From Scratch to Success: Whatfix Founders Khadim Batti & Vara Kumar Namburu Share Struggles and Insights on building a Multi-Million Dollar SaaS Company

Whatfix has a user base of over 10 million people and has been used to create over 1.5 million digital walkthroughs and tutorials. It has 500+ enterprise customers worldwide, including companies like HP, Schneider Electric, and Autodesk. Since its launch in 2014, Whatfix has become a go-to solution for businesses across multiple industries.The platform has also received the "Best SaaS Product for Web/App Development" at the 2021 SaaS Awards.In this episode, we have Whatfix founders Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar Namburu share the journey of Whatfix from their first offline Dreamforce event to reaching 10 Million people, their vision, clients, scale, culture and more. Notes - 00:00 - Highlights of the conversation02:06 - What’s Whatfix and how it’s unique04:07 - Strategy of CTO moving to the US and CEO being in India06:31 - Bringing Vispi Daver as an Angel Investor10:18 - Avoid falling into the trap of following someone else’s playbook as a first-time founder14:13 - Getting the first few Enterprise customers15:57 - Taking Counter-intuitive bets19:40 - Their first big event Dreamforce 25:02 - Going one step back, would they do a 10-15 member round table for their most interested CIOs post Dreamforce event?26:49 - Focusing on farming with Account Managers31:36 - Advice to SaaS founder: When to focus on Brand? 34:10 - Brand-building after their first Dreamforce36:45 - Their initial Ideal customer profile37:58 - Challenges & Hurdles in their 1 to 10 journey39:23 - Examples where the deal got stuck at IT Security or CFO-level43:55 - Enabling multiple stakeholders in a sales decision46:30 - Traditional profile of a sales person47:24 - Hiring profile of their initial senior sales team49:28 - How to deal with people’s Title expectation?54:23 - Building their culture early-on56:28 - Mistakes in their early journey58:06 - Guiding the early team in current journey1:00:05 - Time & efforts in recent rounds of fundings1:04:27 - Raising from Stellaris Venture Partners1:05:32 - Changing path amongst the founders1:06:59 - Account plan review with customers1:08:50 - Having set accounts with every leader to help the customers succeedSend us Fan Mail