Rocketlane is a customer onboarding and PSA platform that accelerates time-to-value and improves project profitability and predictability. And it unifies projects, people, and finances to help you collaborate with customers and deliver projects on time, and on budget. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Rocketlane co-founder and CEO Srikrishnan Ganesan to learn more about the company.
What is Srikrishnan Ganesan's background? Ganesan said:
"I did my bachelor's in Computer Science & Engineering and went to one of India's top B-schools - IIM Bangalore from 2005 to 2007. Post that I've been in in product companies - first building product, and later building the business. I'm a techie at heart and started my career in B2C products - across Verizon, Rediff.com, and a start-up called Jigsee. It was 2012 when I started my first start-up with a couple of close friends, and my B2B SaaS journey started with that venture. We were lucky to be acquired by Freshworks in 2015, and learned a lot about building and running a SaaS business in the 4.5 years we spent there post-acquisition. Inspired by the success and impact I saw at Freshworks, I started Rocketlane in 2020 with the same co-founders - Vignesh and Deepak."
Formation Of Rocketlane
How did the idea for Rocketlane come together? Ganesan shared:
"We thought back on our journey building and scaling Konotor and Freshchat to identify what felt broken or what experiences needed an upgrade or innovation. And one of the areas we really could see impacted by the use of generic, siloed tools was implementation and professional services. We could see that a more purpose-built tool could accelerate projects, reduce anxiety internally and externally, and prevent escalations and poor experiences. We verified with many other client facing services delivery teams across industries. We concluded that this was an area lacking an innovative modern player, and we could take that position if we moved fast and built a stellar product."
Favorite Memory
What has been Ganesan's favorite memory of working with Rocketlane so far? Ganesan reflected:
There are many favorites. Here's my top 3:
-- We reached out to our team members' mentors (outside of work) ahead of Jan 1st, 2021, and put together a video of these mentors wishing their mentees all the best for the year ahead. We could see how the team got emotional about it, and it brought joy to them. It was a great experience.
-- The moment when the first-ever customer agreed to pay for Rocketlane on the very first call we made with them.
-- Our Series B announcement video created a buzz with a beautiful rap song that captured our journey over the last few years
Core Products
What are Rocketlane's core products and features? Ganesan explained:
"Rocketlane is a composite product - it's an amalgamation of project delivery and the operational capabilities you'd expect from a PSA platform - that helps with seamless and efficient client project delivery. Think project management, collaboration, time tracking, resource management, project automation, etc."
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Ganesan and the team face in building the company? Ganesan acknowledged:
"Investing in new software has become more challenging in the SaaS industry. One of the strategies that helped overcome this challenge was conducting a CFO listening tour, during which we spoke with CFOs from various organizations to understand how they assess tools and the return on investment (ROI) of those tools. This approach has enabled us to effectively communicate the benefits of our software to key stakeholders who are increasingly involved in software decision-making. As a result, we can now demonstrate the value of our professional services automation (PSA) tool for organizations and finance teams. This has allowed us to focus our discussions on accelerating revenue generation, preventing revenue losses, and improving profit margins for professional services projects."
"We even created a template for SaaS vendors to use when outlining the ROI of their offering"
Evolution Of Rocketlane's Technology
How has Rocketlane's technology evolved since launching? Ganesan noted:
"Rocketlane is a composite product that continues to add more capabilities, so the technology is incrementally evolving every single day. We've added entire modules on the Professional Services operations side, including time tracking, resource management, project profitability, and so much more."
"We've also incorporated AI in some areas, built deeper dashboards and reports, and multiplied the tool's flexibility to serve larger customers out of the box -- with custom reports, role-based access control, SSO, etc."
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Rocketlane's most significant milestones? Ganesan cited:
"We reached our first $1 million of ARR within the first year of launching the product, growing over 3x each year, raising $45 million of capital, building a 3500+ member community, and hosting our own conference, including our first in-person conference this year."
Customer Success Stories
When asking Ganesan about customer success stories, he highlighted:
"Observe AI, a conversation intelligence platform, bumped its NPS score to 70+ by using Rocketlane to streamline its implementation processes, track its OKRs, and improve client engagement and communication."
"Flatfile, a data exchange platform, has 70% faster go-lives after they started using Rocketlane."
"Verloop, a chatbot platform, has zero go-live delays after implementing Rocketlane."
When asking Ganesan about the company's funding details, he revealed:
"With our new capital, we're focusing on the following areas to keep up our growth trajectory:
Expanding our offering
Rocketlane already has a unique breadth; we plan to go wider and deeper -- automating more workflows upstream and downstream of where we currently operate and launching additional product offerings.
Enhancing the UX of service delivery
We want to improve how our customers' clients experience service delivery, making it seamless, impactful, and delightful. Rocketlane will be the 'front end' of our customers' delivery, and I'm excited about the unique capabilities we are building in this space. Personally, I'm excited about the dynamic, one-of-its-kind client portal we will be launching soon!
AI in project delivery, governance, and operations
We're integrating advanced AI capabilities to revolutionize project delivery, governance, and operations with copilot experiences, automations, forecasting, insights, and recommendations.
Doubling down on community
The Rocketlane community has been a cornerstone of our success.
We're committed to fostering and expanding this community, providing more opportunities for engagement, learning, and collaboration. We will host more events, create more valuable content, and build stronger relationships with our members."
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Rocketlane pursuing? Ganesan assessed:
"The size of the PSA and Client Onboarding market is estimated to be about $9 billion. However, at Rocketlane, we believe that by building software that is easier to deploy, manage, and adopt, we can expand the size of the market by enabling teams of all sizes to use our software."
"Another way to think of the market size is to see Rocketlane as a platform for client project delivery. Today, 50% of the projects that run on project management software are focused on client projects. Rocketlane aims to tap this huge market, with the leading project management tools independently in the 700mn to 1bn+ revenue range already."
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Rocketlane from its competition? Ganesan affirmed:
"The breadth of our product and innovation are very unique in our space."
"Unlike most companies that are building one more product for a delivery team, we're building Rocketlane as an all-in-one delivery and operations management software for PS teams. This includes project management, collaboration, documents, forms, surveys, CSAT, time and effort management, budget and project finances, and more."
"Also, since Rocketlane is built for customer-facing projects, Rocketlane has brought unique innovations around internal vs. external visibility, client portals, templating, partner modules, subscription-type projects, etc."
Future Company Goals
What are some of Rocketlane's future company goals? Ganesan concluded:
"We want to consolidate our position as the modern leader in client project delivery. We intend to expand our offering further and emerge as the default option for anyone thinking about running collaborative initiatives with customers."