Srikrishnan Ganesan began his SaaS journey with Konotor, later acquired by FreshWorks. From zero to at least one, one to 10, and 10 to a 100 scale, the SaaS veteran has seen all of it within the SaaS world.
Sri is now constructing Rocketlane—a purpose-built buyer onboarding platform that shortens the consumer’s time to worth and eliminates hit-or-miss experiences with clients.
Inspiration behind Rocketlane
Sri and his staff launched FreshChats at FreshWorks—type of a relaunch of their product, Konotor, and it grew to become the quickest product there to hit varied income milestones. It was this momentum and never a ‘product concept to unravel an issue’ that pushed Srikrishnan and his staff to exit and construct a brand new enterprise and chase that momentum.
The issue was one thing that they skilled firsthand—buyer expertise. The place each firm claims to be customer-centric, the beginning of the partnership after signing a contract is when many cease being one.
As a substitute of including worth to the purchasers and impressing them, all of them get hidden someplace in a spreadsheet, an electronic mail, or Slack.
“We thought there have to be a greater approach to do that, which places the shopper on the centre of the expertise, optimises the expertise extra professionally, builds belief early on, and brings in the correct automation that can assist you scale,” says Srikrishnan.
Creating a worth proposition amongst clients
One thing that many SaaS founders wrestle with is the time required to ‘wow’ the purchasers with their worth proposition. Sri and his staff tackled this difficulty by specializing in the scale of the shopper whereas deciding the preliminary worth.
Ranging from the demo stage, they targeted on clearly demonstrating the worth their product offers utilizing a presentation mode. It reveals the step-by-step means of how the mission goes to be and the way the journey will unfold in an animated approach.
“You current that at a gathering earlier than you shut a deal or at kickoff. That in itself is sufficient worth for that firm to say—look, I do know my course of, I’m mature, and I am utilizing software program to run my implementation,” he explains.
Whereas, for mid-market corporations, the place issues are on a spreadsheet, Rocketlane automates all of the initiatives in a single place for unified visibility.
“We targeted on guaranteeing that each one the bigger corporations, which have a sure tempo at which they shut offers, have automation turned on the place all their salesforce closed, gained, and accounts robotically became initiatives on Rocketlane. So nothing slips by the cracks, and you may have nice visibility as a frontrunner into what’s occurring throughout all of those,” he says.
Significance of group for a SaaS firm
Buyer onboarding is type of a brand new class, and bringing individuals collectively on this new area may very well be helpful—Sri began with this thought course of.
“There was no different group round buyer onboarding, and we had the distinctive alternative to be the enablers over there. It is not about attempting to ping these individuals about wanting to purchase Rocketlane, however is simply purely a option to be an enabler in a brand new area and play the lengthy sport,” he explains.
Locally, many might not know that Rocketlane is behind this, however there are such a lot of issues to be taught from the experiences and the matters shared there.
There’s an actual alternative to be taught from one another. So for first movers, it’s undoubtedly price it to have an viewers as they will do extra with them in the long term. Additionally, it provides a whole lot of credibility to what they’re doing, Sri provides.
You possibly can take heed to the complete episode right here.
Notes:
01:30: Becoming a member of the SaaS world: From B2C to B2B
08:00: Analysing TAM: Is it a characteristic or an organization?
14:00: When an MVP just isn’t sufficient
20:00: Lowering the time to wow
25:00: Constructing a group as a SaaS enterprise
32:30: Working with trade analysts
36:00: Two books which have helped Sri as a founder.
