"Every single time I've ignored what the market is telling me, I've had to go correct it five or six years later."

Anish Rai spent 16 years building Capillary Technologies starting with five interns, a credit card on AWS, and a pricing model a customer invented for him during a recession.

In this episode of SaaS from Scratch, Vani Kola sits down with Anish to unpack how two IIT Kharagpur graduates with no business idea and no funding landed their first enterprise customer by refusing to write a line of code until someone negotiated with them.

They built India's most trusted customer loyalty platform. Then hit a wall at ₹29M revenue with a ₹16M loss. Then rebuilt shutting down China, SMB, and e-commerce in the same move and came out the other side at $75M ARR with 15 Fortune 200 clients.

What the episode covers:
— Why a recession is the best time to start and the worst time to build a product nobody needs
— The "50 conversations before writing a line of code" rule that still holds 16 years later
— How Indigo Nation accidentally invented Capillary's SaaS pricing model by saying they had no money
— The India TAM ceiling every founder hits and almost nobody admits to early enough
— Why Anish does strategy once every four years and spends three months on it with 40 people
— Raising $300M across 16 years without a single banker
— The 4:30am practice that carried him through a pandemic layoff of 250 people

This is a founder who succeeded in India, got comfortable, paid for it, rebuilt from scratch at 1,000 people, and came out the other side. Everything he learned the hard way is in this conversation.

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