1: Anand Jain on building a successful global SaaS business and pricing it right
“Why is there so much spam in the world!?” In the process of answering this question, CleverTap grew from being a group of engineers tinkering code, to a global SaaS company. Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer of Clevertap, Anand Jain, believes that the first step to building a global company is to “remind yourself that the problems you are solving are universal”. If you are building your product keeping the customer in mind, then no borders can constrain your company’s reach. But with no sales team until 2018 and having monetized the product only after their Series A funding, going global wasn’t an easy feat for them. Building a global company requires one to ask tough questions – How do you hire for a global company? When and how do you monetize your product? How big a role does your sales team play in establishing the early reach of your company? How low does your churn rate need to be? Catch this episode of #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann, to find answers to these plaguing questions as SaaS maven Anand Jain, shares how he charted CleverTap’s journey beyond Indian borders. Time range Topic of discussion 1:03 Why B2B SaaS? 1:47 What were the main challenges in building a B2B SaaS company? 3:51 Was going global always the plan? 5:02 Initial strategy: small ticket size model vs large ticket size model 9:08 As an entrepreneur what kept you going? 10:24 Why monetizing your product is important? 11:30 How do you price your product? 13:02 Does every market has a different pricing strategy? 13:54 How an entrepreneur in B2B SaaS think of unit economics? 15:12 Is it important to be close to your customers geographically? 16:28 Why building a sales organisation with locals having sales expertise is crucial? 17:25 Would you advice entrepreneurs to have a professional sales org much earlier once they have a product? 18:51 Partnership: Should we take a collaborative approach for sales? 20:09 How did you win over in a crowded market? 22:02 Is churn really an important metric and how frequently did you track churn?