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Josh Schachter 

Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of [Un]churned. I’m Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI and host of [Un]churned. Joining me today is SRI Ganesan, founder and CEO of RocketLane, Shri, I’ve been following Rocketlane for quite some time. Its, it’s onboarding software is, is kind of plain and simple. Then, the easiest description that I can give, uh, for it, but I’d rather have you explain Rocket Lane to us, to the audience in your own words. Sure.  

Sri Ganesan  

Happy to do that. Thanks for having me on. Uh, rocket Lane is a customer onboarding platform. Think of it as project collaboration and, uh, execution tool purpose-built for customer onboarding or implementation projects, right? So the goal is how do we help you accelerate your time to value with every customer and provide a delightful collaborative experience, which, which really puts the focus on the partnership and builds credibility during that all important initial partnership that the customer experiences  

Josh Schachter 

With you. Yeah. And that collaborative piece is something that I know that you guys really stress and really focus on. We’re gonna get more into the product a little bit later, um, because I wanna hear the story, uh, uh, about the origins of Rocket Lane. First, I want to learn a little bit about you and continue to learn about the company. So where, where are you based? Where’s the company based?  

Sri Ganesan  

The company is between the US and India. We have a team in, uh, Lehigh in Utah. We have a larger team in Chennai in India, and I’m actually both places, right? So I’m, I’m here, uh, in Chennai right now. Probably spend 60% of my time in India this year, uh, 40% in the  

Josh Schachter    

Us. I, I know you’ve been earning those frequent flyer miles for sure. What, what’s the, what’s the size and stage of, of Rocket Lean?  

Sri Ganesan    

So, we are a series A company. We raised 21 million to date. We are a year and a half years old in terms of, uh, you know, time since launch. But we started building the company two and a half years ago. So we built community before we launched the product. And, uh, in, in terms of customers as well, we grew Forex this year, 2022 versus where we were last year. It’s been tremendous, uh, momentum and, uh, lots of good logos on board as well.  

Josh Schachter

So that’s interesting. I, I, I didn’t realize you guys had launched a community bef and, and even you said you had first customers on board before you launched the product. Tell us a little bit more about that. Well, how did that go? Yeah,  

Sri Ganesan

 So, um, even while we started, you know, envisioning what we were building, we had these, think of them. They’re not necessarily like, uh, partners, uh, design partners, so to speak. Uh, more like people interested in solving the problems that come with, you know, chaos around the implementation, the anxiety that happens during this critical phase. So we enlisted a few people across companies globally who were giving us inputs, showing us what they were doing today, what those key problems are that they were trying to solve. And we realized that each company and each, you know, person, each leader we talked to had been spending a lot of energy on certain dimensions or subtopics where, you know, they were really getting better at something, right? Someone was doing amazing kickoff meetings, someone else was figuring out how to hold stakeholders accountable during the journey. Someone else was like getting better and better at their project management part of solving some other problem.  

Sri Ganesan

And we realized that, hey, if we let all these people talk to each other, it’s gonna be so valuable because they can share their knowledge and, and sort of solve each other’s problems. And that’s where we thought it was gonna be worthwhile to invest in creating a community for people in implementation, onboarding and ps uh, professional services roles in SaaS companies. So we started that in October, 2020, uh, just a few months after we started the company, uh, well before we launched a product. And, uh, that sort of took a life of its own, it has its own brand, it’s called Pre-Flight, and, uh, has more than 2,200 people globally now. There’s 15 local city chapters and, uh, these chapters hold their own pre-flight huddle events. So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s been fantastic to learn from folks in the community. And I would say we also use a lot of that knowledge to inform what we need to build and how we can solve some of the problems that get surfaced there.  

Josh Schachter

I didn’t realize that that pre-flight had to, had predated, uh, the actual product. Uh, I I think that’s really cool. I know you guys have, I mean, I, I know how hard it is marketing and working on social, um, and I’ve been to a couple of your events. They’ve, they’ve all gone really, really smoothly. So, I mean, congratulations on, on that, uh, on bringing the community together even before the product was out the door. Uh, and, and we’ll get back to marketing because I, I, I know we see, you know, in the CS world, we see Rocket Lane out there out and about quite often. And so I wanna learn more about your take on marketing. I wanna rewind a little bit, even before, you know, there was preflight even before there was the first code, uh, line of code being built for Rocket Lane. I know you had worked with some of your team previously. So give us a little bit about that origin story, o o of Rocket Lane. How did this come together? Was it the company, uh, and then the idea, was it the idea and then the company? Give us a little bit of the backstory to Rocket Lane.  

Sri Ganesan   

Sure. So this is our second SaaS startup as a, you know, founding team. So with three founders, we did one venture together from 2012 to 2015. Uh, this company, which was into messaging, was acquired by FreshWorks later became a product called Fresh Chat. FreshWorks is now a public listed SaaS company. Uh, so we spent four and a half years at FreshWorks continuing to build that business. And really, we got pushed pretty quickly into the mid-market and lower end of enterprise, which is where we faced hurdles of onboarding our customers firsthand. So I was in charge of running the business so closely involved in everything on the go-to-market side, including the post-sale journeys. And I must say it was, you know, looking back at the years we spent at FreshWorks, definitely something we felt not so proud about in terms of, uh, what would happen in that post sale journey, right? So it was hard to stay on top of things because you never knew who had the true, accurate picture of how things were going. People would say everything’s good till it wasn’t, and you know, sometimes you would hear it from the customer, right? And, and no system of record, so to speak, to truly understand the customer sentiment and the status of these implementation projects.  

Josh Schachter

Hey, sharre, before we go into the, the, so, so that’s interesting. Tell me about the, the first startup that you guys, um, brought together. So it sounds like it was successful, you, it was acquired, um, you’re now onto the second one together. Well, you said it, it became Fresh Chat, is that correct? What, what was the nature of, like, what was the company that you built first? So  

Sri Ganesan 

What we built was a messaging sdk, a messaging plugin of sorts that went into other people’s apps and, and later into their websites as well. Uh, really enabling the, you know, today we have chat bots for everything, but back in the day we were just enabling that WhatsApp style simple messaging experience or iMessage style experience between consumers and the brands that they wanted to engage  

Josh Schachter

With. And, and how did it come about that this was interesting for  

Sri Ganesan

FreshWorks? Yeah, I think, uh, the world in 20 14, 20 15 was all about mobile first, right? So everyone was talking about going mobile. Google was a mobile first company before it became a AI first company later. So e every company was talking mobile. And we based our whole product on this sort of direction saying, Hey, if every company is going mobile and consumers are gonna interact with brands on mobile, then they need a better way to do it than calling and waiting on a line or sending emails. And what better medium than messaging, which is what we all do to communicate with friends. And that same experience should be available to communicate with, uh, brands and, and, you know, companies be engaged with as well.  

Josh Schachter  

So your company’s acquired, you’re working internally for FreshWorks on Fresh Chat, you’re onboarding new customers as part of FreshWorks, you feel firsthand these pains and difficulties bringing on some of those initial customers and, um, in some of the collaboration, uh, of understanding what’s going on with the customer. Okay, so there’s still, I wanna, let’s continue this story here. Take me from that, from feeling this pain firsthand to then, I guess what, there’s, there’s an idea next of how you could solve for it, or maybe next you guys are released from golden handcuffs of, of vesting. What ha what happens to get from that to incorporation documents for Rocket Lane <laugh>?  

Sri Ganesan

Yeah, so we, we spent four and a half years at FreshWorks more than that golden handcuff period because Fresh Chat was taking off, it was the fastest product in FreshWorks to reach various revenue milestones. So we had a happy journey there, but we also were thinking about, hey, we are, we are truly inspired by what FreshWorks is done for the SaaS ecosystem in India, and how it’s sort of taken shape globally grown into this large company. And we felt, hey, we’ve learned a lot about building a SaaS business. We wanna do one more. And this problem was staring at us that, you know, there is no, every team that we knew other than the implementation team had their own purposeful tooling. We had customer success tools, we had CRM for the sales team, we had support systems for the customer support team, but for this implementation and onboarding team, you know, they were left at the mercy of regular project management tools, Google sheets and, uh, documents, emails, slack, shared channels, a lot of chaos.  

Josh Schachter  

Yeah. And, and so you decided at some point, Hey, let’s go solve this problem. Let’s go bring it to market. Yeah,  

Sri Ganesan

 So we, we had learned a lot at FreshWorks. One of the things we sort of really took away was that there is this unified experience play that can add a lot of value to, uh, a specific functional team, right? So, and, and that’s what got us thinking that, hey, if we are today using a hodge part of different tools to get the work done for this implementation team, and if we realize that, you know, this is a very important part of that customer journey, it’s actually the, you know, the beginning of that partnership with the customer. And that’s exactly where we are not thinking customer centric, right? We are not thinking about the experience of the customer’s perspective. And so we sort of put together some marks and, and thoughts around what a unified solution, which puts the customer at the center of the experience could feel like.  

Sri Ganesan

And we knew we were onto something. And so we sort of, uh, I would say we actually gave a lot of time, uh, at FreshWorks. We said, you know, I think we gave almost six months of, of notice ensured we had a good set of people take over from us to run the team and started afresh in 2020. And then the pandemic hit <laugh>. And uh, uh, that’s when we sort of started saying, okay, let’s, let’s go do this. Let’s activate the journey pandemic, or like this whole lockdown and the situation we were in, we felt is a good time to build focus on just, you know, executing, building a large product. We weren’t gonna launch an V p, which sort of, uh, we put out the door in three months. Instead we knew we were gonna build a full featured all-in-one offering, which is gonna take us a few months to launch. We took, I would say, almost 10 months to get it into the hands of the first like, early beta customers.  

Josh Schachter   

How did you make that decision to take your time launching? Because we, you know, I, I’m a product manager, um, by background, and it, like, one of the holy images that I have in my mind is that whole skateboard to, to race car image, right? If you’re familiar with that, then you know, you, you don’t, you don’t, uh, launch the, the startup with, with the entire, you know, race car, you start with the scooter, the skateboard, then the bicycle, then the scooter, then the motorcycle, then the car, right? Et cetera. So, but maybe you, you skipped the, the scooter step and maybe you went straight to the motorcycle, so to say. How did you, you swam upstream a little bit from content, conventional product wisdom, quote unquote, to be as lean as possible and get the product out as early as possible. What factored into that decision?  

Sri Ganesan

It’s actually, you know, we, we had seen that journey a few times before inside FreshWorks, where a lot of the products that FreshWorks launched, which got early success were not really MVPs. They took their time built full featured products, especially in competitive markets, right? You’re not trying to invent a whole new product, you are building a new kind of product, but it’s, think of it as, uh, more of a unified experience built around familiar experiences that already exist. So we didn’t need to test if the project collaboration piece that we are building would work. We knew it worked because there are so many other project management tools out there. We didn’t need to discover what a document collaboration tool should do or what a form should do. Uh, so the ind individual pieces that make up the product were, you know, we were replacing products that had been there for a long time and we knew that we couldn’t get away with like, putting out something that was 20% of each of those individual pieces. We also knew that we did not want to launch something that was doing only one of the parts. We didn’t wanna launch, like, here’s the project management aspect and we’ll add the rest of the capabilities, the conversation capabilities, the documents, the CSAT later, uh, because we wanted people coming in to understand and experience our full vision, even when they sort of got started with us,  

Josh Schachter   

Was that out of, of fear in some way? I mean, like, did, was it just that there were, there was other stuff out there already folks were using as alternatives, and so you figured that the threshold for them to switch was a little bit higher and, and you needed to differentiate yourself, get, get up to table stakes plus a little bit before you got to market. Absolutely. 

Sri Ganesan 

We felt that we needed to be like 70, 80% there in terms of what you would compare with existing products that people were using, and then layer on our differentiation on top of that. And that’s what gets you to that basic launch. That’s, that was our thought process. We de-risked a fair bit by showing marks of the product and, you know, uh, whatever we’ve built so far, we, we would demo it very regularly with people from the pre-flight community or people who we knew or cold connections we were making on LinkedIn, et cetera. So we de-risked it by showing it to people along the way and getting their feedback and inputs. And also, we did a lot of research upfront, right? So we sort of interviewed 60 people, understood their jobs to be done. That’s how we even came up with those first marks that we put together. So upfront work to de-risk also, we could offer to do this in this manner, right? So I think a lot of companies the only choice you have maybe to do an v mvp, but for us, we did raise some money pretty early on, and we had our r and d team in Chen in India, where I think the amount of product you can build per dollar raised is slightly more. So we took advantage of that  

Josh Schachter

As well. So if I’m hearing you correctly, you, you guys had, had, had a successful startup in the past, so you were able to get a little bit of, of early funding from investors prior to even building the product, which is, which is great. And that’s, that’s, that’s something that’s given to you on the merit of, of your backgrounds, right? In previous success, you also understood that this was a well-defined problem and something that you felt had already been validated in market. And so it was really about getting to a certain level of, of product, uh, richness and, and experience before you have that first exposure to the customer. I think it’s a really astute approach that you took. Um, like I said, you hear conventional wisdom these days and talking about how you need to get as lean, lean, lean as possible, but that can often backfire, right?  

Josh Schachter  

You launch a product that’s not quite ready and, and then you can never get that first impression back. So, um, certainly I think it’s, it’s, it’s worked for you. You guys are growing and, and we do see your name out there in the customer success community quite often these days. So, and by the way, and then as you’re doing this, you’re, you’re not just kind of sitting there twiddling your thumbs, you’re building out your community, right? You’re taking that those 10 months to in parallel build out the, the marketing arm and, and community arm of your business. So  

Sri Ganesan

Absolutely, when we launched, we had a podcast, a community, a bunch of great, you know, thought leadership pieces and articles on the blog, a lot of marketing content, which honestly, when people landed on the site, they would assume you’ve been there for a while. When they look at the product, there’s actually one customer who told us, Hey, I thought you would be like a CDC company given the maturity of the product. So that’s the impression we wanted to leave them with, and I think we did a fair job at it. And the, the thing that people miss when we talk about v MVP and so on, is if you have one look at you, you know, you have all these landscape, you know, slides that come out for different, uh, categories, right? If you look at the marketing landscape, uh, in SaaS for example, there are so many subcategories, and each subcategory has so many products. How are we gonna differentiate in such crowded markets, right? And that too, with solving one piece of the puzzle. So I think more startups will take the non m v MVP route in SaaS to, to succeed. That’s at least our feeling, uh, going forward. You’re gonna see more people move away from trying to build that initial M  

Josh Schachter   

V MVP because the stakes are higher. There is a higher hurdle rate that you have to overcome that, that makes total sense to me. So you, you know, onboarding is, has been buzzworthy, uh, over the past time period. I’ll say, uh, you’ve got Rocket Lane, there’s companies like precursive, there’s Baton Guide cx, there’s a bunch out there, um, Donna Webber evangelizes onboarding, you know, quite often she has her buck onboarding matters. And so I hear more and more and Seymour and more around onboarding. Why is that?  

Sri Ganesan    

Uh, I think, uh, customer success is coming off age, right? So sort of, uh, CS was getting established as a function and, and, uh, a category between say 2013 and now. And once people understood and put in the tooling and, and did their analysis, I guess one of the things people figured is that a lot of that churn or unhappiness in customers and so on can be easily attributed to what happens in that initial part of the journey. If you do a great job during the first onboarding and implementation phase, then you’re creating advocates for your brand. You’re putting your customer success team on the offensive with the customer. They can, you know, go and focus on upsell, cross-sell, and so on. Versus if you did a sloppy job early on in the journey, then customer success is on the back foot from the get go, right?  

Sri Ganesan       

And these, you know, you, you realize that you didn’t get the customer to value on time. You did not get them set up with things in a way in which all their goals are met. And so what was important was to solve for that consistency in the journey, uh, in that initial journey and accelerate how quickly we can get customers to value. And when we do that, the whole partnership is off to a better start, and you can expect better outcomes with the customer. So I think all that churn analysis probably pointed to onboarding being one of those places where things actually went wrong. And so a lot more companies want to solve things over there. They know that there is profound impact on N R R or N D R, you know, it’s, it’s highly correlated with how your onboarding goes.  

Josh Schachter

So little bit of a double-edged sword, having a lot of companies that are, that are in the market and a lot of different products that are approaching similar problems, of course it validates the problem that it’s acute. It also gives you competition like we’ve talked about. How do you, actually, I don’t wanna ask this. I was gonna ask how do you differentiate Rocket Lane, but what I’m more interested in is I see Rocket Lane at all these conferences and events, and, and you’ve really, like we’ve talked about, you’ve done a really nice job of getting the name out there. You have not been afraid to spend marketing dollars. And so I wanna learn more about your mindset in that regard of, of marketing. How do you approach marketing in this space? 

Sri Ganesan 

Yeah, so I think one of the first things our, our, uh, seed investor, one of our VC partners told me was, Hey, I know you guys will build a great product, but last time around you didn’t do much marketing of it. Uh, the product was there, it was used by some amazing brands, but that global success is not something you got to, I really hope you fixed that this time around, right? And that sort of stuck with me as something that was not just a vc, you know, giving random advice, but someone who knew me, someone who had followed our previous journey, giving me genuine input. And so we, you know, I, I thought about it like we, we really have had built a great product the last time around, and this time as well, I would say, uh, we have a best in class product.  

Sri Ganesan  

It’s, you know, more complete and robust and has more breadths than most, uh, products in our space. And so I wanted to do justice to what we were building, right? And that’s where this whole let’s invest early in marketing came from that every function in Rocket Lane should be world class. It’s not just we build the best product and leave the rest to, you know, for customers to figure out instant we should be helping those customers find us know about us. And it’s a new category. I actually read this book by Anthony Canada, who is the CMO of Gainsight about category creation, right? And I would say I’ve followed a lot of the things that were in that book to the T including investing in events. We did the first ever customer onboarding conference last year, uh, prop Propel, right? And it’s again, gonna be, uh, out in, you know, we just announced that in April this year, sorry, I mean 2023, April we’ll be doing the second edition of Propel.  

Sri Ganesan  

So, you know, invest in a community, uh, put together these, you know, uh, ad hoc events in the community. Go and present yourselves. Well, I, I would say we’ve had the best Booth presence in a lot, lot of the events we, we’ve been at. You also of course know we always have the best swag <laugh>. So that’s, that’s the kind of thing we wanna do, right? You do, yeah. We wanna make our presence felt. And when people come and then watch, uh, you know, learn about Rocket Lane, watch our demo, we, you know, really leave them with those ideas to carry back and they’re gonna make a case for us in their organization because they’ve seen us as a high quality world-class company that’s passionate about the problem we’re solving, has built a community, has a podcast, hall, has all of these great resources for them to do their job well and also has a kick ass product, right? So that’s sort of the approach we’ve taken where we want to make sure that, you know, we have a seat at the table in every deal, and then that gives the ability for our sales team and our product to do its thing.  

Josh Schachter 

We are now into 2023 to the extent that you can share what was the outcome of all those efforts in 2022. And, and, and what I’m asking here, So I’ll push you can, you can push back. I’ll push and you push back.  

Sri Ganesan    

Yeah, sure. Um, rather than give you direct numbers, I can tell you some of the names that have come on board, and I think that’ll give you an an idea of what numbers sure be, right? So think about companies like Clari Carta, Mixmax Vidyard, pave Afterpay Front App. A lot of these leading brands in their categories are all our customer now, right? And, uh, lot of what we did at these events, I think we met support logic a bunch of times at events. Uh, troubled omh to take a demo or get his team to take a demo with us, and all these customer success events, they’re now a very happy customer, right? So we’ve sort of, um, left North Stone unturned in terms of, uh, you know, how we hustle and, and chased, uh, best in class, best in category companies so that all the leaders in, you know, most of these categories should be our customers. In fact, the, the, the fun thing is also, uh, Gainsight’s top two implementation partners in cloud and growth molecules are both Rocket Land customers. So all the gain site implementations happening are probably, you know, majority of those are happening on Rocket Lane, right? So I think that’s, that’s been fun to, uh, make that happen.  

Josh Schachter

Fair enough. What’s your vision for Rocket Lane? Let’s look into the future. Five years from now, what is Rocket Lane?  

Sri Ganesan    

So Rocket Lane, five years from now is gonna be the default platform for any kind of customer facing project. Uh, we look at onboarding or implementation projects as our beachhead into a much wider market, which is all kinds of customer facing projects. Whether it’s a marketing agency that wants to run a project with a client or a professional services team of some sort that, or a consulting company that’s, you know, running client facing projects.  

Josh Schachter    

I love it. Just save the customer collaboration in terms of meetings you have with customers to, to update ai. And then, and then, uh, and then we’re good. <laugh>, <laugh>,  

Sri Ganesan      

Of course.  

Josh Schachter   

Sri, thank you so much for being on the program. Congratulations on your growth. Um, wishing you guys all the best in 2023 and uh, it was a pleasure having you. Thank  

Sri Ganesan    

You so much for the opportunity, Josh.