Built enterprise expense management (B2B SaaS) 0 to 1

Happay is B2B expense management SaaS. Built out of India, Happay caters to mid-market & enterprise segment.

I joined Happay in 2016 when company was serving startups with <20 employees. Headed product function, built the enterprise offering grounds up, scaled to 400+ mid/ enterprise customers in 3 years.

Happay was acquired by Cred in 2021 for $180Mn.

Customer Discovery: Worked with early customers / prospects as co-creators to understand their personas, motivations, challenges, processes, policies, workflows etc. Gathered insights and laid foundation for the enterprise offering.

Built MVP: Designed and built MVP (web-app). This included multiple modules like workflows, expense policies, custom fields, role based access controls, accounting integrations etc. Onboarded beta users of early customers for continuous discovery and feedback. Iterated and improved the offering with these beta users.

Card Platform Integration: Improved in-house prepaid card management system (CMS) and integrated it with SaaS offering for enabling card controls for admins.

Built Mobile App: Built mobile experiences for expense filing and expense approvals.

Built Travel Module: Developed full fledged travel requisition module for employees to get business trip approved.

Developed Automations: Brainstormed and developed numerous automations in the product to ease expense reimbursement. Some of these automations included auto-categorisation of expenses, auto-report-filing on scheduled dates, auto-approval of policy compliant reports, auto-settlement of reimbursement funds into employee bank accounts, auto-posting of expenses in accounting SaaS (e.g. Quickbooks) etc.

General Availability: Started onboarding the customer pipeline and added tons of enhancements on the process in the process.

Doubled Down on Automations: Built even more integrations to ease users’ life. Started auto-reading expenses from SMS / mails, integrated with vendors like Uber / Ola to pull invoices, integrated with banks (e.g. HDFC) and card schemes (e.g. Visa) to pull expenses from card statements, built G-suite app for expense filing, enabled in-mail expense approvals, among other things.

Self-Serve Ticket Bookings: Integrated with OTAs (e.g. Cleartrip, FCM) to enable self-serve air ticket booking experience on the platform.

OCR: Evaluated multiple OCR providers and built in-house OCR capabilities to capture receipt details effortlessly.

Vendor Payments – New Product Line: Led discovery and POC efforts for new product line – Procure to Pay (P2P) workflow followed by integrated invoice payments. Integrated with 3 leading Indian banks to support 1 click invoice payment experience.

Scaled Teams & Processes: As head of product, I built and groomed a team of 15+ product managers, product analysts and UX designers in these 3 years. Helped scale engineering team 3X – from 20 to 70. Set up product and engineering processes with the engineering counterpart. Supported defining implementation processes to assist GTM.

Key Customers: PwC, Oxford University Press, Tata Group, Maruti Suzuki, Dominos Pizza etc.