiences shared, founder dilemmas discussed, the unavoidable pain points bantered about.

WhatsApp Image 2017-03-05 at 12.36.07 PM

The 2 main takeaways from Sudheer’s session were

1) Narrow Focus

So when you are starting a business you want everyone to buy your product right? Especially if your product is an Online Software that needs least feet-on-street selling.
 
Now you have chosen a vertical as your karmabhoomi, at least in that vertical, you want everyone, right? In case of Sudheer who builds a kickass product that makes wellness service/spa owners’ life easy, one would expect him to want every Spa, Massage Parlor and Beauty Parlor to use his product. There are at least 5 Beauty Parlors in any 1KM radius of any metro/tier-1 city!
 
The answer is a resounding No. Sudheer chose to focus further narrow on that – upon Customers whose pain point is the most acute. Those are the multiple outlet chains. Now that Zenoti has an established market, it is exploring expanding the customer segment.
 
Apart from the customer segment Zenoti also sets an example in going narrow on geography. Sudheer started Zenoti from Seattle, worked on winning the Seattle market and then looking elsewhere.
 
Reminded me very much how we limited ADDA to Whitefield in Bangalore before spreading wide to rest of India.

2) Empathy

Sudheer highlighted how employees in a StartUp may miss out on the Empathy factor in our dealings with the Customer.
 
To the Cofounder of a Vertical SaaS product Empathy would come naturally. If you are a cobbler all you care about are the feet of customers. When your customer mentions a stitch was sticking out in the shoe, you grimace, you know how annoying it must be to the Customer. Not only you know how it feels you makes sure your Customer knows that you feel her pain. And then of course you fix it
 
But, how do you pass on that Empathy to your employees!
 
Interesting inputs flowed in from all present.
 
Overall, this roundtable set us few steps forward  on the path of overall Wellness and Growth!
 
Of course the final credits goes to Natwar who moderated the session like the pro he is!
 
Guest Post by San Banerjee, ApartmentAdda
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You may have a viable product but do you have a viable business?

(Also posted on LinkedIn here).

I’m a big fan of the “Lean startup” movement. Steve Blank, Ash Maurya and others have done amazing work around innovative, startup companies. Two of my most recommended books in this area are The 4 Steps to Epiphany and Running Lean. I strongly recommend every founder read these. Shockingly, most haven’t!

I’ve come across a new breed of founders who are well versed in the lean startup methodology. They understand the importance of customer discovery, a minimum viable product and the power of testing. These are all necessary to build new products.

I submit that they are not sufficient to create a company.

Here’s why.

A feature isn’t a product; a product isn’t a business; a business isn’t a company; a company isn’t an organisation.

Sanjay Anandaram.

Here are four additional questions you need to look into before you startup.

1) Are you talking to the right, representative prospects to validate your idea?

I’m a big believer of getting out in the field and talking to customers. Dozens even 100’s of them. It is an order of magnitude better than sitting in your office and pontificating. However, talking to 200 people does not make your idea into a viable business opportunity.

Are these 200 people truly representative of the prospective customer pool ?

Or, is there a selection bias? Perhaps, these are only tech-savvy customers in urban areas or the upwardly mobile. You need to estimate how big is that addressable market over the couple of years.

Secondly, how critical of a pain point is it for these users?

Is it an ongoing pain or a one an infrequent, perhaps even a one time, problem ? In general technology has made people be more open to saying “yes” more often to new ideas. This is the classic Aspirin vs. Multi-Vitamin question that VCs often talk about. While new ideas area interesting, it often takes years to change customer behaviour unless it a dire problem for a large number of prospective customers.

Don’t try to “invent” demand. Find basic human needs and solve them better, cheaper and faster.

Evan Williams, Co-founder of Twitter.

Market creation is hard for a variety of reasons; one of the primary reasons is that the cost of distribution is continually getting more expensive.

Lastly, would customers pay — ideally with money or at least with their time(e.g. Snapchat, Instagram, Google)?

2) Can you get effective distribution of your product or service ?

Human beings and businesses alike are being bombarded with a breathtaking innovations at a rapid pace. However, the amount of time, energy and money they have is limited.

How will you reach a large number of customers whether they be consumers or businesses? Are there existing channels that you can tap into ? Would they be cost effective?

Every innovator believes that their product will have strong word of mouth, virality and/or some kind of network effects? Well, most don’t. For most ideas, esp. in B2C, I would be very dubious if you don’t have strong, organic user acquisition channels to grow.

3) Are the unit economics viable?

So you have a problem worth solving, a solution that’s differentiated and a shot at distribution. Now comes the question about “Unit economics”. The simplest place to start is with your gross and net margin. How much money would you make per transaction (or unit of engagement)? This is not GMV or Transaction Value but the money that your business makes.

The first step for this is to calculate your Contribution Margin, or the money you make per transaction less your variable costs. For most businesses, variable costs are marketing, payment gateway charges, delivery/logistics charges, etc. This does not account for fixed charges for your employees, server costs, etc.

Is your margin or take rate (%) enough to cover your variable costs per unit?

If you are relying on scale to get your contribution margin positive, you are barking up the wrong tree! You may never get there.

4) Is there a large enough profit pool to tap into?

If you’ve gotten this far, you clearly have a problem, distribution channel and business that’s worthwhile.

Is there a large enough market size and profit pool in the area that you are in?

I don’t know about these new valuation metrics, but remember that the only way to value a business that will always be true is: present value of discounted future cash flows

Prof. Bill Sahlman, HBS, Circa 1999

If you don’t have a large enough profit pool, you may build a company with great unit economics on a large enough market but have little discounted future cash flow (e.g. IRCTC — Indian Railways). See Rajan Anandan’s prescient comments on the Indian B2C e-commerce marketplaces.

Now comes the source of capital to build your business. If you are aiming for something big and ready to scale fast, then I would recommend using venture capital (if you can affirmatively answer all 4 of these questions, give us a shout at Prime Venture Partners). However, VC money may not be appropriate or relevant for your business or your approach. Here’s one representative list of questions to ask yourself before raising VC money.

All of this won’t be empirically figured out on Day 0 of a startup. Of course, you will learn along the journey. However, you won’t be able to change the contours of the market or the availability of profit pools once you are 6–12 months into your startup.

It behooves you to spend a few weeks or even months to think through these questions before you commit yourself to a new company!

Guest Post by Amit Somani. He is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage VC firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. He tweets occassionally @amitsomani and is trying to become an active, late blooming blogger.

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5 reasons why you should NOT attend #SaaSx4

SaaSx4 is here! It is an event for SaaS founders, by SaaS founders.
SaaSx

Generally, event invites to entrepreneurs focus on why it is imperative to network and learn at the event.

SaaSx is different though. Here are 5 reasons why you shouldn’t attend the event!

You hate criticism!  

SaaSx is all about learning. The speakers and mentors at the event will be honest and brutal in the feedback they dish out about your strategies. All their experience combined is out there for you to take! If you won’t be comfortable with that, you should skive it off.

SaaSx2

You like the Status Quo

  • Entrepreneurship is all about taking risks, calculated ones that pay big dividends. There are a lot of people who prefer playing it safe and do make good progress.SaaSx4 is about how ‘Survival is not enough’ and if you do not wish to explore uncharted territories of SaaS entrepreneurship, SaaSx might not be your cup of tea.

SaaSx4 home

You don’t love networking

  • If all you wanted to do was learn, a webinar or even a YouTube video would suffice! Events are all about networking with people and gaining contacts and SaaSx is the best place to meet like-minded entrepreneurs from all over the country.
  • saasx3

Have you figured out your product, have a scalable plan for your company and sorted out your marketing roadblocks? If not, there is a good chance that you can learn a lot from SaaSx4.

You know the whole nine yards!

Some like fun learning, some don’t! If you fall into the later category, you will feel out of place at SaaSx. Here, we believe in infusing a learning opportunity with every opportunity for fun. If you hate the crowd and getting social, you might not fit it at SaaSx.

You don’t like mixing work and fun

Of course, if any of these reasons seem inappropriate you must get on a SaaSy ride to Chennai on the 17th of March to experience SaaSx4 in all its glory!SaaSx4

Guest Post by Arvind Parthiban, Zarget

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Why No One Responds To Your Customer Success Managers

Who am I writing this for: people who are building or managing a Customer Success function.

What’s my key point: your CSMs need to provide value, and for that it’s better they specialize based on industry (or business-type) versus round-robin or regional distribution.

Our experience with the Hubspot CSM

When we bought Hubspot as our marketing automation platform, we were assigned a customer success manager (CSM). Our CSM did everything right; she got the entire marketing team and the CEO on a call, asked us questions like what will make us successful, what does failure with Hubspot look like, what our goals were, and more.

Then she gave us links to all of Hubspot’s training videos and said she’ll get back to us with a preliminary marketing plan that’ll help us get started. So we waited. When we got the plan we realized she didn’t know that we were a SaaS product. Instead, she mistook us for a marketing agency. It could mean that our website at the time did a shitty job, but I invite you to have a look for yourself.

After we corrected her, she got back with some other campaign ideas which were all a variant of:

  1. Create an ebook
  2. Add a bunch of automated, follow-up emails

Unfortunately, there was zero context of SaaS, about our goals, about how a visitor signing up for a 30 day free-trial is better than getting back to us to talk to Sales. We felt like she had very little understanding of who we were, of martech, or of the SaaS business model.

And Hubspot had 24/7 phone support for our plan level, has all their KB and documentation on the web, has all their training videos available in the Academy, so basically we soon had no need for the Customer Success Manager. That’s a good thing, when customers have everything at their disposal that they don’t need a human touch.

But it’s bad because we had zero need of the CSM. We knew she couldn’t really help us with our key goals. We knew getting on a call with her was not going to bring us much value. Soon enough, we just completely ignored her. And it wasn’t her fault. I’d put it on the person who planned that CSMs will be distributed region-wise without getting the ability to gain experience and expertise in any one industry.

Our experience with the Google Adwords rep

Our experience with the Google Adwords rep has been worse. While the Hubspot CSM just checked-in once in a while if everything was okay, the Adwords rep seems intent on getting us to run more campaigns and campaign types, tweak settings to what we know isn’t optimal for us (they might be good for Google though), and make us spend more budget in general.

She’ll make promises about doing some competitor benchmarking and give us best-practice recommendations, or going through our account and telling us how to optimize, but invariably those aren’t relevant and I now actively avoid getting on calls with her. In fact whenever anyone in the company or in my network asks me about talking to their Adwords rep, I discourage them from it.

So what do I think is the solution

Context. To be valuable, the Customer Success Manager needs to know and understand my problems, and be like a consultant who has seen these same problems and solutions at so many different clients that they can give me useful feedback, leading me to trust and respect them. In fact, the best case scenario would be if I pay extra to get a few more hours of their time every month or quarter.

After all, it’s their expertise that’s valuable, not the fact that they’re easily available.

Other reasons why industry based specialization is valuable

  1. Content marketing: Something written by a CSM who is basically an industry expert is extremely valuable and immediately appeals to readers, because in their language, in their suggestions and in their content resonates the voice of the customers.
  2. Product development: I’ll wager that they’ll end up giving more valuable product feedback than even Sales to your PM team because while Sales will close a deal and move on, it’s the CSMs who then work with customers to actually understand and solve their problems.
  3. A new revenue line: CSMs so valuable that customers pay for their time and help. Like the Forresters, Gartners or ZS Associates of the world.

Guest Post by Siddharth Deswal, Lead Marketing at VWO.