Dev Khare的动态

Dev Khare this is a great metric to track and benchmark. 300k in the US vs 30k in India ??. Are these numbers this drastic for India SAAS companies serving the US market and not the local India market ?

Dev Khare I think applying western metrics to Indian SaaS is a very dangerous path - I completely agree with what Kanav Hasija said below, but I think Indian SaaS has a distinctive advantage - Out-build everyone because of the structural cost advantages. For the first time there is technical talent at par with the world in India - Let's go Out-build everyone. Leverage is everything in life - Indian Startups should not lose our demographic leverage. Also I have realized, working Wall Street Backwards is a bad way to build a business - work customer backwards and be exceptional partners to them - if it means lower Revenue / FTE so be it. Customer satisfaction trumps everything in the long term.

Thanks for posting this Dev. This has been one question haunting us at Disprz post our Series-B and Series-C rounds. I have been doing some research on a better normalised metric for people efficiency that we can compare both India-based and US-based start-ups on. Instead of revenue per employee, a better metric would be revenue per dollar of people costs. Will publish results shortly after completing our analysis. But agree with points 2 and 3 and the culture of over-hiring.

Great insight. #1 also has a combination of not utilizing enablement tools. Indian SaaS engineering teams want to build everything in vs US SaaS companies will subscribe to other SaaS solutions for all things sales, marketing, service etc focusing on their core competency. It’s almost ironic how Indian SaaS companies will not give business to other Indian SaaS companies !

B2B SaaS as we all know is either dead or possibly wounded. Instead of just looking at metrics, we need to look at fundamental issues. With so many incumbent businesses rapidly embracing #GenAI, this means that a “disruption” opportunity that a startup was founded around may have shrunk or disappeared altogether. Wrong estimation of TAM ( 89%. of the funded startups haven’t moved past $3 mil in revenue and they’ve been at at it for 5 years ), lack of understanding of customer segment, heavily commodified without any moats and most importantly too many metoo startups, on top of that most of the key segments are already saturated. ( don’t think HR tech needs 250 startups, problem is already solved but that’s a sad reality )

Spot on Dev. We’ve talked about this earlier —— this issue has to become front & center as all Indian startups who raise enough capital, not just SaaS, spend far far far more than they should and way more than their counterparts in more expensive geographies like the US. I’ve seen previously bootstrapped founders go nuts on spending after raising double digit rounds and with no outcome to support that massive spending. Fancy offices, throwing people at the problem, not staying on top of financials and wild spending on growth without seeing outcomes are some amongst many reasons spending is out of control. Triggered by the sharp bear market starting in 2022, the “best” founders saw this, went all in and fixed with urgency while so many others - including the smart and honest ones - continue to struggle to bring spending inline with their revenue scale. We’ve seen all variations of this journey in the past 18 months as we urged our founders to fix spending with urgency. Fortunate & thankful for crazy hard calls many took but more needs to be said on this topic to define what’s normal and what’s out of whack for spending.

In my general experience, Indian workforce has much lower productivity than American ones. That's why labour is cheaper here (setting aside considerations of exchange rates etc). Cost arbitrage also depends on each function.

When Indian Head quartered SaaS companies sell outside of India, the ARRs are much better. India has embraced the high SaaS tide in the last few years, unlike the West. For instance, It's only in the last recent years, that the Banking and financial services industry in India has slowly begun to go on an OPEX mode due to concerns of data security. Added to this, Asia has always been a people-centric market rather than a platform by itself. So a lot of investment goes into the headcount on account management and customer success functions.