Experts believe India’s best bet is trillion dollar market for SaaS

In his keynote, Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu spoke on ‘Bootstrapping to a Billion Dollars in Value (Discovering Contextual Truth)’. Addressing emerging entrepreneurs starting SaaS businesses, he said, “While software development on the cloud is becoming cheaper and easier, finding paying customers is becoming difficult and harder. The only approach is to observe, analyse and experiment. We must target underserved or unserved customers. They are in niche markets which large companies won’t care for.” He spoke on how talent can create a substantial difference and serving the customers profitably and catering to their requirements in a niche way we can create a strong impact and grow the company.”

Suresh Sambandam, Founder- OrangeScape said, “Quoting from the Startup Genome Project Report 2018, ‘An ecosystem should focus on a startup sector most closely related to its strongest traditional strengths relative to global competition.’ We must ask ourselves what is the traditional strength of our country and how does it relate to global competition? India’s best bet and it’s trillion dollar opportunity lies in SaaS. Over the last 30-40 years, due to the IT services boom, our country has built deep-domain expertise in basically every industry vertical. It is that expertise that needs to be productised to make India a global SaaS hub.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshworks, spoke about building a global SaaS company from India. He said, “The SaaS ecosystem in India has been through a transformational journey and is definitely more robust now, with closer access to mentors, investors and industry peers.