Blume Beacon: Of Space Study, SaaS Pricing, and a PMF framework for the US

Blume Beacon is a collection of curated long reads from Blume's editorial des

Welcome to another edition of Blume Beacon. With Blume Beacon, we promise to deliver a curated list of tech content that informs and questions right to your inbox. This week we have another list of eloquent long reads and engaging perspectives for your reading pleasure. 

So, what can you expect in this edition? 

• An deep dive on Pixxel’s space odyssey

• Tips for early-stage SaaS founders on pricing, scaling, and customer success, and our take on how B2C companies can utilize the marketing function while scaling up

• A seven-step framework for finding PMF in the U.S

• The Importance of Investor Relations and Market Networks functions in Venture Capital

A Space Odyssey: How Pixxel’s Satellites are Keeping an Eye on the Future

Awais Ahmed spent much of his childhood dreaming about going to space. From becoming an astronaut to an astronomer and then an astrophysicist, he dreamt of it all. Even when none of these career options seemed probable, he still harboured the dream to go to space one day. When he went to BITS Pilani in Rajasthan for higher studies in 2015, it was as if his dreams were rekindled. 

In the first year of college, Awais learned that many of his seniors were running a student satellite team. He joined them and soon learned how to build satellites from scratch. It was a pivotal moment for Awais as he took a practical step toward space travel for the first time in his life. One thing led to another, and two years later, his team was selected as one of the 20 finalist teams among 2,500 applicants by Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the Hyperloop Challenge. 

And in three months, the team built the pod and took it to the US to participate in the competition. It was at this moment that Awais knew one thing for certain — he would work in space technology one way or the other. 

Four years ago, that dream came to fruition when Awais and Kshitij Khandelwal, both BITS Pilani engineers, founded Pixxel, a Bengaluru-based space tech startup, perhaps the only Indian company that can create hyperspectral images of the Earth from space. Hyperspectral imaging is a technique that captures images in hundreds of wavelengths and has 50x more information compared to other images. That means Pixxel can capture satellite images with the most vibrant set of colours you have ever seen.

Pixxel sells these hyperspectral images to companies in sectors spanning from mining and agriculture to oil and gas. They have customers across India and the US, including Google, which participated in its $36 Mn series B round in June 2023 along with existing investors Blume Ventures, Radical Ventures, GrowX, Lightspeed, Sparta, and Athera. If that seems too good to be true, wait until you hear it all. In this long read, Blume’s Disha Sharma summarizes the unbelievable story of Pixxel’s journey to space and how the founders overcame funding woes to ensure that their satellites keep an eye on the future. 

A Fitting PMF: In Conversation with Sheel Mohnot, Better Tomorrow Ventures

I think it’s one of those things that’s like what is love? You know when you’re in love. And I think for product market fit there are signs that you have it. You can say it’s basically a strong pull from the market - Sheel Mohnot

In the first two conversations in the series,

Sajith Pai

spoke to founders about their thoughts on Product Market Fit (PMF). This time, he flipped the script to speak to a VC — Sheel Mohnot, co-founder and partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures. Sheel has previously founded two companies, a B2C food services play and a B2B auction services play, and he brings his varied experience across these fields into his understanding of PMF. Come for his insights on how maniacal focus on customer success + speed of iteration helps achieve PMF, and stay for him admitting that defining PMF is a lot like defining love. Check out the full conversation here. 

From 0 to 100: Shashank Bijapur’s Tips for Early-Stage SaaS Founders

When Spotdraft, a Contract Lifecycle Management company that helps companies simplify contract management from creation to execution to compliance, wanted to sell their product in the US market, co-founder and CEO Shashank Bijapur did something interesting. Instead of spending real dollars on active selling, the company started an intense customer discovery process to identify its ICP. Over three months, they sent over 800 emails to in-house counsels across multiple verticals/sectors, leading to 80+ discovery calls.

In this process, Spotdraft learned a lot about their own business, from letting go of every assumption about their ICP to creating a pricing model with scope for future expansion revenue. In a chat with Blume’s Rohit Kaul, Shashank looks back at Spotdraft’s journey from 0 to 100 customers, shares best practices on running a customer discovery process, offers insights on the importance of outbound sales, and lists the mistakes that early-stage SaaS founders should avoid. Read it here. 

The American Dream: The Seven-Step Framework for Finding PMF in the U.S

If you can’t tell already, we think about PMF a lot. And so should founders adopting the Build in India – For the Globe mantra. The U.S. is the most lucrative target market for B2B SaaS companies, potentially offering the largest growth, reputation, and scale rewards. To help the new generation of Indian founders inclined to build directly for the U.S., Anurag Wadehra, a PMF expert with over 30 years of experience as an operator and founder, offers a seven-step framework for companies looking to crack the U.S. market. His practical framework underlines the disadvantages of first-time founders simultaneously building for India and the U.S. and the importance of developing a U.S. fitness hypothesis. Check out the entire framework here.

How B2C Companies can get the most out of the Marketing Function while Scaling Up

As a B2C company scaling beyond 0-to-1, you need one thing — a brand narrative that guides your marketing. If you’re wondering why we are stressing about getting your story right from the get-go, it’s because your brand narrative is a non-replicable moat. Anyone can bring a new product line like yours or another one that elbows you out of the scene. But if you have a solid story that connects with consumers, it will be difficult for others to write you off. “But make sure you are authentic. People see through ingenuity,” says Disha Sharma, our editorial lead. She says companies need a behaviour switch in their marketing strategy as they move beyond the 0-to-1 stage. But how can founders achieve that? We’ve got you covered in this practical primer for B2C founders looking to get the most out of their marketing function. Check it out here. 

Ensuring Investor Success and Building Market Networks in a VC

A Venture Capital fund has two main stakeholders – founders and Limited Partners. Most of the time, founders are in the limelight. But the long-term sustainability and success of any VC fund is impossible without Limited Partners (LPs). In fact, the right LP relationships and engagement allow VCs to take risks, innovate, and make an exponential impact. But not everyone understands what Investor Success means in a VC ecosystem. Most people think of it in the context of a listed company, believing that the role only involves working on quarterly disclosures, annual reports, and other information that is put out in the public domain. Sure, reporting is a part of the job, but the role essentially acts as a bridge between assimilating all information across all internal functions at a firm and presenting it in the best possible way for existing and prospective LPs. 

To dive deeper into the broad scope of the function, Ria Shroff Desai speaks to Mudita Narsaria, a part of the Investor Success team at Blume Ventures in this installment of How Did You Get Here. In the chat, Mudita offers her insights on being a strong Investor Success professional in the world of VC, how this role works within the matrix of a VC fund and holds some critical data and value for the team. Read all about her journey here.

When we talk of adding value to our portfolio companies by leveraging strategic partnerships, revenue channels, growth drivers, and financial services, we’re essentially talking of Market Networks. In a bonus instalment of How Did You Get Here, Ria Shroff Desai sits down with Gautham Sivaramakrishnan, who leads Market Networks at Blume, about the evolution of this fast-moving function and how it shapes the way we look at working with the companies we invest in and being by their side. 

When Gautham joined Blume, this role was expected to help reimagine the Platforms function and look into the next decade of supporting our portfolio companies across their growth needs. Since then, this function has become more integral to our growth. Read about his journey and learn how he stumbled onto this role and the VC industry. Keep an eye out for Gautham’s unique formula of what helps a finance professional successfully transition into such a role. It’s not as simple as you think!

Disruptors in Alternative Investments: How Big is the Opportunity?

In the ever-evolving landscape of investment opportunities, an intriguing asset class has the power to enhance returns, reduce portfolio volatility, and offer much higher diversification to astute investors. Picture this: an investment avenue that has offered an average return as high as ~12.5% in India. An opportunity where a CAGR of a staggering 35% was witnessed during the fiscal year 2020-2021. Consider that this enigmatic asset class commands a significant 12.9% allocation of individual wealth globally. These have been alternative investments in the Indian market.

Here’s what we know: the world of alternative investments encompasses a broad spectrum of non-traditional assets, ranging from real estate and commodities to private equity, hedge funds, cryptocurrencies, P2P lending, lease financing, and more. Traditional investment instruments like stocks, bonds, and mutual funds take a backseat in this world, and the chance to invest in alternative classes opens up for investors willing to venture beyond the beaten path. But how big is the opportunity here and who exactly are these disruptors? To answer that, Blume’s Joseph Sebastian and Sonisha Kukreja deep dive into the emerging alternatives space in the Indian market. Read their thesis here. 

Look Back in Bangers (Revisiting Stories from the Past)

We've been tracking the future of space tech for a while. In light of Pixxel's new round of funding, it makes sense to throw it back to the start. In 2019, Blume's Arpit Agarwal chronicled the evolution of NewSpace in the U.S., touching on some of its biggest successes and failures. In a three-part series, he analyzed events spanning roughly 20 years, superimposed on their context starting all the way back in 1957.

In part one of his thesis, Arpit underscored the differences between the Oldspace vs. NewSpace movement, discussing in detail the history of the space race. The OldSpace era, according to him, started with a primary focus on exploring space as a key input into expanding mankind’s frontiers of knowledge. NewSpace, on the other hand, marked the emergence of a set of ventures focused on the commercial exploration of space, funded by private money.

In the second part, he elaborated on the role that U.S. policy had in shaping the NewSpace industry. As he surmised, the NewSpace industry lowered the launch cost to less than $50 Mn compared to the Space Shuttle program, which costed $4 Bn annually at peak, effectively enabling the creation of a generation of startups that built a new American dream in space.

And then, in the last part of the series, Arpit doubled down on the phenomenon we know now as "space tourism." In his thesis, he singled out Ansari XPrize, the 2004 space competition in which the X Prize Foundation offered US$10 Mn to incentivize the creation of a reliable, reusable, privately financed spaceship that made space travel commercially viable. 

Find part I of his analysis here, part II here; and part III here.