SaaS – Dutch Uncles

India’s SaaS Industry Could Reach $1 Trillion in Value By 2030

Aakash Sharma — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 08:35:10 +0000

With rapid digitisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, India’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry has been one of the biggest frontrunners in topping the growth charts. According to a recent report by SaaSBooMi, McKinsey and SaaS NASSCOM, the industry in India can reach a $1 trillion valuation and create about 5 lakh new jobs by 2030. About 1,000 SaaS-based companies in India, including ten unicorns, generate about $2-3 billion in total revenues and employ nearly 40,000 people.

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The SaaSBooMi, McKinsey and SaaS NASSCOM study found that the global SaaS market is expected to grow at an annual rate of 18-20% with a turnover of over $ 500 billion by 2025.

Indian SaaS Industry Insights

Last year, Indian SaaS companies took advantage of the favourable digital wave due to COVID and saw $1.5 billion invested in them. The sector also added six new unicorns, including Postman, Highradius, Chargebee Zenoti, Browserstack, and Innovacer.

SaaS contributes to approximately 50% of a company’s digital value in today’s time, even though a business typically spends only about 20% of its total technology budget on SaaS. This indicates its potential for value. The ability of Indian product companies to sell to global enterprises from India remotely is the SaaS industry’s biggest strength.

Growth Drivers and Inhibitors for SaaS Start-ups and SMEs

Most SaaS companies, especially B2B SaaS start-ups, choose to hold companies in the US or Singapore to get rid of strict Indian rules. As a result of this, the sector’s employment occurs here, yet most of the value creation takes place outside India. The Reserve Bank of India’s regulations for two-factor authentication are helpful for security, but they hinder start-ups’ ease of functioning. These rules do not allow SaaS companies to regularly bill global customers, which is a key reason they look outside India for listing.

Still, industry leaders are actively working with the government and NASSCOM to address SaaS value creation in India. These regulations will take time, but the government is very open to solving this issue, as per recent public records.

The Job Market – Creating half a million jobs by 2030

While the recent report shows that India’s SaaS sector could reach $1 trillion in value over the next nine years, it also indicates that it could create half a million new jobs. There are currently over 1,000 SaaS compliant companies and over ten unicorns in the Indian market employing around 40,000 people per year.

The Indian ecosystem supports the development and growth of SaaS. This is due to the country’s strong commitment to software implementation like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), collaborative applications, real-world monitoring tools and a better understanding of requirements.

High profile entrepreneurs back Indian SaaS start-ups – the $85 million fund

Top Indian entrepreneurs have set up a fund with an initial budget of $85 million to support SaaS start-ups in India. ‘The Together Fund‘ is set up by Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks Inc., Manav Garg of Eka Corporation, and Shubham Gupta, who heads the SaaS investments at VC Matrix Capital.

In addition to the fund, more than 150 innovators and developers from India and Silicon Valley, including product/engineering heads and designers, have pledged to help start-up entrepreneurs focus on building and selling SaaS businesses worldwide.

Suggested ‘Plan of Action’ for the SaaS industry and aspiring entrepreneurs

For new entrepreneurs in this space, things might get a bit smoother with support from existing players and VCs, and a possible ease up in regulations. Most SaaS start-ups face significant challenges in the earlier stages of growth regarding talent development for scalability. These challenges will be eased up with the new initiatives and support by the business community.

As new entrepreneurs explore the industry and its change-making revolutionary aspects, it is expected that they might have cohesive support from industry associations, government, corporates and investors going forward.

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Postman – Hitting the API Growth Pedestal with a Strong Product

Franzil Dias — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 12:35:08 +0000

In 2012, two humble coding interns at Yahoo kept running into the same issues over and over again. Working out of their Bengaluru-based office, Ankit Sobti and Abhinav Asthana had one key job – to take Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and convert them into a shareable format that developers could use in their projects. Doesn’t sound very simple, does it?

Well, amidst this complicated procedure, the duo found a solution to many coders problems, and thus began the inception of Postman, the collaboration platform for API development.

The Birth of Postman

To begin with, let us understand what an API is. Application Programming Interface – API – is a software intermediary that, in simple words, allows two applications to talk to each other. When you open an application on your phone, any type of process or service from that app requires an API to function. It works as a messenger between the app from your phone to the server’s mainframe wherever it is.

For the founders, learning how the APIs worked was a complex process. Testing and debugging APIs was also a pain for the production team. They had to start over every time an API was changed or updated.

The duo figured out that there were a lot of communication issues when it came to API testing. However, they failed to reach a consensus or a probable solution. The same issue erupted a few years later at Asthana’s first start-up TeliportMe, a social media platform.

The duo was then joined by Abhijit Kane, the third co-founder of Postman. This team of three was building a front-end architecture of their app, and that’s when they had to work with a complicated API and needed to exchange details in the process. However, they ran into the same communication issue and failed to find a solution.

This became the first building block for the trio’s venture. Collating all the previous and current issues, the founders had realised that the tools to support API development were missing. They started noting down the codes to solve the issue (making API testing easier) and posted it on the Chrome Webstore; things took off from there. Google reached out to the team and appreciated the Postman tool. Thereafter, they featured it on the homepage of the Chrome store, which gave the start-up a fantastic visibility and the needed kickstart.

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Postman is the leading API growth collaboration platform in India and is being rapidly adopted throughout the industry.

A Good Product Sells Itself

APIs have been around for four decades but Postman is probably the first start-up to realise the opportunity of private APIs. It is an online company that works into designing, developing and managing APIs for organisations and developers. As soon as the company was launched in 2015, the trio’s desk was flooded with feedback from developers besides enquiries from investors. Interestingly, the USP of the product is its scalability. Right from start-ups to big companies, the adoption, applicability and usage of tools is not limited. The start-up had nearly half a million users even before officially starting the business.

Postman is branded as an all-in-one toolkit for API developers. It is a versatile tool for rapidly, effectively and precisely creating linked applications using APIs. There are two components of the Postman API Network:

Postman Public API Network

It is accessible to the entire API world

Postman Private API Network

It is only accessible to particular groups.

As a user, you can make and store basic and complex HTTPs requests, as well as read their comments. Consequently, the work done is more productive and less stressful.

But the obvious underlying question here is what is so special about this product? Or, why is it so prominent in today’s market?

The answer lies in the product’s versatility in almost all aspects of the company to suit the customer. For example, there are three different types of plans for clients just to make the product more inclusive.

Free option
Postman Pro: For small teams and projects with expanded usage limitations
Postman Enterprise: Includes additional governance and account management for official corporate needs.

Apart from versatility, another reason why its demand in the market is high is because of its convenience. It has many in-built features which make the ability to design, mock, debug, generate automated tests, monitors, documentations and published collections easier. Besides, it is able to fix bugs at 4x faster on average, which helps in staying ahead of the curve.

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The sheer number of operational options on the platform not only make it a favoured platform but a versatile one too.

Turning Product into Business

The start-up received its first round of Series A funding in 2016 of $7 million from Nexus Venture Partners and opened offices in Bangalore, San Francisco and Austin. To date, the company has managed to raise $208 million from the existing investors besides others like CRV.

In June 2020, after receiving $150 million in a Series C round from Insight Partners, at a valuation of $2 billion, Postman became the quickest Software as a Service (SaaS) business to attain unicorn status. Postman is the API development tool of choice for nine of the top ten cloud computing providers, according to Asthana. Its API development platform is used by over 11 million developers around the world, across more than 5,00,000 companies globally, including Microsoft, Twitter, Best Buy, AMC Theaters, PayPal, Shopify, BigCommerce and DocuSign.

What is interesting, as stated by the founders in their blog, is the fact that Postman was started in India. Lots of technology products start in the Silicon Valley and getting global support right in the beginning was commendable for the start-up.

Twitter bought into the idea of Postman because of their feature of mock servers. Daniele Bernardi, a staff partner engineer at Twitter Inc. said in a media statement that they would be able to offer developers easy access as well as secure their production data due to the feature of mock servers.

Microsoft’s decision to become a client of the platform was because of the feature where Postman allowed them to create API integration tests for all of their endpoints, which meant that its API would verify whether the system was functional or not. Apart from this, they also used environment variables and test scripts offered by Postman to build their own flow control structures.

One of the reasons the Postman product is so successful is because of the founders obsession with customer feedback. The team, starting from initial days itself, began tracking every piece of feedback from users all over the world. They were obsessive about product reviews and user requests, and had in-depth conversations with developers as often as possible and continue to do so to date.

In his blog, Asthana writes that loads of feedback is great, but one has to be smart about acting on it. Many start-ups encounter problems when they try to take on too much at once, focusing on the big picture rather than the next feature needed. He says the company had decided early on that it would tackle only one or two problems at a time, get as much input as possible, and really get the solution right before moving on to the next problem.

Besides the initial setup of API Testing, Postman faced a series of challenges. They weren’t too concerned in the early days about things like business model and pricing and wanted to be (and still are) focussed on the product and its development. While other companies prior to Postman were building products, they were close to managers or decision-makers rather than the developer community. That’s where Postman earned the brownie points with the developers. They first started exclusively with developers and gradually moved into more of a true business-to-business offering where they solved organisation-wide problems that impact managers, senior leaders, and cross-functional teams. This was the most organic growth of the company. The product-market-fit was found and worked upon.

Postman ranks 5th in the top 10 API Companies around the world. Its management software is a popular technology and many people are looking for top-rated, well-known software that includes API testing, monitoring and app integration. It is also one of the only three Indian start-ups to appear in the Forbes Cloud 100 list of the most influential SaaS companies in the world

The Pioneer

Postman’s portfolio of products is based on making developer communication simpler. Its approach has been to provide free customer assistance, which is a function that many SaaS firms charge extra for. Given that the majority of developers utilise Postman’s platform, the only option for the company to continue to grow is to extend its use cases and build on the present product.

According to Gartner’s prediction, more than 65% of global infrastructure service providers’ revenue would be produced by API-enabled services by 2023 – that is up from 15% in 2018.

SaaS unicorn Postman will always be credited as the first in history to recognise the potential of API management. In the current era, no software engineer lives without the Postman platform if they ever work on APIs. Postman has become a default tool in API testing and development. APIs may have emerged as a critical part of the software ecosystem lately, but this product will always be credited to be the first one to recognise their potential.

For more inspiring stories like this, read our Inspire Section!

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AI Start-up Fractal Growth Strategy Predicts Revenue Growth in 2022

Anju Nambiar — Sat, 17 Jul 2021 03:34:39 +0000

Big Data rules the world and in the initial days when it was emerging as the giant of IT (Information Technology), companies that tapped into the market grew in leaps and bounds. Fractal.ai is one such company which has achieved tremendous growth over the years. Along their journey, they’ve checked a number of boxes which has made them the market leaders of the Analytics-as-a-Service space.

Fractal.ai and its IPO listing

Fractal.ai is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) company with Fortune 100 companies across the world as its clients. They are an Analytics Solution provider and a strong player in the AI space. They are confident that an Initial Public Offering (IPO) will further add to their growth story and will soon be listing publicly. Fractal is expecting a revenue growth of 37% touching $160 M in the Financial year ending March 2022.

Fractal’s growth strategy

Fractal’s growth story has been fuelled by acquisitions and funding. They ventured into analytics at a crucial juncture when it was being prioritised by organisations for their digital transformation.

Fundraising

The company raised funds and achieved a valuation of 12 times than its global revenue back in 2016 (INR 350 Cr). They redirected this money strategically. They invested the new funds into new markets, employed data professionals and poured money into building their data platforms.

Incubation of other AI projects

Also, a part of their growth strategy are Fractal’s strategic acquisitions of other AI projects like Qure.ai, Theremin.ai, Equgenie.ai and more recently Samya.ai. The acquisition of Samya.ai will further strengthen Fractal’s offerings and expand its reach across industries and increase their global footprint.

A few years ago, they went on an acquisition spree where they acquired start-ups for the sole purpose of building their Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning capabilities. They acquired companies like Imagna Analytics and Mobius Innovations. These acquisitions strengthened Fractal’s technology offering which naturally contributed to its growth.

The Pandemic has been a turning point for Fractal

The start-up has witnessed a business expansion with the outbreak of the pandemic. The pandemic period has boosted the demand for their services. Enterprises have been forced to move their functions and operations to the cloud.

A brand-new Initiative – Crux Intelligence

Their new initiative ‘Crux Intelligence’ is also a part of their upcoming growth strategy. Crux is a solution that offers business intelligence to enterprises and even converts the data intelligence into actionable insights.

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The acquisition of Samya.ai will further strengthen Fractal’s offerings and expand its reach across industries and increase their global footprint.

What’s in it for me?

AI start-ups are continuing to raise funds. In 2020, the AI start-up community collectively raised $836.3 M in funding. Real-time AI and Deep Learning platforms have wide use cases and a variety of applications for ‘smart and intelligent’ projects across a multitude of sectors like automobile manufacturing, robotics and transportation.

Data driven SaaS solutions powered by Machine Learning and AI have immense applications in Enterprise Tech. Nascent industries like Manufacturing and Insurance need business and data intelligence AI solutions. These are the industries you can disrupt as a start-up.

While venturing into the AI space, you need to find the perfect ‘product-market’ fit. This is both crucial and a difficult step for Enterprise Tech start-ups. Irrespective of the industry you are targeting, every enterprise in the target market is unique. Your AI solution must be custom tailored to their requirements. To achieve this level of customisation, your tech team must be strong. Thus, you need to invest in hiring data scientists, engineers and technologists. Investor interest around AI and data intelligence is for start-ups that are building customised AI solutions for previously unsolvable problems.

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India a Strategic Market for Talent Management Start-up, Sense

Anju Nambiar — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 11:33:39 +0000

Sense is an HR Tech and Talent Management start-up based in San Francisco, California which has raised $18 M in a Series C funding round. An AI based talent-management company, Anil Dharni is the Indian CEO and co-founder of Sense.

Why Sense is expanding in India

The company is increasingly focused on the Indian market and has received funding from India’s B2B VC fund ‘Avataar Ventures’. Sense believes that the key to expanding their global presence is to strengthen their hold on the Indian market. As part of this vision, the company has onboarded Sanjay Dharmani as Sense India’s Managing Director and Nishant Rao, founder of Avataar Venture Partners. Sense will make India its regional headquarters as part of its Asian expansion. They are hoping that India’s tech talent pool will add to their engineering team. They also want to have a dedicated marketing and customer service team here in India.

The start-up’s ambitious expansion plans

Sense is harboring broad expansion plans in Asia. In terms of global expansion, Sense plans on tapping into India’s ‘rich talent market’ to help with growing their product. Backed by its latest funding round, Sense is all set to expand its technology centre, data sciences, and product teams. The company is keen on doubling its headcount of 57 staff members at its Bengaluru office in the coming 6 months.

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India is being visualised as a highly strategic market for Sense because the tech talent in India is thriving here and possesses in-depth know-how in the field of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

Why India is a strategic market

India is being visualised as a highly strategic market for Sense because the tech talent in India is thriving here and possesses in-depth know-how in the field of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Sense believes that the whole of Asia holds a market potential of $100 B and India is best fit to serve as the regional headquarters for this market.

What’s in it for me?

Freelancing and the Gig Economies are becoming increasingly popular among the modern workforces. Talent Management start-ups have a good opportunity to capitalise on the transforming work trends. HR Tech is a big part of enterprise tech holding a big chunk of the market share and start-ups will do well to venture into it. Large enterprises and recruitment firms need productive, profitable candidate engagement amidst disrupted job markets.

Recruitment technologies and HR Tech solutions bring in big money in the form of recurring revenue streams. Although the market has significant competition already, with constant innovation, it’s possible to stand out from the crowd and acquire large clients.

The labour market is rebounding even as the second wave ebbs. Remote connectivity is giving new life to the labour market. Talent acquisition technology is thus seeing strong demand within the enterprise tech industry and investors are getting attracted to HR tech start-ups.

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Farmer Empowerment by Agri-Tech Start-Up Rise Hydroponics

Anju Nambiar — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 08:35:04 +0000

Rise Hydroponics is an Agri-tech start-up based in Ahmedabad. Founded in April 2020, this relatively new entrant to the Agri-tech and most importantly, the Hydroponics space has 3 co-founders, Tusshar Agarwal, Meet Patel and Vivek Shukla. Rise Hydroponics is a completely bootstrapped start-up.

What is Rise Hydroponics doing?

Rise Hydroponics is mainly developing indoor and outdoor Hydroponics farm projects. They want to foster an urban farming community within India’s agriculture sector. There is less awareness about Hydroponic farming among India’s rural farmers. Rise Hydroponics understands this and is approaching customers from an educational standpoint.

Rise Hydroponics’ business model is divided into four categories:

Hydroponic Farm Infrastructure setup

They set up indoor or rooftop commercial Hydroponics farms for their clients (mostly farmers). These farms are vertical setups with controlled environment and temperature conditions. They undertake end-to-end infrastructure setup which mostly involves setting up of the greenhouse, the vertical rows of pipe and inlet setup, and supplying the crop specific nutrients for the farmers.

Providing Technology Walkthrough

The company also provides walkthroughs for clients regarding the technology operating the farms. The hydroponic farms operate on IoT based automation and can be managed on a remote SaaS based platform. The web based dashboard is to be utilised by farmers and the farm workers to access real-time condition of the crops from anywhere.

E-Commerce store

They has its very own e-commerce store ‘Rise Freshz’ where they sell their in-house hydroponic produce like Kale and Basil, Baby Spinach, Arugula, Herbs, Product Combos, and more. They also sell subscription-based harvest boxes.

Training Sessions

The start-up also conducts training sessions for farmers so that they can manage their hydroponics farms independently. They undertake weekly training sessions and workshops where farmers obtain key insights like crop selection. The training involves Hydroponics Technology understanding, technical aspects of training, Commercial Aspects of Hydroponics farming, and more.

Empowering Indian farmers with Soilless farming

Rise Hydroponics plans to empower farmers with ‘end-to-end soilless farming solutions’. Rise Hydroponics has taken up the task of educating farmers about the benefits of growing crops in a soilless, nutrient-rich solution:

Faster growth
Richer yield

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Rise Hydroponics has taken up the task of educating farmers about the benefits of growing crops in a soilless, nutrient-rich solution – faster growth and richer yield.

What’s in it for me?

Hydroponic farming is a branch of Agri-tech that is at the fledgling stage but one that’s becoming increasingly popular. Before venturing into Hydroponics, start-ups should understand that this farming method is best suited for growing vegetables like Lettuce, Basil, Cherry Tomatoes, Oregano and Thyme.

The market for these vegetables is in supermarkets, restaurants and nutrition institutes. Depending on your location, thoroughly research on the profitability and local demand for these crops.

Urban consumers in Tier I and II cities are the biggest target consumer base for Hydroponics produce. The import market for Hydroponics produce also has high demand since these veggies are popular and have high consumption rates in countries like the UAE, US, Canada, etc.

You can grow exotic veggies in your very own Hydroponic farm and sell it either through e-commerce or by supplying to restaurant or supermarket chains both in India and abroad. However, if you want to venture into Hydroponic farm setup projects for farming clients, you should know that costs vary depending on a number of factors like farming process and materials used, area occupied by the set-up and the types of crops to be grown.

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SimpliContract is Supporting Organisations Across the Contract Life Cycle

Anju Nambiar — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 06:05:03 +0000

SimpliContract is a Bengaluru-based start-up which offers an AI (Artificial Intelligence) and SaaS (Software-as-a-service) based Contract Lifecycle Management Platform. Simply put, the platform uses modern technologies like AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to make contract creation more accessible and also helps facilitate ‘post-signature contract management practices’.

The start-up recently raised $1.8 M in a seed funding round backed by Kalaari Capital, Picus Capital, Arka Ventures, and Digital Sparrow Capital.

How SimpliContract Supports Organisations

SimpliContract’s platform and services help to manage end-to-end contract lifecycles for organisations. Creating and managing contracts is a critical task since there is frequent back-and-forth between both internal as well as external stakeholders like Vendors and Customers for:

New contract creation
Renewal of existing contracts
Revisions.

The collaboration is often a tedious process which SimpliContract helps ease.

Most importantly, SimpliContract is aimed at shortening the contract lifecycle, and to make sure that compliance and regulations are adhered to. The start-up is determined to improve the decision making process for organisations with respect to contract creation and management.

Their SaaS platform’s simplified user interface is what ticks with organisations. With the help of SImpliContract’s solution, organisations can achieve higher efficiency in terms of making, enforcing and managing contracts.

How the SaaS Enterprise Technology Works

SimpliContract’s SaaS platform integrates with the organisation’s enterprise apps. It provides actionable insights for users through the contract lifecycle from procurement, sales and even across the legal functions.

The software is built on customisable and intelligent workflows which renders it highly adaptable for organisations across multiple industries.

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SimpliContract’s platform and services helps manage end-to-end contract lifecycles for organisations.

What’s in it for me?

The market for CLM SaaS solutions includes mid-large sized enterprises and has a global potential. Although the CLM market has a number of well-established players, there is a good adoption rate for new entrants.

CLM is a lucrative space to venture into for enterprise tech start-ups. The global market for CLM solutions is expected to be valued at $5.2 B by 2027. Since digital transformation is a priority for most organisations during the pandemic, you can pitch your CLM solution/service from this perspective.

There is increasing demand for CLM solutions in the supply chain and manufacturing sector. Since these on-site industries are now trying to adapt to a work-from-home or hybrid business model, enterprise technology solutions like SaaS CLM are vital to them. These industries rely on contracts for a number of partners, third-party vendors that they constantly deal with. Thus, contract management technologies become a necessity.

Target manufacturing and supply chain organisations. Show them the benefits that AI insights provides into the performance of supplier/partner/customer contracts. Approach these clients from an educational standpoint since most organisations are not fully aware of how AI and SaaS work for contracts.

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Astra Security is Securing Businesses’ Websites from Malware and Hackers With New SaaS Security Solutions

Aakash Sharma — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 06:35:03 +0000

Astra Security is a network and cybersecurity company that provides SaaS solutions under its Astra Security Suite in the form of firewall, malware scanner, vulnerability scanner for websites, mobile apps and APIs. Shikhil Sharma and Ananda Krishna founded the company in 2018 in the United States.

Astra Security is a leader in network security and has recently introduced state-of-the-art technical security measures. The start-up has recently launched an exclusive programme to help Astra Security users increase cyber transparency and confidence in their customers and potential partners.

This innovative new feature is part of the company’s latest product, Pentest Suite. It is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that provides hacker-style security testing for applications and meets standard compliance requirements for small and large online businesses.

Astra Security – The New SaaS Solution for Security

Astra Security’s new Pentest panel provides users with more options and information, such as 1,500 test cases, developer collaboration, CXO analysis, certificate downloads, assessments of potential risks based on risks, etc.

In the current situation, many companies are working to provide their potential customers with unique services mixed with the safest measures. Hence, regardless of the size of an organisation, they are rapidly moving towards affiliations with a publicly verified company that meets all required cybersecurity standards.

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Astra Security is seeing a growing interest for its cyber safety resolutions from start-ups. The start-up's plans include managing internet security and payment exceeding set thresholds

Astra Security is Addressing Industry’s Growing Security Concerns

With the boost in online services and pandemic induced widespread digitisation over the past year, consumers are becoming more aware of online safety. With increased sensitivity toward cybersecurity, customers want to be involved with companies that have passed online safety tests and inspections. It is, therefore, becoming all the more critical for companies of all sizes, who have an online presence, to protect the interests of their customers.

Additionally, as the number of cyber-attacks continues to increase, businesses are increasingly recognising their responsibility to perform defensive functions for themselves and the victims of cyberattacks. According to a recent risk-based security report, hackers exposed 36 billion files to data breaches between the first and third quarters of 2020, and malware usage increased by 358% in 2020.

Astra Security is playing a vital role in maintaining cybersecurity and going one step further by issuing verifiable cybersecurity certificates. Today, start-ups in the segment must meet industry needs by translating the needs of consumers into solutions based on their concerns. Astra Security understands current sensitivities and is committed to bringing products to market that provide a seamless and secure customer experience.

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How Chargebee Is Tapping into India’s Hot Market for Cloud Service

Arunima Sharma — Sat, 22 May 2021 11:35:04 +0000

Humble beginnings have worked as a launchpad for some of the most accomplished Ventures we witness today, whether it is Starbucks which was founded by three students of San Francisco or Apple which was started in a garage by a college dropout. A similar narrative was followed by Chargebee, a company started in 2011 with the aim to help SaaS and E-commerce businesses streamline their revenue operations. Its founder and CEO Krish Subramanian started his career as a programmer earning a modest Rs.3,500 a month. Subramanian, along with his three friends Saravanan KP, Rajaraman Santha and Thiyagarajan T, started with two things – an idea that had potential and the zeal to harvest that potential. These four men today are the founders of a company valued at $1.4 billion headquartered in San Francisco.

Assembling The Dream Team: Four Brilliant People Who Shared The Same Goal

Unlike other ventures which start with just an idea, Chargebee started with the coming together of four passionate people with business acumen who really wanted to do something of their own.

By 2009, Subramanian was doing perfectly fine with his career and was heading teams in TCS and Cognizant. It was only after he was offered a long-term opportunity to make an account and build it in the US, something that would need five-seven years that he chose to come back to India and build his own company with his friend Rajaraman in Chennai. The team was soon joined by Rajaraman’s roommate, Thiyagu who was taking a sabbatical from Zoho, a SaaS giant based in Chennai. By May 2011, both Krish and Rajaraman had quit their jobs and joined Thiyagu to build the product full time.

During this time Saravanan KP, who was Rajaraman and Thiyagu’s friend and mentor at Zoho, tried convincing them to stay, but instead saw the potential in the team and left Zoho to join them.These four men started hunting and building on viable product ideas.

The founders chose to build Chargebee as a company inspired by businesses like Fog Creek Software who, according to Subramanian, didn’t focus on having a unique product rather focused on bringing a smart set of people together, enabling them to make decisions and figure out solutions. The team was further encouraged by the launch of Freshworks in 2010 whose co-founder Shan Krishnasamy was close to Rajaraman as both of them had worked together for Advent Net previously.

This connection facilitated a discussion between the co-founders of the two companies and Freshworks whose current net worth is $3.5 billion became one of the first customers of Chargebee.

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Unlike other ventures which start with an idea, Chargebee started with the coming together of four passionate people with business acumen who really wanted to do something of their own

Chargebee Gets Funded: Journey Hurdles and Introspection

From the very beginning, the founders believed that a strong foundation of the team was indispensable for the growth of a company, it is with this belief that the team which started with zero managed to give India its 11th unicorn in 2021 and raised $125 million in its recent Series G funding. The road from point A to today was not straight and smooth, it took a lot of patience and hardwork to successfully make it past the curves and tunnels.

In October 2012, Chargebee raised its first angel round of investment, however, this was a year before the company received its first major funding from Accel. The company was introduced to Shekhar Kirani from Accel via Freshworks. For a very long time, whenever Shekhar used to take a flight to Chennai to meet the Freshworks team, his day would start with a short breakfast meeting with the Chargebee team at a vegetarian restaurant recommended by Subramanian.

Shekhar Kirani wrote in one of his blogs about one thing that Rajaraman said that he still remembers. Rajaraman said that one day Kirani would visit Chennai to specifically meet the Chargebee team and they would then be the one’s offering the breakfast slot to some other start-up.

While in the meeting Shekhar always urged Chargebee to ask deeper questions like, who is interested in buying the product within an organisation? How did they discover Chargebee? What tools/systems did they use before this? It was the ‘why’ questions Shekhar asked that got them to think about the recurring value proposition and arrive at several crucial insights. The founders of Chargebee believe that the questions Kirani raised and the problems he presented really led the company to introspect, work its way to the solutions and therefore it helped them majorly in getting the basics right. In 2012, after a lot of grilling, Shekhar finally invested in Chargebee and this happened only when the company had figured out what it was, who it was for, and why the customers should choose it and not someone else.

Since then, the company has been growing at an exponential rate with every funding series. It raised $5 million in 2015, $14 million in 2019, $55 million in 2020, and finally earned the unicorn status with $125 million raised this year. Its major investors are Accel, Insight Venture Partners, Steadview Capital, and Tiger Global Management.

Chargebee’s Identity and Clout

The Chargebee team wanted to be a company whose main focus was the success of its customers. This was accomplished by making sure that they are available for their customers 24/7. Secondly, the team at a very initial stage understood that since the product relied heavily on working with other products, the Application Programming Interface should not be just as smooth as butter but also ridiculously easy.

Lastly, they realised how crucial their company is for the customers. If Chargebee went down, even for a small while, customers were hit where it hurts most that is their revenues. To make sure this doesn’t happen the team integrated with several payment gateways like Paypal, Amazon Pay, GoCardless, and many more across 150+ countries so that their crashes wouldn’t affect the functioning Chargebee.

The founders of the company have also seamlessly integrated with firms like Mail Chimp, Google Analytics, Slack, Salesforce, to make their operations efficient across different departments such as Sales, Finance, Marketing, etc.

Surviving and Thriving In A Sea Full Of Competition

The company, since its inception, has survived against behemoths like Stripe, a company valued at $95 billion, and other giants like Chargify, Zuora, Braintree, a few names from a long list. One thing that has helped the company sail through these competition-heavy waters is a clear understanding of its purpose and what the customer is expecting from the other end. However, at an initial stage what motivated Chargebee to compete with such big firms was the fact that they started working with very few overheads because of AWS. Chargebee’s entire server load was zero in its first year and cost $100 per month. As a SaaS-based model, it didn’t have to dump all its savings into infrastructure and this meant that it could still compete with large companies who already had millions of dollars in funding. Chargebee and Stripe who compete in the market also work with each other, which helps meet the strategic objectives of both companies.

One of the main advantages of Chargebee, when compared to other companies, is its user-friendly interface, its flexibility, and its customization options. The company has created the option of creating custom fields for the Customer and Subscription objects. This option can be used to track additional information about a customer or their subscription. Chargebee has always kept its approach flexible, it accommodates all the sudden pricing changes a company might have to go through. Through it, companies can run their entire recurring billing process on auto-pilot. All they have to do is schedule calendar billing dates and the Chargebee team takes care of the rest whether it is – proration, taxation, invoice consolidation.

In 2020, the customer reviews ranked Chargebee the number one finance software, not only this, over the next five years the company is predicted to grow at a rate of 17.5 per cent.

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Chargebee raised $5 million in 2015, $14 million in 2019, $55 million in 2020, and finally earned the unicorn status with $125 million raised this year.

Chargebee Believes in Evolving

Since its establishment Chargebee not only survived in the market but also showcased exceptional growth, this was only possible because they always had room to evolve and improve. An example can be the introduction of the ‘Freemium Plan’. In 2016 when the founders realised that they were undervaluing their amazing product against the competitors which further led the customers to doubt its abilities as well. So, they brought major pricing changes and also introduced the Freemium Plan which enabled the early businesses to enjoy the benefits of its platform. Another example can be that of the strategy they used during the pandemic, they employed an ‘Adaptive Marketing Strategy’, a kind of strategy which is designed to conquer these changes and turn them into opportunities for growth. The strategy focused on being fluid so that they could quickly understand the needs of the customer, work on those aspirations, and mould themselves to fit into these changes.

The Company Has Come A Long Way

Through constant effort and change, gradually, a company that was born in Chennai with four friends sipping coffee at a restaurant has turned itself into a big name in the field of subscription management and recurring billing solutions. Chargebee today works with 18,000 customers with its major clients being Freshworks, Calendly, Fujitsu Linux Academy, and operates across 160 different countries. It is a source of employment for 452 people and this year generated a revenue of $33.7 million.

Through its constant innovation, passion towards customer success and of course a wonderful human resource has been able to retain and expand its customer base.

The success of Chargebee can be a source of inspiration for us. When you are taking that first step in establishing a business, remember that Chargebee started with zero funds and zero customers, but what they had was the zeal, passion and knowledge which is required to drive a company to its pinnacle.

For more inspiring stories, check out our Inspire section!

The post How Chargebee Is Tapping into India’s Hot Market for Cloud Service appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

Freshworks’ Journey from a Single Product to Taking on the SaaS Giants

Aparajitha Nair — Mon, 17 May 2021 10:35:03 +0000

Many of us face poor customer service regularly but how many of us actually do something about it? Believe it or not, it just took a broken television and a taxing customer service for two such heckled customers to end up with a start-up worth $3.5 billion! With the technological era already knocking at our doors, depending on troublesome manual software would be a less than desirable option. Hence, SaaS (Software as a Service) products come into play in the form of Freshworks. SaaS are a set softwares which do not require any manual downloading, setup or space on your device. All it requires is a stable device and internet connection.

What is Freshworks? Why Are Its SaaS Products Popular?

Distressed by the lackadaisical approach of customer service, founders Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy thought of working on a cloud-based system that did not require human intervention. Since it was cloud-based (using the internet), it cut out the long wait to get in touch with customer service and the time taken for their issues to be sorted out. The icing on the cake was the ease with which one could use it without human intervention. With this revelation in hand ‘Freshdesk’ was launched in Chennai in June 2010.

Girish Mathrubootham worked at Zoho Corporation (an Indian MNC providing web-based services), when he realised how its competitor Zendesk was on the brink of losing its customers due to incessant price hikes. Since he had the knowledge, an idea and a hunger to bring his idea to fruition, he, along with his colleague Shan Krishnasamy, sought to deliver SaaS products to customers in an entirely different way and at affordable rates. After resigning from Zoho, they started developing their idea and the foundation for Freshworks was laid. It was known as Freshdesk Inc. before it got rechristened as Freshworks Inc. in 2017 to incorporate various new services that they were set to offer. Freshworks is part of the infamous ‘Zoho Mafia’ since its founders are ex-employees of Zoho Corp. With a surplus of $500 million in revenue, this outfit has grown substantially over the years and Freshworks seems to be spearheading it.

After having successfully launched two of their initial products – video chat and co-browsing platform, ‘1CLICK.io’ and ‘Freshsales’, a CRM product – Freshworks crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and launched Freshworks 360, a multi-product SaaS suite for enhanced customer experience.

This product lets businesses maintain a 360-degree view of relevant customer information internally at an affordable price. Freshworks 360 helps in customer integration, making it easier to generate efficient strategies leading to better customer interaction, engagement and retention. It is a market disruptor in every way because of its integration of various services, which were being offered by other companies separately and at higher prices. Other companies just brought in the existing services like sales force automation, call centre and marketing software directly to the cloud-based system. Freshworks, on the other hand, took a refreshing approach with its SaaS Business Suite product which combined sales, support and marketing software together while passing on customer history to the support team. This helped in keeping a 360º view of the customer data. Freshworks 360 provides Freshdesk, Freshsales, Freshmarketer, Freshchat and Freshcaller as its business suite services.

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You can only build a successful company on the foundation of happy customers. Make sure to build awesome products which delights the customers!

The Freshworks Way of Business and Earning Revenue!

The Freshworks business model depends entirely on the ease of working with its web-based products and the integration of various services into one. Softwares, in general, are very difficult to manoeuvre around and use, on an individual level. When we talk about big companies using multi softwares, the task becomes even more difficult. What happens next is that technicians or other people with the requisite knowledge are hired, temporarily or permanently, who handle the softwares. This further leads to a never-ending cycle of dependability, accountability and the turmoil of getting work done. Add to it the fact that these softwares are very expensive and hiring technicians was never cheap as well.

Freshworks brings an organic turn of events with its business suite which has better deep-integrated cloud-based software, making the entire process very easy and affordable.

The company has stuck to its motive of keeping its customers happy, proven by its customer base of more than 40,000 regular customers. With $484 million funding by 6 global investors, Freshworks entered the Unicorn Club (start-ups valued at over $1 billion) in July 2018, becoming India’s first SaaS Unicorn.

Freshworks with Google: Strong Competition to Industry Giants

Headquartered in California, United States, Freshworks had been ambitious from the very beginning by setting up its start-up in an industry which was dominated by giants like Zoho, Zendesk, Microsoft etc. Presently, not only Freshworks is coming up with novel and innovative customer-centric products, but is also aiming to serve big-sized companies, including the SMB segment.

Since Freshworks has always been about better customer experience, it focused a lot on its digital marketing which coupled with its global inside-sales model, lowered its cost of selling. Aided by Google Search advertising, Freshworks quickly garnered interest and a strong customer base which was built across the United States of America and Europe. This only further aided in bettering its services in comparison to some of the biggest competitors of the industry.

Using other Google tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads, strategic campaigns were easily designed and targeted, which further helped its ranking through Google Search and aided its fast growth across the globe. Since 2016, Freshworks has also been using YouTube and Google Marketing Platform to strategize its branding.

When it comes to product comparison, Freshworks CRM is preferred by the majority of customers over Zoho CRM because of the better quality, greater feature updates and roadmaps provided by Freshworks. Customer reviews have rated Freshworks’ CRM higher than the competition’s CRM due to its comprehensive, uncomplicated and integrated services with ensured scalability. Freshworks’ CRM is a guaranteed first choice majorly amongst consumers as compared to other competitors due to ease of use, contextual conversations, zero manual intervention and affordable rates. Consumers swear by Freshworks 360, in comparison to that of the other competitors in the market who are established giants, because of its modern and integrated services, affordability and ease of use. Additionally, Freshworks boasts of a range of 24/5 customer care services through call, mail, text and other mediums, suitable to their customers without any hassle. As observable, in an industry with such big competitors, Freshworks has managed to carve out its SaaS product niche by focusing on customer satisfaction and ease of operation and scalability. This has been their biggest plus point in taking over the industry and getting ahead of the competition in such a short time.

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Data today is broken between several stakeholders of the organisation and therefore, they are not able to answer customer queries effectively and it is going to be difficult for the business to retain a customer once their query is not answered.

Freshworks v/s Zoho: Legal Battle and Consequence

Freshworks has been previously locked in a legal battle with Zoho corp. which filed a lawsuit against it, in the US District Court Northern District of California, for allegedly violating the Defence of Trade Secrets Act; the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act; the Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations; Conversion and Unjust Enrichment.

Founded in 1966, Zoho’s founder Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas in the company’s original lawsuit allegedly claim that “it is using Zoho’s confidential customer and competitive marketing information, planning press releases to coincide with Zoho’s undisclosed product launch dates, and pressuring Zoho’s business partners to divulge confidential customer information.”

Mathrubootham and Krishnasamy had previously worked in Zoho and were allegedly privy to confidential information like Zoho’s product ideas, financial status, business partners and prospects, customer information etc, which were non-public information, as per Zoho. So, instead of filing this court case in Chennai, Zoho decided to approach US court since there exist no trade secret laws in Indian courts. On the contrary, it was beneficial for Zoho to approach the US court since, under the DTSA law, trade secrets can be safeguarded against breach of information. Further on with their allegations, Zoho said that Freshworks had also been involved in poaching its customers by using sensitive private customer information of Zoho and presented email screenshots as evidence. As the primary response to the allegations, a Freshworks spokesperson said, “it looks forward to its day in court where we will address and defend against Zoho’s claims.” Additionally, Freshworks has been complying with the court proceedings and later on, in another response alleged that Zoho had been “expanding on one alleged incident into a case of trade secret misappropriation.”

Even though both the companies are at loggerheads due to the court case, they haven’t let it affect their customers in any way. They continue to be goal-oriented and strive to serve their customers with better services.

Freshworks Promises an Innovative and Fresh Future!

Not only did Freshworks take over the SaaS industry in a major way, but it also did it with a bang with its innovative strategies and products which would never fail to capture a consumer’s attention. One of its competitors has been SalesForce, which patronised the industry for a long time. During its annual customer event ‘Dreamforce’ on 25th September 2018, Freshworks literally gate-crashed the event with a blimp with the words “#failsforce” printed on it. The idea behind this massive strategic campaign was to make people aware of the disadvantages of investing in bloated software like SalesForce. Not only did they become viral on Twitter for this stunt, they got covered by reputed publications like Forbes, Adweek etc.
Freshworks has also used the Internet to its maximum to spread awareness and gather a bigger consumer base. With regular virtual events, podcasts, webinars, targeted SEO strategies and investments in influencer marketing, Freshworks has literally left no stone unturned as a potential avenue for growing their company more. They have even managed to drive in much traffic by launching free tools like ‘Freshstatus’ and ‘Freshping’, which offer great web monitoring services to their users for no cost at all! Their trend of offering high positions to ex-heads of their competitors, like John Crosson and Stacey Epstein, has only helped in increasing their authenticity in the industry.

When experienced veterans join an already promising company, it only builds the customer’s trust further.

With innovative strategies, the company has impressively grown from $1 million in revenue to $100 million within five years. The future for CRM customers and the SaaS industry, under Freshworks, looks to be all about ‘wowing’ their customers regularly with predictive and collaborative contextual engagements for companies, in an integrated way, while also catering to the audience that gives them that validation.

For more inspiring stories like this check out our Inspire section!

The post Freshworks’ Journey from a Single Product to Taking on the SaaS Giants appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

Invoice-Discounting Start-up KredX Growth Strategy: What They Did Right?

Anju Nambiar — Mon, 10 May 2021 08:35:04 +0000

KredX, a Bengaluru-based Fintech start-up is all geared up to disburse INR 1000 Cr. in loans to businesses during the current fiscal year.

Introduction to KredX

KredX offers invoice discounting services to SMEs. They have a product known as ‘Revenue Based Financing (RBF)’ which enables capital access to enterprises based on their upcoming incomes. In the simplest of words, KredX acts as a bridge between SMEs and investors. RBF is essentially a means by which instant capital is handed out to small businesses in their growth stage. By stating proof of immediate revenue like invoices and subscriptions, small businesses promise investors their upcoming earnings in exchange of much-needed capital.

Growth strategy: What did they do right?

Over the years, KredX has disbursed loans to several brands. Their RBF product has worked well with customers with strong presence on the most prominent e-commerce platforms including Amazon, Myntra, and Flipkart. The technology companies that KredX worked with to tweak their cash flow routing were able to gain access to growth capital in less than a fortnight.

They extended a helping hand to more than 25000 businesses and have enabled the disbursal of loans worth INR 7000 Cr. It also helped in their growth that in 2019, KredX received Series B funding of $26 M backed by Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital and Prime Venture Partners.

KredX’s RBF product has been incredibly successful on Software as a Service (SaaS) companies due to the recurring revenue model. By becoming the provider of additional funds to the booming SaaS market, Kred’s growth took on an exponential trajectory. They have extended financial assistance to numerous SaaS companies belonging to different industries.

KredX’s approach of fulfilling a real need in business by leveraging immediate future incomes has been immensely beneficial to SMEs. And by fulfilling their needs, the amount and number of investments they have facilitated is staggering.

The combination of RBF and SaaS has worked very well for KredX and targeting this sector has been their main growth strategy.

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They extended a helping hand to more than 25000 businesses and have enabled the disbursal of loans worth INR 7000 Cr.

What’s in it for me?

SaaS is booming in India currently and the Indian SaaS market is set to be worth $14B by 2025. There are a lot of marketing opportunities specially for fintech start-ups that are providing financing services to SaaS.

SaaS companies are increasingly on the lookout for funding since they need to access flexible working capital on time. They also need funding for maximising their capacities, reach and for manpower investments.

As a fintech start-up, KredX offered investors a high return alternate avenue for investment which investors could hardly resist. MSMEs are the crux of the Indian economy and through technology innovation in fintech, start-ups can ease their burden by offering financial access.

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