Understanding the SaaS playbook with Rocketlane
In this episode of the Prime Venture Partners podcast, Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane, covers the SaaS ecosystem through Rocketlane's journey.
Srikrishnan Ganesan started his SaaS journey with Konotor, later acquired by FreshWorks. From zero to one, one to 10, and 10 to a 100 scale, the SaaS veteran has seen it all in the SaaS world.
Sri is now building Rocketlane—a purpose-built customer onboarding platform that shortens the user's time to value and eliminates hit-or-miss experiences with customers.
Inspiration behind Rocketlane
Sri and his team launched FreshChats at FreshWorks—kind of a relaunch of their product, Konotor, and it became the fastest product there to hit various revenue milestones. It was this momentum and not a ‘product idea to solve a problem’ that pushed Srikrishnan and his team to go out and build a new business and chase that momentum.
The problem was something that they experienced firsthand—customer experience. Where every company claims to be customer-centric, the start of the partnership after signing a contract is when many stop being one.
Instead of adding value to the customers and impressing them, they all get hidden somewhere in a spreadsheet, an email, or Slack.
"We thought there must be a better way to do this, which puts the customer at the centre of the experience, optimises the experience more professionally, builds trust early on, and brings in the right automation to help you scale," says Srikrishnan.
Creating a value proposition among customers
Something that many SaaS founders struggle with is the time required to 'wow' the customers with their value proposition. Sri and his team tackled this issue by focusing on the size of the customer while deciding the initial value.
Starting from the demo stage, they focused on clearly demonstrating the value their product provides using a presentation mode. It shows the step-by-step process of how the project is going to be and how the journey will unfold in an animated way.
"You present that at a meeting before you close a deal or at kickoff. That in itself is enough value for that company to say—look, I know my process, I’m mature, and I'm using software to run my implementation," he explains.
Whereas, for mid-market companies, where things are on a spreadsheet, Rocketlane automates all the projects in one place for unified visibility.
"We focused on ensuring that all the larger companies, which have a certain pace at which they close deals, have automation turned on where all their salesforce closed, won, and accounts automatically turned into projects on Rocketlane. So nothing slips through the cracks, and you can have great visibility as a leader into what's happening across all of these," he says.
Importance of community for a SaaS company
Customer onboarding is sort of a new category, and bringing people together in this new space could be valuable—Sri started with this thought process.
"There was no other community around customer onboarding, and we had the unique opportunity to be the enablers over there. It's not about trying to ping those people about wanting to buy Rocketlane, but is just purely a way to be an enabler in a new space and play the long game," he explains.
In the community, many may not know that Rocketlane is behind this, but there are so many things to learn from the experiences and the topics shared there.
There's a real opportunity to learn from each other. So for first movers, it is definitely worth it to have an audience as they can do more with them in the long run. Also, it adds a lot of credibility to what they are doing, Sri adds.
You can listen to the full episode here.
01:30: Joining the SaaS world: From B2C to B2B
08:00: Analysing TAM: Is it a feature or a company?
14:00: When an MVP is not enough
20:00: Reducing the time to wow
25:00: Building a community as a SaaS business
32:30: Working with industry analysts
36:00: Two books that have helped Sri as a founder.
Edited by Suman Singh