Reviving the SaaS Ecosystem in Hyderabad
Hello readers! My name is Tarun Davuluri, and I see myself primarily as a community builder and enabler. My work revolves around building a strong startup community in Hyderabad. From my experience interacting with startups and other community builders, I feel that mentors play a major role in helping startups grow and it is important to connect good mentors to startups to further their growth.
My idea here is to host an event specifically for SaaS startups in Hyderabad, where a number of subject matter experts would speak on a multitude of topics which could be useful to the startups, and also give the founders a chance to interact with them and benefit from their experience.
It all started when, as part of my work as an Innovation Fellow for the Telangana State Innovation Cell, I was assigned to work on a report on the startup ecosystem in Hyderabad. This involved gathering information on the best startups that we have in Hyderabad and enabling organisations and events designed to help startups. The idea was to understand the offerings of the present ecosystem in Hyderabad and the areas where there is a higher scope for the ecosystem to play a better role to make the community more engaging.
As we focused on SaaS startups and building the SaaS community, the few names that stood out within the SaaS startup ecosystem in Hyderabad are Gainsight, Zenoti, Host Analytics etc. Our intention was to provide a tool for all the SaaS startup founders to interact and realised and therefore created a WhatsApp group as a first step, and the members of the Whatsapp group are meeting every month to engage with each other and learn from speakers /experts.
An idea for the next step evolved when I recently volunteered at SaaSBoomi, the annual SaaS conference in Chennai. All thanks to one person i look up to and the best ecosystem builder this country has, Avinash Raghava for getting me involved. As a volunteer I got an opportunity to interact with the speakers at the conference. When asked as to why they take out time from their busy schedules to interact with young entrepreneurs and attend conferences, almost all speakers said that they consider the time speaking to young startup founders, as a payback to a community and ecosystem that has in a way played a role in their success. Seeing the Chennai ecosystem coming together to build a strong ecosystem for SaaS in India, I believe that the Hyderabad ecosystem has great SaaS potential as well. It is important to build a stronger ecosystem for SaaS startups to scale in Hyderabad, and in India.
It was heartening to see the enthusiastic response from the Hyderabad SaaS founders, and the event #SaaSt- Hyderabad’s first SaaS forum will be held on 2nd March 2019 from 3pm to 9pm followed by Dinner, with the SaaS ecosystem covering a multitude of topics, that would be a great source practical knowledge for the startups and also would give them a chance to interact with all the important players / mentors of the SaaS community. Some founders like Rohit (Darwinbox), Chaitanya (Ozonetel) and Ashok (Report Garden), Yuvraj (Whitenoise) and other companies like Freshworks, Capillary and ServiceNow have shown great interest and enthusiasm to volunteer and have shared their thoughts on what the #SaaSt structure should be like in the near future. These discussions led to finalising of themes for two events in the coming one year. The themes are
(i) Product and Technology (ii) B2B marketing and sales and Investor Centric
I believe this event could potentially revive and boost the SaaS ecosystem in Hyderabad, and should not be missed!
Join the top league by applying here: bit.ly/saast2019
The views mentioned here are my own and I’m not representing any organisation including Government of Telangana
Special thanks to Avni Jesrani for editing this!
