B2B SaaS
Autoninja — India’s largest auto CRM
Autoninja is India’s largest auto CRM — a SaaS product used by 2,000 auto dealers to manage 200 million customers and 2 million phone calls every day.
The journey
I joined a scrappy startup of 12 people that had just found product-market fit. Along the way we raised $6 million in venture capital, became profitable, and exited to ICICI Lombard for $32 million.
I started in operations and analytics, got customers through hard software-adoption journeys in Metro, Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities, and worked with the CTO on back-office operations — which taught me, fundamentally, how software works.
Discovering product management
Working at the grassroots, I found myself training users, identifying gaps, and mocking up what users wanted before I knew what a wireframe was. Within a year I had created my own role blending product and operations, and was promoted into product management.
What we built
A CRM that organised all customer data and gave dealers a 360° view of each customer for the first time — sales, service, insurance and finance in one window. Dealers using the CRM saw a 12% average revenue uplift.
I rebuilt the CRM’s reporting module from an ad-hoc mess of SQL and schedulers into a coherent product — hundreds of mocks, a full spec, shipped in under a year. Sales velocity rose measurably.
I also had an important role in the ETL at the core of the product — a custom data warehouse pulling millions of fragmented customer records from dozens of invoicing systems. I extended it to dozens of automakers, enabling thousands of their dealers to use the CRM.
In Kshitij’s words
“Himanshu has strong leadership skills… As a Product Manager, he worked closely with a large team of engineers and Engineering Managers, earned their respect without line authority and led them to build some of the most complex modules in our CRM product. He left a plush consulting position at ZS to join us when we were just 12 people. He is a versatile talent and any organisation would benefit from having him on their product or innovation teams.” — Kshitij Saxena, Co-founder & CEO (from a recommendation letter)
Autoninja was the career move where I discovered the power of technology — and product management.