From $10M to $100M: Lessons Learnt at Whatfix

by Alok Goyal | Sep 25, 2024 | Functional Notes

Five years back, Whatfix raised its Series B when Eightroads, f-Prime Capital and Cisco joined the captable, and I wrote an article on lessons learnt in going from Series A to B. A lot has changed since then for Whatfix – they have grown 25x in their ARR since...

Launching your enterprise GTM engine: Top 10 takeaways from SaaS Talks #34

by Alok Goyal | Jul 12, 2024 | Functional Notes, SaaS Talks

Building a global enterprise GTM strategy is complex, especially if you’re an early-stage founder.  Unlike SMB strategies that can often be managed remotely, enterprise GTM requires physical presence in multiple countries. This involves handling large deal sizes,...

Bootstrapping SMB-centric GTM: Insights from our SaaS portfolio

by Alok Goyal | May 21, 2024 | Functional Notes

If you’re an early-stage SaaS company focused on SMBs, how do you start your GTM engine? Early experiments in GTM are intertwined with achieving PMF, and also define the velocity, cost and scalability of the eventual GTM motion. We, at Stellaris, strongly believe that...

Building a Casual Gaming Studio from India: A Primer

by Rupali Goel | Nov 30, 2023 | Functional Notes, Market Trends

While the initial idea of speaking to people in the gaming industry was to validate a hypothesis: Building a casual gaming studio from India for the world is a large opportunity (covered in Part I), those conversations proved way more fruitful than we imagined. Not...

Why SaaS companies can withstand the funding downcycle better

by Alok Goyal | Aug 16, 2023 | Functional Notes, Market Trends

Contrary to popular narratives that software is not impacted during downcycles, it does. To a large extent, it already has. Sales cycles have lengthened by 20-25% and public cloud vendors have seen their growth reduce. Over the last 5 quarters, YoY growth for US...

Tired of too many SaaS metrics?

by Alok Goyal | Jan 10, 2023 | Functional Notes

As an investor in early stage SaaS companies, I often find founders to be confused on what metrics they should track. Challenge is not a lack of metrics, but too many metrics, with most of them stage irrelevant for the company. For example for a pre-PMF SaaS company,...