Opinion
Bijapur: Startups cannot find PMF in their first two years going enterprise-first
“I don't think any startup today can start a enterprise first business and really find product market fit in the first year or two years.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bijapur: Billboard ads delivered better ROI than targeted digital performance marketing
“In fact, our ROI for the limited experiment that we did was better than targeted digital marketing or targeted performance marketing that we did online.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Bijapur predicts SpotDraft will reach $100 million ARR within three years
“In the next three years, we'll be a hundred million dollar ARR company.”
Insight
Bijapur: Indian SaaS startups compete against US incumbents mainly on pricing
“My belief is whatever you're building here as SaaS, there is some competitor in the US who's built a
product that is sort of replaceable to what you're doing.
Now, when you go to market, your product is clearly, let's say, 3040, 50% of that more mature, more …”
Insight
Bijapur: Modern SaaS playbooks require starting mid-market before moving upmarket
“And if you look at the SaaS playbook that we see these days, you always start mid-market now and then move much more enterprise as you grow.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bijapur: SpotDraft doubled revenue annually for three years with ~120% NRR
“So SpotDraft is growing, you know, has doubled its revenue. In the last three years, year on year, we are growing at almost a 120% NRR is what we've maintained and we've got close to 400 logos across the globe. Safe to put we are in our let's say the 10 to fif…”
Assertion Supported
Bijapur: Private SaaS multiples dropped to 6x-10x revenue
“The multiples have definitely dropped. We are now mimicking, you know, the six to 10 X revenue multiples that we are seeing in the U S in public markets.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bijapur: 2021-2022 funding boom created startup oversupply and capital shortage
“In 21 and 22, the number of seed and series A companies that got funded. I think there's been that it sort of crowded the market, so there are a lot more companies who are still looking for those seed and series A or series B fundings. So that has led to an ov…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bijapur: ₹100 crore revenue is benchmark for Indian SaaS IPOs
“I think the numbers that get thrown around is about a hundred million dollars, a hundred crores, sorry. And we've seen success coming at that end. We've also started seeing success come at like three, 400 crores. But hundred crores is the number that People ta…”
Insight
Bijapur: Top SaaS salespeople excel through rigorous cadence and CRM hygiene
“What I've seen is that the best salespeople actually have the best cadence, like their hygiene of the CRM is great. You know, their emails are always on time. If you tell them something, they will remember it and they'll ensure that they follow up with you on …”
Insight
Bijapur: Building on existing systems of record carries fatal platform risk
“The problem with building something that plugs into an existing system of record is it, I think the biggest challenge there is it becomes a platform play. Like you're so dependent on the platform that the platform ends up shut locking your feature, then you're…”
Opinion
Bijapur: Procurement is not disrupted well enough and has space for a new system of record
“Procurement, It's still not disrupted well enough. I feel like there is space to build a great system of record and procurement.”
Insight
Bijapur: Companies will not share NDAs as AI training data
“There was a dearth of training data. If the document is called a non-disclosure agreement, companies are not going to disclose it for our training purposes as a data set.”
Insight
Bijapur: Founders must build for customer problems, not verbatim feature requests
“We focused way too much on listening to the customer and building for the customer and not building for the problem that the customer had.”
What-if
Bijapur: SpotDraft should have established sales and marketing much earlier
“If I had to go back and change something in time, I would build the sales and marketing functions way earlier in the life cycle and focus more on Compounding and delivering that value that software has that we are building and showing that to the end customer …”
Insight
Bijapur: Legal customers want faster turnaround, not automated contract analysis
“What we realized today is people don't want a system that can read your contracts and tell you What is the good, bad, and ugly? What they really wanted was faster turnaround time on their contracts.”
Disclosure
SpotDraft will keep human-led onboarding as it scales to thousands of customers
“What we want to keep As is, is the customer centricity in terms of delivering outcomes and doing that right. That's one process. And second is having a human led you know, onboarding and initiation experience, which people like rather than having to come in an…”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Bijapur: SpotDraft is on track to reach $5M ARR by December 2022
“Yeah, we are on, on target to hit five million dollars in ERR.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bijapur: SpotDraft has nearly 100 customers evenly split globally
“We are right now at about close to a hundred customers that we have and of which 50% are in India and 50% are outside of India.”
Disclosure
Bijapur: SpotDraft prioritized product features by analyzing competitors' one-star reviews
“We went and read all the one star reviews everywhere for our competitors and said, let's build these pieces out first and focus on these pieces and make them as our differentiators which has worked well.”
Disclosure
Bijapur: SpotDraft operates as Salesforce for contract automation
“We are an end-to-end contract automation platform. So think of us like the Salesforce for contracts. Contracts get created, managed, analyzed, and collaborated upon using SpotDraft so you can close deals faster.”
