Business
Some six months ago, after shutting down Factordaily, I joined Freshworks, a fast-growing software as a service company built out of Chennai. If you’ve followed this newsletter, you know that I’ve made some seemingly random career choices and it has worked out well for me. When I joined Freshworks, I didn’t quite realize how big the Indian Software as a Service industry was going to be. But then, I started learning about it. Turns out, it could potentially be a trillion-dollar industry in a couple of decades. Some signals here: ⚡️Indian SaaS startups raised over $1 billion venture capital in 217 deals in 2018 (source).⚡️The industry is set to clock $7 billion in revenues by 2022 (source)⚡️In a recent funding round, Freshworks was valued at over $3.5 billion (source)So I sat down with Rajan (Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan), the co-founder of Upekkha earlier this month to quickly dive into the world of SaaS. We start by understanding the opportunity and then dive into how early-stage founders could look at going from 0 - $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Listen in to the episode on your browser or find it on Apple/Google Podcast apps, Spotify, or Stitcher; Please consider leaving us a review and rating us on Apple podcasts if you find this episode useful. ⚡️⚡️⚡️ Here are the timestamps: 1:44= SaaS revenue today vs 10 years ago2:30= Shift in the way SaaS is sold because of social and cloud5:37= $1 trillion opportunity and the magic number 667:50= Shift in the way India builds software11:30= How to think about building a product and start a SaaS company17:00= Defining a persona for whom one is trying to solve a problem 21:50= BAF business framework for SaaS25:25= Definition of a ‘product’ to remember as a mantra30:00= Pricing!33:20= Marketing for SaaS companiesRavish who co-hosts the Use Case podcast along with me was in Beijing last week. We’ll bring you some great stuff from the middle kingdom in the following editions of this newsletter. If you found this podcast useful, consider becoming a paid subscriber. The content here is largely free and supported by a handful of paid subscribers. Get full access to Turnaround at turnaround.substack.com/subscribe