Divyanshu Makkar
Co-Founder and CEO, WizCommerce. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorwizcommerce.com ↗
Divyaanshu Makkar is the co-founder and CEO of WizCommerce (formerly Sourcewiz), a vertical AI-native sales and commerce SaaS platform for wholesale distributors and manufacturers. Prior to founding the company, he was a venture investor at Bessemer Venture Partners and a strategy consultant at EY-Parthenon.
1shows
1appearances
23statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Divyanshu Makkar said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Indian B2B SaaS founders must embrace field sales over remote selling
“Do not be scared of building like field sales. Like a lot of people in the beginning told me that, you know, don't do field sales. And a lot of SaaS founders, by the way, hate field sales, right? Like they don't like it. SaaS is usually thought of as a clean b…”
Makkar: VC skills do not translate to early-stage startup operations
“The skills that you learn in VCs are not really applicable to what you will do as an entrepreneur. And that became very clear to me very quickly. It was clear to me when I did consulting because none of what I did as an entrepreneur You know, outside of like, …”
Makkar: VCs demanding five-year projections pre-product are unfit for seed stage
“Asking for projections for a pre-product company five years out. It's, yeah, it's, you know, I'm just going to do some art there. And I felt like, you know, that like almost all VCs, like no, 99% of the VCs didn't ask me for it only one or two hours. And I, th…”
Charging Indian factory owners monthly creates severe payment collection problems
“Charging Indian factory owner monthly is the worst thing you can do to yourself. And it's like collections will become a huge problem in India. You just keep following up, right?”
Indian Tier-2 manufacturers require in-person sales due to burned trust
“Like people don't convert digitally. This is a segment which is burnt by technology so many times that they will not trust you if you're not, you know, if they don't have a face for it.”
Indian manufacturing lacks China's consistency because export products are handmade
“India is not known for a lot of consistency in their products. Compared to China, which is very mechanized as a setup, right? So, you know, the products are going to get out with a certain quality fail rate, and it's going to be largely the same, what you're e…”
Makkar: Raising venture capital locks startups into rapid growth trajectories
“As soon as you take VC money, right? Like you have decided a trajectory to follow for your business. You know, you can't then say that, okay, I don't want to grow this rapidly or I, you know, want to probably, you know, build this a different way. You have to …”
Vertical SaaS founders must assume pitching VCs have zero domain knowledge
“Like a person like me sitting there at Bessemer, I personally cannot know hundred industries. I cannot associate with a hundred problems. So you have to go in knowing that this guy doesn't understand it. And it's okay for him to not understand it or her unders…”
Makkar: Bessemer evaluates vertical SaaS entirely on metrics, not domain expertise
“And at Bessemer, at least we were very, very metric driven. And I think we published like a good, better, best of SaaS, global SaaS out there. So pretty much that's how I'm going to evaluate. So there were companies in oil and gas. I have no idea about oil and…”
Unsexy markets allow founders to build without chasing vanity metrics
“Those businesses are very, very strong business fundamentals, you know, not very, a lot of people are competing in those spaces, and it gives you a lot of time to build something of value to your customers. You're not always chasing numbers. You're rather like…”
Makkar: India's second-gen factory owners prioritize modern tech and customer experience
“When I actually went on ground, I met like, you know, the second generation, everybody studied abroad or, you know, has gone to a good university. They don't, they have, they're ambitious, they don't want to run it like their fathers, and they are, you know, d…”
Sourcewiz validated demand by selling a no-code Figma prototype upfront
“So we built a prototype. It was a Figma prototype. No tech, no coding involved, but it was literally, you could look at it and you would like, we'll pitch it to you in a way that you will, as a manufacturer, you will not know that I'm pitching to you a prototy…”
Matrix Partners doubted Sourcewiz's monetization before leading their next round
“In fact, Matrix literally didn't believe that, you know, we would be able to charge our customers money. And then when they saw that we actually were able to charge them money, they came in, in the next round, right?”
Makkar: VCs evaluate new startups by pattern-matching against portfolio baggage
“Every VC has baggage. Like, they will try to connect you to some portfolio company that they have seen and that has nothing to do with you. That has nothing to do with what you are building. But you know, that's, it's a complex, like, you know, as a VC also, y…”
Indian lifestyle manufacturers could only process 20% of incoming buyer inquiries
“So we realized that out of all the inquiries that were coming to these people to show products, they were only being able to get to 20% of those inquiries and the rest will be delayed to next month, et cetera.”
In traditional industries, SaaS vendors become the client's sole tech contact
“And that's the good thing about unsexy industries. You almost, even if their wifi goes out, they'll call you. Even if there's a big problem, they'll call you. So you are the only tech company they know, essentially, and they'll come to you for every problem.”
Scaling field sales teams in India quickly erodes brand quality control
“When you scale feet on street, right, you lose control of quality very quickly, and that guy will go and present your brand in whatever way they feel fit.”
Software moats are built by shortening customer time to value
“Giving technology is one thing, but, you know, we've worked a lot on onboarding and I think a lot of the modes that we've built are not just the product. It's like the whole process of onboarding the customer and, you know, like making the time to value short.”
Sourcewiz reached nearly 400 paid customers by acquiring 80 per month
“So by till January, we had like maybe five, seven customers. And then January onwards, we started putting the first salespeople on, on ground. And so now we have, we'll close this month with about close to 400 customers. Every month we're acquiring about 80 cu…”
Makkar predicts Sourcewiz will hit $1M ARR by July 2023
“I think so by next year like same time next year, we should be like, maybe July, we should be hitting a million dollar ARR.”
Sourcewiz founders shadowed owners at nearly 100 factories before launching
“So we probably met. 90 to hundred like ballpark hundred factories before we started. And in some of these factories, we spent two weeks, three weeks shadowing, like the owners just seeing how they work.”
Sajith Pai rejected Makkar's request for an internship at Blume Ventures
“I'd actually asked Sajit for an internship at Loom. I for not an, like I, after he approached me for his portfolio company, I told him that, Hey, I'm more interested in VC. And he straight away said no to me. He said, we are not hiring. We get too many applica…”
Sourcewiz's pre-product pitch deck featured a Notion log of 90 interviews
“And actually it helps, like it helped us in our early VC conversations. I had a slide where, and actually one of the VCs had given me this advice. We were pre-product, right? So we had a slide where I literally had a snapshot of that notion with like all of th…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Divyanshu's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 NEON SHOWLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, WizCommerce | 1 | 23 | — | full record on the Neon Show → |