The Exchanges

Q Can you tell us, right, you shared some of the steps on your, your demand engine. You shared a community, pre-flight, you shared a podcast you had, you shared, you know, the brand investments like the rapid you did in brand building, now it events. What are the other steps that you did in your demand engine?

A We did start spending on marketing early, like on keywords, search keywords to start with. We tried some LinkedIn as well. I don't think, you know, we were experts at any of it early on. We're getting better at those things now with, you know, hiring people who can manage those things. But we started spending some money on it from early, right? We used to send 10,000 dollars a month from August, 20, 21 itself. So just like a couple of months into having the product live. Because creating multiple engines of growth is something we Feel is important in the journey. And we need to, of course, measure and see what works, what doesn't, but we felt it was very important to experiment with different channels and figure out what is going to work for us. So we started spending money on those experiments. Even if we get two customers from spending 10,000 dollars, it's going to make up for that money spent. And, uh, cost of servicing a customer in SaaS anyway is pretty low. So we did pursue different Advertising. Actually, we had customers who told us they found us through Instagram as well.

AI assessment note: “We did start spending on marketing early, like on keywords, search keywords to start with.”

Q Vashree, you know, we are sitting in a very monumental moment, like globally, right? Earlier, Indian product companies were respected because of the product. Today, Indian companies are also respected because of the go-to-market strength the founders have built, right? And you are sitting here in Chennai, right? You are one of the most respected founders in SaaS today in India. So why Chennai?

A Of course, I think every kind of product, you tend to build muscle in certain areas over a period of time, and every generation of companies from a region learns from the previous generation of product companies. In that sense, probably Chennai has had an advantage thanks to, you know, the likes of Zoho, Freshworks, etc. being based out of here. In fact, a lot of, I would say, Chennai-based SaaS startups have Founders who may be ex-Zoho, ex-Freshworks, etc. So, For any startup, I guess there are many unknowns that we need to tackle with, but if you've been part of building a SaaS business before, the number of dimensions or, or, you know, domains where you have some expertise, some exposure, which helps you control variables in that side of things, increases, and that way, I guess, we have some advantage because we've all built some SaaS business before, so we know some aspects of it. The amount of exploration we need to, you know, figure out the rest of it is lesser.

AI assessment note: “Chennai has had an advantage thanks to, you know, the likes of Zoho, Freshworks”

Q At that point in time, like two years ago. So your distribution and marketing muscle is really talked about in the industry, right? Your zero to one journey is really famous that you went from zero to like one million error within 12 months of launching. Tell us about the activities you did pre-launch.

A First thing I would say is, we took a while to launch. We did not launch an MVP. When we launched, it was already a full-featured product. This is, again, one more learning from the Freshworks journey, where we saw how we can de-risk a product while we're building it, and not have to launch prematurely, because I think when you launch prematurely, you're not living up to the vision. The customer can't decipher that vision when the product isn't there yet. So we wanted to avoid that problem. In fact, we had to write a nice note to all our investors as well saying, hey, I know you're eager to see us launch, but that's not the approach we're taking. So I had time on my hands. I was talking to a lot of customers. My co-founders are building the product. I was showing the product early stages to people. We didn't have design partners, but we had a lot of interested parties who were giving us feedback and inputs.

AI assessment note: “I was talking to a lot of customers. My co-founders are building the product.”

Q Rocket Lean is thought to be a category creator, right? So, there are two pieces, right, where you place a SaaS tool or a product in. One is category creator, which is very difficult to build, and the other is tenx better product, right. So, tell us about your thought process. Why did you choose to be, you know, in the first bucket, and how has the journey been like?

A This is probably one thing we did not want to do initially because of the previous journey's experience. But when it came to this problem, in our mind, the wider TAM was, hey, we are 10 X better for customer facing projects than regular project management tools. So we felt there is an established type of product that people are buying, and we are just innovating on top of it to create what is a five X or 10 X better experience for certain kinds of companies. And so it's not a huge leap. There is some budget that can be repurposed. Maybe we charge a premium on top of what Asana or Monday would charge, but we're not entirely going after a brand new budget. We were, for smaller companies, which weren't, were running on spreadsheets, for example. But the value is high. Every founder, you know, early stage, values looking good in front of their customer. They want to look more mature. If you want to sell to an enterprise, and you're going with a spreadsheet, That's not going to inspire confidence in the partnership itself. So I think that message resonated with early stage companies, and they also started buying. But in our mind, yes, there is a category client onboarding that's getting established. There was one other player already in the space who had some amount of traction, but that only made us believe in it more that, hey, okay, someone has some traction, which means we could…

AI assessment note: “This is probably one thing we did not want to do initially”

Q What would they be, would love to? Share with the audience.

A Sure. I think when we started on the connoisseur journey, we were actually looking at, hey, we want to build stuff that's not already out there, very new evangelistic products. We didn't know how much of a challenge that would be, and sort of took on, I would say, too many variables in one go, right? Like, we were figuring out what our product should do. We were convincing customers about, hey, here is why you need such a product. Trying to do that inception in their minds, right? Saying, hey, here's why you need a product like this, and hopefully they realize it, and they come and buy. But the market itself was just maturing as well. Mobile apps were what we were focused on selling to, and while in India, for example, mobile apps were all the craze, and everyone was building an app, The western world, mobile was still, like, very, I would say, you know, ignored part of, for at least for bigger companies, web dominated. I'll give you an example. I learned about this, you know, Fortune hundred retailer. We wanted to pitch to them, and then once we realized that for them, web was the 13th biggest store, which means they had 12 physical stores that were bringing more money than web, and within web, Mobile web was one-fifth the size, rather mobile was, I think, the 13th biggest, and within mobile, mobile web was five times the size of mobile app, and we were focused only on that ap…

AI assessment note: “took on, I would say, too many variables in one go”

Q So, why do founders, right, especially in SaaS, ignore the GTM a lot? Like, the GTM is taken secondary, and they think that once we build a really great product, then we can start reaching out to the customers through an outbound motion, and then over the period of time, then inbound will build, and this never works.

A Yeah, I think there is somewhat of a founder market Our founder GTM Motion Fit as well, and for a lot of people, I mean, to be honest, probably the easier path is to say, hey, let me build that clear ICP and reach out to specific people, and it should work even that way, right? It's not like you won't have that initial traction that way. It may be slower. But you're gonna attract exactly the kind of, or you're gonna chase exactly the kind of customer you want. But I wanted to make it easier for all of us. So I said, hey, if I do the hard work up front, and I'm ready to do it this time, I know last time we did not, this is a feeling of, I did not do justice to our product last time. And this time I wanna do justice.

AI assessment note: “for a lot of people, I mean, to be honest, probably the easier path”