Summary: India SaaS Growth Summit - 4 days, 3 cities, ~200 Founders & Growth Leaders
A summary post from many Presentations, Interactions, Learnings with a growing SaaS builder community in India
Table of content
Summary
ThriveStack collaborated with the India SaaS community in late September 2023, to organize in-person meetups in 3 cities, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi. In total, it was attended by ~200+ individuals, with lots of presentations, conversations, and insights.
India's SaaS market is growing extremely fast.
Founders and SaaS leaders have an insatiable appetite to learn and try new things.
Sales-led growth (SLG) is the primary mechanism for SaaS growth. Product-led growth (PLG) is upcoming and SaaS leaders are finding it difficult to build/apply.
We've just wrapped up the SaaS Growth Summit 2023, and oh, what a ride it’s been!
Zooming through Bangalore, Mumbai, and Gurugram, we connected, conversed, and deep-dived into discussions with the spirited SaaS community across India.
In Bangalore, the startup hub, we chatted about the nuts and bolts of monetizing and scaling PLG strategies. Who attended?: SaaS founders and CTOs from (mostly) B2B SaaS companies.
Moving to Mumbai, our cozy gathering led to deep, rich conversations on keeping users engaged and sticking around. Who attended?: B2B SaaS founders, Growth & Marketing leaders.
Finally, Gurugram saw us brainstorming on starting up businesses in a community-led environment, turning ideas into reality with swift solutions. Who attended?: B2B SaaS founders, Growth & Marketing & Technology leaders.
Why did we pick these cities and these topics?
Well, after many cups of coffee and team debates, we decided to head straight into the beating heart of India’s SaaS world. We aimed to connect with the SaaS builders - the thinkers, the doers, the creators - and delve into topics that are shaping the SaaS space.
Every city brought something new to the table. Bangalore, with its larger SaaS crowd, buzzed with energy and ideas. Mumbai and Gurugram, with their smaller, intimate setups, allowed for deeper, more involved discussions, particularly around B2B, steering our conversations into highly relevant territories.
From discussing rapid building solutions in Gurugram to untying user lifecycle management in Mumbai, and navigating through scaling and monetization in Bangalore, the Summit was a treasure trove of real, actionable insights.
Now, we’re here to spill the beans and share the stories, the learning, and the absolute joy of the journey through the SaaS Growth Summit 2023.
Bangalore: We Started with a Bang!
”I had a great time at the SaaS Growth Summit - Bangalore edition!
The attendees brought so much energy and enthusiasm to the table, making it clear that everyone was keen to learn about product management and go-to-market strategies. It's refreshing to see such awareness and evolution in the industry over the last few years.
What really made the event special, though, was connecting other founders and product leaders building SaaS products. It was good to network with like-minded folks, swap stories, and learn from each other on how they are tackling their growth challenges. I definitely gained a lot of fresh perspectives from the event.”
Mumbai: Small Crowd, Big Insights!
“Great experience moderating the panel discussion. We had a good insightful exchange of ideas between all the attendees.”
“ThriveStack SaaS Growth Summit was a phenomenal event that exceeded my expectations. It was a great opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in the B2B SaaS industry, who shared their insights, strategies, and best practices for achieving growth and success. I especially enjoyed the sessions that covered topics such as product-led growth by Gururaj and the discussion lead by Ashish. The speakers were engaging, knowledgeable, and inspiring. They also provided actionable tips and tools that I could apply to my own business right away.
The event also offered a chance to network with other B2B SaaS builders who were passionate about growth and innovation. I met some amazing people who shared their experiences, challenges, and solutions. I gained valuable connections and feedback that will help me grow my knowledge stack. The community was vibrant, supportive, and collaborative.”
“It was great interacting with your team and other members of the SaaS fraternity. The idea exchange on growth hacks, hits and misses and other real-life anecdotes were like an accelerated learning program! Thanks and look forward to more interaction.”
"It's always exciting to have a diverse bunch of perspectives shared in a small curated gathering - makes for deeper insights, more candid conversations. Great initiative team, wish you all the best"
Gurugram: A Heartwarming End to Our SaaS Journey
Piyush Gupta
”My experience at the Gurugram SaaS Growth Summit was enriching, with lively discussions primarily revolving around community-led growth and the hurdles of managing such communities in India's diverse B2C segment. We navigated through various use cases, such as the Urban Clap community and Baba Ramdev’s temple-style approach, dissecting how he leveraged a community base for Patanjali.
We also explored SaaS communities like Slack, Webflow, and Notion. An insightful realization was the evident need for Indian entrepreneurs to distinguish between product managers and product marketing managers, as the expectations from both roles are quite distinctive and pivotal.”
Summarized Insights & Conversations
#1 Insight: B2B SaaS startups find PLG self-service difficult to build.
Building products to become a distribution mechanism is not core to most startups. At best, early-stage startups build the Self-service registration (Authenticate and register user), but the rest is very difficult to build. There’s no real playbook for them to bank on.
On average, a B2B SaaS company takes ~6-12 months to build PLG self-service and spends 30% of raised capital - making it a difficult goal to pursue.
#2 Insight: Layering SLG on top of PLG is much easier than PLG on top of SLG.
The effort taken to layer PLG on top of an existing (successful) SLG business (SLG+PLG) is way more than starting with PLG and then layering SLG on top (PLG+SLG). We had a lot more discussions on the problems (than solutions) with SLG + PLG.
There was a major hesitancy to the SLG+PLG approach. More on this in a later blog...
Join our Community
To continue these discussions, approaches & solutions, join our Discord community here.
 |
|
 |
|
 | A guest post by
|
 |
|
|
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|