In the first part of this Founder’s Playbook, we looked at some of the hard choices Zenoti made to win in the US market and eventually become a category leader in enterprise SaaS for the wellness industry. One of the hardest calls was to keep its sales and product people focused on a specific vertical, […]

“Whether you’re talking to other founders or looking up books and blogs, they teach you the wrong thing when it comes to vertical SaaS. They made me commit a lot of mistakes. Even investors are not able to give you the proper advice because they’re usually working on horizontal SaaS… We are now a billion-dollar-plus-valued […]

Zenoti, a SaaS unicorn in the beauty and wellness space, was called ManageMySpa eight years ago. Why manage only spas? Why not salons, fitness centers, et al? The choice of name was deliberate. Founder and CEO Sudheer Koneru wanted employees to be narrow-focused at the outset, instead of chasing every opportunity in the industry.  Then, […]

When Guru Hariharan left Amazon, where he applied machine learning to build an automated vendor management system, his vision was that the future of ecommerce was going to be algorithmic. As an entrepreneur, he knew the value of AI/ML to other retailers as well as retail brands for whom ecommerce marketplaces accounted for 90% of […]