SaaStock (for those who might be wondering) is a global community of software as a service (SaaS) founders, executives, and investors. SaaStock Local is an initiative of SaaStock to help build and nurture regional SaaS ecosystems around the world. Recently, the 2nd edition of SaaStock local was held at Razorpay’s office in Bengaluru spearheaded by some of the popular names in the SaaS community such as Nivas Ravichandran (from Freshworks), Sameer Goel and Sravan Kumar.
Airim was invited for the Product Showcase segment of SaaStock local. The event consisted of different segments. Lets look at the key takeaways of the different segments:
Fireside chat with Ashwin Ramesh (CEO, Synup):
- Do not focus on controlling churn of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and VSMEs (Very Small and Micro Enterprises) because in most cases it will be due to a reason that is out of your hands
- Say absolute “NO” to logo-based hiring. A person who has achieved something at a larger company might not have the required skillset for yours. Always hire based on raw talent and employee-company fit
- LTV (Life-Time Value) to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is always absurd in the beginning. CAC will go up as you enter more competitive markets and you’ve to be prepared for that
- Move to US now (unless you can invent a time machine and do it earlier) if you are a SaaS company with your target market in the States. Inside sales works really well for B2B and you can’t compete with your counterpart there from India
Keynote from Shashank Mehta (Product Strategy, Razorpay):
- You’ll never win an award for your org structure but that is one of the most important things that’ll drive results for your business. Keep evolving it!
- Data will tell you what is but it can’t tell you what could have been. Love data but do not ignore your gut
- Initial sales strategy that worked for Razorpay: Target smaller clients an make them super happy
Panel Discussion with Raviteja Dodda, Sameer Goel, Anjali Kumari – Capillary Technologies, Prakhar Jain:
- Generalization will turn to specialisation at scale. Build your ogranization structure in a way so you can easily move from 1-person closing to BDR (Business Dev Reps), SDR (Sales Dev Reps, AE (Account Executive), SE (Sales Executive) closing
- If Enterprises are your target market, be more consistent in closing deals north of USD 100K, and more farming from existing F500 logos
- Hire Sales ops early. One of the reasons why conversions don’t increase even after you implement automation is lack of focus on understanding customers. Manage Sales capacity by hiring optimally for specific functions to grow faster
Keynote from Nathan Latka:
Nathan Latka (a well-known podcaster who recently interviewed Airim) shared his views on (I have hyperlinked the relevant slides from his keynote):
- Fastest way to USD 1.5M ARR
- Reduce churn to negative using cohort expansion
- How to use virality to drive growth?
Unfortunately, power outages due to heavy rains allowed him to share only these pointers. But you can access his full keynote here.
Product Showcases:
10-minute demos of Airim (here’s our presentation for the event), Typito and Slang Labs were well received with a lot of intriguing questions from the SaaStock community.
Overall, the experience was terrific with a lot of great networking opportunities. SaaStock is definitely a great platform for eveyone who is leading a SaaS company or working with one.
A huge shoutout to Prakhar for helping me with content and Sameer for letting me steal some of his pics. WE HAD A BLAST!