At Momentum91, we've been hard at work understanding AI and their use-cases for mid-market and large firms. Late last week, I had the opportunity to share everything we've learnt so far with eChai Ventures at GVFL Limited.

Here are some notes:

👉 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭
Other people also have AI. A lot of folks are building on top of AI and so there is increased competition in almost every vertical. Every niche software has like 3 bootstrapped competitors who are going to market via SEO. Also, product differentiators are difficult to communicate in the age of low attention spans. If you are starting distribution today, it needs a thorough re-imagination.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰/𝐖𝐞𝐚𝐤 𝐀𝐈
Instead of building systems that are kind of smarter at doing a lot of things, you might want to consider building multiple and separate systems that are very smart at doing a few things extremely well. Enterprises/companies will separately pay for solving specific problem areas and addressing their use-cases. The game is depth, not breadth.

👉 𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬
Companies like ClickUp and Notion have done an amazing job at bringing AI within their products. But they are still not AI native. They were conceptualised when AI was not around. They have fit AI retrospectively. There is a large opportunity for building Native AI experiences. Platforms and products that are conceptualised from ground-up in the age of AI. An example of this is a project management system where I can assign tasks to both humans and agents. It will demand a lot of capital and ingenuity but it can be done. Here's a good question to ask: What other 'systems of records' exist that can be made AI native?

👉 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚
AI will solve for analysis, predictions, pattern recognition etc. Most firms do not have accurate data. If you can figure out a way for a business to collect accurate data about their prospects, customers, employees, products, sales, etc - using AI, you can do anything and everything. Figure out a way as to how you will solve for collection, storage and organisation of accurate data.

There were a few other things that we discussed.

👉 Co-pilot and Autopilots
👉 AI wrappers
👉 AI & Funding
👉 Verticalising LLMs
👉 AI Safety
👉 Real-life implementations of AI by companies we have not heard about

This conversation was meant to be a starting point for folks thinking about building in the AI space. It was by no means exhaustive - but sort of a summary of all the research Harsh, Jay, Koushikram and I have been doing for the past few months.

If you want the deck, let me know in the comments and I'll send it over 😇

Thank you Jatin for the opportunity.

Until next time :)

It was an interesting evening spent with services founders discussing about transitioning from services to SaaS at GVFL Limited. Here are some notes on what we discussed:

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫
In my limited experience, doing both services business and a SaaS business together is extremely difficult. Both of them require more than your full time attention and come with very nuanced problems to be solved. Some founders are able to do it. Most companies that do this achieve a really large scale in one of those two and then start the second one. I wouldn't recommend.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠
As a service business, pricing is simpler. It is cost + margin. In SaaS however, it is difficult to arrive at a cost based pricing. Most folks recommend value based pricing but in early stages, it is unclear - the amount of value your SaaS will build for your customers. I'd recommend competitor benchmarking and then speaking to a lot of customers while running experiments. Pricing, much like user research, is an on-going exercise. It is never complete. Hubspot is $2B in ARR - changes pricing every 6 months.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭
I wrote a post about building trust as a SaaS company a while back. Here's the link --> https://lnkd.in/dTVuX_9F

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤
At Clientjoy (Acquired by Synup), we tried over 10 GTM experiments. 3 of them worked. The one that worked best was building resources that answered our prospect's most difficult questions (not ebooks, not blogs - but spreadsheets or cheat-sheets). We got about 17K subscribers for these resources. 5K of them became our customers over next 18 months.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐲𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬
As a services company, we are comfortable with monthly ticket sizes of $4K to $15K. SaaS most likely is 500 times less than that. Building comfort with small ticket recurring payments takes some adjustment. Having customers who you've never spoken to also takes some adjustment.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦
Services business has Clients and these Clients have requirements. SaaS companies have customer cohorts and these cohorts have problems. The mindset required to deal with clients vs customer cohorts is very different. Building that thought process within yourself and the team becomes important. The team will have to go from understanding requirements and giving quotes to listening to problems and identifying insights.

There were a couple more things discussed as well. Do join in the next time if you are around. Thank you Jatin and eChai Ventures for having me in this conversation.

Here are a few things I noticed while joining Bhavesh from Brands.live, Amit from AllEvents and Mahendra from Matrubharti to talk about scaling startups and businesses.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠:
Couple of questions had an interesting undertone. A 'no' from an investor was being taken as a validation on whether or not their startup could work.

I think that an investor could say no for great many reasons. Ultimately, a founder should try to look at their startup as a financial product in an asset class. It will be difficult to do so - but it has to be done while pitching.

This financial product needs to be put in front of atleast 100 investors before we take their responses as a validation. It is a full time activity for 1 founder for 4 months.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬:
Some bits were being asked around 'how to get customers to change their habits/behaviour?'

An arguable opinion of mine about this is that we should not. Changing consumer/customer habits is extremely difficult and an expensive exercise. We must understand that we will have to learn to fall out of love for our idea and build what the market wants.

Atleast in B2B, more often than not, change management is a huge responsibility that no-one on the client side wants to take. As long as you are cheaper, better or faster at enabling them to save time, save money or make more money - that should do the trick.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬:
Couple of interesting hacks were being shared around handling and dealing with negative reviews. These ranged from 'responding to negative reviews quickly' to 'offering the reviewer something for free'.

While these are great for consumer brands, they don't work for B2B. For B2B SaaS, the customer doesn't leave a review. They just churn. At Clientjoy (Acquired by Synup), Anupama and I had a strict schedule of speaking to 1 churned customer every week and we invested significantly in ways to identify churn related behaviours to detect early signals.

After $100K in MRR, a SaaS company is more of a retention game than an acquisition game.

👉 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐨-𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬:
Everyone is looking for co-founders for their own business idea. People who have specific skills are also searching for problems to solve.

What I noticed interestingly is no one is saying that 'I am a great AI engineer - I am looking for a business person who has identified a problem, is trying to build a solution and join them as a co-founder.'

It seemed like people felt they should work only on their own ideas and in absence of that, look for ideas. In my opinion, and most other founders, ideas are dime a dozen. Look for people with complimentary skills and relentless persistence.

At Momentum Ventures, I am proud of the structure and working relationship Jay, Harsh Koushikram and I have created as co-founders.

Lastly, thank you Jatin and eChai Ventures for the opportunity and i-Hub Gujarat for the venue.

Looking forward to the next one!

Couple of things I noticed during a conversation about sales strategies for #startups organised by eChai Ventures in partnership with GVFL Limited.

1. Most questions were around negotiation and pricing.
It is natural to think that the most difficult part of sales is getting the customer to agree on a price point. This is because that's what we as entrepreneurs hear most objections on. It is also because that is fairly relatable and happens to all sales folks.

But it is important to remember that whatever happens in the room (or video calls) is only 5% of the sales process. 95% of sales happens outside of negotiation and pricing.

Negotiation is just one of the stages.

Building a predictable, repeatable and scalable sales engine is significantly harder than handling negotiation. I'd strongly recommend focusing on the sales engine a lot more, a lot early.

2. People do not focus enough on building trust.
Trust is one of those very few things - takes a life-time to build but a moment to lose. Most folks did not realise how valuable proofs, cases and testimonials can be if used the right way and how quick it can make the sales process.

One of the recommendations is - early on, see if you can ride on trust built by someone else. If your #agency does not have enough clients yet, work with an existing agency as a sub-contractor. If your #product does not have enough users/customers yet, launch on marketplaces like AppSumo.

3. In an effort to show our expertise, we end up ripping apart the customer.
No one. Absolutely no one wants to be told they are wrong/incompetent over and over. The customer already realises that they have a problem to be solved and that is why they are there to have a conversation with you.

Once you establish in first few minutes of the conversation that you can help them fix that problem, stop pointing out their mistakes. Consider using cases and portfolio to showcase your value. Consider existing ROI calculations to convince them on the pricing.

4. No one likes being sold to.
But all of us love an interesting conversation. Ultimately, sales is just interesting conversations. Asking open ended questions to understand them better and sharing your experiences to show them who and what you and your company are.

Doing this as a genuine individual (neither as a sales person nor a strategy) has helped us significantly at both Clientjoy (Acquired by Synup) and at Momentum Ventures.

Strongly recommend treating prospects like a person. Not like a bag of money or a record in your #CRM.

Lastly, focus on the process. Everything else will fall into place.

Thank you Jatin for considering me to join in on this discussion with Vikas from Magenta Insights and Shrijay from LegalWiz.in. It was meaningful. Looking forward to the next one.