Potential whitespaces/ under penetrated segments in non-enterprise India SaaS landscape

Our SaaS journey has just begun and I believe this decade belongs to Indian SaaS. Below are some of the potential whitespaces where we could see some SaaS companies (unicorns maybe?) emerge out of India. (This is Part 3 of a Series on India SaaS. In Part 1, I write about how SaaS is eating Software and why India is uniquely positioned to benefit from this revolution, and map the Indian SaaS landscape across segments. In Part 2, I write about Freshworks journey to India’s first SaaS unicorn and beyond. Do check it out!) So let’s dive right in!

Enterprization of Consumer Tools:

• While the Enterprise SaaS segment is well penetrated in terms of solutions for CRM, Marketing Automation, Salesforce automation etc, a potential whitespace existing in SaaS for the coming wave of “Enterprization of consumer” i.e consumers today aspiring to become businesses tomorrow. Substack is one such company that has contributed to this movement. It helps individuals start their email newsletters, and also giving an option to creators to make a livelihood out of writing paid newsletters.
• We are seeing a rise of “Influencers” on platforms such as Instagram, Youtube, TikTok etc. Have you noticed the growing number of videos posted on Instagram by these influencers with the caption “Paid partnership with XYZ”. Many brands and Direct-to-Consumer companies are using Influencer Marketing to grow their customer base. But there is a lot that goes behind such partnerships — getting approached by the brand, evaluating the deal and agreeing to mutually acceptable deliverables by both the brand and the influencer, maintaining a database of all past work, bill generation, getting timely payment, keeping track of all current/ potential collaborations, tax filing etc. Not all influencers have the money to work with an agency who’ll do bits and pieces of the above mentioned tasks. A lot of these tasks happen over email. And given that this wave of embracing professions such as travel vlogger, fashion influencer, streamers is going to accelerate even further, I believe that there exists an opportunity for a SaaS platform to enable a micro/ nano influencer to manage his/ her brand collaborations. Similar to how Zenoti focusses on spa solutions, Innovaccer on health care providers etc, there could be company working with influencers. It could initially be a horizontal SaaS serving creators in all fields. Then after understanding nuances of different types of influencers, vertical SaaS for focused creators such as comedians, fashion bloggers etc can be made.

Source: Twilio presentation

• Another potential opportunity for the influencers exist is to aggregate follower interactions across multiple platforms. Just like every business needs a complete view of their customer (see above), influencers need the same for their followers/ subscribers. They live on their followers subscribing/ engaging with their content on multiple platforms such as Instagram, Youtube, TikTok (or Indian version of TikTok now) etc. While Instagram for Business does give engagement stats it is just for Instagram interactions. So how cool would it be to have a single dashboard for all media engagements across platforms to see likes on posts, comments, replies, subscribers gained, shares of post etc, and combine this with tools to enable creators to create a community of their most loyal followers and give shout outs to them, similar to what Tagmango, Tring or Wysh does.
• One more opportunity that I believe exits in this “Enterprization of consumer” is to build a platform to enable quick and easy launch of brands/ products by these influencers. eg to launch a clothing line, a creator would need to finding designers, manufacturers (potentially in other countries), logistics providers, and other parts of the value chain. All these aspects can be taken care of through a platform, along with other SaaS integrations such as Shopify integration to build website for brand, Razorpay to accept payments etc.

VC/ Startup Founder tools:

• Being in the investing industry, I believe there exists a potential whitespace for a full service Deal Tracker + Portfolio Management Tool. Though there are dealflow tools like Sevanta, Taghash which are used by some VCs in India, the adoption of these products is low at the moment. Lot of interactions for deal sourcing, pipeline and evaluation happen over email and it becomes difficult to track updates on all companies, last conversation with founders, company metrics, follow ups to be done etc. There are many instances where 3 different people from the same firm have reached out to the same founder, which doesn’t reflect good on part of the VC firm. There exists an opportunity for a SaaS platform to provide a dashboard to keep track of all companies at one place, having options of sharing updates with the relevant people in the team from within the dashboard, notes of meetings with founders, next steps, reminders etc. Similarly, portfolio management — in terms of tracking quarterly metrics, LP reporting etc — is mostly done on internal databases on Excel and PowerPoint. A SaaS tool for effective monitoring of all portfolio companies would definitely be interesting for VC funds having many investments — it could have an option for the investee company to enter all relevant metrics in the Investor Dashboard instead of sharing MIS every quarter, which can further be shared with the Limited Partners. The dashboard can show other details such as last fundraising round of company, valuation, latest cap table, ESOP pool, along with data room storing Term sheets, SHAs and other docs.
• Another SaaS opportunity for VC investors and startup founders could be a Relationship management tool i.e a tool helping one keep track of people he/ she interacts with in their personal or professional life, meet over LinkedIn/ Twitter by crafting digital visiting cards with a summary of the last conversation with them, time stamped notes, search meetings by topic — combining capabilities of an assistant notetaker with a conservation database. And even before the conversation, the tool can scrape information off LinkedIn/ Twitter/ Google Search and make cue cards highlighting mutual interest, potential topics of discussion etc. This would obviate the need for looking up someone over online cards before getting on a call.

Micro-software for digitization of MSMEs

• India runs on MSMEs. With 60M MSMEs, India is the largest base of MSMEs in the world, after China. Over the past few years, we have seen MSME focused SaaS companies gain lot of traction, such as Khatabook and OkCredit for digitisation of ledger, Bikayi and OkShop for creating ecommercce storefront. Though one area that is yet to see startups in action is inventory management. Even today, most MSMEs manage their inventory on paper/in a notebook, and as per a study conducted by Lightspeed Venture Partners across 1,000 MSMEs, about 80% of the store owners spend time tallying their accounts at least once in 3 days; more than 65% tally accounts every day. It could be a dashboard for uploading the inventory, keeping track of items sold via walk-ins, home delivery and online storefront, assessing which items are top sellers, giving notification when an item is in short supply, having backend integration with vendors to place order via the app, keeping track of payments due to vendors and notification to do timely payment to avail trade discounts, calculate days of inventory and inventory turns for the seller for efficient operations etc
• Another potentially untapped segment is payroll management. Again payroll records are maintained over paper, and it is difficult to keep track of what is each person’s salary, increments, deductions on account of leave, advance salary etc. Though it is critical to note that for a MSME to adopt a SaaS tool, it has to be as simple to use as Whatsapp. A bulky software with lots of features would see limited/ no adoption even if it solves all requirements.

SaaS for SaaS

• Lastly, with so many SaaS tools in place, I think we would also need a SaaS for managing all these SaaS tools 😅 — to help us see what SaaS tools I am using, how much am I paying and when, optimize my usage etc. For example, an organisation would be using all or a combination of Notion, Zoom, Slack, Salesforce, Clevertap, Whatfix, Zoho among others, it would need a tool to manage and optimise usage of all these solutions.

Would love to know your thoughts on this piece! If you’d like to chat, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn/ Twitter. I’d love to learn from you!

Please note that these views are personal and do not reflect the views of my employer. All data is taken from public sources.