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