Why You Need To Get Face-to-Face with Your SaaS Customers with Amit Mishra of iMocha

When we unlearn IT services and got into SaaS, we thought SaaS is a mechanism where you will create something, you will create website, people will come, they will put their credit card by and you need not talk to them. Okay. That was our sweet assumption then. Welcome to SaaS Origin Stories. Tune in to hear authentic conversations with founders as they share stories from the earlier days of their SaaS startups.

We'll cover painful challenges, early wins and actionable takeaways. You'll hear firsthand the do's and don'ts of building and growing a SaaS, as well as inspirational stories to fuel you on your own SaaS journey. Here is your host, Phil Alves.

Amit, welcome to the show. I'm happy to have you here and chat with you today. Thanks for inviting me to the show. It's an honor to be here and looking for a great chat.

Yeah, for sure. So tell us first a little bit about what iMocha is and what problem you guys solve. Yeah. So iMocha is primarily a skill intelligence platform where we help enterprises for talent acquisition and talent development for identifying and quantifying the skill quantification. So for example, you are hiring at entry level or you are hiring experienced people.

So before they come for an interview, they can take a test and you can talk to only relevant candidate that fit that job role. Thereafter, we provide the interview solution on the platform so that you can interview them.

And now, recently, six months back, we started an onboarding solution even where we help you find out how are they onboard in terms of was it effective or not. So this is about the talent acquisition cycle. For talent development cycle, we help you measure the ROI of your learning spend and efforts, be it onboarding, upskilling, reskilling, certification, training need identification, training need analysis.

So that's the two use cases, talent acquisition and talent development.

And for what kind of positions do you guys help?

So we started with helping for technology positions for the technology companies like Java developers, the encoders, the hackers. Then we got into the entire portfolio of IT that includes ERP professionals, bid functional, technical, Salesforce. Then got into data science, machine learning, AI, ML, developer, scientist. Thereafter, we got as an offering, many skilled libraries on aptitude, cognitive science, soft skills, communication skills.

So then we expanded our portfolio to hire project managers, business analysts. So in IT for an big IT organization, almost all job roles, 300 plus job roles are ready with us with 3000 plus skilled libraries. And as a second industry, we started getting into telecom and now BFSR. So a few of the roles of telecom and BFSR even now.

Well, it's a lot of different positions.

And you guys offer like a library of tests to make sure that you can help people qualify their candidates for all those positions or how does it work?

Like let's say I want to hire a Java developer, like you say, you're going to help me define if the developers are entry level or mid level or a senior.

Is that what your product do?

Sure. So we typically help companies hire at entry level and mid level. We don't help in senior hiring because typically people do not appear for assessment, skill assessment there. But for entry level and mid level, we have 3000 plus skilled libraries for variety of job positions, almost covering all the skills.

And companies can take the ready test, which are well calibrated or can ask our customer success team to create one depending on their job description. And then they send this test, invite candidates. And once the test is done, we have got an offering even of interviewing solution, a bit live interview, live coding interview, and live AI logic box interview, which is unique of its kind.

So from in fact, for engaging them, we create microsites even. So we help them engage, screen, interview and onboard through skill assessment and platform. That's amazing.

And how did you come up with that idea to build this product?

Walk me through like how you decide to build it. Sure. So when we started, Sujitha and I, both the co-founders, we were running an IT services company, IT consulting companies name and what problem, so it was 80 people, IT company we were running. I was a CEO and he was a CTO then even.

And we found out that many times the candidates whom are interviewers and hiring managers are talking do not have a basic trade. So when we tried digging out the problem, we understood that recruiter judges a candidate based on a resume and candidates are very lavish in writing their resume.

Then if they have worked for or attended a training even for a week, they make sure it is part of their resume as an intermediate or professional skills. And a poor recruiter used to get trapped in this and a candidate for interview. And many a times there is a lot of billable hours, wastage from hiring managers standpoint and interview to hiring ratio was very less.

When we were running our own organization, so when we exited IT consulting, thought of solving this problem and we thought of solving this problem with one way interview solution where we will ask a question and we will record the interview responses one minute each, maybe five questions.

And it was an interview problem which we are solving and Sujith and me were having a mocha coffee in a local coffee shop in Pune, India. So we named it like interview mocha. So interview problem we are solving and mocha is the coffee we are having. And anyways coffee is loved in US, so we thought coffee is a good name.

Later on when we tried deeper into it, we understand it is not only an interview problem, but it is a problem with skills. Skills are changing faster when we onboarded customer over a period of time. And we realized that skill assessment is a bigger problem that we need to solve.

So apart from interviewing solution, we started offering skill assessment even and now skill intelligence even by connecting to various data source, which is a recent ad. And because we were offering a complete skill intelligence for talent acquisition and talent development, interview world was limiting the purpose. And that's the reason we renamed to iMooka where i stands for innovation now and mocha is anyways a coffee. So iMooka that way. Makes sense.

So you guys were having the problem in your own business. So like you're running this consulting firm and this IT service and you're like, we're having a hard time to hire these developers or to hire where we have to hire. We're just wasting so much time and you went to solve your own problem. That's how you come up with the idea.

And from there, like how did it become like a product, a separate product from your own company that you had or you run both companies at once?

Talk me through like you solve your own problem and how this become a SaaS product that you have right now. Sure.

So Phil, like both of us do not believe in moonlighting. We believe in sunlight. Who like at least in the Indian region, it sets up daily and like it is daily at six o'clock to 12 o'clock. So you need to work like a son to get something meaningful. So we face this problem in our venture, but when we decided to start solve this, we thought of taking it as a full time job.

And I took it as the first person and so it was doing consulting for a while. And when we got into a stage where we were having some revenue, so did also got in. So we started solving this problem as a full fledged lead and not working in that company earlier. And initially it was tough for first initial few days.

It was not flying and we were not resonating well with the customer. And in fact, I mortgage my house to run it for a while, for almost a year. And then we got a small angel investment and some living and then it flowed.

Okay, great. So you kind of answered my follow up question, how you fund it. So you got to mortgage your own home to fund that and then you're able to get some angel investing and that's how you fund the build of the product. That's very brave of you.

And so walk me through like how long it took to take the product to market and the first like few months of development or even year.

How was that?

Sure. So it took us almost six months of first MVP minimum viable product and to get into the market. And we were good with IT consulting business, but did not have, sorry, it was almost 20, 15, seven years back. So that time we didn't have any flare of product venture or SaaS. And even SaaS ecosystem was not great in India at that time.

There are a couple of companies like Zoho and Freshworks, but Zoho was good, but Freshworks was even at their initial stages then. Then it was a tough time. It took us nine months to earn our first dollar.

Okay, so six, nine months we have been doing it. Then we got a first customer who got website in place. And because it was SaaS, we were trying to sell through online as a channel.

In fact, that time there was no payment gateway for Indian companies, no payment gateway to collect the money. So we got a US company and a payment gateway from US. And nine months later, to our surprise, when we were sleeping in the night, one of the customers from Germany came and paid us $49 a month package. It was a good start.

And thereafter, within a year's time, though it was a small, then we used to have a package of $49 a month, $99 a month, and $499 a month.

And $6,000 was an unlimited package. Now we have customers paying us half a million, $200, $200, very regularly. That time in $6,000 everything, whatever we were selling, we were ready to sell. But that online model worked for us. So from that moment to 18 months, we were lucky. We got close to 600 customers, paying us a small sum, though.

And we reached in first and most like nine months plus 15 months, we reached not a big one, but yeah, 20K MRR then.

So how long did it take to get to 20K MRR?

It took us 18 months. 18 months. That's amazing. That's the best way to manage. Yeah. Then after the journey was a bit fast, but yeah, to get our first. So unlearning, IT consulting took us time. Learning stats was an easy one, but unlearning was hard. Makes sense.

How did you get those customers?

What kind of channel did you use?

You say it was luck, but I'm sure you guys did something to increase your chances of finding them. Sure.

So what happened?

We realized that skill assessment is the need of the customer and we started creating skill libraries through crowdsourcing as a model. So we are the largest skill libraries, I would say worldwide, 3000 plus skills. And that too, majority of those skills are new edge skills, which are relevant, which are generated in our five years, because jobs are changing faster.

So when we were creating skill pages, we realized that as we are creating more and more skills and creating a skill pages on website, every skill pages, for example, we have created Java. So Java online is Java skill is Java skill assessment is becoming a keyword. So we actually started doing SEO on the ski pages. We participated in Quora questions, started answering it.

And because we were creating the skills that are new age that were non-existent earlier, we were the first company to create this new edge skills. It started working on SEO and daily was to get some or other leads, three, four leads, four, five leads from across the globe who were looking for based on those skills. They used to come and we had a free trial then and they have to sign up.

So that's how we started getting our funnel. And for the next good three years, SEO was our primary traction channel. That's awesome. So like you guys went very deep on SEO and would just be like PHP skill level assessment, Java skill level assessment. And that you rank for those keywords and those who bring qualified leads to your product. And you did that for the first three years.

Is that correct?

That's right. I think that's what people have to realize like when you build a SaaS product, you usually should choose one channel and really go deep on that channel before you try to add other channels once you find that channel that works for you.

And so what other channels have you guys as later on to keep growing the company and keep bringing customers?

Yeah. So feel like for first 20k MRR, so almost 250k ARR, SEO was the channel even for our first million dollar which took 18 months from then. SEO was our traction channel. But what we realized after a point in time that we have multiple segments of customers from different industries, different geographies, different segments, enterprises, mid-size companies, large enterprises, SMB, very small businesses, all coming our way and signing it up.

We realized there are some customers who are churning, who have a need which is very seasonal and they do not have adequate needs. So we were having multiple segment, multiple value proposition. And we realized if you would like to scale, we need to get it out from this rollout stage in product lifecycle.

It is called as rollout stage of product lifecycle where you have multi-segment, multiple value proposition to get into where we have a single set of customers with single value proposition which is scalable.

And when we were around at million dollar revenue ARR then, we decided let's find out which is the segment which is big in size, we have a differentiated category to serve them, the frequency of usage of our product is very frequent there, hourly or daily at least. The need will be existing for a longer period of time and will support the expansion potential.

And when we started running these parameters over different set of customers we had, so we found out that we are offering a solution which excites more on this parameter to midsize and enterprises. And that's how we decided to serve midsize customer and enterprise as our primary channel, a primary source.

And once we decided that, we became clear with the named account whom we should go after and then we kept on adding different tracking channels for the growth. That's a very smart approach.

So you go with the customers that you have and you're like, why are the customers that are staying the longest?

Where are the customer that we're adding the most value?

And you kind of figure out who they were and you're like, we're going to go and you're going to expand for this one kind of customer. And I think that's normal when you're starting a business, you get everybody that they'll give you money, you take their money.

But if you want to scale, you have to figure out who is the one customer, the one ISP that it's going to get the most value and that you're going to serve well. And then you can keep adding ICPs later. But I think that was a great strategy that you guys use.

So if you could think like from the early days of your business, what's kind of like the first old shit moment that comes to mind?

So what is happening?

When we're facing a problem of churning and have all multiple segments of customers, and we wanted to get from all customers to one ICP where we can create more value and get more out of it. We were suspicious and a fear of missing out. The revenue was with us.

That how will we be able to manage it?

But then we run through the data that we have 600 customers I talked about and looked at it. To our surprise, though customers were paying us $49 a month to $99 a month and $499 a month, but we had eight customers from those lists paying us through credit card who were 14,500 companies. And there were 44 enterprises who were using us then, but we never realized we never ran that earlier.

And still it was auto-serve mode, do it yourself mode where we were asking them to come and buy and we were not able to grow them because we never paid attention to them. Because SMB buys the product, but to enterprise you need to sell it, you need to help them with different use cases.

So it was both an astonishing and oh shit moment for us that, oh man, we have fortune finding companies using us without us realizing it.

Oh shit, what we are doing, man. Let's do something meaningful with them. That's awesome. I guess the first thing you did was put their logo in your site. That's amazing.

And how about like a very smart decision that you made in the early days?

A decision of?

Yeah, a very smart decision that you made. A decision that you felt like, oh man, that was such a great decision I made in the early days of doing this company.

So in the early days, so first of all, when we unlearned IT services and got into SaaS, we thought SaaS is a mechanism where you will create something, you will create a site, people will come, they will put their credit card by and you need not talk to them. That was our sweet assumption then. And thereafter, we were serving them, chatting with them on the support and all.

But the good thing that we did is we started not only to sell, but once a customer becomes a customer, we started connecting with them over the Zoom call, over the Skype call, and talking to them about what makes them come to our product and talking to them on their problems.

How are we solving?

Initially, we tried doing it as a DIY, but when we started speaking to even a smaller customer, the output and the insights what we got was phenomenal. And I would say we should have done it even early, but we started it late. But after we doing it, we were able to understand. So we assume that we understand our customer better because they use our product and we are selling it.

But when we started speaking to them, they were clear many times as a cohort about their needs, where they are moving towards, what did they perceive us as and what are their problems. So proximity to the customer, talking to them and resonating well helped us navigate taking from that early stage to a growth stage company. That's a great insight.

We do some people look at SaaS and think, I never have to talk to my customer because they can do everything on our website. But once we start talking to them, you start learning and you start growing and you start figuring out what you need to do next. That's a great decision.

And how about a bad decision that you made?

That was a good decision.

Could you share a bad decision that you made as a CEO?

So I would say there are a lot of good decisions and a lot of bad decisions. And the bad decision we did initially was, so what was happening while we were serving and getting customers from across the globe. So good decision was we decided to talk to them and bad decision was we didn't talk to them for a longer period of time.

But apart from that, when we were small, I would say not bad decision, but bad approach was we were not keeping eye on the competition and the industry. So we were serving customers, getting an insight, but whatever we have been selling, we were thinking like a point solution.

Though we are solving a point solution problem, but you should be aware of the bigger problem, what you are a part of for a customer and not having adequate knowledge on industry and competition for a long time. What a bad decision because we started working on whatever was working for us without finding out the external factors.

They were considering while taking those decisions and we did it for quite a while, I would say. So that was the one thing. We were a bootstrap company for the first five years and five and a half years and grew. So though we were growing, but we realized after a million dollar in couple of million dollars, we understood that now this is scalable and we can create a big company.

We took a bit more time to raise finance. That was a bad decision if you would have, once we are clear that we can create a big company, we have a product market to it. So we should have gone fast in raising around, raising series A and get more customers of the sort, but we delayed it. So I would say we could have taken that decision a year earlier also. Makes sense.

So like you feel like you took a little bit too long to go and raise money so you could put some more fire and keep growing the company.

So when you decide to go and raise that money, how much money did you guys raise?

Yeah. So first of all, we decided when COVID hit the world, being a bootstrap company, our runway was limited then around four or five months, six months. So we decided to raise around. So we raised an angel round just after COVID. It was a small angel round where almost all SaaS unicorn CEOs of India, six, seven of them invested a small sum in IMUCA as an angel investment.

So it was some 600k angel round and a year after we raised a series A round of 14 million. Nice. Congrats.

And how does the series A help you guys keep growing from there?

Like did it make a huge difference on your growth speed bringing out the money?

First of all, we were working pretty well with talent acquisition, hiring use case for technology companies. We got funding because before funding, even we got some evidences where we were even expanding customers into talent development, bit of scaling, reskilling, talent training, need identification, training, need analysis.

So we got funding so that from a single product company, we can become a multi-product company, offering when you are going to enterprises, you need to sell more and more to the same guys. So first of all, funding gave us a break even to focus on talent development. And it's a year now, our talent business, which was just 7, 8% then has grown to 30% almost.

So it has given us a break to focus on creating another product. It was in the initial stage. Now it is proven. This funding helped us create more skills at a faster speed and we got into telecom and BFSI after funding. It was only technology companies earlier. And now we got three telecom players, which are all Fortune 500 companies as our customer, 11 banking customers. So first of all, we grew 100%. That's one part.

But apart from that, funding gave us time and leverage so that we got into one, two industries and the use case. So now we are selling only some 100k package then, but now we have one customer paying us half a million, three, four of them paying us 250k and above with multiple offerings to the same customer.

So apart from Go, working on the product, working on the different industries and multiple use cases is what funding has provided as the option. That's amazing. So you made a transition from a tool to a platform. First you were a tool serving a specific kind of customer. And with that funding, you were able to have different products to serve the same customer.

So you are like a platform company now, not just like a tool. And so I want to ask you about being in India.

Where is your customers?

I would imagine most of them are outside, like you say, Fortune 500 companies.

Where are most of your companies based right now?

And how do you feel about building this startup in India versus building in the United States?

Could you talk with me a little bit about that topic?

So Phil, if you would have asked me this question a year back when recruitment was at a peak in the US, 50% business was from the US, 30% from Europe and Middle East, and almost 15% from India then. But US hiring has slowed down a bit in the last six months or so. Now we are at almost 30% from US, 35% from Europe and Middle East, and 30% from India. So this year, our India business has grown.

So number wise US business has even grown, but the growth is not as big as in the other markets for this year for recruiting. But our majority of markets are US followed by India followed by Europe now. Makes sense.

And how was building the company over there in India?

Do you think, like you say, the SaaS community was kind of small?

It might be a little bit harder to raise money. So and you're competing with companies in the United States and companies all over the world.

Do you think that was an advantage?

Is it an advantage to be in India?

Walk me through that. So there is both the ways, advantage as well as disadvantage. The advantage is in India because of the economy and the kind of salaries we pay in India, we can hire more people and if something is not working in the product, we can put the bodies to get the reports out and serve the customer. So we can put so that's an advantage creating a company from India.

Then the second advantage, technical engineering people are good in India. There is no scarcity and we get enough of them of decent quality to create a product. So availability of engineering talent at a low cost and same thing for sales and CS at a low cost is an advantage.

The disadvantage, however, is we do not have a lot of good product managers and product marketing as an ecosystem in SaaS in India, at least for enterprises. So in terms of product management and product marketing and in terms of marketing, like creating the positioning, creating the brand, US is a very mature market and the kind of talent which is available in US, not available in India.

So if you see engineering or other customer success driven guys, maybe India has an advantage. If you talk about product, which is the core of any business and the marketing positioning, which is the core of any business again, so US has an age. And apart from that, when you sit next to the customer, you understand the culture, you understand the patterns, buying patterns, behavior, it definitely gets some help.

But these problems are solved once we got sleazer and we have got a couple of guys in US now and they are giving us those insights. But prior that, definitely both have their advantages and disadvantages. If we were having earlier before raising a fund, we could not have survived in US, but we were profitable in India.

So a golden mix of both, like a few people, a few team members in US and leveraging on Indian ecosystem will be a good thing. So this is my thinking, product and marketing, US is a better place for talent and in India, marketing and customer success at a lower cost. I won't say better, but at a lower cost.

So the other thing, second thing in US, you have an advantage if you are focusing on US in enterprises, then being US for US companies, they certainly have an advantage. Sitting in India, we can understand SMBs well, but when it comes to enterprises, we need to fit on the street in US even now.

That's a great insight for entrepreneurs here and entrepreneurs there, so they can think about how to navigate the market.

So when did you know you built something that would last?

So basically, what happened, there is a context to what we are building. So there is a white space that is created newly because of the skill advancement in the recent past. So if you see, according to all the researchers and we say to the customer, even 40% of the world skills are changed already in the last decade.

And they say in the next 10 years, whichever skill you will be working on will be the new that is not existing today. Either version change will be there, major version change will be there, or the skills will be altogether different. And this stands true for all industries. For example, if you see banking industries, bank tailors and cashier jobs are getting replaced by mobile apps, ATMs, and internet banking.

A person in the United States 30-40 years back used to open toll and pathways gate under the change that has been replaced by RFID and CCTV technologies totally. Regardless of the industries, technologies taking up the jobs, skills are changing faster than ever. Even if you see the marketing in the last 10-20 years, you cannot think about marketing without digital marketing now. And digital marketing was not a reality 20 years back.

If you see the two companies of retail, Walmart and Amazon, the two companies solving the same problem, but the skill matrix of these two organizations is entirely different.

So because of this skill changing very fast, like skill is becoming an economy and every enterprise, every company to stay relevant and to stay competitive need to invest in skills, adopt a skill first approach, align their talent accordingly, invest in talent at across the life cycle of a talent, be it a candidate, be it employee, be it an alumnus, everything in between.

We found out that while companies like Coursera, Udemy, and others are trying to create the content, the courses for the new skill world, there needs to be a reliable layer for quantifying skills at different levels. We started doing it with skill libraries as the first thing.

Now we are getting into a mode where we are parsing resumes, we are crawling social profiles of an employee, we are connecting with HR system, ATS system, LMS system, project management system to get the skill data and trying to create the skill profile of an employee for entire life cycle of that employee where employee and employer both can take multiple decisions regarding the career of that employee.

And this need will last at least for next 40 years in this form because skills are going to get advanced, advanced, and advanced.

I agree with you, and you're going to have to be developing those skills, right?

So like you're well positioned to help those companies develop their people and make sure they're actually get developed.

So how big are you guys today and how big do you think you're going to be in the next 10 years?

You are asking in terms of revenue?

Whatever number you're okay sharing with. If you have, if revenue is public or number of users or whatever you could share. So in terms of customers, we are serving 40 plus enterprises, 60 plus mid segment companies and a couple of hundred SMBs at this point in time. But SMB definition is changed now. And in terms of, so we are having 11 Fortune 500 companies with and 40 plus enterprises as our customers.

Our NDR is almost for our enterprise segment, NDR is almost 200% NRR, Net Recurring Revenue. So we are going more and more with them. In next three to five years, we expect ourselves to do a company between 50 million plus revenue with some 300 plus enterprises as our customer.

So as we are moving more and more enterprises, so we would expect that the ACV of enterprises to go big and for achieving that 50 million in next three to five years, we need to grow 80 to 100% year on year basically. Makes sense. That's cool. And I like how your plan to get there, it is to move up market and serve more of the enterprises.

And I see a lot of SaaS products doing that. Like you start with this small business, but as you're trying to grow and be bigger, it makes a lot of sense to move up market.

So, Amit, thank you very much for your time today. I really like getting to know more about your company and how you guys got here. Congrats on your success. I do have one final question before we end.

Do you have a book they recommend for every SaaS founder?

Yeah. So at the early stages of Imoka, I got to know about the book by the founder of DuckDuckGo. The book name is Ketchum Trumps Everything. I forgot the name of the person, but the book name is Traction Trumps Everything, where it talks about 19 traction channels that are available for a tech company to grow.

And there is a bullseye framework for you to decide which one you should choose or which tree you should try. And that's a very, I would say, strategic as well as tactical book, which helps early stage founder to quickly decide upon which traction channel helps them. So for SaaS founder, I would say Traction Trumps Everything is the book is what I would suggest.

Yeah, that's definitely a great book.

And if people want to follow you and learn more about you, what's the best way to find you online?

I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Awesome.

Okay, again, thank you very much for your time today. This was a great show. Thank you so much, Phil. Thanks for your time and thanks for again inviting me on this podcast. Hope to see you soon. Great to see you soon. SaaS Origin Stories is brought to you by Dev Squad.

To find out more about how we help entrepreneurs launch new products and help larger businesses plug in a ready to go development team, visit devsquad.com. Add us to your rotation by searching for SaaS Origin Stories in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click follow so you don't miss any future episodes. Thanks for listening and remember every SaaS hero has an origin story.