Category: SaaSx

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Open Source and SAAS

While open source software is a fairly well understood in concept, I am always surprised how little it is understood in practice. At a round table of young product companies last month, there were a lot of raised eyebrows and questions when I explained our open source way of working.

Jordan Hubbard, co-creator of FreeBSD and open source veteran, spoke on this topic at this year’s ERPNext Conference, and he basically said this, open source business is all about people. Since the product is free, you sell services around the product, which is your people. This is mostly true for the very large majority of businesses that have mushroomed around open source projects, providing installation, hosting, customization, maintenance and other services around the product.

But there is now a new variable in the equation, SAAS (or Software-as-a-Service). It has been already accepted that SAAS is the way software is sold today. Listed companies like SalesForce, Xero, Zendesk, Workday, NetSuite, Hubspot, Shopify are testimony to the success of SAAS products and the billions of dollars that get spent on SAAS products each year. What does the future hold?

As on-premise is slowly moving into SAAS, I believe that SAAS itself will move into open source. Since the unevenly spread future is already here, there are companies already successfully doing open source + SAAS like WordPress, Ghost CMS, Magento, ERPNext (disclaimer: that’s us).

Open source + SAAS makes a great combination.

Benefits to the user:

  1. Open source products allow virtually unlimited possibilities to deeply integrate the product.
  2. There is a lot more risk in a closed platform, like price increase and slow pace of development.
  3. There is no vendor lock-in
  4. Free!

Benefits to the publisher:

  1. Not everyone wants to host their own infrastructure, this opens up opportunity to build a SAAS platform
  2. Provides word-of-mouth marketing
  3. Vibrant community attracts more users
  4. Community contributes by providing feedback, support, features, fixes, integration, testing, documentation
  5. A lot more incentive to write good code and documentation
  6. Much easier to find and on-board new developers to your team

Going open source is not easy. Business are built on the premise of transactions, and in open source, you have to be very open to giving and communicating without expecting immediate results. But once you cross a certain threshold, community participation can be extremely rewarding.

I am not advocating you open source your product today, but as Wikipedia has shown us, its only a matter of time before someone builds a mature open source product that might replace you.

Then there is no going back.

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So how do you measure the health of your business?

Business model & “LTV” – Life time value

  • Develop the business model that is “realistic” by clearly defining revenue sources, keeping the interest of customers and shareholders
  • Match pricing consistent with revenue streams/goals
  • Define what kind of promotions/discounts are needed and for how long
  • Consider how this leads into recurring revenue streams (for SaaS businesses) or repeat/new orders for traditional businesses
  • Develop a  “model” for customer LTV that is comprehensive (includes cumulative profits and not just simple revenues)
  • Show how LTV will evolve both short and long term

LTV defined – what is the “Value” of an acquired customer?

  • In early stages probably first year Profit could be computed as expected revenues minus expenses (to develop the business)
  • The second and third year it needs to be more realistic with real revenues plugged into the numerator
  • The CC (Cost of Capital) is an estimate of what it costs venture firms to invest in a business. The rate ranges from 35 to 75 based on the risk profile of the entrepreneur(s).
  • The “t” is the denominator indicates # of years as in year 1, 2,3 etc.

GTM (Go-to-market) & CoCA defined

  •  Develop a CoCA or some call it CAC (Cost of customer acquisition) model for your product/service. Its different than LTV.
  • The GTM should include model of lead generation and closing sales (choice of models like direct, indirect, use of outsourcers, online etc.)
  • Map the sales process (sales funnel) to the different people/parties involved from lead generation to closing to collection of money. This might vastly vary based on the type of business you develop.
  • State clearly assumptions you make as the leads move through the “sales funnel”. Its important to get “hunters” involved in the early stage of the business
  •  For the CoCA calculations use – marketing and sales costs, make reasonable assumptions of life of customer, retention rates, and closure rates. Exclude COGS and other fixed costs
  • Map how GTM will evolve over time – short, medium and long term
  • Explore and define where the use of word of mouth (WOM) falls (if any) in the overall GTM. Very important.

CoCA Calculations:

How do you figure if the business is “viable” via CoCA/LTV?


Courtesy: HubSpot

  • SaaS businesses LTV:CoCA ratio needs to be atleast 3:1 and time to CoCA recovery less than 12 months for it to be a viable business.
  • For SaaS businesses the CoCA needs to be anywhere between $1 – $3 per customer
  • As regards unit economics – customer churn should be between 3.5% to 1.5%

What do you track particularly for SaaS businesses?

  • For SaaS businesses – track LTV, CAC, LTV:CAC ratio, CAC recovery etc.
  • The are many more parameters to track. More later…..
  • Importantly track revenue churn vs. customer churn. Why are they different?

Imagine customers paying per month $10 for “basic” services and $100 for “bundled” services (upsell) & you had 5 of each in the early stages. If you lost 2 customers after couple of months, the customer churn would be 2. Imagine losing both customers in the basic category, then your churn is only $20. But if both are from the bundled category, your churn is $200. Big difference.

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How to Incorporate in the USA: US Inc. as a Subsidiary – v2.0

Setting up your headquarters in the US and a subsidiary in India is a tested model. Here’s a blog post by Girish Mathrubootham – founder of Freshdesk, very clearly articulating the process.

Well then, what’s this all about?

The setup we follow at Kissflow is the model in reverse.

Kissflow is headquartered in India, with a subsidiary in the US.

I couldn’t find much information on this model, and thought this might be something worth considering as an option for lots of startups that operate from India. This is not a post on the pros and cons of setting up your headquarters in the USA. That is a complex question and calls for another blog by itself.

This model gives you the option to retain the Intellectual Property (IP) outside of USA and still take advantage of the flexibility that comes with having a US Delaware C-Corp entity.

Also, you will be paying income taxes in line with income in both the countries. In the other model where the HQ is in the US and the subsidiary in India, you may set up the subsidiary as a service company with a transfer pricing model that requires you to have a profit margin of 12% to 15% in line with the services industry. And you will be paying 30% taxes, in the case of India, on that “perceived profit”.

So, here is an alternate model for your consideration that is compliant with the laws of the land in both the countries of operation.

The basics of setting up a company in the US remain the same:

1. Incorporating in USA as a Delaware, C-Corp.

You don’t have to be present in the USA for the incorporation. Instead, you can use one of the many service providers.

Here are a few recommended ones:

The cost for this would be approximately $1000, but you can pick and choose packages depending on the services you would require. I would highly recommend that you complete the entire documentation at a stretch including the formation documents, share allocation, etc.

Leaving out some of these may seem cheaper initially but might hurt you in the long run. So complete the entire procedure as part of the incorporation package to get the basic setup done right. You know what they say about being penny wise and …

2. Getting an EIN

This is similar to the Social Security Number. Each business has a unique tax ID number called Employer Identification Number that you will have to register for.

Ask for this service to be included as part of your incorporation, or, with your legal firm’s guidance complete this step immediately. Having an EIN is essential to deal with banks and pretty much everything else in the USA.

3. Getting a US Address

To receive business documents, it is mandatory that you have a US Address.

You can use a service like virtualpostmail.com which starts at $20 each month to collect the receipt of letters via emails; they scan and upload documents for your review and also ship them to any part of the world, if required, for an additional cost.

Besides this utility, it also serves as your local billing address for your credit/debit cards, etc., which becomes essential when you start paying for services with a US bank account.

We use Regus for this service. They provide a bunch of secretarial services including physical mail scanning and emailing among others. You can choose a package that is appropriate for your business. It is very important for your finance/admin team in India to know if there are any statutory mails from the government, bank, etc. and a service like Regus helps you achieve that.

4. Getting a US Bank Account

You would require a bank that allows remote processing of account opening and operations. We use the services of Chase Bank. Silicon Valley Bank (svb.com) is also an alternative, but requires a reference and a minimum balance of 25k USD. Chase Bank doesn’t have any minimum balance requirement.

Before applying for a bank account, it’s mandatory you have an EIN.

5. Getting a Merchant Account / Payment Gateway

Apply for a Stripe or Braintree account. The fee may be on the higher side, but the increased transparency in pricing, support, and the ease of doing business with them makes up for it.

6. Acquiring a Business Credit Card

It is harder to get a regular business credit card without building a credit history. You can use the debit card for all transactions to start with, until you have enough money in bank to get a secure credit card.

A secure credit card is nothing but a credit card with a spend limit secured by the money in your bank account / deposit.

7. Getting a US Phone Number

You can get a toll free number from any of the service providers like phone.com, Google Voice, or Skype.

That was a quick checklist of things you need to get started with the US company.

Once you have your company set up in the US, here’s how the relationship between the two companies (your Indian HQ and the US subsidiary) would work:

1. Distributor License

Make your US company the exclusive worldwide master distributor of your SaaS product. Set up a distributor license agreement that assigns an exclusive license to the US company, to host and sell your products in the USA. The Indian entity now holds the entire Intellectual Property (IP), by providing a hosting and distribution license to US companies for a 20% price cut per customer. If you look at it, 20% margin is a fair market value even if you had to engage a third party for this service.  Also, the US company has to cover all its expenses related to hosting, sales & marketing, and other operations.

2. Terms of Service

The terms of service of your website and product has to be owned by the US entity, as a distributor of your software. Preferably, all the legal recourse should be made available with your US entity.

3. Earnings and transfer of money

If you are just starting up, my best wishes to you for ramping up your revenue faster. 🙂

You can retain 20% of the revenue earned by the US entity and transfer 80% of the revenue back to your parent company as license fee.

When you start making enough money, you will be liable to pay taxes on the profit made on the 20% margin after all the operational costs are subtracted. Note that you will be paying other taxes such as franchise tax, State tax, etc., which have to be paid anyway to operate a company regardless of whether or not you make profits.

That’s pretty much it.

Statutory warning: As mentioned earlier, do not consider this as legal advice. Just sharing an alternate model than following the traditional model of US HQ. You should definitely consult a lawyer and an accountant to ensure that you stay compliant with all the laws in all the countries that you operate in.

Good luck with your startup and feel free to drop a note to suresh-at-kissflow.com to say “Hello”.

This blog was first published on the ChargeBee blog.

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SaaS India struggles with Inbound Lead Response

As Indian SAAS companies are aspiring to make a global footprint, the sales growth can make or break their goals. Companies who respond fastest as compared to competitors always have first mover advantage to close sales. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later.

We surveyed 90 funded SAAS companies; the observations were quite shocking as far as their inbound lead response is concerned. Only 26% companies (24 out of 90) companies cared to respond to inbound leads. Given the kind of investment companies make in their digital marketing, money goes down the drain if the inbound leads are not tapped efficiently. Even if the leads are contacted, the time to respond makes all the difference.

Inbound Digital Marketing – A must for Generating Leads!

Organizations rely significantly on inbound digital marketing for their businesses. B2B companies invest from $25 to $500 for generating an inbound lead while B2C companies invest from $5 to $25 for the same. The money spent goes down the drain if inbound leads are not responded in an efficient way. The important questions for you to answer are – How many of your inbound leads are never contacted as they get lost during data transfer to sales team? How many inbound leads are loosely passed on to Sales reps to contact with incomplete or wrong information? How many of them are contacted when the prospect have lost interest in you or chosen a competitor?

The answers to these questions will define the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts. However, the good news is that if you are effective in inbound lead response management you are on the top of your business as chances are pegged on higher side in converting inbound sales leads rather than outbound leads for which investments are even on a much higher side.

Time is all what makes a difference!

We (Texo Team) conducted a research on funded B2B SAAS companies in India to analyse the inbound sales readiness. 90 SAAS companies were identified as funded. Web forms on the websites of the identified companies were filled and the responses were logged. We made an analysis on the data and have come out with an interesting insight on the current state of inbound sales processes in these companies or any other B2B company which may be used as a reference point for improvement through process, people and/ or technology.

We found that 8 companies choose to directly call the prospects and 4 companies choose to directly send personalized emails without sending an auto response. 4 companies sent personalized emails along with an auto response. Overall, only 26% companies (24 out of 90) responded to inbound leads out of which 67% (16) adopted calls as the mode of contact and 33% (8) used email as the mode of communication.

Only 4 out of 90 companies responded in less than 10 minutes. And only 7 companies responded in an hour. Click here to download TEXO SAAS Inbound Lead Response Report- 2015 for free and get deeper insights of the research report including the best SAAS companies in India who scored high in lead response research.

Way to Efficiently Manage your Inbound Leads

Inbound Leads are the prospects who have shown any kind of interest in your products/services by making a contact at any of the buyer stage. Marketers and sales reps have to align their engagement strategies with respect to the buyer stage. But what can they do about the 70% of the buyer’s journey that they’re missing out on? They are not able to correctly judge the prospect’s buying stage when they make a contact and hence not able to employ an effective engagement strategy.

And how can a tool like Sales Engagement Hub integrated with Marketing Automation Tools help marketers and sales reps keep pace with their buyers? The level of interest may vary depending on the buying stage the prospect is in, and hence different prospects need to be addressed differently. Factors to be considered for engaging with inbound leads are Response Time, Mode of Communication, Information to be shared, and Frequency of follow-ups and so on. A prospect in the consideration stage would prefer information about products, solutions, services, and case studies, and would need longer follow ups over email (preferably) or call. However, a prospect in the decision stage would be more interested in having information on solutions and pricing, and would need consistent follow-ups (shorter) over call (preferably) or email. Sales Engagement Hub integrated with marketing automation tools help the sales reps and marketers in effectively engaging with prospects.

 

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Product Market Fit – Pre Event playbook by @Avlesh @WebEngage & Arvind Kumar, @attunetech

The morning of the SaaSx2 event saw a great pre-event playbook at the Attune Tech’s Office.

Playbook by Avlesh

Avlesh from WebEngage, Arvind from Attune Tech. and Suresh from KiSSFLOW came together to host the session and anchor the round table.

With a casual round of introductions, Suresh kickstarted the entire roundtable discussion with a question:

Who is your ideal user?

Identifying the ideal user for your product is the key to your entire product. Is it a product for developers? Is it for CEOs? Is it for mobile users? Is it for users of spreadsheets?

Once you identify your user, identify the ‘buying title’ and the ‘influencing title’. The ‘buying title’ would be the shot-caller whereas the ‘influencing title’ would play a major role in influencing the shot-caller to buy your product.

Sometimes, if your on-boarding process is straightforward, you can sidestep your segment. Figure out what’s happening, is your product gaining traction, etc., And then iterate your product.

Aligning Metrics – The key

This is when Avlesh (Webengage) (he was lost in the land of Chennai, damn the cabbie) joined the discussion. He stated a very crucial point, that sometimes entrepreneurs forget during their journey of building their product.

“Try aligning your product to your users’ metrics” was a great insight from him.

If you’re launching a second product, run it by your current customers.

Try answering these questions:

What’s that one thing that your user can relate to? What does he/she get out of this? What are you improving for them?

These are very practical and a data-driven points to consider before taking that step forward towards your market fit.

Instant Gratification -Connecting the dots

Arvind, connected these points to the psychological concept of ‘Instant Gratification’.  What pain point are you trying to address? What’s that ‘wow’ moment they get when they start using your product? Something as simple as what they do everyday and how you can help them do it differently. If users get an immediate result from your product, they would be hooked to it.

Stickiness. The sole determiner.

Suresh mentioned a very simple but powerful point to elucidate product market fit.

“People who like your product will help you in scaling your product. But people who love your product will be your early adopters. Will be your referrers. Will be your evangelists. And they will help you achieve your product’s market fit!”

He also spoke about how product fit is not necessarily a price fit but much more than that. If users love your product, they really wouldn’t mind shelling out some extra money to buy it.

If you had noticed, all these points have something to do with user engagement.

Users see. Users love. Users buy. Users stick on.

Product Market Fit: The process

Product Market Fit isn’t a destination you aim to reach, but it’s a continuous journey.

Here are a few pointers to follow before you set out to find your fit.

  • Understand your market.
  • Estimate the market size.
  • Don’t go after a broad range of things. You can’t be everything for everybody.
  • Identify your segment. Your niche. That sweet-spot!
  • Then, iterate your product. Strip/add features to suit the market.

Mohit from Jombay, who had some thoughtful points to add on to the entire discussion, mentioned about how it’s important to know what to focus on! Positioning your product is a prerequisite in obtaining a market fit.

Are we there yet?

When do you know your product has obtained a market fit? To understand the answer, ask this question. Are more strangers paying for your product? (not just your mom’s friends or cousin’s colleagues). Are you solving your users’ problem?

Sean Ellis answers this beautifully, in his blog.

“I’ve tried to make the concept less abstract by offering a specific metric for determining product/market fit. I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product. Admittedly this threshold is a bit arbitrary, but I defined it after comparing results across nearly 100 startups. Those that struggle for traction are always under 40%, while most that gain strong traction exceed 40%.”

Takeaways

Some quick points to sum up my takeaways from the session:

  • Product market Fit isn’t a destination, it’s a journey.
  • Understand your market.
  • Know your customers.
  • It’s not about the product. It’s about how you position it.
  • Keep your product sticky.
  • Align your products to your users’ metrics.

Avlesh’s sense of humor, Arvind’s sarcasm and Suresh’s guffaws helped maintain a lively atmosphere for the discussion 🙂 It was a great session overall with some brilliant takeaways from all of them.

Guest Post contributed by Anusha Murthy, ChargeBee

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SaaS is the new black – and it has found a place in Chennai

At SaaSx 2015, Girish Mathrubhootham, CEO of cloud-based customer support software Freshdesk and popularly known as the Rajnikanth (think an acting, singing James Bond) of India’s Software as a Service (SaaS) scene, did the unthinkable. He revealed the entire spreadsheet of internal data-based metrics that he presented to his investors in 2011. All the media people were asked to put away their weapons and, at first, I was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to share any of those numbers. Soon, however, I realized that they weren’t even important.

After Girish’s investors took a look at his numbers – and, honestly, at the time, they were not all that impressive – they decided to email his clients with a feedback survey. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with 96 percent of Freshdesk’s customers expressing approval of the product. “We didn’t even expect that,” explains Girish. “The only other feedback we got was customers expressing their desire to see us expand our product into different areas.”

The fact that customers wanted to see Freshdesk expand was important for both the company and its investors. As its progress revealed, the most dynamic feature of a SaaS product is its ability to acquire and reacquire the same customers by offering insightful new features. And, while the transient nature of software products means that differentiation can be difficult to maintain, Girish went on to explain that capturing the market was all about moving in at the right time. “Of course, best practices are easily copied and hard to retain – that’s why I’m only revealing our numbers from 2011-2012,” he joked.

SaaSx 2015, held in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, the self-proclaimed SaaS capital of India, was full of similar insights. People visited from all over the country, the furthest having traveled over 800 miles from Ahmedabad. Those in India’s startup capital, Bangalore – this includes yours truly – traveled over 6 hours and 300 miles on a bus through the winding Western Ghats to reach its neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. Despite an early start, energy was high on the road to the conference – the 34 entrepreneurs on the Microsoft Ventures-organized bus managed to conduct an ice-breaking session without falling over during the turbulent bus ride.

“My biggest virtue as an entrepreneur was patience. And, my biggest mistake… it was probably patience,” quipped one young CEO.

Read more about the SaaS Leap of Faith, SaaS circles are all about community, a blog post contributed by Meghna Rao from TechInAsia

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Funding Game – The rules and the hacks via @skirani & @BKartRed

The weather in Chennai was finally getting kinder & more pleasant in tune with the time of the year, much like the funding climate which has been less testing on the entrepreneur in general. Depending on whether you ask a consumer product entrepreneur or a B2B SaaS product entrepreneur, the level of optimism could vary, but it’s optimism all around.

As a pre-event runup to SaaSx2, we met at Freshdesk’s office in Chennai, for the Roundtable on “What it takes to fund a SaaS company?”.

Shekhar Kirani from Accel and Karthik Reddy from Blume, joined by Girish Mathrubootham from Freshdesk, anchored the conversations.

IMG_1198

Shekhar and Karthik started the round table, with some pretty interesting nuances about what numbers ought to add up, for their investment to make the returns they promised to their limited partners. The conversation touched upon what it takes to get funded at the early stages (upto Series A) and what it takes to be on that path, beyond Series A. Girish chipped in with personal examples of how Freshdesk got funded and his first-hand insight into looking at early stage startups that get funded (or not)!

Here are some bite-sized insights from the conversation that lasted for 3 hours:

On the options for the entrepreneur

  1. Indian B2B entrepreneurs have bootstrapped their startups remarkably well that it’s not an exception. If you are a B2B entrepreneur bootstrap or do more with less. Wait for the right strategic opportunity to scale. With numbers backing you up, raise for growth.

2015-10-07 11.12.22On what drives investors’ decisions

  1. Don’t get discouraged with ‘No’ from a partner of a VC firm. They have their biases and baggages. It’s the partner who has a view and not the firm. Find your champion.
  2. Most investors don’t like it if the outcome has a cap to it — there’s a maximum that you can do in the market and that sets a pretty hard ceiling to crack. In such cases, you’ve to out-execute everyone else and that’s a hard ploy and makes less exciting for the investor. Example: Would you start another CRM company now and if so why would you do what the rest of the 1600 have not done. Even if you execute well, what market share can you capture?
  3. VC firms pitch to Limited Partners (wealthy individuals, family offices, pension funds etc.) more than startups do to investors. They’ve the same issue of having to convince an LP that a certain startup that’s pre-revenue will get an exit worth $100M in 7 years. To do that in India, when there was no such exit till recently, made it even less credible.
  4. Most funds last for 10 years. 3 years to invest and 7 years to grow and nurture those investments towards exit events.
  5. Among the top quartile or decile of startups in a portfolio, one company returns the entire fund. Top 5 companies return 90% of the capital.
  6. Each startup has to be a prospect for a $500M exit, for the fund to meet its “Return on Capital Employed” goals.

On what investors look for in a startup?

  1. In a SaaS startup, front loaded costs are high. So your first two rounds are not about revenue or profitability but more about Product-Market fit and elimination of business model risks.
  2. Integrity, smartness and hard working ethics of the team are important but not sufficient. There has to be a potential for $500M exit for that startup for investors’ math to work. Anything less is already a sub-par outcome.
  3. It’s the job of the entrepreneur to make the VC look and realize how big the market is. They see a 1000 pitches a month and carry stereotypes. Help them make the context switch.
  4. Integrity cannot be stressed enough — Questions about India’s professional ethics do come up.). Indian LPs too find it hard to fathom that it’s possible to legally generate a 25x outcome from a startup, given where they come from and what they’ve seen.

2015-10-07 11.12.37On how to negotiate investment terms

  1. Clauses are there to protect the downsides for an investor. If you understand why they are there it’s easy to have a conversation around them.
  2. Most dissonance that an entrepreneur feels is because s/he does not understand the responsibilities the investor has to his/her fund and their LPs.
  3. Clauses such as liquidation preferences are there to protect the downside of the investments. So long as you cover the down-sides as an entrepreneur, your negotiation leverage for not carrying over these clauses to subsequent rounds is high — Don’t get it yet? Ask entrepreneurs who’ve raised several rounds, on how to negotiate.
  4. Drag along clause is there so that an investor can get the fund its returns as the fund comes to the end of life. If that goal conflicts with your startup’s, look for funds that are early in their life, to take money from and thereby give yourself a better runway.
  5. Everything is negotiable if your numbers are good. All downside protections kick in only during the bad times. So the best way to stay on top of the negotiations is to execute well.

Contributed by Ashwin Ramasamy, ContractIQ

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Are you in India/SaaS, and not at #SaaSx2? You missed transparent mind-blowing insights

SaaSx event is a meetup organized by a bunch of SaaS entrepreneurs for all SaaS entrepreneurs in India. SaaSx Chennai event enables SaaS start-up founders to learn and share tribal knowledge from SaaS (software-as-a-service) start-ups in various stages of the evolutionary ladder.  Every participant registered for the event and was vetted for fitness with theme of the event. (Do events really have qualifying criteria for participants beyond collecting money?)

A good number of us going from Bangalore to Chennai climbed SaaSy bus early in the morning. For everyone who climbed the bus, our learning started in SaSSy bus from Bangalore to Chennai. Entrepreneurs got comfortable with each other quickly and most seem to be in the mind-set described by Yamini “Running a company becomes a lonely job after a point. Super excited to meet other co-founders”.

After crossing to Tamil Nadu, we had breakfast and climbed back to bus. This followed with ice-breaker session where everyone self-introduced themselves and shared 2 things that worked for them and 2 things that did not work for them. Sharing brought the journey to end in Chennai. Some attended private roundtables, followed by lunch, SaaSX2 event started. FireSide Chat was kick-started with Aneesh Reddy of Capillary Technologies on ““The Nuances of Enterprise SaaS” by Ahi and Asha Satapathy.

  • Lonely initial start-up days when it was not cool to work on start-ups. That was okay and they got time to work focused.
  • Shared their approach to balance developing a product and customization needs of customers, how they make decision whether to do customization or not and when to actually execute customization.
  • Shared the challenge to collect money from customers after delivering service and the approach they took to streamline the same. For delays with large enterprise customers, one needs to evaluate whether it makes sense to follow with customer for smaller payments.
  • Shared being lucky not to take hard calls of firing people in India. He thinks firing makes it very difficult to hire senior people at some point of time.

Asha made Aneesh to share personal life tips by asking his advice to young entrepreneur’s to find life partner, which Aneesh coolly as “If you are entrepreneur or plan to be one, marry daughter of business man. She would be able to relate to you as she is already used to relate to her father”. The Next FireSide Chat was started by Sumanth Raghavendra with the man who has mapped SaaS growth from seed funding to Series B and beyond. Yes, Girish Mathrubootham. Earlier he welcomed us sharing his inspiration from thalaivar (leader) Rajinikanth, Tamil film actor. For me, Girish story is very similar to Rajinikanth movies, film world made real in software world.

Girish set context of his learnings and insights might contradict with Aneesh by sharing the difference between order ticket sizes in their individual business. Some of insights shared were

  • Focus should not be just about features in product, but any user must get value in 20 minutes without help from anyone.
  • B2B SaaS is never a winner takes it all market. There will always be a set of 2 to 3 credible players.
  • Decision to spend $40K money earned through Microsoft Hackathon to explore different marketing channels and evaluate their effectiveness. Required courage to spend on marketing against conventional wisdom of boot-strapped start-up booking the money for other purposes.
  • When customer land on the website, product experience starts right at that moment. The customer needs to like what he sees and when he signs, he needs to get value out of the website. If customer ends up saying atleast a vow, there is more probability that the customer might spend time in the next 30 days evaluating your products.

In between sessions, I loved the concepts of #onething at conference where entrepreneurs are asked to share one thing as response to a quick round of questions. Here are few fresh in my mind.

      • #onething “Simplify and communicate “helped team to scale was awesome #communication among team members. The context was the presence of start-up team across multiple geographies.
      • #onething “Should we change focus from Minimal-Viable-Product (MVP) to Billable-Viable-Product(BVP) ?” No money flowing is opinion but cash on table is fact. The Value of BVP: After 30 days of trial, will we get revenue on day 31?
      • Today internet earnings are migrating from advertising to commerce. With more commerce happening, product information is core to the future of brands and market.
      • Choice of Cloud in 2008 enabled us to establish India ecosystem for health management /diagnostics technology products and created a whole new SMB market of SaaS offerings.

Dorai moderated Unconference session. The session started with narrowing down to 3 topics based on audience preference of topics. It just happened that first topic “Inside Sales for SaaS products” took most of the time. It was nice to see exchange of folks with challenges asking questions and folks who cracked challenges sharing their insights. It was nice to see Suresh and Girish stepping up to share their inputs for most of the questions. May be this is exactly how real knowledge sharing should happen.

iSPIRT continues its focus to encourage learning and sharing among entrepreneurs as support for their journeys and here is second event in 2015 to demonstrate their commitment. Here are my thoughts after the event

  • Each questions of entrepreneur’s comes from real world challenges. The answers are not in text book and the answers have to come from real world experiences and are not available in textbooks or class rooms.
  • Learning from SaaS start-ups is tight connected with the context where SaaS start-up operates. Without context of the start-up, insights are of little or no help to entrepreneurs, as learning of SaaS start-up in first context contradicts with the learning of SaaS start-up in second context.
  • No one tried to create good impression. All were open to share their mistakes and what they learnt in the rough way. Indirectly saying that “Failure is first step towards success”.

Here are #bigMistake heard from Bangalore entrepreneurs in #SaaSyBus

  • Sold to friends & thought we were good, product ended up weak. Should’ve sold to toughest customers 1st to make prod strong
  • Hired for start-up experience and skills. Should have hired for attitude and culture fit.
  • Build the product along with sales. First few paying large customer got pissed off and jumped away.
  • Following templates for success does not work. Need to find your own path and your own means to succeed.
  • Took a lot of money from investors and became complacent. Will bootstrap next time.
  • Build a product for a market that was 2small. Now moved to a bigger market and trying hard.
  • Corporate experiences and start-up life are poled apart. Do not worry about other, competitors.
  • Being too passionate when things get hot. Need to step back and take a hard dispassionate look and face reality.
  • Trying to hardsell. Now we just do demos, show the value, if they see the value they will buy.
  • Selling operational cost efficiencies in a fast market does not work.
  • Customer say wants, not need. Product roadmap cannot be based on customer inputs, must come from deep within.
  • Delaying product launch to polish it. Need to launch fast and get market feedback and face reality.

Guest Post by G. Srinivasan

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The Freemium Business Model – What it is and how to make it work.

Summer’s here!

The sun, the vacations, the beach and last but not least, the lemonade stands.

Those little kiosks on the roadside and kids standing beside each of them with jars of cold lemonade, glasses, and inviting smiles.

So Joshua was among those 8-year-olds who had setup his own lemonade stand, for the first time.

The stand was set, the lemonades were ready, he was good to go.

Just then he realised something: there were about 5 lemonade stands in his neighborhood and all of them were the same. He wanted his stand to stand out.

And so he came up with a plan.

In his stand, people would get a plain lemonade for free. In addition to that he will offer around 5 other flavoured lemonades (watermelon or strawberry flavours, anyone?), which would come at a price of $1 a glass (to make up for the cost of giving free lemonades).

The result?

Joshua’s stand not only attracted more crowd, but also got him earning more than his friends.

Well, what we saw here was a small-scale version of what we call the “Freemium model”.

For those of you who need a concrete definition for this term, here goes:

“Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.” – Fred Wilson, VC

Basically the objective of this model is to get the users hooked to the free product, thereby motivating them to subscribe for the paid plan and also promote the product via word-of-mouth.

Chris Anderson in his book “Free” explains that Freemium works on the 5 Percent Rule – where 5% of premium customers support the remaining 95% of free users and also the cost of servicing the 95% is close to zero.

Companies like Evernote, Dropbox, Pandora, Linkedin, Skype, etc., are among the many Freemium success stories.

In fact, Mailchimp has reported a whopping 150% increase in paying customers and 650% increase in profit, within a year of going freemium.

The main plus-point of the Freemium model is that you can do away with the traditional sales-driven marketing strategy – the potential customers get to learn by themselves about the benefits of the product by trying it out, before even buying it (winning their mind share).

In addition to this, with the help of the data from your free users’ behaviours, you can easily find out what features of your product are/aren’t their favorites and which segments of the market are getting the most out of your product (cohort analyses will help).

A good example would be Box, which uses their Freemium model to identify potential upgrade customers, who are then contacted by the salespeople.

But just like any other business model, Freemium has also seen its fair share of failures and criticisms.

In 2006, Google Apps launched a feature for businesses, where they could customize their domains (@yourcompany.com). In 2012, the company announced that they’re taking away the free version and that businesses of all sizes must pay $50 per user per year (or signup for a flexible plan of $5 per user per month).

In one of our previous posts, we had discussed in detail about the various risks associated with a Freemium model for a SaaS business and what you can do to monetize the free users who don’t have an intention to upgrade.

CrazyEgg claims that their monthly revenue doubled once they dropped their free plan.

BUT, this was what Hiten Shah, its co-founder, had to say about the move:

“It was a short-term great decision for increasing revenue but I believe it was not the best decision for the long-term….If I’m starting a new SaaS business today, I would highly consider having a free plan that you invest resources in and plan on keeping forever.”

So what can you do to make your Freemium model a success, like how Joshua nailed it?

Firstly,  not all business models would suit all businesses alike and choosing the model that works right for you is crucial. The Freemium model is no exception to this rule.

A Freemium model would suit you, IF

  • You are positive that your lemonade is the best in the neighbourhood:

You have a high-quality free product which people would want to get their hands on (solves an immediate need/pain).

Also, you know that your long term Freemium users will eventually convert to paid users – which will only happen if the users derive sufficient value from your free product.

  • You’re certain that making 10 lemonades and 100 lemonades would cost you almost the same:

The cost of duplicating and distributing your free product is close to negligible.

The basic economics behind this model is that with the advent of SaaS (multi-tenancy), the marginal cost of distributing a software product among a 100 or a 100,000 is nominal.

  • Your customers know what a lemonade is, how to consume it and how it quenches their thirst:

The features of your free product are simple enough for the customers to educate themselves about and they don’t need hands-on training or support from your side (remember, keeping the cost as minimal as possible is the key).

Any business that involves high customer acquisition or customer service costs is not suitable for a Freemium model.

  • Your stand is in a busy street corner where there are a lot of passers-by – you’ve got enough people thirsty for your lemonade:

Your product will have a large reach and your potential market is huge.

As only a small percentage (1-4% on an average) of your free users would convert into paying customers, you need make that a small percentage of a large number to run a profitable business.

This also means that you have the sufficient infrastructure and operations to serve a mass market.

“The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using.” – Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote

  • You know that people will keep coming back for more lemonade!

Your product promotes repeat usage (increases the stickiness). For example, Evernote’s smile graph. Or, it makes use of the network effect, i.e., the product becomes more beneficial as more people use it (e.g. GitHub).

Evernote’s Smile Graph

Image Source: http://www.inc.com/magazine/201112/evernote-2011-company-of-the-year.html

You must also look at ways of increasing your switching cost. One way could be enhancing the usability of the product, so that the users make use of more features, add more data, and get more value over time.

Because the user commitment drastically reduces when the customers use a product for free, you need to look at other ways to increase commitment.

  • People would love free lemonades, but not free babysitting!

Your product falls into a category where the customers would be happy to get it for free.

For instance, you’ll be happy to use a free app for storing your photos, but not a free lasik surgery. Mission critical products that require extensive support upfront may not be suitable for this business model.

Chargebee itself would be a good example for this case. We experimented with a freemium model for 6 months and learnt some interesting lessons about the type of customers we were attracting and the ROI in terms of free to paid conversions. We eventually decided to grandfather-in the pricing for our existing customers and to discontinue the plan for our new customers.

That pretty much sums up the set of criteria that need to be satisfied to choose the Freemium model.

And if you replied “Yes!” for each of the above points, then read further.

Rob Walling, CEO of HitTail compares the Freemium model to a Samurai sword – “Unless you’re a master at using it, you can cut your arm off.”

Now that you’ve decided to pick up the Samurai sword, let’s look at the “right” ways of using this sword – a few aspects that you need to pay attention to, to make sure that you don’t cut yourselves.

  • No one’s gonna be interested in drinking water from a lemonade stand – even if it’s for free!

You need to find out the optimal balance in the features that you’re offering for free.

If the free features aren’t captivating enough, you simply won’t attract users. If the free features are in abundance, then there’s a good possibility for you to get the required traffic, but you will fall short in the conversion rate.

Also, if your users are getting converted to paid customers all together, it might even imply that your free product is not good enough – which again would be a concern.

You need to know where to draw the line.

  • Joshua chose ‘flavors’ as the segmentation parameter – what about you?

For starters, you could choose a single parameter to differentiate your free plan from the paid plan.

It must be the best possible representative of your product’s value and it must increase with usage, like file storage space and number of stored messages for HipChat.You must then decide on how much of the parameter is going to be for free – set the limits.

Once this is done, you can even think about further enriching your paid plan with a few other premium features – but remember to keep it uncomplicated and straightforward.

  • Who doesn’t want to try out interesting flavours in lemonades?

You need to have a clear upgrade path for the users. For example, Dropbox starts charging the users once they exhaust the free storage space – here the reasons to upgrade into a paid customer is clear to the user.

You must also clearly distinguish the free and the paid plans to help the users see the value in paying you more (to answer the “what’s in it for me?”), thus making it more compelling to upgrade.

  • Are your customers talking about your lemonade stand – is the news spreading?

You need to pay attention to the virality quotient of your product.

Are your free users liking your product? Yes.

Now how to make them spread the word?

You need to device proper referral programs and incentives to achieve that. Yesware, an email tracking tool, attributes its revenue margin to its referral program.

The baseline is this – Your free users SHOULD fall into one of these two categories:

1. Those who will convert into paid customers in due course (Asana allows about 29 people to use its services for free, beyond which it starts charging them)

(or)

2. Those who will help in acquiring more free/paid customers (Dropbox’s referral program)

If not, then it is time to rethink your strategy.

Conclusion:

Joshua’s goal was simple – to make his lemonade stand attractive and earn more than the other stands in his neighbourhood. And he made sure that his goal was met. If it hadn’t been met, he would’ve tried out yet another plan.

You must have a specific set of clear objectives of why you’re choosing the Freemium model – conversion rates, revenue, virality and ultimately your ROI and profitability.

If you’re not getting the expected results, then you might be doing something wrong.

For instance, Chris Anderson says that you must strive for a 10% conversion rate from free to paid.

If the rate falls below that, the cost of serving the freeloaders will make it difficult for you to make money. On the other hand, a rate more than that would signal that you’re offering too little in your free version, which might limit your reach.

Set yourself measurable goals in the long run and ultimately if your goals and your customers’ goals don’t coincide/align, you mustn’t hesitate to pivot. Like how Google did.

May be you need a different model to make your lemonade stand succeed.

Reblogged from ChargeBee, blogpost by Sadhana Balaji.

 

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#SaaSx2 is here – The premier event for SaaS companies looking to scale

When SaaS was discovered by India, a group of young people saw its potential and built incredible businesses around it.

These were the originals, the first SaaS hackers.

We brought a few of them together in March this year, under the banner of SaaSx1, so other SaaS entrepreneurs could learn from them, and don’t have to commit the same mistakes all over again. The idea was that the learning would allow the new, driven breed to leverage experience when building innovative companies. As we said then, the knowledge needed to grow SaaS business from zero to $10k to $100k to $1m in MRR is rare, and the only people who can tell you something about it are the people who have done so already.

The super successful event ensured that we kept getting mails asking us to do another, and soon.

But the quality of the first event ensured that we had to wait and work to put together speakers of the same calibre again, so SaaSx could become a premier event in the ecosystem.

And so here we are.

saaSxWith #SaaSx2, and in the same place where it began – the newest kid of the startup ecosystem, Chennai. The event now returns with a leaner, meaner program that aims at ensuring that people ask the questions they want answers to, and take away specific action items they can immediately implement. This season will also debut an extended networking session, thus ensuring that everyone’s ideas have equal space in the ether, and the information shared and gained benefits everyone in the ecosystem.

Each one of the elements of the program has been tweaked keeping in mind last year’s experience, and the several Playbook RTs and meetups we have facilitated over the last few years. The speakers this year include Girish(Freshdesk), Aneesh Reddy(Capillary), Few SaaS startups and the tentative program is as follows.

Time Session Title
1030 to 1300hrs Pre-Event Playbook – “What it takes to Fund SaaS companies”
1030 to 1300hrs Pre-Event Playbook – “Are you ready to hit the growth pedal’ MVP”
1300-1400hrs Registrations & Lunch Networking
1400-1415hrs Introduce & Welcome #SaaSx2
1415-1515hrs Fireside Chat – “Assembling a Commando Team in the early days”
1515-1535hrs 3 SaaS Founders talks about “One Thing” talk for 5 min each
1535-1635hrs Fireside Chat – “The Nuances of Enterprise SaaS”
1635-1700hrs 3 SaaS Founders talks about “One Thing” talk for 5 min each
1700-1830hrs Group Event
1830-1850hrs SaaS Landscape report to be launched by Signalhill/iSPIRT
1850-1905hrs SaaS Guide to be launched
1905-2000hrs Keynote Address
2000hrs onwards Entertainment – Standup comedy, Networking Cocktails & Dinner

We will keep you updated over this as and when we have information, and please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you need any sort of assistance or have questions you need answered.

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Why are Indian startups so SaaSy? I took a bus ride with 40 entrepreneurs to find out

Reblogged from TechinAsia with the permission of the Author – Malavika Velayanikal

Saas-startups-on-a-bus

I stumbled at pricing initially. I sold my product at an 80 percent discount to a customer who kept pressing for more. After that the customer took me for granted, demanding more and more and more. Instead I should have tried to make him understand the value in the product. If he didn’t get it, I should have just moved on.”

“I learned from that mistake.”

“All of us entrepreneurs hero-worship ideas. An idea is like the superhero of a superhero movie. But what we don’t see clear enough is that for the movie to be a hit, you need a great villain first. If the villain is weak, your hero is also weak. So first thing to do is to figure out your villain. That huge problem which needs solving. I had to go through four iterations to figure out the right problem to solve with my product.”

“I hired an experienced vice president for sales very early on. That was a big mistake.”

“Why?”

“Because, until you figure out your sales learning curve, it is you the founder who should go and sell. Only you know the product enough, you know the architecture, so you can take the call easily. A sales head cannot make the commitments that you can, at that point. He should come in only when it is time to scale.

These were entrepreneurs talking. There were 40 of them, all running SaaS (software-as-a-service) startups in various stages of the evolutionary ladder. Some just out of college, some pushing the pedal at an accelerator, some experienced enough to invest in other startups themselves. They were all on a bus. From Bangalore to Chennai. To attend a first-of-its-kind meetup organized by a bunch of SaaS entrepreneurs for all SaaS entrepreneurs in India,SaaSx Chennai.

That I, a journalist, was embedded on the world’s “SaaSiest bus” – as they called it – didn’t stop any of them from talking about their biggest mistakes or what they learned the rough way.

And that was because SaaS was no longer an untamed, strange animal. Each of the entrepreneurs on the bus knew that they were sitting on a good steed. Everybody had a steady tick on revenue. “People call the SaaS business the flywheel business – it takes time for it to build momentum, but when it does, it is very difficult to stop it. This is what is happening now,” Sharad Sharma, co-founder of startup thinktank iSPIRT – the Indian Software Product Industry Roundtable, who is also on the bus, tells me.

Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of analytics startup BrandSigma. He is also a prolific angel investor with about two dozen investments. Former CEO of Yahoo India’s research and development wing, Sharma has been in the Indian tech industry since 1986, growing companies, building new ones, and now hand-holding young startups.

According to him, today, there are fundamental forces favoring SaaS startups in India.

The Uber for software

SaaS startups in India 1

SaaS is often called “on-demand software” because it refers to a subscription-based delivery model, where applications are accessed via the internet. The subscribers do not have the burden of installing, managing, and maintaining hardware or software; they just need a reliable internet connection. The company selling the software will host and maintain the servers, databases, and code that constitute an application. The buyers pay an annual or monthly subscription fee. That’s all.

It’s a clear win for companies do not want to invest in expensive hardware to host the software. They can spread out costs over time. And for the sellers, it means predictable recurring revenue, good margins, and inbound marketing.

The SaaS movement first picked up pace when Salesforce in San Francisco threw open customer relationship management software for small- and medium-sized companies on a subscription model. This was in 1999. It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2004, raising US$110 million, and acquired dozens of other startups later on.

Meanwhile, Indian startups too had caught on early. Chennai-based Zoho, founded in 1996, launched its first business app on the cloud – Zoho Writer – in 2005. Since then, the bootstrapped company has created a string of applications for businesses around the world, and grew to a subscribers’ base of over 13 million. Its success inspired many Indian startups to adopt the SaaS model.

A good example is customer-support software maker Freshdesk, now one of India’s hottest startups. Founder of Freshdesk Girish Mathrubootham was vice-president for product management at Zoho before he started Freshdesk in 2010. Today, it’s on par with global leaders like Zendesk. Leading software review platform G2 Crowd actually rated it a notch above its American counterpart.

Aces up the sleeve for Indian SaaS startups

Three key factors came together to give Indian startups an edge in SaaS, Sharma says.

First is the new pipe of buyers that everybody is selling to: the small and medium businesses of the West. The market is evolved there, and people don’t want to buy anything from a sales person. Why? “Because of the same reason they don’t want to buy cars from a car salesperson. Nobody buys a car from a car salesperson anymore because the next morning, they have buyer’s remorse. They feel they bought a car that they didn’t want, they bought features they didn’t want, and that they were oversold. And now, this is actually the problem in enterprise software. In every big enterprise, you will hear a term called enterprise shelfware – stocks of software, they are not using at all,” Sharma says.

So now, companies want to do their own homework to come up with software options and talk to sales folk on the phone, where they will be less likely to be cajoled into buying what they don’t want. And in that case, it doesn’t matter where the software-maker is based, in California or Coimbatore. The desk selling and marketing model of SaaS evened the playing field for everybody.

Second is the youth of the market. A few years back, selling on the cloud was just a mere concept. So everybody in this space now, big or small, are startups. There isn’t a Microsoft or an Oracle with a near monopoly in any of the SaaS verticals. For instance, Freshdesk is competing with Zendesk, but Zendesk too is still a startup.

“There is no incumbency – nobody has yet cracked the market fully. The market is still open for new players. That changes the odds completely. That is enormously enabling,” Sharma points out, adding that for the first time, Indian companies are not late to the global market.

The third star that aligned to make the magic work for Indian startups is the inbound marketing model for SaaS. Traditionally, a company needed a creative person, who will make an emotional ad that will resonate with everyone. But for SaaS startups, marketing is more about tweaking the product with numbers in mind – so it appeals to an engineer.

“Today, if you just talk to the people here in the bus, they will tell you that all marketers are also engineers now. They are the same type of people. The new wave of marketing is the scientific marketing; it is not the big idea, it is about making course corrections everyday. So it is very easy for Indian founders to adopt,” Sharma says.

Put these three together, and voila! There is an outpouring of SaaS activity in India, although it’s still an undercovered story in both global media and the local mainstream press.

Why the SaaSiest bus from Bangalore to Chennai?

Bangalore is always the first city to pop up in any conversation about startups in India. But when it comes to SaaS, Chennai has a star line-up – from Zoho to Freshdesk, Indix,ChargeBee, OrangeScape, Unmetric, and so on.

So Bangalore-based iSPIRT decided to hold SaaSx in Chennai and bus a few dozen SaaS founders there from Bangalore. Microsoft Ventures, also based in Bangalore, came in as a co-host.

About 120 SaaS entrepreneurs gathered in a conference hall at a swanky hotel in Chennai eager for some peer learning, expert guidance, and bonhomie. Serial entrepreneur Avlesh Singh, co-founder of customer engagement tool WebEngage was among those who shared his “SaaS story” of how he struck upon the core idea, found the product market fit, got the first 100 customers, and pushed the pedal from there to win almost every leading ecommerce company in the world as a client.

Freshdesk’s Girish Mathrubootham posed questions to the crowd, drew out tips to tackle common hurdles, and answered a few cheeky ones like how his company “poached” a client from its bete noire Zendesk.

The hosts launched a how-to-sell manual, “Jump Start Guide for Desk Marketing and Selling for SaaS,” based on the insights gleaned over the roundtable meetups iSPIRT had been organizing over the past year. The guide was co-written by Krish Subramaniam, founder of Chargebee, Niraj Ranjan Rout, founder of GrexIt, Sahil Parikh, founder of Brightpod, and Suresh Sambandam, founder of OrangeScape.

The inevitable future of enterprise software

SaaSx Chennai

According to Sequoia Capital, SaaS is the inevitable future of enterprise software. Microsoft agrees. The company’s new CEO Satya Nadella is embracing the concept, saying, “we are also in SaaS.”

In India, the SaaS trend has just picked up pace, but already some argue that it is as big as the IT services trend of the early 1990s. The outsourcing market was just opening then, and though there were biggies like Accenture, IBM, and HP in it already, Indian companies like Infosys disrupted their business model. Now, the SaaS startups in the country are taking to the desk selling and marketing model with great gusto, disrupting this space.

Currently, India’s main competitors are Australia and New Zealand among emerging SaaS hubs.

Sharma points out a way to evaluate this space, where companies have started to go public already. For example, customer support startup Zendesk went public last year. Out of the six competitors that Zendesk listed in their public IPO document, four are Indian companies: Kayako Helpdesk Pvt. Ltd., Freshdesk, Inc., SupportBee, Inc., and Tenmiles Technologies Pvt. Ltd (Happy Fox).

Now, there are about 34 SaaS startups in the US touted as IPO material in the coming four years. “Each one of them has Indian companies as their significant competitors, nibbling at their meals, trying to disrupt them. Now think of it. If that doesn’t tell you that India is arriving on the SaaS market, then nothing will,” Sharma says.

Looking around me at a busload of SaaSy entrepreneurs, I’m convinced.

Editing by Josh Horwitz and Terence Lee, second image by Stock Monkeys