The Indian Dream

Today's episode is part of our Micro-SaaS edition of the Trends Series.

Micro-SaaS Newsletter

Our guest today is Preetam Nath from SuperLemon who also recently started new product called DelightChat.

Preetam Nath
SuperLemon
DelightChat

This is our longest episode yet and this was after cutting out at least 30 minutes of Siddharth and Preetam discussing life philosophy, finances, and other stuff. 

Preetam and his co-founder built SuperLemon as an app for the Shopify store. The reason they became well known in the software development  circles is because they were able to scale up a simple idea of a WhatsApp integration into the Shopify ecommerce store. This generated $30,000 or about 20 lacs per month of recurring revenue in less than 14 months.
The team was just the two of them and they accomplished it without any external funding. 

In this episode, we go in detail through how Preetam thought about building and then built Super Lemon but also talk about the factors that are the foundation of success for a Micro-SaaS company such as finding your niche, thinking about distribution and much more. 

SaaS has become a very popular term the last few years. it stands for software as a service - you can just think of it as a subscription model for software. so let's say that somebody is giving you value on a regular basis and you want to pay them on a regular basis for the value they are providing. that is a subscription – Preetam has a great blog article called Subscription is Eating the World. Now just think about the most basic software that you get as a subscription on your web browser or anywhere else. Netflix comes to mind - they provide a service off TV shows and movies on a regular basis and I pay them around ₹500 a month. On the business side you can think about Office 365 where you pay around ₹200 a month for access to the entire office software suite.  

So saas is just software for which I pay a monthly fee. Micro SaaS, or Niche SaaS or Vertical SaaS is just a SaaS product which is looking at a very small niche. For example if your ambitions are to earn only $3000 or 2 lacs per month as a side business then you can make a focused product for which you charge $30 per month and all you have to do is find 100 people love what you made. Considering that the Internet now has 5 billion users, It is much easier now to find a niche and figure out how to serve those people. it doesn't hurt that you will be charging in dollars.

Micro-SaaS Is referred to as the modern lifestyle business Which is set up by its founders to earn a certain amount of money and no more. It gives you the money that you need to enjoy the lifestyle that you want without the stresses of scaling up start up. 

Lastly, I’d like to just make an open call for anyone who’d like to help us write our Trends newsletters on any topic that interests you. Next week, we’re looking into Ayurveda and then Electric Vehicles, Direct to Consumer. Email us  at [email protected]

Preetam Nath's Blog on Micro-SaaS
How I grew my Shopify micro-SaaS to $25k MRR and 20k users in 14 months
Guide: Make money building Shopify micro-SaaS apps
The Mom Test by Rob

Today's episode is part of our Micro-SaaS Edition of the Trends Series.

Micro-SaaS Newsletter

We're going to explore this upcoming trend of Micro-SaaS and talk to a few people who've built Micro-SaaS businesses. What is Micro-SaaS you ask? SaaS is a business that Sells Software as a Service and follows a subscription business model to accrue recurring revenue. Over the last 10-15 years, we've seen some huge organizations being built in the SaaS Industry. Salesforce.com, Hubspot, in the US, Freshdesk, Zoho in India are all examples of giant SaaS companies with revenues in 100s of Millions of dollars and in some cases, even Billions.

Micro-SaaS on the other hand is about focusing on a niche and building a software to serve their needs. A small addressable market that has enough opportunities for you to build a high margin, low capital investment business . To know more about Micro-SaaS, checkout our Trends Newsletter. Over the couple of years, entrepreneurs across the globe have built Micro-SaaS businesses with revenues in Millions of Dollars. We have a story of someone who did just that sitting out of India.

This is a two part of episode. In the first part we covered Gaurav's journey so far and how he built JustCall. In this part, we go deep into the 20 point Micro-SaaS Playbook that Gaurav has created.

Gaurav's Twitter
Gaurav's Linkedin
Gaurav's 20 Step Playbook

At The Indian Dream, we would love to hear from you! If you have any questions or just want to connect with us– please feel free to join our WhatsApp Group Here!

Welcome to the Micro-Saas week at The Indian Dream Podcast.

We're going to explore this upcoming trend of Micro-SaaS and talk to a few people who've built Micro-SaaS businesses. What is Micro-SaaS you ask? SaaS is a business that Sells Software as a Service and follows a subscription business model to accrue recurring revenue. Over the last 10-15 years, we've seen some huge organizations being built in the SaaS Industry. Salesforce.com, Hubspot, in the US, Freshdesk, Zoho in India are all examples of giant SaaS companies with revenues in 100s of Millions of dollars and in some cases, even Billions.

Micro-SaaS on the other hand is about focusing on a niche and building a software to serve their needs. A small addressable market that has enough opportunities for you to build a high margin, low capital investment business . To know more about Micro-SaaS, checkout our Trends Newsletter. Over the couple of years, entrepreneurs across the globe have built Micro-SaaS businesses with revenues in Millions of Dollars. We have a story of someone who did just that sitting out of India. 

Gaurav Sharma has a strong bias for action, you'll always find him building something on the internet. Most of his adult life has been spent building different kinds of technology products. In college, he built a WinX, a virtual stock market software. This spread like wildfire across different colleges and at one point  the product had 2L users. This software led to a job at an Investment Bank that Gaurav ended up quitting fairly quickly. At that point, our man had decided that we was going to choose the entrepreneurship route and going to build products!

After experimenting with a few products, he built an Analytics for Pinterest and coined the term Pinfluence. This went viral, literally overnight because a few big media houses covered the app. The global media attention resulted in an attractive offer from Startup Studio in Los Angeles called Science.Inc. Gaurav then moved to LA and worked Science Inc. and lived the good the Sunny LA life building another business that would scale to Millions of dollars in revenue. In 2015, the urge to startup again grew stronger and this time, he moved back to India to build here.

Since then, He's built JustCall.io, a Cloud Phone System that allows you to monitor and log all the calls that your sales and service teams do. Over the last few years, he's used his experience to scale this to $5m in Annual Revenue. He has also launched Helpwise.co, a Shared Inbox for all customer conversations across different platforms. he's setup SaaS Labs, a studio similar to Science Inc where he builds and invests in other SaaS companies. All of this while being bootstrapped! What a fascinating journey.

This is a two part of episode. In the first part we cover Gaurav's journey so far and how he built JustCall. In the second part, we go deep into the 20 point Micro-SaaS Playbook that Gaurav has created.

Gaurav's Twitter
Gaurav's Linkedin

At The Indian Dream, we would love to hear from you! If you have any questions or just want to connect with us– please feel free to join our WhatsApp Group Here!

Mr. Rajiv Sehgal had one big dream, to build a consumer brand.
This is his story of how he built Jeeru with his kids.

He came from humble beginnings, worked for a few years, and saved up his money to fund his vision.  He first started off in packaged drinking water but realised that the unorganised sector was filled with thousands of brands like his. Knowing he couldn’t compete with the big three kinley, aquafina, and bisleri— he started thinking along the lines of, what value can be added to water? 

Mr. Sehgal started searching for a beverage that had no established brand leadership. He landed up on Jeera Masala. There were thousands of Jeera masala brands in the country but none of them had any national significance. Thus, Jeeru was born. Soon after, Anika joined the family businesses. Her job was to expand Jeeru’s visibility in the market. She started a successful incentive programme for the sales team by providing daily grocery items such as rice and cooking oil. She is also the face behind Jeeru’s strength in modern retail.  They didn’t just want to push sales by offering margins, so they decided to innovate. They started selling Jeeru in cans and as people started noticing the product— distributors started paying attention. 

Within two years, Jeeru started contributing over 11 percent of beverage sales for Future Retail. From ₹10 crore in 2010-11, Xotik Frujus has grown to a revenue of ₹72.95 crore in 2019-20. Jeeru started out as being a Mumbai and Surat based brand but now it has a pan India presence. Even airports sell a premium version of Jeeru. In fact, the brand gets exported to the UK, Middle East, and Africa.

After Anikta, her younger sister Vishaka followed suit and she manages general trade. Their brother Dishank has been the last to join and is focusing on diversifying the business by launching Xotic cafes. He was also instrumental in driving the brand’s partnership with 82.5 communications. 

The family’s dedication to Jeeru and the fact that we all love it is sending out a clear message— the story of Jeeru has many more chapters in store for us!

Link to Jeeru's instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/xotikjeeru/

At The Indian Dream, we would love to hear from you! If you have any questions or just want to connect with us– please feel free to join our WhatsApp Group Here!

We also write a newsletter in which we explore market trends that have the potential to explode in India! Check out TID Trends Newsletter - Here

Who is India's most beloved podcaster? This week we will be talking to none other than Amit Varma!

Welcome to our second episode on the trend report on audience first products. We’re really excited to have Amit Varma with us in this episode. 

Amit hosts the weekly podcast, The Seen and the Unseen. It offers us unique longform content and we are all such fans. No wonder it gets over 150,000 downloads a month!

Amit is currently a columnist for the Times of India, Bloomberg Quint, and Cricket Next. He wrote India Uncut, which was one of India’s most popular blogs in the years it was active, between 2004 and 2008. It now serves as a repository of his published work and all the new writings now come in the form of a newsletter. He's the only person who's won the prestigious Bastiat Prize for Journalism twice. Business Week has named him one of the 50 Most Powerful People in India.

Today's conversation was a journey! We begin in days of blogging, move through the social media revolution, and explore viral forms of content creation in 2020 like podcasts and newsletters. 

Amit has many insights into the Art of being a creator online and what it takes to grow a large audience and build a community. At the core he believes that you need to have a passion for what you're doing because content creation is a labor of love. To be a successful content creator you need to care more about the work than the number of views or downloads. 

We also discuss Amit’s latest venture, The Art of Clear Writing, his first attempt to monetize his audience after more than 15 years of being an online creator. We also explore his future plans and his continued love for longform content. 

The end of the conversation was quite unexpected– Amit was an entrepreneur during the late 90’s when he went to New York to pitch the idea of iTunes before it even existed. He also built a quizzing website which was in the top 3 of India’s most trafficked websites for a while. Tune in to find out how those ventures ended and why Amit decided that being a full time writer would be his mode of entrepreneurship. 

As usual, if you have any questions or just want to connect– please feel free to join our WhatsApp. TID Trends WhatsApp Group

Link to our newsletter: Audience-First Products Report
 
The Art of Clear Writing Course
Seen & Unseen Podcast
India Uncut Blog
Amit's Twitter Account
Amit's Newsletter

Welcome to the 2nd episode of TID Trends - we look at trends that are going to explode in the next 3 to 5 years.

For our second topic we look at Audience-first Products where an entrepreneur first builds an audience or community and then builds a product around the community. You can read our detailed report here.

In this episode we interview Abhinav Chhikara, the founder of 10K Designers, a 12 week UI/UX Course. In his journey to founding 10k Designers, Abhinav first spent about 1.5 years building a community of people interested in UI/UX design while he was working as the Head of Design at Unacademy. Building the community was not easy and we speak in detail about Abhinav's own learnings through this process - how should you engage with the people in your WhatsApp group? What is the best platform to build a community?

After building this community, Abhinav iterated on product development but eventually realised that he could build a UI/UX course. So he did that and it was wildly successful - he is now in his second cohort with more than 30 people in each.

Abhinav comes from a strong background in both community and product building and therefore he's able to layout his entire thought process in detail. Do listen to the episode and if you have any questions a please join our WhatsApp community where we discuss the trends we're going to look at look at drafts of reports and and answer any questions.

Audience-First Products Report
TID Trends WhatsApp Group

ABNUX YouTube Channel
ABNUX Twitter
ABNUX Instagram
10K Designers

Two brothers, Mohit & Rajat had the vision to create a consumer brand. However, they didn't have the required financing to invest in marketing and distribution that a retail brand requires. 

Not ones to give up, they chanced upon an exciting prospect. They realised a lot of up market hotels and resorts were still relying on unbranded and undifferentiated toiletries for their rooms. If you have any memories of traveling to these hotels in India, you'd recall a transparent bottle with Shampoo/Shower gel written on it. They realised this was a business they could potentially start with minimal capital investment. Rajat and Mohit spent months understanding the supply chain and the customer needs. They realised 70% of the products sold to these hotels were actually being exported from China. These products didn't really have any customization either. That's the unique insight that Kimirica was built on. 

They created a line of products like Shower Gel, Shampoos, Face Wash etc for the hotels. They started small by supplying a 3 star hotel in Indore and eventually through organic growth started selling to Marriots and Starwood's. And not just in India, they started exporting to Maldives, Dubai, and other countries! They've had a fascinating journey of scaling by focusing on research&devlopment, personalization of products to their customer's needs, and design. They also made early bets on technology to streamline operations and used business integrity as the foundation of running Kimrica. This is also a story close to my heart because this has been created in Indore— the city I grew up in. 

They were able to make a worldwide impact with their products when Starwood hotels asked their global suppliers to meet with Kimirica. This partnership eventually turned into a strategic Investment from Hunter International (a global brand from Canada) to form Kimirica Hunter. You can also buy their fantastic products directly on Kimirica.shop.

Check out Kimirica Products here. 

In our First Edition of the TID Trends Podcast, we explore the state of the Legal Hemp industry in India with Bombay Hemp Company (BoHeCo) - one of the pioneers of Indian hemp. We talk to them about learnings from their time in the industry, challenges the industry faces, and the potential of turning this million dollar industry into a billion dollar one.

Check out TID Trends Newsletter
Join TID Whatsapp Group

Hemp is a variety of cannabis sativa plant species especially grown for the industrial usage of its derived products. Global regulations around Cannabis in the 1980’s resulted in a decline in Hemp’s cultivation and reduction in research around its potential uses. 

Over the last few years, regulations have been eased across various countries and it has resulted in a massive growth of the Global Industrial Hemp Market. 

In the conversation with BoHeCo, we discuss the following: 

The main issues facing Indian hemp are cultivation (due to the lack of an Indian variety with <0.3% THC) and the regulations around it. An additional barrier are the myths surrounding hemp and the lack of customer awareness. 

The lack of good regulation for Hemp in India has resulted in an extremely low utilization of India's hemp growing capacity.  The work BoHeCo has done to improve regulation for Hemp in India has expanded the potential of the market. 

There are multifold opportunities in the Ayurvedic application of the plant and health applications of Hemp have been growing around the world.

The current media environment around CBD oil and other derivatives just reinforces how important awareness is. Additionally, the role of research and development to make hemp and its derivates legitimate is understated. 

A Book Recommendation that will give you a starting point into the industry! 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy