While it’s common for founders to move on after acquisitions, shutdowns or even the distress sale of their respective companies, a rare spectacle is seasoned executives walking away from successful ventures to start something of their own.
One such story is of Ramesh Ravishankar and Srivatsan Venkatesan, who after spending a decade working with Nasdaq-listed Indian SaaS major Freshworks decided to incorporate a SaaS platform, Highperformr, in 2023.
However, before we delve deeper into the journey of Freshworks’ executives-turned-startup entrepreneurs, here’s a quick look at the Chennai-based SaaS platform.
Founded in July last year, Highperformr provides an AI-powered social media management solution to optimise content distribution and lead generation for businesses.
The platform enables companies to repurpose existing content, such as blogs or case studies, and create multiple versions tailored for various social platforms.
It streamlines content creation, scheduling, and publishing processes for marketing and sales teams and caters to a range of other departments, including operations and HR, enabling them to fully utilise social media for lead generation, engagement and hiring.
By leveraging generative AI and LLM capabilities, the startup helps businesses maximise social media ROI and identify high-value leads through audience monitoring.
Earlier this year, the marketing SaaS startup raised $3.5 Mn in a seed funding round led by Venture Highway. The Neon Fund, Matrix Partners-anchored DeVC, too, participated in the round.
Now, let’s explore what made the two executives leave their cushy jobs and embark on their entrepreneurial journey.
The Birth Of [A] Highperformr
Venkatesan joined Freshworks in 2014 and Ravishankar in 2015. While Venkatesan was tasked with developing customer relationship management (CRM) products for sales and marketing teams from scratch, Ravishankar headed inbound marketing and played a pivotal role in driving inbound leads.
Together, they played a key role in building and expanding Freshsales, a Freshworks’ division that is focussed on building AI-powered CRM software solutions to help sales teams manage leads efficiently and sell smartly.
By this time (September 2021), Freshworks became the first Indian SaaS company to be listed on Nasdaq. While the executives were happy to see their organisation reach new heights, they were soon struck with a dilemma — whether to remain employees for their entire lives or take that entrepreneurial plunge to create another Freshworks or something along the lines.
However, the two did not leave their jobs just yet. They rather thought of building a community, Growthstore.xyz (not related to Freshworks), to share their learnings at Freshworks with the world and learn from others. Next, they started writing experiential blogs and drafting case studies.
While the executives knew that they had to “start up”, they were still clueless. Therefore, they continued to write, even with little to no traction on the community that they had created.
“We couldn’t see much traction. Initially, we thought that something was wrong with the way we were drafting our articles and blogs…because of which we couldn’t grab our readers’ attention, but as we progressed, we realised the unexpected,” Ravishankar said.
The founder added that writing or storytelling was never the issue. Interestingly, the founders confessed that they did not have a distribution strategy in place due to which all of their efforts were going down the drain.
This proved to be a eureka moment for the cofounder duo, who realised that many businesses (small or large) were ailing with the same issue of badly curated content distribution strategy or not having one at all.
As the two looked at each other, their eyes lit up with one question — What’s next? And since that day, there has been no turning back for the cofounder duo. Not to mention, this was precisely the moment that led to the birth of Highperformr.
Further, what helped the duo create the foundation of their venture was their expertise in building a SaaS solution for a company like Freshworks.
Today, the founders take pride in the fact that the solutions offered via their platform are nothing like Freshsales but a platform that leverages the potential of many SaaS solutions like Freshsales to assist businesses.
A Sneak Peek Inside Highperformr’s Tech Stack
Highperformr uses Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Vertex AI, OpenAI, and open-source LLMs for a solid and scalable setup.
“We also help businesses identify high-intent leads by looking at social signals on LinkedIn, such as who fits the company’s target audience, what their recent interactions have been, what kind of interactions and connections they have with the company’s competitors, and how audiences engage,” the founders said, adding that AI has played a major role in Highperformr’s journey so far.
They claim that by integrating AI, they have been able to help companies view social media as a parallel growth engine rather than just a channel for awareness.
Moving on, to streamline many processes, the founders don’t rely on traditional testing platforms, instead, they use LLM’s for testing. “In terms of enhancing user experience, our tech stack is designed to be highly modular. For example, we can receive a customer suggestion on a Thursday, implement it on Friday, test on Saturday, retest on Sunday, and have it live by Monday,” Ravishankar said.
The startup uses AI to provide services and perform tasks such as AI-powered analytics, content prompt platform, content ideation and scheduling.
However, per the founders, the only challenge for now is the rapid evolution of technology. To stay ahead of the tech curve, the startup is in sync with constantly emerging newer LLMs.
What’s Next For Highperformr?
Currently, the founders are confident about Highperformr’s AI capabilities, but their main challenge lies in scaling up the business and achieving product-market fit.
Highperformr targets businesses of all sizes, offering capabilities such as generating engaging social media content, creating image assets, and facilitating seamless workflows for social media managers. The platform not only assists with content creation but also defines the ideal customer profile (ICP) for lead generation, automatically providing businesses with valuable insights and potential leads.
Going forward, the startup plans to integrate with platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive, Mailchimp, Salesloft, Outreach, Canva, among others. These integrations will facilitate a two-way sync, enabling users to track lead sources and seamlessly pass information between systems. Currently, the startup has integrations with Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce and Freshsales.
“The goal is to ensure that sales teams spend minimal time on different platforms, allowing them to leverage readily available data on Highperformr,” Ravishankar said.
Additionally, the company aims to grow its workforce, particularly in sales and marketing. As this will be the company’s first full financial year, it aims to reach 1,000 paying customers by FY25. Currently, they have 7,000 free customers.
While the company’s long term vision is to become a $100 Mn revenue-generating platform, it won’t be an easy road ahead, especially when India is witnessing a Tsunami of AI-focussed SaaS solutions. Also, the founders’ playbook to integrate all the known enterprise tech platforms on Highperformr is nothing special. Going ahead, the startup will have to find a niche which is quite hard to replicate.
As of now, Highperformr operates in the Indian SaaS market which is expected to become a $70 Bn opportunity by 2030. Fuelling this is the advent of GenAI, which, according to an Inc42 report, is expected to grow to $17 Bn by the end of this decade.
[Edited By Shishir Parasher]
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