Study the journey of your favourite Company

1. Reverse Engineering a
SaaS company

2. Why are we doing this?
• Reverse Engineering is one of the best ways to
understand a product / industry / technology into
which significant research has already gone into.
Let’s avoid reinventing wheels.
• You can witness first hand what’s awesome and
what royally sucks about what’s already out there.
• It’ll also help you better understand and
appreciate some of the counter-intuitive things
you see in a product

3. So how do we do this?

4. Take some time off, Google a lot
and find your favourite SaaS
company in the whole wide world
Skills Required : Being a Google-Fu

5. Action Learning at sv.co
In a changing world, it is important that people be
masters at the art of asking penetrating questions.
When nobody knows what’s going to happen next,
your ability to ask penetrating questions is what’ll get
you forward.
When you reverse engineer a SaaS company, you’re
going to ask deep penetrating questions and make a
good guess at what you think the answers that the
founders of the company had in mind.

6. Take a good guess at figuring out
the consumer insight it was built on
• Founders say many stories about why
they started their companies
• Some of are meant to impress, some are
rhetorics, some really had no idea why.
They just did it.
• However, the consumer insight, sooner
or later will (have to) be arrived at and will
take the company to heights

7. What are the big 5 choices the
company made? List ‘em down.
• What feature did they build first?
• When did they launch?
• What did their prototype look like? Are you impressed?
• What did they do so wrong?
• What do you think they do goddamn right?

8. You get the drift
Now let’s begin in a structured manner

9. ToDo: Prepare a deck that
reverse engineers your
favourite SaaS company
Ensure the deck answers all of the questions that
follow

10. Time
Steps
1. Idea
2. Prototype
3. Early Customers
4. Efficiently adding customers
5. Scaling Business Operations
6. Being Operational Break-even
7. Generating Business Profits
8. Defending Profits from competition
9. Recovering Business Investments
10. Return on Investment for Shareholders
Let’s ask penetrating questions about each of the
stage the company went through. It starts with great
questions!
T= 10 yearsT= 6 months
T= 0

11. Let’s consider the
example of Freshdesk

12. Why did Girish
start Fresh
desk?
What pain point
was he solving
and for whom?

13. On what consumer insight was it
actually built?

14. What did they launch first?
Was it the first feature that they launched that got
them their got them their first 10,000 customers?

15. How did Freshdesk manage to get
(recruit) their first 1000 customers?
Most often, the first 1000 customer are not going to find your product.
You have to find them and convince them to use it and pay for it.

16. Once 1000
customers came
onboard, how
did Girish scale
it to onboard
10,000 and
eventually 50,000
customers?

17. Scaling Operations
• How did Girish scale the team
in-tact while growing?
• What did he do so that better
people kept joining
Freshdesk?
• How did he manage to not
become ‘corporate’ in culture?
• How did he retain the startup
ethos while scaling that fast?
• What kept him going during
the difficult times?

18. How did Freshdesk defend itself against
stiff competition and win?
What are the moves Freshdesk made?

19. What are some of the
other great questions
you can ask to
reverse engineer
your favourite SaaS
company?

20. Time
Steps
1. Idea
2. Prototype
3. Early Customers
4. Efficiently adding customers
5. Scaling Business Operations
6. Being Operational Break-even
7. Generating Business Profits
8. Defending Profits from competition
9. Recovering Business Investments
10. Return on Investment for Shareholders
Think hard about each of the stage and ask the
best of questions!
T= 10 yearsT= 6 months
T= 0

21. Ask great questions!

22. Don’t forget to check
the Rubric for pointers.