SUMMARY
India is home to 17 SaaS unicorns, of which six entered the billion-dollar valuation club in 2022, as SaaS startups are looking to capitalise on the $720 Bn global opportunity
Ritesh Arora, cofounder and CEO of BrowserStack, decodes the key steps to follow when SaaS startups aim to scale up
According to Arora, SaaS startups must know their TAM, and those who think global can always create a better product
The transformative potential of India’s SaaS narrative has been pretty clear in the wake of the pandemic as small businesses and medium-to-large enterprises adopted distributed operations and remote working. More importantly, these are going to be long-term trends in a post-pandemic world, and the Indian SaaS industry shows no sign of slowing down, given the dominance of the go-to digital markets, both locally and globally.
The country boasts 17 SaaS unicorns, of which six entered the billion-dollar valuation club in 2022, and Indian SaaS startups are looking to capitalise on the $720 Bn global opportunity.
Amongst these names is one of the highest valued SaaS firms in India, BrowserStack. As the next guest of Inc42 & LogiNext series, Masters Of SaaS, we got onboard Ritesh Arora, the cofounder and CEO of this Dublin-based startup working towards the goal of ‘build local but think global’.
During a candid conversation with Dhruvil Sanghvi, CEO of LogiNext, Arora revealed how his company adhered to the business philosophy of ‘build local but think global’. Besides, the key learning on its way to becoming a unicorn was that the SaaS startup should have hired sooner and better.
“I wish we had scaled our product organisation in the first year itself and not five-six years after starting the business,” he said.
Arora believes that the moment (B2B) users show stickiness for an offering, a startup’s sales team should get in touch with them to close bigger deals. The BrowserStack CEO says that his company tries not to hire ‘nomads’ (professionals who frequently change jobs) as it looks for people who will be there for the long haul.
Asked about the funding winter, Arora insisted that SaaS startups must figure out how to be self-sustained. “We’ve never raised any primary capital,” he said proudly. But a time will come when a startup must find the ‘right investor’ in order to scale up. This should be someone who has seen the journey of scale, has skin in the game and will be there for the next 10 years.
Although getting the timing right is tricky, a startup deserves to go public when it reaches a certain size, market opportunity, operational maturity and professionalism, believes Arora.
Watch Dhruvil Sanghvi, CEO of LogiNext, speak with BrowserStack’s cofounder and CEO Ritesh Arora about the latter’s journey to reaching the billion-dollar valuation mark, the core learning on his way and his advice for other SaaS startup founders.
As we look ahead, it is quite clear that SaaS startups will continue to play a crucial role in powering the digital future. To cut through the noise and deliver actionable insights, Inc42 and LogiNext have launched a brand new series titled the Masters Of SaaS. Here, you will learn the essentials from India’s leading tech founders like Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks, India’s first SaaS company to list on NASDAQ, with more interesting interactions to follow!
