How do VCs view investing in Indian SaaS companies without US-based customers?

I still think it's similar in the sense that if you are not making a lot of your revenue from the world's biggest software market, which is the US, you don't really have that much of a chance to succeed. 

The other thing is, for a lot of industry verticals, the US has the most sophisticated buyers and therefore, you can create the most sophisticated product because you have sophisticated buyers who are doing certain things. Therefore, the US is a great place where your product can actually improve a lot. It's like a crucible where it's just going to go through a lot more innovation than it would if you were just focused on India. 

I believe a SaaS company starting from India has to be global from day one. They cannot focus on India and then, pivot and start focusing on other markets. You absolutely have to be global from day one. And that's something we believe at Appsmith because that's how we started. 

Appsmith today has around 10,000 companies that use us every month, but we have sent zero cold emails and we have never run ads. It's been completely organic, which is really surprising to people because people assume that if you have to run a SaaS business, you have to go do cold email and you have to do a sales-led approach. But here’s me sitting in my bedroom, and our product reaches 180 countries of the world and 10,000 teams in a month. That is only possible today.