Article · About 8 min read

AMA with Krish Subramanian, CEO of Chargebee

Alex Theuma · SaaStock Free Intermediate India

The clearest statement of the partner posture that got them their early distribution: complement Stripe, Braintree and PayPal rather than compete with them, and amplify their features.

  • At 106 people, 102 sat in Chennai and 3 in San Francisco, with 60 percent in engineering, product and design.
  • Pricing started at a 49 dollar entry plan and a 249 dollar enterprise plan.
  • The freemium tier of ten free invoices mostly pulled in design and dev agencies, the wrong customer.
  • Krish says their biggest competitor is the billing system a customer would build in-house on Stripe or Braintree.
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The question it answers

  1. How did Chargebee get its first paying customers after 18 months with none?

Read with it

  1. Krish is blunt that inbound marketing was the whole strategy, chosen because Chennai gave them no access to a Silicon Valley... Insight Partners Article · long read How Krish Subramanian built global SaaS unicorn Chargebee out of India Insight Partners
  2. Fills in the part the founder interviews skip: how the team formed out of Zoho, how they picked recurring billing, and the... SeedToScale (Accel India) Article · Long read The Early Story of Chargebee: Why it's Better to Start with People, not Ideas Prabhakar Reddy
  3. The most granular first customer account: alpha at roughly 12 months, beta at roughly 18, and the first customer a UK... Mixergy Podcast · About 1 hr, full transcript How Krish Subramanian's Chargebee cures the headaches of subscription billing Krish Subramanian
  4. The outside view of the same years, useful for sanity checking how long the search for product market fit really took before... Contrary Research Report · Long report Chargebee Business Breakdown & Founding Story Contrary Research
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