What Does Indian SaaS Stand For?
One of the most common ways Indian SaaS is marketed is by its market cap. SaaSBoomi and other cheerleaders routinely come up with reports and articles touting how billions of dollars worth of wealth is to be created in the SaaS world. It reminds me of the famous scene written by Aaron Sorkin where a fictional Sean Parker tells to a young Zuckerberg, “a million isn’t cool, you know whats cool, a billion”. Unicorns are common now, and a billion isn’t cool either, so now its trillion.
While we look at the Valley for inspiration, it is important to realize that money isn’t what the Valley really stands for. It’s innovation. Splintered off the units that broke off from Bell Labs, the Silicon Valley became a place where technology and innovation solved problems for people. Computers were being built that were faster and cheaper and smaller. Software was being written to make these machines accessible to ordinary people. It was not about the money, yes money mattered, but it I would argue that it was not central to the creation of the Valley.
If India wants to consider itself as a rising power, it needs to look beyond China to the rise of postwar Germany and Japan. Both these countries had proud and industrious citizens who were humiliated in war and misled by their leaders. After the wars, there was an opportunity to rebuild the brand for their countries and today, Germany and Japan are the world’s biggest economies behind the United States and China. While I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, Japanese products were the most coveted. Germans have excelled in engineering and are still world leaders in most industrial categories.
What has been central to their rise? Were they motivated to becoming trillion dollar economies, or was there some deeper, more fundamental thing they banked on? I think it was the latter and what they really obsessed about was Quality.
Lean Manufacturing
Japanese automobile companies started off as cheap alternatives, but they did not stop there and went deeply into the problems of large scale manufacturing. They realized that variability was the key to waste and built a completely new style of manufacturing management, called Lean Manufacturing, that ensured on maximum standardization and minimum variability. The 5S system of housekeeping was central to the Japanese workplace. It was designed so that there was no chance of anything being out of place.
Japanese manufacturing systems were so great that their automakers like Toyota and Honda became market leaders worldwide. Lean was the engine of their growth.
German Engineering
Let me share a personal story here. My father led engineering for our family business which produced hospital equipment, mostly furniture. Every year, he used to make an annual trip to the largest gathering of the industry in Germany and come back with product catalogues. From a young age, I used to marvel at those catalogues and the quality of products and images they projected which was way better than what we produced.
Many years later, I had an opportunity interact with the world’s best manufacturing companies in the domain, who were equivalent to Mercedes or BMW in the industry, and my experience was eye opening. In the mid 2000s, the CEO of the company, visited us in India. While walking through our factory, he stopped by a rack of incoming raw material. He picked up a metal rod and observed that it was slightly bent. “Such raw material would never make way into our shop floor. We would reject it straight away”. That was my first learning how how the Germans think.
Later that year I had the opportunity to visit them in Germany. During the tour, the CEO was showing us some of their latest products under development. They looked fabulous. I asked him, “How long do you take to build these products?”. To give you some context, our products were considered the best in India and we used to take six months to roll out a new version. We were the only company in India to have automated testing rigs to physically test the product for reliability and find out its breaking point.
“Three years”, the German CEO replied. “We don’t put our name on any product that does not meet our standards of excellence and perfection”. He also added they invest several million Euros to achieve the famed German quality. That was when it struck me that they did not have any special equipment in their factory. Our prototyping shop was not half as bad as theirs, but they had a magic ingredient, patience. The obsession for quality meant that they did not mind investing three years to build a product, and their development did not end at their factory, but extended all the way to the supply chain.
My later interaction with Germans, many of who are customers now, has reinforced this cultural value that is central to their society and the engine of their growth.
Quality and Indian SaaS
So coming back to Indian SaaS products, we need to think of what values we project for ourselves. We are the stories we tell ourselves. If we keep obsessing about money, we will make it central to our existence and everything we do will always be measured by it. Money is not bad measure, but there has to be something deeper. Indian IT Services created a name for Indian talent. Indian software products can create a brand for Indian craftsmanship.
If we focus on headlines like “Indian SaaS sets new benchmarks for quality” or “Enterprises choose Indian SaaS for superior design and user experience”, then we will change the narrative of ourselves. It will have two outcomes:
- We will create a global brand for Indian SaaS
- We will reinforce to our teams and companies what we stand for.
We often forget that money is the outcome of doing good work. At Frappe, we try to put quality and product before revenue. The conversations in are centered around simplicity and perfection, not lead qualification and sales incentives. We don’t even have annual sales targets for ourselves, because we believe in doing good work is more fundamental to our company. Our goal is not to hit the next target, but to be acclaimed for our products. (We also do free software). Sadly I have had few such conversations in the Indian SaaS community.
Indian SaaS leaders need to have this conversation about what we really stand for? Let us find out what is central to Indian SaaS and where we want to project our industry. Like the Germans and Japanese, what will set Indian products apart? Both these countries had “cultural movements” in their industry that had global impact? What will we bring on the table? We have a great ecosystem already and there is so much more we can do. We owe it not only to ourselves but also our society.
Special thanks to Avinash Raghava for instigating this post.
