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Step into the intersection of technology and marketing with the latest episode of the Marketing Nation SaaS podcast. Hosted by Arvind Parthiban, the Co-Founder & CEO of SuperOps.ai, this episode welcomes Ramesh Ravishankar, Co-Founder and CGO of Highperformer.ai, whose previous stints at Freshworks and Google have armed him with unparalleled insights into the digital marketing world.
This conversation delves into the evolving landscape where AI meets content creation, debunking myths about AI's role in the future of marketing jobs by highlighting its potential to enhance human creativity and efficiency. Ramesh shares his journey with Highperformer.ai, offering a unique perspective on leveraging AI to build a robust social presence and the strategic importance of identifying your Total Addressable Market (TAM) early on.
Get a glimpse into product-led growth strategies that attract leads organically, and the critical decision-making between inbound and outbound marketing based on the stage of your company and the current market demands. The episode draws inspiration from Freshworks' success, showcasing how optimizing AdWords strategy and managing lead quality can scale a business from serving SMBs to mid-market enterprises.
Join us for this engaging and insightful session, designed for both budding entrepreneurs and seasoned marketers looking to navigate today's dynamic digital landscape with confidence and creativity.
Key Takeaways:
1:13 - Content Marketing Revolution: AI's Role
3:40 - Ramesh's Journey: Freshworks to Google
5:33 - Highperformer.ai: A Strategic Odyssey
8:49 - Startup Success: Unlocking TAM
13:11 - Growth Hacking with Free Tools
21:07 - Scaling Up: From SMB to Worldwide
23:58 - Lead Quality: Marketing vs. Sales Dynamics
28:10 - The Lead Conversion Debate
29:51 - The Inbound Marketing Roadmap: Strategic Insights
32:06 - Advanced Tactics in Lead Generation
40:39 - GenAI: Transforming Marketing Workflows
43:55 - SEO Evolution: The AI Content Impact
Key Mentions:
ChatGPT
Freshworks
Google
AdWords
LinkedIn
Salesforce
Sora.ai
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Welcome to another episode of Founder’s Deep Dive! Join our guest, Sachin Bhatia, and our host, Suresh Sambandam, as they delve into several topics, including the formula for happiness, expanding into a global market, and all the challenges and wins that come along the way. It’s a very intellectual conversation where they talk about very abstract and high-level concepts using anecdotes from their own lives. Enjoy the episode!
Key Takeaways
02:00 - Meet the Players!
03:24 - Success vs Happiness
06:50 - Are You an Architect or a Contractor?
10:00 - Early 2000s - A Changing India
12:05 - Moving from BPO to Enterprise Segment
17:30 - Ameyo’s First Enterprise Customer
19:55 - Inside Sales and Sales Development
22:20 - Can SMB SaaS Survive?
24:19 - Global Emerging Markets
27:07 - Different Countries and their Ticket Sizes
31:30 - Doing Business in Dubai
35:35 - Team Distribution for International Markets
37:26 - Relationship Building in Emerging Markets
40:20 - Generating Pipelines for Enterprises
45:58 - Ameyo’s Secret Sauce
51:28 - Successful Marketing Strategies
56:18 - Final Words of Wisdom Key Mentions
02:59 - OrangeScape (KissFlow)
05:30 - Freshworks
05:40 - Drishti (Ameyo)
06:35 - HP, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, IBM
06:30 - Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, HCL
11:45 - ZOHO
14:45 - Helion
14:49 - Daksh
15:44 - Ameyo
15:59 - Peppertap
15:59 - Meru
16:00 - UrbanCompany
16:38 - Ola
17:40 - Motilal Oswal
19:36 - HubSpot
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Welcome to another episode of Deep Dive! Suresh, our host, and Aditya Tulsian, our guest, delve into the critical role of ICPs and how organizations deal with acquisition journeys.
Aditya is a seasoned entrepreneur who founded Numberz, which was acquired by Chargebee, prior to which he held a very important role at Intuit. After an MBA at ISB Hyderabad, launching QuickBooks in India was the experience that revealed a universal truth to him: businesses worry about cash flow, not accounting. In 2016, inspired by these insights, Aditya co-founded Numberz, initially for Indian small businesses, later expanding globally. The company recently got acquired by Chargebee, uniting visionary forces.
In the world of startups, understanding the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is like holding the compass that guides the business. The success, failure, or struggles of any company can be traced back to the clarity or confusion they have about the ICP. Aditya and Suresh nail down what it takes to find your perfect ICP, and the struggles and pressures of navigating an acquisition conversation with both the buyer and the team.
Key Takeaways:
00:00 - Meet Aditya Tulsian!
07:00 - Finding the perfect ICP - Problem first or person first?
08:13 - Mr. Cook’s billionaire’s business blueprint
09:15 - When Suresh narrowly missed meeting Mr. Cook
11:13 - Nuances of B2B and B2C with ICP
15:15 - Narrowing down customer segments to ICP
17:54 - Your ICP is actually a combination of 3 people
19:09 - How BYJU’S missed the ICP
21:50 - Tally vs Intuit
22:37 - Numberz’s journey with ICP
27:42 - The buyer, user and influencer of Numberz
30:20 - Repercussions of a vague ICP
32:00 - The fundamental difference between Box and Dropbox
33:46 - Product team’s role in finding the ICP
35:00 - The impact of the right ICP on marketing
38:53 - A leader’s job in the organization
39:45 - Critical points to keep in mind during an acquisition
44:16 - Handling uncertainties like a pro during acquisitions
48:44 - Managing your team’s concerns around an acquisition
52:45 - Closing thoughts
Key Mentions
01:37 - Numberz
01:40 - ChargeBee
03:18 - Intuit
03:47 - QuickBooks
10:36 - KissFlow
12:52 - Facebook
19:10 - BYJU’S
21:50 - Tally
32:01 - Box
32:03 - Dropbox
41:43 - Freshworks
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Enjoy this 50-minute podcast where Arvind and Varun get on a call with Ankit Oberoi to decode the dilemma of ABM, or Account Based Marketing. Ankit, being a proponent for documentation and structure, talks about his journey with AdPushup and how they discovered the untapped potential of ABM in a world filled with inbound marketing companies. Having cracked the ABM playbook methodically, Ankit shares some gems of wisdom with Arvind and Varun as the three of them nail down the specifics of what ABM is and how to leverage it to engage prospective clients in ways that really matter.
Key Takeaways
01:45 - Meet Ankit Oberoi!
03:50 - The Power of ABM
05:52 - Ankit’s tryst with ABM
08:42 - Big companies are intimidating!
11:38 - Identifying the right ICP for you
14:49 - Pick an ICP for your roadmap or pick a roadmap for your ICP?
18:38 - Outbound vs ABM
21:06 - Structuring the Organization for ABM
25:12 - SuperOps’ journey with ABM
27:28 - Using a RevOps team
33:48 - Building the ABM machine
35:35 - Database Management at AdPushup
39:45 - AdPushup’s channels beyond ABM
45:48 - Planning for Zelto’s acquisition
Key Mentions
01:16 - Zelto
02:04 - AdPushup
03:39 - SGx
08:41 - Kayako
39:05 - Almabase
41:32 - Microsoft Azure
41:42 - Google
44:05 - Facebook
Happy watching and listening! 🎧
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“Never change your SEO team while shifting from SMB to enterprise, because once lost, never regained.” Join Maansi Sanghi and Arvind for more such knowledge bombs as they deep-dive into the world of product marketing.
Maansi takes us through her journey of product marketing, and how the team at iMocha braved the tumultuous shift from an SMB model to an enterprise model of marketing. You’ll also find a lot of tips and tricks on how to refine and hone your processes and your pipelines inside your organization.
Tune in with Maansi and Arvind as they break down and examine the bare bones of a business and the best practices for marketing teams.
Key Takeaways
02:25 – Forming strong teams
04:50 – Indispensable players in a marketing team
05:10 – iMocha’s team structure
05:45 – The dichotomy of inbound and content teams
08:25 – From SMB to Enterprise
11:40 – Your demand generation engine
13:19 – Do you have a channel problem or a marketing problem?
16:12 – Enterprise marketing tenets
18:12 – iMocha’s training protocols
22:27 – Setting OKRs for your team
30:52 – How deep is your sale?
33:40 – Positioning yourself in events
43:11 – Making an impression on your customer
46:29 – Rapid Fire!
Key Mentions
iMocha - 05:09
FreshWorks - 08:15
HubSpot - 27:11
MS Excel - 27:14
Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount
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For the next 45 minutes, join our guest Anand Venkatraman as he and Arvind dive deep into the murky waters of partner channel marketing. It's a power packed episode filled with gems of knowledge and wisdom that could substitute for an MBA lecture.
Anand introduces the world of partner channels (yes, it's non-MBA friendly), and then goes into the nitty gritties of how to cultivate that side of the business, the best practices while working with partners and the most common mistakes you're better off avoiding when it's your turn.
Tune in and listen to Anand and Arvind dissect some really abstract concepts with crystal clear insights—on the very first episode of Marketing Nation!
Key Takeaways00:00 - Intro
03:25 - Partner Channels 101
04:20 - The Revenue Partners
08:04 - The Technology Partners
09:58 - Owning the partner channels
15:00 - A small start-up’s cheat sheet for partner acquisition
20:40 - Vetting a partner’s account books
22:19 - SuperOps’s journey with partner channels
23:20 - Feeding the partner engine
27:30 - Common mistakes to avoid
32:25 - On the importance of PRM
33:57 - Taking MDF more seriously
35:33 - A shifting market - On-prem to SaaS
44:05 - Anand’s message to founders
Key Mentions00:38 - Salesforce
00:40 - Akamai
00:42, 38:41 - FreshWorks
00:47 - CleverTap
01:00 - Growthloop.ai
06:49 - TCS, Accenture, HCL
08:41 - Line Messenger
08:48 - KakaoTalk
09:20 - Amazon, Google, Microsoft
22:20 - SuperOps
22:43 - Connectwise
22:43 - Kaseya
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This episode is special because its the first time we are having a founder from Singapore join the SaaSBoomi Podcast!
Suresh Sambandam, CEO of KissFlow has a virtual sit down with none other than Sagar Khatri, the founder of Multiplier, a Sequoia surge backed SaaS business that helps business hire talent globally. We dive deep to talk about Sagar’s motivations to start Multiplier, how AI disrupts his offering and his dream of running a public company.
Key Takeaways00:19 - Multiplier and Sagar’s intro
01:50 - Multiplier's value prop and its benefits
16:15 - Sagar's story behind starting Multiplier and why it's a SaaS business
21:14 - Sagar's vision for making payroll an employee-driven phenomenon
26:02 - How Multiplier deals with legalities and potential challenges in their business model
36:48 - Importance of having a strong product background for Platform dev
39:27 - How AI influences Sagar's business
46:10 - Role of governments in employment and the gig economy's effect on social contributions
53:15 - Sagar's go-to-market strategy and their sales cycle for inbound and outbound leads
56:09 - Sagar's thoughts on "The Ride of a Lifetime" by Bob Iger
57:10 - What Sagar envisions for the future of Multiplier and his dream of running a public company
Key MentionsAmazon: Sagar mentioned employment use cases with companies like Amazon and Orange.Orange: Sagar mentioned employment use cases with companies like Amazon and Orange.Sequoia: Sequoia has been an investor in Sagar's previous startup and was indirectly involved in his experiences that led to the founding of Multiplier.GCP: Sagar talked about the shift from having server rooms to using cloud solutions like GCP.Azure: Sagar discussed the shift from having server rooms to using solutions like Azure.Kissflow: A platform that Sagar mentioned his company Multiplier uses for their backend.ADP: ADP was mentioned as a traditional payroll processing company that Multiplier aims to outpace with its more modern, employee-driven approach.Tiger Global Management: Tiger Global Management is an investor in Multiplier for their Series B round.DST Global: DST Global is an investor in Multiplier for their Series B round.Pine Labs: Pine Labs is another investor in Multiplier.IIT Bombay: The co-founders of Multiplier are both alumni of IIT Bombay.Kelly Services: Kelly Services was mentioned as a traditional staffing services firm similar to what Multiplier aims to disrupt with their platform.Talent Wiki: Sagar mentioned that they have created a Talent Wiki of 150 countries to help customers with labor law information.Ranstad: Ranstad was mentioned as a traditional staffing services firm similar to what Multiplier aims to disrupt with their platform.Robert Walters: Robert Walters is a recruitment agency where Am Paul Sing, Co-founder of Multiplier, previously worked.Lazada: Lazada is an e-commerce company in Southeast Asia where Multiplier’s CTO previously worked as SVP of Engineering.Freshworks: Sagar compared his company's go-to-market model with that of Freshworks.MTR: A restaurant in India that Sagar loves, mentioned while discussing a meeting in Chennai with Suresh.Sangeetha Restaurants: A restaurant in Chennai that Suresh suggested Sagar visit when he comes to the city.
Multiplier is a platform that allows companies to hire talent globally without the need to set up legal entities in each country. With coverage in 150 countries, Multiplier handles all aspects of employment such as contracts, payroll, benefits, taxes, and social contributions, allowing companies to focus on sourcing the right talent. Although Multiplier itself does not do recruitment, it provides the infrastructure necessary for a company to hire globally.
The employee is technically on Multiplier's payroll since the legal entity belongs to Multiplier. What seems to matter more is the work relationship and the emotional connection that employees have with their team and their work, not the legal specifics.
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Suresh Sambandam, CEO of KissFlow has a virtual sit down with not one but two co-founders, who also happen to be a married couple. Besides finding out about how they set out on founding their respective companies, Suresh also explores their unique working dynamics and relationship, the ups and downs of doing business together, the pros and cons of operating out of a Tier 2 city and of course their secrets to building a successful business model with CallHippo and SoftwareSuggest. Enjoy this first of its kind episode!
Key Takeaways
5:13 - CallHippo business model
7:10 - Inception of CallHippo, founder story and current revenues
11:18 - Global customer segments
12:44 - Impact of inbound marketing, how to manage your budget for Inbound Marketing
15:05 - SEO strategy
19:15 - Exercising patience to see SEO results
21:57 - Optimizing for humans not Google
26:20 - Traffic to sign up rate
32:23 - Tactical hacks for increasing sign up conversion and churn rates
34:59 - Marketing to Sales funnel - Handling different ticket size customer segments
41:48 - Hiring strategy in a Tier 2 city
45:24 - Pros and Cons of operating out of a Tier 2 city
50:33 - Spouses to Co-Founders
53:52 - Developing the culture at CallHippo
1:01:32 - Vision for CallHippo
Key Mentions
3:36 Software Suggest
3:43 CallHippo
3:57 Exotel
8:08 Avinash Raghava
8:30 Girish Mathrubootham
10:55 Ozonetel
18:09 RingCentral
21:05 Google
32:05 Mail Chimp
35:48 HubSpot
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In Part 2 of Getting SaaS Pricing right, Arvind and Varun bump it up a notch. They discuss key features of a pricing plan like Naming of plans, the ideal number of plans to go with, Add-ons, Discounts, cost-based pricing and value-based pricing.
Listen on as the duo share insights from their own experience of having worked for and mentored other companies and of course getting the price right in their own respective startups. Enjoy the show!
Key Takeaways
3:40 - Decoy pricing plan
6:05 - What's the ideal number of price plans?
8:30 - Open Vs Hidden pricing
14:00 - Contact us to know the pricing
16:56 - Knowing your target audience while selling
21:40 - Naming the Price Plans
26:10 - Deciding on the value metric
28:05 - Land and expand strategy
29:55 - What is value and value-based pricing?
35:43 - Is there room for Add-ons?
42:12 - How often do we change pricing?
44:23 - Open Vs Closed pricing verdict
46:05 - Dishing out Discounts
49:15 - Importance of pricing in NRR
52:00 - Top 3 ways to increase NRR
56:15 - Importance of revenue recognition
59:15 - Varun and Arvind’s Pricing pet peeves
Key mentions
Apple
SuperOps
Girish M
Zoho
FreshDesk
PipeCandy
Wingman
Intercom
Spot Instances
Spot.io
ChargeBee
Manage Engine
Hubspot
IKEA
Sequoia
For Entrepreneurs
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In this episode of the BTS podcast, our hosts Arvind and Varun introduce a new format of discussion to the show and decide to pick each other's brains to go deeper into topics that are pertinent to founders and marketeers.
They explore the various aspects of designing the perfect pricing plan for your business keeping in mind various aspects such as the product, the perceived value, the market segment, the industry and the buyer persona.
Listen on as they explore pricing strategies of various companies who’ve done it right from the get-go and others who’ve got it right through trial and error, in effect showcasing how setting a pricing plan for your SaaS product may not always be the simplest or most straightforward exercise.
Key Takeaways/Timestamps
2:37 - MSP - Managed Service Provider
3:10 - Silent price hikes in the industry
5:33 - 4 levers of business
7:32 - Effective communication over Grandfathering
10:02 - Pricing game on point
11:09 - HubSpot-on pricing
14:03 - Unpredictable pricing design
16:17 - Don’t reinvent the pricing wheel that works
20:28 - Questions to ask before designing the pricing model
21:41 - Who’s doing the heavy lifting?
22:32 - Top 3 challenges faced by Indian Saas companies
24:54 - Perceived value of your product
28:55 - Are you selling based on the features of your product?
32:52 - Playing to the persona
36:45 - Common pricing mistakes in the Indian ecosystem
Key Mentions
3:30 - Ninjaone
7:37 - Netflix
11:44 - Intercom
12:04 - Hubspot
12:11 - Salesforce
12:13 - Pipedrive
17:10 - Girish Mathrubootham
38:02 - Pipecandy
38:19 - Wingman
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In this episode of the Founder’s Deep Dive Podcast, Suresh Sambandham CEO and Founder of KissFlow has a one on one with Prabhu Rangarajan, Co-founder of M2P Fintech.
M2P is an API infrastructure giant delivering futuristic and customer-centric fintech solutions through cutting-edge technology with a wide range of solutions across Payments, Lending, and Banking.
Suresh and Prabhu get into the juicy details of how M2P was founded and how they grew from a 60 member company pre-pandemic to a 1200 member company now. Prabhu also shares his journey of founding M2P along with his co-founders Madhu and Muthu and now acquiring 8 other companies and in effect running M2P with 20 co-founders who became the founding team.
Listen on to hear more about the exciting success story of M2P!
Key Takeaways
2:46 - Inception of M2P
6:50 - Tatkal: Inventing on-tap money
8:21 - M2P customer base
11:18 - How does M2P charge its customers
12:30 - Story behind the name M2P
14:30 - Bringing the founders together
20:30 - Do too many cooks spoil the broth?
27:30 - Role playing between Founders
29:28 - M2Ps Multi-city presence
30:24 - Numbers Pre and Post Covid
34:44 - Funding, Acquisitions & Expansion
40:53 - Acquisitions left, right and center
43:11 - Carving a niche with no competition
44:56 - Cultural integration of multiple companies into M2P
54:40 - Building a company for the next 100 years
Key Mentions
4:35 - IIFL Finance
4:38 - DCB Bank
9:23 - Slice
16:25 - Madhusudanan
16:39 - Muthukumar
16:43 - Visa
36:33 - Paytm
38:44 - Amrish Rau
38:45 - Kunal Shah
39:01 - 39:05
Tiger Global
Insight Partners
Mitsubishi UFJ Group of Japan
41:11 - FinFlux
47:33 - Sujay Vasudevan
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ExtraaEdge is an early start-up founded in 2016, currently powering 350+ Educational Institutes with the cloud computing solution. Founded by Abhishek Ballabh (ex. HSBC Data Scientist) & Sushil Mundada (ex. HSBC - Lead BA & CRM Architect) ExtraaEdge delivers all the required tools for End-to-End automation of admissions processes. With their combined passion for education and knowledge expertise in Data and CRM, they contribute by developing ExtraaEdge.
In this episode, Varun and Arvind explore Abhishek Ballabh’s journey of founding ExtraaEdge and his experience of SaaSBOOMi’s SGx program. Abhishek shares various marketing insights and anecdotes about his journey so far and how his new found “yoda-mindset” has taken him and his company from a primarily hustle-driven outbound sales company to now being predominantly inbound marketing-driven organization.
Listen on as this trio share some great insights and banter.
Key Take aways0:41 Welcome and Introduction to Abhishek Ballabh & ExtraaEdge
2:59 CAGR Banter
4:03 Marketing Org Chart
7:17 Desi Perception of Marketing & Sales
8:41 Coupling the effects of SGx and Covid
10:18 Lessons learnt in SGx put to practice
11:43 SGx - Growth Vipassana for entrepreneurs
12:44 Who reports to Marketing?
19:58 Founder Branding
21:20 Channeling one’s Yoda-mindset
22:49 Being the face of the brand
26:55 ExtraaEdge’s transformation Pre and Post SGx
30:41 Apple’s DRI concept
31:56 Transformation from Outbound Hustle to Inbound Marathon
36:28 First International client through ABM
41:57 Maximizing MarTech through ExtraaEdge Certification Academy
48:46 Being synonymous with your industry
49:47 Stacking Marketing Dominoes across the prospects journey
52:10 The push and pull of Marketing & Sales
53:39 Founder being a student of Marketing & Conclusion
Key Mentions1:48 HSBC
2:09 Mindtickle
4:41 Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, Y Combinator
6:30 Sushil Mundada
6:43 SaaSBOOMi Growth X program
8:25 Sachin Bhatia
20:20 Niti Ratnaparkhi
20:58 Yoda (Star Wars)
30:16 Apple
30:18 Steve Jobs
36:52 Ankit Oberoi & Ad Pushup
37:20 Bits Pilani Dubai
39:35 Nikhil Sutar
43:46 Career Guide
48:01 Robert Cialdini
48:47 Almabase
Happy watching! -
In this Episode, our hosts Varun and Arvind have a virtual sit down with Naveen Goyal, CEO and Founder of NoPaperForms.
NoPaperForms is the India’s largest and most advanced SaaS based Enrolment Automation Platform enabling educational institutions to unlock their potential i.e. Attract, Engage, and Grow their Enrolments. Serving 1000+ customers, NoPaperForms, today, is the de facto choice for anyone in education, looking to grow - be it Preschool to K-12, Higher Education to Online Degrees, Coaching & Training Institutes to EdTech.
Varun and Arvind explore Naveen’s journey of founding NoPaperForms and his insights on the way he’s structured his marketing org, unifying sub-functions, de-positioning the CRM viewpoint and addressing the problem statement head on. Naveen also shares why and how he went about commencing the 100 day challenge across the firm.
Listen on as this trio share some valuable insights and learn from each others experiences.
Key Takeaways
1:18 Welcome and Introduction to NoPaperForms
3:23 NoPaperForms Marketing Org Chart
7:54 Aligning Product, Marketing & Sales
9:06 One-man marketing magician?
11:53 100 people in 100 days challenge
18:06 De-positioning the CRM and addressing the problem statement
20:34 Positioning the enrolment process
24:08 Unification of the product
26:49 Introducing the enrolment cloud to the market
30:14 Brand Identity and positioning
34:20 Newspaper campaign through Covid
39:27 NoPaperForms uses Paper
46:25 Psychology, brand retention & conversion
49:10 Rapid fire round
54:19 Conclusion
Key Mentions
15:20 Suraj Sapra - Co-founder, NoPaperForms
21:21 SRM University, Vellore Institute of Technology
30:52 Apple
31:07 Volvo, Tesla
31:15 Mercedes, BMW
32:47 Leadsquared
32:55 Extraaedge
33:40 Girish M - Founder & CEO, Freshworks
40:03 Ashish Tulsian - Co-founder & CEO, Posist
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Kalyan Varma is the Co-Founder & CEO of Almabase. Before solving the alumni fundraising problem, Kalyan worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, just as he moved to start an online marketplace which couldn’t scale, yet he kept trying new things to eventually stumble upon the gap in the education system to eventually start Almabase.
Kalyan is an alumnus of NIT Warangal and cites BITS Pilani as the foremost institution in the country with the strongest alumni relations.
In this episode, as we dug deeper into the idea in this unconventional space, Kalyan breaks down the idea by sharing memorable experiences from some of the big institutions around the world; the challenges he faced in US trying to learn more about the disorganized space, in a bid to fix the broken relationship between the alumni and the colleges to create a win-win situation for both around the world.
Tune in to watch an insightful conversation brew among the trio.
Key take aways
2:14 - A creative way of solving high college tuition fees
5:15 - Building blocks of a strong marketing structure
10:55 - How can sales empower marketing?
14:11 - Thought leadership marketing and category creation
17:27 - Getting the first US customers
18:34 - Cold emailing and customer development hack
21:30 - Going all out to understand your Customers
25:10 - Why now is a good time to sell to US?
27:20 - Customer agony to features
28:47 - The Power of a rock-solid CRM
30:38 - How CRM is set up differently for better?
33:30 - The CRM mantra that helped us
37:01 - 5x scale from ABM compared to Outbound
38:25 - The Win-Win-Win Strategy
39:44 - Partnering with a billion dollar company as a startup
44:31 - Disengagement of Alumni
48:12 - Starting up in 2023: What will you do differently?
49:33 - Kalyan’s biggest pet peeve
Happy listening!🎧
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Saravana Kumar, the founder of Kovai.co is a techie, a marketer who was ahead of the curve, a and maverick salesperson.Even during his early career, he has done the unthinkable of switching from a product company like Microsoft to consulting company like Accenture.
While at Accenture, he continued working with Microsoft products, he spotted gaps that left enterprise clients in the lurch. The techie and entrepreneur in Saravana Kumar built a product to address the challenge and managed to sell it to an enterprise market successfully. All this while working part-time for Fidelity International and moonlighting on his idea during 2 weekdays and the weekend.
During the initial days of Kovai.co, Saravana Kumar was able to win 30 enterprise clients clocking in $300k in revenues. Saravana Kumar also had the sales and marketing acumen that made him run content marketing when the term itself was known only to a handful.
He built an audience for his idea by writing 600+ articles about the Microsoft BizTalk server which created the initial buzz and demand for the product even before it its launch. This also led to Microsoft recognizing him as the ‘Most Valuable Professional’ in BizTalk Server, a credential he has held for the past 15 years.
To further build the sales pipeline, he also attended user group events across Europe and succeeded at winning at least 10 leads from every event.
As a SaaS brand’s leader, Saravana Kumar is also adept at doling out deals that others cannot refuse. A skill that came in handy in building a leadership team consisting of ex-Microsoft employees among many others.
Tune into our latest episode where Saravana retraces Kovai.co’s journey from being a one-person company to a multi-product SaaS company that is now 250+ people strong.
Key take aways:02:13 - Introduction/Who is Saravana Kumar?
03:18 - The birth of BizTalk360, the first product
04:09 - From London to Kovai (Coimbatore)
04:52 - I see. I solve. I sell.
07:04 - Leaving Microsoft for a red carpet welcome at Accenture
16.56 - Building an audience before the product
19:23 -Nuances of pricing a SaaS product
24:56 - The two ingredients that helped couture the enterprise market (blog and events)
29:03 - Tracing the growth journey from $100k to $8 Million
34:42 -Giving a Microsoft guy a deal he could not refuse
36:06 - A Founder's Mindset ingrained since childhood
41:47 - Coping with the challenges of a multi-product strategy
47:34 - The biggest cost in building a software company
49:19 - Acquisitions to fuel business growth
52:46 - Building leadership talent from past network
58:45 - The Culture DNA of Kovai.co
1:02:03 - Kovai.co - The story behind the name
1:02:34 - Kovai Connect - A program to nurture young talent
01:03:08 - The next 5-10 years for Kovai
Key mentions
16:42 - Sarvana Kumar wins recognition for exceptional community leadership - The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Walking buddy becomes the new COO for Kovai.co - SaaS firm Kovai.co appoints Andrew Cloke as new COO1:07:10 Saravana Kumar featured on the cover of the Latka SaaS magazineMicrosoftIIT Madras Stanford University AccentureNational Health Service Fidelity International Biztalk360Serverless360 Andrew Cloke -
Pranay is a SaaS investor at Matrix Partners India. Before moving to investing, Pranay played several key roles at Freshworks including the Director of Growth Marketing at Freshworks, and managed to ramp up the marketing machinery.
He has also worked with the CEO’s office at Freshworks where he was responsible for ramping the revenues from 5 Million to 100 Million.
He comes with tons of knowledge on how marketing used to work in the past, how it works today, and how SaaS businesses should think about marketing for the future.
Pranay recommends SaaS businesses find new channels where their target audience hangs out as early as possible. There is no single marketing strategy or channel that will always work. It is necessary for businesses to find their “distribution edge”.
The BTS Podcast Episode 10 has Pranay sharing several nuggets of marketing wisdom.
Tune in to watch the full podcast.
Key takeaways:
1:24 - Building a SaaS company: Then and Now
3:46 - The challenges that businesses face today
4:35 - Optimizing costs for lead-gen
7:56 - Worthy SaaS examples
9:15 - Lessons learnt from experiments
13:45 - Winning the confidence of enterprise customers
19:19 - The Experience Roadshow
26:34 - How to measure the RoI of non-standard events
28:03 - Indicators of Product Market Fit and Business Market Fit
33:05 - Founders should become students of sales
34:35 - Indian SaaS advantage
39:41 - Rapid fire
Resources mentioned2:34 - How Wiz reached $100M ARR in 18 months? Techcrunch8:02 - Rocketlane’s Community Building | The CMO Journal29:55 - Girish Mathrubootam’s first blog announcing Freshdesk as a startup in October 2010 while Freshdesk was publicly launched in June 20114 interesting campaigns discussed throughout the podcastThe van that traveled to 11 destinations | Freshworks Experience Roadshow | 2019Going on air to create virality - #Failsforce campaignReports instill confidence in buyers - Freshdesk | Forrester TEI ReportRocketlane’s rap song announcing fundraisingKey mentions8:00 - Srikrishnan Ganesan of RocketLane2. 33:00 - Rishi Kulkarni and Sameer Goel of Revv
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Dhruvil Sanghvi is a tech-savvy engineer who began his career as a consultant before taking up the entrepreneurial journey in 2015. Today, he also invests in startups. Coming from a multi-generational business family, Dhruvil believes that launching and running a successful business is the best way to create a big impact on society and economy. His journey of kickstarting LogiNext with his own savings, raising 10 Million dollars in funding within a short span of 9 months after the seed round definitely has lessons for every SaaS founder.
LogiNext is a global technology and automation company with a focus on the transportation, home deliveries, omni-channel fulfillment, and B2B distribution market.
Founded in 2015, LogiNext can be rightly called one of the early entrants into the Indian SaaS space. LogiNext entered the market during a period when Amazon and several other startups were setting up the rapidly growing startup scene.
This episode will unravel the growth journey of LogiNext and how it went on to global brands like McDonald’s, Mahindra, PayTM, Myntra, Decathlon & Domino’s among many others as its clients. As a bonus, Dhruvil will also share the lessons he learned from the mistakes he made as a founder and how LogiNext managed to bounce back from them. The lessons helped them scale 150 clients across SEA, the Middle East, India, the US, Europe, and Latin America.
Key takeaways
1:35 - What is LogiNext
2:45 - Dhruvil’s Background
9:30 - How consulting experience helped in SaaS?
13:38 - Advantages of coming from a business family
21:27 - Raising funds as a new entrepreneur
23:20 - How did he spend the first $100k on the company?
28:26 - What did it take to raise the first $500k?
30:05 - Going from $500k to $10 Million in funding within 9 months
42:32 - GTM Plan and Ideal ICPs
46:28 - Acquisition Model
47:06 - Marketing and Sales Spend
49:07 - Becoming an investor
52:29 - SaaS Founders that Dhruvil looks up to
53:48 - 3 exciting startup investments Dhruvil has made
54:09 - Thoughts on work-life balance
55:23 - Advice for upcoming SaaS Entrepreneurs
Key mentions
Microsoft Venture
Reliance GenNext
Indian Angel Network
Vijay Shekhar Sharma : Twitter | LinkedIn
Sanjay Mehta : Twitter | LinkedIn
Happy Listening! 🎧
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From Pigeons, to Food to User Retention - A journey of tinkering, grit and innovation.
Anand Jain is a serial entrepreneur, who started his entrepreneurial journey as a 16 year old in college by fixing computers and selling softwares to lawyers. In this episode he talks about his upbringing, early ventures, and his current startup CleverTap.
CleverTap is a user retention platform that helps companies retain users for life, with clients like Jio, Times Group, Swiggy, PayTM, and Dream 11.
Patented Database Technology
50 petabytes of data currently stored by CleverTap
DIY approach in his early college years, learning to repair electrical and electronic appliances in his neighbourhood. Bicycling to the ISRO’s computer lab in his 10th grade in the early 90s to interact with computers and spend the whole night programming.
Side Hustle during college;
Selling software to advocates when he was 16 years old in floppy drives.
Having a roofing startup that helped the problem of pigeons in cities.
Database that runs on user actions or verbs
Key Takeaways:
2:16 - What is CleverTap?
3:57 - Which companies use CleverTap?
6:22 - CleverTap’s USPs and why companies prefer using CleverTap over building the feature natively
11:32 - Suresh and Anand find out that they have similar origin stories
14:22 - Anand’s early years in school and college
20:53 - Side hustles in college at 16
24:37 - Learning by doing
26:55 - Early days of customer acquisition
31:23 - Data comes before Analytics
33:33 - Dealing with variations in data types for various clients
38:39 - Learnings of a third time entrepreneur
47:48 - Defining the ideal customer
50:57 - People hate outbound calls. How to crack this problem?
55:01 - Dealing with international markets
57:19 - Acquisitions
1:08:15 - Organizational Structure
1:25:30 - ABM at CleverTap
1:35:55 - Culture
Happy listening!
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Ashish Tulsian ran a restaurant before building Posist, a software which runs restaurants.
Ashish and his stories go a long way.
Watch this episode for unheard stories and insights like ‘ThugTales of Restaurantpur’ - an unthinkable ABM campaign, marketing to Lawyer, Doctor, CA & Engineer at once, how Posist has perfected event marketing, playbook for B2B conferences, why they didn’t VC capital and more.
Key take aways:1:04 Posist intro
5:33 Marketing org structure and evolution
10:32 Hacking SEO with 200 web pages
15:22 Inflection point in restaurant tech
17:21 The secret to hiring content writers
18:57 Marketing to a diverse customer persona
20:01 Cracking distribution when the persona is fuzzy
21:02 Content marketing - growing ‘Restaurant Times’ to 3.5M views per year
21:52 Benefits of avoiding clickbait-y blog titles
25:27 Evolution targeting SMB to Enterprise
26:35 Best way to go global
29:02 Why didn't we raise VC capital?
31:32 The unthinkable ABM campaign
44:04 The forgotten aspect in marketing and advertising
47:21 How Posist have perfected event marketing?
1:00:32 The Playbook for B2B conferences
1:00:4:38 Rapid fire
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Sales team is closer to the customer's problems.
How do we bring the marketing and product teams closer to customer problems, so that they feel the voice of the customer?
Voice of the customer is really valuable. It's very hard to get access to it, and even if you get access to it, it's a pain to gain insights from it, and then scale it up.
This is the pain point which led Shruti Kapoor and her co-founders Muralidharan Venkatasubramanian - Head of Product and Srikar Yekollu - to start Wingman, a conversation intelligence SaaS.
Wingman acts as the single source of truth for all types of interactions between sales teams and buyers including emails and calls.
It analyzes them and it gives the ability to deep dive into these conversations and provide the larger analytics and intelligence, to improve revenue.
Their 1st million revenues came in around 2.5 years, and 2nd million in the next 6 months. They’ve also been part of Ycombinator and SaaSBOOMi GrowthX.
Wingman recently got acquired by Clari.
Tune in to this episode to gain insights on right time to get acquired, nitigrities of valuation from the standpoint of acquisition and fundraising, the AI piece on strengthening revenues, how personal branding for you as a founder helps and more.
1:31 - What’s Wingman?
3:07 -Why Wingman welcomed the early acquisition by Clari - 3 key factors
3:22 - Figuring out the valuation
4:32 - Valuation multiples by Private Equity companies
7:15 - Valuation multiples during fundraising versus acquisitions10:03 - VC valuation v/s PE valuation
12:19 - What does it mean if a VC is giving a 20x valuation multiple?
15:43 - The idea of Wingman and how did the founding team come together?
21:06 - Using AI to gain sales intelligence from sales calls using Wingman24:55 - Funds raised and investors
25:31 - Rationale for high pricing, is it a sales barrier?
29:18 - ICP of Wingman
30:56 - SaaS pricing insights for Indian market31:31 - Change in org structure after acquisition
34:45 - Wingman’s go-to market model
35:50 - Creating proxies of trust - personal branding as a founder
36:40 - How to increase average ticket sizes
39:46 - OTE v/s sales quota - Visa fler
