Tag: chennai

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Survival is not enough: #SaaSx4

Note: SaaSx is an invite only event, for SaaS founders, by SaaS founders. 

Are you ready to push beyond SaaS survival?

Are you all set for Chennai on March 17th?

The SaaS world is changing. Niches are breaking out, the number of SaaS startups is increasing by the day. Competition is fierce and being SaaS is not sufficient.

If you’re not the best in your market in some way that your customers deeply care about, it’s no longer enough to just survive.

So welcome to Singara Chennai, the SaaS capital of India, where you may find some answers you seek! Apply here for an invite, limited seats remaining.

Are you solving the right problem? Are you targeting a good enough market? If you’re at an early stage, @cbKrish @ArvindParthiban @Avlesh and @sKirani are hosting an unconference on getting the basics right.Be ready to participate, sitting quietly is not an option!

For startups that have reached product-market fit, with at least a million dollar ARR, are you ready to dial it up to 11? A small closed-door round table with @MrGirish & @SureshSambandam might help you get on track to build a world class organisation (and biz model too).

Post lunch, on stage we tear into the problem+discovery+UX+market of a couple of brave founders, in the early stages of product-market-fit. We’ll have @Avlesh @sKirani @Spinfree break it down for you, so you can build it back again. See https://pn.ispirt.in/every-product-needs-a-good-teardown/ for what went down last time around.

Want to increase ARR? You could increase your lead velocity or your ACV. Want stickier customers? You could improve product or move up market. Vertical SaaS for enterprise is getting hotter and hotter, and we have @Sudheer_Zenoti talking about making the move from SMB customers to Enterprise customers, and the pitfalls and perils thereof.

Do you know what it really takes to go from $0-100K-500K-1M ARR? Well here’s where we get a peek behind the curtains. We have a couple of entrepreneurs sharing their stories of growing from scratch to initial scale. This is a session which will NOT be recorded or replayed. Only for those who are in the room!

Wouldn’t it be great if we could keep taking the perfect steps on the path to $1M ARR? Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone could just tell us which steps are mistakes to avoid? Well @MrGirish is going to do just that, talking about what they did in their early days that didn’t turn out just quite right.

And after a long day of SaaS-talking, when you want to tune out of ACV, CAC, LTV, CMRR, LVR, … tune in to the soothing sound of the Bay of Bengal, and lose yourself in dinner and conversations. (We won’t judge you if the topic stays SaaSy 😉

So come right over, sign up now, there’s no place where your love for 3-letter acronyms, business customers, and software, will feel more at home, than Chennai on the 17th March.

See you there!

Secure your spot before 10th March 2017 to get a seat at SaaSx4

Building a sustainable B2C Business by Mithun Sacheti, CaratLane

There isn’t a single consumer-facing startup that is profitable today. The losses of most companies are attributed towards the skyrocketed marketing costs that startups face in reaching to the Indian consumer today. You might counter that reality by saying that consumer-focused (B2C) companies continue to raise money – and boat loads of it. But there is a hypothesis that everyone seems to be working towards – get in on that secret!

Sustainable-eCommerce-by-CaratLane-Mithun-Sacheti-1-300x300

In this playbook, Mithun Sacheti the founder of Caratlane (India’s biggest player in the online jewellery space) will share insights from his playbook on how he is building Caratlane towards being a profitable enterprise. Insights will also include some of the painful (and expensive) snafus committed that cost the company both time, money and energy perhaps in the wrong direction.

Things you can hope to learn during this Playbook session:

1. Quick Introduction to the B2C Landscape in India
2. When to Start your marketing engine
3. Understanding the economics of B2C Marketing
4. How to build a sustainable marketing plan that keeps a B2C business not just afloat, but also helps scale.

Apply for this playbook by 1st May, 2016 and we will confirm your participation.

The Playbook roundtable is a format of event organized by iSPiRT (an association for Product Startups in India) that picks a specific topic that is vague or requires indepth understanding, anchors a few key entrepreneurs who have key insights on that topic, and invites hand-picked entrepreneurs who would benefit the most from the conversation for the roundtable. Each roundtable is no more than 12 participants. The anchor(s) kickstart the discussion, which evolves to a conversational format around best practices and key insights around the topic. Each session lasts approximately six hours. The insights are recorded, and shared as Playbooks to the community.

More details : http://www.ispirt.in/what-we-do/Playbook

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It Was a “SaaS”y Day at Chennai: Chapter 1#SaaSx3

The April sun wasn’t evident at the beach side locale, near the historic town of Mamallapuram, which hold relics of exceptional beauty on its rocks sculpted under the patronage of the Pallava kings. Had it been the early part of last century, in all probability, we could have reached this place in passenger boats sailing through the Buckingham Canal, now condemned to history. It was using this canal route that the national poet Subramanya Bharatiar escaped to Pondicherry to prevent an imminent arrest by the British to endow us with memorable literary gifts in Tamil.

By favourable alignment of choicest factors, Chennai is home to successful SaaS enterprises. To say SaaS is the preserve of Chennai is surely an overstatement. To put it in perspective, it is a worldwide phenomenon and Chennai has made a mark in India. Undoubtedly, the success of Girish Mathrubootham (Freshdesk) has a lot to do with Chennai hailed as the SaaS capital of India, with Suresh Sambandam (KissFlow), Sanjay Parthasarathy (Indix), Krish Subramanian (Chargebee) and Lux (Unmetric) in the elite SaaS league giving an aura to Chennai, not to forget that it was Zoho that made it to the big SaaS league, taking on Salesforce, from Chennai.

At SaaSx3 it was a day filled with peer-to-peer learning, some fun, and a super-duper end. Playbook roundtables, One Thing Series, Product Teardown, and a presentation of “superscaling” (my term!) by Girish as the grand finale completed the agenda. Pallav Nadhani of Fusion Charts and Krish Subramanian of Chargebee (in partnership with Suresh Sambandam of KissFlow) engaged select SaaS startups on a roundtable each. iSPIRT’s agenda of peer-to-peer learning and networking, with the intention of forming a vibrant community of product entrepreneurs, took the form of playbook roundtables where the successful entrepreneurs share the secret of their product success with the product startups. The focus of both the roundtables, where I spent some time in each, was on the product. While Krish focused on taking the product from 0 to $1 million, Pallav chose the marketing as a tool for product’s success.

Find out why the customer chooses your product

Krish spent a considerable time in explaining the key to product success – understanding the persona of the buyer. “Product-market fit is constantly evolving,” he said. The process doesn’t stop with customer acquisition and onboarding but continues with retention of the customer, on what is now called the customer success. Acquiring the customer is a tedious process for which several methods and processes come in handy. The important take-away from this session was understanding the customer’s intent to buy the product. Krish liberally quoted from Chargebee’s experience to explain his perspective – their assumption of why the customer bought Chargebee flipped on its head when they saw the real data on why they did. How to find out? It is best to ask – first through a non-intrusive e-mail followed up by conversations and further e-mail exchanges.

The whole point of the discussion hovered around the 10% conversion rate – of prospects into buyers. But Suresh clarified that it is a benchmark for large enterprises, but the real numbers that convert is the key rather than the percentage if the customers are SMBs.

Krish said that the choice between free trial vs freemium is loaded in favour of freemium. But what usually happens is that the free trial users pump up the numbers (the customer count) but largely the free trial customers don’t turn buyers. The truth is freemium works well but free trial also works. The real answer is it all depends on the product. What also works is adding a “powered by *product logo*.” This has worked WebEngage and Freshdesk. WebEngage had a “powered by *logo*” on its product design (for a cheaper priced version) so that it gets more prospects into the funnel. If the customer is not paying, at least he can be used as a channel for prospecting. Freshdesk used the “powered by *logo*” on all its customer support e-mails (which is actually generated by Freshdesk) sent by the free user in its forever free product.

Another important aspect touched upon was making the pricing transparent and known, especially if the target customers are SMBs in the case of self-servicing SaaS products. If the customer base is large enterprises, the price conversation can happen offline and it is not necessary to provide price information on the website.

Constantly evaluate your customers and look for influencers

When I entered the conversation, Pallav was focusing on why, how and what of the product. He defined customer cohorts as influencers, buyers and users. Pallav’s proposition was a lot deeper – a good product markets itself. But you also ask deeper questions – even the reason why you (your product) exist to answer the other defining aspects of why the product sells (Pallav’s recommendation: view Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle video on why, how, what). The why exists converts simply into what problem is the product solving. But identifying the customer is a continuous evaluation process. Only if you know why you exist can you target the most appropriate buyers for your product so that your solution is aligned to their needs. For targeting customers at the right time, you must understand the customer behaviour a bit deeply. Pallav gave examples of how customer habits can be known from data. His marketing pitch was a bit philosophical quoting Seth Godin, who said, “The valuable forms of marketing are consumed voluntarily” (read Three Changes of Marketing). The network effect is powerful, as Avilesh Singh of WebEngage explained using his product marketing strategy. He said how changing his focus from marketing execs to developers as customers reaped rich dividends.

But, beyond all this, remember the most essential aspect is the product itself, which should be flawless from the customer experience point of view. Then other aspects are built on top of it.

#SaaSx3 – Where The League of Extraordinary SaaS Hackers meet

SaaSx3 brings together best-in-breed SaaS entrepreneurs across India to celebrate, inspire & spark up the spirit of start-up ecosystem. It’s an exclusive invite-only event, created by SaaS entrepreneurs for SaaS entrepreneurs!

SaaSx3 is an opportunity to network, learn, and engage with the most passionate individuals in India’s startup ecosystem. We can promise you one thing – You’ll have never been to a conference like this before!

More details for SaaSx3 – saasx.in

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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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#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
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20th #PlayBookRT at Chennai: Sales war stories from 2 SaaS start-ups

An interesting discussion on the theme of ‘Sales’ happened last weekend at Chennai (Orangescape office) as part of the iSpirt round table. Shashank N D from Practo and Girish Rowjee from Greytip gave engaging presentations on their journey and the ~20 participants responded enthusiastically with several interruptions (read questions :)). [Note: A similar discussion in Bengaluru was covered earlier here]

Sales Stage - PractoShashank wooed the audience by starting off with his story on the origins of Practo – when his dad had to undergo a knee operation and wanted to get 2nd opinion from another doctor abroad, he couldn’t send out the medical records electronically. Thus began a singular journey of using emerging technologies such as cloud and mobile to enhance patient experience.

Here are some key ‘Sales’ takeaways from his presentation:

  • Golden Rule: Never build something without making a sale. Practo always got a buy-in from existing or potential customers before actually building new features. This was true even in their early stages.

 

Selling and Coding should be the only activities.

    • Practo benefitted heavily from referrals. They did Zero cold calling and focused on delighting existing customers. The doctors who became customers of Practo were so happy with the product that they were happy to evangelize it amongst their peers
    • It is important that the founders bring on the early adopters. At Practo, the founders got the first 50 customers and in the process achieved Product/Market fit (took about an year). While this number may vary for each company, it is important to note that dedicated sales or marketing should be brought on only after this stage.
    • Shashank also talked about evolution of the sales team over the years. While founders are the best sales persons in the initial stage, it is important to bring P-salesmen (P for Passionate) at the next stage followed by R-salesmen (R for regular) for mass adoption.
    • While product-market fit was the focus during the first phase of going from 0 to 50 customers, the next phase focussed on sales culture. Bringing on P-salespeople, providing free trials for instant gratification of customers, value based selling etc were the highlights
    • Zero discount policy: Practo followed a strict no-discount policy. This actually helped them reduce bargaining behaviour and enabled them to be seen as high-value. But in the ensuing discussion on this topic, most agreed that this is based on the type of product, target market etc. Selling to large customers may not be possible without discounts.
    • ‘Instant Gratification’ was a key customer psychology aspect that Practo focussed on during its sales cycle. Practo provides a feature where the doctor will be able to send an SMS alert to the patient within 30 seconds. This feature became a star-attraction of the product and improved sales
    • Practo was one of the first companies in India to sell a SaaS product offline. Some blogs even mentioned that this was start-up graveyard but it eventually did work for Practo.
    • As a matter of principle, Practo did not focus on doctors/hospitals that did not have computer infrastructure. This gave focus to their sales process. Also, they did not target general physicians and focused on specialists such as dentists, dermatologists etc. Thus targeting really helped them
    • To set up appointments, Practo initially had their own salespeople calling as well as had an inside sales team (with many women!). But what eventually worked for them was to create territories and assigning salespeople to specific territories. Salesmen were then made responsible market intelligence, cold calling etc. Usually the salesperson has to wait at the hospital to meet the doctor in person (like a medical rep) for the first time. But subsequent meetings were all setup through follow-up calls and prior appointments.
    • Medical reps couldn’t deliver as salespeople. They did not have the mind-set to challenge the doctors. At Practo, the smarter and tech-savvy sales guys were more successful as they were about to demonstrate the value of the product/technology to the doctors.
    • After various experiments, Practo had a clear separation of hunting salesmen and farming salesmen. Also most sales guys sell one product.
    • It is important to incentivize salespeople to get maximum yields from them. They have now established something called ‘flyers club’ where top 3 performers can go to a destination of their choice on an annual basis
    • All new salespeople undergo a 1 week training program and are instilled the Practo way of sales. But they have observed that it takes nearly 3 months for them to reach an efficient state.
    • There was an interesting discussion on a question on reselling partners. Majority of the participants concluded that resellers cannot solve your sales problems. What they can do is to magnify your sales success story. Resellers also bring in warm leads and act as influencers.

Shashank from PractoInterestingly and rather ironically, the session concluded with a note that start-ups should not target other start-ups as customers except as early adopters or reference case studies!!

Product Management related takeaways from Practo:

  • Practo spent inordinate number of hours with doctors. The idea was to understand user behaviour, just seeing them go about doing their work, how they interact with the software etc.
  • Practo had an interesting philosophy for feature prioritization – their order of importance was product vision, customers, employees and finally investors! Thus even when customers gave multiple feature requests, only those that aligned with the vision got implemented
  • Practo has lot of focus on analysing product usage, customer data etc. They built in-house tools (eg: epicentre) to monitor usage. Even during early stages when they had just 3 developers, one of them was purely focused on tools. Shashank calls it their ‘secret sauce’ for success.
  • They had a 30% conversion rate for face-to-face trial to paying customer.

IMG_2567The presentation on Practo was followed by a short session on Girish’s entrepreneurial journey with a few nuggets on sales related topics. Unlike Practo, Greytip did not have field salesmen and they went the online sales route for their payroll management software. It took them 2 years to realize that this model will not work well in India – not because of any issues on their side – but the market just did not buy without salesmen. Girish added that many of the emails that they send out are never read by the payroll in-charge. In fact, Greytip realized that CEOs may be more interested in such payroll software but the payroll head did not have the vision or mind-set to think of such possibilities. Thus began a journey of attempting to educate the target segment and build credibility in the process. Greytip also built relationships with payroll processors. Since the competition in payroll processing was cut-throat, their pricing was in fact determined by the market.

IMG_2568The following links were highly recommended during the discussion:

 

Guest Post Contributed by Karthik V, a software product enthusiast with degrees from IIT & IIM

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‘Making Readily Available Useful, Robust, Easy-to-use & Affordable Software Products for Millions’– the NRich story

ProductNation interviewed Badrinarayanan V S (Badri), Founder of NRich Software. In this discussion, he explains how he was able to build a sustainable business by focusing on solving simple everyday problems of the commoner. Read on…

NRich seems to have more than a decade of experience in offering products and consulting services targeted to Indian customers. Can you tell us about how it all started?

As I gained professional experience working at different software companies in India such as Wipro, Polaris, Kumaran Software and Cybertech, I noticed that none of these companies prioritized software products as their engine for growth. Large part of their portfolio and revenue realization aspects relied on services. To me, this was a disturbing thought, since I was convinced that products based strategy would actually benefit a firm in the long term. This led me to establish NRich software

My initial thoughts were to try and understand why software products did not sell in India. I was puzzled that although there were many software products in the accounting space, Tally ruled and others weren’t even being noticed. This sparked a detailed research and analysis which pointed to the lack of market-readiness amongst most product vendors in India.

Out of this research was born NRich*Scan, a consulting service that helped diagnose and assess the state of Market Readiness of software products based on 51 critical parameters over the Ideation, Development and Sales & Marketing Phases.  Through a series of questions, I would finally arrive at a score that would indicate the areas where the product was strong and areas that one needed to focus on to achieve market success.

How did your first offering fare in the marketplace? What experience did you gain through this? 

Given that the concept of market readiness itself was new, there was high resistance amongst large companies towards NRich*Scan. Surprisingly, entrepreneurs were very receptive to NRich*Scan because they were committed to the success of their products.  We worked with products across different domains such as Resume Management, Correspondence Management , Jewellery Design, ERP for Process industries, Carnatic Music Tutor etc.  Some of our customers saved a lot of cash that would have otherwise gone towards selling an unready product and some even addressed the failings befor re-launching their products.

While it was easy to develop a product, most founders found selling it very tough because their sales people were inadequately skilled and equipped.  I created a specialized training program for selling software products called ExSell.  Seeing the struggle in selling Hospital Information System (HIS) packages, I have recently launched a special edition of ExSell for HIS.

When and how did your first software product come out from NRich? What factors led to its creation? 

From my consulting services, I clearly understood that to design, develop and sell a software product, one need not be a domain expert. Since I had started my analysis of product readiness in the accounting/finance area, I had noticed that not only the businesses, but individuals also needed to be fiscally prudent to manage their expenses. I noticed that no tool existed for this segment and hence developed a simple and easy to use product that would help individuals manage their personal finances powerfully. By the time this product was in the market, Outlook group of magazines were rechristening their personal finance magazine as Outlook Money. They were impressed with our product and ordered 3000 licenses, which they decided to gift to their subscribers. This was a great validation of our product and helped us get traction in the marketplace. Based on this, we created a much more robust product ‘Enrich’ that offered more benefits.

What marketing efforts did you undertake to penetrate the market?

Since we clearly identified that the success of our product required a shift in attitude and behavioral aspects of individuals, we zeroed in on advertising in personal finance magazines. This was largely because we figured out those who buy or read these magazines are concerned about their money and hence would find our offering attractive.  We talked about their lives and their issues by not managing their money powerfully and positioned Enrich as a solution to their problems.  We were amazed at the response we got.  People from all over the country including small towns and villages, readily paid money into our bank account or ordered via VPP (the India Post option of Cash on Delivery) just on the basis of our empathetic ads.

How did the transition from offering personal finance product to a healthcare offering happen?

With the success of our personal finance product, we realized that consumers were willing to look at software products to help them manage their lives and that inspired us to address the health care especially chronic disease management.  We clearly observed that just as how people were careless in managing money, they were equally casual about their health. It was not that they were neglecting their health, but many other things occupied their minds which made them attending to regular tests or attend reviews a low priority.

We also observed that the approach by patients and doctors towards chronic diseases was callous. Most patients would file their test results and prescriptions and forget and the doctors would probably look just at the latest result for diagnosis and treatment. In this process, vital information about the history of the patient over time was being missed out.

To make a difference in this scenario, we conceptualized and implemented Diasof (www.diasof.com) an online service that helps diabetic patients to be Healthier Anywhere, Anytime.  DiaSof helps the users share their analyzed medical history with their doctors either online or via a hard copy and also remind them via email and sms to take their tests in time and meet their doctor as scheduled. Further, they would be able to access their own records from anywhere using their mobile phones or tablets, which could be invaluable whilst travel and in cases of emergency.

How did your customers receive the new product? What challenges and successes you have had selling this to your target segment? 

Although we tried reaching Diabetic patients through pharmacies and diagnostic labs, we found that their receptivity and willingness was maximum when their doctor recommended DiaSof.

We were fortunate to find a very patient-responsive and forward looking supporter in Dr Vijay Viswanathan, an eminent Diabetologist and the MD of MV Diabetic Hospital in Chennai.  Together, we have made DiaSof available to many Diabetic patients from all over the country and the numbers are increasing at a rapid pace.  The response from many senior diabetologists and endocrinologists is also very encouraging.  Our goal is to Save A Million Diabetic Lives By End Of 2015.

We are in the process of signing up more hospitals and physicians and replicate this model across major towns and cities in India in the months to come.

Upon observing your offerings thus far, I notice that you are focused on solving the often overlooked and very minor problems that people may face. How does this approach help you succeed or differentiate with others – and is this mode sustainable for a company? 

It is my belief that a software product is successful when it is simple and extremely easy to use besides being affordable. Hence, at NRich, we are maniacally focused on delivering lean software solutions so that our users can realize the value quickly.  We add facilities only when we are doubly sure that they will add value.  We recently added a facility for the users to upload their photograph into their DiaSof account, not for cosmetic purposes but because doctors will be able to recognize their patient’s face better than by name.

Although the framework of DiaSof can be applied for any chronic disease without much modifications, we have consciously kept the focus on Diabetes.  We have, for example,  developed a product that addresses Thyroid management but we will launch it only when DiaSof reaches a critical installation base.

From your experience, what are the key aspects one should focus on when building a product based business in India? What needs to be kept in mind if one needs to sell to Indian customers? 

Firstly, one should identify the target customer segment, in a way that it is not too narrow (in which case you cannot scale) nor too broad (which makes focus virtually impossible). This is absolutely critical. Once this is done, there must be high clarity on the pain points of this segment and how your product solves those pain points.

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iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable: Positioning and Messaging – Lot of it is common sense!

If your grandmother does not understand your message, then you might as well not communicate is the crux of what was discussed during this Roundtable facilitated by Shankar Maruwada and Nandita Sinha.

This roundtable discussed the ‘What’ of the positioning and messaging and not the ‘how’ of the positioning. There was very little theory except perhaps setting the context and the entire session was practical.

To illustrate the significance of positioning and messaging, one of the participating companies gave an elevator pitch thinking the rest of us are his prospective customers. Then people spoke about what stuck in their minds about the pitch. It varied from ‘I lost him’ to ‘I was thinking of a completely different business model’. The person who gave the pitch looked at all the responses to understand if there were any surprises and what needs to be the part of their messaging.

Discussion on the first pitch led to the understanding of the following:

  1. The curse of knowledge forms a part of all the messaging – what is easily understandable for us is not understandable for the market.
  2. Often times, people start to have internal chatters – they start to think even before the pitch is complete and the attention span is just about 30 seconds.
  3. Most messaging is at a conceptual level and addresses the left-brain of their audience, which does not persuade people to make decisions. Try addressing to their emotions, their right brain and the easiest way is to do these through stories.

Using the first pitch as an example, Shankar explained what goes into creating a tight message and it was

  • Identify the customer segment. You can have one overall messaging of your offering and can have multiple messages for multiple segments
  • Setup is the context of your offering. It can be some challenges that your customer segment faces or the industry faces. There can be multiple setups to your messaging
  • Explain the benefits of your solution. How your offering is unique to the customers need will be the persuasive part of your pitch. Setup combined with benefits is what would make the message that you communicate
  • Features and supporting credibility will have to come after this phase of setup and benefits

After this, one more exercise was carried out where all the participating companies were asked to write down 3 setups and 3 benefits while avoiding features. All the pitches were discussed at length and I am sure all those who attended the Roundtable went back a lot wiser about messaging.

Shankar emphasized on a very important fact that you may not crack your messaging in one sitting and it has to be an iterative process. He also asked people not to think in words and instead begin with stories, then move on to thoughts and then switch to words. This is the best way in which you will get to do your messaging right.

This Roundtable was attended by 9 companies with 12 participants and 2 facilitators. This roundtable kicked off to a hilarious start, during the introductions most people in the room claimed that their Saturday night favorite drink was either butter milk, tea or coffee.

I am looking forward to more such sessions.

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Domain knowledge is key to building successful B2B products

Suresh Sambandam is the founder and CEO of OrangeScape, a company he set up along with colleague from Selectica, Mani Doraisamy. OrangeScape provides a Platform as a Service (PaaS) to build domain rich solutions, easily and fast. The company recently launched KiSSFLOW, the first workflow-as-a-service exclusively for Google Apps which seamlessly integrates with Google mail, docs and contacts. In the first of a two-part interview for pn.ispirt.in, Suresh talks to us about what inspired him to start OrangeScape, what factors he feels are important while starting up and when to recognize the deciding moment of whether to give up or continue.

So many people from smaller town today who are getting into the business today — for example you have people from Udupi and Agra who are foraying into the business. What about your story –you yourself hail from Cuddalore, a Tier 3 city so where did it start for you?

I believe that there are two sources of ideas. One is typically a B2C idea – and this comes from your common encounters. You yourself are consumer, and you encounter different problems as a user of a product. You get frustrated and you think about building new products or solutions to solve this frustration. This is where you can see a lot of younger people like college kids or graduates getting in to the game – if you carefully observe most of these products you’ll see more B2C products because the founders would have been users themselves who were faced with a particular problem and then thought about solving it. These don’t really require very deep domain knowledge. On the other hand you can take OrangeScape which is a B2B product that’s complex, as B2B products tend to be. This is because it takes someone who’s been in the area to understand the dynamics, gain deeper knowledge and figure out the gaps and challenges.

Personally, prior to starting OrangeScape I was working for a company called Selectica which is a US based company that was one of the leaders in business rule engine space. At some point Selectica sold the Division I was part of, to Accenture, and we saw that as a great segue into the problem of how can we democratize application building process? That is a deep domain knowledge we got exposed due to our intensive work at Selectica in an adjacent area. So all this experience and knowledge helped the core team generate the idea and we decided this was something we should address and go after.

So essentially there are two key factors that started the OrangeScape story. One was the experience that you gained from the previous companies you worked at, that helped you identify scope for improvement. The other was the core team, which is obviously fundamental to getting out on your own. What other factors would you say are important when you’re starting up?

India is slowly moving from services to a product building country. OrangeScape takes this thinking to one more level of sophistication which from product to creating sophisticated technology /platform. As I said before, to know this side of the tracks you need a lot of domain expertise. You need to know the problem and go after that. Second, of course the team is the most important thing. We had been blessed with a great team starting with my co-founder Mani that stayed on course for a longtime on this journey. Thirdly, I would say to some extent the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’ plays a role here. Initially, we didn’t know how big the problem we were going after really was.

It was only after years did we realize that this is problem that an IBM or Oracle would go after, not a startup. But then if I knew all that when I started off, there are chances that we would have given up. Sometimes you don’t know everything about the problem, but then you take chances. And then you need to stay put on the path and committed. You have to be convinced about the problem and pursue the solution. So all these things need to come together for you to go in the direction that you want to.

When you do you decide that you’re making it or breaking it? What is that deciding factor? Where do you decided ‘enough is enough it’s time to get a day job’, or ‘hey, we’ve cracked it’?

The defining moment depends on your assessment of how big the problem you’re trying to solve. If the problem that you’re trying to solve is big enough for you to stay put on your course, then that’s a pretty strong deciding factor. I don’t think many people realize that it took SAP 15 years to go from product concept to launch and in the last ten years, they’ve been doing good business. Now cloud is disrupting their business, that is a different story. SAP was convinced that the problem they were dealing with was big enough and this inspired the vision for them to stay on course. So this is one aspect that determines whether you should hang up your boots or not. I would say that if you’re going after a small a problem then after some years you may decide to give up, but if it’s bigger then this may not happen. The other aspect is that if you’re meeting progress and you’re doing reasonably ok (not significantly, but you’re definitely progressing) then again this gives you the motivation to stay focused. If none of this is happening, then that may be an indicator that you may have to move on.