Reverse Engineering a SaaS company

Why are we doing this?• Reverse Engineering is one of the best ways to

understand a product / industry / technology into which significant research has already gone into. Let’s avoid reinventing wheels.

• You can witness first hand what’s awesome and what royally sucks about what’s already out there.

• It’ll also help you better understand and appreciate some of the counter-intuitive things you see in a product

So how do we do this?

Take some time off, Google a lot and find your favourite SaaS

company in the whole wide world

Skills Required : Being a Google-Fu

Action Learning at sv.coIn a changing world, it is important that people be masters at the art of asking penetrating questions.

When nobody knows what’s going to happen next, your ability to ask penetrating questions is what’ll get

you forward.

When you reverse engineer a SaaS company, you’re going to ask deep penetrating questions and make a good guess at what you think the answers that the

founders of the company had in mind.

Take a good guess at figuring out the consumer insight it was built on

• Founders say many stories about why they started their companies

• Some of are meant to impress, some are rhetorics, some really had no idea why. They just did it.

• However, the consumer insight, sooner or later will (have to) be arrived at and will take the company to heights

What are the big 5 choices the company made? List ‘em down.

• What feature did they build first?

• When did they launch?

• What did their prototype look like? Are you impressed?

• What did they do so wrong?

• What do you think they do goddamn right?

You get the drift

Now let’s begin in a structured manner

ToDo: Prepare a deck that reverse engineers your

favourite SaaS company

Ensure the deck answers all of the questions that follow

Time

Steps

1. Idea2. Prototype

3. Early Customers4. Efficiently adding customers

5. Scaling Business Operations6. Being Operational Break-even

7. Generating Business Profits

8. Defending Profits from competition

9. Recovering Business Investments

10. Return on Investment for Shareholders

Let’s ask penetrating questions about each of the stage the company went through. It starts with great

questions!

T= 10 yearsT= 6 monthsT= 0

Let’s consider the example of Freshdesk

Why did Girish start Fresh

desk?

What pain point was he solving and for whom?

On what consumer insight was it actually built?

What did they launch first?Was it the first feature that they launched that got them their got them their first 10,000 customers?

How did Freshdesk manage to get (recruit) their first 1000 customers?

Most often, the first 1000 customer are not going to find your product. You have to find them and convince them to use it and pay for it.

Once 1000 customers came

onboard, how did Girish scale

it to onboard 10,000 and

eventually 50,000 customers?

Scaling Operations• How did Girish scale the team

in-tact while growing?

• What did he do so that better people kept joining Freshdesk?

• How did he manage to not become ‘corporate’ in culture?

• How did he retain the startup ethos while scaling that fast?

• What kept him going during the difficult times?

How did Freshdesk defend itself against stiff competition and win?

What are the moves Freshdesk made?

What are some of the other great questions

you can ask to reverse engineer

your favourite SaaS company?

Time

Steps

1. Idea2. Prototype

3. Early Customers4. Efficiently adding customers

5. Scaling Business Operations6. Being Operational Break-even

7. Generating Business Profits

8. Defending Profits from competition

9. Recovering Business Investments

10. Return on Investment for Shareholders

Think hard about each of the stage and ask the best of questions!

T= 10 yearsT= 6 monthsT= 0

Ask great questions!

Don’t forget to check the Rubric for pointers.