For those who aren’t aware, PNCamp is a bootcamp event for early stage SaaS startups. We were lucky enough to get invited to the event in Pune on Oct 8. The event, like earlier SaaSx event in Chennai, is a no-nonsense event for founders and product folks. The day-long event had two tracks: one for B2B startups and one for B2C startups. We, at Fyle, were part of the B2B track.
The B2B track consisted of a mix of talks by accomplished folks — Suresh of Kissflow, Krish of ChargeBee and Ankit of AdPushup covering fun anecdotes, practical suggestions and cautionary tales. Here are a couple of interesting ones (more on my twitter).
@sureshsambandam we said no to a lot of things early on.
— Siva Narayanan (@K2_181) October 8, 2016
@oberoiankit use adwords to validate your idea for SaaS product #pncamp
— Siva Narayanan (@K2_181) October 8, 2016
@cbkrish 3 pages to nail home, pricing and features. #pncamp
— Siva Narayanan (@K2_181) October 8, 2016
Apart from these talks, there were “Product Teardown” sessions where a startup gets 10 mins to demo and talk about their product and the next 15 mins is spent in critical evaluation. The framework for the session is aptly summarized by this diagram:
Something every early stage company to validate pic.twitter.com/XEe6qHO24o
— Suresh Sambandam (@sureshsambandam) October 8, 2016
Fyle got to participate in the Product Teardown session and the most important learnings for us were:
- Pricing page and testimonials are really important to increase confidence in your product
- Remove unnecessary friction during sign up flow. E.g. we had an email verification step which, in hindsight, is an overkill
- Pick your audience and get them to a wow really quickly. E.g. you may restrict your app to G-Suite customers and optimize their experience by deep integrations
- Put some effort into content marketing, it will pay in the long run
- Saying NO — the lack of focus for a company reflects in its website and affects the product, team and business
Overall, the event was refreshing in the level of candor — founders were openly discussing problems with focus, hiring and customer acquisition and tips and suggestions were extremely practical in nature. It was part-educational and part-therapeutic for me and I highly recommend it for early stage startups.
Special thanks to all the volunteers and facilitators for organizing a fantastic event! One parting thought from Ankit on how to get fresh insights into your product which we’re going to institutionalize 🙂
@oberoiankit get drunk and test your product for good insights #pncamp
— Siva Narayanan (@K2_181) October 8, 2016
Guest Post by Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan, Fyle.in. The original post can be accessed on Medium