Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Khadim Bhatti, the co founder and CEO of WhatFix, a digital adoption platform that helps businesses simplify training and support.
In 2014, Khadim and his co founder Vara launched WhatFix from India.
They had already spent three years working on another product which never got any traction.
But things seem different this time with their new startup.
In eight years since launch, they've grown the business to multiple eight figures in Arrival, built a team of nearly 850 people and raised $140 million at a valuation of around $600 million.
But in the early days, the founders struggled to grow sales.
After getting their first 30 or 40 customers, they thought they'd found product market fit and all they had to do was hire a sales team and start scaling.
But sales were slow and inconsistent and eventually the founders realized that product market fit wasn't enough for they also needed a go to market fit before they could scale the business.
In this episode we talk about the seven challenges the founders had to overcome, lessons they learned, and how they were eventually able to drive predictable sales growth.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Pradeem, welcome to the show.
Welcome back.
Khadim Batti (01:37.900)
Thanks Amar.
I'm really, really happy to come back again to the show.
Omer (01:42.140)
Do you have a favorite quote that you can share with us?
Something that inspires or motivates you?
Khadim Batti (01:46.030)
Yep.
I mean, big fan of execution.
So I love the quote by Andy Grove, the Intel founder.
He says like no strategy is better than its execution.
Omer (01:57.710)
Right.
Khadim Batti (01:58.070)
So strategy is always glorified as part of the it's very stability and in interaction.
But then it is of no value if there's no execution.
Right.
And with execution, strategy can be sharpened and that can become your competitive differentiation.
And I've seen that actually in my journey as well.
So I really love this code.
Omer (02:19.960)
Great.
So for people who aren't familiar with what fix, tell us, what does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Khadim Batti (02:27.880)
Yeah, So I think it's been seven to eight years now in the journey, Umar.
So when the problem statement has evolved the way we have seen it.
So if I have to explain this, today there is like $700 billion worth of enterprise software sold every year.
That translates to 800 to 900 software application in every large enterprise.
So that means they are spending maybe several hundred or few billion dollar a year.
They would not see the ROI on those software stack or we call digital transformation until employees or the users adopt them.
Then only this digitization will give them their ROI in terms of customer experience or efficiency and so on.
Now the adoption of the software is very crucial here and that's what we help.
We create a layer of adoption on top of the underlying software stack which hand holds the user step by step, helps them to complete any task, ensures the process compliance, gives them the nudges on the need basis and it ensures that employees are engaged and enterprises see the roi.
So it's a new category called digital adoption solutions and we are one of the pioneers there.
Omer (03:38.140)
Can you give us a sense of the size of the business?
Where are you in terms of revenue, customer size of team?
Khadim Batti (03:43.580)
Yeah.
So we are close to 850 people globally.
We have offices and we started from India, we have office now in Atlanta, Bay Area, San Jose, Chicago.
In US we have now office presence in Frankfurt, London, Sydney.
We just started in having our presence in Singapore as well as starting in France as well.
So 73% of our revenue comes from US market, close to 20% from Western Europe, around 70% comes from Asia Pacific.
So we're very focused on three to four geographies and really doubling down on them.
600 customers.
Our sweet spot is enterprise.
We are adding close to four to five new Fortune 500 logos every quarter.
We are now more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, 150 global thousand.
Typical contract value for us is close to $100,000 a year.
Omer (04:36.060)
So when we talked last time, it was episode 310.
We shared the story of what fix and how you and your co founder Varu had built this business and got it to where it is today.
I love that story because not only did we talk about how you've been able to build a multiple eight figure business, but also how you struggle for three years trying to build a product that nobody seemed to be interested in.
And I think that resonates potentially with a lot of people out there who are struggling and give some hope, right, that there's this.
Just have to keep going, just have to figure out the right thing to focus on, you know, and I think, you know, if people want to kind of hear the full story, then go back and listen to that episode.
But today what I wanted to do was really to invite you back and learn some of the lessons that, that you guys went through.
In terms of, you know, but figuring out how to scale the business and finding that go to market fit.
And you know, I think the sort of, the story really starts here.
When you guys had, you'd gone out and started doing the founder led sales, you had Probably I think 30 or 40 customers at the time, things were looking good that you'd finally figured out, you know, how to get to product market fit.
And now it was just a matter of, you know, let's scale.
Right, let's scale and we're going to hit that hockey stick growth curve and things are all going to be good.
And it turned out to be a lot more complicated than kind of, you know, it initially seemed.
So as you and I did discuss.
So today's really what we want to try and do is to share seven lessons or seven steps or challenges that you guys went through and we want to try and unpack those to figure out what was the lesson that you learned at each step of the way and how can we then help people who are maybe in that same situation today trying to figure out their own, you know, go to market fit to take away some, some actionable insights from that.
So why don't, why don't we start with the, you know, maybe you can just sort of set the scene where you guys were when you sort of had this 30, 40 customers and where you felt, felt you needed to go next.
But things weren't as straightforward as they initially seemed.
Khadim Batti (06:54.960)
Yeah.
So Omar, actually we are talking about seven to eight years before today actually we're talking about.
So we spent three, close to three, three years to get that product market fit.
Maybe we didn't have enough learnings or podcast available at that point.
I feel people can iterate and learn faster and don't spend three years like what we spent.
But yeah, coming back.
So as I was mentioning earlier that we are a new category, right.
So when specifically when you're a new category, it's not a budgeted line item.
You have to get the budget from different departments or business functions and all right.
So typical sales cycles and are longer.
You need to create the market awareness.
You even don't know actually you have the pygmy hypothesis, okay, which segment, which industry, whether it's a small mid market.
So you have a lot of hypothesis in terms of segment geography, size of the customer.
And both the founders were engineering background, myself and my other co founder as well starting from India.
So we thought okay, the best way to start is target small businesses globally because for enterprise our initial thought process Was that we need to be physically present in that geography to get the market.
And we were looking at the global market, specifically us.
So we thought, okay, let's start with a small business.
We got that 30, 40 customers as you were mentioning.
And since we were looking at small businesses, typical ACV, we were having around 2,000, 2,500 a year.
Right.
Couple of hundred dollars MRR, kind of.
We can say that 30, 40 customers are there.
It's product market fit.
We thought so.
But then we started digging deeper.
We found that some of the customers were churning out after a few quarters or a year or so because they were not able to realize the roi.
And when we started investigating why this is happening, the small businesses, their top priority problem statement was how they can scale and what products or what solutions in the market can help them scale or grow in terms of reducing the support queries or ensuring that learning or training that was not very high priority problem statement for them.
So it was nice to have.
Of course they were buying it because they were wowed with that concept at that point.
But then they were not putting enough effort to realize that ROI because it was not very important for them.
So it became nice to have and we used to see the churn.
So even though we got 30, 40 customers, got to close to $100,000 ARR.
Initially we believed we have a PMF, but actually we didn't get a PMF.
So that's where we started looking.
Okay, how do we solve this and should we go to different segment, different geography or different sector?
Omer (09:40.460)
You also raised your first round of investment.
I think it was about a million dollars.
When did that happen?
Khadim Batti (09:45.020)
So I think once we got that five to eight customers, seven, eight customers, we were around $10,000 ARR.
That's where we got our seed round of a million dollars.
Because even investors, the problem statement, they liked it.
They saw that we have five to seven customers are paying us.
So this can be scaled.
Even we had a decent hypothesis, so they backed us.
So that wasn't their point.
Omer (10:08.590)
Okay, great.
So basically this first step was you were going and doing founder led sales.
It was mostly just cold email outreach.
And I know you mentioned as well when we talked last time that you were making sure that you were having face to face meetings because when you threw these prices out there because you didn't know how much to charge, you wanted to see the reaction of people.
Khadim Batti (10:29.150)
Yeah, so we were two people company at that point.
Right.
So and we were looking for product market fit.
So what we used to do was we had a basic MVP of our product built at that point.
And my co founder used to collect 30, 40 email IDs every day from US small businesses, their founders, their senior folks.
I used to write them personalized email wherever we used to get response.
And if they were in the same city, we used to actually go in person and see the reaction after the demo when we throw them the price points and all.
That's one of the fastest ways we could think of iterating.
And that helped actually because we were able to close the 30, 40 customers that I was mentioning.
So both of us were actually working on getting those initial set of customers.
Once we got that few customers on board, we were, we started getting some support tickets.
Now that's when we recruited our first engineering guy and I also got my first sales guy on board.
Omer (11:25.480)
So yeah, so let's talk about that.
So you've got the, the seed round.
You decide that you want to go out and hire salespeople that you believe you've got to product market fit or close to it.
And now it's just a matter of scaling.
What happened when you brought the salesperson on?
What did you see with sales?
Did they start growing?
Khadim Batti (11:50.330)
So again I got one sales guy, we had one engineer and one marketer on board.
Now first few sales I was leading and I asked my sales guy to shadow me, right?
So he used to join all the meetings, but I used to lead those meetings.
I wanted him because we didn't have any process to coach a sales guy, no enablement even.
We both were engineers.
So he also don't know how to train the sales guy, right?
So I just took the person along, my sales guy along with all my deals.
I closed three forward deals and he was shadowing me.
I reversed after those three, four deals which he was shadowing.
Like I asked my sales guy to lead it now.
So he started leading those calls, he started leading those demos and then I was shadowing him so that I can help him out wherever there were some questions which he could not address.
Once he got three to four deals closed, I thought maybe this is the time, maybe I can add one or two more sales guys.
So I recruited one fresh grad and one more experienced salesperson.
So it was a team of three.
Initially everybody spent like a few days to build a pipeline, like create some opportunities and then start demonstrating create that motion.
They closed few deals, each one of them, and then there was a lull for next four to six weeks.
And after that again they closed three to four deals.
Then again There was a lull for four to six weeks.
I didn't realize initially what was happening.
And then when I started going deeper, I found that, okay, they spent some time, close to a few days or few weeks to create that pipe generates 15, 20 conversations.
When their plate was full with those conversations and there were two or three customers which they think they can close, they used to spend most of their efforts in chasing those customers and closing those deals.
When they closed the deals, the remaining seven to eight, they were not so hopeful.
Then they start spending again the next few weeks to create the next set of opportunities.
So because they put were playing both the roles like SDR and AE themselves.
Right.
So it was sequential.
You can say they used to generate opportunities, then close, then generate.
I think being from engineering background, I didn't realize this early.
I should have had.
But then that was the time when I thought, okay, I should now hire an SDR and help them out.
So we recruited a couple of SDRs and who would be responsible for creating the pipe and then A's would be responsible for only closing the deals.
That's how we got to that.
50, 60 customers, 140,000.
$50,000 ARR.
But then, which I was mentioning earlier, that issue of not exactly product market fit, being nice to have for that particular segment started cropping up when we were actually trying to work with some customers for ROI and all.
And we realized that, okay, maybe this is not the right segment and we need to move on.
Omer (14:44.870)
So how did you figure out that you needed to hire an SDR to solve that problem?
I mean, you said neither of you guys had a sales background.
It's funny, I spoke to a founder recently who said he was running his business for about a year before he even realized or he learned what an SDR was.
So how did you guys figure that out?
Did you have a basic knowledge of sales?
Did you go and look to mentors or people to kind of help you out?
But how did you kind of navigate through that and figure out, okay, this is the way we need to structure the sales team.
Yeah.
Khadim Batti (15:23.730)
So actually when I, when I saw this pattern of like one month things were not working out, another one, another month we had some deals coming in.
I took this problem statement to my investor who had written me seed round right to and my seed investor was actually back had a background of sales operations in, in large company prior to that, before he became vc.
So he immediately diagnosed this problem and he said, I think you need an sdr.
I asked him what does SDR do?
And how does it work?
Then he started explaining and he actually told me the kind of a sales process, what actually should evolve for us.
He connected with me a couple of other founders in different companies which were a couple of steps ahead of us.
I spoke to them, I tried to learn from them their sales processes.
I got a couple of them as an advisor and mentor.
Also asked them to write a, if they would be interested to write a check on us as an angel investor.
Got few of them.
I think that also helped like then it became a cadence for me like every quarter go and speak to a couple of founders, couple of functional experts, try to identify the blind spots because those guys would have navigated them and try to see if I can commit that one or two less mistakes and move faster.
Omer (16:40.790)
Great.
So you unpack that issue and you've got a solution in terms of the way that you're going to have SDRs really kind of building the pipeline and generating leads and qualifying and then the AES can pitch and hopefully close those deals.
The next challenge was that as you started hiring more people and again it sort of sounds like great, we've identified this sales problem, we've organized in a better way.
Now we're going to scale.
And then you hit another challenge which was there were issues around consistency in terms of how they were pitching the use cases.
They would talk about what was going on there as you started to grow the sales team.
Khadim Batti (17:28.470)
Yeah, I think those consistency part or enablement part, that problem is, I feel it's a lifelong.
We still face that problem.
We have like 150 people sales marketing team and the problem becomes just more complex.
Anyway, coming back to, I think once we got to 10 to 12 folks in sales and SDR, I think that's where the first problem, what we started, look we started facing was we didn't have enough data to actually even make decisions or enough visibility across the pipe.
So first thing was we had to define stages of the sales cycle.
We had some crude definition.
We had to more put it in place and, and start using some CRM even for pipedrive at that point.
So different stages, what is the movement across different stage, what are the drops, what's the conversion rate?
Once you have that kind of data, I think it becomes easier to even actually make some decisions.
It's easier to identify the bottlenecks and actually start training people.
So I think the number one gap was actually we didn't have this visibility.
So again some of the mentors, some of the advisors helped me saying okay, you need to Start collecting those information, define those gates and stages very clearly and get those metrics metrics in place.
We found that okay, for some AES, the movements across stages happens more in a much better way.
For some AES, they get stuck in POC, some are getting stuck in security.
So it's like some, some, some of them are good in demo because they figured out the wow.
They figured out the how to discover the problem and actually address with what fixes the solution.
Some of them.
But when they move forward, maybe they were because they were not from non tech background, they were getting confused.
When information security discussions comes in, they were not so comfortable on the deployment questions actually like how this will get delivered, how this get deployed.
Some of the guys who were coming from a little bit tech background because there are a lot of sales reps which are tech engineers with an mba.
So they were comfortable on the tech part, but that sometimes they are not comfortable with our demo pitches.
So we started identifying this problem statements and we realized that okay, I think the problem is we need to have that clear data based on data.
Identify those gaps based on those gaps.
Actually start training and enablement.
So I think at 10 to 12 people we started finding this gap.
And as we started scaling this started initially it was done by my sales manager, myself personally my other co founder.
And as we grew like today, we have a sales enablement team of around six people.
We have a sales operation team of around six, seven people.
We have separated out of a sales engineering sales consultant who are experts in information security, creating the pitches, creating the demo, doing the proof of concepts.
Sales guys are now more specialized for holding, holding the room, doing the discovery, identifying the sales process and moving the deal, doing the closure.
So there are specialization have come across the company and each specialization.
Now people know that they have to go specifically in this particular part.
They need to answer everything.
And for them we have created the training, we have identified all the courses and modules.
So gradually it evolved.
But the first enablement first person would be the founder along with sales manager if it's in place.
Yeah.
So that problem started when we were actually we crossed 10 people.
Omer (20:52.210)
And it sounds like as you mentioned, it happens as you keep growing sales.
It still keeps, keeps happening.
Khadim Batti (20:59.450)
Yeah, it happens today also like I think every few days this discussion comes back to table again and again and again.
Right.
Like today we are evolving ourselves from single product to multi product company.
Now can I enable all the sales guy for those different two different products?
Should I enable only few guys and see should I have a sales Engineer.
Specialized engineer for product one, product two.
So there are so many questions which we need to answer.
How do we structure this now as an organization?
Right.
And if the deal comes where both the products are required, there will be two AES, two sales engineers.
Again, nobody wants to talk to so many people right in a sales deal.
So it sounds simple sometimes, but there are too much of complexities involved when you're doing this at scale.
We are doing, actually we can say we are handling around 400 to 450 opportunities every quarter now.
Omer (21:50.180)
Awesome.
All right, so let's talk about the next challenge which was really around moving upmarket to enterprise customers.
And from what I understand at the time, you were getting a mixture of leads.
So there were the small SMB type leads coming through, there were enterprise leads.
And one of the challenges that you were facing was that a large chunk of your revenue was still coming from small businesses, but you knew that you needed to move upmarket towards enterprise.
So tell us about that.
What was going on?
What kind of problems did you start experiencing?
Khadim Batti (22:28.800)
So the use case, what actually started evolving was actually if the product is more complex, what fix would be a best fit?
When the product is complex and there are more number of users on top of it.
Now if I look at CRMs or ERPs, they're pretty complex applications.
And if I look at any company which is, let's say 50 people team and there are only 10 sales rep and they are using a CRM, even though if it might be Dynamics or SAP or Salesforce, those 10 people would work together and they may not need that kind of handholding which I would provide via what fix.
But now imagine there's three different geographies.
There are 200 sales guys, we are using a CRM along with CPU, CLN.
The solution is not pretty complex.
Any change in the process, any change in the compliance, 200 people to be trained, making them adoption, making them adopt those process or features.
It's hard and nobody wants to read emails or training manuals and all.
So it became very natural for us that as the number of employees increased, the treatment would be better.
And by the time we had a couple of customers where we saw that there's a clear ROI and there was a high paying capacity because they were willing to pay much more for this problem.
But since we were, let's say quarter million, kind of an ARR, $250,000 and then 200,000 or 220,000 coming from small businesses, it's like going back to 20, 30k ARR.
If I dumped all the small businesses which was actually paying some of our bills.
Right.
So what we did, instead of taking a very bold decision of just saying, okay, I'll stop everything and I'll go to enterprise, we started increasing our floor price.
So instead of $2,000 which we started with a year, we said, okay, now we're going to do $4,000.
We're not going to entertain any deals below that so that whoever is not able to pay, they'll churn out.
And who are able to pay, they may be able to put more effort to see the ROI of the solutions.
From 4 we made it 8, and then from 8 we made it 10.
And we saw eventually that companies which are less than 100 people or 150 people, they actually stopped buying the solution.
And gradually we had customers mostly with 150, 200 employees to 1,000, which became our small to mid market or emerging market, what we call and more than thousand employees started becoming our enterprise and more than 5,000 became our larger enterprise.
So that's how we did.
We gradually started increasing our floor and started moving up in the market.
Early on when our floor was, let's say $2,000, we never used to boldly ask the customer saying that okay, this is our price, would you be ready to pay?
But when we realized and we started building some pipeline enterprise, we used to call out in the qualification stage itself that this is the minimum price point and if you are willing we can arrange for a demo.
So that's how we started filtering more and more strictly and we started moving more and more upmarket.
So today, if I have to say, close to 95% of my revenue comes from thousand plus employee companies and remaining 5% would be built between 202,000 people.
Omer (25:35.520)
How long did it take you to make that transition from being in the situation where you're getting a mixture of leads to a point where you say, no, we are definitely focused on enterprise customers.
We've made that transition.
How long did it take?
And in hindsight, do you think it was still the right approach or could you have got there faster?
Khadim Batti (25:54.960)
Yeah, so it took me 15 to 18 months actually because we were also not very confident how to generate enterprise leads.
So cutting off that small businesses would have actually crashed our revenue.
And we didn't know that the new funding would come in whether I'll be able to generate enterprise leads.
We thought we'll buy some time.
So it took 15 to 18 months.
By the time we were able to figure out our enterprise play, we got the Product tweaked.
We participated in few events.
We bounced off our solution, identified the use case.
I can crystallized our messaging.
What would actually resonate with enterprise customers.
Fix some of the information security or deployment issues.
What typically enterprise customer would look but not small businesses won't matter.
For them it won't matter.
Get some certifications in place like ISO SOC 2.
So it gave us a time given, a choice inside.
If I have to say, maybe if I would have directly moved all my resources to focus on enterprise customers, it would have helped me to crash, maybe save maybe four to six months.
Definitely.
But again, at that point I had to balance out between cash revenue coming in versus speed of moving to enterprise.
Today it sounds I should have done maybe the letter one directly move to enterprise faster.
But yeah, anyway, I think we have, we have landed here.
So all fine.
Omer (27:21.200)
Yeah.
And totally.
And there's so much uncertainty at the time.
You don't know if you're going to be able to move up market, how much you'll be able to charge and so on.
Khadim Batti (27:29.760)
I'll tell you one story actually, Omar.
I was in one of the events, I believe it was DreamForce event in 2016.
We were averaging, our price points were three or four thousand dollars a year at that point.
And we were validating our enterprise play.
One of the enterprise customers, VP dropped to our booth.
We gave them the demo.
It was wow, okay, this is great.
I have one of the ERP solutions with 700, 800 users.
What would be the price?
We were so used to telling 3,000, 4,000.
We said, okay, we'll tell the higher price, let's bounce off $8,000.
You know, the person said, okay, 18 to 12, 96,000.
That looks fine.
You know, we were so scared that okay, we were trying to say 8,000 a year.
It was $96,000 a year, $8,000 a month.
Right.
So that's where we started learning like, okay, the enterprise price points and the value and it's quite different actually.
Omer (28:27.460)
Yeah, I want to talk about that because you have another great story about pricing with enterprise that I want to cover.
But before we get into that, so you make the transition to enterprise and now it's like, yeah, now you'll be able to scale.
Right.
Everything is kind of falling into place.
You've got the sales team, you know who you're targeting.
But then you also had to face some challenges around how to segment the market.
Like you were now selling to customers worldwide.
You had different markets to prioritize.
You were still at the time still selling everything from India to customers around the world.
So tell us what was going on there at the time and again, what problems started to emerge from that?
Khadim Batti (29:10.800)
Yeah.
So what happens when you, when you are selling it remote and when you are relying on inbound as a channel?
You would get leads from across the world.
Like you might get a lead from South Africa and then next day you might get it from France or Germany and then from Australia and you have three to four sales guys.
You're not divided them into geographies.
Same guy is actually working in the morning giving a demo to Australian customer and then evening we are expecting him to give to someone else.
And imagine the same thing with SDRs or later on with the support and engineering when they have to do some quick fixes.
Right.
So operationally it becomes a nightmare.
This was a good part.
We realized pretty early on that it's not possible to actually manage multiple geographies with a lean team.
It won't be efficient and it won't be right.
So we thought okay, since we are in India, if anything comes from India, we'll entertain.
But apart from India we'll just focus on one geography and naturally it was us.
So we aligned our team like 60, 70% of our sales, marketing, customer support.
We aligned that everybody would be working in shift.
They would be starting at 5pm in India time continue till 2.33am and engineering and some other guys would be in the day and maybe one of the sales guys would be working.
Even I changed my time zone.
That actually helped us operationally because otherwise somebody sends an email, a potential customer from us sends an email at midnight 12, nobody responds.
Next day we respond in the morning like it's like 36, 48 hours of lag and that's very bad customer experience.
So we realized pretty early and when operationally we change all this, it helped.
And any other lead coming from other geographies.
It used to be nice to have one of our daytime sales guy would respond if it comes in, closes, fine.
If it doesn't close, no need to fret too much about it.
But any deals from us or India we should address it with utmost customer and gives rock solid customer experience and sales experience.
So that was the first choice we made.
The second after us of course more leads were coming in from different parts of the world.
So again the question was where do we expand more.
So we thought okay, let's continue to doubling down on US market.
So my co founder relocated to us.
We hired a couple of local folks.
So he used to double down going to customers if there was a FaceTime required or giving an in person demo, customized demo, do some POCs.
So we started having some physical presence in the US geography and since English was again the language which was comfortable for us, any other geography where there would be an expectation of supporting different collaterals in different language or support in different language would be again we thought it would be operationally very hard to pull it off in early days.
So we thought okay, let's now focus only on UK after us which is again again an English speaking country.
So after us we thought UK and UK also one of the other reasons would be it.
The time zone also matches very well with India, right?
So they start around 1pm or 2pm India time and then if I am there till 10, 11 in the night, I think we cover the Europe time zone or primary UK time zone.
So UKV was the next one.
And then we, after a year or so we hired a couple of folks in uk.
We transferred one guy from India as well.
Third one we thought okay, after us, uk, India.
Then we thought okay, let's continue with English.
Let's not do more of any other language yet.
We start, we started getting some customers from Germany, France, different countries.
We were supporting English, we were losing some customers because of the language issues and other stuff, not local presence.
But again we were very clear.
That's nice to have.
For now let's focus where we can actually use our existing website, existing collaterals.
So we started focusing on Australia and when the time came, okay, now we've tried to further double down, further scale up in terms of geography.
I thought now it's time to experiment the first non English country.
So we narrowed down on Germany because we had by then only 7,8 customers in Germany.
So we also had built muscle by the time in terms of company there were 300, 400 people.
So we did some six, seven people local hiring use our existing customers, created a complete collaterals in that language and we doubled down in Germany and that became a playbook, right?
It worked really well for us and now it becomes that how I can replicate that for other geographies, maybe if I could do for French or to do for Japan.
So that's how, that's, that's what the approach actually to resolve the operational challenge which would come to resolve the cultural or language barriers which we would face.
So that's how we navigate it.
Some of those decisions I feel I would repeat the same way.
Omer (33:51.530)
And then what happened when you made those changes?
How did it affect sales?
How did it affect your go to market.
Khadim Batti (33:58.570)
So yeah, it worked well actually.
Right.
Like because since we were really focused well on initial days on us, the number of logos which we collect from a specific one geography, that helps actually to build the trust, that helps to build some kind of a what a mouth or virality within that particular industry or particular segment.
So when we used to go for a event in the US or let's say Dreamforce or some other event, we used to have five, six customers visiting us in our booth and a few other guys were potential customers.
We used to make them handshakes, you know, hey man, just meet this guy.
He's been using us for a couple of years.
So I think that momentum builds up.
You can focus on pr, you can focus on your branding, everything in one or two geographies.
Right.
You can't spread too thin.
So that helped us to really build very solid momentum in actually US.
And I was mentioning earlier like today also like 70, close to 75% of our revenue comes from US market.
And we are now getting so many Fortune customers every quarter.
And by the time we built, we went to uk when we started creating the footprint locally in that market, that same playbook helped us again, like okay, getting those few large customers within that geography, using them in that event, repeating those how to use the customer for evangelism and get more customers.
And then we did the first time we did that a couple of years back for Germany for a non English language.
So I think those learning those playbook, once it establishes it becomes very easy to replicate it afterwards.
Omer (35:36.130)
Okay, let's talk about the next challenge you faced which was around pricing.
Now this was something that we've talked about from the early days to going and talking to small customers and trying to see, gauge the reactions and see what they're willing to pay to.
That story you shared about the enterprise customer coming, seeing you at the booth at the event, there was a large enterprise customer in the US that a deal that you looked really promising but you ended up losing.
And a lot of that was from what I understand down to the way you priced or the quote you provided.
Can you tell us about that?
Because I think that's a great story.
Khadim Batti (36:18.930)
Yeah, so early on actually we were pricing based on some assumptions what we had in terms of how much somebody would pay for it because we didn't have a very hard ROI value parameters.
But the best way we learned over a period of time is like, okay, what kind of value we provide to customers and actually price it accordingly.
So if you are on let's say if I am demonstrating a customer set of features and then I say, okay, I'm going to price you X.
So the customer is actually evaluating me as a tool because they're just buying some set of features.
But if I'm demonstrating a product with a solution for the problem, what they are looking to solve and they say, and then I quantify that, okay, this problem which you're looking at, what fix will be able to solve and make you derive an ROI of $3 million and show the person is not expecting the next slide, that I'm going to say $3,000 as a customer, as a price point.
Right.
I can actually even price it a quarter million or $300,000 because you're setting that value.
So that's how we evolve ourselves as well.
But coming back to that story which you were referring to, so we were talking to one of the largest banks in states very early on.
I think we hardly had a couple of enterprise customers at that point.
We didn't want to lose that deal.
Actually.
It's not like we wanted to win that deal.
So we become too defensive.
They wanted to have used what fix on, I think 10 to 15,000 sales reps on a CRM.
We had by then only sold what fix max on thousand seats on a CRM.
And they said, okay, for us it was like an unlimited license on a CRM.
So we priced it around 70, $75,000.
Everything was going fine.
Three, four rounds of discussions, demos.
We built some champions.
They were saying, man, tool looks awesome.
We have tried it.
Everything looks fine.
Give us a quote.
And then we, after getting the quote, we never heard back.
We thought, man, I think we gave too much price.
We should have given 25k instead of 75k.
Omer (38:26.060)
So you thought you had charged too much?
Khadim Batti (38:29.500)
Yes.
And then fast forward a year down the line.
We hired head of sales in us.
He joined.
He was going through our CRM.
He said, man, why did you lose this particular deal?
Because I know a friend who is a VP of sales in this particular bank.
Any reason?
So we said, yeah, I think we priced high.
He said, okay, let me find out.
He gave him a call.
He called me back a couple of days later.
He said, I spoke to him.
He said, Boss, I had two quotes on my table.
One was around 300, $400,000 and one was 75K.
I've spent like tens of millions of dollars on my CRM.
I don't know whether this company can even support.
They don't even know what it would Cost to hire one customer support person in us.
I need a partner who would be long term with me, not someone who would not even survive after six months, the company which would not survive.
So we realized actually we underpriced because the value was much higher and the person was looking for a long term partner rather than a tool or a vendor.
That was a really good lesson to learn.
By the way, Omar, last quarter we won that customer back.
Omer (39:38.190)
Nice.
Nice.
That's a good ending to that story.
Love it.
Khadim Batti (39:41.950)
Yes.
So I think we spoke a year back.
I think we didn't have this customer and they came up early this year.
They were not happy with the different vendor and now I think we price them the right way.
Omer (39:52.230)
You didn't charge them 75,000 this time.
All right, great.
So the challenge number seven was really about figuring out how to narrow focus.
So you know, we've talked about sort of taking this journey through building out the sales team, figuring out how to get more consistency in the way the sales process works, the pitches, the use cases, so on moving over to enterprise customers and then learning to segment the market.
And some of the lessons you learned around pricing along the way, which, which help.
But the, the other thing was from what I understand is that despite getting focused on enterprise and the US market and all of that stuff, you really still had a very broad use case on how what fix could work and what type of software or applications it could be used for.
And that that was still creating.
I assume that you especially as engineering guys, you look at that and say well of course that's the way you want to build something.
Right?
Because then it has kind of universal appeal.
But that was creating a bunch of issues for you, right?
Khadim Batti (41:06.460)
That's right.
So let me give you some context actually.
So initially we thought we were looking at what fix as a solution which will help onboard adopt any software.
Now when I look at this problem, the potential use cases can be I can help a product manager to onboard their end users.
It can be B2C product manager for a bank portal or consumer software.
It can be a B2B SaaS product manager who want to onboard their SMB customers or enterprise customers.
I can use what fix for onboarding adoption of an employee inside an organization on a third party software like CRM, ebr, a custom software.
Right.
Now this gives too many different variations.
Like if I'm using what fix on an E commerce portal, if the E commerce portal has a million hits every day, maybe few of them might use what fix.
Maybe 0.5% or so.
So what would I price?
What kind of use cases they would like to have?
Maybe they don't want what fix in every different buttons or pages they might need.
Maybe only in few areas.
If I look at for B2B SaaS, product manager, they want to maybe use what fix to nudge and create more free trial to conversion.
But when I'm looking for enterprise employee experience use case in terms of organization, an operations guy or a CIO office or IT office want actually employees to adopt the process, be more compliant.
And there are people like L and D in the former case there are product managers who are ready to customize use what fix APIs but they need some it to be very well integrated with the underlying platform.
But if I go into the later use case of employee experience, if I say okay, there are 20 APIs which need to integrate, they will start scratching their head, okay, do I need to go to service company like Infosys, Exchange or someone to get this customized?
Because I and Lindy folks, or sometimes you know, let's say large non tech company or manufacturing, they don't even know where the engineering guys are.
So the product, when you start going deeper, the product starts evolving differently.
Initially it didn't occur to us unless we started looking at some of these use cases and started going deeper.
Second, you cannot build your differentiations in all these use cases all the market you need to pick your battles.
It occurred to us little also hard way.
Actually I was pitching to some of the investors for my series B round and I was mentioning all these use cases and I was very proud that it shows a huge tan.
And they asked like what's the differentiation in each one which you are stronger?
I was trying to blabber around saying okay, we are doing this, we are doing that.
There are a few customers here, a few customers here, a few customers here.
The investor wanted to push me saying that okay, pick one and go deep.
Finally he asked me and I was not actually narrowing down.
Finally he asked me one question, let's see if I put a gun on your head and I asked you to pick one, which one would that be?
And immediately I pointed at one of the use case that is employee experience.
And he asked me why.
I gave my three reasons.
Because my product was easy to deploy, author maintain and it resonates with the particular buyer Persona and the people who use this.
In this particular use case we have a strong product differentiation as well.
And we and the paying capacity of this particular category or segment is much, much, much higher.
So then you should do that.
Actually I came back, thought a lot and said yeah, that's the right thing you should do.
And that's where actually we started pivoting.
Not pivoting, I would say narrowing down.
I'll tell you one more case study here.
So now even in this particular case I've always been talking about adoption, learning, onboarding, training, right?
So if I have to do a value parameter I can always prove that okay, I'm going to reduce your 40% of your support tickets.
And if for a company, let's say if they're getting thousand support tickets I can multiply by x number of hours or dollars and I can show okay, you're going to save million $.
I can save you 50, I can charge you 50k or 100k for one application.
Now still it's a little horizontal within employee experience itself within internal we further actually a few quarters back we started narrowing on even further.
So we didn't actually start going like we came up with a different approach like T like be horizontal for employee experience but figure out some more niche.
Now I'll give you an example.
Like let's say if I'm going for a insurance claims actually for property casualty or life and annuity or something now instead of saying I'm going to help you with reducing your support tickets or I'm going to help your employees to onboard faster if I can tell them that I'm going to help you reduce your claims processing time.
Now that's the business metric.
Everybody's concerned in that particular department, business department.
It's not only botheration of an enablement guy or operations guy, but even the chief business manager or head of business line, maybe they are doing $200 million claims every every quarter or every year.
And if I can move that needle by even half a percentage point in terms of timing and efficiency and all, it's a big inflection.
I can say okay, I can improve your transaction and NPS after every insurer which provides you I can reduce your claims or compliance error because anybody defaults is actually have to be maybe potentially there might be million dollar penalty there.
Now these are very hard business KPIs which I can influence.
I could not have possibly find this kind of metric if I would not have narrowed down further domain or industry use case.
So that really resonated very very well.
And our capacity to price point of price point actually even went higher.
And then we started slicing much more.
Our TAM which was looking bigger actually now became much more realizable.
So I feel the narrowing down actually helps to identify those hardcore hard ROI parameters or value parameters.
You can price better, you can message better, you can pitch better.
It resonates with maybe the right business buyers.
So I think that's how I think we evolved, by narrowing down.
Omer (47:14.930)
Yeah.
And it's such a difficult decision to make when you're in the middle of it because you're looking at this landscape and you're saying, but the product can help so many industries, so many apps, so many use cases.
And doesn't that show us that we have this huge opportunity?
Right.
And if we then, you know, put 95% of that to the side and say we're going to focus on one, one thing, one app.
Right.
That feels like such a counterintuitive thing.
It's so difficult.
You touched on it a little bit.
But just for someone who's maybe going through that and struggling to, to really narrow down just what's some advice that you would offer them in terms of helping to take that leap and commit to one market or one use case.
Khadim Batti (48:07.710)
Yeah.
So when you narrow down, actually as I was mentioning, your value parameters become crystal clear as I was giving an example of that insurance use case.
It's very easy to enable most of your AES.
It's easy to actually qualify your incoming leads because whatever you're telling them about the value and the solution, it resonates very, very quickly.
So your sales cycle starts quizzing.
You are charging now 2x or 3x what you were initially thinking, because you are able to enable and message position very well, your win rate goes up, maybe actually double some.
Now you are doing every activity much more efficiently and at the higher price point.
So with the horizontal approach, it sounds that very jazzy that okay, you have a lot.
But then if your win rates are, let's say 15%, your price points are, let's say 10k.
Imagine your price point can go 3x30k.
Your win rate from 15% becomes 40% with even the less number of people, actually you would accelerate and look much faster and much better.
Second, when you win those deals, let's say in insurance, you have out of top 25 insurers, you have five already on board now with some hard work.
Now you are having OEM players or SIS working with you for that particular.
It becomes inevitable or it becomes very easy to get the other 15 and the sales cycles and all starts becoming much, much smaller.
In our case, specifically, if I am getting into ERP or if I am getting into CRM or HR software, Visa, Vis If I'm getting into core business application with a buy in from a business leader it becomes much more sticky and I can actually spread across the organization also very quickly.
So there are a lot more benefits and actually helps you to accelerate much faster.
Omer (49:55.470)
Great, great points.
We should wrap up get onto the lightning round.
You've done this before so you know what to expect.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to ask them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Khadim Batti (50:07.510)
Yep.
That's great.
Omer (50:08.910)
What's one piece of business advice that you've received?
Khadim Batti (50:12.900)
One advice actually which I really love which I think I read in one of the presentations, I don't remember exactly, it was six, seven years back which mentioned that never over designate people when you hire them because in early days actually you are not even in position to actually evaluate people and it's very easy to just attract some talent.
You keep over designating them.
So maybe if I got a director, potentially let's say a director of marketing because I don't know how to evaluate and just want to attract and I give them VP or CMO I will the company over grows in a year the person would have been fantastic director.
But now since you need a V.P.
maybe you would lose that guy.
So I think when I read that advice and we implemented it has given terrific result.
You need to do expectation management but it works great.
Omer (51:02.820)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Khadim Batti (51:05.230)
Hard thing about hard things.
Right.
So a lot of things which we discussed.
I think every every entrepreneur goes through those ups and downs.
So there are really good stories by Anderson there.
I think it's a must read for most of the entrepreneurs.
Omer (51:17.390)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Khadim Batti (51:21.390)
Curiosity.
A founder has to be curious to keep questioning if they want to solve the problem with the first principle approach.
They need to talk around.
They need to figure it out why this has to be built like this, why this has process is supposed to be like this.
Why this arc structure has to be like this.
If they're curious if they can learn I think they can iterate and they can build it much better.
Omer (51:44.490)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit productivity tool?
Khadim Batti (51:49.610)
I currently use actually more of Slack so keep creating.
I kept creating channels for a specific area which actually is bothering me.
Identify, pull in some people debate there call for a quick meeting if it doesn't get resolved.
So I think it's becoming a good brainstorming for me which can work even in asynchronous mode.
Omer (52:10.980)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Khadim Batti (52:14.100)
I would like to replicate what I'm doing in ar.
What fix for AR with AR actually.
Omer (52:21.300)
Interesting idea.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Khadim Batti (52:26.030)
I don't know whether we will call it fun fact or not.
I have two kids, 18 and 14.
Actually I spent good amount of time doing some small 3D printing with them, doing some small programming with them in terms of building some small robots and all.
So yeah, I think it's a stress buster.
Good way to spend time with the kids and also learn some basics.
Omer (52:46.510)
Awesome.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Khadim Batti (52:49.710)
I think spending time with family actually as much as time I can spend on weekends because we don't get much time apart from family and work.
Whenever I'm driving, whenever I get some other free time, go through some podcast.
I'm one of the fan of your podcast as well.
Omer (53:06.970)
Thank you.
Khadim Batti (53:07.930)
And read some books as I was quoting one of them.
So I'm trying to read maybe at least one book a quarter.
I want to increase it to one a month, but yeah, I'm a little bit more lazy there.
Omer (53:20.170)
Thank you so much for coming back, Khadim.
It's been a pleasure.
And you're one of those people that I never run out of stuff to talk about and I feel like we could keep this conversation going for, for another few hours.
So thank you so much for, for making the time, staying up late and most importantly, sharing.
Sharing those lessons that you learned in terms of going through that evolution and figuring out, you know, from product market fit to go to market fit and the journey that you took.
And I think hopefully that's going to be valuable for a lot of other founders who are maybe going through that process today.
So appreciate that.
If people want to learn more about what fix, they can go to whatfix.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Khadim Batti (54:09.150)
So can reach out to me over my email fadimotfix.com or connect me over LinkedIn.
Kadim Bhatti and it's a really pleasure to be on this podcast, Omar.
It helps me release the journey, what we went through.
Happy to do it again.
Omer (54:24.330)
Maybe we should make this an annual event to keep checking in and see where you're going.
Khadim Batti (54:28.330)
Yeah, we'll do more mistakes and we'll share more learnings.
Omer (54:31.210)
Yes, please, please make more mistakes.
Thank you so much.
Khadim Batti (54:35.610)
Thank you.
Thank you.
