Building a developer-focused global SaaS business

Summary

SaaS companies typically think of product-market fit in terms of geography. They are often advised to focus their efforts on and perfect PMF in one location before they move on to the next. But how do you think about PMF when you’re catering to a global customer base from inception? For a developer-focused SaaS business, the GTM and PMF motions are different than they are for its enterprise-focused counterparts. A bottom-up approach, focus on distribution, and understanding developer-led sales motions in different geographies are some of the things to take into account. 

Indian founders are building for the world, across categories and industries. Several of these businesses build software-as-a-service (SaaS) products for customers, perfecting their product market fit (PMF) and go-to-market (GTM) motions in India. Many others are beginning their journeys selling in global markets, especially the US. Among all these, Hasura stands out for being a developer-focused product, which began selling to the world from India, and then from the US, before expanding to other countries.

Hasura has made application development more efficient. It solves a pain point for developers that is critical to overall app development. It makes application programming interfaces (APIs) instantly available and more flexible, by tapping into data sources efficiently. With users in 44 of Fortune 100 companies as well as fast growing tech giants that range from General Mills to Swiggy, Hasura is a name to reckon with in the open-source software space. 

For a company primarily driven by bottom-up adoption by developers, the motions of PMF and GTM are a little different from the usual. We spoke to Rajoshi Ghosh, the co-founder and COO at Hasura, to understand how an open-source SaaS business goes global, scales up, finds its market, and more.  

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Bottom-up adoption

One of the first things Rajoshi explains is the difference in an entrepreneur’s thought process for building a developer-focused global SaaS product. “Founders have most likely seen enough signs, either from their prior experiences or having talked to different people, to know if what they’re building is for a global audience,” she says. 

“It is a product used primarily by developers, and individual developers start using it and trying it out, and then bring it into their organisations.” - Rajoshi

In Hasura’s case, they knew the problem they were trying to solve was one that app development teams faced globally. So the path to finding PMF was not driven by geography, unlike businesses that sell to top executives at enterprises. It was driven by its everyday users, who then introduced Hasura to their org to become paying customers. So the first signs of a geography-based PMF came from looking at where this initial adoption was coming from.

The adoption strategy for Hasura was bottom-up. “It is a product used primarily by developers, and individual developers start using it and trying it out, and then bring it into their organisations,” Rajoshi says. 

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The distribution lens

Founders get into business with a hypothesis, and as they launch the product, the market and customers help them validate the hypothesis. In Hasura’s case, the hypothesis was that the product would be relevant to developers globally. 

“The thing to focus on initially would be distribution, because unlike having to build sales teams and sales strategies, the internet is global from day one.” - Rajoshi

The starting point was India. But, Rajoshi says, that was more because the co-founders were based in India, so their initial contacts, and the first few people they had access to build their initial team because of prior networks were in India. Things were most familiar and accessible to them. The next thing to do was to test whether the product was actually something that could be adopted and sold beyond India.

“The thing to focus on initially would be distribution, because unlike having to build sales teams and sales strategies, the internet is global from day one,” she explains. She adds that focusing on distribution to make sure that products are being discovered globally is cheaper, faster and easier to experiment with, because they can do that sitting anywhere. “These include channels such as advertisements, communities, or publications that people in certain geographies consume. This is the way to initially validate and see if you can get conversations going,” she says.

Distribution helped Hasura identify and solve issues around access, product flow, and geography-independent product usage. That feedback from users helped fine tune the product, helping the company move towards finding global PMF. 

The false flags 

Once you find validation from users, or your hypothesis is verified, it is easy to get swept up in the euphoria, often at the cost of finding real PMF. One of the surest signs that you’ve hit PMF is seeing the numbers rise on the revenue and growth fronts. However, for a developer-focused SaaS business, it can be a slippery slope between finding users impressed with your product, and onboarding actual paying customers. 

“In the initial stages, it is one of the most obvious false flags: a potential customer saying they may pay if you add a feature. Or, show interest by saying they’ll try it out, be your first customer, but will consider paying if you add a particular feature. As a result, you go into a product development feedback loop,” Rajoshi explains. 

She’s quick to add though, that this is different from the feedback you receive from users in the distribution phase. That feedback comes from the actual use of the product, and more likely a more practical problem the users might be facing. 

Essentially, your product should translate into some kind of real, not vanity growth, based actual use. 

For an opensource software business like Hasura, it was important to have a hypothesis of what people would pay for. “Because if you don't have a hypothesis of what you will commercialise, then you may give away too much for free, or it may be very hard to monetise later,” explains Rajoshi. The other end of this hypothesis is companies that are clear that their entire software would be paid, but they keep a free trial period of six months or so initially. “That works well as a hypothesis too, because you know what you're going to charge for.”

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Sales motion in India vs the US

Hasura’s growth and expansion trajectory is unlike most SaaS products, in the sense that it is an open source software that solves for developers as the core customer or user base, instead of building for specific industries. This developer infrastructure space has a different sales process in India and the US, mainly because of the way open source software is used and understood in the two geographies.

The use of open source software has been more prevalent in geographies such as North America and Europe, but India is catching up. “Things are changing fast in terms of software buying. Until a few years ago, most technology decision making in Indian companies was top down,” Rajoshi says. 

As a result, the focus is more on introductions to higher ups in organisations and trying to make a top down sale. 

In the US, just letting more developers have access to the product is a good strategy. “Because even if you get somebody higher up to talk to, they are probably going to ask the developers if they have heard of this new software, and whether they have used it. If they haven’t it’s usually a bit of a problem, and the next step would be to ask the developers to try it out. And that developer feedback plays heavily into the purchase decision,” she adds. 

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Think before you expand

For Hasura, the distribution was global from the beginning. The first sales were founder-led, and the Hasura team was selling to customers in the US from India. When the time came to expand their sales function, they chose to set up a base in the US.

“We hired our first salesperson in the US, because it was useful from a geography, timezone and convenience perspective. And even though we had customers from other geographies such as APAC, EMEA, and others, we were primarily selling based out of the US for the first two years,” Rajoshi says.

Takeaway for founders: You can sell globally in a developer based software business, and figure out the right time frame to set up a base in different geographies as you expand.

“We hired our first salesperson in the US, because it was useful from a geography, timezone and convenience perspective.” - Rajoshi

“Everything depends on what type of a business you have. What's your annual contract value, or what kind of sales motion you have, so there's a lot of nuance to this,” she adds. 

SaaS and open source software from India are finding champions globally. Hasura's experience in selling to a global customer base, beginning with developers, has important lessons for entrepreneurs building in similar areas and markets.

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#opensource #SaaS #bottomup #API #distribution