The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 10

Baskar Agneeswaran, Vajro

How Vajro Used the Shopify SaaS Marketplace to Triple Revenue

Baskar Agneeswaran is the co-founder of Vajro, a cloud-based mobile commerce platform that creates instant mobile shopping apps for e-commerce stores. You probably hear about product-market fit all the time and why that's so important to building a successful SaaS company. But what about founder-market fit? In 2015, Baskar and two of his friends set out to build a price comparison app. They wanted to get into the e-commerce space and believed they could help consumers find better deals. Two years later, their startup failed. They'd underestimated how much work was required to maintain the huge amount of data they needed to power their app. And as a bootstrapped business, they just didn't have enough money to keep going. But even though they failed, their experience helped them learn about e-commerce and more importantly about themselves. They knew their price comparison app was a great idea. It just wasn't a great idea for them. They realized that their strength was in mobile app development and that they were more likely to be successful if they focused on that. Soon after they came up with the idea of a SaaS product that helped Shopify stores to quickly and easily create a mobile shopping app. And it didn't take long for them to get traction. Then the pandemic hit and initially, it looked like their business was going to be in trouble. But instead of panicking, they started taking a closer look at what was going on. And they saw that mobile usage was increasing and it felt like there was actually an opportunity for them. So they decided to double down and actually hire more people during the pandemic. And in the last few months, they've tripled revenue and are doing 6-figures in MRR and still growing. It's a great story about the importance of founder-market fit. You may have a great idea, but it might not be the right idea for you. So figuring your founder-market fit is just as important if not more important than product-market fit - especially in the early days of your SaaS business. Enjoy the interview.

Abdullah Alsaadi, Taker

4 Failed Startups Before Finding Early Traction at $1M ARR

Abdullah Alsaadi is the co-founder and CEO of Taker.io, an online ordering platform and mobile app for restaurants. How many failed startups could you handle before you gave up? Abdullah was working as a security systems engineer in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He had an idea for a cryptocurrency app. He was so excited about it that he jumped into building the product. After writing almost 30,000 lines of code, his app was ready. And that's when he realized he'd built a cool product, but there was no market for it. Sometime later, he had an idea to build an app on the Salesforce Platform. He'd learned his lesson from his last failure and had a clear market and customer in mind this time. But Salesforce wasn't set up at the time to support app developers in the Middle East. So Abdullah wasn't able to sell anything on their platform. He then decided to start a B2B last-mile delivery company. This time he made sure that customers could actually pay for his product. And his solution was a success and he had happy customers. But the business wasn't profitable and there was no easy way to find efficiencies and scale. His perseverance and grit kept Abdullah going. He pivoted to a delivery management software product. He knew this business could be profitable and his prospective customers loved his product. But they used legacy point of sale (POS) systems which were impossible to integrate with. It seemed like no matter what Abdullah tried, or how good his idea or product was, he just couldn't find success. It was failure after failure. Most of us might have given up by now. But Abdullah started working on his next idea. But he was out of money and didn't have the funds to build a new product. And he didn't exactly have a strong track record of success to persuade investors. Yet he found a way to build the product and get it to market. And this time things started to move in his favor. He's grown Taker.io from zero to almost a million US dollars annual run rate (ARR). There are some great lessons on what Abdullah did right with Taker.io and how he funded the development, found customers, and grew the business. But more importantly, he learned far more valuable lessons from all the failures he had over a period of 5 or 6 years. And that's what is really interesting about Abdullah's story. I hope you enjoy it.