Serendipity to SaaSt

How a cold message turned into SaaSt, Hyderabad’s first SaaS forum

It all began with a text message that I sent to Sudheer Koneru, Zenoti and Sreedhar Peddineni of GainSight on February 13, 2019 at 3.30AM as a customary follow up message about conducting a round table with the T-SaaS (WhatsApp) group members. I had an inkling that if I texted them multiple times, the message will get registered in their mind and they will contact me whenever they are in Hyderabad. To my pleasant surprise, I found out that both of them were in Hyderabad and they spontaneously agreed to take a session. I reached out to Rohith (Darwinbox) and Nitish (Auctus Consultants) about conducting a workshop given that many of the SaaS founders were in the city. Rohith, like always, encouraged me and so did Nitish. We first planned to host one meetup of some of the SaaS company founders in Hyderabad. Still reeling under the infectious effect of SaaS Boomi and with my experience of conceptualising & organising large-scale events, I just had to dream big. I thought, why not organize an annual conference in Hyderabad when we have the best minds of the SaaS Industry willing to contribute their time? Thus the journey of SaaSt began!

“Thank you team SaaSt. Amazing work putting it together. It was an important day for all SaaS start-ups in Hyderabad.”

Michelle, founder, SatisFIND Technology Pvt Ltd

Why SaaSt is special?

1. Community Driven: From the very outset, the idea was to make SaaSt a community-driven event and having the founders curate every aspect from it. I wanted to volunteer in my individual capacity rather than representing TSIC since it is often proved that community-initiatives have better traction than organisation-driven initiatives. All we needed was to create a platform of like-minded individuals. It just took 10 minutes to put together a team of volunteers, a feat I didn’t think was possible even in my dreams. Starting with the founders of SaaS companies, Rohit Chennamaneni (Darwinbox), Chaitanya (Ozonetel), Yuvraj (Whitenoise) and team, and Prem (Raasta Studios), who became the pillars behind the success of SaaSt.

The founders roadmap session with Rohit, Ashok, Sundeep and Chaitanya

2. Founders On-board: We started with 2 speakers and had 15 speakers on board in a week. Not all of them were based out of Hyderabad and people like Aneesh Reddy came all the way from Bangalore to attend the event and encourage us. What was even more encouraging were their timely inputs and keen interest in curating the content and setting the agenda. I remember requesting Sreedhar Peddineni of GainSight, if he could conduct a workshop followed by a concluding note for 35 minutes and his response just made my day.

3. Welcoming the New: Hyderabad is host to hundreds of SaaS companies, working in every nook and corner of the city. With this single event which provided a concrete forum to a curated list of SaaS founders to exchange their learnings, this became all the more apparent. Out of the 120 curated CXO’s, 60% of them were new participants who were not an erstwhile member or attendee of any of the start-up community events of the city.

4. Pay it Forward: At the very outset, we had made a decision to opt for VC fund to support the event, at least for the first chapter, rather than approaching the individual SaaS start-ups or Corporates even as many of them were more than willing to support us. It’s quite common that when you are associated with a government organization, people tend to expect government sponsorship for any event you organize. But we have always believed that the power of community is stronger than any organisation including the state. When we reached out to Sateesh Andra, Managing Director, Endiya Partners, his response heightened our spirits: “Whether we benefit or not,” he wrote, “we would like to help develop the ecosystem.” Isn’t this what we mean when we say, ‘pay it forward to your community’?

VC’s in the town : Abhishek Srivastava (Endiya) & Pratik Agarwal (Accel)

Chennai: Collaboration, not Competition

When you are doing an event right after SaaS Boomi, with the same domain expertise, it is but natural for people to view it as a competition. On the contrary, SaaS Boomi, held at Chennai, was an inspiration for SaaSt. As a volunteer for SaaS Boomi, I had the opportunity to work very closely with the event and all I wanted to do was to carry forward the vision set by SaaS Boomi in my city, Hyderabad. SaaSt was born out of a similar vision to create a single platform for all SaaS entrepreneurs of Hyderabad, to create a city-specific SaaS community which will in turn help India stand tall in Global SaaS economy. And I was proved right when the Chennai SaaS community extended their wholehearted support to SaaSt. It was a sign that the new India was all about these passionate founders from different parts of the country, driving the economy together with a common passion and purpose. After all, they all belong to the same tribe, a SaaS-y tribe.

What Worked for Us

1. Not the Biggest, Only the Best: This was more than the event’s tagline. It was the brand story of SaaSt. We knew that our purpose was not to draw a huge crowd, but to curate the best of the lot. Thus after much deliberations, we created SaaSt as an exclusive invite-only event for the top 100 SaaS company founders.
2. Deep Learning in Hands-on Format: All our sessions were planned in such a way that the audience would get a taste of ‘experiential’ learning where speakers will open up and share knowledge from their real experiences. The agenda was clearly aligned with the interest of attendees to ensure maximum relevance of the event.
3. Marketing & Communication: Maintaining timely communication with the different stakeholders played a major role in this whole event and we can’t forget the efforts of ‘Whitenoise’ team, to make this happen. I think a significant portion of credit for the success of SaaSt goes to ‘Whitenoise’. Their creation of the ‘user journey map’ was especially helpful where they traced the different stakeholders’ journeys from the time they hear about the event till they receive the feedback mail after the event. This helped us gauge the mood of the stakeholders at the different points and to design appropriate communication interventions. Once this was taken care of, marketing the whole event was very organic with founders coming forward to promote the event.

“You’ve conducted an excellent event. I’ve been attending events in Hyderabad for the past 9 years and this has been the best one. I’ve met a lot of interesting people. I have never walked away from an event with so many follow up meetings. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the start-ups I talked to. I think Hyderabad is doing better than I realized. Thanks for helping me understand that.”

— Ashok Varma, Founder, Report Garden

Anand Arvind (Zenoti) in an engaged conversation during our networking sessions

The Way Forward for SaaSt

Following are the future plans we have in mind, to further grow and nurture the SaaSt community in Hyderabad over the coming months:

1. Making our existing communication forum SaaSt, a WhatsApp group, stronger, where more and more founders can discuss their pressing issues and learnings among themselves.
2. Conducting monthly meet-ups with founders on focussed topics by involving mentors. This is also part of a major initiative we have taken from TSIC, to build a strong mentor ecosystem in the state

SaaSt: Growth Edition

One of the reasons for SaaSt to have become successful was due to the creation of a forum where founders and speakers could open up their knowledge and hard learnings for the next-gen entrepreneurs. We want to take this forward with our ‘Growth edition’, where we would like to experiment with an overnight stay in a resort. This would include new formats like one-on-one mentor-mentee sessions, investor breakouts with extreme focus groups among other things. The good news is that this time around, we have 3–4 months and hopefully, the support of all the stakeholders of SaaSt Chapter One, to make it happen.

Kudos to Sreedhar Peddineni, Anand Arvind, Vamshidhar Reddy, Sudheer Koneru, Aneesh Reddy, Rohit Chennamaneni, Shashin Rastogi, Chandra Balani, Sundeep, Abhishek Srivastava, Pratik Agarwal, Kiran Darisi, Chaitanya and Ashok for supporting the first chapter of SaaSt, for making it happen and for believing in the principle of paying-it-forward to the ecosystem. Not to forget our partner, AWS for being a believer & supporter of ecosystem initiatives.

Finally, a big thanks to all the volunteers who went great lengths and put in huge efforts into pulling this together. This wouldn’t have happened without them.

The views mentioned here are my own and I’m not representing any organisation including Government of Telangana

Special thanks to Pritha, Whitenoise for editing this!