Shashank Bijapur on the importance of outbound sales and building guardrails as you scale your B2B SaaS business

 A VC interviews a B2B SaaS founder on the best methods to scale up from the early phases. These are the 'hard yards' you'll want to read about when trying to accelerate from 1 to 100, having gone from zero to one.

Shashank Bijapur, CEO, Spotdraft: “You can't take back any features that you've already given. For example, if I said support is free, unlimited support tickets because my UI is bad, my product is still in development, but I can offer unlimited support to a customer with real people answering questions. Now suddenly you can't say that support will be $10,000. Your customers will churn. Or assume that you said at the time of signing early customers that all upgrades and updates are free. Now you have a GPT style AI version that came in, you will have to offer it to them for free. And that's going to be a huge cost to you."

These are the words of Shashank Bijapur, co-founder, and CEO of Spotdraft, a Contract Lifecycle Management company that helps companies simplify contract management from creation to execution to compliance. I spoke to Shashank to understand their journey from 0 to 100 customers, how they sell in the US from India, and the mistakes early-stage SaaS founders should avoid. I am sharing below his key insights and intuitions as he builds Spotdraft. I hope you enjoy them.

Spotdraft had some clients in India but hadn’t sold in the US market. Instead of going for ‘random acts of GTM’ (a term I heard recently from Anurag Wadehra, a renowned start-up coach and advisor) and spending real dollars on active selling, they started an intense customer discovery process to identify their ICP. They sent out over 800 mails in over 3 months to in-house counsels across multiple verticals/sectors, with ~10% conversion to customer discovery calls.

What improved their conversion rate? Instead of being lazy and blasting the same message to all types of prospects, Spotdraft’s founders customized these mails. Firstly, these mails were sent from founders’ inboxes, which makes a lot of difference in people choosing to respond. Secondly, they didn’t use these mails to sell Spotdraft’s software. Instead, they went in with the clear intention of learning about the market from them. Lastly, they personalized the mails for each recipient. They researched the recipients and started with an attention-capturing hook rather than straightaway jumping into asking them to get onto a call.

Shashank: “These were hyper specific emails. So the emails would almost be like Rohit, lets say you have Max as your dog and you put up a photograph on social media. So the mail will almost be like Hey, I just saw your photograph with your dog Max, and I love it, by the way. I also have a Labrador who's eight years old. The reason I'm writing you this email is because I am on this journey to launch our contract management product in the US. So I'm trying to get in touch with legal leaders like you to learn from you and understand what your current pain points are and how you're solving them. Just to be clear, this is not a sales email. I really want to learn. And that was the intention that we would go with."