Building cross-border SaaS from India

Recently, there has been a buzz about cross-border SaaS.

We have seen some extremely successful companies:

From Zoho which started the trend of having Engineering in India with Go-to-Market (GTM) in the US to Venture-backed startups such as Freshworks, Mindtickle, Chargebee, and so on.

If we have a look at the unicorn list of Indian companies, SaaS comes second to Fintech and E-commerce, and this list excludes companies that have US headquarters. (Companies like Eightfold, Rubrik, and even Prodigal, for instance, would never show up in this list).

Fundamentally, the idea has a lot of merit: the cost of having Indian team members is going to be lesser than that in the US due to the purchasing power parity. To hire the same level of talent, a company in India will spend far lower amounts than would be the case in the US, thereby providing an efficiency advantage. In addition, the conservative spending nature ingrained in Indian culture leads to operators opting for inexpensive operations and vendors. Therefore, these SaaS companies opt for having an Engineering and Product Org. in India, with a Go-to-market team primarily in the US.

However - building such a company has its challenges.

Product team away from customers: Given that most of the team is away from the customers, who are predominantly based in the US, product iterations can take time and feedback cycles can become unnecessarily long.

Product and customer-driven culture in the team: The Indian ecosystem has already started seeing product engineers, but there is a shortage of such talent. Inculcating a product-driven culture to solve the customer pain-points will become the driving force for many startups in the future, however, the companies need to take additional efforts to inculcate such a culture in India.

At Prodigal, we are solving for both -

We opportunistically are looking for the best product and engineering talent in India that are already product driven and are at the top echelon of overall tech experience.

We already have Harsh and Akshat in the US who help us get Customer Feedback quickly and to bring the best of the ML world in our team.

And we continue to use this advantage of ours to the best.

PS - if you are looking for a series-A startup with a strong growth journey, please do look at the link in the comments! We are hiring for our foundational engineering and product people to lead the charter to scale our products to build the intelligence layer of Consumer Finance.