Yega Kumarappan, Paperflite
How They Closed 500 SaaS Customers With No Outbound Sales
Yega Kumarappan is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Paperflite, a content and sales enablement platform that helps B2B marketing and sales teams close deals faster. Back in 2015, Yega and his future co-founders were building an internal venture at Cognizant. They needed to create decks, videos, case studies, and brochures, then get all of that into the hands of sales teams. Every tool they tried was terrible. That problem stuck with them. After more than a decade at Cognizant, all three founders walked away from stable careers with families to support. They had a working prototype when they went to investors. In January 2018, they raised a 400K seed round. Girish from Freshworks put money in. So did the ex-CEO of Cognizant. Paperflite never raised again. A year in, they were profitable. The product was a Netflix-like experience for sales content. Instead of digging through folders in SharePoint and Dropbox, sales reps logged in and saw exactly what worked for their product, their region, and their type of buyer. But selling SaaS without sales experience was harder than expected. Then one day, a message came through their Intercom chat. It was from S&P Global, asking if Paperflite could host research materials for a conference called COP22. The team had no idea what COP22 was. They thought a friend was pranking them. It turned out to be the UN climate change conference. That wasn't luck. For their first couple of years, Yega's team lived on Quora and Reddit, answering every question they could find about sales content and knowledge management. That's how the inbound started. Conversion was the next problem. Generic product tours converted at 2 to 3%. So they tried something almost nobody does. They spent 8 to 10 hours setting up a custom demo for every single prospect. A personalized hub, with their actual content, in their regions, for their buyer segments. Conversion jumped to 20%. Today, Paperflite serves over 500 B2B organizations, does seven figures in ARR, and has 140 employees across India and the US. All on that same 400K. This is one of the cleanest case studies of selling SaaS without sales experience and still building a durable, profitable B2B company.
