HubSpot. Google. Saleseforce. AWS. Zoom.

Listen Time: 25 Minutes

Most workers in the SaaS industry will know (and work on) these platforms. But what is something that sets these companies apart from their lesser-known competitors? 

Marketplaces. 

SaaS marketplaces serve as a guide to potential customers for all the things they can do if they adopt a product. Marketplaces also work as a showcase for integrations, partners, and products. Today, companies are discovering that having a great product isn’t always enough to retain customers; however, having a suite of offerings and applications that help them easily connect and extend all their day-to-day tools just might be.

There are many factors that determine how a company should develop their marketplace strategy, but the one constant?

Your customers’ needs. You have to ask: 

1. What integrations and partners are most important to my customers’ goals?
2. How can those fit together for maximum value and frictionless buying?

Once those questions have been answered, you’re ready to start building your own marketplace. You’ll be able to promote your partners, integrations, and products to your customers and future partners all in one place.

In this episode of Smart Route, we sat down with Nik Sanghvi, Vice President of Alliances & Business Development at Caspio and the leader of their partner program. Their low-code marketplace helps companies grow revenue, source new business opportunities, and offer go-to-market solutions. 

Listen in to this conversation to discover how marketplaces came to dominate the SaaS industry and how building a SaaS marketplace can help creators and partners rake in revenue while driving customer loyalty.

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About Nik Sanghvi

Nik leads Caspio’s partner program. Over a career spanning 20 years in technology, he has worked with some of the largest global technology companies, as well as digital transformation and intelligent automation startups in Silicon Valley. Delivering easy-to-use and powerful technology solutions is not just a job for Nik, it’s a passion. When he’s not working, Nik loves spending time with his family, reading, or working out.

Episode Transcript

Courtney

Hello and welcome to episode 25 of Smart Route I’m your host and strategic partnership manager at call tracking metrics Courtney Tyson

Working in partnerships for a SaaS company for me has been really enlightening.  I learned a lot about the value of partnerships and how partnering with other companies really helps to drive growth for ours. One of the most popular partnership concepts at the moment is this idea of a company having what we call a marketplace where a company can showcase the different partnerships integrations products and services etc that it offers and so today we’re going to dive into this concept deeper with Nik Sanghvi VP of alliances and business development at Caspio. Thank you so much for being here with us Nick.

Nik Sanghvi

Yeah, great to be here, Thanks for having.

Courtney

Excited to chat with you and before we get started I’m just going to share a little bit more about you with our audience so we invited Nick today because he’s really an expert on marketplaces having built one from the bottom up Nick Les casio’s partner program casio is the no code platform for business applications. Nick’s career has been spanning over 20 years in technology and he’s worked with some of the largest global technology companies as well as digital transformation and intelligent automation startups in Silicon Valley he delivers easy to use and powerful technology solutions and that’s a passion for Nick. So. Thanks again. Nick for being here and let’s get started. Let’s talk about the basics Nick so tell us a little bit more about the concept of a SaaS marketplace and why companies are diving into them.

Nik Sanghvi

Yeah, absolutely so the the whole concept started with more and more SaaS applications not wanting to stop at just being software but rather. Wanting to be a platform and so this whole idea of ah you know, 2 sided platforms where you enable ah creators or your partners or developers on the one hand to create applications but it could be many other things right? like. For example, there can be marketplaces for artists who showcase their wares. Etc as well. So this whole two-sided marketplace approach started really taking off and ah ah, people started seeing successful companies like uber airbnb etc bringing this whole concept to life on the b two c side and. Then b two b players like salesforce and others also realize that we don’t necessarily have all the answers ourselves that are you know our passionate fans in form of customers or partners or developers who maybe already. Building out stuff. You know for their own use but which can also help many others and so that’s how that whole idea of Marketplace is started and it’s a booming economy today.

Courtney

Yeah I I whenever I think of the concept of marketplace is what I think back to is Etsy when Etsy launched right? And how great that was for creators to be able to share what they make with others right? And so Nick what you’ve just said today is yeah the sas marketplace is essentially the same thing. It’s a tool that’s helping companies to. Enable their partners or other companies might want to work with them to build with them and work with them in a different way than they normally have  so you’ve done this in your current role. You’ve built a marketplace from the ground up and we’d like to hear more about you and your role. Ah, Vp of alliances and business development and really what your journey was like to build the Caspio marketplace.

Nik Sanghvi

Yeah, absolutely. So , again , you know just to clarify for the benefit of listeners. It’s a big team effort right? So any of these efforts like especially in starting a marketplace for your Saas application or your. Ah, platform as a service is a huge team effort. There’s several people working on it and so for example, just just from our perspective at Cure Caspio There’s marketing that is involved in. You know, coming up with the product marketing as well as just the overall website. Ah, you know, ah marketing team in coming up with the whole concept. The idea the you know, discussing commercialization etc. There the product team gets involved in making sure that the marketplace integrates very nicely with the product and then. There is the development team that actually builds out the whole thing then there’s alliances or Partnerships Team. Ah, which reaches out to partners. Get the word out saying hey or Marketplaces live now. , come and list your applications. Could also also be just those internal either professional services or other developer teams that will have to initially see the marketplace with some applications because nobody wants to look at an empty storefront and If You have an empty store friend no partner will want to list their apps either. So there’s a lot of a huge team effort and what we felt is you know there is there’s but there’s definite huge value here. In a number of different areas. 1 is getting your own customer. You know first of all providing value to your customers by giving them a variety of these apps. Some of them are even completely free. Some might be paid for but you know. Typically it would be a fraction of the cost that it would take them to build it themselves. Ah so you’re giving value to your customers by increasing their attention and stickiness with the platform. Ah you are Also this is a legion mechanism as well. So You know if someone were to search for low code. No code Crm Template Caspio’s crm template on our marketplace might show up and then that becomes a direct use case and then they’ll be like oh Wow So I get this template and this is and I can build it.

Nik Sanghvi

My own way on my low code to no-code, using a low-code platform instead of using Salesforce or huport etc. So there’s a lot of value. Partners can make additional revenue out of ah you know instead of just delivering solutions on a case-to-case basis.

Courtney

And then.

Nik Sanghvi

Once they’ve developed one solution. They can actually keep on monetizing it for hundreds of other customers. So that there’s definite tremendous value here and sometimes there’s just you know they? there’s these passionate fans in terms of developers etc on the ecosystem who just want to contribute back to the community right? I mean there’s so many of them. They just want to see that hey I spent so much effort in building this out I Want to give it back to the community. So all of those.

Courtney

That’s wonderful. So just to kind of recap you, you kind of went through a few different.  you know value I guess value adds to the marketplace or why it’s valuable right? So number 1 marketplaces are providing value to customers. It’s making customers stickier right? It’s retaining them more. Likely because what a marketplace can do is help them to connect their tech stack. So if you’re allowing someone to help connect 2 pieces of software. It helps them to be stickier with both of those pieces you talked about the marketplace being a lead gen mechanism which is huge right? I think we’re going to talk a little bit about how. Companies kind of buy for marketplaces and how marketplaces have kind of shifted buying behavior a little bit and then two marketplaces can be a huge marketing tool for partners on the company who host them. So for partners. It’s allowing them to get in front of your audience.  for those hosting them I mean it’s showing. All of the different tools that you have under your belt or integrations which if someone comes to your site shopping. They want to see those things to see if your tool is going to be great for them. You talk about just enabling devs making sure that they kind of have an environment where they can build and then share which I think is cool and I know that some marketplaces even monetize those things. So with that said, there are lots of different types of marketplaces out there. Some that maybe just kind of host. Maybe what we call cards right? like hey these are our partners. This is our partner marketplace but there’s also the deeper marketplaces such as what Caspio built.

Courtney

Which is a true build environment where partners can go and build with Caspio which is very cool and that’s really where the retention and the stickiness is coming from in my opinion. . So so many companies have built or they’re in the process of building marketplaces just like you have because obviously they see the value. You talked about the benefits of a marketplace you know from a company hosting 1 and and their partners and their customers was there anything else that you wanted to kind of throw in there as. Is maybe like ah a benefit or a value ad for either. You know the company partners or customers.

Nik Sanghvi

I think , ah one of the other things that does come to mind is that  nowadays you know SaaS platforms as well as pass which is like platform as a service symbol ah like Caspio. Ah. Many of us have a component of usage-based pricing right? So ah like at casio. For example, if you use a certain number of of what we call data pages which are basically different screens in your application then you go. You had to go to the next higher level similarly you know in hubspot or salesforce if you use certain amounts of functionality. You have to bp up to the next level. So. Marketplaces also help you in your expansion with your current customers as well. So that expansion revenue also does get served by marketplaces because ah 1 you know customer might have for example, come in to use Caspio for say their crm to begin with. But then they come across this whole hey I have this oh did these people also have this marketing library and ah you know project management system as well as I t ticketing system all of these are templates let me just download them. Check them out and see if they work for me or not and.

Ah, lo and behold. You certainly have customers who are using Caspio a lot more. They’re going up to the next plan. So there’s an expansion revenue component as well in there and then there’s of course I think you also kind of made a reference that is that. To make the whole marketplace transactions very smooth and seamless. You would ideally want to act as the kind of intermediary in those transactions. You’re not necessarily wanting customers to, you know, fish out their credit cards and pay each and every vendor on the marketplace. Although you could do that but ah, the ideal smooth frictionless experience would be kind of like an Apple app store or something if you go into an app you know the app store you buy it? Actually you’re paying Apple, Apple’s taking a cut on that and then. Passing it over to the partner Apple in the meantime also performs a lot of you know the performing quality check security check etc. It also so if you say hey oh no I want my money back or something like that. You just know if you know to reach out to Apple they would refund it to you so ah, it does. Make the operation a little smoother for the partner as well because all they need to know they don’t need to bother with hundreds of different customers calling in requesting this that refunds whatever they’re just getting a check at the end of the month and the experience for customers also much more improved.

While acting as an intermediary and providing this value ad ah your platform cannot obviously extract a certain fee out of it as well in the process. So.

Courtney

Yeah so I think that’s a huge factor to consider right? when companies are planning to build a marketplace the whole kind of monetization right? and what you’re saying is that it’s kind of best to kind of act as the intermediary in a way. To help with those transactions and it’s a way to help your partners monetize what they’re building with you giving them the opportunity to make money for themselves not only for Caspio I think that’s a great point. So outside of Monetization Nik What other factors does a company need to consider when thinking about building a marketplace.

Nik Sanghvi

so I mean the first thing would be first of all, you know, not every product is going to be suited for a marketplace you need to.

From a marketplace perspective like you said at the very basic there’s just like a partner directory of sorts and maybe you’re helping in making the connections like ah for example, Vix has a partner marketplace where partners list their and vix is a website building tool for those who are not familiar. But. And the list partners with their catalogs and all of that and customers can reach out saying that hey I have a project vix does some intelligent routing of those projects to different partners etc. So that’s it. Kind of the first step in building it? , and that’s actually how we also got started at Casia but then you need to have something that allows for that extensibility right? So we are Caspio obviously being a no code- low code platform there.

Yeah, that was a given from day one is you can build applications etc so that there needs to be some level of extensibility that you can build on top of and ah you know you need to provide those developer kits or whatever so that and the documentation etc right? so. And again, you know Zoom initially started off as just a meeting app. But as they kind of grew now Zoom has a marketplace or you’re going to go in and there’s various apps that interoperate with Zoom and all of that so it can be kind of a gradual step in your journey. But your application does need to be extensible via Apis etc to, you know, build on top of there are also other you know we generally think of apps and such but there is also data marketplaces are also a big thing so snowflake has a data marketplace. Ah there’s not an app related there at all. But you have hundreds of data vendors out there. You can, you know, get any sort of weather related data such as financial information, currency exchange rates, stock market information, etc. There’s hundreds of these vendors providing these datasets. So running into terabytes and terabytes of information you could buy them gets automatically integrated or uploaded into your snowflake database and then you can start using the data like that. So that’s datasets which is in fact.

At Caspio as well. That’s the next category that we are adding and kind actively reaching out to partners to get that added as well. So that there’s a bunch of different categories that you can think of and see what would help your customers.

And basically if we always keep that perspective or point of view from a customer’s point of view I think we can definitely start building and adding value and kind of to your earlier point around. You know the? ah. Being an intermediary and providing that value and thus being able to also extract that in a commission or whatever out of it I would just compare Craigslist and Airbnb which one would you prefer. Craigslist is not going to charge you anything. But you don’t know. Ah how valid that list listing is you? You don’t know you don’t have that trust factor you don’t have anything whereas airbnb. In fact, they even think that hey this is the airbnb fee right? And you’re like ah but that’s okay because they’re providing such a much better experience.

Nik Sanghvi

Right? So that’s where you have to decide where you want to be on that spectrum.

Courtney

Yeah, and I think one of the most important things you just said too is you need to evaluate who your customers are and what they’re looking for in order to determine what your marketplace is going to look like. I think that that was ah a huge point. There’s a lot of different factors to consider when building a marketplace but. Considering what your customers will find value and it is important we talked a lot about how oh go ahead? Sorry Nick.

Nik Sanghvi

Yeah, and actually just 1 more thing that you know since you brought it up I think I collected and and by the way this I was going to mention that there is this. And towards the end I was going to mention that there is this fantastic book by Andrew Chin of ah and recent horovitz. The book is called the cold start problem and ah you know Andrew spent time at uber and has worked with many other startups and ah. Ah, he’d spent time with Uber during its very early days so he really discusses this problem at length and for example in a two-sided marketplace. What do you want? first? Do you want the drivers first or the passengers first and it’s kind of a catch when you do right? Like. Ah, without the drivers. The passengers are not going to be there and without the passengers. Why would anyone want to be a driver but so many things to think about.

Courtney

Sure and I selfishly loved this question too. Nik being that you know you’ve had so much experience building marketplaces and here at Ctm we’re in the process of building ours too and you know we’re just kind of on the forefront of kind of scoping that out. So you know speaking to you with that experience certainly helps. , we talked a lot about marketplaces really kind of being this indirect selling tool. , and so I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how marketplaces have changed how professionals purchase software. But also you know how businesses sell their software too from those different perspectives. How are marketplaces changing? You know the way it’s purchased and the way it’s sold when we’re talking about software of course.

Nik Sanghvi

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely so marketplaces I mean they’re just marching and becoming a much bigger share of how software is sold and purchased you know so started off more as like. Ah, hey this would be a nice add-on like salesforce etc opening up like an app marketplace of sorts and and then but then soon enough there were companies and tech companies that were built on just offering solutions on the salesforce marketplace. Just like there of course companies built out of the app store right? So on the b two c side similarly and there have been so many companies that are just you know all that they do is cater to the marketplaces. . Like aws marketplace is another thing that comes to mind there are companies that are tightly integrated they’re hosted on Aws and they just want to make the experience frictionless for buyers to buy. So if you’re already an Aws customer and. Something is listed on the aws marketplace where you can provision buy it and provision it directly on the same bill as your Aws bill. It just makes it a whole lot easier. You don’t know how to go through as many hoops in terms of your procurement and your finance teams and especially the bigger ones. The organization.

Ah, the more these things slow down your deals in closing so you know this is going to take over more and more of the buying and selling processes as we go forward. There is also from a buyer’s perspective again. Just like that whole like you know airbnb experience the other value of airbnb. You can see those ratings and reviews and you know that these are actual people like you who have lived who’ve stayed in those properties etc. That’s the same value that you get out of a marketplace as you get those. As they call it the huge EC or the US generates rated content which is very valuable nowadays is there reviews and ratings. , you know , when you see people like yourself and you read the reviews of you know, love the Crm template. Wish it had these so and so things. Right? Then you’ll be like oh yeah, and then if you see a lot of like if you’re a small business and you see a lot of small business customer saying hey I run a 50 member business and this this employee management system worked perfectly for us then you’re like oh yeah, okay, this makes sense for me right. Ah, whereas if it’s you’re a large company then you’re like oh no, this is not going to maybe cut it out for me etc. So there’s all of that value as well. That comes through.

Courtney

That’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s Interesting. You spoke a lot about the user-generated content. I guess I didn’t think about it from that perspective right? I’m thinking very much about the company building in the Market. Place and then using it as a marketing tool and selling tool but also the company hosting the marketplace using it as a selling tool a marketing tool but to think about how someone who builds on a marketplace can then have that user content generated I mean those are those are reviews and we know. Value of reviews and how much weight we as consumers hold to them So That’s that’s really very interesting to think About.  I think in general Marketplaces just have a variety of different benefits, and the fact that they’re this indirect selling Tool. It’s going to drive. You know the value and money really right to both parties and all parties involved is really what’s the main benefit here right? , so this has been extremely insightful and helpful to kind of better understand the concept of Marketplaces How to get started the different types and such.

Nik Sanghvi

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Courtney

You had plugged in a book earlier, The Cold Start Problem, Nik, but I wanted to ask if there was anything else that you’d like to plug before we conclude today.

Nik Sanghvi

Ah, yeah I mean absolutely since we did speak a lot about Caspio and welcome viewers and listeners to check us out at wwwww.caspio.com and that’s spell casp I o dot com ah, and while there check out our marketplace check out our partner program and see and of course check out our platform as well. Ah, we think it’s the leading low-code. No-code platform and so do a lot of analysts and users on various platforms. Ratings platforms like G2 and Capterra so would love to hear back from your audience on what they think.

Courtney

That’s wonderful. Yeah, definitely go check out the marketplace that Nick and his team built from the ground up. It’s really nice to look at I’ll put it that way right? You guys did a great job and I wish you all the luck with it I know you’ll you’ll do great.

Courtney

Definitely if you have any interest in learning more about building marketplaces connect with Nick on Linkedin too. So when we share the episode. We’ll be sure to include your social handles as well. , so yeah I mean in general again. Marketplaces have a variety of benefits. They really allow a company to showcase its partnerships and feature capabilities. Course means that marketplaces act as a selling and a marketing tool and for consers marketing marketplaces I’m sorry are giving you an easier way to buy. They’re giving you insight into what other users  are saying and how they’re using tools. . So marketplaces are just in general. A really great and direct selling tool. There’s different types out there. So definitely fill your customers out and fill your company out before you decide to move forward and you know look at the concept of what you’re building. So again, Nik, this was wonderful. Appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us. Thanks again.

Nik Sanghvi

Yeah, thanks, it was great for me as well. Courtney, great chatting with you. Thanks for having.

Courtney

Wonderful again. Vesta block to you in casio and the new marketplace thanks Dick all right? That was great.

Nik Sanghvi

Yeah, thanks Bye now. Okay.