The Early Stage SaaS Growth Onion - WRR Edition 1
How we think about growth in an early stage B2B SaaS, and what we do.
At 5PM today, I was writing an article when suddenly the world started clapping. In the morning, streets of Manipal looked like a scene from Will Smith’s I am legend. I had just got off a call with a founder who was surprised how well his company was doing remotely, and how quite a few folks are discovering better productivity while WFH.
Stay safe, keep your loved ones safe as well. A friend forwarded me a blog from Matrix Partners, it’s a very good read about the learnings from China’s startup ecosystem, and I strongly recommend you to read it.
Startup learnings from China in the Wake of Covid19
“beating Covid-19 is most likely going to take much longer than expected and through this note, our attempt is to help the startup community think through the difficult choices we have to make.”
After launching Recurr a few days back, we received some great response from the SaaS community. From people telling us this was needed to founders and VCs/Accelerators exploring opportunities to work together - We felt like we are in the right place at the right time.
But not everything has been happening according to plan. We expected to get out, meet founders, ask them about their challenges and then tell them how we think we can help. But what happens in reality is that most people ask us ‘What can you do’, or ‘What are the kind of services you provide’.
For quite some time, SaaS in India has seen only two kinds of external support -
Consultants - Usually seen as SMEs who can come and tell your team what to do.
Agencies - Usually seen as workforce that will do what you ask them to do.
Recurr lies somewhere in the middle. We have a brain of our own, and also execute stuff for you. We have extensive experience in early stage B2B SaaS. And we do anything and everything (other than writing code), so it was very difficult for us to ‘send a deck with our services’. But since the question did exist, we sat down to figure what’s a good solution to that problem.
We decided to write a long-form piece on how we look at early stage growth and what are the things we believe founders should get done (Also the areas they can get help from us in). When we looked at the whole piece, and we felt growing a SaaS business at early stage is very much like putting together an onion, peel by peel. We wrote it here (~3000 words) -
The SaaS Growth Onion — Our views on early stage growth for B2B SaaS
“This is not a playbook by any means - It is to showcase our thoughts, our expertise and our point of views when we go and work with an early stage SaaS.”
This is the first edition of WRR (Weekly Recurring Reads), our newsletter. We want to push more and better content, curated articles and interesting threads every Sunday to you - Makes for your weekly SaaS reading . Also, you’re receiving this email because with we’re connected on Linkedin, or because we interacted in the past two years. If you’re not interested, please feel free to unsubscribe - Sorry for being irrelevant.
Stay safe!
Pratik Sagar Mishra