The Rocketlane Journey

In today’s episode, we have Sri and Vignesh the Co-founders of Rocketlane. They’re in conversation with Pranay Desai Vice – President, at Matrix Partners India. They talk about the team's deep SaaS history, learning from their prior venture, Konotor, their vision for Rocketlane and much more.

Salonie:

Hi and welcome to Matrix Moments, this is Salonie and on today’s episode we have Sri and Vignesh the Co-founders of Rocketlane. A B2B SaaS start-up, its creating a benchmark experience in client onboarding as well as building a global brand. They’re in conversation with Pranay Desai Vice – President, at Matrix Partners India. And as part of this episode, they cover the teams deep SaaS history, learnings from their prior venture, Konotor, later acquired by Freshworks. Their vision for Rocketlane and much more. Tune – in.

Pranay:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Matrix Moments podcast and thank you for tuning in. This is Pranay here and I’m the VP and lead for B2B SaaS investments here at Matrix Partners India. I’m personally very excited about this podcast because I’ve known these people for a very long time. So today we’re going to be talking about the founders’ journey for second time SaaS entrepreneurs with Srikrishnan and Vignesh from Rocketlane. Hi, Sri, hi, Vignesh.

Srikrishnan:

Hi, Pranay. Excited to do this with you.

Pranay:

So, good, guys, I think I’ve known you for a long time but just for the benefit of our audience can you share a little bit about yourselves?

Srikrishnan:

Sure. As you introduced already, we’re on our second SaaS journey. Actually, you can say we built three SaaS products before this, like three variants of the same one to be more exact. So we built a product from 2012-2015 bootstrapped for a long time, this was called Konotor and if you use the chat inside apps like Zomato, Swiggy, BigBasket, Bank Bazaar and many other popular apps in India, some in Southeast Asia, that was powered by Konotor in that time. Later got acquired by Freshworks, relaunched as Hotline.io later relaunched as Freshchat and that’s a product that’s been wildly successful globally and that’s sort of the last thing we did at Freshworks. And then we’re on this new journey building Rocketlane the idea for which came from our stint at Freshworks.

Vignesh:

So, I take care of all thing’s product, I think Pranay is well versed with the internal dynamics of work between Deepak, me and Sri what we do. So, Deepak takes care of engineering, I take care of product and GV takes care of everything else essentially. Pranay, you want to chip in with what the term is you can probably ---

Pranay:

Yeah. I think for those who don’t know I already know Sri, Deepak and Vignesh from 2015 because I was the person who acquired the first company while at Freshworks, so we’ve known each other for a good 6-7 years now. And I think I first wanted to go back and hear about kind of your dynamic, right, because you have a very tight knit complete team from day 1. So where did you meet each other?

Vignesh:

Right. Sri and I, we’ve been friends from like college, I think we’ve known each other for 20 years. My association with Deepak goes back even longer, I think since I was ten years old probably, so more than 25 years I’ve known him, I think 28 years I’ve known Deepak. And that’s how it started, I think GV and Deepak knew each other from like the Yahoo Messenger days where they were chatting with each other etcetra but never quite met. I think Konotor was like the first time they came together. But that dynamic has evolved, I think initially we all did everything, we all were coding, we did blogs, we did website whatever and I think over a period of time each of us have found our own niches and it’s a different set of dynamic now between us.

Srikrishnan: Yeah, the first time around all of us did everything but we had clear areas of who makes a decision on product, who makes the decision on tech, who makes the decision on anything business side. But this time it’s from day 1 it’s been more clearly, okay, I’ll handle this, you handle this. I don’t need to code this time, Vignesh doesn’t need to worry about sales or writing blogs so we sort of have it more clear-cut.

Pranay:

And I think when you acquire a company the way the founder operates tells you a lot about how they’re going to be so I hated negotiating with Srikrishnan during our acquisition and I’ve gone through this with eight other people. So I know he’ll make a great founder, a terrific business guy but I hated being on the other side. You asked for whatever you wanted and you got everything.

Srikrishnan:

Yeah, I think one of the lessons I learnt in that journey is try to make your lawyer sort of the villain in that negotiation phase like put all the blame on the lawyer and still maintain your dynamic with at least the founder on the other side to make sure it doesn’t put you in awkward situations.

Pranay:

I don’t know if Archana is hearing this, but I wonder what she’s thinking about it right now. Sri, tell us a little bit about your vision with Rocketlane?

Srikrishnan:

Yeah. So as I was saying in the Freshworks journey we got to work with a lot of large customers onboarding enterprise customers globally. And that’s where we experienced like what it takes to bring onboard and implement our solutions for these mid-market and enterprise customers. So it was sort of chaotic, stressful for everyone involved because there were multiple work stages that people needed to be on top of so there would be a Trello board that’s shared with the customer, there would be like spreadsheets floating around, different documents, SOWs, requirements, documents etcetra. And it was hard for people to be on top of all that was happening, so someone would drop the ball. And then you would need heroics from someone on the team to come and fix things and we felt there was a lack of visibility as well with respect to where things were across like different onboarding projects that were happening. And we felt all of this was leading to a very subpar experience from the customer side of things. We were subjecting them to so many documents and dropping the ball and all of that, that we thought, hey, what if we look at this from the customer’s side and design things ground up for like how can we make a consistent, transparent, and delightful journey happen for every customer onboarding. So that’s sort of the vision how we can transform client delivery journeys into really leveling up from where they are today where you’re just throwing spreadsheets and documents at them and instead make it like a beautiful experience for them, that’s the crux of what we’re trying to do. There are many side effects which will help out the company in different ways but the core is elevating customer experience during the onboarding journey.

Pranay:

Great. And just one question, right, if you reflect back on your initial journey about Konotor, then you came into Freshworks, built Hotline, then evolved into Freshchat, what were your learnings through the cycle and, Sri, maybe you want to go first on this.

Srikrishnan:

I would say a whole bunch of things, firstly with Konotor we sort of were playing in this mobile first market, it was the buzzword of the day. However, like how much ever we thought things were moving and we had some good brands definitely working with us I think momentum wise reflecting back the largest player in this space was also moving slowly, we were probably like the second or third in this space, we were also moving slowly as compared to what was happening in other markets. Like if we look at someone like Intercom who was playing in the web chat space in the same time that they moved from 1 to 50 million the movement for the largest player in this inapt chat space was much, much smaller, negligible compared to the movement we saw for someone like Intercom. So I think my biggest lesson from that journey has been pick a market which is either like so big already that you don’t need to even think about hey, is there TAM etcetra or pick a market which has big momentum behind it and it’s not just being a buzzword, people are actually looking for solutions using solutions.

Vignesh:

Right. I think as an anecdote, right, I was just looking at Product hunt yesterday because we launched in Product hunt, the first product Konotor, in 2014 we’d listed it as mobile first intercom.io. Right, it was actually we were so close to what our eventual answer was to be three years later but the adjacent market was so big and it was growing so fast but it took us three years to sort of open our eyes and say, hey, that’s where we want to be.

In fact during the intervening three periods, we had a sales person who used to come and tell us customers are asking for web chat, can we build it. And I think at some level it was also a thing of hey, you know what, we’re building a mobile first solution. I think somewhere our founder’s ego also comes in and says, hey, we’re building a mobile solution, we want to be the everything for mobile, we want to be support, marketing etcetra and we sort of closed the door to Intercom and as a competition for Intercom, right. And by the time they had taken a significant lead but whereas if we had pivoted earlier we don’t know what would have happened. So I think momentum, size of market, were all big lessons that you can’t unlearn. And letting go of your ego to figure out, okay, there’s a large market, go chase momentum, don’t be stuck to your, hey, this is what I am. There is a fine line between saying, hey, this is my vision, this is what I want to do whereas and what the market is responding to what you’ve put out there. I think straddling that line is what I think this part of the journey is for us.

Pranay:

What are your thoughts on go to market? Like between product and GTM what’s more important in your eyes today?

Srikrishnan:

I mean there are enough examples on both ends of the spectrum where there’s a crappy product which has great distribution and hence it’s like in everyone’s mind the obvious choice. And likewise, on the other end of the spectrum you have products that grew purely from like a virality angle because people found value from using it. So I think each founder, each founding team is going to have their own playbook of what is playing to their strengths. And then you need to optimize around that, there’s no one answer so if you’re -- and there needs to be a fit for the kind of products you’re building and the playbook you’re adopting you can’t say, hey, I’m going to build something that is going to help leaders in the org succeed and then help assume that its going to grow virally. So if you’re going to have like a bottoms up adoption that works in certain categories and there you need more beautiful products. If you’re going to go top down then it’s more about maybe your sales motions and how you get in front of those execs who are going to make that buyer decision on. So I think there’s different parts to that initial success and then eventually you settle somewhere where even the bottoms up folks need their top down method of selling when they start working with larger and larger enterprises and likewise for you to have a successful relationship with a big company the adoption needs to happen so the products need to become better so I think it comes to some sort of a middle ground somewhere.

Pranay:

Got it. That’s the MBA answer though, it depends. So I think moving on so let’s talk a little bit about the Rocketlane journey, right, so I know you started in March 2020 when we just went into lockdown so how has the kind of team and people development aspect been for you?

Vignesh:

Right. I think if you just keep listening in a little more context there has been almost like a completely remote team. So far we’ve hired people all the way from like Jaipur up in the north to like Thanjavur down in the South of Tamilnadu, we have people dotted all over the place. So it’s been like a fairly interesting learning experience, I think this is completely new to us, right, we’ve never been in a situation where we’ve had to develop remotely because and engineering and product was sort of the initial things we had to do during that phase so I can talk about how we went about doing that and what were the thought process behind doing all of those things.

So I think one of the few things that in office presence enables an engineering and product team to do is to be able to have this serendipitous conversations, to be able to check in frequently, to be able to say, hey, what are you working on, this customer has a bug can we fix it. We’re constantly apprised of what the progress is because we’re leaning over -- especially the small team we’re leaning over the shoulder and saying, oh, this is the progress on this screen so far, can we do this, can we do that. Now instead of that you need to sort of put in process to enable all of that, how do you have a process to say, hey, this is how we’re thinking about how the feature itself is going to be designed. This is how we hand off the design to the engineers and this is how we explain what needs to happen here. And how do we check in on the progress of the feature itself, right, because you don’t have a monitor to look at. You have to essentially have like a ceremony to figure out what the progress is. The whole team needs to be appraised of what’s happening because it’s so easy again to be disconnected because everyone is sitting at their home, nobody else knows what else is happening, how do you bring a common sense of that we’re building this together, oh, this is what the other person is working on, this is what lesson do we learn from here.

So a few things worked, I think one of the first things that we did was we said, okay, because frankly we’re not going to see each other throughout the week let’s do a plan. Let’s do a plan on Monday, we dog fooded our own product, essentially we can sort of substitute Rocketlane for a productivity product as well even though it’s custom built for onboarding but we can use it as a productivity solution as well. So every engineer puts down what their aspirational goal is for the week, right, so it’s not like we broadly know what we have to build there’s a roadmap. But the engineers pick what they want to build and from that they say, hey, I’m committing to this on Friday.

So we have a detailed Monday planning and we sort of say we go back and forth, hey, can we pick more. I think maybe this is too much for you to chew, can we scope it down and we have like intermediate milestone. And then we have a everyday check-in at 7:30 in the night. Right, so it’s not like what are you planning to do, we sort of inverted the question and said hey, this is what I have achieved, this is what I’ve been blocked on so if someone can unblock me today, I will start on the morning. Right, so everything became about what you got done rather than what is the plan. So, the plan was made on Monday and everything going forward in that week is what I got done. On a Friday we have a -- this is probably the most looked forward ceremony in the company, right, we have a demo day like 2-3 hours where every engineer sort of showcases. Because one of the additional things you wanted to do is how do you bring engineering ownership, right, again this is a lesson probably a topic for a different day, but the moment engineering has ownership on product experience, the moment you say hey, this is your feature, you’re delivering it and this is how the customer is perceiving it. You’ve really unlocked a different thing, it’s no longer about engineering thinking, oh, this is spec from product, this is what according to the spec I’ve built it, that’s it. Instead of that there’s a real involvement from them, hey, this is a problem we’re trying to solve, this is how I’m coding for it and this is how the customer is seeing.

If you take them through the journey and bring ownership into the process, there’s nothing like that. So essentially the engineers are actually presenting, the product managers have nothing to do with it. The engineers are presenting, hey, this is the problem, this is how we’ve coded for it, this is where we’re taking it and they’re demoing to product. There’s click through etcetra and they might be like half-baked etcetra but that’s expected because it’s a weekly demo thing. So I think this has really worked for us and we have a all hands as well, probably Sri can talk about that, but from an engineering and product perspective this is how it’s been and I think we probably started engineering in a very serious way only in July and in nine months we had the whole product and we had nothing before that. And I think if anything it’s been faster than any of the other products we’ve built before. So it’s been great, yeah, and it’s been a great learning experience also for us.

Srikrishnan:

Yeah, the one thing I like about those demo days is day before that our designer catches up in detail with -- like our designers, couple of designers, catch up with each front-end engineer to make sure that things are going to look polished during that demo. So, we have those little wow moments coming out even in those internal demos which eventually translate to customer wow. So that’s something I love about it. And I think the more things we needed to be very intentional about right from the beginning of the journey one of which was how do you make sure people understand what this customer onboarding problems. Because lot of new people joining the team may not be aware of like what it takes to onboard a new customer, they may have been working on product, even at like a product company but they may not have experienced what it takes to get a large customer live.

So we recorded conversations with hundreds of folks that we were talking to from very early on, right, so right from problem discovery we have these repositories, we have probably more than 300 hours of conversations now. Initially it was only problem discovery, then it became like demos of high-fidelity marks, then it became demos of the product itself. And now and before as in the past whenever we did those demos we would record, put up snippets in our Slack channel saying, hey, guys, we just had this conversation with the customer, potential customer, watch this. So that they understand the pains and they relate to what the problems are, empathize with it. Now what we do is any new joinee we have a series of videos that we give them saying over the course of the next week please watch these videos so that you understand what it takes to onboard a customer, what are the problems people are facing, how do they react when they see our product, what do they like in it. So it gives them a fair idea of what we’re solving and that brings that additional -- because I think good ideas can come from anywhere so they start thinking about it, okay, how are we going to solve this problem for the customer. So that’s one, and then we also wanted to create an avenue for people to catch up in general, right, for us to share updates over our company or to build a better bond among team members.

So we used to do an all hands in the past, then we said, hey, let everyone turn on their videos so let’s make it all faces, so we have a all faces meeting every Thursday. It’s a video on meeting where we’re just sort of chatting about different topics, people ask questions about anything from how a VC makes money, to angel investing, to how to think about marketing in a startup to how do you define -- like it could be anything. So people are curious to learn as part of this journey, that’s why they join us, right, because they want to be part of an early startup journey where there’s a lot of learning happening. And so we made it a forum for people to chat about any topic, sometimes they’re telling us -- I think last week a couple of people were talking about ghost stories, anything goes. So there’s no rules around this catchup session. But we form stronger bonds, we pull each other’s legs, people understand its okay to pull like a founder’s leg. That brings us all closer together, right, so that helps. And that helps us have more honest conversations in general as well outside of like this meeting because we’re forming that bond. We’ve done quizzes, we’ve done like games and two truths and one lie about each member of the team, whatever it is. Do something fun, get to know a little more about each other, that’s one thing that’s worked really well for us I would say.

Pranay:

Great. So that’s a perfect segue into kind of the quickfire round. So this is not about Rocketlane, this is life outside Rocketlane so Sri, two truths and a lie. No, no, just kidding. Sri, best piece of advice you’ve heard, something you want to share with all the aspiring founders out there?

Srikrishnan:

Yeah. I’m going to say it’s finally market trumps the best golden advice that I’ve gotten. So build something where -- I think the way it was framed for me was rising tide lifts all boats. So are you playing in a hard market or easy market, where like everyone is doing well, choose a market like that. We all do our startups at the peak of our life generally like we’re spending our best years on this, so optimize for a journey that’s going to be aided by like strong momentum outside of only what you’re trying to make happen. I think that’s my best advice.

Pranay:

Got it. And, Vignesh, your pick, best piece of advice you’ve heard?

Vignesh:

I don’t know if it is advice but I think it’s probably I think Girish said this some time, I mean, it resonated with me very deeply. I think he said success is in the large things; happiness is in the small things. And I think that’s something which I sort of optimize for like if you need to be successful you need to be like build a big business like whatever, try to do the replicate the Freshchat journey if possible, hit the same milestones etcetra but everyday happiness is for me is the journey. So I optimize for that, hey, what kind of problems am I working with, am I learning something new, you know, find happiness in your everyday job, don’t try to find happiness in success. And I think that is something which I optimize for.

Pranay:

Brilliant. Got it. And what’s a must-read book for you and why?

Vignesh:

For me, I think there are a lot of brilliant books. For me I think probably from a product perspective I would say Competing against Luck I think is a must for product folks out there. I think once you start seeing product as a sequence of jobs to be done as opposed to a feature set it really moves your thinking from inside out, outside in, you’re not thinking, hey, here’s a feature which I need to give the customer rather than, hey, here are a set of problems that the customer is facing, how do I solve for that. I think that’s one. And I think Creative Selection is like a book from one of the engineers who developed the first Iphone, how they built it, what engineering ownership over a product can bring, how does iteratively how do you come to a solution, how do you become better. It’s not like the very first solution that you bring out is the best but how do you iterate quickly and improve every day to get to the right thing. It’s also I’m a big Apple fan boy so it also gives me an insight of how Apple works. I think that is also a must read for product folks. Beyond that I think there are a bunch but maybe -- I can’t recall on top of my mind.

Pranay:

Sri, what’s your favorite?

Srikrishnan:

I would say this was a recommendation for me from Krish of Charge Bee, Leadership and Self-Deception. And I thought like it was one of the most -- it made me so conscious about how I’m behaving in different situations and I feel if everyone reads the book and internalizes it, it makes life so much easier to deal with people. And that’s part of how a lot of friction in general gets created problems in general gets created and I think that was one brilliant book. And another one I really liked which I read last year was Made to Stick, just gave a framework of how to think about like how can you tell your ideas in better ways, how do you make your ideas stick with other people. So that was a brilliant book on that front.

Vignesh:

I think Leadership and Self-Deception is not just -- I second that it’s a brilliant book. It’s not just for leadership or whatever, I think it’s for everyday life it’s a great book.

Pranay:

And one last question from my side, so like kind of the entrepreneurship journey is kind of a ten year journey mixed with highs and lows so how do you take care of yourselves through the times.

Vignesh:

I think for me I’m generally a lot more aware that there will be highs and lows. I think especially I think the Konotor journey it takes you through a wringer, right, it takes you, you’ll have enormous highs where your new customer or users are using you and it will take you through lows as well. But I think just being aware that just treat that the highs might not stay whereas the lows are also equally won’t stay -- it’s not like -- there will be better days to come, just persist and stick with it and you’ll probably have better days ahead. And I think the other thing going back to my earlier thing, right, I think happiness is in the small things, so I really -- I mean everyday there’s nothing else I would like to do. This is probably the best thing for me, the best job I’ve ever had building product and going through the startup journey because I find happiness in the everyday things, being involved with engineering, design, having those customer conversations, having that aha moment where we say a throwaway line from a customer leads to a product feature etcetra.

So I think you should find happiness in those things and just being aware that the highs and lows might be temporary but you have to look back at it over a long period of time for it to make sense and like not be in that moment and be brought down by it.

Srikrishnan:

I think from especially from a SaaS perspective I think like the whole growth mindset aspect also works because typically it’s not like as hit or miss as a B2C startup would be. So in that sense if you’ve not done something, not managed to crack something you haven’t managed to crack it yet and you can figure it out if you think okay, you know what, I want to crack this. It may take longer but keep trying and crack it and I’ve seen a lot of startups which I thought maybe in 2014 or 2015 I thought this company is stuck over here. But then they persisted and I think a lot of those companies that persisted have actually turned out to become successful over a period of time. So in that sense I think if there’s a low figure out what you need to solve, put your heads to it, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the journey, it’s just a part of the journey and you need to focus on figuring it out and then move forward.

Pranay:

Awesome. So I think with that we’ve come to the end of this podcast. Thank you, everyone, for those especially you guys who stuck it around till the end and hope to have you back for the next episode.

Salonie:

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