Founded in 2020 by Deepak Bala, Srikrishnan Ganesan, and Vignesh Girishankar, Rocketlane is a B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that is building a unified workspace enabling customers to collaborate on onboarding projects.
Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-Founder & CEO of Rocketlane, discusses the origins of the company’s name, why they chose Rocketlane.com as a domain, and what’s new and interesting in their future plans.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how Rocketlane got started?
Vignesh, Deepak, and I (Srikrishnan) worked at Freshworks together, and we’ve onboarded many large mid-market and enterprise customers. We experienced firsthand the pains involved while onboarding customers – how chaotic it can be and how hero-driven it typically was. It solely depended on one or two individuals on the team to ensure the project crossed the finish line. We also realized how bad the experience could be when information is siloed across different tools like email, Slack, project management software, and documents. The accurate picture of what’s happening in any project is never readily available/accessible. This leads to escalations, disappointments, and eventually, churn.
Onboarding is the phase where you make or break trust with your customers, and many companies are unfortunately breaking that trust. We aim to change that.
Rocketlane brings the right kind of visibility to your onboarding projects and unifies all information and experiences in one place. By doing so, Rocketlane helps businesses deliver a consistently solid experience for every customer. That’s how Rocketlane was born. We started the company in April 2020. And we named it ‘Rocketlane’ because our mission is to accelerate how quickly you can deliver value. And if you put your projects on Rocketlane, they are going to take off faster.
What was the process of selecting a brand name like? When did you know this was the one? What was the reason to get the domain name Rocketlane.com?
We named the company ‘Rocketlane’ because our mission is to accelerate how quickly businesses can deliver value to their customers. And if they put their projects on the Rocketlane, then they are going to take off faster. Hence the name. This was a premium domain name, but we went ahead and purchased it because we really loved it.
How has owning Rocketlane.com affected your business? Do you own any other domain names?
I think customers and prospects like the name a lot. We’ve had many of them mention that they love the name, Rocketlane. I don’t know if it’s had a tangible impact on the business, but it’s definitely a good brand name for us.
Other domains we own are – preflight.cx, preflight.club, preflight.vip, and rocketlane.co.
What was the vision and purpose of your company when it first started and how has Rocketlane evolved as a brand since?
Our vision is to make customer project delivery beautiful and professional. Think customer-facing projects, think Rocketlane. Our initial vision was more towards client onboarding and that’s really worked well with SaaS companies and helped us grow quite fast in a short period. Becoming a category leader on G2 recently is a testament to our growth.
We are currently evolving Rocketlane to support multi-org projects – like a company working with a partner ecosystem to onboard customers.
With our new enhancements, these third-party partners and vendors can also hop on to Rocketlane with the right level of visibility and collaborate easily with their clients.
How do you value your brand?
We’ve been building Rocketlane with a focus on brand from early on. Branding is important to us because we are in a new category.
As the category is still emerging, we want Rocketlane to be synonymous with onboarding and customer-facing projects. So in that sense, we place a high value on our brand. That’s also why we ensure that we are always on social, actively posting about customer onboarding, and trying to be thought leaders in this space. We even run a podcast, we have a community for Customer Success professionals called Preflight, and we’re hosting the first-ever event in this space called Propel22. So we are indeed building a brand actively and we’ve also exhibited Rocketlane at big external events like SaaStr, Gainsight, Pulse, etc.
Has the pandemic affected your company in any way? What has changed since?
We started building the company after the pandemic struck in April 2020. And we’ve been quite intentional about how we make and communicate decisions as we expand our team. We want all our team members to understand why we’re making certain decisions, and make sure they are all on board.
From introducing team members to each other to learning how Rocketlane works, videos play a major role in our company.
We make sure every member watches the recordings of our problem discovery phase and customer demos as a way to bring everyone on the same page.
We also run our all-faces meeting (instead of all-hands) week on week to build more rapport within our team. We even have a bunch of interesting rituals we’ve created that enable a remote team to function and deliver work better. All of this will be even more exciting when we go back to the office.
What do you do to make sure your marketing is effective?
Distribution and storytelling are key aspects of marketing. So any content we put out has to be useful, engaging, and well-seeded to enable distribution. We always ask ourselves, “Is this content share-worthy? Why will someone share it?” before anything goes out.
What would your advice be to entrepreneurs who are just starting out?
To entrepreneurs starting out, I’d say it’s never too early to focus on branding. Of course, people will tell you to crack product-market fit initially.
But if you know which space you’re building in and if that’s not going to change, it definitely makes sense to start early on the branding front. Know everything about what your organization is trying to solve and showcase yourselves as thought leaders in the space you’re building for. Put your brand at the center of everything that you do. I’m specifically talking about B2B startup entrepreneurs here.
What do’s and dont’s can you share when it comes to branding and naming?
When it comes to branding and naming, I would say create separate names for different entities wherever applicable. For instance, our CS community is called Preflight, our event is called Propel, and our podcast is called The Launch Station. It’s important to tie all your names into the overall brand. Everything we do is around the “rocket” theme. This way it becomes easy for your brand to be memorable.
Having said that, there’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to naming. It should feel right for what you’re doing, it should resonate with your customers and prospects. So make sure to validate that before you make any name(s) final.
It should feel right for what you’re doing, it should resonate with your customers and prospects. So make sure to validate that before you make any name(s) final.
Srikrishnan Ganesan – Co-Founder & CEO – Rocketlane
What is next for Rocketlane?
As mentioned earlier, we’re going after more categories of customer-facing projects. We’re making Rocketlane fully support even multi-org projects – like a company working with a partner ecosystem to onboard customers.
With our new enhancements, these third-party partners and vendors can also hop on to Rocketlane and collaborate easily with their clients.
Though our original focus was to cater to customer onboarding teams at B2B tech companies selling to mid-market and enterprise customers, we already have companies like consulting firms and marketing agencies using our product. Our goal is to get more such use cases going for Rocketlane.
Last thing, if some of our readers have more questions. Where can they reach you online?
You can always reach us at care@rocketlane.com
You can follow Rocketlane on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook or visit their website to find out more about the platform.
How does your brand name match your company vision? What new horizons can a better name open? Get in touch if you feel your brand deserves a better name, we are always happy to help.
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