Bala Srinivasa, Managing Director of Arkam Ventures, discusses the maturation of the domestic Indian market for enterprise B2B SaaS solutions.
Assertion Supported
Srinivasa: KrazyBee maintains 70% repeat rate and net margin profitability
“Crazy Bee has a 70% repeat rate, and they have people who come back to them two, three times a year. Right. And this completely changes your business model versus a traditional MBFC or however you lend, and it's actually a profitable model. Crazy B is profitab…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Srinivasa: KrazyBee customer acquisition costs ₹300 versus ₹7,000 for banks
“Someone like a crazy bee can acquire a customer for 300 rupees. A bank today for a credit card customer, it costs them 7000 rupees, right?”
Assertion Contradicted
Srinivasa: Signzy reached over $10M ARR in three years selling to Indian banks
“And as a result, they've been very, very successful in the Indian financial landscape in terms of getting to 10 plus million ARR over three years, right?”
Insight
Srinivasa: Low willingness to pay pushes Indian SMB SaaS into lending
“We have seen companies with 50, 60,000 customers, but the propensity to get the customer to pay is very, very low. And as a result, you then pivot into, Hey, I've got all this customer data. I'm now going to get, for example, into FinTech lending, which seems …”
Disclosure
Arkam Ventures avoids brands targeting only India's wealthiest ten million
“What we are less likely to invest in is, for example, if you said Hey, I am building a very high-end fashion brand just for the top ten million in India, right? Because the price points are such that you know, it is something that we think we can be very profi…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Srinivasa: High-quality Indian SaaS founders are emerging from Freshworks, Chargebee, and Zoho
“India right now is in an amazing place in terms of very, very high quality entrepreneurs in the SaaS space, and people are coming off very strong organizations, whether it's Freshworks, whether it's Chargebee, whether it is Zoho, etc.”