So, how do you move upmarket?

by Alok Goyal | Jan 21, 2020 | Functional Notes

You did all the hard work in building your founding team, ideating to a problem to be solved, creating the minimum viable product (MVP), finding product market fit, and creating some version of a go-to-market recipe that can be scaled. All you now need is fuel to be...

Creating Design Centred Product Organizations

by Arpit Maheshwari, Rahul Chowdhri | Jan 13, 2020 | Functional Notes

As a co-founder of VC-backed travel start-up Mygola (acquired by MakeMyTrip), and then Chief Product Officer for MakeMyTrip and GoIbibo (MMT / GI) – India’s largest OTA, Anshuman Bapna knows a thing or two about building digital products for a...

Why moving upmarket is (mostly) important for creating large SaaS companies

by Alok Goyal | Dec 20, 2019 | Functional Notes

Six years back, almost to the date, I drew a graph between CAC (Cost of Acquiring a Customer) and ACV (average Annual Contract Value) for SaaS companies. This was part of a presentation I made to the partnership at Helion to emphasize the point that ACV by itself is...

Scalability of New Age Consumer Brands

by Arpit Maheshwari | Sep 17, 2019 | Functional Notes

Enough has been written about the need for more consumer brands in almost all spheres of our lives. Given that we are all consumers first, it is apparent that with increasing individualism, rising incomes, and scarcity of time at hand, a new set of brands will get...

Let’s talk about debt, baby

by Ritesh Banglani | Mar 19, 2019 | Functional Notes

If you have raised venture capital in India in the past few years, you have surely asked yourself the question, “Should I be raising venture debt as well?”. Venture debt, as the term suggests, is a form of risk financing through debt rather than equity. In India, it...

Coin operators…And what coin do you need?

by Alok Goyal | Feb 28, 2019 | Functional Notes

Have you heard the cobra story? The story goes like this – there were a lot of cobras in Delhi and to kill them, the British rulers announced an incentive per killed cobra. Did it have an effect? Absolutely! Many cobras were killed and a lot of money was paid out. But...