Skip to main content

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 :)

Popular posts from this blog

First Post

By C Chaitanya
In this blog, I will be talking about my experiences in trying to build a cloud telephony platform , KooKoo . Along the way I will also be talking about different design choices I made, good programming practices and the IVR domain in general. For technoratti: NNFJW8EW86C3
Read more

Integrating Arborjs with Angular to create a live calls dashboard

By C Chaitanya
Arborjs  is a cool graph visualization library. Angular  is one of the best JavaScript frameworks and we have been using Angular in a lot of our front end development. When you handle millions of calls, proper visualization becomes very important. Without proper visualization, you can get lost in the mountains of data. So we spend a lot of time to come up with good visualizations to represent the data. Since we loved the cool way in which Arbor represented graph data, we could not wait to hook it up with Angular. Because of Angular's two way data binding, when you hook up Angularjs with Arbor.js you can get a dynamically updated visualization of graph data with cool animations. To give back to the community, we have put up the code online at Github . Basically we have created an Angularjs directive for Arborjs. Please feel free to fork the code and add extensions and use it for your own visualizations. The code is self explanatory with comments inline. Best way to get s
Read more

Google's approach to business communication

By C Chaitanya
 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
Read more