PMF Convo #18 - Sri Ganesan, Rocketlane

As part of the PMF Convo series, I recently spoke to Srikrishnan ‘Sri’ Ganesan, cofounder and CEO of Rocketlane, a SaaS startup that sells software for better customer onboarding, implementation, and professional services automation. In June 2024, Rocketlane raised a $24m Series B from 8VC supported by existing investors Z47 and Nexus on the back of strong market momentum in the U.S. market.  This was on the back of an $18m Series A in January ‘22 and a $3m seed in mid-’21. Rocketlane is emerging as a breakout SaaS play from India, and in this convo, Sri covers the Rocketlane story giving us glimpses of the decisions that led to their success. In addition he also covers his learnings on the importance of the market and picking the space to play in well. This emerges as a key takeaway from the episode.

The complete transcript of our conversation is here - lots of gold there. Below, find the excerpts from the conversation that I found particularly interesting. They cover 

• the journey of his first startup, Konotor, and how he arrived at the unlock that they were playing in the wrong end of the market, and how correcting it led to growth and momentum. 
• his definition of PMF as pull, and why stranger MRR is important 
• how they decided the problem they were going after at Rocketlane was worth it, and how they validated the solution / product
• How they arrived at the community + content playbook that has decisively contributed to Rocketlane’s success.
• his advice to younger founders and finally, his book recommendations.

Where you play matters

There is a fascinating section where Sri talks about how they struggled with getting growth going at his startup Konotor and later Hotline (a Freshworks; Konotor was acquired by them and rebranded as Hotline). The primary reason was the space or customer set they picked - mobile apps - whereas the market was really on the website side as all the traffic was there. The why now was missing. Once they corrected this, and repositioned the product to be relevant to websites, and launched it as Freshchat, the product took off.

Sri: “...this mobile first mobile only product really didn't take off at all. Again, we had some good growth in India, Southeast Asia, etc. but globally it wasn't taking off. And one of the realisations was when we went and spoke to some people in person, I actually took a break from work and went and met all kinds of folks in the space to just understand why am I not seeing traction first? And one of the things I heard is, and this like a senior marketing leader in the US who said, if you look at retail as a category for example for Macy's, mobile is the 13th biggest store for them that means there are 11 physical stores that are doing more.

There is also an online web which is doing more and even within mobile, mobile app is one fifth the size of mobile web and you are servicing only mobile app. So, this whole in-app, customer support engagement is not yet a priority.

That was one realisation we had. At the same time, me and Girish from FreshWorks were at a conference and Shekhar Kirani of Accel was talking about this idea of rising tide lifts all boats. And after that session, both of us stepped outside the conference room and we had the same realisation that we were not playing in a rising tide type market for this product Hotline. So, essentially, we realised that our competitors at that time…none of them were growing fast.

On the other hand, something like Intercom or Drift in the web messaging space, Intercom grew from 1 to 50 million in two years or something. So there was all that traction happening in some other market and we were playing somewhere else and focused only on mobile. In fact, even when customers had told me if you give me this also for mobile web and web, this will be great. I had said, no…”

Sri’s definition of PMF (product-market fit)

Sri looks at PMF in terms of pull, and market momentum. Ideally it should be pull in a large market and preferably when your early customers are strangers not friends. It is a good definition, and the concept of PMF as pull is something I have seen in past PMF Convos as well (Sheel Mohnot, Prukalpa etc.)

Sri: “For me, it means the market pulls your product. It's not you trying so hard to push it, force it on people, but instead once they see your product, there is a want and need for it which people express and there is that active uptake of your product that you start seeing. I'll give you a couple of examples. I think just the momentum that we had with Rocketlane in our first three months, we got to around 30 paying customers and to me I didn't need to know more. I didn't need to get to one and a half million in revenue or anything else to know that there is product market fit because I said, if there is this kind of pull, if you see that momentum, excitement around what you have, if the market is consuming your offering, then clearly there is a product market fit.

It needs to be a big enough market. That's one thing, there is no point having great PMF in a very tiny market, you want to have it in a wide enough market. And also if you build for a category, if you know already that there are big companies in that category, then it's just about proving that you're able to sell to a handful of people in that category to know that okay, there is a good fitment there, there's other players out there, people still chose you and it should be what Girish (Mathrcalls stranger MRR, not selling into people you know, but people you don't know should be buying the product. So, that's what I would see as product market fit. If it is only people from your network buying, it could be for any reason, right? So you don't want to conflate that with PMF.”

Validating the problem, and solution

Once the founder picks the problem to go after, they then have to do both problem validation (Is this real? Is this big?) and solution validation (will this work?). In the passage below, Sri describes how they approached it at Rocketlane.

Sri: “We tried to validate if this is a problem that the CEO of the company is aware of? That means it will get more traction. That idea will fly if it has board level visibility, CEO level visibility of the problem itself. It's not just within the function that people think it's a problem, but the CEO is aware, likewise investors, and we spoke to VCs, some of them talked about this whole contracted ARR versus live ARR as a problem for some of the companies focused on enterprise. It became clear that these are things that are going to resonate from a ‘why a product in this space’ standpoint. Then it came to let's study how people are doing this today. How are they solving the problem today outside of product, what products are they using, what workarounds are they using? What tools are they cobbling together? The best signal is when people are custom building their own solutions and we saw that happen a few times.

In some cases, someone like FarEye had actually built their own products. Someone like Segment had built very elaborate macros on spreadsheets to solve the problem. So, all of that told us people are investing enough energy in this so we should be able to go after this market. And then it came to validating if our solution will be a good fit. So we just started with click through prototypes and started showing people you told us about this problem before you showed us how we're solving it. Do you think this can be a solution that will add value for you? Here's how we are imagining things, here is what it can do. Give us your feedback. So, we started doing a lot of those calls as well along the way. We didn't wait until product launch.”

How they arrived at the content + community led motion

Rocketlane has invested heavily in content (blogs, a podcast called Launch Station) and community (called Preflight, for onboarding professionals) and this has helped them not only stand apart and help in creating category awareness,  but also has helped in top of funnel as well as faster conversion. Here Sri describes the early days of Rocketlane and how they set up the community and content machine

Sri: “we first didn't start a community, we just said we're going to do a webinar and so many people signed up, it was so engaging as a webinar session and it was all about how this guy, Nimesh of Rockmetric, brought their implementation time down from six months to six weeks and he was telling that story and everyone was super engaged. So, with that one session I could see that there is so much more that people can learn from each other. So I said, let's become a facilitator of this and we'll also learn, all of my content after that, thought leadership content that we put out, what we presented at conferences came from what we learned from this community and being able to talk as an authority when you're talking to a prospect or customer about a problem, not just related to your product, but that you understand the space well, that you understand what they need to do to fix a problem, that you have great ideas for them.

I think that also goes a distance and customer trusting you as the company to partner with. If you are just all about your own product, it's weak, you need to be an expert at the space. And we managed to do that with community, the podcast, etc. It was a very intentional strategy to look bigger than what we are. So we said, how do we appear bigger? We need to do some things for that. Let's make that happen. Let's ensure that we have this whole plan around what can make Rocketlane look like a 2-year-old company at launch. And that's what we heard from a lot of people that when you look at the website, there's a pretty mature website. It had all this podcasts stuff in it. It had a community with 800 members in it already. So, no one thinks of it as something that just launched. Company that launched four years before us, people thought we were older than them when they looked at the website.”

Sri’s advice to younger founders on how to approach PMF

Not surprisingly, his advice to younger founders is about verifying that the space they are in is indeed the right one. Momentum is the biggest signal, he says.

Sri: It's about challenging them to come up with, essentially if someone is struggling with traction, if not growing, either challenge them with if there's someone else in your space that's growing fast, why not you, or no one in your space is growing fast, are you sure it's the right space? And setting some goal for them saying, you should try to do X by Y time period with focus and that will tell you whether there's anything to this or not. I think very often if the ones where I warn them more are where I see it as tech searching for a problem, which happens at times. Why they seem to be doing things more inside out based on something built from a tech perspective, but that's not going to help get to that PMF…we need to start from a problem. But yeah. And that whole realisation, how can I help them with the realisation that they're either playing in a very hard market that's not going to be easy to sell into. It could be things like multiple stakeholders to convince, you're not going with one thing for one persona. Just opening their eyes to the challenges they have from a market perspective or are you playing in a good market or not? That's sort of the biggest area where I keep pushing people to develop a better understanding.

The momentum is the biggest signal. You either, if you have 1 -5 x 70K plus deals, then I know for I say 70K, it could even be 50K plus, right? You have five 50K plus deals coming from strangers, then you have something going for you. Or if you've had like, Hey, I got to 150 small customers within 8-9 months, that's again a very strong signal that you have good product market fit.

Books he recommends

1/ Category Creation by Anthony Kennada (ex CMO of Gainsight, and one of the pioneers, and category creators of Customer Success category.

2/ Competing against Luck by the late great Clayon Christensen, which details the jobs to be done framework.