SaaSt - Chapter 1

The first chapter of SaaSt brought together the SaaS founders in Hyderabad to discuss everything, from the choice of co-founders, modelling for the right product market fit to choice of geographies to expand to, with peers at different stages of the same journey.

The power of proximity is disproportionate when it comes to learning from each other. SaaSt started with the intention to bring the best of SaaS ecosystem in Hyderabad together and share openly. Hacks, successes, roadblocks, failures etc. are regular parts of everyone’s entrepreneurial journey and listening to them in an open forum from folks ahead in the journey and from each other is the best hack for a founder for his/her journey.

“There’s a lot of controversy when it comes to theories about evolution, but when it comes to evolution in the software industry, there’s only one theory that makes sense: surviving by learning from experience (yours and others) and usage patterns.”

― Marc Benioff, Behind the Cloud

The design and detailing of the event (in just 2 weeks of inception) was all thanks to a great team at TSIC (Telangana State Innovation Cell), WhiteNoise, Amplify and a few other ecosystem players in Hyderabad. Endiya and AWS were the sponsors. Even at a short notice we had generated great interest in the event and the team curated 75 early stage founders to attend the event (who knew so many saas companies existed in Hyderabad!)

Chapter 1 - All about choices

Anand and Sudheer (Zenoti) spoke through their Zenoti Journey about the product journey from a workflow system to an ‘invisible saas’ which powers all the major technology touchpoints in a Spa ecosystem, the geographic market journey from India to US through Middle East. The journey is a lesson in making choices - defining the company’s space, identifying opportunities, understanding customer needs (incl going for multiple waxing, spa sessions).

Sateesh (Endiya) and Sreedhar (Gainsight) spoke about building Global Products. Beyond the basics of getting PMF and sales model for each market right, they also spoke about key influences and influencers in the market - these include analysts (Gartner, Forrester etc), advisors, partners etc. which are very distinct for every market. Also about dealing with ‘customisation hungry’ enterprises and managing them through a single code base.

Sreedhar also did the concluding session where he shared the journey of building two immensely successful, category creating enterprise SaaS companies - Gainsight and Host Analytics.  He spoke about the challenges of multi location company in early 2000s, importance of getting the first ‘3’ customers (who are sold on mockups rather than the actual product) before actually building much, when to think about fundraising (especially a Series A). The key focus area he discussed through his experience was the importance the sequence of - Crawl, Walk, Run and Fly in a startup journey.

Aneesh (Capillary) spoke in his very personal style spoke about his journey as an individual from his student days at KGP, first job, early days of Capillary, acquisitions and seeing it in its scale up phases. He spoke in detail about the choice/option of the right kind of investors at different stages (an example he spoke about how at early stage a group of angels was very helpful for him rather than a VC). He also spoke about the need for investors to ask tough questions and tough questions should not be construed as recommendations.

A point of view on two sides of an acquisition was brought to the fore when Nitin (Martjack) shared the stage and reason for them to exit and Aneesh spoke about the value they saw in the Martjack addition to the Capillary portfolio.

Kiran (Freshworks) spoke about maintaining the product service standards in a very rapidly growing environment. Specific areas he detailed were about a coding culture of thinking scale from inception. He also described how Freshworks infra evolved to the present stage based on different choices they made. He described how even at this stage it made sense to be on a public cloud rather than something built in-house.

Ashok (ReportGarden), Chaitanya (Ozonetel), Sundeep (Gramener) and I (Darwinbox) tried to put together a fun format session where we spoke about our choice of co-founders, bootstrapping as a choice (3 of them were bootstrapped), market and timing choices, names of our products and of course regrets (a lot of them!).

On a side note, here is the story behind the names :

ReportGarden - best combination with the word report that was available

Cuckoo (Ozonetel) - inspired from Yahoo!

Gramener -initial agri/rural focus

Darwinbox - Evolution!

As an entrepreneur, below are a few learnings I took away that could be priceless for any early stage entrepreneur

1. Choose a co-founder based on chemistry. Complimentary skills is a bonus but it is more important to trust each other
2. Product Market Fit is a journey that you go through in each new geography that you want to have a significant presence in. The nuances/details are very important to be looked into
3. Observe/Shadow the customer in their environment to understand how you can reduce the friction in their daily activities with the products. Iterate on top of this
4. We need to constantly iterate on the customer segment and proposition at every stage of the journey both for scale and focus
5. Important to define a few set of ‘rules/boundaries’ in every aspect of the business - e.g best coding practices, values, office rules
6. The choice of VCs at different stages could be based on what you need the most during the stage in addition to the money - advice, recruitment of senior leaders, network for GTM, new geographies etc
7. Have people around you who can ask the tough questions (co-founders/investors/employees). Tough questions are not just to criticise or change direction but to build conviction on choices

Eagerly looking forward to Chapter 2, the SaaSt Growth Edition.

To more such events in every city and most of them in Hyderabad :)