SaaS category creation playbook feat. Rocketlane

Create a movement, not a product.

SaaS founders know and love Hubspot (another Matrix Partners investment) for creating the inbound marketing movement and the next set of India SaaS cos. like Postman & Chargebee are following suit.

Hear from Srikrishnan of Rocketlane on his journey of creating the customer onboarding category. In conversation with Pranay from Matrix Partners India, learn about the importance of driving the narrative, tactical advice to build a thriving community of advocates, and how to measure your brand efforts. Tune in

Key takeaways from the episode:

- Mission over Product. To be a category leader, you need to stand for a movement, not a product.

- Be the Authoritative Voice. Raise the bar for everything marketing including your website and content. Your audience needs to look up to you.

- Consistency & Repetition. You need to show up every single day. Your brand compounds with time so play the long game.

- Start early. Start marketing the day you start your company. Build a waitlist of leads that are excited by the mission.

- Focus on the community. Get industry leaders together and open up their playbooks from multiple domains. Networks + learnings + soft introductions to your brand.

Play the long game. There will be a cold start. But efforts compound over time so keep shipping on a schedule.

Pranay:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Matrix Moments podcast. This session is about building a new category in enterprise SaaS and navigating yourself into category leadership position. So for this we have Sri of Rocketlane, we’ve had the pleasure to partner with Sri and Rocketlane during the seed round back last year. So I would love to hand over to Sri first to give a quick introduction about himself and the company.

Sri:

Hi, folks. Sri, this side co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane. We’re a customer onboarding platform which is a fairly new thing – I'm not sure how many of you watching have come across this before. But especially if you're selling B2B tech into mid market or enterprise there’s this whole dance that we need to go through with the customer where you're setting up things, you're migrating data, you're training their teams and there’s this whole onboarding journey that we try to help you templatize and make seamless so that every customer is onboarded in a consistent way and that’s what Rocketlane helps you do.

Pranay:

Awesome. So let’s roll back the years first, so I think I know Sri from the Freshworks days where we acquired his first company, Konotor, so maybe before we jump into Rocketlane it’ll be good to talk about what you experienced especially on the GTM brand and category front at Konotor, at Freshworks and how you're thinking about things this time.

Sri:

Right, and this is actually a topic I care quite a bit about. Our first startup journey with Konotor we were doing a new kind of product as well. So messaging had just sort of taken off on the D2C front like everyone was using Whatsapp and what not. So we decided that people should also be able to message with businesses and that's what Konotor was all about, it was a SDK plug in that went into other people’s mobile apps to enable a messaging experience.

If you’ve used apps like Zomato, Swiggy, Big Basket etc or like 1-800 Flowers and so globally we were powering the messaging experience inside those apps which was also a new experience. We had to – it was an evangelistic saying, we needed to convince people about it, it was pretty hard to get people to understand why they should do it and our experience had been that after the Freshworks acquisition we sort of pivoted into saying we’ll do chats for web and mobile. And web chat of course was a very well established category and we really saw how quickly the business was able to grow when we went into a well-established category versus what we had been championing on our own at Konotor.

So one of our biggest learnings actually from the last journey was you can have so much faster growth if you focus on an established category versus going after a new one and yet here we are.

Pranay:

Yet you’ve picked a hard problem again of creating a market, so maybe a good point to start with was the day you decided to start Rocketlane how were you thinking about marketing on day 0. You make some plan on canvas but that established need does not exist.

Sri:

I think one of the big differences between the last journey and this one was we were aware that we need to put that focus, additional focus, on marketing to make that new category happen. Last time we thought we’ll build a great product and things will happen. This time one of the first things I actually did was read a book called Category Creation by Anthony Kennada who was CMO at Gainsight which happens to be one of the last successful categories created, customer success.

And I had quite a few takeaways from the book that we started putting into action on day 1.

Pranay:

So when did you start?

Sri:

So literally I would say the first month when we had decided this is what we’re going to build one of the things I focused on was to say ok, if we are to eventually publish a book on customer onboarding what would the chapters be and started writing posts like think of it as a log post on each what could translate into a chapter. So my understanding of what is core in each of those aspects of customer onboarding as a topic. So if we had to teach someone what this is about, what would those key topics be. So that's where we actually got started writing like ten blog posts was the first thing I did.

Pranay:

Alright. I know you have a wildly successful community now but what was the driving force behind that and how did you land upon that kind of that the right thing to do?

Sri:

So it was a few things that happened, I would say the first thing was when we went through the whole customer discovery journey, when we were talking to people from different companies who were playing roles of like either leadership roles in customer onboarding or founders of companies who’re going through evolving their onboarding. We found that a lot of them had focused on different aspects of customer onboarding, they had different takes on what’s the right thing to do.

Which all came from the context of their business of course, right, and yet we could see that there were some similarities which could apply across all – you know, you could borrow from one company a great idea and there would be others who find that to be a solution for their onboarding challenges as well. So I saw merit in creating a space where people could share with each other but what made things even more apparent is I was chatting with a founder who told me this story of how they used to have like a five month process to onboard a customer and what he did to get it down to one month.

Like it was a series of things that they figured and I said will you be open to chatting about this with other founders and other leaders in implementation and onboarding and he said yeah, sure, why not. I posted that I'm going to do this sort of chat with this person, Nimesh from Rockmetric, posted on Whatsapp which had a lot of enterprise SaaS scholars. And all of them said yes, and we gave the join in, I want my implementation leader to join in and so on.

So we all of a sudden had this event on a Saturday evening where there were 30 people on a Zoom call and it was super engaging. Like people were asking questions, it was a one hour session and Nimesh had to drop off after that but people still had questions. So I said, hey, why don’t you all join this Slack group that I've created and let’s continue the conversation there. That's how the community started but what we did from there was say, hey, every month let’s do two of these sessions where we invite someone to talk about their onboarding.

And we will invite all those who had attended the first session and the second session and so on to the next session where we will also talk about it on LinkedIn and social to get more people in and everyone who joins also ends up in our Slack community, so that's how the Slack thing got started. And the minute we had 50 people in there we knew that we wanted to turn this into something bigger.

Pranay:

Got it. And just as an aside do you think this would work for every other category or was just the concept somewhat different that you had this opportunity to create over here?

Sri:

I think there are a bunch of functions for which a lot of communities already exist, so if you look at digital marketing there’s like tonnes of Whatsapp groups, Slack communities etc for it, even for customer success for that matter. But for onboarding or implementation folks there wasn’t a specific space where people can go and engage. There were threads that popped up around this from time to time in a CS community but there wasn't one space meant for just these folks in professional services implementation, onboarding and so I think it is different for us but I feel there may be niches around what you're building where communities may not exist.

I have some examples as well but broadly I think you can still find either a direct person who needs a community or a influencer who doesn’t have a space where they can share today and go build something around it. And it is hard to build a community but I think it is worthwhile.

Pranay:

And obviously every community has a cold start problem so how did you think about that time investment and like after getting to those first 30 or 50 people where did you go from there?

Sri:

Yeah, I think the cold start is a real problem not just for the first 50 or 100 but looking back I think only when we had reached like 800-1000 people was there a lot of engagement and action happening in the community. And I think the first thing we got right was anticipating and acknowledging that there will be problem. Like we didn’t go in expecting that these 50 people we added will start having conversations, in fact I remember I was chatting about this with our marketing lead as well as with an intern we had hired at that point to run the community that don’t expect engagement. We’re going to be the ones who have to pull people into conversations, we’re going to have to post questions into the community ourselves, if someone asked the question others are not going to answer, we need to figure out who is good at answering it and tag them for them to come and answer.

So these are things we sort of knew would be the case, you're not going to see automatic traction. And we mentally prepared ourselves for a period of time where it’s all driven by us. We got lucky that we had some friends of Rocketlane, folks who had worked with me at Freshworks before, you know, some of our early customers early design partners who are also passionate about the problem so they started contributing and then the people who we featured in those monthly events they would also start engaging because they now had an affinity to our platform.

So those things helped us to make it seem like it was buzzing and I think just the new people joining in created some buzz as well, people will join, introduce themselves. We would tag them and ask them to introduce themselves, those things helped. But I would say it took us a year to get to a lot of organic activity where we don’t even need to do anything today. In fact there are I think 15 or 16 city chapters now where people also organize their own events. So it’s taking my focus to them.

Pranay:

So you have commented in the long term you see that a lot of conversations only but you mentioned like people coming in introducing themselves so where were these people coming from, how are they finding their way into the community?

Sri:

I think we did a few things, one, for every event that we did initially I used to make notes from the event of what I learnt and these were like genuine learnings, this was highly tactical sort of like whatever we learnt put it into like a notion doc, it wasn't a formal blog post on a website, it was just a notion document with my notes. And at the end of it there was also more conversations you can join up, you’ll find the link and I would post this on social, I would post it inside the community as well if someone wanted to share it with someone else.

So that had some amount of inbound happening because it was genuinely useful content and it wasn't from us it was like someone shared something interesting with us and we posted it. We also started doing this SDR type motion of inviting people because we saw that very early on because of our location at that point all of us were in India so we had some leaders from India presenting and there were lot of people joining from other Indian companies. But we always knew that we wanted to be a global company so we sort of said let’s invite people globally, let’s do some global events.

So we started like cold connecting with people on LinkedIn nothing about Rocketlane but hey, we have this community called Preflight, we have people from companies like Greensight, Zenders and Chargebee and so on in it, why don’t you join. And then people started joining because in this function there was that yearning to be part of something where we would learn and grow, so that helped.

Pranay:

Got it. And so that events took a life of their own, right, as the podcast. So what else did you do?

Sri:

The events were their own thing but we actually started a podcast separately. So the events were recorded, yes, that video content is still sitting with us, we haven’t really made use of them yet, but we also started a separate podcast where we interviewed leaders in CS and we called it the launch station. So there’s Preflight, the launch station, Rocketlane, everything themed from our company. And the reason we invested and it was a lot of time initially and I haven’t done podcast before, it was a lot of time for me to get it right, redo things etc in fact the first ever guest we had them come twice to record the whole thing a second time as well.

And the reason we invested in all of this was we knew that to be a category leader in a new and emerging category at every point in time we need to look bigger than where we are. So if you look at our website the people who have told us I thought this company must be at least 2-3 years old and that was when it was a month since we launched. So we put in a lot of effort into bringing out content, bringing out thought leadership, bringing out all of these avenues where we’re present. Here’s a podcast, here’s a community, it can't be a one month old company usually but in this case it was a product that had launched a month before. We actually launched the community nine months before we launched the product.

Pranay:

So you almost started building the community when you started building the product?

Sri:

Yes. So content, community, podcast, we prepared and created all of that ahead of launch. So when we launched we looked way ahead of where we actually were. And it’s something we continue to do, I would say we plan these sort of initiatives every quarter which we try to focus on and deliver from a marketing side. So if it was community, podcast etc before -- website, you know, we then started focusing on let’s do events and let’s create thought leadership content that we can -- we’re going to use some of it but we created three key pieces of thought leadership content which we used through the last year. So and we invested a lot of energy into these and what worked beautifully I would say is our sales and marketing working hand in hand.

So sales of course has targets to hit their revenue numbers, their quota, but they don’t look at it as siloed, I'm just going to focus on their numbers. They actually talk to every prospect about hey, why they should join our community whether or not you buy our product. You should look at these great resources that we have, we have an RFP template for you to use if you're looking for software in this space. We have a podcast that you should tune into, we have this event that's upcoming. We did Propel, the first ever customer onboarding conference, a two day event.

So all of these were big things that we planned and executed on and our sales team has not just looked at it as things leading them but has actually been passionate about our initiatives as well. And that helps and even for the customer I think that creates that sense of hey, this company is doing so many things, right?

Pranay:

They’re about a mission not just the product.

Sri:

Exactly. It’s a mission it’s also the maturity. So the two things which help us I believe close more customers are also people understanding that we’re passionate about the problem and we’re a mature company.

Pranay:

And I think we have to talk about that rap video, so how did that come to life?

Sri:

Yeah, for those who haven’t watched look up our story so far Rocketlane, I think it’s a rap that we did for our series A announcement and like a lot of things at Rocketlane I think --

Pranay:

Because I know all three of you and that's just not you.

Sri:

True. Someday I will surprise you but as of now it’s not us. But, yeah, lot of things we do, big things, we sort of put a timeline around something, make a decision and then work backwards from there. And likewise this was like, hey, Jan 19th was going to be our funding announcement PR, let’s make like something share worthy before it. And we were lucky that we had this guy Rahul on our team on the content marketing side who is a rapper and a standup comic and we had hired him for this like we know that when we’re creating a category we need to also put ourselves out there in as many ways as we can, we need to create some share worthy content, we need to get some eyeballs to look at us.

And that was what the rap was all about, right, how do we make some noise and how do we raise above the clutter, everyone’s doing a funding announcement, it’s not news anymore. In fact Tech Crunch probably wouldn’t carry news of funding announcements now if it doesn’t meet some buzz worthy criteria for them. And for us this was about saying hey, there’s this great opportunity, we have great talent, let’s showcase that talent, let’s also showcase who we are in terms of our culture as a team that they’re a cool company, a modern brand and that's another important thing for me that I think not enough startups focus on brand early and it can never be bad for you if you build brand.

Yes, you need to get to product market fit, you need to like get your sales going and so on and there’s no point in just building a brand but we started thinking long term and I have luckily we have a good team, have two other co-founders also who are looking at product and so on so I could take the moment to say ok, let’s focus a little bit on brand. And this is also about hiring so people see that video it’s so much easier to close candidates. Now I’ve actually made this my Zoom waiting room video so anyone who comes on a meeting with us if you're waiting for two minutes it’s then you watch the video as well.

But, yes, it’s the effort that went into it from my side was close to nil and yet like it came out pretty amazing.

Pranay:

And just when you think about all these investments around brand so I think question on every founder’s mind is how do you think about returns and ROI. So how did you think about it the early days even when you put out like a Rocketlane rap video. How do you know what’s working, what’s not working that had to double down?

Sri:

I think, one, this has been a very conscious effort to say we’re playing a long game here, now some things will work, some things won'the, but every time we’re going in asking ourselves hey, is the content we’re creating share worthy, is it useful. Like if it’s a blog we’re writing in a category creation play the search volume’s pretty low, people are not all searching for customer onboarding.

But if someone lands on our site searching for something on customer onboarding they’d better find it to be valuable, otherwise you’ve lost, the person’s going to not think of you as a high quality company anymore. So really focused on having a high bar for whatever we put out. And all these events that we have 1000-800 people in the community now and we have 3000 people attend Propel rather register for Propel, I think 1000 attended live. So all of this adds up over a period of time and because we’re taking a long view and we believe like how revenues are sort of compounding and cumulative in SaaS brand is also like that.

And so is like all your marketing efforts, all the content you do it’s all going to add up at some point and give you returns, we don’t measure it on a daily basis, I know that this is all helping us close those deals faster. Whoever is coming in to the door,value is what we’ve built as a team is able to close. Likewise the rap video helped us close so many hires, it makes us a more attractive company to work with. So there is enough value in all of that, to be honest the like dollar investment was only $200 to make that video. Of course it took time from like a couple of people on the team though.

Pranay:

No, no, I say this when it comes to marketing because I run a marketing team is when it comes to marketing everyone has an opinion because there is no right or wrong and everyone’s opinion is better than your opinion. So how did you think about it and just like you're talking about the rap video or Propel event and all the things that worked were there examples where things didn’t work or didn’t go to plan and how did you think about those?

Sri:

Sure. I think we’ve done announcements for some of the features that we launched, I don’t think those necessarily like were – we made like great videos but it wasn't really inside out in a way we felt good about those videos and probably for someone already looking at what we are those were great videos to explain things but in hindsight if someone wasn't looking for something I don’t think those videos would have made a difference to them, I don’t think it would have pulled them towards us.

So some realization that's at some point we said let’s aim for share worthy content, it may or may not work. And of course we’ve done a bunch of PR not everything has always gotten enough coverage. We have launched some great I would say pieces of content like we had this state of customer onboarding survey that we did and we did a launch event on that survey results withone of the experts in customer onboarding as a space. That was a hit, at the same time we did like a maturity assessment model I think those who came across it have really found it to be like a great resource for them, valuable resource, but it’s not like widespread the internet, you know, it’s a simple enough thing but we need to figure out how to distribute it better.

Pranay:

Got it. And I guess last question from me but as a founder how involved are you in some of these things, where do you spend your time between like platform marketing sales success of that?

Sri:

I think I am very involved with marketing sales and post sales customer success support, if anything I would say my nature is to drift more into support but for this such as what I’ve done is at least for the first year or the first year and a half because we started a lot of this before we launched the product. I’ve focused almost alternate quarters on more marketing efforts, on more sales efforts. So obviously leading up to launch it was a lot more on marketing. You know, the community podcast etc was where a lot of time was spent. Post launch the first quarter was completely focused on sales and then we did some events.

So we needed to focus on doing those events really well, we needed some thought leadership content for it, so I needed to like create the content, practice delivering it and focus on that. Appeared on a bunch of podcasts around our launch as well so PR had a lot of my time going into it but I would say the tilt was towards sales that quarter. The next quarter we came back and said, ok, let’s do more on marketing and the next quarter we did more on sales. But for the big initiatives each quarter the two big initiatives we drive our marketing each quarter I sort of made sure that we set a very high mark and I get pretty involved at least one of them and sort of ensure that the stuff we’re putting out is of very high quality.

So we do have that quality bar which needs my involvement and there’s probably one big initiative that I get involved in each quarter on the marketing side.

Pranay:

Awesome. And again last question but any when you think about this journey and you're obviously are talking to a lot of other founders, early stage entrepreneurs in the ecosystem, so any advice for them or any kind of common mistakes you see that you think can be avoided?

Sri:

I think this whole appearing bigger than you are I think is key if you believe that you're not truly testing testing if the market will work but rather you have enough insight to believe it’s going to work then in a way it’s up to us to make it happen and often things like content, you know, some of these marketing initiatives need founder involvement. And we can't just hire a content marketer and hope that they’re going to deliver highest quality content on a regular basis because they’re good at content marketing, the domain expertise still needs to come from you.

Pranay:

So the domain and the negative comes from you?

Sri:

Right. I’ve seen how Krish from Chargebee used to go into work on a Saturday, sit with the content team and knock out what are the topics you'll now right about and what goes in as a core for each of those. Now the content marketer is obviously great at telling that story the right way, giving like a beautiful analogy to start with which is going to capture the attention of the person reading, keep them hooked to the content but it’s still like your job to give them the material to go with it. And I think the other thing I would say is each of us needs to find a few channels that we’re going to really get on and double down on those.

For us G2 was one of those where we really managed to push hard, get customers to review us, put in their – I think we might have even – annoyed a few of them but overall it’s been good because we got to be a leader in two quarters and now we’re at number 1.

Pranay:

Awesome. So I think just to summarize start marketing on day 0, the day you start building product, play the long game. Hire a rap musician [Laughter], find those launch events, deadlines, activities that unite the entire team and even if you're a one year old baby whose learning how to crawl you have to appear like that mature 5-6-7 year old organization.

Sri:

Absolutely. That's pretty much sums up great.

Pranay:

Awesome. Thank you for doing this and hopefully the jetlag is not too bad because we’re in sunny SF but we can go grab some coffee now.

Sri:

Perfect. Thanks for having me, Pranay.

Salonie:

Thanks for tuning in. For more Matrix Moments episodes, you can head to www.matrixpartners.in/matrixmoments. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more updates.