1.Product

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• I am working on my own product - ie, Fyno. It is a B2B SaaS product - It’s Zapier for communications | A communication infrastructure solution that allows product companies to:
• • Integrate with any communication channel/ vendor;
  • Manage multi-channel templates in one place; and
  • Comes with an orchestration layer to build notification flows, automate communication pipelines.
• Early stage | Have ~ 12 customers with signed contracts (including a couple of enterprise customers)

No PMF. But Fyno product is very

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similar to Courier.com in the US.

Courier has achieved PMF. It has ~

$5mn in revenue and recently closed

Series B, led by Google ventures.

• As compared to Marketing automation platforms which offer similar multi-channel communication orchestration, Fyno and Courier is an engineering product which focuses on transactional, real time communications like OTPs, order status updates, payment confirmations, reminders etc.
• These communications are often managed by Product and engineering teams through APIs (to avoid latency and get better deliverability).

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2. Partnership opportunity

Map the user journey for your product on whimsical. Identify gaps in service, possible customer pain points, customer requests for a particular feature.

Based on your analysis, explain if the partnership can close gaps in service, solve for customer pain-point. Can you build the requested feature yourself? If no, can partnership solve for this?

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The Pship opportunity is to enter a new category and not solve the problems of an existing customer segment. Its repurposing and repositioning the product in the new market, explained more in Part 3 below.

3. Litmus test

What is the new Market opportunity?

These are the 3 primary types of customer communications

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~80% of customer communication comprises of marketing nudges - oriented towards acquisition, conversion, engagement and retention. Primary tools used for this - Martechs like Moengage, WebEngage, CleverTap, Braze etc.

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• While we are best positioned to solve transactional communications, we wanted to go after the bigger pie, i.e., the marketing comms as:
• • It drives higher perceived value for the customers since it directly impacts revenue; and
  • Taps into the growth / marketing budget of customers.

When we did a thorough research about this marketing automation, we realised:

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• Martechs are typically customer data platform with a communication pipeline.
• They come with an abstraction and a no-code orchestration layer
• They require businesses to send all possible data points to their platforms (like clickstream data, transactional data, purchase history, profile data (including personal data, device, etc).
• Then they allow businesses to filter through the data to build cohorts/ segments, chart journeys, build communication pipelines / automations and measure resuilts.
• Most Martechs bill for data/ events stored on their platform - the pricing is based on the data / event storage.

Now here’s the critical insight - There is a large segment of businesses that do not use Martechs. Who are they?

• Regulated businesses (like insurance, financial services etc.): Strong regulatory oversight creates high friction for sending customer data to third party tools.
• Tech first businesses with very large data sets: Businesses like Dream 11, MyCircle and Flipkart. They have built inhouse Marketing automation tools.
• Businesses with data sensitive engineering head/ CTO: They are absolutely not okay to share customer data with third party tools. They will always choose Metabase over mixpanel/ amplitude since metabase has an on-premise offering.
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• Impactful Tailwinds:
• • New data protection law in India which is potentially going to influence more companies to build inhouse solutions or look for safer alternatives to Martechs.
  • Standardisation of database solutions and data engineering practices that will make it easier to manage large volumes of data inhouse
  • Advancement and commoditisation of AI modules: Procurement and deployment of AI module will necessitate having complete access and control on proprietary customer date.
• So in-short, there is a reasonable audience who currently manage data in-house (and do not use a Martech) and there will be an influx of companies that will start managing customer data in-house.
• Managing data is one thing - but what about abstraction, orchestration and analytics?

Fyno will build a middleware (Lets call it "connect" )which will consist of:

• A docker solution which will run in the infra of customers and contain a no-code abstraction and orchestration layer.
• The no-code abstraction layer (like metabase) which allows users to query databases and create cohorts. Using Gen AI, it will permit querying the database with natural language: Example: ‘Find me customers who invested more than 10K over the last 2 weeks’ and you will have your customer cohort ready.
• The no-code orchestration layer which will allow you to chart customer journey’s
• And finally, a secure connection to Fyno’s multi-channel cloud that will be used to trigger a specific communication to customers based on the communication flow (using the integration, template and the channel flow) configured on Fyno.
• So ultimately, critical customer data never leaves your infra and only the communication related data, that needs to be anyways shared with cpaas vendors will pass through Fyno.

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Value proposition to Businesses?

Save data management cost (getting rid of expensive SaaS tools / get similar experience at no additional cost

• More control and security over customer data
• No more leaky ETL/ data pipelines
• Get the power of Martech without building one - Finally! Growth and marketing folks in such businesses can breath relief and feel empowered.

4. Identifying right partners

👉🏼 State the following for your product

1. Who is your ICP?
2. What are your brand values?
3. What is your current market? (Types of companies, industry sectors, geographical reach)
4. Create a list of possible partners and perform a partner fitment test.
5. What does your partner gain from this partnership?

Explain your ICP here:

User: Growth and Marketing team

Decision maker: CTO/ CPO (depending on whether it is a product led org or tech led org)

Influencer: Security and data protection officer

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Mention your brand values here:

- Integration first company

- Helping companies to provide better end-user experience

- Solving primarily for engineering and product efforts

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Explain your current market here:

- Data sensitive companies

- Regulated companies

- Companies nearing significant events like public market listing

- Companies on whom data privacy law would apply

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List of possible partners here:

- Data warehouses like Snowflake, Rudderstack, Redshift, BigQuery

- Databases like MongoDB, MySQL, Postgresql

- Visualisation Solutions like Looker, Metabase, PowerBi, Tableau etc

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💡partner fitment test