SaaS for startups

2. Vital Stats
• SAAS product built for Gmail and Google Apps
• 1000+ companies are paying customers in 30+
countries
• 17 people team
• 5 year old
• Less than Rs. 1 crore raised. Virtually bootstrapped.
• Profitable, happy, impatient.

3. Why we love SAAS
• Global marketplace with team sitting in India
• Inbound customer acquisition. And it scales!
• Low touch, self serve
• Recurring revenue :)

4. Why we built Hiver
• People say they hate email. Thats not the truth.
• Email is the one business app that every
knowledge worker in the world uses. Everyday.
• So, why not take it to another level of Awesome!

5. Hiver - Birth
• Originally, a tool to help organisations save email
threads into a knowledge base. Raised money for
that.

6. Hiver - Rebirth
• We realised we wanted to sell to SMBs, who don’t
care about “knowledge”.
• SMBs want tools to run core business functions
• Morphed into a customer support, task
management tool.

9. The one app to rule them all
How about 10,000 companies as paying customers!
• Support for multiple platforms - Outlook, iOS,
Android.
• Go deeper into core business functions.
• Get sophisticated, but preserve simplicity.
• Market hard. Market smart.

10. Learnings - Product
• Nothing less than world class would do.
• Stay away from vanity metrics.
• Simplify. Your target audience should be able to set
up in under 10 minutes without any help from you.
• Customers tell you what they want. Your job to
figure out what they actually need.
• Start charging early. Don’t underprice.

11. Learnings - Marketing
• Optimize for search. Do that early.
• Get covered in relevant blogs. Persistence and
Iteration are the key.
• Get Adwords working. Even at a high CPC and
CPA.
• Do content marketing. The results will be a long
term asset.

12. Learnings - Team
• Stop looking for a co-founder. They will come.
• Build hiring pull - social media, events, coverage.
• Screen programmers online (HackerEarth/Codility)
• Keep an open mind. Only two things matter: Skill
and Ethics.

13. Keep in touch :)
niraj@hiverhq.com