SaaSBoomi 2025 – Learnings and Observations

SaaSBoomi Annual 2025 happened at Chennai from March 24-26, 2025 this week. For those unfamiliar, SaaSBoomi is a pay-it-forward community of over 4000 startups and are helping shape the SaaS/AI industry in the country. 

I was happy to attend this year as well after a great experience in 2024. Founders and CEOs open up, get vulnerable, and share priceless insights. None of this content is recorded. Here are some of my notes and observations from the sessions I attended at this year’s event. I write these because it also serves as a learning for me later on to look back and refer. 

Highlights From Day 1 

The New World Order

Girish Mathroobotham, Founder & Executive Chairman of Freshworks and Founding Partner of Together Fund

It is always nice to hear from Girish. He kick-started the event with an opening note. He touched on having a Learning(Growth) Mindset as opposed to being rigid (or Fixed). He also said that audacious returns call for audacious risks. One thing that stuck with me was — how can we win with the teams we have? 

The New Operating System for Building Companies 

Sanket Shah, CEO of InVideo

It was a treat to listen to Sanket Shah. He talked about first principles and also how he approaches the product roadmap. He also talked about how they have a small team and would not work on anything which will not have a 10X impact. They prioritize growth and how they can build a superior experience. Sanket was interviewed by Suresh Sambandam, Founder & CEO of Kissflow who asked some great questions. It was also nice that the floor was open to the audience as well to get their questions answered. 

10x not 100% 

Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners & and Surge: 

I would say this was the highlight talk of the event. Rajan asked us – Are we building a 10X better product? He also highlighted the benefit of not having a legacy. You need to start with a 10X better product and this is the way to win. The System integration expertise is also critical. He stressed that we could do a lot with smaller teams. Rajan shared examples of 10X better products like  Bolt, Cursor, Perplexity and more. 

• Cursor was able to hit $100M ARR with 20 people in 21 months 
• Bolt, 20M ARR in 2 months with 15 people 
• Aragon.AI, $10M ARR with 9 people in 24 months.

If you think about all this, it makes a lot of sense to all of us. How do we build one such product?

In between sessions, there was a start-up showcase. Companies like Spyne, Spry, Maxim, SalesMonk shared what they were up to. 

Ambitious Ideas for a Better World

Dilip Kumar, Investor, Health at Rainmatter by Zerodha

Sameer Shisodia, CEO of Rainmatter Foundation

I am glad that I attended this session, moderated by Sridhar Ranganathan, CEO of B2Brain. This was offbeat and not a regular session. Here, Dilip and Sameer talked about real world problems in India and how Zerodha (Rainmatter Foundation) was approaching them. 

I was surprised to learn that 50% of the drugs sold in India are counterfeit. There’s also the very real problem kids of this generation face: Climate change and how much plastic we use every day. How is Zerodha betting on multiple investments to solve these real world problems? These were the learnings. 

Monetizing Innovation [Deep Dive]

Madhavan Ramanujam, General Partner at 49 Palms Ventures

Madhavan also wrote a book on this. The session covered some very interesting insights on understanding the willingness to pay, outcome based pricing, how one size fits none and more. 

SaaSBoomi Annual Awards

SaaSBoomi also had an awards night honoring the leaders, movers and shakers in the Indian SaaS/AI industry. Congratulations to the winners —  Lucidity, InVideo, Whatfix, Presentations.ai and Keka. 

The Pay-It-Forward champions were also recognized. Congratulations to Arvind Parthiban, Vengat Krishnaraj, Nivedha Venkatesan, Vishal Virani, and others I may have missed. Aditya Sanghi did an amazing job hosting the awards evening and also kept us entertained. Thanks, Aditya Sanghi for being a great host to the awards night. It was so much fun and you kept us engaged..

Highlights From Day 2

Though the day started early at 8:30 am or so, I went in by around 9:30 am and went to the general sessions by 10:00 am. The plan was to attend a session or two and then get out and network. However, the content was so good that I decided to stay for 3 and half hours and it was intense learning.

The Big, Fat, Bootstrapped Exit

Paras Chopra, Founder & Researcher at Lossfunk & Founder of Wingify

Sparsh Gupta, Co-founder & CEO of Wingify

They spoke with Pallav Nadhani, Co-Founder & ex-CEO of FusionCharts/Muze. It was great to listen to perspectives from both Paras and Sparsh, including about why they decided to sell the business to Everstone Capital. They also shared the lessons learnt from the process. The key here is building a solid business and they were never in a desperate hurry. 

Paras also shared some of his concerns on real world challenges we have, talking about India needing something similar to the 1000 genius program that China had. Sparsh is enjoying what he does and he is glad to be continuing to run the business. 

Enterprise Lessons from Whatfix: SaaS Sales To AI Innovation

Khadim Batti, Co-founder & CEO of Whatfix 

Khadim was in conversation with Shruti Kapoor, Founder & ex-CEO of Wingman and he shared practical tips on things that worked for them at Whatfix. He also talked about back when was naive and shared the mistakes they made. 

He highlighted the importance of factoring in the customers’ pain and your sales, marketing, and service costs when it comes to pricing your products. Especially when selling to enterprise customers. Thanks Khadim for all the great learnings. 

The SaaS Model Is Under Attack – Let’s Talk About What’s Next

Krish Subramanian, Co-founder and CEO of Chargebee

Mihir Nanavati, ex-President of RollWorks

I enjoyed listening to Mihir and he also referenced the book 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer. 

1. Scale economy 
2. Network economy
3. Counter-positioning the product
4. Branding
5. Switching costs
6. Cornered Resources 
7. Process Power. 

Mihir shared his share of the mistakes as well which the audience could relate to. Krish shared an important learning which I think all of us need to apply. The founders need to lean in with their thoughts/perspective/feedback and have a discussion with the team. I could relate to this and will be applying it  🙂 

If SaaS Grew With Cloud, AI Goes To Space & Beyond

Satya Chakravarthy, Founder of The ePlane Co.

I was initially planning to skip this session for an early lunch. Thankful I didn’t. Satya is also a Professor at IIT Madras, and a two-time TEDX speaker. He is also a Co-founder of innovative startups including, Agnikul Cosmos, Aerostrovilos Energy, Avishkaar Hyperloop and GalaxEye.

He started his presentation with his learning from Tony Seba. I could relate to this as I had taken one of Tony’s courses, at Stanford Continuing Studies a while back. There was a ton of learning and so much is happening in our own back-yard. This is a blessing. 

Other interesting things from the event:

It is awesome to be part of such an innovative and entrepreneurial crowd. There were over 100 entrepreneurs and SaaS leaders at the event from across the country. The energy was electric and the sessions proved to be worth every minute I spent there. Networking and conversations proved to be a very rewarding experience at the event as well. 

Boomi AI is a new initiative from SaaSBoomi which will focus on AI. SaaSBoomi is also setting up a membership which costs Rs. 10,000 a year. (Very Well worth it) and I will  very gladly become a member.

Vinodth Muthukrishnan, VP & COO of Webex Customer Experience, Cisco, did a fantastic job keeping the crowd engaged as the emcee of the event. A Big Kudos to the content team – There were a lot of people involved – Ashwin Ramasamy, Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, VIvek Khandelwal, Gowrishankar Nagarajan,Sathya Viwanathan,  Vishal Virani, Vengath Krishnaraj,  Nivedha Vijay Venkatesh and more. Thanks Ashwin, Also enjoyed the dinner with Prasanna, you and others later in the evening.

Final Thoughts:

It is inspiring to see such a well-organized and insightful event not just in India, but in our very own Chennai. SaaSBoomi has definitely set the bar for an event that makes you want to make the most of every minute you’re at their venue. From the registration process to the actual event experience, it was very smooth. Just to give you some context, when I went in to register, there was no need to even type by first or last name. My badge was generated with face recognition. During the event, I even got pictures of me from the event.

Thanks Avinash Raghava for your leadership and kudos to the entire team for putting together an amazing event. You really Pay-it-Forward and as attendees, there are a lot of takeaways and practical insights which we could apply to our businesses. Each one of us has to execute and contribute to the growth story.

Thankful that I was able to attend this year with Iyappan Perumal and Bhavani Ramasubbu.