Two months into SaaSBoomi and Avinash, known for throwing curveballs, suggests that we plan a growth retreat in the Bay Area. This is in addition to our flagship event: Caravan.
SaaSBoomi has been curating Growth Retreats for a few years. We’ve had a couple of editions across Bengaluru and Delhi NCR. Over these past three editions, we’ve had 30+ companies, and 35+ founders attend these sessions. It’s not just the Growth Retreats that we have been hosting, we host the very well-known SaaSBoomi annual, SGX, Bootstrapped founder retreat, and many, many more. Just for context, in 2024 alone, we’ve hosted 15+ events and have had 2,000+ people attend them.
So, why is this one especially important and daunting?
This is our first international growth retreat and that too in a city halfway across the globe.
But there’s a more philosophical reason why this is a formidable task. Our primary ambition of hosting these events is to encourage camaraderie. We imagine a world where Indian founders can rely on each other for support, help, inspiration, and guidance. We want these events to not just be a place where they glean tactical knowledge about running their business, this is important, but it is about helping people make connections. In the quest to build a $1 trillion product nation, as a collective, we’ll have to help each other build.
The idea was to set up a retreat for around 12 to 14 founders, each with an ARR of $3 million or more in the US market, all looking to scale their SaaS businesses in the country. It would be a closed-door event, encouraging peer-to-peer learning and building real connections. Sounds straightforward, right? But for me, it was uncharted territory—new geography, a totally different time zone, and all the challenges that come with it.
I can’t lie though, I’ve enjoyed every step of the journey. A key driving force for me has always been the pursuit of continuous learning in everything I do. With Vinod Muthukrishnan, Mohit Garg, Shubham Goel, and, of course, Avinash Raghava being part of the Growth Retreat Team, I was extremely sure I would not be disappointed.
I’ve been part of SaaSBoomi for six months now, and every day I’m still amazed by the sheer dedication and commitment of each volunteer. For the past three months, we’ve had weekly calls with Vinod, Mohit, and Shubham, no matter where they are in the world, whether they’re traveling for work, on vacation, or even sneaking away from a dinner party for a quick half-hour chat.
Our plan of action was simple: divide and conquer. I needed to find the perfect venue close to SFO but still a little further away from the city so that it feels like a retreat and plan the logistics for the same. Avinash was in charge of reaching out to the right participants and Vinod, Shubham, and Mohit had to ensure that we had an ambitious list of speakers and ensure that they were part of the retreat.
It wasn’t as easy as it sounded, I learned very quickly that organizing things in the US is not the same as organizing things in India. You need to wait at least 24 to 48 hours for responses, people are not open to sharing phone numbers, so you need to wait for them to respond to the emails (which can take several days at times), and there is a protocol and contract in place for every big or small transaction. At times I felt extracting teeth may be easier, but this is just part of the process.
With less than a month to go, I am extremely proud to say that the team has been able to put together an incredible lineup of speakers and founders for this two-day event.
We have 14 founders from 12 unique companies participating in the retreat along with our 5 volunteers:
Amarpreet Kalkat
Arvind Parthiban
Avinash Raghava
Gaurav Sharma
Girish Redekar
Kedar Kulkarni
Kishore Natarajan
Mohit Garg
Neha Arya
Our event starts with Jessia kicking off the workshop with an icebreaker session to help founders acclimatize to the format of this growth retreat and introduce themselves to their peers.
The next day begins with a networking breakfast followed by a workshop on revenue architecture and GTM alignment with Jacco van der Kooij. Up next is deep dives on enterprise sales with Vispi Daver, pivoting, and reinvention hosted by Umesh Sachdev. There will also be a very personal, first-person POV on the founder’s well-being, board management, scaling, and personal branding by Abhinav Shashank.
We end the workshop with a conversation with Dheeraj Pandey on how to build an operating rhythm for your company, scaling leaders and long-term teams.
While I was writing this, I checked our registration. Interestingly, about 75% of our founders registered even before we released our guest list or agenda. The fact that founders are willing to invest their time and money in this retreat even before having all the information humbles me.
Thank you, founders. Our product nation dreams just took another step into the sunlight.
Join us to unpack deep insights and frameworks to tackle the challenges of scaling SaaS businesses in the US markets. Learn more about the Growth Retreat here.
