Pick one painful workflow you know from your own work, sell it before you build it, and ship the smallest version that does that one job. In order: talk to people who have the problem until you can describe it in their words; get a few to commit as design partners or pre-pay; build the thin version (an AI app builder or no-code tool is enough to start); and charge from the first customer, pricing on the value you create. To get paid in India, Razorpay's standard plan takes 2% a transaction. To sell abroad, Stripe India charges 3% on cards issued outside India and opens by invitation, or Paddle acts as merchant of record and handles foreign sales tax for 5% plus 50 cents. Exported software services are zero-rated under GST; file a Letter of Undertaking at the start of each financial year so you do not pay IGST upfront and wait for a refund. Then track the few SaaS metrics that matter (churn, CAC, payback) and keep costs low until revenue carries you.
Walling's whole case is that a niche too small for big competitors is precisely where a focused founder has room to win. He is practical about validating demand before building and marketing to a defined audience. If your worry is that your market looks unglamorous, this book argues that is a feature, not a flaw.
Most GST explainers stop at the 40 lakh / 20 lakh threshold. This one is written for founders who need to decide whether to register voluntarily before they are forced to, and it makes the B2B case concretely: a registered vendor can issue tax invoices so buyers claim input tax credit, and you recover GST paid on AWS, SaaS, and rent. It also covers the 2025 GSTR-2B mismatch reality, so you register with your eyes open on the filing burden.
Mandatory registration is 40 lakh turnover for goods and 20 lakh for services in most states, but interstate supply and e-commerce force registration regardless of turnover.
Register voluntarily early if you sell B2B: unregistered vendors force buyers to eat the tax, and you cannot reclaim input credit on tools, ads, or rent without registration.
GST is an ongoing filing commitment, not a one-time step: ITC now depends on GSTR-2B auto-matching, so supplier compliance directly affects the credit you can claim.
Patrick Campbell built ProfitWell on pricing data from thousands of companies, and this is the single best free deep-dive on SaaS pricing strategy. It's the canonical starting point for value metrics, segments, and packaging.
David Skok's For Entrepreneurs work is the foundational, near-universally cited source on SaaS unit economics and modeling. It's where the LTV:CAC and CAC-payback conventions were popularized.
Freshworks sold its first customer (a school in Australia) four days after launch and grew to a NASDAQ IPO without a US sales team in the early days, making it the definitive proof that Indian founders can sell globally from day one. This is the founder's own distilled playbook, not secondhand analysis.
India's most used payment gateway for small businesses, taking UPI, cards and netbanking. The pricing page lists a standard fee of 2% plus GST per transaction, with no gateway fee for the first 90 days on its current offer and custom pricing above ₹5 lakh a month.
The founder-led community of Indian SaaS builders, now growing into AIBoomi, with its Playbook, annual conference, roundtables and city chapters on building a global software company from India.
