Skip to main content

Finding minimum revenue of SaaS startups in India

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 :)

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures.  While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...

Google's approach to business communication

 Google has been making silent moves in the business communication space. Google has mostly lost the instant messaging wars. But it does not want to lose the business communication war. WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have been making their own moves to enable businesses to reach their customers through their channels. Its all about who has control over the communication channels. Especially communication which leads to business. That's where the money is. Currently, Google is the king of search and most online transactions start with a Google search. FB, Amazon, Apple and others want to change that. They want the search to start on their properties. And they have started making the moves. WhatsApp business allows small businesses to conduct their transactions on WhatsApp. FB and Instagram have long supported small businesses to manage their business on their channels. Apple has also made some nice moves with Apple business chat. They have integrated a whole shopping expe...