Omer Khan [00:00:09]:
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is a 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 Samir Narka, the founder and CEO of Connect Insights, an omnichannel customer experience management platform that helps enterprise brands monitor and manage customer interactions across social media, email calls and chat. In 2014, Sameer was a software developer working in finance.
Omer Khan [00:00:43]:
One day, while talking to a restaurant chain's marketing team, he discovered they were paying hundreds of dollars each month just for basic Google Analytics reports. That moment sparked an idea. What if businesses could access deeper insights across all channels at a fraction of the cost? But Samir's journey was far from smooth. It took over two years and more than 50 failed sales meetings before landing the first paying customer. During this time, Samir supported himself by taking on software services work and reinvesting that revenue to fund the product.
Omer Khan [00:01:15]:
His early success came through partnerships with agencies instead of trying to sell directly to brands. But scaling beyond India required a different strategy. Sameer and his team pivoted to forging alliances with CRM companies, contact centers and chatbot providers which opened doors to over 30 countries. Today, Connect Insights is a 7 million ARR business that has grown 200% in the last two years, all without external funding. In this episode, you'll learn how Samir transformed years of sales failure into actionable insights that help land enterprise customers.
Omer Khan [00:01:48]:
Why balancing consulting work alongside product development was critical to bootstrapping success. The strategies he used to expand into international markets and forge strong relationships with global partners. We talk about how he and his team stayed competitive against well funded incumbents by doubling down on an all in one solution. And what Samir's journey teaches about scaling a SaaS business sustainably without external funding. So I hope you enjoy. Sameer, welcome to the show.
Sameer Narkar [00:02:17]:
Hey Omar. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here.
Omer Khan [00:02:20]:
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Sameer Narkar [00:02:25]:
Sure. I mean, if you're asking about business, my favorite quotes are, you know, what matters is how intense is your intent. And I like the Nike way. Just do it.
Omer Khan [00:02:37]:
Love them both. That's great. So let's talk about Connect Insights. What does the product do, who's it for? And what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Sameer Narkar [00:02:48]:
What we call about Connect Insights is an omnichannel customer experience management platform. But simply put, what happens in today's world is when I'm a brand, I could be a brand from any given sector be it automobiles or fintech or airlines, qsr, retail, fnb. People are expressing opinions about me on various platforms and trying to reach out to me if they have any queries or issues. And at the same time when they talk about these issues or queries, they are also creating a brand perception about me as a brand.
Sameer Narkar [00:03:29]:
And in today's world the customers can go on any platform. They can go on X, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn. They can also go on blogs, forums. There are so many review sites, you know and every time they talk to talk about me as a brand, they're actually telling all their friends that you know, I have a problem with this particular brand and it's kind of creating a brand perception and no matter if I, if I am, I'm having some brand ambassador talking great things about my product.
Sameer Narkar [00:04:04]:
But if, if, if one of my friend, if one of my friend is not having a good experience then, then he's going to take me seriously more than the brand ambassador. So that's the context on which this product is built. We bring in data from all possible channels all over the web, right from social media which is Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, your Google business reviews, sites like Trustpilot, Quora, also data from blogs, forums, you know, that is one source of data.
Sameer Narkar [00:04:38]:
We cover all non voice channels and then we also ensure that your emails are integrated within our platform. Your calls, call center apps, chatbots, you know, every single touch point about a customer gets tracked in our platform as you authenticate your channels. And that's just the start. Beyond this, we give you entire customer 360, you know, who is talking from where they're talking, what kind of responses you can give, assisting the agents. It's built on top of AI, you know, so we kind of offer all those features within our platform.
Omer Khan [00:05:14]:
So you have, you know, social media listening tools that look out for mentions for your brand. Some will actually help those brands to actually reply and engage with your customers. But with Connect Insights you're doing a lot more than that, right? From what I understand you are basically collecting data from every single touch point, a call that a call center rep had, an email from a customer and pulling all that together to give the organization a really rich and comprehensive sort of overview of what's going on with their customers.
Sameer Narkar [00:05:50]:
Yeah, yeah, that's very true. And all these customers also look at return on investments, roi, what's the ROI today. It's one thing to actually integrate everything and offer a unified solution, but on top of that you should really have tools to assist the agents so that they respond smartly. Integrate AI in such a way that if a query otherwise what it takes 15 minutes, can that be solved in five minutes? Because you have all the solutions integrated together. Those are the things that really matter.
Sameer Narkar [00:06:23]:
And if we can reduce that time by 1/3, that means today's agents, their agents with Connect insights can actually solve 150 queries instead of 50 that they were solving with other siloed platforms. Which means if in a day they can actually do three times more than the than what they're doing. So agent productivity also giving you all the insights.
Sameer Narkar [00:06:45]:
And there's another angle to the product as well which gives you detailed marketing insights of who is talking from where they are talking, what is the sentiment, what different product aspects people talk, how are you faring against the competition, demographics, information. So you get all that in one unified product.
Omer Khan [00:07:03]:
Great. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
Sameer Narkar [00:07:09]:
Still we are somewhere around 7 million or so this year we should complete about 7 million. Our year ends in the month of March, but we have done pretty good progress. It's about more than 200% growth that we have seen in the past two years. Our customers, we can say that we are fairly there in about 30 odd countries today. Started from India where we have the the biggest customer base but going forward we have good customer base in Medalist in Southeast Asia, a few customers in UK and Latam. So that's how we grew.
Sameer Narkar [00:07:46]:
And talking about our team size, we could well be around about 130 odd people today.
Omer Khan [00:07:51]:
So the business was founded in 2014 I think.
Sameer Narkar [00:07:56]:
Yeah.
Omer Khan [00:07:57]:
And you bootstrapped to get the business going and you're still bootstrapped, is that right?
Sameer Narkar [00:08:06]:
That's right, yeah, we're still bootstrapped. I say this, we are heavily funded by our customers.
Omer Khan [00:08:13]:
Yeah, I like that. Cool. Okay, so let's go back to I guess pre2014. Where did the idea come from? What were you doing at the time?
Sameer Narkar [00:08:25]:
So my background is I'm a, a software developer. I mean I did a lot of coding before I started this company also first few models that were built in this product. I did the coding myself for about six, seven years. I worked in various companies. I was actually in finance domain but as a software engineer and developed apps or products in different verticals. I worked in derivatives and equities market when I started my career. Then in Mutual funds and insurance, and built software for various companies.
Sameer Narkar [00:09:02]:
And then one fine day, there was some idea around building an app, which is what we started our company with. Analytics was part of that app. But eventually the product pivoted in a way where we focused more on social media analytics to start with. And then the product went on to become a complete omnichannel customer experience platform.
Omer Khan [00:09:25]:
But what specifically what was the specific problem that you noticed that got you working on that idea? Was this like one of those things that you just randomly came across, you know, some idea and thought it'd be cool to build a product for it, or was it kind of more like based on the kind of work that you were doing as a developer, you started seeing these types of issues and sort of, you know, the light bulb moment kind of happened?
Sameer Narkar [00:09:47]:
No, in fact, it's a very interesting story. So what we were working on was more of an app that had some kind of analytics for business owners, and that is where we started working on it. But it was more of an idea, which was more of a B2C app. And I was working on this while I was actually working in some other company. So I did not straight away start jump into the business and started working on the app.
Sameer Narkar [00:10:16]:
While I was doing it, I was kind of doing some market research, going to a few, you know, business owners to ask them about this. And one insight that I got from one of this big restaurant, Chen, where they had their own digital marketing agency. I went to, you know, meet them and they told me that just for the Google Analytics piece, they are paying about 10,000 rupees, which is fairly about, say, I would say, $300 or so for the reports of Google Analytics per month.
Sameer Narkar [00:10:54]:
And I said, what if I give you a product which can give you all the analytics in one place, will that work for you? And they said, I don't mind trying that. So, and then I went to some few more agencies just to validate that idea. So the first piece of our product that we built was analytics of your own social media channels. And it was pretty simple. You know, just get the numbers from the APIs, build some charts around that.
Sameer Narkar [00:11:21]:
It was a prototype kind of thing that we built and went to the market and said, this is what we have to offer. Pay us as less as maybe, you know, say $100 a month and I can give you this particular thing. They said, good, fine, but you know, maybe can you add few more things thereabout? And we started working on it, but it took us more than two years to actually get our first customer. Although I should have got that customer with whom I had validated the idea, but they did not buy.
Sameer Narkar [00:11:52]:
And then we started working on it. And obviously when you're building a product like this, you need to invest in your servers, cloud infrastructure. So those were the challenges. But slowly we started to get our first customer and from there on we kind of moved on. So those were kind of the early days, how we validated the idea. And I always tell people that, you know, you can always have great ideas.
Sameer Narkar [00:12:16]:
You might think it is a great idea, but unless you go ahead and validate that with the actual customers, not your friends, is when you should actually start working on those ideas.
Omer Khan [00:12:27]:
Yeah, I mean, two years is a long time to get that first customer. It's not uncommon. Especially if you're bootstrapping and working a full time job at the same time that it can take, it can take some time to have that breakthrough. If you sort of look back at it now, is there something that you feel like, okay, if I could go back in time and I was in that situation again, this is what I would do different, differently to try and close that first customer faster?
Sameer Narkar [00:12:58]:
Yeah, I would definitely say that. So, you know, since I was coming from a software background, not very sales focused, I always had that feeling that, you know, unless you are perfect with your product, you can't do sales. And sales never came naturally to me. What I should have done back then was with whatever was ready, I should have hit the market more to do sales and you know, get some money. But that's the reason we actually took some more time to do our first sales.
Sameer Narkar [00:13:26]:
We can say that I could have been a better salesperson back then, which I am right now.
Omer Khan [00:13:30]:
Good, good. Okay, great. So it takes two years to get that first customer. You're kind of going back and forth, iterating on the product. Eventually you close the deal. What about getting to the first 10? How long did that take and how easy or hard was that?
Sameer Narkar [00:13:53]:
See, our potential customers are brands, mostly B2C brands back then, where we would reach out to say automobiles or airlines or banking, financial services. You have your retail F and B. So these were our potential customers because they would need a social listening product. But just getting meetings with them was very difficult. So what we did was we went through the route of agencies and each of these brands have a social media agency. And back then it was not very structured.
Sameer Narkar [00:14:29]:
If you see in today's world, most agencies would fall under Dentsu or WPP Group or Omnicom IPG Group. Back then there were a lot of agencies which were scattered. Today they are part of some, some or the other group. So we went to those agencies, showed them the product. It was very important for them to have this kind of product for their pitches to the customer. Okay. So our first set of customers were agencies.
Sameer Narkar [00:14:56]:
We told them that fine, you know, you can take our product for free for pitches, but if you win the pitch, then sell our product. So it was a very natural partnership with all digital marketing agencies back then. And we worked with them. So and, and we started from India, so, so getting the first 10 customers and even first, I would say 25 to 30 customers, it was not direct to the customers, it was via the agency channel. That's how we actually started our business with.
Sameer Narkar [00:15:26]:
And I'm very thankful for all the agencies who helped us back then.
Omer Khan [00:15:29]:
How many conversations did you have to have until you landed, you know, the right number of agencies? You needed to get those first 10 or 20 customers.
Sameer Narkar [00:15:41]:
Okay. In fact, much before we got our first customer, I had meetings with all possible agencies here in, in Mumbai, India where we operate. Again, you know, you have to be innovative when you don't have a lot of money. So I, I had some intern working for us and, and how I was internal, in fact, not paying him. I was telling him that this is your college internship. Internship. I do not have money to pay. If you want to work, I'll give you the exposure. You're going to work directly with me.
Sameer Narkar [00:16:10]:
He agreed for that and he used to arrange at least five meetings a week for me, if not more. And we would go and meet the agencies. And because social media was fairly new and fairly big back then and say 2014-15, everybody wanted those social listening reports. And we created very good dashboards. In fact, back then when we were actually presenting our product, we were not even saving data because we are not having enough servers to save all the data. So we were actually showing it runtime, just fetching the data right there, showing the dashboards.
Sameer Narkar [00:16:45]:
It was only when I got the first paying customer who paid us in advance for three months for a total of five brands. That was the biggest deal that we cracked that day. I bought some decent enough cloud infra to actually start my product. I said, my implementation will take 15 days. You have to pay me then. Only I can give you discounts for five brands. And they had some problem with their earlier product and they badly wanted some solution. They liked me more than the product.
Sameer Narkar [00:17:18]:
And that's when we actually took some Money that day itself, went on to buy the cloud infra. And then we started.
Omer Khan [00:17:26]:
Yeah, so around that time the product was a. You talked about kind of looking at Google Analytics and giving them a nice dashboard of their data. And then you mentioned social listening. So fundamentally, is that what the product did at that stage? It's sort of those two things.
Sameer Narkar [00:17:45]:
Yeah. Till that time we actually were building the entire piece of also social response management so they could get the feed and also respond to the customer queries. When we were only offering analytics of say Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube analytics, they were saying that we still get this from the native platform. Why should we pay for the entire. You are just bringing all together. So we worked on getting the social media response management for the customer care team.
Sameer Narkar [00:18:16]:
That's when they actually said, okay, now it makes sense to have both the solutions ready in one platform. So by the time we actually got our first serious customer is when our product was kind of finished product with the social care plus the social listening plus the social analytics. And then we went on to build also social publishing software. So the product was evolved by the time we actually got our first customer. But I must have had at least 50 to 60 meetings with potential customer where things did not work for me.
Sameer Narkar [00:18:48]:
Maybe I was a bad salesperson.
Omer Khan [00:18:51]:
It's just part of the learning process.
Sameer Narkar [00:18:53]:
Right?
Omer Khan [00:18:53]:
It's just like we all have to go through that. But 50 or 60 meetings of not having a breakthrough, that's hard, man. It's like you gotta be super resilient to keep going.
Sameer Narkar [00:19:04]:
Yeah, that's true. I mean, but we were supporting ourselves with other software services, you know, I mean, how do we make money while we're doing this? We had no capital, so we were actually doing software services business for a lot of other, you know, companies where we would make some money so that we could support ourselves. So when, when people ask me, you know, how did you bootstrap? Because you're building a product, you need, you need, you need server infrastructure, you need a team, and you're again competing with some of the biggest competitors.
Sameer Narkar [00:19:36]:
How do you still manage to bootstrap? So my answer to that is when you look at services companies, there are many services companies, they never get funded, they always get money from the customers. So that was my idea, that if you need to build a product, you need a team, you need maybe cloud infra, you also need to pay for data. So how do you make money? You need to find your own ways. Because if you invest too much time chasing the investors and not Actually meet your customers, then you're going to lose time.
Sameer Narkar [00:20:10]:
So you either have a choice to, you can do both, of course, meet the investors also and also focus on the customers. But I was very focused on getting new customers and to support us, we are actually doing software services business. So if software services businesses can, can grow without funding, then why can't products? Because we can, we are really good at building products so we should be good at also building software services where we actually supported ourselves, made some money and that, that money we invested in the product.
Omer Khan [00:20:43]:
So by the time you got the, the product sort of figured out to, you know, to, to, to a place where you, you were able to sell it to, to potential customers, what was the, what was the competitive landscape like? How many other products were out there? How much of this was. It's kind of like a new category and, and people haven't really, you know, got a good solution versus there are already products out there.
Omer Khan [00:21:07]:
And you're trying to figure out how you can, you know, differentiate and kind of find, find a space for your product.
Sameer Narkar [00:21:13]:
We can fairly say that this was a crowded space back then. There were many products out there which were offering these services. Our unique value proposition was we were offering everything in one product instead of customers buying three or four products. So just in the social space where we were operating back then. And today of course we are complete omnichannel solution. But back then we were, we were a social suite which could do social care.
Sameer Narkar [00:21:43]:
You know, we're responding to the customer queries where we could do social listening, you know, social analytics of your brand and competition and social publishing. So I divided them into four different categories and the products which were there available were actually doing, you know, one thing, not everything, so that there would be something like a hootsuite or a sprout social for focusing too much on social media publishing.
Sameer Narkar [00:22:09]:
There could be Brand Watch Stock walker on social listening and there could be products like Simply Measured and the products like Social Bakers which would focus on social media analytics, we were offering a solution all in one that was our unique value proposition and would say that you'll save money with one product instead of going for, for at least three or four products. So that's how we kind of showed the unique value proposition back then. But today we kind of tell the entire omnichannel story, not just social.
Sameer Narkar [00:22:41]:
We bring in data from emails, calls, chats and give you a complete unified view. So over the years our unique value proposition did change, but now it is not really about saving money on the products and is actually saving money on the operations side of things. You know, that's the pitch that we do today. So things have changed. Back then this was a story. Now the Omnichannel and AI is our story today.
Omer Khan [00:23:09]:
Cool. So when a founder, an early stage founder, is trying to get a product into a market and they're already established incumbents who've been around for years, they often have a ton of features that your product doesn't have. And so there's this huge gap in terms of feature comparison when you then say, I'm going to be an all in one. So you don't have to buy four or five products now, you've just four or five x'd the number of features that you have to potentially compete with.
Omer Khan [00:23:42]:
So the value prop in terms of all in one, great. But did you have challenges or difficulties when people would then look at your product and say, okay, that's great in terms of all in one, but I don't have this XYZ or whatever? Or did you feel like you were able to figure out which were the features that really mattered?
Sameer Narkar [00:24:06]:
Yeah, that's very important because you're kind of taking chances on few features that you believe will work. For example, while you're offering all the four features. For me, the listening and analytics was my personal favorite. But as we were working in the market, we believed that social care is more important because that's what customers were actually looking for. And we did some insights.
Sameer Narkar [00:24:36]:
Let's say we have some set of customers about say 40 odd customers back then and we were looking at which all features they ask for most, where do they, where are the support queries coming? And personally, because I love analytics and I love dashboards and I love BI tools, my focus was more on the social listening and analytics side of things, whereas our customers were actually preferring more the care side of things.
Sameer Narkar [00:25:05]:
And although we did not have good reports on care, which are like your ticketing or CSAT or NPS sla, we, we are actually not good enough to be honest, because we are focusing more on the listening analytics. So the customer queries come and then you cannot argue with them that this is not how it works. You actually have to listen to your customers. They are the best ones to give you feedback or the critical ones.
Sameer Narkar [00:25:30]:
If they are facing some problem, try to work on it and then you gauge the idea and then you start focusing on those features that really matter and can work in the market. Because we can always make the mistake of thinking that this is what I believe is the best feature of our product versus what the market really likes.
Omer Khan [00:25:50]:
Let's talk a little bit about expansion into markets outside of India. I was talking to a founder this morning, actually, who is early stages in India, has built a great product, has had some success with some local companies. And I was like saying, how do I, how do I expand? How do I get into the US market? I don't know people there. It's not like I can get warm intros or anything like that. And it's a challenge for a lot of founders.
Omer Khan [00:26:22]:
You know, they maybe look at the US market as obviously one place that they want to be. They may be in India, they may be in Europe, they may be somewhere else. What was that experience like for you? How did you go about? Which market did you tackle first? I mean, Obviously you're in 30 different markets now, but how did that process start?
Sameer Narkar [00:26:40]:
In fact, from day one, when we were actually building the product, we knew that this can go to all possible countries if it is working in India for certain set of customers. See, my belief is like this. Let's say if I have five customers today and if they are enterprise customers and if they have opted for our product, that means the product is the right fit. Then if I have five, I'll definitely have 50 customers. You know, I just need to figure out a way to reach out to those potential customers.
Sameer Narkar [00:27:14]:
If I have 50, I'll definitely have 500. You know, I need to reach out to those customers. Now that is a difficult part. You know, first you, first you have a product and then you want the world to know about it. And when you say, you know the world should know about you, you cannot directly jump to the market which you feel that will work. And I've seen a lot of.
Sameer Narkar [00:27:37]:
In fact today I'm part of a lot of groups where the founders meet and all I have seen stories of the most funded customers, sorry, most funded SaaS startups where the first thing that they did after getting money was spend that on ads. And how did they made the investors interested? By saying that we have this solution, we want to expand in the U.S. give us money. And then they have to justify spending that money and they spend a lot of money on ads trying to reach out to the US market.
Sameer Narkar [00:28:12]:
And this is a story that I've heard from at least four to five founders. Even if you're bootstrapped, I mean straight away, you shouldn't think of jumping into the market with direct sales. The best way to do is find out the channels which will take your product and that's the easiest way to do it. And what we did was we kind of tried to partner with CRM companies, contact centers, say chatbots and marketing automation tools. And we defined something called as four pillars of omnichannel customer experience. Every single brand wants a CRM.
Sameer Narkar [00:28:58]:
Every single brand wants a contact center, wants a live chat. They want marketing automation tools and they want social listening tools. Every single brand has it, but one product cannot fulfill that story. So we said that let's reach out to the biggest CRM companies in the world, maybe Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, try to come on their app marketplace and from there reach out to their partners and try and do some early sales which will not be then limited only to India. That's the question that we asked.
Sameer Narkar [00:29:34]:
What are the best chances for us to get a new customer in the a country that we have no presence? This is the best way to go. And we call that as an ISV partnership. And with some initial sales from say, Salesforce or Genesis or via some chatbot companies, some marketing automations. What we did was then we tapped their partners and their partners were introduced to this product. We understood the gap. Of course, we had some competition with the likes of say, say Sprinklr or Sprout Social. We obviously have that competition.
Sameer Narkar [00:30:09]:
But then partners have something of their interest to sell our product along with say a CRM or contact center. So that's how we kind of got into different countries. And wherever we did more business via the partners is where we actually had our own salespeople to work. And to be honest, I've spent some money on ads, but it didn't really never worked for me. But, but the partner channel, the ISV channel, is the best way to expand. If, if the product is the right fit for that partner, then, then, then you'll do business.
Omer Khan [00:30:43]:
How easy or hard was it to get these isvs on board? I mean, you know, one of the things I've seen and even personally experience with trying to set up these kinds of partnerships is that first of all, you've got to figure out who to, who to go and potentially partner with. You've got to reach out to these people, make you sure. Maybe the response often is like lukewarm because they've got a million other things to do and adding on to some new unknown partnership is not top of their list.
Omer Khan [00:31:08]:
And then you've got to kind of actually, once you do get somebody interested, it can take forever to actually get something to a point where you're actually executing on this idea. So what was that experience like for you? Were people resonating, were people responding? Like, were they excited when they heard about this idea?
Sameer Narkar [00:31:30]:
Oh, no. I mean, it's not that easy. In fact, you know, if you directly reach out to say let's, let's look at this way. There's, there are so many partners of Salesforce. There's so many partners of Zendesk or Freshworks. You get a list of those partners, you try to reach out to them. They're already doing great business with, you know, with the likes of Salesforce. In fact, these companies give them leads and they're very much busy with the implementation and stuff like that. So it's not an easy thing to do really.
Sameer Narkar [00:32:01]:
But once you get on their marketplace like Salesforce as an app exchange, that's when they actually take you seriously. If you get into the app marketplace of, let's say Genesis or Nice, which are bigger contact centers, once you are there in that marketplace, that's when the partners take you seriously. And if you get an introduction from the ISP directly, again, the partners would be interested. So it's a difficult process. We actually have a team of five people dedicated to get the partners to get our product introduced to them.
Sameer Narkar [00:32:39]:
Then it gets to the nurturing team of the partnership team. And I'll tell you, I mean, we could probably have today 90 partners with whom the agreements have been signed, but we might be hardly working with 20 odd partners. Whereas we are still nurturing those 70 partners where they can give us the first deal. And once they see the money with the first deal, that's where they are interested. So again, once you have partner on board, you actually have to work for them.
Sameer Narkar [00:33:10]:
For first two, three deals, you find the lead, but you don't close directly. You give it via the partner. Never mind you might lose 25, 30% of the commission. But then once that partner sees that we are working for them and we actually get the lead, our people do the demo, we close the deal, and yet we give commission to the partners. So you really have to build that win win model so that they get the first set of customers because of us, and then they start bringing you business.
Sameer Narkar [00:33:44]:
So there are two things to it. One is to convince the partner to become a partner. After they get a partner, you should have a very good plan to how to work with them.
Omer Khan [00:33:53]:
I like that. I think some founders might look at that type of situation and say, I can't afford to give up 25, 35% of potential revenue on this deal. And especially if I'm doing the work, I'm finding the lead, my team's doing the demos and so on. Like, why not just go directly and do that? But the picture I sort of had in my mind was it was almost like you were going to one potential partner and it might take forever to get this thing going and you're having to do a lot of work.
Omer Khan [00:34:26]:
But once this sort of flywheel starts spinning and they see the value and they understand, you know, they see money coming in, they understand how to sell this thing, it starts to take care of itself, and then you can move to another place and try to get another flywheel spinning and so on. And in the long term, it turns out to be a better approach because then you're not having to, you know, bring in all the leads and sell and do everything yourself.
Sameer Narkar [00:34:50]:
Yeah, it can always be a lean model because even though we have our salespeople in certain parts of the world, we only do business via partners. You know, outside India, we don't do direct business. We do it via partners. So our sales people can be, you know, one or two people in that. In that country. But if I have like seven, eight good partners, it is having, let's say, if.
Sameer Narkar [00:35:13]:
If those seven partners put two people to work for you, then you actually having a team of 14 plus your own two people, I mean, it's a team of 16. You can either have 15 or 16 in your people working directly or take the help of partners. You know, net net. You will actually save money if you start giving commission to the partner. So it's a win. Win. It's a win for partner, it's win for you, it's win for the customer.
Omer Khan [00:35:37]:
I'm curious. When you talked about getting those initial customers in India, you worked with agencies and through them sold the product. But when you talked about the US market and going in there, you didn't mention agencies. You Talked about these ISVs and chatbots and CRMs and things like that. Did you try the agency route as well, or was there a reason you didn't do that?
Sameer Narkar [00:36:02]:
No, no, we tried. We tried the agency model as well. I mean, logically, it was the second step for us after getting the agencies in India. It was very logical that if I have relations with my Dentsu India team, with the WPP India team, the next thing is to get the US counterparts to work for you. That's very logical. And we tried that. We tried that for years. We tried that, but somehow it didn't work. I don't know exactly the reason. Maybe my commitment was not good enough.
Sameer Narkar [00:36:36]:
But when you're trying 10 things and out of which four or five work for you, you then focus on the, on the things that are working for you and then not the ones that are not working. So we should have given more efforts to find the agency route to actually do business in the US and other markets. But because ISVs work, then we kind of change that model and started working with the ISVs and the partners.
Omer Khan [00:37:02]:
The other potential growth channel I've seen work, sometimes not work has been events. It's often, you know, and especially it can work if you're a US based founder, but also, you know, if you're, if you're in another country. Events can be a potential great way to get face time with those, you know, those, those customers, those people you want to sell to, potentially have more deeper in depth conversations.
Omer Khan [00:37:32]:
Even if it is somebody walking through, you know, and kind of walking past your booth, getting a five, ten minute conversation can be really meaningful versus, you know, sending a cold email. But there's for some finals, it's work, some finals, it's just been like something they can't figure out how to get going. Did you try that?
Sameer Narkar [00:37:53]:
Yeah. We do events and even our learnings with events is after doing events for the last three years when we were really active doing events. And it's also a big investment because events take a lot of money. Also to decide as a founder that shall I invest in this particular event or not is also a big decision and especially if you're a bootstrapped founder.
Sameer Narkar [00:38:22]:
So when we did some initial events maybe three years back, what we learned was if it's a very massive event and then there are some events like Jitex and Leap in Middle east, you can hardly make a mark. Whereas if you do smaller events where there are about say 100 attendees and there are four or five sponsors and you get to speak on stage and have a booth, those kind of events work.
Sameer Narkar [00:38:56]:
And even better are the events, we call those events as bespoke events where you are actually calling 30 odd potential customers, have two or three, your own set of customers and letting the customers meet the prospects and talk about your product. Those are the best ones because these are very highly qualified leads. Leads. And you don't generally call anyone like you know, 20, 30 prospects just by, you know, you actually had some traction with them. They have seen your product or they are at a very high stage of getting closed.
Sameer Narkar [00:39:34]:
Bring those customers for these very small events and let your customers also Be there. That's where the maximum sales happen. So smaller, smaller events with 30 odd prospects, good for sales, little bit large events where you are one of the sponsors and you are having keynote opportunity and a booth. Good for sales, good for marketing, but not so much for sales. I would say good for market. And the bigger events is waste of time, waste of money. So that's a learning over the years
Omer Khan [00:40:09]:
and you think it's a waste of money because you sort of get lost in the noise of the big events and to get noticed you just have to spend a ridiculous amount of money.
Sameer Narkar [00:40:19]:
That's true. And people get tired in such big events. I mean the potential customer will take your card. You might feel that great, we did a great demo or so. But when they go back home, they have actually met 50 other vendors and they're tired and they don't open your emails. So bigger events do it for branding or so still because you cannot miss the opportunity of meeting a large audience. But the sales will never come from bigger events.
Omer Khan [00:40:54]:
Were these events, were you targeting directly the customer, the brand at these events or were you going to events where you could connect with ISVs or both?
Sameer Narkar [00:41:07]:
Both, both. So in the bigger events, yeah, I missed that point. So when you go for bigger events, you can obviously meet the partners and ISVs, that's where it really works. But the smaller events work with direct sales. I mean even if you're doing direct sales, doesn't mean that we are not doing it via the partners. But they are understanding what Connect Insights is. We have pitched to them and if you're doing business outside India, then we'll say, fine, we'll have the local partner come and meet you to close the deal.
Sameer Narkar [00:41:36]:
And that's how we kind of work with them.
Omer Khan [00:41:38]:
And so with customers in 30 markets today, how is the team distributed? Are you hiring more people in those markets? Are you able to keep most of it running from India? How is it set up?
Sameer Narkar [00:41:53]:
So we have now four registered companies. So we are registered in India, Singapore, UAE and us. We have our teams in say uae, Saudi Arabia. You have someone in Singapore, we have someone in Brazil who operates from the, from the Latin market. Most so product hiring, customer success, solutions consultants, all in India. Outside India, only salespeople. Even the BDRs, they operate from India and India. We have our offices in three locations. Mumbai, Delhi and Chile, Chennai. So that's where our SDRs and you know, solutions consultants sit. Outside India, only salespeople.
Sameer Narkar [00:42:38]:
And they, they work only with partners.
Omer Khan [00:42:40]:
Right. So it's been quite a Journey, you know, from 10, 11 years ago to being in a full time job, having an idea, building a product, waiting patiently two years for that first customer, having those 50 or 60 meetings with people and getting no breakthrough through to closing the year at over $7 million in revenue. If you sort of look back at this journey over the last decade, is there like one big takeaway, one lesson or something that you wish you had maybe done differently?
Sameer Narkar [00:43:21]:
Yeah, I mean, as I told back in early days, I should have been little more aggressive with sales. The partnership and the international expansion really happened in last three years or so. Before that it was Covid times. So, you know, even during COVID times, we did some business outside India. We had few customers in the Middle east that we got via our contact center partners. But there was no focus as such to grow in the international market. We were still focused on making a great product.
Sameer Narkar [00:43:56]:
Maybe pre Covid we could have started our international expansion, but it started late. But then the growth was very fast. So no regrets on that side of things. We had an evolved product, we had integrations built with so many other apps and the sales is happening naturally. So we're growing at about say 200%. Not bad. Maybe next year looks much more promising. So no regrets on that side. But maybe back then early days we could have been more aggressive in sales.
Omer Khan [00:44:29]:
Yeah. I'll follow up with you and see where you are and when you hit that $10 million mark, it'll be a nice milestone to hit.
Sameer Narkar [00:44:41]:
That's true. We are very close to that. We are very close to that. Our targets for the next year are obviously more than 15 million and we hope we should achieve that. Yeah.
Omer Khan [00:44:51]:
Great. All right, let's wrap up. Let's go into the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Sameer Narkar [00:45:04]:
The best business advices that I received in early days was if you have the right product fit, money wouldn't be a challenge. And you need not be ready with everything as you go along. Things will work out for you. Just do not hesitate to take the right step if you believe that this is the right thing to do. But money is the challenge. Do not hesitate to actually go ahead and invest.
Omer Khan [00:45:30]:
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Sameer Narkar [00:45:32]:
A few good books that I read. One is definitely the one by predictable revenue. It's by one of the employees of Salesforce. I'm not getting the name right now. Another book is never split the Difference. If you really Want to know a lot about negotiations and you know how to go about it. I would highly recommend this book. There's another book that I really like. Not related to business, but something that will help you in your life. I have read that book at least five times so far. It's Zen and the Art of Happiness.
Sameer Narkar [00:46:12]:
That's one of my favorite book.
Omer Khan [00:46:14]:
Nice. The never split. The difference is Chris Voss and I don't know if you've seen masterclass.com of
Sameer Narkar [00:46:26]:
twist was I've seen him. I've seen that.
Omer Khan [00:46:28]:
Yeah. So he has a masterclass now on there. And I just signed up for masterclass again recently and it's genius the stuff that he goes on about in terms of negotiation strategies. And this guy came from being a hostage negotiator. Right. So it's like amazing stories, but in many ways you sort of realize, oh, actually, you know, the stakes on this kind of situation I'm in trying to negotiate is nothing compared to what, you know, this guy has sort of experienced, but really fascinating just hearing him talk about that stuff.
Sameer Narkar [00:47:04]:
Very good book. And in fact I subscribe to that masterclass also. It's on Netflix or Amazon Prime. This was during COVID times and I subscribed for it. After reading the book again, I subscribed for the masterclass.
Omer Khan [00:47:15]:
Yeah, it's great. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Sameer Narkar [00:47:22]:
I think perseverance, patience, Perseverance, great resilience, tenacity. You need all of that along with the capabilities of building a product.
Omer Khan [00:47:32]:
Yep. And you shared some good examples of perseverance with your story. What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Sameer Narkar [00:47:41]:
I still keep it simple. Of course we use a few tools out there, but I am still a notepad person. I have like five, six items to deliver. I mean, I'll work in the night with just spend my 10 minutes to plan my next day and I just go ahead and execute that plan. That's at the end of the day. Your yearly targets, your quarterly targets, your monthly targets, they come down to how best you work on that particular day. So keeping things simple.
Omer Khan [00:48:17]:
Yeah, love it. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Sameer Narkar [00:48:24]:
I have something that I'm thinking of, you know, I mean, that's not to do with technology or something of that sort. I believe in India we are a very passionate cricket. Cricket loving country, sports loving country. But we are not so good at football. Football, I mean, soccer. I have some crazy idea of Bringing some good talent from, from Africa and South America to India and, and promote cricket in those countries. Let's see if I, if I one fine day achieve in my getting into
Omer Khan [00:48:56]:
that a cultural sports exchange.
Sameer Narkar [00:48:59]:
Yeah. Cultural sports exchange, yeah.
Omer Khan [00:49:01]:
Or what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Sameer Narkar [00:49:08]:
I, I, I spend a lot of time researching about space. I, I do love to watch the night sky. I, I was good in my engineering days, so I fairly understand the concepts of physics, but I do a lot, I do a lot, I do watch a lot of videos on, in this subject. Trying to understand the theory of relativity, maybe.
Omer Khan [00:49:34]:
Cool, cool. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Sameer Narkar [00:49:41]:
I was a good sportsman. You know, I played cricket well. I was a very good chess player. I played football also. So, yeah, I mean, for all my friends who know me from my college days, they would remember me as a sportsman. So I definitely love to still play cricket and play football and chess. So, yeah, that's what I do.
Omer Khan [00:50:01]:
Love it. Great. Well, Sameer, thank you for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Kind of unpacking that story over the last decade and sharing hopefully some useful lessons for other people who are listening. If people want to check out Kinect insights, they can go to connectinsights.com that's connect with a K. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Sameer Narkar [00:50:26]:
Well, they can connect with me on LinkedIn, just search for Sameer Narkar or Twitter. My handle is Sameer Narkar on Twitter. And you connect with me on LinkedIn or visit our website. Talk to our chatbot. We kind of released a new chatbot on our website and built on top of AI with an AI agent. It's one of the best chatbots that we believe and has a good sense of humor as well. We maybe try it. You can try that as well.
Omer Khan [00:50:59]:
I'm going to try that out too. Cool. And we'll include those links in the show notes as well so people can find them. Great. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate your time and I wish you and the team the best of success.
Sameer Narkar [00:51:13]:
Thank you so much, Omar. Thank you for having us.
Omer Khan [00:51:15]:
My pleasure. Cheers.
