As part of the PMF Convo series, I recently spoke to Srikrishnan Ganesan, cofounder and CEO of Rocketlane, a SaaS startup that sells software for better customer onboarding, implementation, and professional services automation. In June ’24, Rocketlane raised a $24m Series B co-led by 8VC, Z47, and Nexus Ventures on the back of strong market momentum in the U.S. market. This was on the back of an $18m Series A in January ‘22 and a $3m seed in mid-’21. Rocketlane is emerging as a breakout SaaS play from India, and in this convo, Sri covers the Rocketlane story giving us glimpses of the decisions that led to their success. In addition he also covers his learnings on the importance of the market and picking the space to play in well. This emerges as a key takeaway from the episode.

In our conversation, we covered

  • the journey of his first startup, Konotor, and how he arrived at the unlock that they were playing in the wrong end of the market, and how correcting it led to growth and momentum. 
  • his definition of PMF as pull, and why stranger MRR is important 
  • how they decided the problem they were going after at Rocketlane was worth it, and how they validated the solution / product
  • How they arrived at the community + content playbook that has decisively contributed to Rocketlane’s success.
  • his advice to younger founders and finally, his book recommendations.

An edited transcript of our zoom chat, conducted on 13th August 2024, is below.

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Srikrishnan: We launched inside FreshWorks as Hotline.io again did not have strong PMF (product-market fit) and then relaunched a third time inside Freshworks that’s when the product really took off. And there’s some insights there, and learnings from the previous journey on what we changed and what has informed us on how we want to go about building this time. 

Sajith: Konotor did not have PMF, Hotline did not have PMF but Freshchat had?

Srikrishnan: Yes.

Sajith: No, that’s great as well. So we can cover that too. So if you’re comfortable, just take me through the Konotor, Hotline, Freshchat journey and the journey to PMF, if you’re fine with that.

Konotor’s (Sri’s previous startup) journey to PMF

Srikrishnan: Sure. So, Konotor was a pivot. So we were initially when we started the company, we were trying to build a B2C product, trying to take on WhatsApp with a voice messaging focused experience. Same time Hike came in with a product around messaging, same time WeChat and Line launched in India from China and Japan perspective. So there were a lot of things happening in messaging as a space and we at one point decided that, hey, we want to pivot from building B2C into, hey, we have this messaging capability, why don’t we package it and offer it to others? And the goal was we had seen that customers would give us feedback through voice messages in our own app. So, we thought, what if we package this as a feedback capability for others to add to their app? And the thought evolved into not just feedback but into engagement as an SDK for your app where you can talk to the customer, customer can talk to you, you can have a conversation, can be support, it can be marketing, it can be feedback. So, to facilitate all of that was the idea.

At the outset we thought there are 4 – 5 million apps on Android and Apple App Store and so there is huge TAM was the thought process. And then we thought every app should need this and went to market with this SDK, launched it on Hacker news, launched it on – at that time there was no Product Hunt when we first launched – but sort of put it out there and saw that there were signups but hardly anyone was actually using the product. We literally then started doing this. Hey, let’s meet companies that are building apps and show them what our SDK can do for them.

And literally do door to door sales in Bangalore is what we ended up doing for the next phase where every week I will travel to Bangalore from Chennai, go to wherever there is a whole bunch of startups like Diamond District or Koramangala etc. and go into every office and say, Hey, are you folks building an app and here is what we do and we actually got some traction. We got our first 15 – 20 apps which started using us by just knocking on doors in Bangalore. Then other, it could be friends making introductions to their friends who are building apps. And this was a time where everyone was building apps. So we’ve done all sorts of stuff, like VCs introducing their portfolio companies like Faasos was one of our first paying customers that came through an introduction from Sequoia. OYO came through an introduction from Sequoia. So, things like that started happening over a period of time, but we had very chunky growth. I think at our peak we might have had around 70 – 75 paying customers and all of this took us a good more than a year and a half to get there, to get to 60 – 70 paying customers.

In our first 6 – 7 months, we had 4 paying customers out of 20 that were using us. And it’s purely because we knew that if we asked them for money, they’d probably stop using the product so we didn’t. So, we just let people use it. And this is when this whole mobile thing was at its peak, we had Myntra going mobile only at one point, if you remember they said we’re going to stop the website it’s only going to be a mobile app, things like that were happening. So, ideally we should have had much more traction, but we did not. And we put it down to, okay, we don’t know how to take this to market and we don’t have a good outbound playbook. We were getting some conversations from Southeast Asia. We hardly had any traction in the US and Europe. We had two customers, I mean two companies using us. One was Target and the other was 1-800-Flowers. So, Target paid us a lot of money, but 1-800-Flowers was just using the product. So, this was a state of things when we were about to raise a seed round and during that time it happened that one thing led to the other and we had an offer from a company to acquire us saying, hey, we want to get into this whole mobile messaging space and chat support space.

And once we had that one offer, it actually looked attractive enough for us to consider. And at that point, FreshWorks also came into the picture and said, we will do this deal. And it became almost a no-brainer for us because we didn’t necessarily know… we had plans of “we want to get to this scale, this number, etc.” But I don’t think we had the “here is how we are going to do it”. We were just hustling and it had been three years of running that company. We said, okay, let’s go and build this within FreshWorks, maybe it’ll be better. That’s where the Hotline.io happened, which was essentially a relaunch of our product with some additional capabilities coming from the FreshWorks side like in-app FAQs and so on. So, this became a little more support focused as a product, in app customer support.

We launched this in Feb 2016 and we told ourselves and the FreshWorks team that if we get to a certain milestone within a year, then we’ll consider this like a success. And we actually got only 60% of that milestone. And the realisation was not about  – my goal was I thought, hey, within FreshWorks we’ll have better sales. We can cross sell to their existing customers, it should be easier. But this mobile first mobile only product really didn’t take off at all. Again, we had some good growth in India, Southeast Asia, etc. but globally it wasn’t taking off. And one of the realisations was when we went and spoke to some people in person, I actually took a break from work and went and met all kinds of folks in the space to just understand why am I not seeing traction first? And one of the things I heard is, and this like a senior marketing leader in the US who said, if you look at retail as a category for example for Macy’s, mobile is the 13th biggest store for them that means there are 11 physical stores that are doing more.

There is also online web which is doing more and even within mobile, mobile app is one fifth the size of mobile web and you are servicing only mobile app and most people are not yet in a state where they know what they want to do for their app, So, that’s not a focus for them. They’re doing this, am I building the app for acquiring new customers? Am I building the app for my loyal user base? They’re figuring those things out. So, this whole in-app, customer support engagement is not yet a priority.

That was one realisation we had. At the same time, me and Girish from FreshWorks were at a conference and Shekhar Kirani of Accel was talking about this idea of rising tide lifts all boats. And after that session, both of us stepped outside the conference room and we had the same realisation that we were not playing in a rising tide type market for this product Hotline. So, essentially, we realised that our competitors at that time, there were a couple of firms Helpshift in Pune, there were a couple of folks in the US, none of them were growing fast.

On the other hand, something like Intercom or Drift in the web messaging space, Intercom grew from 1 to 50 million in two years or something. So there was all that traction happening in some other market and we were playing somewhere else and focused only on mobile. In fact, even when customers had told me if you give me this also for mobile web and web, this will be great. I had said, no, there are so many other products that do it for Web; live chat is done and dusted, it’s been out there for so long, our focus is creating this new modern asynchronous messaging experience for mobile, which is like your WhatsApp style chat where you can respond at any time. The business can then respond when they can, you can respond. It’s convenient for you to be able to engage at your convenience. Unlike the old school live chat which exists on websites. So we had that very narrow, here is what we’re going to build and here is why it needs to exist. And even today I would say it needs to exist. It’s not done well by most people. It’s still chat that times you out and so on. And we were going against all of that and saying this needs to be the case.

Finally, relaunched Freshchat for web and mobile and that became the fastest product in FreshWorks to hit various revenue milestones. So just that one change, let’s also build for the web took off like crazy. That was product market fit and I actually wrote a blog post, let me pull that up and share it with you as well. The title for the post was ‘The Market Trumps All Else’. Essentially to say you need to pick the right market, especially as we are founders in our best years, we are usually building these products and at the height of our confidence and we are doing things and in that period, if we don’t do something which has momentum behind it, tailwind behind it, and we are going up against everything else, that we are essentially battling a very hard market, then it’s highly unlikely that you’ll succeed or you need to know what resources you need, what stacked up against you to go and try to succeed in a very hard market.

Sajith: Yeah, I have it here in front of me. Thanks. So, it’s a good segue for the next question. What, according to you when you say Freshchat at PMF and what is your definition on what does PMF mean to you? I mean just intuitively as a founder, what does it mean to you?

Sri’s definition of PMF

Srikrishnan: For me, it means the market pulls your product. It’s not you trying so hard to push it, force it on people, but instead once they see your product, there is a want and need for it which people express and there is that active uptake of your product that you start seeing. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I think just the momentum that we had with Rocketlane in our first three months, we got to around 30 paying customers and to me I didn’t need to know more. I didn’t need to get to one and a half million in revenue or anything else to know that there is product market fit because I said, if there is this kind of pull, if you see that momentum, excitement around what you have, if the market is consuming your offering, then clearly there is a product market fit.

It needs to be a big enough market. That’s one thing, there is no point having great product market fit in a very tiny market, you want to have it in a wide enough market. And also if you build for a category, if you know already that there are big companies in that category, then it’s just about proving that you’re able to sell to a handful of people in that category to know that okay, there is a good fitment there, there’s other players out there, people still chose you and it should be what Girish calls stranger MRR, not selling into people you know, but people you don’t know should be buying the product. So, that’s what I would see as product market fit. If it is only people from your network buying, it could be for any reason, right? So you don’t want to conflate that with PMF.

Sajith: Got it. Given the learnings you had from Konotor to Hotline to Freshchat, how did you approach PMF at Rocketlane, was there something, even while picking the space, did you think about the market and all that? 

Picking the problem to go after

Srikrishnan: Yeah, I spent a lot of time just on thinking about which problem we want to take on. We identified a bunch of things and then we aligned on which problem we want to focus on. Then, went around spending 3 – 4 months validating. And in that blog post I shared there’s a bunch of things to identify if a market is hard, the reverse of that is things that can help you identify if there’s going to be a good market for you. Right? And examples are one, is there a clear goal or objective that you’re able to help a customer with? For example, for us it was, I want to shorten the time to value for my customer as a goal. So, if that is a goal, then we know that you need to build product a certain way to help them with that ability to shrink down their implementation timeline or launch timelines.

We tried to validate if this is a problem that the CEO of the company is aware of? That means it will get more traction. That idea will fly if it has board level visibility, CEO level visibility of the problem itself. It’s not just within the function that people think it’s a problem, but the CEO is aware, likewise investors, and we spoke to VCs, some of them talked about this whole contracted ARR versus live ARR as a problem for some of the companies focused on enterprise. It became clear that these are things that are going to resonate from a ‘why a product in this space’ standpoint. Then it came to let’s study how people are doing this today. How are they solving the problem today outside of product, what products are they using, what workarounds are they using? What tools are they cobbling together? The best signal is when people are custom building their own solutions and we saw that happen a few times.

In some cases, someone like FarEye had actually built their own products. Someone like Segment had built very elaborate macros on spreadsheets to solve the problem. So, all of that told us people are investing enough energy in this so we should be able to go after this market. And then it came to validating if our solution will be a good fit. So we just started with click through prototypes and started showing people you told us about this problem before you showed us how we’re solving it. Do you think this can be a solution that will add value for you? Here’s how we are imagining things, here is what it can do. Give us your feedback. So, we started doing a lot of those calls as well along the way. We didn’t wait until product launch.

We sort of said, we are going to build not an MVP, but we want to build a full feature of product and we wanted to de-risk that. It’s going to take us a year to build. After a year we shouldn’t find that it’s not the right product for this market. So, we kept showing them as we built, part of it was product, part of it was mocks, but we kept demoing the solution to people over time. So that sort of gave us new ideas, that gave us feedback before it was in the hands of the customer and also helped us showcase the full vision we have. Usually when you launch an MVP and give it in the hands of a customer, they’re going to take it down a certain direction. For example, if I had only done the project management piece and given it to a customer saying use this for your customer facing projects, it might have had some takers initially, but people would’ve kept asking us for more project management related features from there.

And that would’ve taken us down a direction of just being yet another Project Management tool. We said, this is an all-in-one tool, so let’s build out the documents, the forms, the C-sat, various set of capabilities that we want to bring into this space first, then launch it so that people see the broader vision of what we are trying to build. And their asks are also more based on what the product is overall, what do I need to be more successful, rather than them seeing us as yet another project management tool.

I would say all that demoing, looking at reactions of people for different things that we were showcasing in the mocks, what made them go wow etc., all of that culminated in when we launched the product, it was already a significant solution that could get people excited, a solution that could win against some competitors who had been around for a while, etc. Onboarding was a new space. There were others who were building as well. It wasn’t like we were the only ones and people who are in the market searching for a tool in that space will look at others and us. And we were able to show this sort of differentiated product. We were able to use this and to build product, we use this framework called jobs to be done, which is championed by Intercom, etc. So, that again helped us clearly showcase how each role, whether it’s a consultant in the implementation team or it’s a leader or the customer, everyone, how will they get what they want out of it and how is it helping them and being successful in their roles? What job is the tool doing? We were able to showcase that in a good way and that helped us get that initial momentum and validate that there was PMF.

Building a fat product

Sajith: I want to interrupt you here, not interrupt really. So, one interesting thing is that you build the full product. Now typically when I spar with my founders very early on, I try and encourage them to build one tip of this spear / wedge strategy where you build something which is the biggest burning need, like a hero use case and then get in and then do multiproduct from there or multi feature, expand the feature basket, land and expand, etc. Rocketlane seems like the opposite, and I loved the way you mentioned only project management would’ve meant getting more similar feedback then obviously no first tool is enough so you had to build more broadly, I really loved that part. It was an intentional through thing saying no wedge / tip of the spear strategy. This will be a full stack but horizontal feature set.

Srikrishnan: Correct. So part of the value is that, this is purpose built for customer facing projects. The other piece which is unique about it is that it is all in one as a product. So, when you’re doing a unification play, you need to go out with something that is maybe 70% of an Asana, 70% of a Google doc, 70% of a Slack, all of that should already exist in it. Otherwise people wouldn’t understand that this is a unification play.

We want them to bet on the fact that this is more all in one. It’s actually simplifying their world because today your conversations, your work items, all of that is siloed across different types of documents, different types of tools, etc. We are bringing it together as part of the proposition and hence it needed to be this way. We had to battle hard with our VCs by the way about, we’re not going to launch a 3 month MVP here is why we wrote a memo to them saying, Hey, don’t keep asking us every month about when we’re going to launch. The approach is this and here is all the things we want to build before we launch. Here is why and this is what we believe will help us succeed in this market. And also the bar for what people expect out of products is so high now that we wanted to go in with enough breadth, depth and polish. Depth, not too much depth everywhere, but in certain areas, for example, project management, we said, it needs to have reasonable depth in project management. We can’t go with a thing that’s too simple. In documents, chat, etc. maybe it can start off with lesser depth, but certain areas we need to go further down.

Early GTM, leveraging community and content 

Sajith: So while building was happening and you got breathing space from your investors, you also ran a complete content machine, you created Preflight, then you had a podcast called Launch Station and then maybe one or two other things as well. So was that something which intentionally was thought through or was that again something that evolved saying, what’s thinking around that GTM, that community building GTM?

Srikrishnan: So, definitely intentionally, firstly we have an advantage of being three co-founders and my role in that build phase was a) to keep having conversations with prospects, to keep building the relationship with a whole bunch of companies that could become customers one year down the line. So, we needed something to keep them engaged. We also found that every conversation with these folks, we would learn something about the space. It wasn’t all necessarily what we can productize, some of it were ideas we could productize. Some of it was just learning about best practices, learning about like, someone is doing this gamification, interesting. Someone is doing such a good job of their kickoff, interesting. Someone else is talking about steering committee meetings to keep the projects on track. So, there are all these things which we felt, what if they all learn from each other and we are learning so much.

What if we turn this into something more and there is no community in this space. Let’s build a community. So, we saw that pent up need for it because we first didn’t start a community, we just said we’re going to do a webinar and so many people signed up, it was so engaging as a webinar session and it was all about how this guy, Nimesh of Rockmetric, brought their implementation time down from six months to six weeks and he was telling that story and everyone was super engaged. So, with that one session I could see that there is so much more that people can learn from each other. So I said, let’s become a facilitator of this and we’ll also learn, all of my content after that, thought leadership content that we put out, what we presented at conferences came from what we learned from this community and being able to talk as an authority when you’re talking to a prospect or customer about a problem, not just related to your product, but that you understand the space well, that you understand what they need to do to fix a problem, that you have great ideas for them.

I think that also goes a distance and customer trusting you as the company to partner with. If you are just all about your own product, it’s weak, you need to be an expert at the space. And we managed to do that with community, the podcast, etc. It was a very intentional strategy to look bigger than what we are. So we said, how do we appear bigger? We need to do some things for that. Let’s make that happen. Let’s ensure that we have this whole plan around what can make Rocketlane look like a 2-year-old company at launch. And that’s what we heard from a lot of people that when you look at the website, there’s a pretty mature website. It had all this podcasts stuff in it. It had a community with 800 members in it already. So, no one thinks of it as something that just launched. Company that launched four years before us, people thought we were older than them when they looked at the website.

Sajith: Was it the content, was it when you scroll through the content, was that the giveaway, the depth of the content posts and stuff like that?

Srikrishnan: No, it’s also just the fact that we had a community, we had an active podcast, 13 episodes. I think they had four episodes. It’s also the website’s look and feel itself. We put a lot of effort into ensuring that that website looked mature even when we didn’t have customers, we got quotes from people and we didn’t say these are customers. We said, here’s what these people are saying about it. We put their company logos. We had a bunch of people featured over there. So, those are things we did. But yeah, it was also a push from our VC, Vikram Vaidyanathan of Matrix, who is a classmate of mine from B school. When we did Konotor, we sort of expected that we would build a great product and people will take it up on their own. People will find value and they’ll spread the word. And we didn’t do any marketing, zero. We never ran a Google ad ever in the whole history of the company. Never. We had some blog posts that was just me writing once in a while. We never hired anyone in marketing. The website was designed by me. We didn’t even have a designer, it was bad. And so he said, this time I hope you take marketing more seriously and storytelling for SaaS and so on. I said, okay, this actually comes from a genuine place. Let me actually put real effort to do justice to the product. That’s how we think about it. How do we, from marketing, sales, every other function do justice to the product that we have. So, that’s the angle we took.

Sajith: Thank you. One interesting takeaway is you have to write about your customers’ problems, not just your product. So, that’s an interesting point as well. Let’s say over the first year of launch and GTM motion, because you’d already spoken to these folks, prospects, it was outbound, right? By nature of it was outbound. What’s your ACV, if I may ask?

Rocketlane’s metrics

Srikrishnan: For mid-market, our ACV is around $45K, but we also have SMB customers, which is around a $4K, 4.5K. And our first 30 customers was pretty low ACV it was around $7K, but that was not all outbound, that was a lot of inbound, from Product Hunt itself we got a lot of… Though we had been nurturing a lot of relationships over the year, once we launched, our focus went into who was signing up versus us continuing to chase because we had a lot of inbound signups happening from the Product Hunt launch and so on. We were number one on Product Hunt, it gave us quite some traction at that time. So, we made the most of that. We timed our Product Hunt launch and our seed announcement together. So, we waited a whole year to announce the company’s fundraise and we timed it both on the same day. So we had a lot of traction that day, a lot of curiosity around the company and so on.

Sajith: When was this?

Srikrishnan: June, 2021

Sajith: Got it. So, ACV midmarket was around $45K, SMB is around $4.5K, 1/10th of it. So, $7.5K product was the first 30 customer was that self-served naturally or was it assisted?

Srikrishnan: Assisted.

Sajith: Okay. So what metrics did you put in place to track? And I presume you would’ve engagement metrics and demand metrics as well. So, I was just curious.

Srikrishnan: We largely focused at that time just on what our pipeline looked like and converting from the pipeline and adding more into the pipeline. It’s almost like one quarter build pipeline, next quarter close pipeline. So, kept alternating between spending my energy more on marketing versus my energy more on sales. And truly I would say we cared mostly about that ARR growth because we’ve experienced how momentum solves so many problems for the company automatically for the team. So, we wanted to ensure that people start seeing that momentum and that becomes the drug for everyone. That’s what keeps us going. So, that was a focus, but from our product usage standpoint, etc. we wanted to make sure that the USP for the product is customer facing projects. So, are all of these companies inviting their customers? What sort of brands are getting exposed to Rocketlane? What is that leading to? One of our early customers had brands like Uber working with them and it was really nice to see someone from Uber come and rate the experience they had during their onboarding as a five star experience. And all of that gave us validation that this product is able to elevate the experience for the customer and create more of that intensity and connectedness, transparency that is needed in that project execution journey.

Sajith: Got it. So, typically every customer onboarded, you tracked, did they have customer facing projects as opposed to internal ones and how many logos, other logos are getting onboarded. So, if you had, for example, company X and they had some kind of a customer-facing solution to Airbnb or Uber, whatever and how many such logos are coming in and did you actively track that and were you able to sell into those companies? Was that a GTM tool?

Srikrishnan: They were our customer’s customers, so we didn’t have the right to go and engage them. It was more for anecdotally understanding what is happening that we tracked it and got a sense of it and we wanted to track that overall number. We are now exposed to 800 companies. And then we are also looking at what are the metrics to measure in terms of how many projects are completing, are getting abandoned, how many are completing within the timeframe that first planned versus outside of that timeframe. We started giving metrics on all of this to our customers. And then of course you want to see that you’ve built a broad product, but how many people are using all of the capabilities? Are they using the documents? Are they using the forms? Are they using other things that we launched? So, more and more product metrics that we were tracking overall.

Sri’s advice to younger founders

Sajith: Last three questions. How should founders, like if folks come to you for advice, I’m sure you’re mentoring Angel investing in some folks, etc. So what’s your advice to them about product market fit? I don’t even know if founders discuss this overtly, sometimes PMF is more like an investor metric so to say, so what’s your advice for them? How do you suggest that they work towards it? Are there any caveats, thumb rules? How do you tell founders that it looks like you have hit PMF?

Srikrishnan: Understood. It’s about challenging them to come up with, essentially if someone is struggling with traction, if not growing, either challenge them with if there’s someone else in your space that’s growing fast, why not you, or no one in your space is growing fast, are you sure it’s the right space? And setting some goal for them saying, you should try to do X by Y time period with focus and that will tell you whether there’s anything to this or not. I think very often if the ones where I warn them more are where I see it as tech searching for a problem, which happens at times. Why they seem to be doing things more inside out based on something built from a tech perspective, but that’s not going to help get to that PMF…we need to start from a problem. I actually have this T-shirt saying problem greater than product and I wear it very often. I think don’t focus on what you built already.

Sajith: Where did you get that?

Srikrishnan: We made it incidentally during the Hotline days. But yeah. And that whole realisation, how can I help them with the realisation that they’re either playing in a very hard market that’s not going to be easy to sell into. It could be things like multiple stakeholders to convince, you’re not going with one thing for one persona. Just opening their eyes to the challenges they have from a market perspective or are you playing in a good market or not? That’s sort of the biggest area where I keep pushing people to develop a better understanding.

Sajith: Got it. Any broad thumb rules? I think focus on the problem, market, these are the two broad caveats you would look out and pace of growth.

Srikrishnan: Correct? So are there other companies that are at really strong revenues, right? If there’s someone else who’s a hundred million ($ rev) plus, good, if there’s someone else who is at ($) 500 million plus, great. You want to see some of those signals to know that it’s a good market and then you build a differentiated solution. Maybe you go in a narrow area first to win over there, then you sort of broaden who you are going after. But is there enough market to be had and is there enough proof that someone can win in this space and take that market share? We want to at least see that and that’s what I push people to see, especially B2B.

Sajith: Got it. And as part of the question, is there something which tells you that aha, here is PMF. Growth broadly is the one thing that seems to me from what you see, growth broadly is what gives you a clue that what could be PMF.

Srikrishnan: Correct. The momentum is the biggest signal. You either, if you have 1, 5 – 70K plus deals, then I know for I say 70K, it could even be 50K plus, right? You have five 50K plus deals coming from strangers, then you have something going for you. Or if you’ve had like, Hey, I got to 150 small customers within 8-9 months, that’s again a very strong signal that you have good product market fit.

The Pick

Sajith: Got it. The last two questions, there’s a section in the book which is called ‘the pick’, which is, like what you said, where you play sometimes is very critical, sometimes more important than how you win. So, before you came to onboarding, I just wanted to get your sense of how you went around looking at the space because it seems like it was a search, it was not something that you came out of a company saying, oh man, I’ve had this problem in this company. So, it didn’t come out of a deep problem that you personally had, it was more to do with the search and figuring out this would be an interesting space. If so, how did you guys, was there any other idea that you gave up, etc.?

Srikrishnan: Yeah, so we actually looked back at our journey and said, what are problems that we saw? We identified some sales problems, some team collaboration problems across the teams within the company. And then we also identified this problem, which is more of a post-sale problem. But we first broadened it each saying, okay, what is the big problem we’re trying to solve? And we said, it’s cross company collaboration running projects across companies. So, if you look at Smartsheets, Asana, Monday.com, etc. 50% of the projects that run on them are actually customer facing projects. And that is the big problem to solve. Within that, the wedge for us is, or the beachhead market, is customer onboarding projects because we understand that space well. We have a very strong why it matters for these companies, the whole gap between live ARR and contracted ARR, the time to value gap, the churn that happens because of it, etc., made that a strong enough area to start, where we felt we have enough domain knowledge. 

We felt it was like a narrower place to start because the wider product is like what we have today, which is in a category called professional services automation. So, that includes the operation side of things like resource management, time tracking, rate cards, project accounting, etc. for any services team. But we said we’ll focus on a less mature services team within product companies, and first we’ll win over there. It has some advantages. One, when you sell to product companies that are doing implementation projects, the exposure is far more because each one will be implementing for 30 – 100 customers a month, etc. So, we get that second order benefit of more companies noticing and experiencing Rocketlane compared to selling it to a marketing agency that works with five clients. So that is one reason. Second, we thought it should also get us some really good brands on board because SaaS companies have bigger, better brands than me going to a random IT services company and saying, come on board as a customer, especially if you’re not going to a large enterprise.

And all of that made us start at a certain point, and that’s where we said, okay, let’s start with the smaller SaaS companies as the services teams inside SaaS companies, which is your onboarding team, implementation team, Professional Services team, etc. That’s where we started, and that was the idea behind it. That’s how we said, okay, this is what we want to do first. The reason why we picked this idea was also I would say, one, we felt it had some legacy players. It didn’t have a new modern leader in the space, so that felt like a gap. The ideas that were in sales, we felt so crowded, so many people selling to the same persona and so many ways in which sales efficiency and effectiveness can be increased. So, you’re competing against so many other tools that are trying to help with the same results in different ways. So, we actually felt doing something for a team that is not serviced by one good product. Instead they’re having to do a separate solution for time tracking, a separate solution for project management, a separate solution for documents, etc. let’s go and offer them a modern all in one tool. That became the reason why we picked that area. We thought there was a unique position to take in that space.

Sajith: Got it. Who are the competitors, the legacy competitors?

Srikrishnan: FinancialForce, Mavenlink, etc. They’re all rebranded now.

Sajith: Yeah. Excellent. Got it. And was there any other idea that you actually gave up? You said you looked at something in sales, etc. Was there anything that came close and you said, we will focus on this.

Srikrishnan: I mean there were ideas around many ideas actually that we looked at, but one of them was in the active sales guidance, think of it as if you’re on a call with the customer, how do I guide you on touching all the points you need to touch, ensuring that there’s this sort of decision tree that can assist you during a call. We saw some other tools like that as well and said, this looks interesting and we have some thoughts around how to do this better, that’s one area. We considered can we go after Atlassian and build the modern stack for internal team collaboration? And we had a vision for what that would be. So, those were two ideas we did strongly consider.

Sajith: Got it. A final question, we wrap it up soon. Recommended resources. I know you’re a reader, so resources on this topic like growth, PMF, GTM, it could be a video, it could be a podcast, it could be books?

Sri’s recommended resources

Srikrishnan: GTM, one of the books I found value from was this book by Anthony Kennada, the Ex-CMO of Gainsight called Category Creation.

Sajith: Category Creation.

Srikrishnan: So, that is one. There’s this book about the Jobs to Be Done framework. I don’t remember the name of the book, but this famous example of what is the job of a milkshake that someone buys on the road. It was a great example. I’ll tell you, I think it’s by Clayton Christensen.

Sajith: Competing Against Luck, I think correct?

Srikrishnan: Correct, yes.

Sajith: Yeah. Anything else?

Srikrishnan: Those are two resources I would say. Other than that, no, I think those two come to mind as very relevant in a startup journey.

Sajith: Got it. I think we’ll pause here unless you want to say anything, cover anything that you feel I didn’t ask you?

Srikrishnan: Not really, Sajith. I think pretty much covers a lot of the things that I have been saying previously as well.

Sajith: I’ll just stop here.