India has the third-largest SaaS ecosystem after the US and China, as per a report by Motilal Oswal. And, going by another report published by Bain & Company, Indian SaaS companies are poised to achieve a revenue of $30 billion by 2025, thereby capturing an 8-9 percent share in the global SaaS market.
“However, we haven’t heard much about SaaS performance marketing agencies that are exquisitely trained to deal with this fast-paced growth of SaaS startups. This led to the inception of TripleDart Digital, a SaaS performance marketing agency in APAC,” says Shiyam Sunder, Co-founder and MD, TripleDart Digital.
Founded in December 2020 by Shiyam Sunder, Manoj Palanikumar, Jayakumar Muthusamy, and Sabarinathan Rajeswaran, Bengaluru-based TripleDart is focused on increasing the ROI for its clients via varied online channels.
“Another pain point that we address is identifying the right resources for SaaS business owners. With significant funds, and a great product, one thing that SaaS startups lack is time, and a perfect SaaS marketing playbook to crack the growth formula of this industry. As the SaaS market is fairly new, identifying corresponding SMEs has been tedious for founders. We want to ease this pain point by providing an in-house team for the performance marketing needs of SaaS startups,” Shiyam adds.
TripleDart’s pilot services include organic channels (SEO, content marketing and digital PR), paid media (paid search, paid social, performance creatives, landing pages and account-based advertising), and analytical intelligence (strategy and consulting, conversion rate optimisation (CRO), brand research and brand audit).
Class apart
“Our USP is that we are aware of the dynamics of how a marketing funnel works in the SaaS ecosystem. Thus, we don’t throw numbers in the air,” claims Shiyam.
He goes on to add that TripleDart’s services are based on custom frameworks which are sure to drive growth.
“Scaling SaaS demand generation engines require distinct skills, dedicated focus and staying up to date with the latest innovations, which come easily to our employees given their experience and background in the industry,” he says.
Shiyam claims TripleDart does not have any real competition in the Indian market as of now. “However, our global competitors, or rather the market players we look up to, would include firms like Klientboost, Directive Consulting and Refine Labs,” he states.
SaaS in its DNA
TripleDart’s founding team has a sound SaaS pedigree, so to speak.
Shiyam has worked with multiple SaaS unicorns including Zoho, Freshworks, Hotjar, and HeyDigital, leading performance marketing teams in his stints. His contribution to every client that joins Tripledart Digital’s portfolio is rendering his previous experience with other scale ups to their performance marketing playbook.
Manoj is TripleDart’s go-to-market expert, and is fondly known as All Things Inbound Marketing personnel. He has previously worked in Zoho, Salesken and Merkle Science.
Jayakumar’s expertise lies in data, and his proficiency in SaaS emerges from previous stints with Freshworks, Multiplier and HeyDigital.
Sabari, Head of Paid Marketing at TripleDart, specializes in strategising, managing, and scaling clients’ paid channels. He has previously worked in Multiplier, Kovai.co and Stan Ventures.
“We have grown from a team of 20 to about 50,” Shiyam says.
The present and the future
As per a report by Expert Market Research (EMR), the global digital marketing industry reached a value of nearly $305 billion in 2020. The market is further expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.6 percent between 2021 and 2026 to reach a value of around $807 billion by 2026.
The rise in digital content creation and consumption of that content through various online channels are driving growth in the sector, the report noted.
Currently bootstrapped, Shiyam states that being a service-based firm, it was started with an initial investment of Rs 5 lakh.
He claims it has been profitable since its inception, and has generated an ARR of $250,000 for FY 2021, projecting $1.5 million in ARR for FY 2022.
“We are a global agency, and our clientele is spread across the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and the APAC regions. Predominantly, our clients hail from the APAC region. We have served 35+ SaaS startups in the last 18 months, and some of our clients include Mobstac, Pepper Content, MoEngage, Adpushup, Apty, Oloid and Multiplier,” he adds.
Going forward, TripleDart is primed to focus more on the West.
