The SaaS Podcast

Suresh Sambandam, Kissflow

How Kissflow's SaaS SEO Strategy Generates 50% of All Leads

Suresh Sambandam is the CEO of Kissflow, the first unified digital workplace for organizations to manage all of their work on a single, unified platform. Kissflow is used by over 10,000 customers across 160 countries, including more than fifty Fortune 500 companies. Suresh was working as an engineer for a startup when he spotted an opportunity for a business idea. He eventually quit his job to launch his startup in 2003. Things looked promising at the start. Before he knew it, he had a team of 40 people. But the product just didn't get the traction he'd hoped for and he eventually had to pivot. With his new idea, he raised $1M from angel investors. But he was too early to market. And by the following year, he was running out of money and had to layoff most of his employees. And then in 2013, a customer helped him see the potential of his product. A UK based design company bought his product for $50K but then spent another $90K on building a great user interface for it. That was when Suresh had his aha moment. He realized that as an engineer, he'd been focusing too much on features and technology. Instead, he had to get his company building great user experiences. And that's when things started to click with his third pivot (which became KiSSFLOW). The more the team focused on creating a great user experience, the more their product resonated with customers. Today his company is doing close to $10M in ARR and has over 200 employees. We talk about his multiple pivots, the 10 years it took to find product/market fit, his strategic approach to search engine optimization and how that now drives over 50% of leads. And we talk about what Suresh calls "Desk Marketing & Selling" which his team based in Chennai, India is using to land B2B customers around the world.