Ep. 158 - 97% of SaaS Churn at First Opportunity is Decided in the First 90 Days—Onboarding Is the Key

Guest: Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-Founder & CEO of Rocketlane

Most B2B SaaS leaders know that onboarding is important but underestimate its impact.

The reality is that 97% of churn at first opportunity is decided in the first 90 days, making onboarding the most critical stage in the customer journey and the defining factor in revenue growth and long-term customer success.

In this episode, Sri Ganesan, Co-Founder and CEO of Rocketlane, shares how SaaS companies can transform onboarding from a fragmented process into a strategic advantage. From community-led growth to automation-driven efficiency, he reveals what top SaaS companies do differently to drive retention, expansion, and revenue acceleration.

Key Takeaways:

• Onboarding Determines Retention & Growth: The first 90 days define whether customers will churn or expand.
• Community-Led Growth Builds Credibility: Building an engaged audience before launch fosters trust and momentum.
• Automation Eliminates Inefficiency: Siloed tools slow teams down; all-in-one platforms drive success.
• Market Validation is Critical: The biggest factor in startup success isn’t the product—it’s picking the right market. 

Sri shares actionable strategies for SaaS CMOs and CROs to create onboarding experiences that drive retention, expansion, and revenue acceleration—making this episode a must-listen.

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Transcript

Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS go to market teams to accelerate revenue growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Sri Ganesan, co founder and CEO of RocketLane, a customer onboarding platform that shortens time to value and helps you deliver a collaborative, transparent, and delightful onboarding experience.

Sri Ganesan: Hey Sri, welcome to the podcast 

Hey Ken, thanks for having me on today. 

Ken Lempit: It's a pleasure. It's a great topic and I'm really excited to dig in. But, before we do so, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and a bit more about your company Rocketlane? 

Sri Ganesan: Sure. So Rocketlane is my second venture as a SaaS founder.

Third startup that I've been part of technically. And, uh, started my journey at Verizon as a product manager. One thing led to the other move to smaller and smaller companies, eventually starting up on my own with a couple of friends. It's the last venture was acquired by a company called Freshworks, which did exceedingly well. Went public in 2021.

And A lot that we learned on that journey is what we are putting into practice at RocketLane and how we're building the company. RocketLane is now close to five years old as a venture. What we do is we provide software for various kinds of professional services and, you know, services teams that do project based work.

And what's unique is we are one of the few solutions that I would say is looking at this as an all in one solution for a services team that handles both the front end of the business, which is how you're working with customers, collaborating, executing together, the governance around your projects that you're running, all of that, including like a beautiful customer portal.

And also the backend of things, which is how you run your operations, your staffing for a new project, tracking efforts. invoicing a customer, doing your revenue recognition the right way, and so on. So, all in one platform to unlock, we call it our trifecta. your people and your projects and processes, your finances and people and your customer experience all in one tool.

Ken Lempit: Well, you know, having great onboarding experiences can make a big difference in the economic outcome for the partnerships, right on both sides of the partnership. So I'd love to dig in deeper on that as we go through our episode today. But first I think it'd be interesting to understand sort of how you went from the big company movie, which I also did, you know, started at IBM and Citicorp.

Like, you know, how do you go from the big company movie to startups? And what are the things that happened early in your career that kind of drove you to become an entrepreneur? Because a lot of the people that listen here, you know, they're considering the jump. They're not all entrepreneurs yet.

Sri Ganesan: I think, you know, when I try to nail down what drove me towards the path I'm on, I think in a way, if I had to sum it up very simply, I would say it's the joy of creation. Very early in my career I think even before I started my first job, I assumed that writing code is what I enjoyed like, you know, coding up new products.

Then I realized that creation of the product was something that I enjoyed. So my first gig with Verizon was as a product manager for their set top box software files, TV set hub box, and then move to a company in India called rediff.com. It was the first dot com from India incidentally, and I was a product manager there as well.

Then I went on to head product for a very small startup. And that's the journey where I realized it's not just creating products that I enjoy, but also building the team, creating the culture of the company. I was involved in everything from finding office space for the company to, you know, hiring people, launching the first version of the product.

So it was, a journey that I cherished and I thought, Hey, you know, it's this act of creating something out of nothing, which I really enjoy. And so came together with a couple of my very close friends to do our first startup back in 2014. 

Ken Lempit: You know, my, my early career, I was a, we call an engineer now also

and there's definitely more to it than just the coding, right? Getting people around a vision, realizing something that changes the real world is, a big part of what makes that a lot of fun. Talk to me a little bit about, like, lessons learned in the first couple of young companies that really inform the startup of RocketLane, because I think, you know, especially if it's your first startup, you're not going to anticipate everything that you need to do to be successful, even in your second or third, you may not have everything, but what are the most important lessons learned you brought into Rocketlane?

Sri Ganesan: Yeah. I think the, the first startup I was part of as head of product, we had great traction. we launched a mobile app. It had 6 million downloads in the first six months, things were going really well. And then that momentum, that confidence is what led me to do the first startup. Which we started with a B2C product.

Which had 10, 000 users in the first six months this time, right? Instead of 6 million, like we experienced before. And that taught me something about how hard it can be if you don't have the right pull from the market. And, you know, we eventually launched a B2B product, which still had, you know, I would say decent momentum, good logos on board as customers.

But when we went into Freshworks after we got acquired, that's when we understood what true momentum for a B2B company can feel like when you're winning customers every day, when there's like growth and really a different kind of speed at which the organization grows or has to grow to service the customer demand.

And the biggest takeaway from both of those experiences was market trumps all else. You know, the single most important thing for you to do is validate the market you're playing in, how big it is. How much demand there is going to be for what you're building. So we actually spent a few months, I would say, just validating our idea this time before we got down to building anything.

 That's probably the biggest lesson. There are many, many other lessons that we've taken away from that journey. 

I said market trumps all else in terms of like, when you look at all sorts of factors, which are going to influence your success as a startup, the most important thing to get right is, am I picking the right market?

Sri Ganesan: You don't even need to have the perfect product. I think, you know, the market will pull out the right product if you're in the right market. So that was the biggest lesson. 

Ken Lempit: I just think about my experience looking at, you know, average software that did really well. And a lot of times it was early in a market, right?

You don't have to be first to market, but be early in a space. And you do get pulled in as the market starts absorbing solutions, right? 

Sri Ganesan: Yeah. If you're playing in a big enough market, you can also find a big enough niche within a big market. And that helps you arrive at what your product differentiation is when you spend enough time learning about the space, learning about the jobs to be done of people.

So it's, I think a lot of upfront work about understanding, validating the jobs to be done of the potential buyer, the potential user for your software. And as you go through that journey, You will uncover areas where you can truly differentiate. And that's been super useful for us in our current journey, like a very sharp positioning.

We started narrower than what we are today, got a lot of success over there, then started broadening the tab that we go after. 

Ken Lempit: Well, want to ask you about that initial product, because as I understand it was pretty full featured out of the gate, not really an MVP. So what gave you the confidence to build a pretty robust solution, sort of as version one?

Sri Ganesan: The first version of the product wasn't full blown professional services automation. It was playing in a category called client onboarding, but as you said, it was still very, very full featured for that category, it was a new category. But the unique thing about this category is that it was like a unification play, where we were bringing together, people were using spreadsheets, project management tools, documents.

Slack shared channels with the customer, emails, et cetera, to collaborate across companies and get a customer on boarded, right? When you're running a implementation project or onboarding project with a customer, there are a lot of channels around which you're collaborating. Some of them are communication focused.

Some of them are like, how do I send a status update? Some of them are tracking things between the two companies. Some of them are for feedback from a customer. What we decided to do was to build this all-in-one platform, which has project management, document collaboration, templating feedback, and CSAT

natively built in a Slack style communication experience between the customer and you. There's a customer facing portal, there's a internal view. The two are different. The customer portal is easier to use, the internal view is more robust. And then of course you need your reporting analytics. All purpose built for

these kind of teams that are running customer facing projects that are repeatable in nature. What can you learn from your repetitions? So, all of that needed to be in place on day one. And we can't go up against, you know, the project management tools that are more mature with something that is, you know, 20% as mature and try to replace it, right? So we needed to get fairly mature in terms of our capability set on day one within each of the pieces, whether it's document collaboration, project management, communications, et cetera, then stitch it all together into one unified experience as well. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess also with project management, I mean, a lot of these professional services, things probably look more like task management, right?

It's, this is the recipe to do these different things. They're not really very ornate projects with multi level Gantt. It's more like make sure you get all these things done. So, probably not insurmountable at the outset anyway. 

Sri Ganesan: I think the, the size of the customer determines the complexity of the project and actually the size of the customer's customer determines the complexity of the project often.

 That gave us a little time to continue the maturity journey purely from a project management perspective. The interesting thing we did was, we went on like a 100, 120 calls through the course of a year where we were building out this product to do like demos of what we were building without the product being ready, without giving it in their hands and to collect feedback to observe what caught their attention, what did they like about what we were presenting?

Very often this was mostly click through marks, not necessarily the product itself. Parts of it were the product that we built out. Parts of it were click through marks. And we told folks, Hey, we're not trying to sell you because we are six months away from launching anything anyway. So just jump on the call, go through this with us, show us how you're doing things today.

And we'll show you, how we plan to go about building this. So those who were interested showed us a lot. So that helped us understand. how manual things were today for them, what were areas where we could add value when they showed us their current process. And then when we showed them our demo, even though it's not a real product, we could assess their reactions and know if we are on the right path, where should we put in more focus, et cetera.

And there's a very specific reason we chose not to give an early version of a product in their hands. We wanted it to feel like when they get it, they already see the full vision of the product, not part of it. Because if you give them part of it, they're going to take it down a path, which they're more used to versus if you give them your full vision, then they understand the trade offs better.

Ken Lempit: That makes a lot of sense. And it's a way to sort of start building some momentum and as we'll discuss in a minute community around this as well. Right. Why don't we talk a little bit more about. What's needed in professional services automation. You focus on client onboarding and professional services management.

So what are those top problems to be solved in this space? You know, I'm not sure people have thought, 

if they haven't been exposed to it they might not have thought about it. And how did you solve solutions that solve things that didn't exist in the market yet? 

Sri Ganesan: I think people put up with siloed systems today.

They, they've, you know, they believe here is what is there and here's what I can use. So they just put up with it. So what we figured is, what are the areas where we can add true efficiency and intelligence for our customers? A good example could be I am running a project, it's a 100k budget to run this project.

And mentally, I have some heuristics around when I finished the solutioning stage, we should have probably consumed, 20 percent of the budget by then. But when I'm actually tracking my efforts in a different system and tracking my project in a different system, you don't get to easily tie that data together of how much effort got spent in what phase of the project.

In Rocketlane, because you do it all in one place, we are able to configure early warning systems that tell you, you just finished discovery. You've already spent 12 percent of the budget. You should have been at under 7 percent. So maybe a leader needs to pay attention over here. I think one of our biggest insights is when it comes to client facing project delivery, the ball is in your court always as a vendor and you need to actively be thinking about,

how do I get warnings and signals early enough from a system so that as a leader I can jump in faster and resolve situations? I can, you know, pull in the right stakeholders on the client side as well, to figure out a situation versus waiting till it escalates and comes my way as an escalation. So I think that's a big idea that we focused on to build a lot of automation around for,

you know, the system to flag risk, the system to flag problems early. And that's something that's really resonated with our client base. The other thing of course is, you know, every team, every department prefers to use one software for tracking all of the things that they're doing. And I think our view is, when you provide this unified experience, it creates a lot of efficiencies by getting rid of redundant work.

A lot of teams operate without true understanding of their capacity, supply demand on the, services team side. And are they using spreadsheets? To, to do things very manually, but when you tie together project management experience with automated resource management experience, if you change your project schedule, you don't need to worry about, Hey, did I also go and update my spreadsheet?

It's automatically taken care of. So those were the kind of things that we uncovered when we looked at, what are people doing manually today that we can go in and replace? What are they not able to do because of lack of all in one software? 

Ken Lempit: And, you know, all in one, definitely on trend, right? You know, if you think about the kind of the state of SaaS today, so that definitely plays in your favor.

But I think we should talk about your actual go to market strategy around community. I feel like this is an underappreciated play, and you started building community even before the product was ready for launch, right? Can you open up a little bit about how you did that? what your approach was and the tangible benefits to Rocketlane of, you know, being community led in no small part.

Sri Ganesan: Absolutely. Happy to chat about that. I think, you know, the, the idea sort of started in an organic way. As I mentioned, we were going on lots and lots of calls with, folks in this space to validate what we were building to showcase demos, etc. And we were asking people to open up their playbook.

How are they doing things today? One of the things we figured was, a lot of the leaders who were passionate about the space, they had uncovered different areas where they had made a lot of progress in, in their space. A couple of examples could be someone did a really great job of what they did in their kickoff meetings, which set the tone for the rest of the project really set things on the right path.

Someone else would talk about how they, you know, their enterprise engagements have like a steering committee meeting that runs a certain way, which is helping them with the right outcomes with those clients. And we figured that there's so many tips and tricks and best practices that all of these folks have, which if they share with each other, it would make for so much more learning.

And so we just happened to by chance, invite one of those leaders saying, Hey, do you want to talk about how you went down from like six months of implementation to two months of implementation? and they said yeah sure, I can do a session and so we posted about this on LinkedIn and in a WhatsApp group and got a lot of responses saying, Hey, I'm interested in hearing the story, did that online session.

And part of that session, I just said, Hey, by the way, so many questions coming up in this session, maybe I can create a Slack group and invite you all so you can continue the conversation. And that's how the community really started, right? So it was very organic. like 21 people joined that session, 17 of them joined the community.

And then we started inviting people to join the community. We will do two sessions like this every month. And we made it a prerequisite to be part of the community to join the sessions. And, it just started snowballing from there. By the time we launched eight months later, we had around 800 people in the community by then.

Today, we have more than 4000 people in the community. So it's grown. It's, you know, taken a life of its own. There's a lot of learning for us from the community, a lot of content that we take, repurpose and use as well, because whatever we learn, we want to share with everyone. So we make it into like posts, eBooks, et cetera, that we are able to share.

But also we're able to borrow ideas from there to influence our product. So I think a lot of great ideas have come from our community. It helps us look like a thought leader in the space because we're truly learning from people all across the globe. We're doing great things in their function and we are, you know, re sharing those learnings with a wider audience.

And I think, more than us finding customers from the community, which also happens, I think the community adds much more credibility to who we are. And that's how I see the value of community. It's the learnings we get. It's the influence it has on our product. And it's also how we get seen in our space as someone who's unique, because we're sort of leading with community and thought leadership.

Ken Lempit: So you're encouraging learning among the members of your community, right? 

Sri Ganesan: Absolutely. 

Ken Lempit: Is there any formality now to this community? Is it organized and administered or is it still kind of just this single cell organism? 

Sri Ganesan: We do have a community manager, right? And the idea is to keep this as a space where.

People discuss these topics. We don't want, you know, someone coming in and marketing something. Even we don't push our product into the community. We, in fact, I would say for the first two years, probably no one knew that this was from Rocketlane. You know, it would say powered by Rocketlane on the website somewhere, but inside the community, we never talked much about Rocketlane and it was all intentional. 

It's about creating that space where people discuss. Things that are important to them, not to create a space where we go and sell. And I think that's helped shape it a certain way. It still has a life of its own. The community manager, of course, hosts events and shines the spotlight on good work that people in the community are doing, shares the learnings and so on but that's about it, right?

Sri Ganesan: We, we do restrict who gets into the community. We want people in the function to be in it. We don't want, you know, just people who want to check out. any and every community to come in and join. So we're careful about who we let in. 

Ken Lempit: it sounds like a great asset, not only to Rocketlane, but the participants.

It's a really great laboratory for you and them. Tell me what the symbiosis is there between the Slack community and Rocketlane TV and your annual conference. You know, do they overlap at all? what's the play there? 

Sri Ganesan: Yeah, absolutely. The play really is in a way every company needs to think of themselves as a media company in the future.

And that's what set us down this path when we saw community taking off. We said, Hey, what more should we be doing from an audience building perspective? And what more do large companies that are creating categories do? We want to be seen as a category leader. So what are the other things we should be doing for the space?

And conference was an obvious one where we said, Hey, there is no conference for customer onboarding as a space. In fact, even for professional services, there isn't like a dedicated PS person only type conference. People end up going to customer success events and so on. So we saw that as a big opportunity for us to own an event like the biggest event in the space.

So we launched, the first two years we did this purely as a virtual event, but last year and this year, we've gone into a physical event as well. The event is called Propel. It's happening in the Bay Area. This, this time,  May 14th and 15th, 2025. rocketlane.com/propel. If anyone listening is interested. But yeah, I think the idea was how do we bring all these great thoughts and inputs we're getting from the community and amplify that to a larger audience.

And how do we shine the spotlight on people doing great work in the space that can inspire others who are attending, listening to these events, right? So, that was the purpose of the conference. Again, it's not a Rocketlane themed conference. It's very much for people in the space. It's very much thought leadership.

So I think that's worked out really, really well for us. We had some very, very interesting conversations and topics that we've covered at Propel over the years. This year, the theme is, we're calling it the Intelligent Delivery Organization. How should teams look to become more nimble, smart, and radically efficient given what's happening around us with AI, et cetera.

So it's, it's been fun building that conference and community. Rocketlane TV is, it's more like a Netflix of our own. We wanted to bring a novel experience for consuming all the great content we are creating from community, creating from the conference, creating from many other, you know, we host a podcast as well.

also give an outlet for third party content creators to get more visibility, right? So instead of just putting it up on YouTube, here is a very focused destination for people in professional services. If you have great content for PS, add it here and more people who are interested in the space will find it.

So that's been our approach to all of these media properties of sorts that we're building. 

Ken Lempit: Hey, I noticed that the super early bird for the conference is probably expiring just as we're recording. Do you want to give a promo code for the Saas backwards listeners to maybe extend that early bird? 

Sri Ganesan: Yeah, we can do a SAS backwards 15 promo code so that

people get an additional 15 percent off if you want to register. 

Ken Lempit: That's great. So we'll, we'll put that in the show notes too, for people. Thanks so much. It looks like a very worthwhile conference. You want to give people a little bit more on what the experience as they're at Propel 25. 

Sri Ganesan: Yeah. So we're going to have leaders from companies like MongoDB and Palantir and many other popular

tech companies who have professional services and implementation teams as the primary speakers at this event. And the idea is to showcase teams that are doing very, I would say groundbreaking work in terms of how they're intelligent about their processes, how they're intelligent and smart about how they're automating a lot of work used to be done manually.

Also how they're preparing their organizations for the future, how they're rethinking roles in a delivery team, given, I think every function is in a way having to reinvent itself this year. And I don't think while a lot of professional services teams are actually working on implementing technology and AI for their customers, very often they're not doing it for themselves.

And we wanted to. make this event something that will, you know, shake them up a little and say, Hey, look at what's happening around you. You need to pay attention. You need to jump on this band wagon. 

Ken Lempit: Awesome. 

I want to get into the subject matter itself as sort of the last thing we talked about on this episode.

And in our prior conversation, you mentioned that

a gigantic amount of churn is decided really in the early days of you know, onboarding and using a solution, right? The beginning of a relationship kind of defines how it's going to turn out. What are the specific strategies and is there data that you've uncovered that helps your customers to improve onboarding and to reduce the churn associated with that beginning of a relationship?

Sri Ganesan: Yeah. I think the very surprising statistic I heard was 97 percent of all churn, churn at first opportunity, meaning, you know, in the first January timeline comes up, is decided in the first three months of a partnership. And, you know, when you think about that, these first three months are where you, the customer experiences,

what it is to partner with you. And they almost instantly decide, Hey, is this a good vendor, good partner for me to bet on? Or am I going to struggle with them? And very often, it's down to even how you kick off with them, or, you know, the earlier in the journey is where more judgment happens, typically in any relationship or partnership.

And after that, it's either, you know, them saying, Hey, you confirm my, judgment, or Oh, this is an exception if you do otherwise. So if you make a good impression early on, then even if you make a mistake, it's seen as they're usually good, they made a mistake. Now, if you start off on the wrong note, then the first mistake is a confirmation that, Hey, we made a wrong decision with this vendor. We need to part ways. And hence that, a lot of focus needs to go into how you do things very early in the journey. Be super careful. Have a very neat playbook of how you execute with customers. The more thoughtful it is, the more impressive it is, the more you can teach the customer early on in your journey, the more they will rely on your partnership.

So, I would actually say engineer those teaching moments into your partnership very early. We do some very interesting things around that. Even in our kickoff call with any customer project. how prepared we come to that kickoff call, what things we do to impress them in that, which they go back with, Oh, we should be doing this as well with our customers, right?

So we want to leave them with those kinds of ideas share one example. And there's something I learned from our community, where one step in our process that we outlined for our implementation projects is that we'll say, Hey, after you go live after a month, there's going to be a reverse demo that your team does for us.

To show us how you're using the product. It helps us assess how our training was. It also helps us assess if there are any other quick wins we can help you with. And this resonates well with the customer and they go, maybe we should do this with our customers too. So that's the, you know, reaction you want from them early on in the journey.

Ken Lempit: So I think that's a great pearl of wisdom right there. The reverse demo, any software company could really benefit from having their customers demo back, not only, you know, from the standpoint of helping them use the software better, but they may uncover reasons why that you haven't thought of, right?

The capabilities there, but you haven't really emphasized it. So, the reverse demo. Sri, thanks so much for that. And that's, that's the reward for going the distance in this episode. If people want to learn more about Rocketlane or reach out to you, how can they do that? 

Sri Ganesan: I'm Srikrishnan Ganesan on LinkedIn.

sri@ocketlane.com on email, srikrishnang on Twitter, Hit me up I'm happy to be in touch and help out with anything I can or learn from anyone I can. 

Ken Lempit: That's fantastic. And if people want to reach me on LinkedIn, they can linkedIn/in/kenlempit. My demand generation agency for SaaS is called Austin Lawrence group.

And if you haven't subscribed yet to the podcast, you can do so wherever podcasts are distributed or on YouTube. If you'd like the full video. Sri, thanks so much for appearing on SaaS backwards. 

Sri Ganesan: Thank you for the opportunity. Again, Ken enjoyed chatting with you today.