Indian SaaS revolution, product design and more with Rajan, Co-founder of Upekkha

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.

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⚡️⚡️⚡️ Here are the timestamps:

1. 1:44= SaaS revenue today vs 10 years ago

2. 2:30= Shift in the way SaaS is sold because of social and cloud

3. 5:37= $1 trillion opportunity and the magic number 66

4. 7:50= Shift in the way India builds software

5. 11:30= How to think about building a product and start a SaaS company

6. 17:00= Defining a persona for whom one is trying to solve a problem

7. 21:50= BAF business framework for SaaS

8. 25:25= Definition of a ‘product’ to remember as a mantra

9. 30:00= Pricing!

10. 33:20= Marketing for SaaS companies

Ravish 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.

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