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Actionable
Takeaways

Deeply Understand Your ICP:

Constantly refine and segment your ICP to maximize alignment between your solution and the customers who will benefit the most. Saying no to the wrong customers is as important as saying yes to the right ones.

Embrace Hybrid SaaS + Service Models:

For mid-market companies, offering a blend of software and services can be a powerful way to ensure adoption and outcomes, especially in repetitive tasks like procurement and vendor management.

Leverage Event Marketing:

In-person events, especially post-COVID, are an effective way to build long-term relationships with prospects. Creative event formats and partnering with communities can increase engagement and reduce costs.

Outcomes Matter:

Customers are increasingly focused on outcomes, not just software. Offering guaranteed results, like Spendflo does with cost savings, can differentiate your solution in competitive markets.

Avoid Cold Outbound:

For mid-market companies, cold outbound is becoming less effective due to changing spam rules and difficulties in lead collection. Consider pivoting to more sophisticated account-based strategies and intent-based marketing.

Conversation
Highlights

The Marriage Problem: Why Spendflo Had to Combine Three Categories That Nobody Else Would Touch

Most CFOs have a recurring nightmare: Quarter after quarter, they stare at an Excel sheet showing SaaS spend climbing higher, with no clear owner, no central process, and no way to get it under control.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Siddharth Sridharan, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendflo, a SaaS spend management platform that’s raised $15.4 million, shared how this exact nightmare became his founding moment. The story started with a LinkedIn message.

 

A LinkedIn Message That Launched a Company

December 2020. Siddharth’s ex-CFO reached out about a contract he’d signed two years earlier, at a company he’d left a year ago. “She hit me up on LinkedIn and said, where the hell is this? Can you help me with this?” Siddharth recalls. “And by that time, id left the company. Its only been a year. Shes hitting me up a year later about a contract that I signed two years ago. And then I realized, oh, wow, she really needs help.”

At his previous startup, his CFO appeared every quarter with the same complaint. “She used to walk up to me every quarter with an Excel sheet and said, this keeps going up, this number keeps going up. Go figure out what it is and go cut it by half,” he explains. The solution? More Excel sheets that nobody used. “And then I used to create an excel sheet. Nobody use it. Nobody followed any processes, nobody have any idea where the contracts are. It just kept repeating itself,” Siddharth shares.

Within two months of that LinkedIn message, Spendflo had signed its first customer. “I got married in February 2021, and I was negotiating our first contract on my first night,” he remembers.

 

The Category Nobody Wanted to Define

Everyone had a different name for what Spendflo did. “A lot of people think where SaaS management that’s existed for a while,” Siddharth explains. “A lot of us think we’re spend management. Everybody would kind of put us in like procurement software and all of that. So we’re in a very unique place where we kind of cross all of these chasms.”

Traditional SaaS management tools focused purely on discovery, connecting to SSO and ERP systems to show spend. But no procurement help. No pricing intelligence. No contract management.

The insight came from understanding their target buyer: companies with 200 to 2,000 employees, technology-first, where SaaS represents huge spend. “For those types of companies, a lot of their spend is SAS spend,” Siddharth notes. “They don’t necessarily have procurement software and they don’t really have spend management as well.”

“What we figured out is wed actually have to marry SaaS management, spend management and procurement management into one single place,” Siddharth shares. “And that’s when SAS spend management as a category even came up,” Siddharth recalls. “And it became a category only in 2022, I would say or 2021. 2022 ish.” But even today, “Personally, it’s still a struggle that we face,” he admits.

 

The Outcome-Based Bet and ICP Evolution

Spendflo wouldn’t just sell software. They’d deliver outcomes, acting as a virtual procurement team with guaranteed savings. “The best part about this model is it’s outcome based,” Siddharth says. “You don’t have issues with traditional issues that you have with software, which is there’s no adoption, there’s no implementation fails.”

But it demands extreme ICP specificity. “You need to be even more specific,” Siddharth warns. “You need to say, hey, what’s the revenue type? What’s the financial structure of that company? What’s the type of Persona who will buy this? At which stage of the company’s life cycle does this actually makes sense?”

The breakthrough came from learning to say no after four quarters of iteration. “We made a decision to actually say no to a section of the customers that don’t work for us,” Siddharth explains. “Where we prioritize our time and where we prioritize our dollars, from a GTM standpoint, has become a lot more robust.”

 

Building a Post-COVID Event Engine

For the first million in revenue, Spendflo relied on referrals and cold outbound. Then Rajiv and Divas joined from Freshworks with event marketing expertise. “As were coming out of COVID in 2022, people wanted to be in person,” Siddharth recalls. “They were craving some in person time to be social in late 2022 and early 2023 onwards.”

Their approach inverted typical event marketing. Spendflo starts with their account list. “First thing you need to do is have an account list of accounts that you think really matter to you and are your ideal customer profile,” Siddharth explains. “And you map them across different cities or countries, for example. And then you kind of map out your events for the quarter.”

Cost management came through partnerships with communities and other SaaS companies targeting the same ICP. Format selection matters too. Last week they hosted a pickleball event in San Francisco because “Pickleball is like the hottest thing ever right now.”

Executive participation is non-negotiable. “Whoever is attending the event, either be your sales teams, your founders executives, and if their executives there, then you make sure that your executive team is also there,” Siddharth emphasizes. The journey took time. “The first version of this is me and Rajiv, like showing up to events and then hosting dinners ourselves with nobody showing up,” Siddharth recalls. “And now we have waitlist for our events.”

 

What Didn’t Work

Spendflo invested fourteen months trying to make cold outbound work. They shut it down. On analyst relations, rather than force fit into Gartner and Forrester’s adjacent categories, Spendflo focused on where mid-market buyers actually research. “For us, it actually makes a lot of sense for us to just do a lot of the review sites like G two and like Captera,” Siddharth explains.

 

The Vision: Becoming the Largest SaaS Buyer

Three to five years out, Spendflo’s vision is elegantly simple. “What we really want to make sure that every customer that we have, or every customer who works with Penflow, our goal is to make every dollar count for them,” Siddharth explains. “A couple of years down the line, we want to become one of the largest, if not the largest, SaaS buyers in the world.”

From a LinkedIn message to building a new category at the intersection of three existing ones, Spendflo’s journey shows how the best categories emerge from solving real problems in ways existing tools can’t. Sometimes the best category is the one nobody wanted to define until you proved it had to exist.