Insights From Second Time SaaS Founders - Part 2

Pranay:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Matrix Moments podcast. I'm Pranay and I lead our enterprise software investments. I'm excited to do this topic with three phenomenal founders but today we’re going to talk about second innings and all of you people with me today are second time entrepreneurs again building enterprise SaaS companies.

Pranay:

And I think maybe switching gears, right, so for all three of your teams are in India market is in the US, right, so if you have to think about how to go about picking the idea of first version of the product in your first innings then how are you doing it now? Any evolution in thought process, differences?

Arvind:

I’ll go first. My last gig I did was Zarget which is in the marketing space where we actually quickly went on to a good number of customers, we had almost 300 customers very, very small customers but churn was high because it was a use and throw software. Like people will do their website and then after two months they’ll use it and they don’t have a need for the next two years. So this I didn’t foresee, nobody could foresee at the time. I was very clear on one thing like I want to build a product from India to the globe but the model of selling from India should be easy. Legion should be easy, it should come into that model of insite sales where the cap as a stayback should be clear and I went back to what I know. There is a Rajnikanth dialogue, right, there is a dialogue. I wanted to go back to things which I knew well so picked a vertical of IT which is MSP space which fits into that SMB inside sales model, SMB market. It has a less than 10 KSUB it has a established category I can sell it from India. So picked that and did the reverse engineering of okay, can another player is there an opportunity. So I wanted to start an IT then did the research and found out MSP as a opportunity and we moved to the MSP market. We spoke to close to around 50 MSPs, did the initial conversations and everything and thanks to Matrix, Matrix helped us with all the conversations and the initial days we spoke to solar vends, enable counters and everybody and decided okay, there is a good space. So we have an opportunity to like scale and bring a predictable legion from India, sell from India, you don’t have to hire a sales in the initial days, so that was an advantage so I picked that. That was the initial research.

Pranay:

Got it. So I guess obviously founder market fit so you're talking of picking a market you understand, pick a GTM that you're very familiar with and then within those templates started looking at are there possibilities in doing something there.

Arvind:

Correct.

Rishi:

Many, many years ago go for a counter from China and it looks like they had so many serial entrepreneurs that he has a playbook. He says your first startup is about skill, second startup is the market, third startup is passion. In my case I was ‘ulta’, my first was like passion, I need to build some tech in India, that's how it started. But I think the final realization is tenth software or then you call it the enterprise . After a long, long time I’ve now come to this decision that there’s only one market, there’s only one market. And picking a market for your startup is extremely critical. All things being equal in terms of your skill, your ability, fund raising this, that, everything there’s one thing that needs, everything else is the market. Not a penny its luck but it’s just to pick the market because it is so fluid, people pay money for productivity, pay money for new ideas. So my first mistake, first startup was purely passion, want to bring tech, want to bring high quality audio video businesses here saying that it was the right thing that she also pointed that it was the right thing. Market was just wrong, I was solving for India. And the second time was pick the market and then iterate it on what is the problem and did almost 75 customer interviews across sales, operations, everything and seeing like there is one problem that you could build a skill, you could be passionate around it, you could get a talent pool around it, there’s a GTM that's there, but I think picking the market is very important.

Pranay:

And just perfectly everyone gets so I know out of initially started in sales sector but what were the thesis, what were the evolution, I know there was a SaaS somewhere in the middle so how did you think about going to the US like when did you go there?

Rishi:

I think once you pick the market I think it’ll be a very, very, lazy answer, lazy approach if you're not in the place. If you decide I'm going to sell something luxury in Europe or I want to sell something in London or something for Middle East and if you're not in the market day one I think you're just being lazy.

Pranay:

First time founder will usually say I don’t have the money to pay for going to US.

Rishi:

I’ve now realized there is a work around solution for all of these things, right, if you're in the Middle East Middle East will offer entrepreneurs wide open, you must be there execute things. I still remember 2011-12-13 there was this thing called y Area this is a Middle Eastern founder who says I will post you for three months, I’ll pay your rent and everything, you just be here and solve your problems. If you believe your own you have identified the problem and you have at least some sense of solution for a problem the market is wide open for you to be there as a so that's the first I guess, if you understand this is the market then you got to be there.

Pranay:

So when did you go to the US?

Rishi:

Even before the formation of the company we applied for the visa. Only when we went into the visa center consulate that is when he asked the question where is your official letter we realized we are inviting ourselves to the US. And we were pretty sure that that guy was going to throw us out and they put us into a different queue and then we went into the, as founders we have a software and we are going to change the world and he gave us the visa. I have no idea how we felt but 2016, 2017 both me and Sameer’s visa had expired, we were in Chennai the consulate, we had a letter that we invited ourselves to the US to build something in the US. And then we went into we went into SalesForce, we went into a bunch of businesses. So we went after sales operations, the idea was I think pretty like AI and earlier it was cloud, before that it was just – so we know it’s software.

Pranay:

You were testing ideas.

Rishi:

Yes, I was just testing ideas in SaaS. We had a deck, and we had 2-3 laptops, we had a friend there who we took there and all three laptops showed different versions of the product, different pitches and we were just testing out which one sells. We started with that and we ahead with that. So there is really a lot of opportunity if you’re in the market, if you have a sense of the market and if you're able to participate in the market. So be there on day 0, it’s not even day 1 and second is at least today a lot of people have the sense of what the problem they’re solving. But if you don’t there are plenty of opportunities if you're there. I know there are right now who have a tech solution around AI, ML, audio, video, be there and you’ll be surprised how much of business needs are there for this. The connecting the dots that you won't be able to do it if you're not in the market and that’s largely what I realized is key.

Vijay:

I think a really good point I was just thinking so the last company Minjar we wanted to basically build something on the cloud because I have previously used cloud and I started 10 years I used cloud and in 2013 when we started we said, okay, we can actually. So with previous experience I learnt if you're betting on a tech see is that immediate value, see potentially early sense of durable value and if that value is scalable you can build something around that. But I generally tell founders don’t worry too much about idea, right, don’t be super obsessed with an idea because that idea won't be the same just like 2-3 months after starting and talking to prospects these ideas will get refined into what, but I always – so one of my engineers he joined Atomicworks again, Akash always says this, software is for money rich people and the other way to look at it is software is about efficiency and productivity. So it is valuable for a market where the time is more than big money, which essentially means okay which are the markets where people have per capita GDP of 40,000 dollars and more you just go there. And now you can pick individual countries, the good thing about universities from east coast to west coast and of course cultures differ when we go from west coast states then the answers different but largely one can read one language mostly broadly 80 percent or at least 70-80 percent culture is the same. So you can easily close that and it’s a highly productive so they value their brand more than the money so you can sell any software, anything that improves their efficiency or productivity. Now when we were thinking about Atomicwork we were basically saying, you know, we applied a different trigger, we didn’t apply the previous one. We basically said are we going to a good neighborhood, so a good neighborhood is basically a market where there are multiple big companies where they’re making a tonne of money and because they’re making a tonne of money and they’ve been around for some time, there really is some customer dissatisfaction, can we go and just solve for those customer dissatisfaction. So the thing with good neighborhood is you know that multiple people went there, built good houses, we call it product, they made money. A good neighborhood generally attracts more and more people to come and so that was one thing. And second thing is, you know, do you have your team and that also has the long term view. Now the way to basically think about this long term view is that people’s basic needs are taken care of. So that was one of the thesis for putting together the team. And the last thing we basically thought is are we and as both of them said, Rishi and Arvind, when you go speak to customers your ideas will get lot more refined, actually you start the product when you go talk to people. The only thing I would basically tell is when humans are buying software don’t , if machines are buying software it doesn’t matter whether you sit in Bhopal, whether you sit in Santa Monica but we know today largely 99.9 percent buying is done by humans so it essentially means they would like to see a human and you also have to understand their culture, their context. So India is a high context culture, US is like a very high context culture. In a low context culture you can just go pitch, redirect, tell what you can do what you cannot do in the thesis. US is like a very high context, India and China, these are all high context customers. So if you try to apply this cultural aspect to your product building or selling there it won't work. So at least we got to understand I think it’s we knew how to be – if you're selling vegetables be in a good neighborhood. Right, because you know people will come, they have money they’ll buy it. So if you're selling software why wouldn’t you do the research. And so go to US and there’s one more thing, you know, I was actually talking to one of the founder who said, very proudly said we’re in 30 countries. I said where does 95 percent of your revenue come he said 5 countries, I said then why are you wasting your time in the other 25 countries for 5 percent revenue because you're not even a market leader in any of these 5 countries. So don’t get too obsessed with whether at 1 million or 10 million or 20 million about going to like 100 countries because then and don’t be too obsessed with . I mean very recently actually just like four days ago I learnt this beautiful thing called how do you design your product for chasing beliefs, your own beliefs and customer beliefs and how do you use trends. On thinking or prediction of a trend and what competition is thinking and then the shifts in the market. Right, so and just think upon it, right, so of course you have to use your own brains because you're starting, you have to bring something that has a differentiation. You also have to add customer beliefs, customer beliefs are nothing but their experience and stuff. You need to look at what’s happening in the market last year and you also have to look at what’s happening broadly in the market. Like last six months I got this GPT you know, the whole autonomous agents like. I think these are like very critical changes, you should pay attention at least try to understand and say this is the context of my product of my business, And one of the reason for me immediately going for last five weeks almost like five weeks to US was I really wanted to go meet customers prospects but also I wanted to go meet people who have built and see technology trends for the last 40 years not just 10 years, 20 years time because they have a different perspective. And then I came back and I basically said if we want to build every software company just like every company will be a mobile plus company, cloud plus company or whatever, right, everybody will. But first we have to get a AI customer, if they don’t use AI are they not building AI for company or AI.  As individuals we do, so how do we enforce that within the team so we really appreciate the power of .

Pranay:

This is a totally different topic.

Arvind:

No, I think also to one of the which I think you will agree with this pretty much the pain point of the customer has been the same for generations, like for decades. Every decade something changes, either it was from moving from software to SaaS and then now from SaaS to AI I think the pain point is same, the solution which we’re giving is in a different format. So I think that played a big as you said the trend watching out for the trend also makes a lot of sense in the market. I’ll just share one thing which we did. We started exactly during the pandemic, okay, so and every office said you can work from home now. And IT was managing it in one company and then I would have to manage somebody who is sitting in Detroit has moved to Hawaii and --

Pranay:

They have 500 offices not one or two.

Arvind:

This was a challenge. Right, so this MSP business was going like managing distributed workforce was an opportunity again. Now it’s again it’s changing into hybrid co-managed IT, there are lot of things which is changing every two years. I think building solutions for this new age problems is something which we should always look out for and keep changing it all the time.

Vijay:

So I think it’s the oldest problem, apply new trends, new technology, new experience.

Rishi:

I think what we also when I'm looking at like what you’ve done, what Arvind has done, what Vijay has done, what the trend is it’s also important that just ability to be around long enough is also very critical. Not saying that ChatGPT is not like a massive inflection point that has come for it, it has. But as long as you survive, you stick long enough you continue to build trust in the market, you continue to solve solutions in the market, problems in the market and yeah, your product I still remember this out of mind – I met this founder in the US and what they did was couple of pivots not to the product but rather the market but they survived and in three years to four years they had the widest and deepest feature base in that market and after that the product just sold because some combo feature was fitting in that. So in the end software as you said is about trust, you're solving somebody’s problem, productivity problem and as long as you're around there and you're solving people’s problems it’s tech. So it’s very important to while paying attention to the trends and other things but burning out or just vanishing is not the solution at all.

Pranay:

Okay. So I think it’s a good segue into the next question I had, what I'm hearing around the room is obviously immerse yourselves in the market and learn their context, their culture, their pains, right. Your concept of market is good neighborhood, the existing budget, large category, new trendline is disrupting maybe a fat and lazy enterprise competitor who doesn’t want to evolve because they have their profit pool so they will not change. And you're going there and selling organic vegetables. But again to this point about this trust in the market, right, this is one question I wanted to ask is how did you think about marketing, brand, GTM differently and maybe again we’ll start with Arvind who’s our resident marketing guru. Arvind, when did you start thinking about GTM and marketing and how did you go about it this time?

Arvind:

Now I started from day 1, man, as a marketer myself I think I had the strong belief of building product has become fairly easy nowadays because of the technology advancement, like things we can actually go to like some two smart engineers sitting in a garage can actually build a product. Like in Joho back then there was no AWS we had to build the client, we had to build the date center everything that was tough for us. Today building product is easy but GTM – back then the keyboard cost was $1, $1.5 per Google search, today a click is $300, right, and everybody are writing content now ChatGPT content is overload. So building the GTM engine and getting the predictability and organic legion and the brand is becoming way tougher day by day. More and more companies are coming, it’s crowded, standing out and building a brand is tougher. So that's why, touch wood, I started day 1 like even before we like we’re launching our product writing code started telling the story. We did more than 50 podcasts before even we showed the first prototype, immersed ourselves with all the influencers, started talking about AI, created peers and things like that. So brand will I think we kind of everybody in the MSP market knows us took on the biggest competitor and we did a campaign, did all this things that we used to do in Freshworks and so built a brand but to your answer don’t wait, building a brand is like building a product, it also requires time, start from day 1 is my advice.

Vijay:

Yeah. So I think I agree with it. so I would also say build a brand in the market where it matters. So I’ll give you an example, right, so when we built Minjar I can tell you most people in Bangalore also we knew, I mean people started writing e-mails after we because it doesn’t matter if an employee in Bangalore knows about my product because they’re not my clients. Rather I will There are like hundreds of companies in the US who knew about Minjar, they always thought we’re a Japanese company because of the name and or have a Japanese connection. So I would also say three things, right, so as Arvind said you take any two SaaS products 70-80 percent features are wrong, there’s no differentiation. Probably every product has like one, two clear separators. So how can you separate yourself, you have to make a point. Again I’ll tell it’s about brand as so there’s a company brand that you’re dealing with, there’s a product solution brand you're dealing with and there is a employer or a So all three are important, if you really want to build a great company you have to go build all these things. Just like you're doing product engineering I would say do brand engineering. I would also say once you have a product lot of us are under this a good delightful support. How big competitive advantage it could delight. That's the biggest I mean I often used to joke when I was studying for engineering I never woke up at 3 am to do customer escalation calls but in Nutanix I know like multiple times where I woke up at like 3 am, 4 am, 1 am, it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter whether you're a junior engineer or whether you're a VP engineer if there is an escalation engineering call just show up, acknowledge the problem, create a clap, support it and there were like so many instances like customers said I know you guys are like not as big as your competitor, either it’s like a very big company that has a billion and a half in revenue, 5000-6000 people company. Despite this the customers actually told us really the thing that we really like about you is when we have a problem you show up and help us fix it and that we do really appreciate it. I think a brand users have differentiated from day 1. Use support as a differentiator from day 1 of your product, don’t think about setting up a delightful support, a delightful customer success, delightful onboarding, implementation support etc as in I’ll do this once I get to finally in 5 million, 3 million, 10 million etc, I think you can just use these tokens to create 40-50 percent differentiation in the market.

Again one of the things I have seen people are building software for US, they sponsor conferences in Bangalore. I mean it’s useless, don’t even attend, you know, this is literally waste. It’s okay if nobody in Bangalore knows about your company, you should be delighted if everybody in Chicago knows about your company because that's where the universities are. Or you're selling to media people everybody will not know about you that's better than everybody in Chennai or Bangalore knowing about you. I think build a branding market where it really matters to you and I think Arvind spoke about this startups don’t have branding. From day 1 you don’t have branding and you don’t have trust and it’s very hard basically. One of the greatest things that we’re lucky a second time is getting print people and you know, associate them with your company if not with product by doing podcasts, by doing like blogs, by doing knowledge sharing with them where you can infuse their brand so that people think – so the first person – we thought like similarly, right, should we do podcasts or not. We said let’s do a podcast, so who should be the first guest on a podcast. We said okay, like how about bringing the guy who is today called as father or modern HR and we. And really strived hard for it, you know, we don’t have a connection. We didn’t go ask and you see please introduce us. We called him ahead, reached out, begged and now we basically said okay one HR leader is great, we need to bring one IT leader and one business leader and  because just talk about HR, you know, that becomes like very boring for your audience. You don’t need to do like I don’t also believe quantity of it, just do like ten podcasts one a month but do a really high quality. You can't do one a month do one a quarter, you can't do one a quarter do one in half year, you can't even one in half year at least do one. I completely agree, build focus on brand from day 1, focus on customer delightful customer, not customers, delightful customer success from day 1 of your product.

Rishi:

And I feel like for a first time entrepreneur especially in the tech when you come from a product or a technology background it’s really, really hard to think of these ideas of marketing or brand. And there’s also the personality, many of us are very introvert and even to address that becomes very hard. I think here is where I think couple of things I really think is like focus on one thing. Right, if it’s market then in the market US also if you're looking at PMG just focus on one thing and just do the same things that you do. If the only things that you ever bought is Levies because you care about that brand or you go to that brand because there’s familiarity, there’s you’ve been around that or there’s a language of empathy so just do that and which is why I'm saying it’s like day 0 being in the market matters because you run into the same people again and again, there’s familiarity and start getting empathy because hey, I know your problem and you're now entering into a if you're an enterprise then you could co-creation, if you're non enterprise then you're basically doing some kind of a value build for that. But I think the core thing for vocabulary that really works for a first time entrepreneur actually from tech is the age focus. Don’t go I do PMG also, I do enterprise also, I do DRI also, I do services also, no. That's just big market and as you said I’ll be in Europe also, I'm in UK. Target one market, right, and just double down on that thing. It really is not a hard decision to not move these things but it is such less stressful and you can go 10x deeper, I mean if you just focus on one thing. In our case I still remember and this was a learning in my of course I if you even pick one of the region in the US and focus. If you think that east coast is awesome or Florida is awesome or west coast is awesome or Texas just focus on that market because North America is so deep and diverse that

Pranay:

I’ve also seen this, everyone wants to set for Bay Area startups, I want Stripe as a logo, but there’s also --

Rishi:

We discovered and you’ll see that on North America’s largest medical conference, HIMSS, happens in Orlando. It’s the largest conference and people are selling everything and anything there or like from a medical Tshirts to medical desks to medical software to medical that, anything, fact submissions are being sold there. It’s surprising if you focus how much answer starts coming out of them. So I think it comes back to is be in the market and focus on a few things and you start worrying these basic principles of branding and stuff that folks in B2C and others just knowing day 1. Whereas you can't hop on background in tech background. It’s very, very hard to understand what’s a SQM budget, what’s a SEO budget, what’s a PMG, what’s an enterprise. Be in the market, spend time there and this automatically comes in. I’ll just start a very, very, very interesting anecdote because I just repeated this at least a hundred times in the last. We observed one of our not competitors but someone we were aspiring to do that they did for big market sales every fortnight in Bay Area. So they’ll call sale sops and legal something we copied that and we hosted that in a nice area called Dinner House in Bay Area Mountain View. Five years from now we’ve now acquired their company which actually bought that real estate of Dinner House and is our now office. So it’s just such a cool circle but I think the memories there are is why didn’t I address these when we close other sales or when co creation happens if you're in the market and it’s extremely focused activity. And is that branding, is that marketing, it may be it is not but it really works. And I think that's a good point I think day 0 be in the market.

Vijay:

I think that's a great point so one of the things lot of startups say I can't bring my customers together, they say we can't bring the customers to the. So we used to host this lunch on day 3 where there are no parties and nobody is hosting social meets are all over, like pub crawl etc and everybody is really looking for a good show out of party and it doesn’t cost much. So lot of people actually felt they’re a big company because in 10-8 months they actually host a  lunch because it also means intimacy. One of the things colleagues say is what wen they added field visits like just one visit in a year that retention improved by 3 percentage points, that's huge. So I think just adding like that extra onen And second thing we might Arvind said I generally tell founders there’s no US zone market as a startup. You pick one area, you pick Seattle or pick New York or pick Chicago or you pick midwest or maybe it’s on the west coast or the east coast, call them, you don’t need to run like your campaigns for the entire US you just pick that one area and you really go after them. And have your own approach like don’t copy because everybody is cold calling, everybody is doing 5000 e-mails in a day, like customer discovery People told me, Vijay, I stopped buying software from cold calling guys but they call us. We technologists are abusing technology for people and people are now saying I have a separate e-mail which I use on my Twitter, Linkedin, a separate phone number which I give because I get like hundreds and hundreds of  I think founders should start separating I sent 5000 e-mails I got five people who responded and I'm in shit. I think as a company you can take it like very differently, you know, by creating value for your target segment and not frustrate them, bother them. Don’t abuse people attention etc because people also stop buying this whole whether it’s marketing or in sales. The only thing I say is I generally discourage founders for but I tell you need to learn SMP skills as a founder, sales and marketing skills and business skills.

Rishi:

Yeah, you really need to learn SMP skills.

Vijay:

Yeah, but the SMP for sales and marketing business but don’t build for SMP unless you're a very experienced founder.

Rishi:

There are just these or this coffee hotspots I’ll pick up North Matilda’s anywhere, a good city Mountain View the King’s Street right outside easily 50 enterprise companies right there. Just go there, easily 50 companies right there. Just go put yourself setup all your meetings, you know, first year.

Arvind:

No, but I like one thing, I’ll agree and disagree for one thing. So agreeing is definitely picking one region and going deeper, don’t get distracted with multiple regions and in diluting your investment also. I totally agree on picking one region. But as a marketer there is one thing I’ll say if you try ten things only three will work, seven is going to fail. You have to understand that you have to identify the top just one that works best for you and this is the time that you can have a limited budget to spend in. Okay, I put this much money, how much am I getting ROI and test the top ten channels and pick the top three. So I would recommend to try multiple channels not just pick one thing so that you will know where to double down when it works. So picking one region is good but experiment your top channels with a limited budget would be my one advice.

Vijay:

And the last thing I would say is the first million the founder has to pay. Stop this whole idea that I raised three million I will hire a US --

Pranay:

Hire a VP sales and --

Vijay:

And the first million has to be founder led, and then it has to be founder managed before you bring unit type teams or VP sales in. If you don’t know how to sell, if you don’t sell you don’t learn your product, you don’t learn your competition, you don’t learn about customer problem, you don’t learn about client behavior, client cycles, client process, friction in it and any founder who says I can't sell I generally say you don’t give your other cofounder.

Rishi:

I totally agree.

Pranay:

What I'm hearing is the 0-1 the first sales people only the founder, you cannot outsource that to a salesperson or a sales leader. Once you have that playbook a weekly sales income and then you hire 5-7 people and train your team so they're can at least give a sales once you have a playbook.

Arvind:

Basically you create the playbook on how to sell and then the sales person you hire is going to make it repeated to the same thing, same playbook can be repeated to multiple sales.

Rishi:

And Indian SaaS right now I have made that mistake, I’ll do that and now hopefully sharing that lessons with others is building an SDI team or sales team is zero guarantee for any kind of success. Just because a BTech team of ten engineering be shipping code you build a team of ten in shipping content doesn’t mean that you have. That is one part that is so counterintuitive and just doesn’t work.

Pranay:

I think in most cases our spam detectors get better and like you said, right, people are getting smarter and improving the noise. So it’s not  you need some air cover, some brand or something that time. The second thing is I think sales is formulaic so it’s easy. So people that say okay, I can hire techs because five techs million dollar quota but though I think sales is scientific but marketing is art and if you can't create the pipeline to feed the just close them, but if you can't  pipeline you will not be able to do business.

Vijay:

I think just don’t listen to any podcasts, the best of that breed, current strategies. Right, don’t apply a 10-year old, 20-year old did their first 100 million, 500 million, don’t go for it. Just go look at the guy who made the 5 million in the last two years, you know, their strategy probably works. The only thing I would also say is this was a learning for me in Minjar like after we crossed first 2 million dollars and we hired a sales person I always felt when I used to go for a customer visit we could close the deal and only when this guy is going they’re not able to close the deal and at one point they used to say why can't you go with him, He gives the information but they won't say ask us. You know what customer told, he said the sales guy comes and makes a commitment I’ll probably give 5 percent weightage to that commitment but because I know that a product teams, engineering teams don’t  but if a founder a CEO comes and makes that commitment the entire company will rally towards that commitment and deliver on it.

Pranay:

I think it goes back to the same point where you said first million founder led then next should be founder managed. But I think it’s very hard for someone to trust a company which is ten people sitting thousands of kilometers away and the trust can only be reached by the founder. So even after you hire a sales team you just get on the closing call and say I'm the CEO, I'm here for you, this is my e-mail ID and phone number.

Vijay:

And also if you write that e-mail as a founder please don’t send your HDR on the call, people get frustrated. So you should talk and be acknowledged.

Rishi:

You know, I think just from the  one thing that I wanted to add on from my side is I’ve been doubling down on that be in the market living and breathing the air in the marketplace. We also miss out what really matters to the market today, in 2023 mid market enterprises privacy, security, data management is like the number one item for you to create. So you talk about new product, doesn’t even reach to the question that if you’ve not risked these things and you're sitting here using your product experience, looking at competition, and for all these things whereas the companies are really solving is hey, every day I'm getting these phishing attacks, spam attacks, CCPA lawsuits, GDPI law suits, privacy, data and there are these powered centers created in the company that now someone who has legal this one is now hired CEO on the table and product is not the first one out there. So I think being in the market gives you that sense of what matters, right now this is.

Vijay:

Without compliance you can't sell SaaS, five years ago you could sell but today you can't sell.

Arvind:

Even if it’s SMB I think they’re all their own companies. Doesn’t matter if it’s enterprise or SMB anymore.

Pranay:

Cool. Anything else, anything you think we should pivot. I know we’ve gone quite long but --

Vijay:

I hope

Rishi:

Although one item was --

Vijay:

Maybe like what’s one advice from Rishi.

Pranay:

One advice from a first time founder building SaaS may or may not be for the US.

Rishi:

I think one advice is hard but I think when it comes to hiring it’s important to sequence because it costs money, it’s an overhead in terms of the culture. So the time that you spend sequencing in the sense that you want to hire a person first and get a cofounder first or an engineer first or a product management and marketing it’s very, very important that  and that sequence is just very much driven by what market you're in. So these two are very much tied by like I want to be self-served PMG in North America and then figure out what your first three hires, you know, the sequence that needs to be. You listen to others, you listen to other founders, Sometimes pressure from board investors come in and you make a bunch of desires that will put your cart in front of the horse and then I don’t think you should solve that. Because then one advice is like figure out the market first and second is hire in the right sequence. So what’s your first hire that you’ll hire from that market. Usual answer is oh, I’ll hire a VP sales. Sometimes it could be very or it could be simply a customer services for that. Because you are the sales person in any case, so it’s really worth thinking to is who your first and the second hire is and sequence that.

Arvind:

Okay, I think as founders there is a nature we are persistent, okay, that's a good thing. But in startup I would want to think about the balance between being persistent and failing fast. As a startup we never run out of money we run out of time, it’s the time which matters and for anybody who is starting up the one advice I would want to give is it’s okay, you will not get everything right, sometimes you will go in the wrong direction but to understand that you made a mistake and went in the wrong direction, fail fast and come back. The time you are saving by I messed up is more important if you're thinking that I'm persistent and right and still walking towards the wrong path it’s more dangerous than that's not persistent. Like understanding that I’ve failed and correcting it is very, very important to beat and it’s a good nature to have as a founder because you will not be right all the time. You will be making mistakes but accepting that and failing fast is important nature that founders should have. So the balance between persist and being failing fast is important.

Pranay:

Vijay.

Vijay:

Okay, for the first time founders my only advice is be accessible to your customer problem and be adaptible as Arvind said the only thing that matters is the only thought you can build company and all the design, scale. You know, large go to market if all the first build the product, Stop at any particular events, stop wasting your time. I think most founders run out of time because they waste too much of their time and debt takes time. So I think founders the other advice I have is founders are responsible for shaping the work, be extremely thoughtful, otherwise you waste your entire team’s time at shaping playbook, that's not reasonable for investing. So be customer problem it’s not your product ideas first, and be clear to build product first you can build company next. And don’t worry about like I generally discourage when I meet founders at events what they are you've read that I basically attending conference at least for the 100 million  but when it is at a 100 K it’s like such a waste of impact, right, I think as a founder you should respect your time. And put a very, very, high opportunity cost so that when you make those pivots that are necessary and you don’t go by one rounders and you don’t waste too much time, your time, your companies time, your investors’ money and your customer’s time when you crack it. Focus on building new product and the way to build different product is In the day 1 drive talking to customers its’ the only thing that really matters and don’t waste your time because you’ll likely most precious thing for the company.

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