SaaS Marketing - Now and Then: Pranay Desai, Matrix Partners India | BTS E10 | SaaSBoomi Podcast

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Pranay is a SaaS investor at Matrix Partners India. Before moving to investing, Pranay played several key roles at Freshworks including the Director of Growth Marketing at Freshworks, and managed to ramp up the marketing machinery.

He has also worked with the CEO’s office at Freshworks where he was responsible for ramping the revenues from 5 Million to 100 Million.

He comes with tons of knowledge on how marketing used to work in the past, how it works today, and how SaaS businesses should think about marketing for the future.

Pranay recommends SaaS businesses find new channels where their target audience hangs out as early as possible. There is no single marketing strategy or channel that will always work. It is necessary for businesses to find their “distribution edge”.

The BTS Podcast Episode 10 has Pranay sharing several nuggets of marketing wisdom.

Tune in to watch the full podcast.

Key takeaways:

1:24 - Building a SaaS company: Then and Now

3:46 - The challenges that businesses face today

4:35 - Optimizing costs for lead-gen

7:56 - Worthy SaaS examples

9:15 - Lessons learnt from experiments

13:45 - Winning the confidence of enterprise customers

19:19 - The Experience Roadshow

26:34 - How to measure the RoI of non-standard events

28:03 - Indicators of Product Market Fit and Business Market Fit

33:05 - Founders should become students of sales

34:35 - Indian SaaS advantage

39:41 - Rapid fire

Resources mentioned

1. 2:34 - How Wiz reached $100M ARR in 18 months? Techcrunch
2. 8:02 - Rocketlane’s Community Building | The CMO Journal
3. 29:55 - Girish Mathrubootam’s first blog announcing Freshdesk as a startup in October 2010 while Freshdesk was publicly launched in June 2011
4. 4 interesting campaigns discussed throughout the podcast
   1. The van that traveled to 11 destinations | Freshworks Experience Roadshow | 2019
   2. Going on air to create virality - #Failsforce campaign
   3. Reports instill confidence in buyers - Freshdesk | Forrester TEI Report
   4. Rocketlane’s rap song announcing fundraising

Key mentions

1. 8:00 - Srikrishnan Ganesan of RocketLane

2. 33:00 - Rishi Kulkarni and Sameer Goel of Revv