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Finding minimum revenue of SaaS startups in India

By C Chaitanya
Update 1: Updated the title to reflect my idea more. All startups mentioned below must be doing much more revenue than predicted. The idea was to come out with a good revenue per employee for SaaS startups in India with mostly employees in India.
Update 2: Added the correct link for Jason Lemkin's blog

If only there was some formulaic way of finding out the revenue of a SaaS startup in India. Can we say if a SaaS startup is performing optimally or not?
The reason I love SaaS so much is that almost all good SaaS businesses are like well oiled machines. And machines are predictable. So I was sure there must be a formula.

I had seen Jason Lemkin come up with a formula for predicting the competitors' revenue

So inspired by that the following is my formula for predicting revenues of SaaS companies from India.

Revenue = Number of employees * $50,000(or Rs.30 lakhs)
(Update 2021: Multiply by $70,000 given the increase in salaries)

Turns out you can get a pretty good idea of number of employees in a company from Linkedin. So following are my guesstimates of some well know SaaS startups :)
(Update 2021: These numbers are with employee numbers from 2017 and $50,000/employee)
Zoho: 200 Million
Freshdesk: 45 million
Capillary: 37 million
Zenoti: 8 million
Wingify: 7.5 million
Browser Stack: 5.5 million
Agile CRM: 5.5 million
Chargebee: 3 million
Webengage: 3 million
Fusion Charts: 2.5 million
Crowdfire: 2.5 million

Please note that these numbers have been arrived at using very very unscientific methods and should be used at your own peril. They do not reflect the actual revenue numbers of the companies. But they give a reference point for startups planning on doing a SaaS business from India.

Homework: You can find out our revenue at Ozonetel using a similar method. I have not put that up in this blog post and leave that as a homework. I will not confirm that the number arrived by this means is correct for Ozonetel also :)

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