20 resources from The Neon Show we point people to, and the questions each answers.
A sitting CIO explains how he actually finds and evaluates startup vendors, including that roughly 80% arrive through outbound. Qualification advice is far more reliable when it comes from the person doing the buying.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia 62 min
Listen on Spotify open.spotify.com →Kapil built one of India's few listed SaaS companies, so when he takes apart the myths (Indians will not pay for software, they demand endless customisation, they want enterprise support at SMB prices) he is arguing from a P&L. Essential if you are deciding whether India is a real market for you.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Kapil Makhija 80 min listen
Sharath has built two enterprise companies (Observe, Sanas) with engineering in India and buyers in the US, and is direct about founder-led sales being non-negotiable for the first customers. Good on what actually has to move to the US and what does not.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Sharath Keshava Narayana 90 min listen
A rare account of channel evolution in order (outbound, then inbound, then events, then expansion) as Whatfix went from one million to seventy million ARR, plus why they split the CTO to the US and kept the CEO in India.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar Namburu 1 hr 9 min listen
The buyer's side of enterprise outbound, from a CIO who says roughly 80 percent of the startups he evaluates were found through outbound research, peers or LinkedIn. He also times each phase of his buying process, which tells you exactly how long your deal will take.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Karthik Chakkarapani 62 min listen
The best Indian example of building demand before a product exists: a community launched nine months ahead, a podcast for the same buyers, 100 plus customer conversations, then a launch timed with the funding news. Concrete on the demand gen channels that followed too.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Srikrishnan Ganesan podcast episode
A SaaSBoomi co-founder walking through how an Indian SaaS business is actually run, including the operating discipline and numbers, in one sitting. Rare to get this much India-specific ground covered in one place.
On The Neon Show by Suresh Sambandam 90 min
An Indian founder who built audience first and product second, with the process behind the content rather than just the outcome. The clearest local case for founder brand as a real distribution channel.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1 hr
Zuora's CIO walks through his actual evaluation path, from first look to security review to procurement, and how many pitches survive each stage. Hearing the buying committee described from the buyer's chair is worth more than any stakeholder map template.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Karthik Chakkarapani 60 min listen
Open neon.fund →Twenty four minutes on what building an audience from India actually looked like: started in 2018 knowing nothing about venture, recorded 50 plus investors, and years later it became a fund backing SpotDraft, CloudSEK and Whatfix. The timeline is the lesson.
On The Neon Show by Nansi Mishra and Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24 min listen
Open neon.fund →Kiran Darisi (Atomicwork) and Sreedhar Peddineni (GTMBuddy), both out of the Freshworks lineage, on why per seat pricing stops making sense when the product is doing the work, and what you sell instead. The practitioner view behind the margin numbers.
On The Neon Show by Siddhartha Ahluwalia 80 min listen
Open neon.fund →The second S-curve is the part most retellings skip. Once existing WhatsApp resellers ran out, the pitch changed to starting a business online with zero investment, and this episode covers the channel mix that followed.
On The Neon Show by Vidit Aatrey About 60 min
Open neon.fund →The pricing episode. He wanted to launch at 9 dollars a month and was talked into 99, and explains why price should track the value someone else got rather than the effort you put in.
On The Neon Show by Paras Chopra About 70 min
Both founders tell the Dreamforce booth bet and the accidental twelve times pricing discovery, which is the single most useful anecdote in Indian SaaS pricing.
On The Neon Show by Khadim Batti About 1 hr 9 min
The best single source on the pre-product community play: 120 cold conversations, Preflight, the Product Hunt and funding double launch, and 30 paying customers in two and a half months.
On The Neon Show by Srikrishnan Ganesan 47 min
The clearest account of the four to five year SMB to enterprise transition, why India first beat going global, and the full revenue arc including the year it fell 55 percent.
On The Neon Show by Shivakumar Ganesan About 1 hr
Where the motion came from: the Ola number masking call, 350 inbound SMBs at 10 to 15 a month, the rupee pricing experiments, and the year by year ARR table.
On The Neon Show by Shivakumar Ganesan 59 min
Open neon.fund →Where the profitability argument and the people buy from people line come from, along with his honest read on why Indian SaaS takes longer to reach 100 million in ARR.
On The Neon Show by Manav Garg 93 min
Open neon.fund →Before you pick a CRM, it helps to hear someone who built one for Indian sales teams explain what founders actually use it for and what they buy too early. Practical context for keeping the first stack small.
On The Neon Show by Nilesh Patel with Siddhartha Ahluwalia 48 min
Listen on Apple Podcasts podcasts.apple.com →Yamini Bhat turned her own early wins at Vymo into a motion that sells to banks and insurers, so she talks about the unglamorous part: what each stage means, who owns it, and what a new rep needs written down. Useful when the process still lives only in the founder's head.
On The Neon Show by Yamini Bhat 41 min
