Here seasoned founders make bulbs flash in the heads of newbies

Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO of Kissflow, who was one of the mentors at the iSPIRT ProductNation bootcamp in Pune. Photo credit: Sumit Chakraberty

“Are you an accounting company or a finance company?”

The question was addressed to Baskar Ganapathy, co-founder and product head of Numberz. It’s an early stage fintech startup with a software product to help small businesses manage their invoices and cash flow.

What makes it different is an add-on feature that lets businesses get a credit line and working capital loans. Baskar explained that managing accounts gave Numberz the credit profile of a business, which made it easier to provide loans.

What’s more, businesses can not only get loans for themselves through Numberz, but prompt their clients to use it too. It has a GetFinance button to send with an invoice to clients who may need loans to pay their dues.

The problem arises in pitching the product. Accounting tools are many, but a financing avenue through an accounting software product is unusual. Shouldn’t this be the highlight instead of an add-on? Hence the question to Baskar on how he was positioning the startup.

The question came from Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO of Kissflow, one of India’s SaaS success stories from Chennai. It provides workflow automation software on the cloud to over 10,000 companies around the world. Suresh knows a thing or two about being razor-focused in pitching a software product.

Don’t tell me anything more about your product other than how it is going to solve the client’s problem.

A word to the wise is sufficient. Baskar and his co-founder at Numberz, Aditya Tulsian, both worked at Intuit earlier. They led campaigns for adoption of Intuit products like Quickbooks for accountants, and saw a gap in getting small businesses to use accounting software. So the Numberz cashflow management product was a natural extension of what they had done earlier. Now the interaction with Suresh gave them food for thought on positioning their unique financing product for small businesses.

The interaction happened at a bootcamp in Pune organized by non-profit think tank iSPIRT (Indian Software Product Industry Round-Table), whose mission is to transform India from a back office for software services to an innovation hub for software products.

This was the second Product Nation Bootcamp in Pune aimed at helping early stage startups looking for product-market fit. ISPIRT holds a similar bootcamp for growth stage companies in Mysore.

Places like Pune and Mysore are emerging startup hubs which lack the abundance of role models and mentors in India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore, or its SaaS capital, Chennai. Seasoned entrepreneurs and mentors from the bigger hubs of Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai had day-long interactions with startups who had signed up for the bootcamp in Pune.

See: Why India must fix its obsession with software services and pivot to products

Go-to-market tips

Lucep CEO Kaiesh Vohra needed tips on entering the US market

Some were startups which had already got traction and won recognition, like Lucep, a startup based in Singapore and Bangalore which uses artificial intelligence to help businesses get smarter with sales. It has clients in Asia and now wants to enter the more lucrative US market for such a product.

Some of the feedback was brutal, which is how it should be, because it helps nip problems in the bud.

Lucep’s founder and CEO, Kaiesh Vohra, an Edinburgh University AI lab grad who earlier worked with Accenture, grabbed the chance to present his product and ask for tips from a panel that included mentors from Freshdesk, Chargebee, and Kissflow – three Indian SaaS startups that have become global leaders in their domains.

“These guys are so good at selling to the US from India, right?” he tells me when we share a ride to a party after the bootcamp. “Cracking our US sales was the reason I wanted to come to this bootcamp.”

The key takeaway for him is that he has to communicate within seconds how he is solving a problem for an American buyer. “Don’t tell me anything more about your product other than how it is going to solve the client’s problem,” one of the panelists told him. Kaiesh resolved to rework his product’s pitch for the US as soon as he got back to Bangalore.

See: Meet the artificially intelligent sales gorilla that closes deals faster

Both pragmatic and philosophical

Some of the exchanges were philosophical. “Isn’t visual programming dead?” asked a panelist to Murukesh Sadasivan, co-founder and CEO of Codeflow, a startup that aims to help developers create cloud-based apps faster by wiring together reusable components on a visual canvas. A discussion followed on how programmers love to code, where they feel they’re more in control and and aren’t limited in their options.

The emergence of hubs like Pune and connections between them and the bigger hubs augurs well for India’s software product ecosystem.

Some of the feedback was brutal, which is how it should be, because it helps nip problems in the bud. The Pi.team, for instance, wants to provide a product for small businesses to automate their customer relationship management, HR, and finance.

The panelists found their product too horizontal. “Will you be selling the product to HR or finance or customer relationship guys? Isn’t it better to focus on one vertical first, because each has its own challenges in adoption? Do small businesses need an ERP?” These were some fundamental questions to ponder for the Pi.team.

The startup bootcamp last weekend was in the sprawling campus of Persistent Systems, a software builder from Pune which had US$400 million in revenue in the last fiscal year. The emergence of hubs like Pune and connections between them and the bigger hubs augurs well for India’s software product ecosystem.

See: Something’s rotten in India’s startup scene – and it’s time to call it out

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