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Shounak Banerjee

I write on SaaS companies, for SaaS companies & build SaaS companies.

4 unhinged founders that accidentally built brands (and what you can learn from them)

4 unhinged founders that accidentally built brands (and what you can learn from them)

If you think you can build a great founder brand by sharing generic "value" on social media, you probably just got back from doing the Harlem Shake and have your ringtone set to Gangnam style. But if you take the time machine forward to 2024, you'll

The ugly, incomplete, buggy MVPs of top tech companies

Product Management

The ugly, incomplete, buggy MVPs of top tech companies

“An MVP isn’t a product, it's a process. An MVP is a process that you repeat over and over again: Identify your riskiest assumption, find the smallest possible experiment to test that assumption, and use the results of the experiment to course correct” - Jim Brikman A

How these 3 startups take on billion-dollar incumbents (and win)

How these 3 startups take on billion-dollar incumbents (and win)

Incumbents have hordes of employees, thousands of loyal customers and trusted brands built over decades. Startups have a few ambitious people and a couple of laptops. On paper, startups should never win. In practice, new entrants with less experience, less money and fewer people often win. AWS disrupted Oracle, Slack

3 pivots that transformed failures into successes

Product Management

3 pivots that transformed failures into successes

Pivots in startups are a tricky business for good reason. They feel overwhelming, expensive & heartbreaking. It's sunk-cost fallacy at its best -- you've spent countless hours and days building out something with such tenacity & now you're faced with the prospect of letting

Will OpenAI's $5b burn wipe out startups? (no, and here's why)

Product Management

Will OpenAI's $5b burn wipe out startups? (no, and here's why)

Birds fly. Cows eat grass. Startups lose money. While most startups burn a few hundred thousand to a few million a year, OpenAI is reportedly hurtling towards bankruptcy because they’re burning $5 billion a year (of their total of ~$14b in investment). Your hands might be a bit sweaty

How software built Nvidia's $2.97T hardware empire

How software built Nvidia's $2.97T hardware empire

Ask someone what makes Nvidia worth almost $3 trillion, they’ll tell you it’s because they manufacture GPUs for use in AI, aka hardware. But if it was about making chips, why do fellow chipmakers stocks look like this: While Nvidia’s looks like this: Over the past 5

How top B2B companies got their first 100 customers

How top B2B companies got their first 100 customers

Getting your first 100 customers is one of the hardest challenges — it’s that zero-to-one phase where companies either make or break. This is especially true for B2B SaaS products where the bar for a good product is high, sales cycles are long, and product adoption can take a long

Rippling: The $11.3B company raising $ without pitch decks

Rippling: The $11.3B company raising $ without pitch decks

Where we glaze other great products 👇 Where we glaze other great products 👇 There are only two ways to make money in a SaaS business - bundling & unbundling. After software moved to the cloud, companies made billions peeling off specific features & products from mega-conglomerates who were still stuck in

From Virginia to Wall Street: Reddit's origin story

From Virginia to Wall Street: Reddit's origin story

Where we glaze other great products 👇 Where we glaze other great products 👇 With over one billion posts and 16+ billion comments, Reddit has 76 million daily active users, who spend an average of 16 minutes on the site per day. On average, about 1 million posts are added to Reddit

How Hubspot became a $32B marketing & sales behemoth

How Hubspot became a $32B marketing & sales behemoth

Where we glaze other great products 👇 Where we glaze other great products 👇 One of the most common startup advice given to founders is to focus on one thing and do that really well. Hubspot did the exact opposite and in the process, ended up building a $32 billion company. According