SaaS playbooks
A very large proportion of successful Indian SaaS companies have grown by largely selling to Tech teams. What does this tell us about the so-called "SaaS playbooks"?
During a random conversation this evening, I realized that a LOT of Indian SaaS companies that have done well sell to technology teams!
Postman and WhatFix are obvious names that come to mind on this. You can also add the likes of BrowserStack, ChargeBee, Sprinto, Rocketlane and Hasura to this (based entirely on my understanding, of course!).
This makes me wonder - Indian VCs (a whole bunch of whom we met earlier this year) like to talk about “SaaS playbooks” (basically stuff that you need to do, in their opinion, if you were to become a successful SaaS company - this is obviously based on companies that they have seen). Given that most Indian SaaS successes nowadays are SaaS companies that sell to tech teams, should we instead consider this a “SaaS-selling-to-Tech (SaaSstT ??? ) playbook?
The SaaSstT playbook
Some of the features of this “SaaS playbook” that I can attribute to SaaSstT include:
Spray-and-pray outbound sales for customer acquisition. Scour Apollo / ZoomInfo to get leads and then run “outbound campaigns”. Unsolicited email followed by periodic follow-up. Now you have guys like Klenty (they don’t sell to Tech teams, but they’re not VC funded) who are building “AI SDRs” to automate this email research and sending process (I think there’s another new company that’s raised tonnes of money to again build AI SDRs - not Indian I think).
Low ticket size (of the order of $10-20 per user per month), which “a team lead can swipe on her corporate credit card without IT approvals”, followed by growing the account. People quote examples such as Slack for this approach
Team almost entirely based in India, customer base almost entirely in the US
Setting your location on LinkedIn as “United States”, irrespective of where you are based (I’m not ruling out doing this sometime in the near future)
(these are minor points and may not universally apply, so bucketing them in one point) - marketing using SEO and keyword buying, easy “one click” integration, sales team entirely in India (except for one founder who moves to the US), etc. etc.
I guess you get the drift. Anything else (specific) that you can think of, where what is generally accepted to be “SaaS way” is actually “SaaSstT way”?
To SaaS or not?
While on this, I’ve oscillated over the last year on whether I should describe Babbage Insight as SaaS. We are selling software, and will will monetize it with a periodic fee - which means we will offer it as a service. So technically we are SaaS.
However, given we are in the data space, we’re doing on-premise deployments (so that customer data privacy is ensured). We are not going to operate at the $10-20 per user per month price point. And we are not selling to tech teams, which means a lot of the “conventional SaaSstT playbooks” don’t apply to us. For these reasons I’m trying to avoid getting bucketed as “SaaS”.
Then again, as I’d written long ago on my personal blog - people like to stereotype you because it allows them to “understand” you using fewer bits of information (think LZW compression). So I guess one way or another, I need to take a stance on this “SaaS axis”.
{SaaS} - {SaaSstT}
What are some Indian companies that you can think of that are SaaS but not SaaSstT? The OGs such as Zoho and Freshworks immediately come to mind. There are Hyderabad-based Zenoti and Darwinbox (both of which, incidentally, started selling in India before moving abroad). Then there are a bunch of HR Tech companies (also include Darwinbox).
I asked ChatGPT to name SaaSstT and {Saas} - {SaaSstT} (not in that many words). Obviously the former list was much much longer!