Background

Questions

1. Tell us about what inspired you to start Appsmith. What was your thesis behind it?
2. Appsmith is differentiated in the space with its open source approach. Why did you choose the open-source model for Appsmith and can you share how you think about the role that open source plays in internal tools SaaS?
3. When you started Appsmith, who were your first customers? What did they use Appsmith for? How did you find your initial product-market fit?
4. Were the people who came after reading your launch post, individual developers who are building something quick for their own teams and their orgs? Have those profiles changed over the years?
5. Building and selling in India vs. the US. What does your geographical segmentation of customers look like right now?
6. Do you see any differences in terms of the developer requirements or the nature of developers between the US and India? If you do see those differences, how are you straddling them?
7. Talking about the US, we’ve seen some very large companies emerge out of open source there, such as GitLab and Docker. In India, the typically large open source SaaS companies have been few—Zoho, FreshWorks, and Whatfix, all which are large SaaS but proper. Do you see any blockers in terms of India building large open source SaaS companies?
8. What are your thoughts about the Indian SaaS ecosystem? It’s evolved over the last 8 or 10 years. What are the drivers of its evolution? Where do you think it's going?
9. A few years ago, VCs wouldn’t invest in Indian SaaS companies that did not have customer bases in the US because they thought that was where the largest market was. Has that changed? Is it still the same? Is it somewhere in between?
10. When you say you're building a global internal tool for engineers, one of the top names which come to mind is Retool. How do you position Appsmith specifically vs. Retool and more generally vs. players like Airplane, Superblocks and some of the others? Are there specific use cases or industries where you think Appsmith is better suited?
11. I am looking at your pricing page. Don't you have a mix of seat-based plus usage-based pricing, like USD 0.40 plus USD 20 for the core user? Could you help us understand the pricing model a little bit better?
12. Let’s turn to the kind of use cases for Retool vs. Appsmith vs. Airplane. There are certain platforms engineers use to build internal tools where the employee/CTO/finance team is hitting a broad database. There are other tools used to build an external tool where someone from outside the company's hitting the broad database. How different are these tools? Do your customers use them interchangeably?
13. Appsmith and Retool cater to developers who can write JavaScript, React, SQL. Webflow, Airtable and GPay are for the completely non-technical folk. Could you highlight the differences in features of external tools and tools being used to build apps for internal customers?
14. You said React was probably your biggest competitor. In that context, do you think you could phrase Appsmith as a lightweight PaaS used for deploying internal tools? If you agree, do you see more modern PaaS like Vercel or Netlify being your competitors in this market?
15. You mentioned usage-based, and being capped per user. How does your revenue expand once you're inside an org? Since you’re selling to the engineers, does your revenue get capped at the number of engineers an org can have?
16. What does success look like for Appsmith? Say five years from now, what does Appsmith become if everything goes well?
17. Lastly, is there anything you’d like to add that we have not touched upon about Appsmith or the internal tools market?