Article

Selling Smart: The Insider's Guide to SaaS Success in India

Blume Ventures Free Beginner India

This is the honest, founder-written version of what selling to Indian SMBs actually looks like: high-touch, relationship-first, and run over the channels your buyers already live on. It grounds the exact reality behind your question, that a WhatsApp broadcast list of your customers can pull 70 to 80 percent open rates, and that showing up in person early lifts deal size and renewals. Treat it as a starting point for how to think about your first accounts, not a step-by-step script.

  • Indian SMB selling stays high-touch well past the early days: founder-led conversations and in-person meetings move deals more than automated funnels.
  • WhatsApp beats email for reach here. A simple broadcast list of your customers can hit 70 to 80 percent open rates with real replies.
  • Your first buyers will ask for custom features. Fold the reasonable asks into the roadmap to build trust instead of treating them as noise.
Open on blume.vc ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. I'm building for Indian SMBs who use WhatsApp for everything. How do I get my first 10 without a fancy sales process?
  2. What are the biggest mistakes founders make trying to land their first customers that I should avoid?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to win your first 10 B2B customers Lenny Rachitsky
  4. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  5. The global playbooks assume a US-style buying process; this one is written for the Indian enterprise reality, where the sale... Blume Ventures Article · 25 min read The Rough Guide to Building an Enterprise SaaS Dhandha in India Blume Ventures (with Aakrit Vaish, Haptik)
  6. The consumer counterpart to finding B2B customers, focused on manually recruiting your first users for a consumer product. It... Lenny's Newsletter Article How to Find Your Early Adopters by Doing Things That Don't Scale Lenny Rachitsky
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →