Prime Venture Partners Podcast
A podcast for entrepreneurs who are looking to build & grow their startups. Avoid common traps & learn uncommon strategies & tactics from makers & doers of startup ecosystem. Prime Ventures is a early-stage venture fund which focuses on startups that not only need capital but also require mentoring to transform them into disruptive companies. We share a passion for working closely with entrepreneurs and enjoy sharing their journey in a high-frequency, interactive and fun environment.Read more about us at http://primevp.in
Prime Venture Partners Podcast
How Khadim Batti Built Whatfix Into a ~$900 Million Global SaaS Leader | Podcast
How do you pivot from an early idea that didn’t work ➝ to building a global SaaS leader trusted by 700+ enterprises?
In this full episode of the Prime Podcast, Khadim Batti (Co-founder & CEO, Whatfix) reveals the raw founder journey:
- The pivot moment that sparked Whatfix
- Hustling with 500 cold emails to close first customers
- Landing a Fortune 10 client at $25/month (and why logos matter more than price)
- Why product-market fit keeps evolving
- Scaling SaaS from India ➝ US with 85+ Fortune 500 clients
- Raising $270M and turning investors into growth partners
- How AI is shaping the future of digital adoption
📌 Hosted by Gaurav Ranjan, Principal at Prime Venture Partners
📌 Episode Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction
02:40 – Creating a Category Before It Existed
08:30 – PMF as a Moving Target
12:20 – 500 Emails & First Customers
15:50 – Why Focus on the US Market
18:40 – Fortune 10 Customer at $25
22:10 – Narrowing Down GTM
25:00 – Selling to Enterprises
30:00 – India vs US Sales Teams
37:00 – Fundraising Lessons
44:20 – How AI is Changing Digital Adoption
47:19 – Making Investors Work for You
📺 Subscribe for more founder journeys
#SaaS #Entrepreneurship #Whatfix #Founders #StartupJourney #VentureCapital #ScalingStartups #IndiaToGlobal #DigitalAdoption #Leadership #StartupEcosystem #FounderLessons #CategoryCreation #PrimeVenturePatnersPodcast
Within three months we would have sent more than 500 personalized emails, got around 30-35 demos in close two weeks, and that's how Wattfix started.
Speaker 2:They've raised $270 million like to date and have close to 900 plus employees being used by over 700 customers across 40 plus countries, including 85 plus Fortune 500 customers.
Speaker 1:We both were engineers. We didn't know anything. We iterated, we learned. The VCs asked for DocMoho. Bigger time, bigger time. We sold it for $25 a month Okay, because I didn't bother about the price.
Speaker 2:I wanted that logo.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so from 50k to 250k to million dollars. After first 5-6 customers we started focusing on US. Now suddenly I can sign quarter million deals, half a million deals, million dollar deal. 95% of revenue comes from us. Wow, 5% comes from us.
Speaker 2:And as you raise the growth rounds, what are the fundraising strategies?
Speaker 1:Geography- persona, your segment, your use case. The narrower, the faster, yeah. So I think that's where a lot of founders get confused. Actually, when there's a bigger time, start going very horizontal. You go early, of course you can do it, but it can be done later. We got Cisco Investments, we got F Prime Capital in Boston, along with 8 Roads. They had a Euro presence, Euro UK and Sequoia, PIC15, strong US presence. Softbank is there, Tragear is there. Okay, we have Warburg. There's a saying crying baby gets more milk.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of Prime Ventures Podcast. Today I have a very special guest with me, someone who has put India SaaS on the global world map. Somebody who has built a product which started off as a widget is now a full-blown enterprise product being used by over 700 customers across 40-plus countries, including 85-plus Fortune 500 customers. They've raised $270 million life-to-date and have close to 900-plus employees. Welcome, Khadim, to Prime Ventures Podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here, yeah happy to be here Gaurav.
Speaker 2:So Khadim would love to know the starting journey for WattFix. What are the initial idea? What are the initial insights that led to the starting of WattFix?
Speaker 1:Sure, so started by myself and my co-founder, varak Kumar. We've been working for more than 25 years, so prior to starting up, actually we were working in Huawei Telecom building PI product line for Huawei, both on the engineering side. We never had exposure to sales and marketing, so set the context, so we came out. That was something around 2011-12 timeframe. A lot of businesses were moving online, trying to take advantage of online presence, social media search right, to take advantage of online presence, social media search right. So we thought why not build something to help these small businesses to leverage their social and search presence? We built a tool called Search Enabler. We got an initial set of customers 50-60 paying customers. It was premium try and buy.
Speaker 1:What we found was we didn't get a strong product market fit. There was a lot of churn. People were not realizing the ROI. But while solving the problem of helping customers, we realized that they need a lot more handholding and the traditional mechanism of handholding doesn't work and we created guidance for some of our help where they can actually complete their task, and that button was called Fixit, where they click and it will help them. A lot of people loved it and they said can I use this Fixit feature for my application for my customers. That really made us think like, okay, this looks a little disruptive. We tried to Google, we tried to see if something is there. We couldn't find anything because it was no category. Only thing we were getting was LMS or support tools or training tools. We thought, okay, maybe this is a good problem to solve and we reverted and that's how.
Speaker 1:WhatFix started.
Speaker 2:Got it. That's a very interesting journey. I mean a lot of times when we see founders as well. Right, they pick up on an idea and they, over time, they realize, talking to customers, that what will work will not work. Hence, like saying close to the customer is very important in the early days. Right now, whatfix operates in a category called DAP Digital Adoption Platforms. Was that a category back then or was it something new that you were trying to build and create? How did the customer awareness happen over time? See?
Speaker 1:I think everybody would have heard like any point of time, there are several other people solving the same problem. Yes, in different parts of the world. Right, but since it's not a well-defined category, you don't know how to look for right. Like, as I was mentioning earlier, when we started something like we started WhatFix, we were trying to solve the problem of onboarding learning support. So we started Googling and figuring out, like, what other product exists and we didn't find anything similar. Because we were looking for learning management systems or support tools. We thought probably we are the one, we are the only one, and we started initially.
Speaker 1:We started, we started calling that, okay, we'll simplify your onboarding. There was no keyword right, and that's how we used to also do Google and all after a few months there was like always, like oh shit, moment. There are some other guys also solving the same problem. Somebody started before us, somebody started around time. What we started? Different people were calling it different. Some were calling it guidance system, some were calling it onboarding tool, some were calling it product learning, online product learning or something like that. Gradually, as the problem statement evolved, with the help of Gartner, this category was coined as digital adoption solutions and the players like us started calling ourselves a digital adoption solutions, and the players like us OneFix started calling ourselves a digital adoption platform, Right Right, and since the category started getting created, awareness increased, RFP started coming out and inbound also started.
Speaker 1:Well, ticket size increased. But early on, as you asked, there was no category. We used to call ourselves with different names. At some point we also called ourselves performance support system. For a while we were trying to see what resonates, how we can latch on some existing budgets and all. But yeah, eventually it became digital adoption solution in platforms.
Speaker 2:Got it and what you mentioned started off more as a widget and today the Ful enterprise product right. What are the journey from there? How did that transition happen?
Speaker 1:So we started as a very pinpointed solution where we can actually handhold customers on any software. So we created a help widget where they can click find a help and when they click on the help, it will start guiding them. As we started working with customers, more features evolved around that People needed different kind of widgets, pop-ups, auto nudges, segmentations and all this stuff. I'll still bucket this like an adoption tool for web. As we started going deeper into enterprises, they wanted to solve this adoption problem for hundreds of softwares and several of the softwares were not on web right Like what they're saying. Some fleet management system.
Speaker 1:They were saying okay, I have mobile first solution. There was some legacy solution which were desktop, can you solve that? So we started becoming a full stack adoption tool. We started building desktop. We were a little late in mobile, so we acquired a company called Leap in 2019, 2020. So that made us a full adoption across any type of software. So if I go to a CIO, if they have hundreds of software, we can say we can solve that problem.
Speaker 1:As we started working across software, we realized a lot more understanding of how the workflows perform, what are the gaps in the workflows, what are the different features in the software perform. Because many of this visibility is not there with these folks. Because those visibilities are with the product managers who sell the software, but the consumers don't have the B2B companies and it's not easy to provide that visibility because they cannot instrument the source code, because they don't have access to source code. But we were very good on the web, via extensions, via playing on the browser or SDKs on the Windows or Mac. We use the same technology to actually understand the clickstream and come up with analytics. So we created product analytics on third-party software. So from full-stack adoption tool to now analytics. Further, we extrapolated analytics to give enterprise-wide view. We call it enterprise insights. So this is how we evolved.
Speaker 1:Now, if you look at the digital transformation cycle because that's what we started getting into we learned that we need to help customers with digital transformation and we were solving the problem primarily post-go-live. That's a half of the solution. So post-go-live we help them in improving their option. We help them in the measurement what happens beforego-live. We help them in improving their option. We help them in the measurement what happens before go-live. A lot of stuff's happening there as well.
Speaker 1:A lot of customers say can you help us Even before we go live? Making awareness, training people, making them understand. We don't want them to wait till the production or we don't want them to touch the production system. So we started helping them measurement before go-live as well, as created another product called Mirror. It can simulate the environment, make people ready. If customers don't want their employees to touch the production environment, they can actually learn on the simulated environment. So whole digital transformation cycle now we can cover Right from simulation to onboarding to learning in the flow of work, with measurement across not only at the application level, at the process level, at the enterprise level. So that's how the whole ecosystem and the portfolio evolved.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 2:That's very interesting, right? I mean, here you're trying to build something which is category creating. Nothing has been done like this before. So a couple of questions there, right, how do you figure out what a building is the right thing, right, one? And second, what a building makes business sense. I mean, you can solve a problem for one customer, but you need, like, thousands of customers for it to be like a large, viable business. So how do you validate whether what you're doing is right? And second, is there a large market for that? When you're building something which is new and category creating, I'm sure there'll be multiple answers to this.
Speaker 1:What worked for us is actually the problem we were trying to solve. Of course, initially we were a little quite spread across. So of course, initially we were a little quite spread across when we narrowed down that, okay, we are going to solve this problem for enterprises, for softwares where they're used internally by employees. So now we are narrowing down, we call it employee experience. Now, who will be the people who will be in charge for this? Right? So let's say, l&d and internal IT. So now, when you speak to several of those L&Ds and you start realizing, okay, it's their responsibility to ensure that there's a hand-holding upon the software for all the employees and IT is responsible for adoption. When you talk to similar personas and they also talk the same language, now you realize, okay, across thousands of enterprises probably the same persona exists and they have a similar set of problems. But if you don't have a clear persona, then maybe it's hard to replicate, right, because you need that repeatability. Where you're for a persona, you can create that pitch, resonate their the value levers, what they are looking for, the kpis, what they want to influence, and then you can actually replicate across a similar person, across several companies so that that worked for us. Another to like. Let's say, if we have done that, like we talk about product market, yes, right, so what we have learned.
Speaker 1:Or like, product market fit is again a moving target. Right, I might have achieved a product market fit for a, let's say, a sales operation person who is buying WhatFix on a top of Salesforce, giving me $30,000, $50,000 or something. Now, if I have to become a large company of a few hundred million dollars, how do I grow? Because that person has a check size like they can sign maybe $50,000. Like, if you had seen the journey of Salesforce, anyone 50k. Now they are signing maybe 20-30 million dollars. Right, because otherwise it's very hard to get a billion and a quarter right. Same way, for us, like I can't sign a thousand customers every year to move the needle, I need to also grow up the deal sizes. So from 50k to 250k to million dollars. But when you start going up the ticket size, the authority who approves that budget or the decision maker goes up.
Speaker 1:Now I can't go and tell a CIO who is owning, let's say, 250 million dollar or billion dollar budget on the software stack. I'm going to improve your software tool for a sales team. It isn't significant, right? So something has to be there. So my product market fit for that person has changed.
Speaker 1:So now, as I was mentioning earlier how the product portfolio evolved, now for that person, I am giving the enterprise wide view that, okay, you are spending several hundreds of millions of dollars on a software stack or a digital transformation projects. I can ensure you that you get the clear, measurable, first of all measure the outcome ROI and then I'll give you tools to improvise that pre-go-live, post-go-live. If something is not working, maybe you can cut the licenses. If something is not working and you nearly need it, maybe I'll give you the adoption tools across different stack to improvise it. Now that if I would not have built all this platform, maybe that level product market fit I would not have achieved. Now suddenly I can sign quarter million deals, half a million deals, million dollar deals, and I feel, as we move forward, the journey goes on. Maybe tomorrow, if I want a 5 million, 10 million dollar deal size in a single check, maybe more value needs to be created.
Speaker 2:We'll come back to this, like the journey from like a widget to a SM, but before that, like taking a step back and just going back to the initial journey itself. Right, you mentioned that both you and Vara were not from business backgrounds or like sales and marketing background. Both of you are techies. So how do you go about like doing the initial GTM, figuring out the initial set of customers, validating your product? Like a lot of founders in the early days, they build like really nice product but they struggle with like go to market in the initial days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I think when we did the first product search enabler, we did similar mistake, like most of the founders would do. Right, like we all. We assume, if we are from engineering background, that we build people will come. Yes, Nobody comes.
Speaker 1:Specifically, we want to sell to B2B. So what we decided to first do MVP and get the validation before you build. But it's hard actually to do it. But we did that actually. We created a mock-up pages. We created a landing page without actually a real running product. We have that small thing working on previous product, that fix it button and all. And we, what we did is actually we were only two people.
Speaker 1:Company Vara started giving me 25, 30 email IDs every day. I used to review those websites, the support pages, and create a personalized emailer and send it to them With a demo like how this will work for your product or your site. Within three months we would have sent more than 500 personalized emails, got around 30-35 demos and closed two deals. That was my first two deals. It was pure outbound and that's how we started our GTM. We both were engineers. We didn't know anything. We iterated, we learned. Then we thought, okay, one thing which was very clear for us was, if we know the customers, their requirement, building is not going to be hard for us because we know the tech. What is hard for us is DTM, because we don't know anything.
Speaker 1:So let's double down on that. So we did the first hiring of a salesperson. I was doing sales, so two sellers Vara was only fixing bugs or requirements. Second person we hired was also sales guy. Third guy we hired was a marketing guy. What I was overburdened it was only bug fixing. Features were slowed down. Then we hired two engineers. So we went. That's how, and when the first seller came in, he shadowed me for the first couple of sales. After that I used to shadow him and my initial thing was also we used to have daily stand-up with the sellers. Never discuss when you're closing the deal, what are the next step, Something very first principle approach. We tried and it kind of worked.
Speaker 2:Right. That's amazing. I mean, basically you did things initially which would not scale right, but it gave you like enough and more perspective of the customer, insights from the customer, just to add.
Speaker 1:Actually things really worked out for us because personally involved in first 15-20 sales or I led the first 15-20 sales we didn't know pricing, we didn't know how to even properly create sales collaterals and all. But when we went in person or when we were directly getting on the Zoom, we used to iterate very quickly. Skype back then. I'm guessing yeah, Skype. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:So we used to iterate very, very quickly actually, and first two sellers also hustled with us accordingly, and then, once we started, we knew that this is the pitch, this is the aha moment in my sales process and all we doubled down those messages on our website. Then we started a little messages on our website.
Speaker 1:Then we started a little bit on Google Ads, so Google Ads got us to one and a half million dollars. Wow Right, we started. Apparently we did some more stuff, like we added. I personally wrote almost like more than 100 answers on Quora, because Quora was a little bit more popular. Getapp, g2, crowd, right, so those started giving us a lot of deals, but mostly were SMBs actually, but that got us to like maybe one and a half million dollars.
Speaker 2:Okay, wow, that's amazing. And when did you in this whole journey, when did you decide to like focus on the US market? Today, almost 70% of revenue comes from the US, if I'm right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you mentioned, even though we have customers across a lot of countries, but we are very concentrated, like 70%, close to 70%, comes from US. Only around 22-23% comes from UK, germany, france. So if you look at these 3-4 countries it's almost like 92-93% of revenue. India even though we started from India, india is around maybe 2-3%. Austria is another 2-3%. Austria is another 2-3%. So like 5-6 countries before rank, like that's my 99% of the business, very concentrated Because that's my design.
Speaker 1:So when we started selling VodFix initially, once we got 5-6 customers, we realized that if we want to build because we initially did some demos in India, probably we were pretty quick to understand it's hard to get money out of this market specifically for a new category. Those people are still spending on CRMs and ERPs. Right, if you want to build a $100 million or something new category which is still getting defined, we need to go to the market which is very early adopter and natural choice was US, one market where you can build a large company. So after first five, six customers, we started focusing on US. So even my personal outbounds, everything was US. We started working on the US time zone. Out of my two sellers I said one will focus on US and one will focus on India. So very early on in my first single digit of customers, like first 10 customers, I had one from us, one from europe right.
Speaker 2:So very early on we started, got it and the initial days right. How do you build credibility as a like a very young startup with like few customers, and that too in a new category? Right, how do you build credibility with US customers? A lot of people say, I mean, these days we hear a lot like you need to be closer to a customer, move to the US, meet them in person. But I'm assuming you did a lot of that remote, setting out of India or in Bangalore, right? So how do you build?
Speaker 1:that credibility actually got out right. It was a new category so probably we were in the level playing field with other players. Our presence probably didn't matter so much If it's existing category. If somebody is going and selling a CRM today in an office in Coca-Cola or GE somewhere, I might need to be present because somebody is not going to write a check of 5-10 million dollars without saying.
Speaker 1:But it's a new category, something new problem people don't even know what's the category name. They don't know what are the alternatives. You have some kind of an advantage, right. So probably that worked for us. A second is actually important to build trust, right when you are very early on. How do you build trust? You need a couple of logos at least, right? So if I go to some company in US and say, okay, I have Google as a customer, or some Bank of America or some other customer, people will start trusting Okay, they are working with the big guys and maybe I can trust them. But how do you get the first two or three? That's a chicken and egg problem. That's where a lot of hustle is required.
Speaker 1:What we did is actually when somebody started comparing us with some other legacy players or something else, when we started going deeper, we realized every larger enterprise has something very specific or unique they need, and if we can identify that, we can actually really put a whole narrative around that. Okay, without this feature, without this particular thing, you may not be able to achieve the success some legacy player might want to do it, but it's not a priority. They would say I will do it in two years and we say, okay, we are small guys, we are nimble, we are agile, we will put our 100% to make you successful. Of course, everybody will not buy that, but you just need couple of them to buy it. So we got that initial couple of guys, really big companies.
Speaker 1:In fact we got one of the fortune 500 actually very early on and then we really used to squeeze that to every customer we used to every prospect. We used to go, we used to code that name and Like those couple of logos which you want. Initially you don't want to win that logo, you don't want to lose that logo, so pricing doesn't matter. You might want to do something very specific for them, that's fine. Get those and then actually utilize them as much as possible and then, of course, gradually you will also stabilize everything. So that's how it worked for us. So I remember one first Fortune 500 company which we onboarded Sound very stupid here. We sold it for $25 a month Because I didn't bother about the price, I wanted that logo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, so the yeah. So it's more about getting that one anchor customer that I can leverage to get more.
Speaker 1:The other guy who was saying that logo doesn't ask like how much is all that yeah?
Speaker 2:This guy's using you. Yeah, yeah, I remember one of.
Speaker 1:In fact, I'll tell you that was a not even fortune fact. It was fortune 10. Oh wow yeah got it.
Speaker 2:so from here, like how do you build this into a repeatable process right as you start scaling? I mean the first initial set of customers understand you need to hustle, you need to like navigate your way through founder-led sales, but to build a large enterprise you have to make this into a repeatable process that somebody else can drive. How did that transition happen? What did you do about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when we started getting few customers enterprise customers we realized they were a little bit spread, like we were going behind some customer experience use case where they can use Watfix for their end customers onboarding. Some are using internally Within internally also. Some are using on a HR platform, some are using on a sales platform, some are using on a procurement Like G-team becomes very hard.
Speaker 1:Right yeah, Person also starts differing a bit, Like on the CX side the product manager is a buyer. On the EX side there are some time HR operations, there are some time IT L&D. That becomes really hard to train people and make a repeatable process. So we said let's narrow down. So we narrowed down into initially to start with to HR platform and sales platform, Salesforce and SuccessFactors and we realized that SuccessFactors, there's a lot of spend. We ended Salesforce events. So Salesforce, there was a lot of Salesforce events called Dreamforce. Within three days we pitched to around 300 people there. It was a small booth. We were probably the only Indian company attending at that point. Now a lot of companies are coming.
Speaker 2:That's called Agentforce, yeah.
Speaker 1:So there where we realized actually, that spend is so high Like even a glass cleaning company says, I have 250 seats of Salesforce. There are some companies which have logistics, Many varieties of different businesses, right, Some mining companies and all and they have thousands of seats. Some are spending $2 million, $5 million, and when we say, okay, I'm going to spend, like this is going to charge you $20,000, $30,000, or $10,000.
Speaker 1:They never used to flinch because they're already spending a million dollars and this is going to help them to improve their adoption or ensure the.
Speaker 1:ROI on the underlying platform. They used to agree. After coming back, we said, okay, let's focus on that platform. All of our Google ads, a lot of events around that, a lot of outbound, all resonated like all actually went behind that. In fact, out of first 100, 200 customers, I feel 40, 45% will be on that platform. So that really narrowed down our made our pitch of whether it is a shop or our GTM activities were very, very aligned. And then once we land, then we said, okay, we can do more. And after Salesforce for landing, we used HR software and then now we use many other motions as well.
Speaker 1:As we evolved, like channel-wise, everything came in right. Like we had Outbound, we had at some point we started partnership alliances as well. Google was working, events started working. At some point we realized that, okay, we are landing, well, we are acquiring logos, but we're not able to successfully expand. So that was another motion we had to really iterate and build. We thought sellers can actually we can give them logos, they will expand.
Speaker 1:But then they were very transactional because they were wired to do new transactions. Somebody had to really map their account, understand what are the critical projects going on? How do we, who are the decision makers. That required a lot of patience and research. So that's a little different skill. We thought success guys will do it, but they were. When they started doing something like that, they were compromising on the value delivery. In a new category, value delivery is very important. We said, okay, that's also not the right place. So we created a new team. We called account managers who were responsible only for expansions. So sales team got divided sell AEs for new logos and AMs for expansions. That started working. So a lot of iterations, a lot of different things to actually make it work and then make it scale.
Speaker 2:Right. So all of these things, while this was happening, were there established playbooks that you tried to use or was it all like first principles-based thinking, learning, iterating it's a combination actually right, like if you can try first principle, everything.
Speaker 1:But a lot of people have been there and that right. Why not learn? So, like every time, every quarter, I used to meet with several people in the US, several people in India who have been there, who have learned from them, like what worked, what didn't work, and then really think from your variables, like what are your variables? Will this playbook work, or this playbook work as is? We need tweaking or it has to be completely different. See, answers were very different, like some people. Many people told my sellers will do both expansion. Some people success will do expansion. Some people told there has to be separate team because of XYZ reason. Now I have to pick up which is the right for me. Sometimes you pick up wrong thing and you have to apply it in the right way according to your variables and also these variables also will evolve, right, maybe what worked for me yesterday may not work tomorrow, or what didn't work today might work tomorrow got it.
Speaker 2:Now one very important question that I want to like get your views on. In India, we In India we see a lot of companies like young founders starting up, trying to build software. Right, and it's easy to start in the SMB mid-market space. You have easy access to customer decision makers. Right, you can only start there. But then it has its own inherent challenges low ECV, high churn, right. Eventually everybody wants to move upmarket, but only a few people are able to do that and you have done it like really well. So could you walk us through that journey of like moving from, say, an SMB mid-market customer to enterprise customer? How does that happen? What does it take from a product point of view, gtm point of view, from a team structure point of view?
Speaker 1:So we also started with many of those like SMB and see very important is to if you are building a large, if you want to build a large company out of SMB, you cannot go out and knocking every door right. It has to be a lot more. Inbound also has to work and many people have done successfully, like Freshworks and many other guys actually. So we thought we'll build a community platform where people will create the free guiding system, help, tutorials which are interactive, visual, and that will become viral and it will become the cost of acquisition will be lower. We tried that for a few quarters. We realized it's very hard to moderate and keep it. It is to break a lot and because of that and then we did a lot of Google ads and GitHub and Queras and other stuff we used to get SMBs regularly but the churn was high. What we realized was like our product is not an immediate requirement for an SMB founder or someone. They're looking for growth. We help in onboarding, realization of ROI, post-sale and the sales is in the mind, is the top of the mind share for those guys. So it becomes suddenly we become nice to have and then it's okay, this is not the market. We need to go up market. We didn't have a choice actually. We realized that and that's where we how do we get into enterprise? We did get one or two enterprises inbound and other places, but we need to make it as a well-designed or as a process. And that's where we started doing a couple of events, like we did an event which I was mentioning, the Dreamforce, and where we learned a lot. The whole messaging across the website and everything evolved for enterprises and we iterated on that and built the sales accordingly.
Speaker 1:In terms of channels, we continued with Google Ads. We didn't stop that, but we used to now filter a lot Saying, okay, google ads, we didn't stop that, but we used to now filter a lot Saying okay, we're not going to qualify anyone who's going to give us less than $10,000. Okay, and for the rest of the guys, we never used to give them the price. We remove the price from the website so that it goes to SDR and AE so that they can qualify, address the problem and then give the quotations. On the product side and all a lot of system has to have a wall, like if you roll for SMB, it has to be what do you call that? Ease of use is very important, like it should be, without handholding. People should be able to use it, but when you go to enterprise, a lot of integrations are required.
Speaker 1:Like I need to integrate with underlying platforms or Salesforce or anything. It has to work with multiple browsers. Security becomes very important, like we went through all the ISOs and SOCs and other compliances. Then roadmap has to be very clear because people will ask for roadmaps and other stuff. So product also evolved Scale a lot of testing on the scale, actually load testing and other stuff and all Data privacy security would cover that. Sorry, this one, where are you actually hosting? But that also becomes very important, like European countries wanted data to be within Europe whereas the US wanted within US and so on. So a lot of things evolved over a period of time Product, our GTM, our security and other stuff. And that's how we were able to get into enterprise Got it, got it and but it was not like we build everything first and then went.
Speaker 2:It was a journey, organic journey. It was journey, got it got it.
Speaker 1:But most important was to be very, very clear that, okay, this is the market, this is the segment we want to target. Doing both doesn same with geography also. Doing multiple geographies to start with is not very hard right.
Speaker 2:So I mean essentially at least you need to like be as narrow as possible in the beginning, right, whether it's geography, persona, your segment, your use case.
Speaker 1:The narrower, the faster you would be and then you keep on expanding maybe VCs ask for a lot more bigger time.
Speaker 2:Bigger time, yeah so time, for this could be everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I think that's where a lot of founders get confused. Actually, when there's a bigger time, they start going very horizontal. To go early, of course you can do it, but it can be done later.
Speaker 2:Now I mean one of the things that happens in early days, right? I mean, in your case, it was a very conscious decision to go to the US one to move from bed market to enterprise, right? A lot of times you're leaving money on the table or low-hanging fruits, whether it's India customers, I can meet them and close the deal in one week. Or I'm doing well with SMBs. Why do I need to leave customers who are less than $10,000 ACVs? How do you change the DNA of the company? Because on one side, if you have an excellent investor, they would want to ask for growth. Your sales guys are saying I'm closing this deal of $8,000, just asking me not to do this and like hunt for $80,000 deal.
Speaker 1:That's a tough thing actually, right? I'll tell you when the tougher problem, like when we were at $1.5 million, we were doing two major use cases right, of course there are several sub use cases. One was selling to product leaders for using VodFix for onboarding their customers and one for using VodFix internally for the employees, where the buyers were different IT or L&D and all. At some point we realized this is also very big. Sorry, these two are very different. We need to select one. And we were already a million dollar, I think, and at that point when we did, the revenue was 50-50. Okay, but if we continue to do that, our product will not evolve in a right way Because the requirement was very.
Speaker 1:We started realizing that product managers need lots more bells and whistles in terms of customization. When I asked them that, okay, you need to use this API, they were saying, fine, I have engineers who will do it. When you ask an L&D guy saying, okay, you need to use this API, they will imagine they will not think, okay, where is my engineers? They will think, okay, I have to outsource to Infosys, tcs, who will do this, how much they want to charge this. Right, they need very ease of deployment, ease of maintenance. These guys don't bother about that different set of requirements. If I do all, I will be neither either or there I still got to 1 million. Yeah, yeah should have been.
Speaker 1:But at that point we decided, okay, we need to do one. So it was a hard decision. There was a lot of debate internally so we said, okay, we'll not churn this case, but any feature comes from EX and if multiple customers are requesting, we'll deploy that, right. So eventually, what happened? We became very strong player in this. Today, 95% of revenue comes from this. Wow, 5% still comes from this. It's still there. Yeah, we also many people know a lot of features actually applicable here. It works, but that was by design.
Speaker 1:So our win rate also, like earlier, like we were winning, let's say, two or one out of ten in competitive, I think, because we were here, there and all. But at some point we started winning six out of ten. Like, if we lose here, we would be like frustrated why did we lose? What did we do wrong? Why are our platformers here? If we lose, we don't care, right. So now, if you see, at that point we were actually, we gave up this revenue. We were losing $8,000, $12,000, winning $100,000 deals, $250,000 deals, right. So we accelerated. Temporarily. It might have felt that we might not.
Speaker 1:So, similarly, right if somebody wants to make a choice with the geography, right. If I could do India, I could do US, I could do UK. Everything sounds intuitive. But then to make a geography successful, I need to have a product marketing, I need to do events. I need to basically always say, if you can't, if you send us all, you need to put a lot of cover fire right. Yeah, so you need to give a lot of collaterals, battle cards. You need to do local events. You need to do ABM, maybe for that local hosting right. You need to strike some alliances in that geography Post that you need sales engineers, support engineers, success guys. That's how you make geography successful, right. You will churn very fast, make a leaky bucket. So it requires too much for making one geography also successful like I was explaining about a use case.
Speaker 1:So we out. Okay, let's focus on less geographies. But whichever geography you want to focus, go 100%, Invest. So that's where the problem happens, Like I get one deal here, one deal there, one deal there, but it sounds okay very, very early on to get an understanding of the product market fit, but at some point they need to narrow down. Go 100% so that you get velocity.
Speaker 2:Right, right, as you've done this, like multiple times, choices that you have to make, whether it is India, us SMB Enterprise, cx, ex, looking back, do you think there could be some framework that you can use to like make these decisions, whether it's your internal capability, market size, whatever it could be like anything that simplifies the decision making process not that you've done it multiple times, so each decision was because of different for different aspects.
Speaker 1:Actually, right, the use cases which I did was actually to make our product available. Right, product having a strong differentiators against the competition. If I do multiple use cases, that's a problem, right. So I do hear from a lot of founders when I ask them what is a differentiator? They say I do A plus B plus C, whereas there are three different companies for A, b, c. There's a reason for this. They go D. Right. So that's a rational year.
Speaker 1:When I do geography, like I was mentioning, from the aspect of too much of operational challenge, right, if I do too many geographies, how do I go 100% in the geography? Just add one more example Many times I've seen like a seller does there are two sellers in the company and they do multiple geographies. Why? Because occasionally I get leads from india, sometimes from us, sometimes from uk. Now, how do you do slas? Yeah, like somebody responds to you in us at 1 am, but you can't expect that seller to be awake at 1 am because you ask them to start morning 9 am shift with the india team as well. Yes, so now you are not responding at 1 a because you have asked them to start morning 9am shift with the India team as well.
Speaker 1:Yes, so now you are not responding. At 1am next day you respond. Your turnaround time is like more than 24 hours. Very hard to win those deals so you need to go all in there. So now geography is. I would say one of the important criteria is your operations, how you settle the operations and set up the operations, etc. So every decision you make, I think there is a major reason, like one variable which is going to impact that decision, whether it's your competitive building of differentiators or operations, or sometimes maybe size. Actually, a TAM right.
Speaker 1:Like SMB versus enterprise. In our case, nice to have versus must have. I couldn't have built a large company, but I have to build here. So those are. I would not say there is one thing every decision there is a different variable.
Speaker 2:There got it very interesting and see we work with a lot of early stage companies, right, and where, as you said, like initially you're doing everything like from sales to product, everything right. But as you start scaling up you have to let go of things right, and we a lot of times we see it very hard for founders to let go of because they're the ones like who were driving product, who are doing sales. At what point do you think it is okay and like is's some way where you can build comfort as a founder, to say, okay, now let me bring in the next set of leaders who can like drive it and let me take a backseat and focus on other important things.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty comfortable with that from very early on, right like. What has worked for me is when I got my first sales guy on board, so I asked him to. There was no onboarding checklist, or there's no training and all.
Speaker 1:I said, okay, just join me with first three, four deals and then you do deals, I'll join you. That's it right. So when he joined in a few deals with me, he learned, and when he was doing the deals, I was sitting with him. If there was any objection which he couldn't answer, I was answering and I also built my confidence that, okay, he's able to do it After that I don don't have to. Right, then I have to start looking at something else.
Speaker 1:Similarly, let's say, if I were to give an example of marketing, right, we really went uh deep at some point on google ads and when google ads started working, that initial experiments was done by us, the founders now I need to. I thought, okay, now let me get someone. So I hired uh whipple. So he was expert in google ads. He really went really deep and some things which we never knew. Actually he did that right. But now I don't have to poke my nose there because he's doing fine.
Speaker 1:I have to start thinking about like, what next? What are the other marketing channels I need to focus on? So we started focusing on events. Right, well, this is it. Rakhar and other guys are doing, couple of guys are doing sales, so that channel has been established. Like from Google ads it goes to them and then that inbound mechanism.
Speaker 1:So I have to look at what is the next channel. I have to do it. Then, on the sales side, I started looking at personally at SIs, at alliances. So whatever starts working, hire the person who can take it, take it next, take it further and scale and as a founder, you can start focusing on the next area which I think you need to experiment, because you are the best guy to 0, to 1, you can do experiment. So today also right, if I look at what I and Vara also do, I think we delegate as much as possible without losing control. So put that checks and balances. Now we have systems in place and all. We take the regular reporting and all. But keep yourself free for the things which only you can do.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Right. So of course people will do mistakes, but that's also another way to learn fast. Yes, people get bolder.
Speaker 2:People start owning things Great. In this age, I think no conversation can be done without talking about AI. You work a lot of enterprises right. We have heard mixed feedback. A lot of enterprises are excited about adopting AI. Some are still skeptical, whether it's about data privacy, exposing the data to models, etc. So what has been your experience working with enterprises and their expectation on AI? How are they thinking about AI?
Speaker 1:Last couple of years I've been speaking to a lot of CIOs of large enterprises, even several fortunes, and all what I've seen is like, if I have to tell you about 18, 24 months prior, everybody wanted to know what's happening in the AI, what you guys are doing in AI, what you are seeing around. They used to ask everybody was curious but do not deploy. When we started demonstrating like, okay, these are other things which we are building, everybody saw that and one of the CIOs said, okay, is it working in my company? If it is working, I'm going to go out and immediately stop what fix? Because we are not sure about information security and data controls and all this stuff.
Speaker 1:They were like 18-24 months back. Their IT teams and IS teams were still learning how to evaluate AI features and products. Actually, fast forward six months, last six months, what I've seen is most of the companies now have AI committees or AI task force. These are large enterprises and they have figured out some of the use cases which they think are the low-hanging and where there's a minimal risk and they can actually try out. Ai.
Speaker 1:Their IS team governance team, and everybody are now good, capable actually to evaluate. Ai. They have started building their own infrastructure and all. So now I think enterprise companies are a lot more ready, of course, not at a very wide deployment, but selected use cases. They are now aggressively going Another 12 to 18 months fast forward. I think they'll go very wide, got it, got it.
Speaker 2:The other thing that we keep hearing and would like to get your inputs on that is these days, companies like and these are like AI companies call them SaaS. Ai companies are able to scale up very fast, right. I mean fast right. I mean in the earlier days, like five years back, one million revenue in one year was like a good milestone. Today that has changed from one million to five million and companies are able to do like 10, 20, 30, 50 million, scale in like a year's time, and not only consumer products or enterprise products. Are you seeing some of that happening from a customer adopting it fast, basically making it sooner?
Speaker 1:It's all about tailwind right, like, if you look at before cloud, maybe getting to 1 million would have been very long. Yes, post cloud, I think everybody wanted to get on that. There was a lot of pull, was there, right? And that's where SEOs and Google people started doing a lot Same way. Now, with this AI era, time is even bigger. Yeah, everybody is ready at the same point of time because awareness is very, very high. So the pull is even much, maybe 10x stronger than what it used to be when the cloud started actually. So everybody wants to experiment and nobody wants to be left behind. Right, there's a FOMO. So probably what we used to see in 0 to 1, now we are seeing in maybe zero to five. So, of course, as I was mentioning, everybody wants to hear what we are doing in AI, what others, what is happening in AI and, if it resonates, what the low-hanging use cases or low-hanging fruits, what they have identified. People would like to. People want to try, very, very quickly Got it Okay.
Speaker 2:So there is like propensity to try. There is, as I said, ai committees, there are budgets.
Speaker 1:Just need to hit the right people with the right use case.
Speaker 2:I got it. One question right which comes and this again we're seeing keep coming up now with AI right. We discussed this earlier India versus US right and you yourself said that India is a very hard market to like, build and get money out of. Do you think that has changed with time, since the time you started building to now? Will it change? Because these days we do see we meet a lot of AI companies who are selling to enterprises in India. We do see people tracking 50, 60, $70,000 deals, which was a lot of in the past. Right, I mean, very few companies could do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you see a lot of things change, right? Even if you look at like 10 years prior when Watfix started or Freshworks or Chargebees, and we all were very small companies, right, and we also consume so much software. Yes, same thing has happened on the consumer side, whether it's Zomato's or Swiggy's or Flipkart's. And, all right, believe we would have built I'm forgetting about the banking, not other sectors, only consumer tech and B2B tech we would have actually 100 companies who can consume a lot of softwares. We use like maybe 150 plus softwares and a lot of Indian and we pay a lot of them 50k, 100k as well, right? So getting those out of that 100, 200 pool of tech companies in India, indian bond, I think getting that first million is literally much faster and easier, so that itself can get you product market fit.
Speaker 1:Understanding, narrowing down, refining or sharpening your product can happen very, very quickly. So that part has definitely changed. So 0 to 1 has become easier compared to what it was. 1 to 10, I'm not sure yet I'm not the right guy to answer. Not the right guy to answer. It might have become easier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, we do see even 1 to 10 happening, but 10 to 100 is where it's still unknown. Yeah Right, switching gears a little bit. Over the last 10 years you have raised over $270 million, right.
Speaker 1:And it was a good thing and a bad thing.
Speaker 2:Capital is always the good thing. Right it and like have enough room to grow Early stage. Of course they bet a lot more on the team and the founders right, and of course you do validate the market. But team is what you bet on In your experience as you started scaling up and as you raised the growth rounds. What are the fundraising strategy? How did the change right? Which pool of capital did you like tap into? How did that happen? Anything on the fundraising journey?
Speaker 1:I've also learned over as we went through the journey right. So early on we wanted somebody who can really believe in the problem, what we are solving right. We needed somebody who can understand the product understand. So Ashish and Alok, also as part of at the time Helion, they resonated very well because Ashish was a product guy himself, right, and Alok also from enterprise background. And then once we got that product market fit when we were raising Series A, we realized that, okay, gtm is our weakness. Yeah, right, we need to get somebody who can help us there. And by that time we had seen the value what Alok was giving us. So we pushed, we discussed with Alok and he led our Series A.
Speaker 2:So that was from Stellaris.
Speaker 1:So, Stellaris yeah, so by the time I think they had seed round to series A, I think they were split in there, stellaris was formed.
Speaker 1:So from product, we started realizing a lot more GTM. And then we started realizing a lot more that, okay about geography, yeah Right. So that's where we thought, okay, we need to get more, get local guys or somebody who can help in the geography. We got Cisco Investments, we got F Prime Capital in Boston, along with 8 Roads, they had a Europe presence and Sequoia Pick 15, a strong US presence. So that was the mindshare and that's what we got in see, as we started going further, then we needed bigger guys who can actually help us with CIO Connects.
Speaker 1:So SoftBank happened with that mindset and of course, check size also makes a difference. Right, like how you go. And then, as you go forward, similar thought process, like somebody who can actually have a strong presence in the CIO networks and other stuff. And Warburg also happened because they have very good portfolio management team in the US and other places and all Along with that. Another thought process was like we need two or three guys with very deep pockets so that we can give more exits to the existing investors and if we want to raise more rounds, if we do some acquisitions and all, so somebody also somebody can pull in. So that's how we thought okay, softbank is there, dragonu is there. Okay, we have Warburg. So we have three to four guys who have deep pockets, who can back us up multiple times.
Speaker 2:Got it, got it. And one thing that you mentioned, right, I mean, in every funding round you look for investors who could help you, right? That is one thing, that was a major you like make the most out of investors. How do you make investors work for?
Speaker 1:you investor claims yeah, that's why everyone claims and actually I also think most of the investors can also do yes, but actually the onus is on the founders to take that. Yeah, right, because investor is not thinking about your company 24 hours. You are thinking right. So what it's like in series a b time, like we used to investor ask in the board meetings, right Then as we progressed. Now we, like last couple of years, we have a founder's office, cop, dev guy. So they interface a lot, they map the portfolios of the investors and they actually connect our sales guys and all Our sales guys are connected with a lot of portfolio management teams of different investors and directly they help take the help for events and all. I personally then again have my ownership, along with my founder's office to actually identify the advisors expert in marketing sales. So now it's a lot more structured, but I think ownership, I would say, is on the team, on the founders.
Speaker 2:To make the investors work Well you can't expect that.
Speaker 1:you don't ask and somebody like there's a saying crying baby gets more milk. Yeah, so you need to cry a lot Right.
Speaker 2:Great, this has been very insightful, kadim. One last question just to wrap up the discussion. Right, the overall SaaS landscape has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Ai has come in GTM, people have a lot more clarity. There's a lot more talent available. If you had to do this all over again now, starting from scratch, how would you have gone about this? Anything different that you would have done?
Speaker 1:If I have to start now, I know a lot more GTM. I think it's still the same.
Speaker 2:Khadim, who was a techie.
Speaker 1:If I was the same guy I would have made the same number of mistakes, but if I have to, some things which I could have done very differently if I were to answer that right, like the journey was a lot of small pivots and hops. Right, like community SME enterprise, I would have tried to understand the value of what did this product deliver and for whom. So that product market rate, even theoretically, I would have thought I validated much earlier with the right segment cohort and I would have saved three years. That's number one. Right, probably I would have needed less funding. That's number one.
Speaker 1:Second, actually a lot of things we learned on the journey. Right, like many part of demand chain I didn't know. Many part of alliances I didn't know. Some things we learned on the journey. Right, like many part of demand chain I didn't know Many part of alliances I didn't know. Some things we tried prematurely. It didn't work. Some things we tried pretty late. Some things we tried in the wrong way, like expansions and all Many places we threw a lot more people on the problem statements and all right. So many of those mistakes. We avoid it. If I had to rebuild all this thing, probably instead of 800 people, maybe I would have built this thing with 500 people, because I would have learned how to hire, how to align people in the right way how to make best use of processes and systems and tools.
Speaker 2:Great Khadun, pleasure talking to you. There's a lot more that we could discuss time. Maybe next time we'll have a detailed discussion.
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