upekkha revenue, CEO prasannaThiyagarajan k(Rajan), team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

so what if I told you that 85 percent of the SAS startups that start out do not cross a million dollar in ARR this is statistics from Nathan's uh database that he puts together where he tracks the entire SAS Universe there are about 32 499 startups as of yesterday and out of them about 4766 startups are Beyond a million dollar in ARR that's roughly about 15 out of 100. now out of those four hundred and four thousand seven hundred and sixty six startups 2700 odd startups are above two above 10 million in ARR uh 2687 startups are about 10 million era which means one out of two that have crossed a million also crosses 10. now anybody in the SAS industry knows that you know if you cross about 10 million in ARR then you are almost Immortal it's very very hard to kill that particular startup unless of course you do something very stupid maybe you got caught in a rave party or like you know you invested in Silicon Valley Bank just before March 10. and I I know two founder friends who did that so other other than that you are pretty much immortal now some of you who are like you know very data Centric here like no you're just taking a snapshot of the stats here like you should look at the time series fair enough I looked at this data at crunch base crunchbase says that as of yesterday 24 700 startups are there in the world now Nathan tracks bootstrap startups as well that's why you see the numbers are different but out of that 3 000 startups are the ones that have crossed about a million dollar in Era five years ago I looked at the statistics because I was writing a blog post for comparing the number of startups between India Israel us UK and Australia and at that time there were 17 700 SAS startups out of which again about 2 700 odd startups were above a million dollar in ARR and I work very closely with Indian SAS startups and in 2018 the number was there were 783 SAS startups out of which 72 had crossed a million so you can slice and dice them differently you take snapshots in different years and you could even go back to 2011 when Jason lemkin was tracking the number ranges between 10 to 15 percent zero to one stage of the startup is is where the highest amount of mortality rate is and me and my co-founder prasanna we've been thinking about this for a while why is it that in the zero to one stage the highest amount of modality rate is there he was working at Microsoft made into it and we ran accelerators inside in our organization and outside and uh we were trying to improve the odds of the zero to one mortality rate we looked at lot of Frameworks we looked at lean Sheen startup or whatever was the fashion of the day like whatever is the fashion of today we were looking at Frameworks and we said you know could we use it and it would get very elated we would say oh this is something that looks like that you can solve the problem and then you know a few months later you'd realize that you know it was uh it was only being used by people who were selling Frameworks it doesn't really really help and out of all the Frameworks that we have looked at the one that I'm the most disappointed with is this whole idea of product Market fit it's not even a framework it's just a phrase some people like to call it a mental model and I think you know it is a fraud mental model I have not found a single entrepreneur who could look at the definition of product Market fit and say hey this is how I reach product Market fit it has not been actionable at all this mental model is only used by investors that's what I've seen in the last 10 years to decide whether they should further do follow-on funding or not it doesn't help in making progress in an actionable way for founders so I run a SAS accelerator called upeka and I work with about 108 startups as of our last cohort which is the 11th cohort and in our first cohort in in 2017 we had uh 10 startups that joined us eight out of the ten have crossed about a million dollar in ARR ninth took a small exit and then the tenth one is the one that did not cross the million dollar ARR Mark they're roughly about 40K of mrr now through these trials and iterations there is some method to this madness of going from zero to one where the odds are more than 15 that we've seen right and in that experience what we've come to frame this as is we call it as building a SAS flywheel now when you are building a SAS product you are of course gonna do engineering you're going to do building you're going to create your product you're going to do some marketing you're going to do some sales and you're going to set up your customer success all of this is going to happen but underneath that you're going to actually do fundamental choices fundamental blocks and that we call as the inner flywheel and this inner fly Village is nothing but a set of six choices that you make and the reason we call this is a flywheelers is all these choices are interrelated with each other you change one of the choices you have to come back and look at all the choices and you know re re-evaluate them and maybe change them if you change one of these choices now uh when Nathan uh reached out to prasanna he said hey look uh no you need to give a talk and then uh we were like yeah sure but then I told prasanna look we spent six months working with Founders on working on these six choices how is it that I'm gonna be able to do this in 20 minutes and he said no go figure and then Nathan connected us to Mandy and Mandy was like look if you don't finish this in 20 minutes you're gonna yank the speaker out of the stage well fair enough but then I love when a conference is so tightly well produced so good job Mandy and Nathan on making sure that the conference is running really really tightly but then what I'm gonna do is I'm not gonna cover 108 slides I'm only going to talk about four of these six choices and very limited aspects of those four or the six choices all right so let me start with the first one and this is my favorite one how many of you in the audience are Developer raise hands okay I expected a little bit more I mean about uh 15 to 20 percent I hated to break it to you guys that you know I was a developer myself right most of us think that you know pushing code is is equal to product I'm sorry pushing code is is not equal to product and a product is a problem that you're solving for a group of people often the group is called a fancy name is given to it called as the ideal customer Persona just you know you group them in certain way and then you refer to that using a shorthand name often that shorthand name is is called as a category but of course you know if you are designing a chair or you're building a product like a chair you're not gonna say hey what problem does a chair solve you're gonna be like yeah this is chair I want ergonomic chair or I want a chair with a wheel right but imagine the day when chair was getting designed for the first time ever at that particular point in time we did not have the common mental model of the word called chair right we were perhaps having this conversation about okay you know we're trying to make sure that you know we're able to elevate someone a certain feet above the ground right and when you're building your software when you're building your SAS company today you're perhaps at the same point in time and chair was getting built for the first time so therefore it pays for you to think about this in terms of the problem that you're solving and in terms of the uh like a group of people that you're focusing on and you want to make sure that you're solving a high value problem and you want to make sure that you are deliberately thinking about the group of people to whom you want to Target this and and you want to make sure that you know if you're building SAS you're at least thinking about solving a problem which is at least worth three thousand dollars this is the cost of problem is at least three thousand dollars or more let me illustrate this with an example imoka was part of the first cohort at Topeka and they were a skill assessment platform company um you know if you're if you're doing hiring then you know imoka is relevant to you uh what what they do is they make the entire pre-screening of the hiring process automated they send out tests to candidates they they get evaluated and the dashboard of that is presented to the hiring manager they're being Founders they were targeting other Founders and they were selling thousand dollar ACV in a year and they had flat revenue for quite some time they were good at sales they would complete the sale but then three months later the starter founder that had signed up will churn out they changed their approach a little bit instead of focusing on Founders they went to large companies which have at least about 10 000 people in their organization at least 200 people in their HR organization and then they said they took the same piece of code and then gave it to them now these folks who are in in large organization they spend their entire day in sending all these surveys so sending all these skill assessment tests now if for a Founder what happens is he may do hiring once twice maybe Thrice a week he's not gonna do this use case on a daily basis but when it is...