As a part of B2B Yatra, we're looking to screen our documentary to thousands of colleges in India!
The Goal? To inspire students in colleges across India to either build, or join B2B Startups as Interns, Full Timers.
And, here comes Anto, the super energetic soul - One of the few meetings I've had in quite some time where you lose the track of time! :)
Anto built Under 25 Universe for the last 11 years, to empower and celebrate hundreds of thousands of young people by giving them a voice and a space to connect, learn, and grow.
Under25 has it's wings spread across 4000 colleges in India, and aspires to be the largest platform for students where they can freely express themselves, connect with like-minded peers, and pursue their passions. Crazy!
MR Rangaswami Thanks for the connect, you're a rockstar! โค๏ธ
Those who didnโt able to come, I am sharing my points which I wrote during session. Hope it will helpful to community (specially sales person and founder)
โ USA contain 90% paying customer than rest world โ Do the night shift โ Cold call: MOST IMPORTANT now days, as there you have 100% control โ Sales doesnโt need degree its human psycology โ Understand the country culture from basic to advance, custome must fill like he/she from their own culture
โ in first meeting, we are sellling 30 mins so mind its value.
โ Your company must have bonus of more than 1 lac per quater, 2 quaters or year depend upon team
โ Best time to call in USA 7:30 to 8:00 am EST(as they leave from home to office, so they pick the call during travelling)
โ Schedule for 100 meetings with your customer then it will be usefull for entire career, as those moving from one company to another and give reference
โ Every friday, profiling your customers and call or reach them on next week
โ Invest on Sales Navigator, Invest on database for marketting
Calling Pychology: Never do: โ Am I speaking with <name>? โ Is this right time to talk?
Do this: โ Hey, this is Chirag, How are you? Do you remember me? We met in an event happened on last saturday.
โ When some say, I am not interested then ask for it reason. (Dont shame)
Any service-based company founder I meet, invariably at least once mention that they want to build a product or they want to make a transition from service-based to product-based business! ๐
While many entrepreneurs are pursuing it, very few succeed.
To learn the challenges faced by entrepreneurs in this pursuit, "Transitioning from IT Services to SaaS Products" was organized by eChai Ventures at IIMA Ventures.
Yash Shah shared his experiences of a successful transition for Service based to SaaS product company and we had some insightful interactions on various points.
Some of the learning nudgets from the meetup:
๐ Start promoting product as soon as you start building product not after it is ready to launch. Most of the founders wait till MVP is ready and then start looking for initial customers to get their feedback. Instead of that, it was suggested that it is preferred to start searching for clients as soon as the development of the product starts.
๐ The challenges we face in service based company would be more or less same ( client not paying on time, employees churn rate, etc.) even when the company is scaled. While in SaaS company, as the product scales, the problems would be different at each stage of 100 customers, 10000 customers or a million customers. So, as a founder, you have to be prepared for managing new challenges and finding solution for it.
๐ Customers can come up with N number of requests or features in your product. It is not advisable to go for building each feature that is requested. Customization can be done up to some level but you have to put some line to it. If customer is ready for paying customization, that then can be prioritized.
๐ Having a product based company requires a completely different mindset than having a service based company. So, if you are trying both then keep both the teams separate and do not mix them up.
Overall, it was a great learning experience and interacting.
Kudos to Jatin Chaudhary for his efforts to bring all the people together. Looking forward to attending more knowledge sharing sessions.
A discussion all about selling as an early-stage startup, building marketplace businesses, the maturing SaaS landscape in Asia, breaking silos and more with:
Couple of months back, we had the graduation for SGx5 cohort in Goa. SGx is a 16 week pay-it-forward program by SaaSBoomi where founders of early stageย
#saas companies go through growth acceleration with mentors and wingmates who have been through the curve.
About a year ago, Anupama and I had the good fortune of being part of the SGx4 cohort for Clientjoy (Acquired by Synup). Our learnings were crisp, clear and actionable.
They helped us with improving our account activations, getting a handle on our ICP and focusing on the right metrics. I also witnessed them helping my batchmates with their US GTM, going about category creation and setting up sales processes.
If you are a SaaS company doing $500K to $1.5M in ARR, link to apply to SGx6 is in the first comment.
Here's what you can expect if you are selected: - Goal setting and weekly check-ins for your GTM - Sat morning calls to hold you accountable every week - Play-books on things you think you already know but you don't - like SEO, outbound, PPC etc - 2 founders who will work with you and get their hands dirty, and most valuable of all - Genuine community that also happens to be the world's largest pay-it-forward community for SaaS.
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:
๐ ๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐จ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐จ๐ญ๐ก ๐จ๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ฆ ๐ญ๐จ๐ ๐๐ญ๐ก๐๐ซ 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.
๐ ๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐ซ๐ซ๐ข๐ฏ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐ญ ๐ฉ๐ซ๐ข๐๐ข๐ง๐ 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.
๐ ๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐ฎ๐ข๐ฅ๐๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐ซ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ญ I wrote a post about building trust as a SaaS company a while back. Here's the link --> https://lnkd.in/dTVuX_9F
๐ ๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐ก๐๐ง๐ง๐๐ฅ๐ฌ ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ญ ๐ฐ๐จ๐ซ๐ค 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.
๐ ๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐ข๐ง๐๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐๐จ๐ซ๐ญ ๐ฐ๐ข๐ญ๐ก ๐ฌ๐ฆ๐๐ฅ๐ฅ ๐ญ๐ข๐๐ค๐๐ญ ๐ฉ๐๐ฒ๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ญ๐ฌ 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.
๐ ๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐ก๐๐ง๐ ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ฆ๐ข๐ง๐๐ฌ๐๐ญ ๐จ๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ญ๐๐๐ฆ 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.
I am back from SaaSBoomi Annual 2024, held in Chennai ๐
๐นNot long ago, Chennai struggled to attract Investors.
๐นFast forward to 7th Mar 2024 - Investors from all over globe flew to Chennai, eager to see what SaaS Founders are building and offer them help, guidance and capital
Tusker AI : No-Code AI Computer Vision Platform for Image and Video Analytics
Tusker is a NO code AI Vision platform, which helps the entire Business Community by Automating their Computer Vision project in span of just few hours instead of weeks without knowledge about AI.
About the team
TUSKER AI Co-Founders worked on similar initiatives, and they also ran a couple of Bootstrap start-ups successfully for the past decade.ย
They were professionals and worked in a Similar domain for the last 5 years where the computer Vision and Surveillance Industry were part of it but it Lacked Automation.ย
So, this leads to thinking more about Innovation and Product Automation. So, in a nutshell, they are similar tech-savvy like-minded Entrepreneurs who have been working with a similar vision for almost a decade now.ย
TUSKER AIโs co-founders were colleagues first, then friends, then became people having the same enthusiasm, and now a couple of innovators working on the same Vision to revolutionize and democratize AI.ย
Eureka moment
Well Eureka moment for me itself had a long journey and after serving in the IT sector for over a decade now the pain point for me was crystal clear and I was cent percent sure what is my next goal for my community and how I can be suitable for solving this.ย
As an entrepreneur for over a decade and coming from the Artificial Intelligence domain, I always wonder what more can be done to make people's lives easy.ย
Also, as an AI Technologist and as a business owner, I should have the liberty to experiment with AI without having core coding knowledge and generate AI models.
SAAS-based model - per camera monthly subscription) for video analytics as well as API calls(per million images) and per model creation on our platform. ย
Traction
200 million images processed
150+ Models trained
200+ users
100+ live streams processed ย
Community support
Speaking on the behalf of the whole team, it would be an honor for us if any Technologists or any AI-Market Enthusiast could be our Mentor/Advisor as we are looking for these profiles to help us achieve our targeted goals. We are looking for โGlobal GTMโ as our vision is to empower everyone at a Global Scale with our Global Enterprise Grade-Tool-kit, therefore we need a โGlobal Guidanceโ to reflect our visibility globally.
Gallabox is a no-code, conversational commerce platform that leverages the WhatsApp Business API to help small and medium-sized businesses improve their sales conversions.
About the team
Yogesh was one of the early Engineering team members at Sulekha where he built the marketplace for Local Services, mining deep understanding of user needs and โmatchmakingโ with SMB offers. He was also the first Engineering team member at CredAvenue where he built the fintech marketplace for debt.
Yathin created the Value Delivery function at Sulekha, a system that kept track of whatโs due to paying customers and led the B2B product at Sulekha that was used by over 50,000 SMBs to keep track of their leads and deals.
Karthik helped build Sulekhaโs Local Services business from ground up and built it to a Rs 100 crore ARR on the back of over 50,000 SMBs. He saw how the Internet was impacting SMBs at the dawn of the digital era while at Sify. He built the wedding services marketplace for Matrimony with users on one end and SMBs on the other.
Eureka moment
Sales is the lifeblood for small to medium sized businesses, but they lack the resources & know-how to convert their prospects and sell better.ย
We want to help businesses grow their sales through cutting-edge technologies channeled through easy-to-use tools - to digitize and automate their customer interactions.
How does it work?
ย
Business model
We are a SaaS company and charge subscription for use of our product. Plans vary by features and are designed for businesses of all sizes
Traction
We now serve almost 1,000 paying customers from India and abroad, while over 12,000 businesses use our product for free.
Community support
Help us with product feedback, offer constructive criticism and brainstorm for new ideas for product road-map and for GTM.
Attending events like this fuels our journey at AllEvents, propelling us to dream bigger and set new milestones.
Don't miss out on the chance to learn, connect, and supercharge your entrepreneurial spirit. Every event is a catalyst for growth, inspiration, and lifelong connections.
Seize the opportunity to elevate your journeyโbecause a happening life is a life well-lived!
โPrateek, letโs travel across India to know more about the stories of India SaaSโ
4 months ago, my co-founder Sri reached out to me with this crazy text and bag full of even crazier ideas. Without a second thought, I knew I was in.
And that's how from Day 0, both of us went all in.
And here we are todayโIโm extremely excited to introduce to you, The Bharat SaaS Yatra!
Our vision? To celebrate the Rise of India SaaS, and cover hundreds of stories of SaaS FoundersโThe wins, the losses, the challenges and everything in between โค๏ธ
Stories not just from the Tier 1 cities, but also the gritty tales from Tier 2 & Tier 3 cities.
Hitting the road for the next 4 months to travel across 20 cities and capture the Fan-SaaStic stories out there.
Wondering, where weโll meet? In one of the finest immersive SaaS exhibitions that weโre setting up across all the 20 cities. I bet, youโre going to love it!
Thank you for the honour to be a #speaker at eChai's marketing event at Urban Vault in Bengaluru to talk about right market strategies for startups, smbs.
he room was quite full with close to 50 budding entrepreneurs from various age groups, states of india, and countries..majority being in their 20s to 30s.
The session was for 2 hours but went for 3.5 hours with 1.5 hours for questions and answers. These were the various questions asked:
Here are the list of questions in the meantime for each of us to answer:
1) What do you see are the new paradigm strategies of marketing 2) How has <your company> experienced the shift over the last few years or in 2024 and beyond. 3) What are the changes you have been experiencing and how are you responding to those changes? 4) What is the preferred future you see for entrepreneurs 5) What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs and experienced entrepreneurs 6) What is a non negotiable for you moving forward? Plus there were around 20 plus questions from 1 to 1 discussion with entrepreneurs during the Q&A session.
Loved it thoroughly that echai is giving the #platform to entrepreneurs to come forward and learn through communities...good to see 4 #womeninbusiness#womenentrepreneurs there.
Many people asked me if I can mentor them or help them with marketing strategies. The answer is yes, of course.
People who expressed interests for follow up sessions, or for mentoring please book as you need it. Sharing the link based on popular requests: https://lnkd.in/gnkmHQcN
Today, with a wide network of 5,000 schools spread across 27 states and 250 cities, every member of Saarthi Pedagogy is committed to helping schools and students improve their learning outcomes.
around thinking about MVPs and what it took him to build Superblog ai. and also from
Amit Chavan
.ย
The highlights from my notes say:
- B2C is hard. Sigh. - Build stuff for yourself, solve your own problem. - Do primary research by looking over trends. - Consumer behavior change revolves around three axes: Energy, time, and money. - Your first set of customers will come from your Alpha and beta users. - Your organic channels could be from either of these: ย - SEO ย - Build in public ย - Word of mouth - Good PMs follow revenue/business. - Sales is getting the cheque in hand.
- SEO in the future might take a different form, could evolve into chat engine optimization.
And got connected to a few interesting folks as well.
Brands.live is revolutionizing branding for MSMEs/SMBs across India by providing business marketing posters, banners and festival posts to grow their business with 3 easy steps - select, Download, and Share!
Let me tell you a story that seems almost too good to be true. My name is Bhavesh, and this journey starts with a simple meeting that felt like fate. In 2019, in Ahmedabad, at a networking event by Patel Business Network, I met another Bhavesh -
Bhavesh Korat
. We both believed in doing good for others, and thatโs what brought us together.
We quickly realized we shared more than just a name; we had a common dream. So, in 2020, with a small team of six, we started Brands.live. Our goal was pretty straightforward: help small businesses in India make a name for themselves without breaking the bank.
The idea was to make branding simple and accessible. We wanted every small business owner to have the chance to tell their story, to stand out, and to grow. It felt like everything just clicked into place as we worked on this.
Now, looking back, itโs amazing to see how far weโve come. Weโve faced challenges, sure, but our belief in our mission has kept us going. We're not just building a company; we're hoping to inspire a whole community of entrepreneurs.
Our roles also complement as
Bhavesh Korat
ย manages the Tech, Finance, and sales, I manage Content and Marketing.
YOMO AI is AI-Powered Conversation Intelligence Platform for teams.
So, back in 2019, I just tagged along with a buddy of mine because he had this meeting about some Women 4.0 ML workshops happening across India. Honestly, I wasn't all that into it; just wanted a quick way to hitch a ride to LD BRTS and head home. But then, things took a turn.
We met this guy who was all pumped about organizing the event. They were chatting away about plans and execution, and there I was, just hanging. I had a bunch of ideas popping into my head, but I kept quiet. Then they shifted gears to talking about growing their community, and I couldn't help myselfโI just blurted out my two cents on how design and branding could really make a difference. That's all I really knew back then.
Turns out, this sparked a whole new conversation, and before I knew it, I was deep in discussion with Tirth, who was running this Instagram community with over 18K followers. We met again the next day, and bam, we were on the same wavelength, dreaming big about starting our own thing in the ed-tech space, which was pretty fresh at the time. We quickly cooked up MADโshort for Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science. Fast forward six months, we were teaching over 300 students and had made some good cash. But then, COVID hit, and everything just fell apart. We had our share of clashes and decided to call it quits.
Fast forward again, two years later, I hit Tirth up out of the blue, thinking we should give it another shot. This time we launched HYPR, aiming to shake up the ed-tech scene. But turns out, the timing was off; the market wasn't looking for another ed-tech player. So, we had to pivot from that too.
Now, we're onto something new called YOMO.ย
YOMO is a user insights platform that enables product teams to build better customer-centric products by going beyond basic analytics. It's been quite the ride, from a random meetup to launching not one, but two startups, facing setbacks and still pushing forward. If you told me back in 2019 that tagging along for a ride would lead to all this, I'd have laughed. But here we are, proof that sometimes the smallest decisions can lead you to places you never imagined.
Magenta provides powerful reports and insights that drive sales growth by integrating with ERPs like Tally, Busy, SAP etc.
โ I was associated with iBall Brand since 2001 and Vikalp joined in 2008 and we did lot of projects together for 11 years.
When I discussed about the idea of making a business intelligence software with Vikalp, he immediately came to Ahmedabad from Delhi to discuss about the next steps.
Our approach to defining co-founder roles was intuitive rather than structured. Vikalp naturally gravitated towards product management due to his deep tech background and passion. Our mutual understanding was that, regardless of our individual expertise areas, we would maintain an open dialogue, challenging and questioning each other's decisions.ย
This dynamic allows us to progress collectively, guided by the strong conviction of the decision-maker in any given situation.
I'm thrilled to share that our partner, Upekkha, is now welcoming applications for their UP24 Spring Cohort. This is a golden opportunity for SaaS startups looking to catapult their growth to the next level.
What's on offer? - A robust ๐ฐ $125K Pre-Seed Fund to kickstart your journey. - Unparalleled ๐ strategic guidance and support for global expansion. - An opportunity to ๐ฅ join a vibrant community of 300+ founders who are reshaping the SaaS landscape globally.
๐ Why Upekkha? ๐
Upekkha isn't just about funding. It's about fostering a community where founders can thrive, share, and grow together. With 40 startups funded in 2023 and plans to fund 70 more in 2024, Upekkha is on a mission to nurture the next wave of SaaS success stories. Whether you're dreaming of hitting your first $1M ARR or scaling beyond, Upekkha's track record speaks volumes:
- 165+ profitable and capital-efficient startups. - 11 startups have soared past $1M ARR, with three exceeding $5M ARR. - A remarkable 85% of the first 20 startups are cash flow positive and growing month-on-month.
Don't let this chance slip through your fingers! The application deadline is 15th Feb 2024. If you're ready to take your SaaS startup to unprecedented heights, apply now at https://lnkd.in/gcZuKGGS.
eChai Ventures partners with select brands as their growth partner, helping them expand market reach, drive revenue growth, amplify brand visibility, and strengthen hiring efforts.
Monika Mehta
Tushar Tejuja
Smitha Saravanan
Sai Krishna
Amit Chavan
Bhavesh Korat
