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

Mashing up Freshdesk with KooKoo for customer support ticket management

By C Chaitanya
Sorry for the delay in writing a blog post. I have been caught up in too many things since last month(we are growing, so its all good :)) Anyway, this week I thought I will look at how we can use the latest rockstar startup from India, Freshdesk . Freshdesk, as most of you know is one of the best "Social Helpdesk" systems out there. I am sure most of you are already using Freshdesk to support your customers. In this blogpost I will explain how you can add telephony to the mixture. In particular I will show some code which you can use to : Welcome the caller by name Ask him to enter his ticket id Play out the ticket status Connect the caller to the correct agent handling the ticket. Luckily for us, Freshdesk has a very well defined API and it was a pleasure to work with it. The engineers were also very supportive and answered all my queries quickly. So lets get into the code directly. 1. First we need to get the caller information. For this we need to a
Read more