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

16/03/201717/03/2017

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.

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

11/03/201715/03/2017

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

10/03/201710/03/2017

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

GMV, 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.

This is a guest post by Arvind Yadav,

Principal at Aurum Equity Partners LLP.

09/03/201714/03/2017

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

06/03/201712/03/2017

“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.

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

03/03/201712/03/2017

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.

02/03/201702/03/2017

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.

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

13/02/201712/03/2017

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:

Create an ebook
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

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.
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.
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.

09/02/201708/02/2017

How limited access to paid tools as a startup made me realize the need for a community

When I started out as an entrepreneur the journey was fueled by big dreams that were perhaps a bit too daring. It wasn’t smooth sailing and early days were tough. Life in a startup is dotted with challenges that can be overcome only by sacrifice.

Bootstrapping required a lot of restraint – both professionally and personally. Leaving a good-paying job at Zoho and trying to build a company meant cutting a lot of corners. We had to forgo luxuries, back out from family & vacation time, self-inflict pay cuts and moved into an apartment-turned office.

However, the biggest gripe was lack of access to the tools and services we loved. From basic necessities like Mail or CRM solution to universally used tools like Photoshop and Invision seem like a luxury when bootstrapping. As the saying goes ‘Nothing good comes for free’. We were pushed to try and find open-source alternatives. But they were nothing but painful compromises! It hurt us a lot – we couldn’t get things done in the same timescale as we could’ve.

A lot of products, tools and services do have offers but there were none tailor-made for the struggling startups. We had to make do with the free stuff and somehow managed to get our product out! Our product attracted funding and things slowly started to change and got to a better place. However, we still remember the struggles of our startup life!

Here is a small tribute to startups and the struggles we face:

Somewhere amidst the mad rush of shifting to our new office and redesigning our logo, I realized that it’s time I gave back to the startup community. The easiest option was to provide a free trial extension for startups but it rather made sense to initiate a change!

Every solution, product or service a startup requires is most likely what another startup is working on and if we are able to set up a mutual sharing, we can surge ahead as a single startup ecosystem!

This is the idea behind #RespectStartups, powered by Zarget, for the startup community. It is an opportunity for every startup, no matter how small, to make an impact and reach out in a big way. I personally urge every entrepreneur to look at this as an opportune moment to give back to the community.

Share your offers and claim the ones you need at www.respectstartups.com

Voice your opinions about the movement with #RespectStartups on social media.

Let’s say “No!” to startup sacrifices! Let’s march ahead as a startup ecosystem…

Guest Post by Arvind Parthiban, Co-founder & CEO of Zarget. He loves travelling, is a foodie and is crazy about football, a Chelsea fanatic. With 12 years of experience in the SaaS industry, now into startup life.

08/02/201712/03/2017

I am the Product Manager

Of the various hats I have worn all these years – Founder, Sales guy, Deployment Specialist, Level 1 and Level 2 Support, DevOps, Coder, Cheque depositor – I have come to realize I was a Product Manager all along – right from the get go.

Putting a label on what you do is extremely important. It helps you define the job you do, appreciate it, read more on it and helps you improve on that particular skill.

If you are the guy/girl in charge of making the Product among the Founding Team – you are the Product Manager. Say it out aloud – “I am the Product Manager”. The fate of your entire Startup lies in your decisions.

All other designations – CEO, CTO, Director, Co-Founder all are important – for the outside world and your team-mates – but nothing is as critical as the “Product Manager” hat you are wearing now.

Strap the Product Manager Hat tight.

When I gave Sales demo – I was not trying to get a Cheque out of the customer. I was listening to their pain points, and my mind was frantically scanning to see how my Startup could alleviate those paint points. I was trying to find patterns among Customers – so my solution can solve them all. I was trying to see how much value we can give them, and price our product as a fraction of the value ( and not just features ).

When I was paying the monthly bill for AWS account – and saw it was increasing gradually, asked myself – Are such resource hogging servers really necessary – and promptly turned them off – and found better cost effective alternatives. Also when I plan a feature, I keep the cost in mind – I am not going to get sold on the hype of a technology.

When I got a customer to go live – I realised how a few small features created some of the biggest headaches and heartburns. Promptly booted them off or tweaked them.

When I had to do Marketing – do SEO, or write content for Brochrures, or create Competitor analysis – I had to analyse inwardly as well as the competition and could identify the areas we were strong and weak. I knew what areas we could pull ahead of the competition – become more stronger, and what areas we had to improve – so we cannot be beaten down with.

If you are the Product Manager of a Startup – and working 9 to 5, doing a few customer interviews, talking to the CEO/CTO/Founder, browsing competitors website/Apps, STOP – you have to do more. [ ps : Startup founders, if you have hired Product Managers – here is what they have to start doing ]

1. Accompany the Sales guys in a few demos. In fact you should constantly do this – product keeps changing, market keeps changing, competiton keeps changing.

2. Get your hands dirty and deploy a few accounts – from start to finish.

3. Write the next set of marketing material, do the next Competitor Analysis document yourself – instead of just giving inputs.

4. Do SEO, plan the adwords campaign yourself.

5. Be the DevOps and/or pay the AWS bill from your pocket and get it reimbursed – and see for yourself that one cool feature which hardly anyone uses is costing a bomb.

And for Founders of Product Startups – Say it aloud. Print and Stick this in big fonts right in front of you.

“I am the Product Manager”

Guest Post by Venkat Kandaswamy, CoFounder, ApartmentAdda

07/02/201712/03/2017

A Framework For Building SaaS Products That Don’t Churn

When you say “reduce SaaS churn”, most people will immediately imagine tactics like drip email campaigns, great onboarding, customer marketing, gamification and automated alerts when users show signs of leaving. But this post is not about tactics. This post recognizes that users are smarter than any of the cute tricks we can come up with, and it attempts to get to the core of why there are some products that business users keep paying for, and others they discard.

If you’re a founder or product manager, I’ll encourage you to think deeply about this stuff, versus thinking about your next “growth hack”.

Products on which company processes are based

There are products on which organizational functions are dependent and processes are built. These are usually CRMs, Marketing Automation, HR software and Support software. The defining features are

they’re used by decision makers for reporting purposes and are often used to track teams’ KPIs and goals
they’re used to run day-to-day functions of the team and organization, for example, the process of applying for and approving employee leaves, or changing the stage of a sales opportunity
some people are logged in to the system during their entire working day
others log in once in a while to complete certain tasks
the system collects and retains valuable data that companies are not comfortable losing

Some observations about these products are

the sales cycles are usually longer than a month
customers will rarely buy these products without first being sure of the processes that are dependent on them
they need extensive API support and data integrations, because the data they collect becomes more valuable once combined with other data
heavy cross-functional training is required after the sale, and the product takes the blame if a customer org. doesn’t adopt and use it to the best of its capability
you need a lot of quality documentation so that you’re not overburdened with support tickets

An important note about products used by decision makers

When I started out at VWO a few years ago, the most important metrics were “free-trial signups” and “paid customers” (about 95% were self-service monthly subscriptions). Back then, Google Analytics (GA) was our most important source of data. We recorded free-trial signups, upgrades to a paid subscription and revenue in GA so it was what we looked at everyday.

In the past couple of years, we’ve started serving more mid-market and enterprise customers. Because of this, a few things have changed:

The average deal size has increased from $x00 to $x0000
The quality of free-trial signups matters as much as the quantity
A large amount of revenue comes from payments made through bank-transfers and other offline methods
“New MRR” is now more important than “new customers”

Because of all these changes, Google Analytics isn’t important anymore. Instead, the big decision are made after looking at reports in the CRM and our database, where all lead/deal/customer/revenue data sits. Through this shift I observed how when businesses evolve, the metrics that matter to them change, and this has a domino effect on the SaaS products that fall in and out of favor.

Now here’s another interesting anecdote: VWO has a large number of ecommerce customers. For the majority of these businesses, Google Analytics is the “source of truth”, so we simply had to build an integration with GA. In fact, we once lost a big customer because their VWO test reports didn’t agree with their GA data (completely possible and for good reasons, read this to understand why). The internal VWO champion tried to fight it out and explain the difference to management, but we lost the customer after some time.

So my point is this… it is well worth your while to build capabilities that will be used to make the important decisions, and if that’s not possible, then align your product with the primary reporting tool used by your target market.

Products that give results with minimal effort after initial setup

Some of these are:

Lead generation pop-ups, sidebars
Landing page software (specially when tied to on-going PPC campaigns or SEO keywords)
Retargeting software, like Perfect Audience and AdRoll
Exit intent pop-ups, almost always tied to lead generation
Personalization and behavioral targeting
Email automation like Vero and Intercom

While you’re building a product that keeps producing results with minimal interference, give a thought to how you can add public branding for that little bit of ‘virality’.

It’s also important to note that products tied to performance will quickly be removed when that performance isn’t enough. In this case, the product itself may be great, but it is dependent on something else working. For example, landing page software gets abandoned when the Adwords campaigns it was used for aren’t working out.

Products that monitor and provide reports and alerts on a recurring basis without needing additional effort

Few that come to mind are

Mention (social mention tracking, we’ve had it on for at least a couple years… rarely log in but open almost every daily email report)
Server Density (server monitoring)
SEOKeywordRanking (SEO keyword rank tracking; old school interface and not updated in a long time, but am sure its creator Will Reinhardt doesn’t need to work anymore)

While building your product, talk to users about the data they find most useful and want to look at everyday, or see what parts of your reports are accessed most often, then send that data out as daily/weekly emails. It becomes a part of users’ morning routine to check the emails and note/discuss/alert if something’s going right or wrong.

Products that enable data flow between different systems

Think Zapier, PipeMonk, Jitterbit and Informatica. Admittedly, data integration is more of an enterprise problem, but the good thing is that once put in, they’re very difficult to remove. That’s because they’re usually implemented after someone high enough has identified the need to have all the various data silos talking to each other, and that robust decisions can’t be made without a complete picture of the issue at hand.

Case study: Hubspot

Processes are based around the product? Yes, for marketing and sales
There’s someone almost always logged in? Yes, marketing
Managers use the product to report on performance? Yes, primarily marketing qualified leads, then customers and revenue
Product collects and retains valuable data that customers are not comfortable losing? Yes
Has components that produce results without needing on-going effort? Yes, lead-gen landing pages, website personalization, automated rule-based emails
Components that monitor and alert automatically? Yes, primarily alerts to sales owners about lead activity, and other alerts around social media, monthly/quarterly goals, etc.
Components that enable data flow between different systems? A well maintained and documented Salesforce connector, otherwise they have a platform for developers

As you can see, Hubspot is doing pretty well in minimizing churn. It seems to me that would be the case with most large, successful SaaS products. In fact, understanding the reasons why organizations keep paying for products is why large successful software are large and successful, as compared to just large.

I hope you’re able to use this post as a framework to think about what makes products stick, and apply those principles to the products you’re managing or building. Also, do you have anything else I can add to this? For some reason it seems to me the list is incomplete.

Guest Post by Siddharth Deswal, Lead Marketing at VWO.

06/02/201712/03/2017

Volunteer Hero: Vivek Raghavan

iSPIRT volunteers build public goods inspired by open-source Linux and Wikipedia. Our volunteers are selfless, committed and conflict-free. They are animated by a burning cause.

One such cause is about creating technology platforms that will help make India a Product Nation. Building a successful country-scale technology platform is hard. And doing this as an open and public platform is even more challenging. It takes talent, sweat, and toil to do this.

Vivek Raghavan for instance. He stepped in as a part-time volunteer to help build Aadhaar back in late-2010. Soon he was working as a full-time volunteer. Had he known that he would be volunteering full-time even after so many years, he might not have taken the plunge! In fact, two years ago, he gave up. After all, it’s not easy to work in a government system to make things happen. But, his sense of mission sprinkled with some emotional appeal from other iSPIRT volunteers had him back in action again.

We have many full-time volunteers in iSPIRT who take a year or two to give back to the ecosystem. But few have done it for six years! Here is a successful entrepreneur – with two notable exits in the US – waking up every morning to make the world better for all of us. His example inspires other volunteers. He kindles the fire that keeps iSPIRT running.

Vivek’s uncommon ownership and determination make him an iSPIRT volunteer hero.

Guest post by Pramod Varma & Sanjay Jain

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.” – Arthur Ashe

01/02/201731/01/2017

Are AI and Automation dirty words for some?

Man being replaced by machines has been a topic very well documented in our academic and social history. While, designing machines that can replicate human intelligence is ‘the dream’ for many, the idea has seen its fair share of resistance from anxious workers afraid to lose their livelihood. It would be a mistake to think that the phenomenon is only very recent. The Luddite movement, which began in Nottingham in 1811, was named after a disgruntled weaver who broke two stocking frames in a fit of rage. Destruction of machinery, as a form of protest, was carried out throughout England by groups of English textile workers and self-employed weavers. Since then, the term ‘Luddite’ has become a reference to someone opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation or new technologies in general.

Back to the 21st Century, Infosys’s human resources head Krishnamurthy Shankar has revealed that the company had “released” 8,000-9,000 employees in the last 12 months due to automation of lower-end jobs. The employees are not necessarily jobless and have been retrained and absorbed to carry out ‘more advanced projects’. The company also reduced its hiring in the Jan to December 2016 period to 5,700 compared to 17,000 in the first nine months of previous fiscal year. Infosys is not alone in their journey towards automation. Most Indian and global IT services companies are investing in automation of processes in their core businesses such as Application Management, Infrastructure Management and Business Process Management (BPM).

India’s IT giants are leaving no stones unturned to fill the gaps in their digital portfolio of products and services. The subjects of Internet of Things, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Automation figure high on each company’s organic strategy and also in their shopping list for inorganic growth (Table 1).

Table 1: Select Digital Acquisitions by Indian IT majors

Acquirer		Target	Value (USD mn)		Brief
Infosys	Panaya			200	Provider of automation technology for large scale enterprise software management
Wipro	Healthplan Services			460	A technology and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) provider in the U.S. Health Insurance market
Wipro	Appiro			500	A services company that helps customers create next-generation Worker and Customer Experience using the latest cloud technologies
Infosys	Skava			120	A provider of digital experience solutions, including mobile commerce and in-store shopping experiences to large retail clients
Tech Mahindra	The BIO Agency			52	UK-based digital transformation firm
Tech Mahindra	Target Group			164	A provider of business process outsourcing and software solutions

Automation is heralding the age of Industry 4.0 which is characterised by a diminishing boundary between the cyber and physical systems. In October 2016, World Bank research announced that Automation threatens 69 % of the jobs in India, while 77% in China. Google’s AI research lab, Google Brain is working on building AI software that can build more AI software. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they started thinking about the Skynet from Terminator or the writings of James Barrat – Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.

As per research by Gartner, IT process automation (ITPA) is very underpenetrated (only 15-20%) and will move towards maturity over the next 5-10 years. Most leading vendors in the IT services space have launched an automation platform to boost delivery efficiency.

Table 2: Automation/ AI Platforms of Indian IT Players

Company	Platform	Offerings
Wipro	Holmes	An artificial-intelligence platform built on opensource computing aimed at optimising resource utilisation and reducing costs
Infosys	Aikido	Enables creation of intelligent robots that can resolve incident related to customer orders
TCS	Ignio	An Artificial intelligence-based automation platform which automates and optimizes IT processes within an organisation.
Tech Mahindra	Carexa Uno	Customer care, with agent virtualisation, analytics, assisted interactions and digital channels.
HCL Technologies	DryIce	A digital service exchange platform enabled by ServiceNOW

Source: NASSCOM, Edelweiss

Platforms based on novel technologies will minimise the human effort required. Are the coders coding away their jobs then? Thankfully, there are learned people who believe otherwise. As per NASSCOM, the future may not be as dire. There is a distinct possibility that repetitive and labour intensive jobs such as data entry and testing may get completely automated, but there will be augmentation of cognitive jobs. New roles will emerge which will focus on training, learning and maintenance requirements of AI systems. Indian companies will also need to invest in re-training its employees or importing talent in the short term. In the long term, a joint effort with technology schools such as IITs and IISc will be needed to build a supply chain of talent. 65% of Google DeepMind’s hires were directly from academia.

The Indian IT services sector is worth approximately USD 150 billion, and it is largely export dependent. The Indian players need to enhance their digital capabilities to compete globally. Automation is a key area of this digital growth and so is the evolution of skilled workforce and their job profiles. The fear of technology destroying all the jobs is as unreasonable now as it was in the 18th century. Also, it is evident from history that technology has always led to creation of more jobs than it has destroyed.

The workforce engaged in IT services by nature is flexible and open to evolving work profiles. Workers in some other sectors may not have that option, especially at the jobs requiring less complexity. HDFC bank just announced that it has witnessed a head count reduction of 4,500 due to efficiency improvements and attritions in the last quarter alone. The Bank is planning to install up to 20 humanoids named “Íra” at its branches in the two years to assist customers. Ira has been developed by Kochi-based Asimov Robotics and the company has already received queries from airports, hospitality industry and retail chains to deploy similar humanoids. It would be a good move for all professionals in all sectors to ask themselves – “Can a Robot do my job?”, and upgrade their professional skills accordingly.

This is a guest post by Arvind Yadav,

Principal at Aurum Equity Partners LLP.

31/01/201712/03/2017

The Product Manager’s RuleBook

This post is not about “tools” which will make you (integral)dx more productive. This post is about telling you rules of the Jungle called Product Management.

So you are the Product Manager, Right ?

You just graduated out of B-School (or even worse completed your bachelors degree) and you have been given the product manager tag in the company you decided to work in. Welcome to the Jungle. Unless you have a really f**ed up CEO or a clueless CTO, you are in for a hell of a ride. There are a dozen of definitions of a Product Manager but, here is the one that sticks –

You are the mini ‘CEO’

Welcome to the Jungle. People don’t follow rules here. Especially when it comes to product. Here are 49 rules that I have curated, over the course of 7 years, across Product, Operations and Sales.

Rules

As a Product Manager, you will be exposed to attention, and a lot of it. Mostly unwanted and discomforting. Don’t be surprised if your peers are jealous of your role. You will get pulled into every meeting. You will looked upto/at for every release. For every feature. For almost every client meeting/call. But that is least of your worries. Unless you have been a PM before, your biggest challenge would be not having a benchmark. You have no way to draw the line. Follow these rules and you will stumble less- I am personally still trying to master the art.

Get sold to the product. Believe in the product yourself. If you don’t, try again. If you still can’t make your self believe it, drop it and find something else.
You will get sucked up in your work schedule. Be ready for it.
Don’t get sucked up every time. At times, drop the bomb on Sales and Marketing. Reality check can never hurt
Learn the art of saying no. At least in your head. Practice it over a period of time with/on your CEO, CTO, Sales and Marketing (in that order)
Develop a healthy relationship with your developers, QA and designers.
Avoid making value judgements. What are value judgements ? The statement that you say aloud in your head without ANY authority or reliable data to back it. You always know when you are speaking from the gut. (You know who else spoke from the gut ? George W Bush)
Trust your developers. Back them up. Stand for them. Pat their back and give them credit.
Bet on your Sales and Marketing. Support them. Be their favourite cheer leader. Always
Keep some buffer from Day 0 itself on your delivery schedule. You are surrounded by uncertainties. Every client wanted “it” yesterday and no dev will have it ready by tomorrow.
Split roles between you and your CTO. Decide, who will plan and who will drive the execution. Don’t fuck this one up. Don’t take planning, because you most likely don’t understand your dev’s code.
Between your CEO, CMO and you, figure out who will OBSESS about “organic growth” (SEO). You don’t have bandwidth, don’t ever opt-in for this one.
Coin and propagate your own product terminology/nomenclature, before sales “oversimplifies” it or dev “rocket-sciences” it. This is a critical to build and manage perception.
Write emails with keywords that you can search. Chat with keywords that you can recall and search again. You will spend significant time in forwarding old emails to dev, sales, marketing, CEO. Skip the CTO. Your CTO barely opens your email.
Park your personal choices of colors, fonts and design at home. Product is being built for customer’s delight, not yours (or your investors)
Like a rhetoric, keep telling point #14 to your CEO.
Get a Tee that says “Good is not fast and fast is not cheap.” Boring, cliche but still right.
Pulling an all nighter for product release is cool and fun, but not if you are releasing thrice a week.
Remember that you don’t understand quality assurance or testing. Like everything else, QA is a skill. Unless you have learnt it, avoid claiming it.
If you are building a B2B product, you definitely need a QA. If you are building a B2C product, hell as sure you need more than 1 QA.
Be friends with QA and Designer. Make them feel special. You won’t exist without them.
Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. Under communication is an assumption. Hence, under communication is a fuck up. Over communicate and play safe.
Build your own narrative as an objective and data driven person. Understand and question the objective before jumping into anything (including that market research slide for the investor deck)
Document everything that is made and not made. At least try.
Begin you conversations with developers and designers with context. They will feel involved, aware and productive. Context helps. Always.
In the same breathe, demand context from Sales, Marketing and CEO. You will be able to address their requirement faster.
You will always be able to sell better than your entire sales team combined. But again, don’t do it.
Keep your Company Logo Product Logo, favicon, Product Description (1 liner, 5 lines and 1 pager) always ready. Anyone can ask for this. Anytime.
Plan ahead for a week. Do so on a Saturday/Friday Evening. Do it on a Sunday night if you have to but NEVER on a Monday morning.
CEO’s often talk sense. Listen to them.
Not everything that your CEO said was actionable. Don’t act on everything that your CEO says. They most likely didn’t expect action themselves.
Build your own opinion about the industry, domain, and the product. Attend conferences/events focused on your industry.
CTO’s can/will have walls. Be inquisitive ( read pushy)
You need to be aligned with your CEO, Sales, Marketing and CTO. Don’t forget your actual job (Mini CEO/Get-Shit-Done)
There is nothing better than pen paper when it comes to maintaining lists. There is nothing better than pen paper when it comes to wire-framing.
Don’t boil the ocean with every release planning. Every dog has his(/her) day. You will have yours on the day of bug bashing.
Avoid falling sick. Exercise daily. Meditate daily. And buy a Macbook air
Nothing will go wrong if you are late by two minutes late in sending that presentation/ releasing your product update. Be right and late rather than being sorry and on time. If your Sales team can’t hold for a client for 2 mins, imagine..Again, plan better next time and avoid being sorry.
Next time, a Sales guy says that “it was you and your product” that costed him/her a sale. Gulp down your ego. Hear them out. They are ranting. The next day, give it back to them. Patiently.
Your role needs you to seek feedback. Proactively. Ideally once a month, from all your peers. Similarly, your feedback for your peers is critical.
Sales folks are hired for selling. They most likely, can’t make presentations. Live with this fact. Make a template for them. Engage your sales team by changing the template’s colours every 10th week.
There is never a bad time for having chai/coffee. Though Obama doesn’t drink coffee. But again, you are not Obama.
Content writing is NOT your forte. Nevertheless, write the copy for your website or someone else will write something that you never made/promised/planned. Rant about it, if you ever hire a content writer
Create your own reports, dashboards and product performance benchmarks. Do this before the developers starts developing.
Start your day with numbers of the previous day.
Learn to let go, of things you like. Your favourite features, CEO’s favorite feature, colors, fonts, processes and evening dates.
In hindsight, you will always be right. Move on.
You job needs you to be a swinging pendulum. Hah. Self-Pity mode is awesome. But, don’t let it stretch for more than few hours
Last but not the least, remember to laugh about that how, once upon a time, everyone including your head of sales, marketing lead, CEO, CTO and dev ops were clueless about the house of cards that “you” got “built”
In the end, make your own list. And pass it on.

Author – Vivek Khandelwal

Founder of Datability Solutions, a technology startup building iZooto, a web push notification platform for user engagement and retention.