Scale Your SaaS

250: How to Educate Your Market to Win Traction - with Shaunak Roy

February 07, 2023 Matt Wolach
Scale Your SaaS
250: How to Educate Your Market to Win Traction - with Shaunak Roy
Show Notes Transcript

How To Educate Your Market To Win Traction – Shaunak Roy


EPISODE SUMMARY


It’s not easy to develop a SaaS product that people will love. As with any business venture, building and launching a startup software platform  takes a lot of work; it’s a roller coaster ride out there. That’s why it’s necessary to understand the basics and how the entire process goes. 

Yellowdig's CEO and founder, Shaunak Roy, talks about how their company started and how they built their product. He shares their process with Host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach and the importance of going through every step.


PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE

Podcast: Scale Your SaaS

Episode: Episode No. 250, “How To Educate Your Marketing To Win Traction – With Shaunak Roy”

Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS sales coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor

Guest: Shaunak Roy, CEO & Founder of Yellowdig


TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE

  • Find Your Idea 
  • Study Your Niche
  • Identify Your Problem and Develop a Solution
  • Build Your Product


EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

  • Go Through The Basics
  • Talk To Your Customers



TOP QUOTES
Shaunak Roy
 
[06:31] “The first question is, what's the problem? What are you trying to solve?”


[15:22] “There is no silver bullet; I mean, it's always like, kind of making sure all the bare basics are done right.”


[19:41] “Focus on the bare basics. It's easy to get kind of defocus and go the shiny object or that one thing if I did a company is going to grow, but the reality often is that the basics has to work.”
 
 
Matt Wolach
 
[01:36] “We're all living through it. And hopefully, we're living the dream, as they say.”


[13:58] “You are combining some of the education you're doing and just users sharing their experience. The more we can do that, the better that will help the marketing and sales effort.”


LEARN MORE

To learn more about Shaunak Roy and Yellowdig, visit: https://www.yellowdig.co/.

You can also find Shaunak Roy on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunak-roy-65231b/.

For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com/.

Get even more tips by following Matt elsewhere:

Matt Wolach:

When selling to a tough market, it can be difficult to figure out how to get your way in there. And sometimes you don't even know who your right prospect is or what they care about. So trying to grow your company can be very difficult. That's why it's important for you to listen to this episode from Shaunak Roy, Shaunak, founder of Yellowdig. They're doing awesome stuff in the education sector, but a very, very difficult market to wiggle your way into. Well, he had a tough experience when they started, they had to pivot a few years later and completely rebuild their app, his story is going to be important for you to listen to if you're an early stage company trying to figure out how to grow because they've been successful now, but it took them a little while and he shares some of the exact things they did. It might be important for you to hear that too.

Unknown:

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach,

Matt Wolach:

and welcome to the show. Very excited to have you here. Thank you very much for coming. If you're listening. Thanks for doing that. If you're watching on YouTube, thank you for doing that as well. I am really excited for today's episode and glad that you're here with us. I'm here with Shaunak Roy. Shaunak, How's your day going?

Shaunak Roy:

So far, so good. You know, it's just one of those days in the middle of the week. So living through it.

Matt Wolach:

Awesome. I think we're all living through it. And hopefully we're living the dream, as they say, but let me tell everybody about you Shaunak, so Shaunak is the founder and CEO of Yellowdig. Yellowdig is a community driven active learning platform adopted by over 130 colleges and universities, k 12. Schools and corporate training clients. yellowlegs mission is to transform every classroom into an active social and experimental learning community. Shaunak graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Bombay, and completed his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, beautiful place. By the way, prior to founding Yellowdig, Shaunak spent a decade advising global companies on technology, strategy and growth. So he knows his stuff around software. He knows his stuff about creating software, it's going to grow and scale and I cannot wait to hear his story. So once again, Chuck, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah,

Shaunak Roy:

thank you. Thanks for the invite, Matt.

Matt Wolach:

Absolutely. So tell me, what have you been up to lately? And what's coming up for you?

Shaunak Roy:

Well, lately? You know, I mean, you kind of in terms of the company, I mean, you know, we have been on this journey for the last eight years now. And, you know, I was used to say, seven years, but now just become ETS. So I was looking back and say, what did we do for the last eight years? And was it a worthwhile investment of time. So you know, a little bit of kind of thinking back, and also they can think of the future, which is one part of you know, getting into a new year is to think about all the things that we are going to do this year, and then we will judge again, in the end of the year, what we accomplished. So I'm kind of in the middle of that kind of cycle or the planning phase right now, for the company. Very cool.

Matt Wolach:

I love those phases myself, I've been in a few of them. But I want to kind of go back, where did you get the idea for Yellowdig? How did that whole thing happen?

Shaunak Roy:

Well, you know, I mean, the story kind of goes by this, which is, you know, I was employed in a company gainfully employed, and then I kind of wanted to be an entrepreneur, it was always in the back of my mind that one day, I'm going to start this company in which is going to be this. So, you know, eight years back, I quit my job, actually, it kind of worked backwards, but I kind of decided that i This isn't the time for me to plunge and I did plunge in with a little bit of background work. And, and I thought about things that gets me excited. You know, I one thing I love doing is building products, you know, technology products, and I kind of enjoy doing those sketches enjoys doing those brainstorming sessions. So one thing was I was kind of really geeking out in the idea of learning. You know, we all have to learn spatial in day and age when we live in where things are changing rapidly around us. But, but a lot of that learning is very kind of old school. If you look at the basic way people learn, they go to a classroom, sign up for a degree program go to Coursera. And that hasn't changed. So I was really curious about how technology can change learning. So that was one of my passions, I got really interested in that topic. The other thing happened was, yeah, I had to build a business around it. So of course, you know, finding who to sell to and what exactly to build and all of that. So long story short, we started with a very kind of rough idea. What we want to do is just kind of apply technology and learning and make learning better. And I kind of went through the path of discovering like what it might look like so two, three years kind of piloting, experimenting a lot and then after that we found our niche and kind of grew around it.

Matt Wolach:

I love that whole process. I've been through it, as I mentioned a few times myself, growing my companies and trying to find that niche. How did you get to that niche? You said it took it two or three years? Because originally you were like, Who do we sell to? How did you come up with that ICP that ideal customer profile? And and how did you come to realize it was? Did you know it right away? Or you just wanted to prove it out? Or did you have to go through a whole process to try and identify who that was? How'd that go?

Shaunak Roy:

Yeah, it was mostly the layer which was like, mostly kind of exploring a variety of things. So that one thing I would want to kind of want to mention here, which is if you think about building a SaaS company, and you know, in education or healthcare or any other sectors, there are two kinds of companies one can build one is that a company which kind of goes with an existing, you know, product, which is already established, and you can think about back office products, like you know, variety of things that people use, and you can build a product, which is slightly better, because you have a different idea or different product if and technology are approaching it, but the market is already established. The other kind of product you can build, which is you know, if you are a little more ambitious, like maybe you can say foolishly, I was a little bit where you can say that you know what, I'm going to just make this completely different. Like I want to reimagine how things happen in education, and healthcare in any other sector, where there is no such product, but you want to really build something new and a new way of doing things. So yesterday was one of the later part, which is we kind of thought that we are going to change how people learn. So imagine that going to school and say, Hey, I have a product that's going to change how people learn. The first question is, what's the problem? Again? What are you trying to solve? Why is it the problem so so we can run into that a little bit early up, you know, early on growing, where we were trying to get to find ways of how people learn better, but we quite did not have a product category established. And a lot of the early conversation was about piloting, frankly, to begin going and giving our product to people, for professors, whoever would be willing to use it and saying that, give it a try, you know, try for one semester, right? One class, and if you really don't want to lose your job, I mean, some people don't worry about that, too. But if you're not worried about it, if you're one of those innovators who want to try new things, why don't you try something new and see what it is. So we went through that cycle, and by what three years time, we realize that we have something that is truly working, it's truly changing, because some of our users will come back and say, Shana, coming, I love all these things. I know there are a bunch of things you want to improve in the product, but distinct was just amazing. It was a magic, and we really loved it, I can talk more about what it was. So that was the time he kind of went back to the drawing board. And we said that, okay, we have found something that truly Some people love, you know, and then can we can we build a product around it, and that'd be the core offering. So we went to a kind of completely rebuild of our platform, three years in to kind of really build the platform and on that piece, and which is what we're doing now.

Matt Wolach:

So first, first things first. I mean, that'd be kind of scary to realize, Oh, we got to rebuild everything. We're already this far down. We've got to rebuild everything. And then secondly, yeah, what was that? What made you do

Shaunak Roy:

that? So yeah, absolutely scary. For me, for our team for investors, because we raised some money by the end. And we also kind of, you know, it's not a great thing to go back to investors and say, We're gonna rebuild it. But the exciting part was that, you know, we had a core team, which already has seen the the magic part of it, like, we know, if it did this thing, how transformative it is for our users. Were using it and how they're benefiting from the product. So I think we were enough belief by them that this is going to work if we could build this thing properly. And the other exciting part was that, you know, we had a bunch of technical debt, right, three years in, we're doing a bunch of experimentations. And we build features that didn't quite work out. So you can imagine the feature went away, but the code base had, you know, some technical debt because of that, so. So we were excited about rebuild the whole thing where there won't be any technical debt. So we will we know exactly the problem that we're solving, you know, how to build this thing. And we also knew that the kind of technologies we want to use to build it in a way so that we can actually scale it without much technical debt.

Matt Wolach:

Awesome. And in terms of the education sector that you're selling into, have you found them to be kind of slow to adopt technology? What's the pace there?

Shaunak Roy:

Yeah, traditionally slow. If you look at education, you know, it's a trillion dollar plus industry, if you want to call it industry, obviously, you know, we talk about tuition as being so high and not only the US but all around the world. If you add everything up, I mean, trillions of dollars are being spent in education, but only about two to 3%. The numbers that I've seen is in digital technologies. So if you look at the overall budget of a college or university and average one, you will see that 97 to 90% of the spent is salaries or books or things that they do in a physical like building buildings or you know, kind of designing classrooms and things like that. And only a miniscule two to 3% goes towards actually building digital experiences that are going to engage learners online. Now look at the other side of the equation, who they're teaching, which is, you know, young kids, even older people, we are spending hours and hours and online platforms. So, but education is not quite used to that. So the exciting part is that in the next 10 years, a lot of that spent a lot of that work is going to move towards online education, which is already happening because of the pandemic and other things that are happening in the sector. At the same time, which creates this huge opportunity to kind of really build systems that are going to change education. So not only, like kind of doing the brick and mortar kind of back office things, but also the front office, like how you can imagine education in an online environment. So yeah, it's an exciting time. So but it also takes, you know, essentially be having relationships with our clients, which are universities, Dean's professors, Provost presidents, who are also with us kind of in this journey to kind of figure out what our learning would look like, you know, seven years down the line, we were just a company with a mission or a vision to build something. But now luckily, we have hundreds of universities, which are working with us now very closely in terms of designing the future.

Matt Wolach:

Very cool. And is that something, you know, you mentioned that such a small percentage of the budget is allocated towards technology? Are you guys allocating some effort and some money towards education of your market to try and get them to understand how important it is for technology to aid in learning for technology to help the overall education process, are you guys putting some some effort into educating everybody,

Shaunak Roy:

you know, I would say our sales and marketing is entirely towards educating the market. You know, I would say that, if you go to higher education, you say that I have this piece of software, please buy it, you know, they would not buy it, because they typically would buy based on things that they have used, they see value in it, or, you know, some one of the peers, you know, maybe a professor who's teaching in a different department in a different school, or could be a different institution has used it and have seen value. That's how they buy education technologies. So our effort in from a sales and marketing standpoint is to going to enable that, you know, to give you some examples, just this week, you know, tomorrow and day, after we are hosting a two day Summit, where we have invited over like 50 speakers from our client base, who are going to come in and talk about their journey, you know, not only with our product, you know, they may present our product, but they may also talk about other products that they're using, or their overall ecosystem. So and that we see is the biggest, one of the largest, where we are driving our sales and marketing, which is why kind of having our clients talk about their experiences and learn from each other, to you know, use our technology or other technologies in the market.

Matt Wolach:

That's genius, by the way I love those types of getting, is that going to be virtual? Or is that yes? Or is that is that fully

Shaunak Roy:

virtual get together? Virtual? Yeah. And, you know, it so happens that, you know, education,

Matt Wolach:

I don't think it's enough companies.

Shaunak Roy:

Yeah, I was just, I was just going to say that, you know, when we decided to do this thing about, you know, three or four months back, and we had this debate that whether we should do it in person, or virtual, because in person, you have that person for two days, for example, and you can plan it around it, we decided to go virtual, because a lot of people are starting to kind of not travel as much for whatever reason, especially, you know, in the economy we are in and, and I'm glad that we went virtual, because the enthusiasm has been much more than what we expected. Like the the numbers, we were thinking that we will get for this conference, we have like almost double it by now. So, so we excited about it and thought he was saying something.

Matt Wolach:

Yeah, no, I was gonna say I don't think enough companies use a virtual event or any event in order to help themselves from a marketing perspective and kind of use your your opportunity with your users, your existing users who are happy and want to share how happy they are with the product. I love that you are combining some of the education you're doing along with just users sharing their experience that the more that we can do that the better that's going to help the marketing and sales effort. I love it.

Shaunak Roy:

Yeah, no, thank you. I mean, we have been surprised to see the level of engagement and excitement around it. And yeah, if I wish I did it like three years back, but you know, this is a good time for us to get started with it.

Matt Wolach:

Fantastic. So in terms of your company, looking at the growth that you've had, what were some of the best moves that you made along the way that kind of helped your company achieve some of the success some of the results that you've gotten? Chuck? Well,

Shaunak Roy:

I think, you know, in terms of, you know, making the right decisions, like we have done plenty of wrong decisions, as you would imagine. I mean, I've probably done much more work, bad decisions and good decisions, but overall, over time, hopefully we have learned from those decisions to make right one. So, you know, I mean, in terms of starting a company, I'll say kind of two things that are important and which we have done some examples. One is that you have to do the basics, right? You know, in terms of building a good product and getting feedback from your users to make sure that the product actually usable and the experience is better, it gets better over time, having the right client success organization so that users who decide to use your platform actually get supported through the process, and they see the value. And having a sales organization that is starting to get them, you know, and marketing as well to kind of do some of the things that we're doing. So, I mean, one thing I would say is that, you know, there is no silver bullet, I mean, it's always like, kind of making sure all the bare basics are all done right. So that the business works is kind of very important. The other thing I would say in terms of strategies that our kind of has worked for us is often it is not to do with, like the business per se, but our users and our customers, more we have seen an early on, I can realize that is education is a very unique sector, right? I mean, we are we are building SAS, but for a very unique sector where there are traditions in place where people behave in a certain way they expect certain things, they may not be comfortable with certain types of activities, like for example, sales. Often I've seen SAS companies get very aggressive in terms of sending emails, like you know, a whole bunch of emails, and they treat their customers as if, yeah, if I sent 100 emails, if I get 10 responses back, I get five meetings out of it, and I get two sales done. That is okay with a lot of sectors. But you know, especially when it comes to education, it's very relationship driven. So if you, if somebody gets annoyed, because you're over sending emails, and you're not being respectful about their time, or the way you communicate to them, that's going to have an impact on the line, because they may not talk about your company in the right way. Or, you know, because people do by value that a lot. So, you know, for us, one of the things we do is that we are very careful about how we approach our clients, you know, how we have those conversations, if they use our product, not use our product, we maintain a relationship with them. So they come back later on and maybe go to another institution, they would kind of come back to us. So I think that part we have done well, you know, over the years to kind of make sure that we are, you know, we have a good relationship with our partners.

Matt Wolach:

I think that's great that was that something that you had to learn your whole relationship part of the industry? Did you initially go out and kind of send a bunch of emails and learn that oops, it's not the right way? How did that happen?

Shaunak Roy:

Yeah, great question. So yes, so in the beginning, you know, I was following a lot of the best practices that are typically talked about in SAS building SAS businesses, which is you think about your marketing funnel, sales funnel, and you gotta go through a very metrics driven approach, which, by the way, it's important to know like, you know, things are happening from an informational standpoint. But, but I did realize and kind of we got the feedback from the market is that the relationship is extremely important in this space, and how people view you and how, you know, what's your motivation as a company? Because, you know, a lot of times, the question comes up is, you know, in our stage, there are clients who come to us, and they want to make the product available to the entire institution. So every student is going to use us not only once or twice, but actually every day in every learning environment they're going to be in. So they rely on us to make sure that experience is really well done. And the students have a great experience. So it requires a lot of trust building with them, so that you know why they would want to work with us and why we are working with them. And it's a long term relationship. We want to manage the company in a way so that they can rely on our software and our services is very important for the sector. So, you know, the way we learn is by having conversation with taglines and kind of started to realize that what's important for them, and not only we just talk the talk, but we actually walk the walk, so that we set up our teams in a certain way, the kind of investors we want to bring into the company have that alignment, so that they kind of work with us for that long term vision is important. So yeah, some of those things. I mean, I mean, it's not that hard. I mean, it basically takes to kind of sit with your clients and understand or really pay attention to what the market is asking. And I think those are the things we kind of learned over the years to make sure that we have a trusted relationship with our partners.

Matt Wolach:

Yeah, I think that's super important. Those that partner relationship is absolutely critical. You know, as we wrap up here, shannock What would you say to other software founders who are kind of just getting started and looking for some some ways to grow?

Shaunak Roy:

Yeah, I would say that, you know, you know, maybe to the things that I kind of said before, which is first focus on the bare basics, it's easy to get kind of you know, defocus and go the shiny object or that one thing if I did a company is going to grow but the reality often is that the basics has to work. So product line success, sales, marketing, and having the right people in the right spots and how Being a clear, focused strategy to kind of make things better over time is extremely important. The second and the second thing I'll say is that also kind of think about who your customers are, and why they're buying your product and the other products or the other ecosystem they're living in. You know, it's sometimes easy to kind of think of a software company as, um, you're just providing your features and functionality, and you're gonna be using it. But very often, you know, what we have found is that it is a much more complicated system, especially for the vertical businesses, but it goes after businesses. So kind of really understanding that ecosystem and being able to kind of, you know, align on their values and your values and outcomes. Looking together is very important. So, you know, if I were to say one thing, I would say that is one thing I see a lot of founders miss out early on, if they do early on, including myself, by the way, if I did earlier on, I would have probably gone faster in all the years that we had, you know, that we didn't, you know,

Matt Wolach:

that's fantastic advice. And I would totally agree as well, how can everybody get in touch with you or learn more about Yellowdig? Where, where can they contact you?

Shaunak Roy:

Well, you know, in terms of learning about the company, just go to our website, Yellowdig dot Kol. There's a plenty of case studies and things that they do if you're in education. If you want to learn more about the company, there are plenty of case studies out there. You can also reach out to our team by requesting a demo, and we'd love to get to show you how the product works. And in terms of we're getting in touch with me, you know, I would say LinkedIn is probably the best way. You can search by name and LinkedIn and send me a request. love to chat.

Matt Wolach:

Perfect. And we'll make sure we put that into the show notes or in the description. If you're watching on YouTube shot. This has been fantastic. Thanks so much for coming in and sharing your wisdom. Yeah, well, thanks

Shaunak Roy:

so much, Matt. Enjoy the conversation. And thanks for doing this.

Matt Wolach:

I enjoyed it as well and everybody out there thank you very much for coming. Make sure you are subscribed to the show. You do not want to miss out on any other leaders and creators like Shaunak Make sure you're hitting that subscribe button that way you're going to get all of the advice and insights into growing your own company. Thank you very much for coming. And we'll see you next time. Take care. Thank you, Matt.

Unknown:

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS for more help on finding great leads and closing more deals. Go to Mattwolach.com