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The single most frequent mistake #entrepreneurs make during the #customer #development process

There are many assumptions we make about the product or the customer problem, which makes us develop solutions that may be really more complicated than required.

A friend and fellow entrepreneur I met on Friday was showing me a prototype (HML mock up with transitions, with some simple functions implemented) of this SaaS application. He had used a developer on hire at UpWork to develop the initial version. After speaking to and confirming the mockup (wireframes) with 10 different users he was off to develop and deliver the MVP. Overall he had spent about $8000 in design and development and had taken about 13 weeks to develop the MVP. Most of the time was spent back and forth with the design team for the HTML / CSS and the development team for confirming features and transitions.

Of the 13 weeks, his development team spent 2 weeks just implementing a sign up process, a user cancellation process, a payment process, a refund process, a login process, a password retrieval process, etc. Which he did not realize was the tax of developing a SaaS solution. Instead he took the 5 step approach to building a SaaS application and followed it religiously.

The critical mistake during customer development that most entrepreneurs make is to lead with the solution or product instead of spending time learning about the current solutions.

When he was showing it to potential customers, he found that most of them liked the product and said they’d use it and pay for it, if they could find value in 2-3 weeks. He was pretty happy given that most users were ready to pay for the product, which he did believe would solve a critical problem for them.

After developing the MVP and letting his users know about the product, he followed up by asking them to start to use the application. The first two days were great, with lots of feedback and improvements that they gave him about the product.

Then for the next 3 days there was radio silence. Even after his prodding and cajoling, most users were not using the application.

Instead of talking to users face to face, he instead decided to spend time with them (3 hours each user), shadowing them to understand why they were not using the application.

Turns out most of the users needed his product, but either A) did not remember it existed or B) were used to using their workaround – largely using a combination of email and cut and paste into Slack.

The biggest barrier to his adoption and usage was their existing process (although inefficient) was something they were used to and so were able to “optimize” it to make it quick and “fast” for their own usage. So much that they felt that using his product (which I can assure you would be vastly superior) would slow them down.

He then pivoted his product (not idea) to implement the one feature they all wanted as a Chrome plugin. Which worked like a charm.

He then had to remove the top 3 features and undo all the user login and management, infrastructure code and other remaining features, just to support the user behavior for their existing process.

The big takeaway for him was that when you have a hammer, everything seems like a nail.

The biggest takeaway for his wife (who is his cofounder) was not over engineer the solution.

The big takeaway for me was the failed customer development process. With all our biases (which all of us have) – we always tend to lead with the solution (“let me show you a demo”), instead of understanding the problem better to focus on delivering the one feature that matters, without all the bells and whistles.

Image From:  http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/05/the-visual-guide-to-cognitive-biases/

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What is a good sales target for a sales person in SaaS in India?

Unfortunately there is no fixed answer. Problem with SaaS is that there are too many moving variables. LTV,Churn,ARR,ARPU etc. So its really hard to come up with one fixed number. So based on our experience and our product the following is a number we have come up with to set targets for our sales organization.

0.8x(x is the sales person’s salary)

So, a sales person should pull in 0.8x worth of MRR every month. Or 9.6x worth of annual contract values every month. This is the number from which they start getting incentives.So for example a sales rep getting around 18 lakhs salary should pull in around Rs.1,20,000 MRR every month. If he pulls in 30,000 MRR(0.2X) he will be just covering his base salary. If he pulls in 75,000(0.5X) he will be covering the organization costs. And only if he pulls in anything above that will the company move towards profitability. And only when the company is profitable will the sales get an incentive.

Obviously there are a lot of assumptions made to arrive at this number. We are assuming the LTV to be around a year and churn is also very low. You can find a spreadsheet with some numbers here. You can modify the variables to fit for your organization.Just open SaaS Sales Targets and play around with the values to see the numbers. You can also download it and modify it as you see fit.

Since we started a sales organization a couple of years ago we have been experimenting with different variables and this is a good rule of thumb to follow for setting sales targets. Please comment on what your experience has been. Is our model too tough on sales guys or too easy. Hopefully we can all come out with a comprehensive model for sales in SaaS in India.

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The first 5 steps to building your own SaaS application

This post is for non developer founders who want to build a SaaS application.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a relatively small market – at $19 Billion in total revenues, it seems large, but compared to $250 Billion of the overall software market it seems minuscule. It has grown from nothing to this large number in the last 10 years. Similar to the eCommerce market, which seems large but is less than 15% of overall retail, the opportunities will start to be in the niches is my prediction.

The big question is when and how will it grow and where are the opportunities. While there are many specialist firms focusing on SaaS alone, the incumbent software companies (the largest of who are Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc.) are also making their own investments to move their businesses from selling licensed software to services.

One of the key opportunities I see is that ability for smaller, niche markets to be targeted using SaaS. Since the deployment model, time to value and cost are so much lower now than 10 years ago,  it is easy to build a niche product that can gain rapid fan following among the target customers and *if that customer base* does grow and end up having more budget it can be a lucrative market.

I do get the question often about the steps to build a SaaS business. Even if you dont intend to build a Venture funded business, the economics of SaaS are determined by cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and cost of servicing the customer (developing, operating and maintaining the software).

What I am increasingly starting to see is that most prototypes are either built by a developer founder, or outsourced (by a non technical founder) to “prove that the market exists“.

1. The first step I’d recommend before you start development, is to sign up 15-20 beta customers. Target people you know well who will stick through your crappy alpha, beta and version 1, so you can convince them that the value does exist when you iterate quickly.

For early beta customers, there are many techniques you can use including: a) setting up a launch page and promoting that launch page on social media b) setting up a launch page and buying Google adwords to drive signups and following up with signups via email c) blogging about the topic to share what you know about that market d) interviewing influential users before you launch or e) setup an email newsletter of great content for that industry and have many potential users subscribe to that newsletter.

2. The next step is to create an activity model and user flows.

This step is to ensure that you can know exactly what are the top 3 features you need to implement first which will make your product “must have” to solve the problem for your users.

In fact if you can identify the top feature (just one) that people will come back and use everyday, you should be good to go to the next step. Validate the top feature with your beta customer list, so you are building what they will use.

3. The next step is to create a mockup using wireframes. These are typically good to show the screens your user will go through and the experience as well. I would get a lot of feedback on the list of steps and screens before I build the prototype.

Typically in your first pass stick to under 7 screens would be my suggestion. That’s enough for a 45 second to 1 min “demo” and should give your users a feel for what the app will do. If they ask you for “one” feature that matters more to them than the ones you have, dont mock it up yet, but put it on your list until you have enough users interested.

4. Design your database schema. A database schema is good to share with your developers entities that exist in your application and what their relationship are. I tend to use DB Schema or just Freemind to show to fields without the datatypes.

5. Understand and select your “stack”. Even if you want to outsource your application development I’d recommend you talk to a few developer friends who can educate you on the stacks they use – what the front end languages and libraries would be, what the back end language would be and the database options. You will be more confident when you talk to your outsourcing company and also be able to help make tradeoffs when you need them.

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Building Marketing & Sales Engine for Your Global B2B SaaS Product

Recently, India has seen many success stories of product startups in the SaaS category, which are building products for the global market. Here is what we did –

Suresh Sambandam, Founder and CEO of OrangeScape (the company behind KissFlow), in collaboration with the iSPIRT team, conducted the 49th #PlayBookRT on building SaaS products for the world. Sokrati (Pune) played a gracious host for this event, and saw around 14 product entrepreneurs from different cities.


Avinash Raghava introduced Suresh and the RT was kicked off with a round of introduction from all the participants.

Suresh laid out the purpose of the round table and defined the scope. This PlayBookRT was for the B2B SaaS startups with a product that has a global audience. These companies have achieved a product-market fit with a MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) in the range of $1K to $5K. These companies are looking to move the needle to $50K-$100K MRR. Essentially, early startups that are looking to grow at least 110x.

B2B customers need to be segmented with certain metrics. For KissFlow, the number of employees was a key metric to identify customer segments. The segments were –

  • SOHO (<10 employees),
  • Very Small Business (10-50),
  • SMB (50-500),
  • Mid-Market (500-5000) and
  • Enterprises (5000+)

Depending on your product, you may segment the customers by their revenues.

It is unlikely that your product will work across all segments as it is. The sweet spot for KissFlow is the SMB and Mid Market, as the value proposition is stronger for these customers. You have to pick your own sweet spot.

There was some discussion on why Enterprise segment is different from the others. There were multiple views on that. It was discussed that the marketing and sales processes are different for large customers. Their buying process is different too. They want “vendors” to come to them. Often, the product itself doesn’t work. Example – for KissFlow, Enterprise’s would need integration with their existing systems like SAP or Oracle. The SMB or Mid-Market customers do not have such requirements. For enterprises, you may have to package your product as a custom solution. Instead of the entire company, you may find it easier to get your product rolled out in a specific department.

The Mid-Market segment opens a big opportunity in US market. Typically, in the US, $5,000 is the approval limit in this segment. Most of the SaaS products fit in this limit. That makes decision making easier and fast. These companies are willing to spend money on products that help them compete with big guys.

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The discussion then moved on to the core elements of a successful SaaS business.

The role of the product in SaaS is very high. For enterprise products, the product comes at the end of the sales cycle. For SaaS products, the opposite is true. So, your product has to solve a problem.

While product is at the core of your business, marketing comes before the product. Your marketing communication needs to match the product promise.

Before accelerating your marketing, you need to decide on the product positioning. Your product is either a category creator, or provides a novel approach to an existing and well-understood category, or low cost alternative. Often, most of the SaaS businesses will fall in the second or third category. It’s also possible that product positioning could be mix of last two categories. The category creator products are hardest to pull off. The low-cost alternative need not be a low-priced alternative. Being in India, we can enjoy the advantage of low cost structures. Some companies do pass on the cost benefits to the customer via low price. While offering a low price option, it is important to ensure that you are not perceived as a low-quality option.

The next topic of discussion was offering a Freemium product vs Free trial. Often, for SaaS, this choice does not depend on the cost. The general consensus seemed to emerge that a free trial is the best option. Even if it doesn’t cost you much to offer part of the product for free, the effort to convert that free user to being a ‘paid’ user is high. Plus, when the user is ready to pay for the product, the user still may go out to look for other options. There are “free” products that make you pay with say a link to their website. This is not really free as your customers are paying with a different currency.

Like all discussions, this one too took a detour and we discussed about sales for the global customer base. To serve the US market, you need to have a night shift. For KissFlow, the newly signed up customer receives two emails – one automated and one personal email. The automated email is to schedule a demo of the product. KISSFlow has reduced the friction to sign up dramatically. You sign up with just an email. They have a team to find out information about that person based on the email address. All the new leads get assigned to the sales team automatically based on timezones and available bandwidth with the sales team. Each sales person handles about 200 leads per month with an annual contract value of less than $5,000.

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The next topic of discuss was pricing. People visit the homepage and then the ‘pricing’ page. They are qualifying themselves by looking at pricing. There are various ways to price your product. For the well-established category, competition will be a huge influencer in your pricing. You can also price your product based on value offered, though, you need to clearly demonstrate the value of the product. For KissFlow, the anchor was Google Apps. At the start, they focused on a niche of companies who have adopted Google Apps, which costs $5 per user per month. So, they picked the price of $3 per month.

For SaaS companies, raising the prices is usually not a problem. You can grandfather your existing customers who will continue to enjoy the same price, but the newer customers will pay a higher price. The real problem is lowering the prices, as it upsets existing customers. If your customers are not complaining about the prices, you are leaving money on the table and you should raise the price.

You should make users pay every month irrespective of their usage. You shouldn’t have to sell your product every month to the customers. That’s why your customers need to keep paying every month. Setting the expectations also ensures that customers are not thinking about pricing often.

Marketing was the next topic of discussion. Your website is a core marketing asset. You should avoid outsourcing the site development and have an in-house team for updating and maintaining the website.

Your home page should have a crisp headline with some value proposition. Jargon should be avoided. Make it easy for customers to understand and take a decision about your product. You should create a “customers” page for social proof. Highlight your major customers on this page. If you are running a blog, it will have visitors who are not aware about your product. You should create ads for your own product and run them on your blog.

You can use SEO and AdWords to bring the organic and paid traffic. SEO needs a lot of time to ramp up. So, start early with a dedicated team, even if it is a one-person team. AdWords needs a specialist to handle the paid traffic. Here, you can define your key metrics like costs per sign up. AdWords can deliver a sign up at $10-$25 for search and $2-$10 for display ads. These are only sign ups and not conversions. You need to measure conversion to paid subscription. That would be your true cost of customer acquisition.

2015-05-30 12.41.40

You need to have a responsive site as mobile traffic is growing. Even though most business users will sign up for your product with a desktop, they might discover your product on the mobile (maybe while reading a blog). They need to have a good experience when they are on mobile.

You can run re-marketing ads. This will provide you multiple opportunities to reach out to the user. Test out different messaging in the re-targeting. You can do smarter remarketing by finding the users’ point of interaction. For paid ads, start with only the US and then keep adding more countries depending on the quality of the traffic. There was a brief discussion on content marketing, focused on the disciplined approach to creating valuable content that will start delivering results over a period of time.

This was an excellent round table that covered most of the aspects of building SaaS products for the global market.

Contributed by Shashikant Kore, Co-founder of Karooya.

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The 5 most important questions to ask before you price your SaaS product

Over the last few weeks I had a chance to review 89 of the companies to understand their free to paid conversion and also a chance to talk to 13 companies. What I learned was that time spent on the pricing page was a key indicator of conversion and you can A/B test your pricing page for colors, position of your highest and lowest prices, number of plans showed, feature listing and your call to action. The names of your pricing plan also has a significant signalling effect on your customer’s perception of your product. I believe the future of SaaS pricing will move from pay-per-usage to pay-for-outcomes.

The most frequent question I get asked about SaaS companies is how to think about pricing for the product. Here are some constructs to think about and 7 questions to ask before you come up with a pricing model or a price for your product.

1. Understanding your customers current solution and options and their “cost per unit of activity” is the most important thing you should do first. For e.g. if you sell a Sales force automation solution, the customer might be using an Excel spreadsheet to track their sales because they dont have too many opportunities. So in their minds the “cost per unit” is zero, since they have already “paid” for Excel.

2. SaaS pricing is a marketing function not finance or operations. If the team that determines the value of your offering to the customer is another them, then it is their responsibility. The reason for this is that value of your product determines how much you can charge, not what customers are willing to pay. Value cannot be determined as a absolute, only relative. Which is why you have to compare it to their current solution.

3. At the early stages (less than 50-100 customers) optimize for more customers and quicker sales cycles not for profit. To get data and buying patterns you need enough data and a meaningful sample size. When you go beyond the early customers, it is time to optimize for LTV and CAC.

Here are the top 7 questions to ask before you come up with a pricing model for your SaaS product.

1. What are the current options for your customer?

Find out how are they solving the problem your product addresses currently and how much does it cost them to do that.

2. What are the different segments of your customers?

Find out if there are different problems your product can solve and the value associated with those problems. That would be the best indicator of

3. What is your goal from your pricing?

It is not always obvious to say that your goal is to get the “most money” or to be the most expensive product. Some companies want to be the 80% functionality at 20% of the cost option. Determine your pricing goal – profitability (after customer acquisition costs), value creation, marketshare, etc.

4. What is your cost of customer acquisition?

For most parts, your cost of development tends to be fixed (if you hire 3 people, you have to pay their salaries regardless of how many features the ship), but the cost of customer acquisition tends to be a variable. So if your costs dont take CAC into account, you will have a model that wont be profitable.

5. What is your sales model?

Linking Sales and Pricing for SaaS

I usually use the price and complexity of sales / marketing on two axes to understand the sales strategy for a SaaS company.

If you are a company with a lower price point and low complexity of sales, you will have to rely on customers to try and buy (freemium) the product on their own and work on obtaining customers at a low cost.

If you are a very complex product or have a complex sales process and your product costs a lot, you will have to hire a field sales team to help you sell.

If however, your product is priced high and your complexity is low then you will build an inside (phone) sales team.

If you have a high complexity product and sales model and low price, your company will die.

Use this model to determine where you want to be and price the product appropriately.

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Starting with an SMB focus vs. enterprise for SaaS companies. Which is better?

branches&creatures (1)In the initial days of your SaaS startup, when you are doing user development, you may find that your product will help both SMB (Small Medium Business) users as well at Enterpriseusers.

There’s a tendency to then focus more on the “customer” development than the user. Assuming you have spent enough time on the user, there is a serious possibility of getting distracted from your mission by doing “both” at the same time.

Here is a dichotomy for entrepreneurs – Knowing that the milestone of Monthly Recurring Revenue (sans Churn) is the most important metric for SaaS companies, many entrepreneurs try to take the “relatively” easy route to try and get more larger enterprise deals for their product, if that’s what they know.

I have found that most entrepreneurs with an enterprise background end up finding 5-10 early customers who are willing to pay for a good product, but in the bargain they end up flexing their enterprise sales” muscle instead of building the “SMB marketing” muscle.

There is nothing wrong with choosing either market, but there is a big enough difference between both.

The enterprise SaaS market will end up with longer sales cycles (even if you know the decision makers), larger deals and request for integration with many existing tools and processes.

The SMB SaaS market will end up with smaller individual sales, an inbound marketing driven “self service” approach to vending and a extreme focus on seamless “on boarding” of users (sans training).

Many entrepreneurs also convince themselves that they can do both at the same time.

Which cannot be farther from the truth.

So, the question I usually get asked is “Which one do investors prefer“?

The answer is either one, since investors care about quality and quantity of revenue, but above all they also care about empirical evidence that they money they invest in will generate the consistency in the business for the chosen model.

Inconsistencies kill fund raising cycles.

So, if you chose to say you will build an enterprise sales model, you need to show your financial, product, hiring and operational model to support that type of business.

If, however you say your company will build a try and buy model for SMB sales online, with minimal or zero human touch from your side, driven by digital marketing, you need to show evidence that you can do that over a 3-6 month (or more) period.

I have seen many entrepreneurs confuse any revenue with good revenue. Consistency matters.

You have to show investors that you have done what you want to do.

Empirical evidence trumps theories.

So, my suggestion is to pick a model, stick to it for some time, before you decide to pivot if that does not work for you. Before you raise money, showing that the model you are choosing is one you have relevant expertise and knowledge in running is going to be critical.

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Here’s how we get more than 50% conversion in cold emailing

For any SaaS sales team, cold emailing is the life line of the sales funnel. For organisations like ours, with smaller ticket size deals, the cold emailing channel has to work, otherwise the CAC vs LTV balance can go for a toss.Cold Emailing

Every entrepreneur, whether in sales or not, is selling something. If you are pitching investors, you are selling a vision and a team; if you are mailing potential hires, you are pitching work environment and potential gains; if you are mailing a potential mentor, you are pitching to his altruistic or “giving back to the society” tendencies. For any cold email to work, it is essential that you understand how a conversation with a stranger on a digital platform is structured.

This sounds fairly simple doesn’t it? We have tried so many variants of cold emailing at Betaglide and the truth remains, in most cases it doesn’t work. Imagine yourself in your customer’s shoes and assess “Why would I ever be interested to read this email or even opening this email?”. There are multiple ways an email can be structured and different ways work for different people. For us, most things didn’t work but thankfully, a few did! Here’s the outline and our learning behind it and how we approached it.

  • Subject Line: This is the first line your receiver is going to see and is going to make the decision whether to open the email or not in a split second. The key here is to respect your customer’s time. S/He receives hundreds of emails every day and what makes your email so special for her/him to open it? This is the questions you should be answering in your subject line. Also, don’t make it generic or loaded with data. Email is extremely personal and you would do good to remember that. For us, subject lines like “Increase/boost your user retention”, “Decrease your churn with retention.ai” just didn’t work. We had less than 5% email open rate with such subject lines. That is pretty bad when you are trying to scout for beta users who need to trust you and your product to become an early adopter. What instead worked was “Hey John, a message from Manan”, “John – Become your app’s rockstar”. The subject line should be catchy enough to garner curiosity in the reader’s mind for her/him to decide to open the email.
  • Introduction: This is one of the most trickiest part which took us a whole bunch of experiments to crack. The first couple of lines in the email is going to decide whether the receiver reads it further or not. With most automation tools, now you can personalise emails that you send. It is a no-brainer to start with “Hey John or Hi John” instead of “Dear John”. Especially if you are selling to C level executives and product managers. This makes them immediately comfortable and as they have already seen the salutation multiple times in their regular email conversations. The next part is first few lines of the email. This took some really hard thinking to crack. Most of the times, we are eager to say something about us but that is a wrong way to look at it. The first few lines should be about the recipient of the email! Research about the person/company that you are sending the email to. Congratulate them if they recently got a promotion or if their company recently achieved a milestone. This immediately grabs her/his interest in your email and decides to read on. We find tools like Linkedin sales navigator and Rapportive ideal for such research! If you a know a better tool for this, do tell!
  • The pitch: After all, you are writing this email to sell him something. In his book, “Zero to One”, Peter Thiel explains that best sales process hardly ever looks like sales. We initially made a mistake of writing about our product and its features in this section. No one cares a penny’s worth about what your product does! Make the pitch about her/him! What are the problems that your customer is facing and how you can solve them along with a number. If you can not pitch your product in just two lines, you really need to work on it. We used to have an eight line pitch! Never worked! Talking so much about your product just seems very salesy! The point is that your pitch should not sound salesy but something that can genuinely help the recipient achieve her/his goals.  That is your pitch perfect. Remember, the purpose of the first email is to start a conversation about the problem that your customer faces and then slowly convincing her/him that you are the man to solve it!
  • Closing: This is the simplest part and most people do it right. If you are mailing directly to the person who is going to use your product, ask for a “brief time for a call”. If you are mailing founder/VP who might not be the primary user of your product, ask them to connect you to the “relevant person in the organisation.”

Email, when done right can become the cornerstone of your sales process and open the floodgates of hot leads! One might say that the approach is time consuming for you have to do research on each customer you are sending the email to. But remember, sales is about relationships and trust you build with the stakeholder. Invest that time for the clients that are essential to your growth and it is going to be worth it!

Guest blog post by Manan Shah, Retention.ai

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Jump Start Your SaaS Business by Selling to US Market: Learn the Nuts and Bolts from Whodunnit

jumpstart-guid-1Are you a first time SaaS entrepreneur targeting the US market? Learn it from the masters through the Jump Start Guide to Desk Marketing and Selling for SaaS put together by Krish Subramaniam (Chargebee), Niraj Ranjan Rout (GrexIt), Sahil Parikh (Brightpod), and Suresh Sambandam (KiSSFLOW). Aaron Ross launched the guide during the first SaaSx event in Chennai put together by iSPIRT, attended by more than 100 SaaS entrepreneurs.

The following are the take-aways. Use the guide to understand in-depth and develop your strategy to hit $100 million in sales. All the very best!

Marketing

  • There are four different strategies employed by Indian entrepreneurs for customer acquisition: Learn from Wingify, KiSSFLOW, GrexIt, Freshdesk.
  • Free trials don’t work for higher sales value. And prices are not listed publicly by most companies.
  • What is the right pricing? There is no one sutra to it. But get it right before you push your sales pitch. Learn strategies from the hackers who did it before.
  • Have a team in place to handle marketing efforts with clear segmentation of the team: marketing/product/sales. Have clear-cut roles as they often blur.
  • Understand the 10 recommended activities before you start marketing.
  • Focus on building the trust of the customer visiting your product website for the first time. To make it attractive, for example, think of a “Benefits” page instead of listing “Features.”
  • Learn how to build content around long tail keywords for effective SEO.
  • Marketing based on content generation (content marketing) has many dimensions to it. Use all of them for maximum benefits.
  • Social channels ensure better outreach. Make your presence felt on social pages.
  • Retarget your customers who just dropped by your website.
  • You can innovatively market using your product itself.
  • Get a marketing team in place.
  • There are some sales channels you must ignore before starting the SaaS company.

Selling

  • Learn what catching, coaching, and closing mean.
  • Winning the first few customers is the founder’s job.
  • Learn what tools to use for customer development.
  • Develop an effective funnel.
  • Facilitate self-selection and build engagement with the customers.
  • Collect key information during the engagement process.
  • Post-trial offers work for closing the customer.
  • Learn the customer closure techniques to use.
  • Structure your sales team clearly.
  • Doing a great customer service after sales is essential to retaining the customers. Learn the tips.

Download the guide here{link}.

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Growth Hackers Will Share Their Secrets at SaaSx Chennai

This Thursday evening will witness the largest gathering of SaaS founders in India. In the event conceived by iSPIRT called SaaSx Chennai, more than 100 people, largely SaaS founders, apart from a few handful of product industry influencers, will brainstorm on various aspects of a SaaS business, especially taking the SaaS organization from a $10 million revenue to a $100 million revenue.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk, talks of Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue, as the brain behind Salesforce.com’s recurring $100 million revenue year on year. He initially started a company, raised $5 million, burnt the whole cash, and shut down the company. Then he joined Salesforce.com as a cold caller. Finding cold calling to be a bit arduous in winning customers, he conceived what Girish calls Cold Calling 2.0. His idea was to first interact with the customer on email and then establish a rapport, before calling the customer. The idea behind this exercise to first zeroing in on the most suitable customer for your product. This turns the prospect into a paying customer quickly.

SaaSx_headerAt SaaSx Chennai, Aaron Ross will deliver the keynote as SaaSx via video and will release the Jump Start Guide Desk Marketing and Selling for SaaS, co-authored by Suresh Sambandam, founder of KissFlow, Krish Subramaniam, co-founder of ChargeBee, Niraj Ranjan Rout, founder of GrexIt, and Sahil Parikh, founder of BrightPod.

jumpstart-guid-1Suresh says the event was conceived on the lines of SaaStr Conference, hosted by Jason Lemkin. He attended the event in San Francisco this February. Buoyed by the 300 to 400 founders coming together from all over the world in SaaSter, he wanted to bring together the SaaS founders in India. SaaS companies are witnessing phenomenal growth all over the world, and India is also seeing an uptick in this sector. Chennai is emerging as the SaaS hub of India, thanks to six big companies that are running their operations here. There are startups emerging as well. “Just two days after we announced the event, 65 signups happened and SaaS founders were excited by the idea,” says Suresh.

“In a focused event, founders can discuss real problems,” says Girish. A conference of a general nature does not give a beneficial take-away for an entrepreneur. “The idea is to bring similar people at similar stages of growth and discuss their pain points,” says Krish of Chargebee. He says cross-learning from each other will be useful in solving many problems the SaaS entrepreneurs face. “Even before the event, many one-on-one meetings are happening among SaaS entrepreneurs,” says Krish.

The event will have four parts. A My Story session with three SaaS founders, followed by an open house on Anything and Everything on SaaS moderated by Girish, aided by Suresh and Krish.

Aaron Ross will deliver the keynote then and finally, the Jumpstart Guide will be released