7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Service-Enabled SaaS to $15M

The hardest part about founding a company isn’t having the idea. It’s figuring out who actually needs what you’re building, and then convincing them to buy it. Most founders get this backwards.

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 seven hard-won lessons from building his company’s go-to-market motion. These aren’t theoretical frameworks. They’re tactical insights from someone who’s negotiated contracts on his wedding night, hosted dinners where nobody showed up, and spent fourteen months failing at cold outbound before shutting it down entirely.

Lesson 1: Service-Enabled Models Demand Surgical ICP Precision

If you’re considering a service-enabled SaaS model, your ICP needs to be more specific than you think possible. “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?”

This isn’t standard B2B segmentation. For Spendflo, it took four quarters of iteration to nail down their ICP: technology-first companies with 200 to 2,000 employees where SaaS spend represents a significant portion of overall spending.

The upside? When you nail the ICP, traditional SaaS problems disappear. “The best part about this model is it’s outcome based,” Siddharth explains. “You don’t have issues with traditional issues that you have with software, which is there’s no adoption, there’s no implementation fails.”

Lesson 2: Learn to Say No as You Scale

The early-stage pressure to sign every customer is intense. But that creates technical debt in your customer base. Spendflo made a strategic decision that transformed their GTM motion. “We made a decision to actually say no to a section of the customers that don’t work for us,” Siddharth shares. “And we’ve said yes, and we said, hey, we will do everything in our power to acquire a certain type of customer.”

This clarity cascades through your entire organization. “Where we prioritize our time and where we prioritize our dollars, from a GTM standpoint, has become a lot more robust,” Siddharth notes.

Lesson 3: Start Events with Your Account List, Not the Event Itself

Most B2B companies plan events backwards. They pick a venue, set a date, and hope the right people show up. Spendflo inverts this entirely.

“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.”

Pull your target account list. Filter by city. Only then plan the gathering. Cost management came through strategic partnerships. “We partner with a lot of communities, finance communities, procurement communities, as well as other SaaS companies that kind of sell to the same ICP,” Siddharth shares.

Lesson 4: Executive Participation in Events 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. “That’s what it takes to build genuine relationships with these customers.”

This means serious travel commitment from founders and executives. The journey takes 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.”

Lesson 5: Know When to Kill a Channel

Spendflo invested fourteen months trying to make cold outbound work. They built the team, implemented systems, gave it a genuine shot. It never delivered. They shut it down.

The lesson isn’t that cold outbound doesn’t work universally. It’s about recognizing when a channel isn’t working for your specific motion and having the discipline to reallocate resources.

Lesson 6: Match Your Analyst Strategy to Your Buyer

Category positioning affects where you invest in analyst relations. For Spendflo, Gartner and Forrester have adjacent categories but nothing that fits perfectly. Rather than force fit, they focused on where their buyers actually research.

“I don’t think it necessarily makes sense if you serve the mid market because the mid market buyer is trying to solve a genuine problem and he doesn’t have the nearly necessarily the time or the resources to go figure out what Gartner is saying about that particular category,” Siddharth explains. “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.”

Mid-market buyers aren’t reading Magic Quadrants. They’re asking peers and reading G2 reviews.

Lesson 7: Creating New Categories Requires Constant Education

When you’re building at the intersection of multiple existing categories, positioning confusion persists. “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.”

Spendflo had to marry SaaS management, spend management, and procurement management into one platform. “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. Creating a new category isn’t a one-time positioning exercise. It’s ongoing education in every conversation, every piece of content, every event.