How a Mumbai agency owner pre-sold an influencer SaaS to $50K a month

Who built it, and what they built

Yash Chavan is the founder of SARAL, an influencer relationship management platform built for e-commerce businesses. The software helps brands find influencers, reach out to them, manage the relationships, and track how those partnerships perform.

The company is bootstrapped out of Mumbai and sells primarily to brands based in the US. Yash describes himself as a marketer who left engineering college, moved through sales roles at early-stage startups, and eventually focused on growing SaaS companies.

Where the idea came from

Before SARAL, Yash ran a marketing agency. When the iOS 14.5 privacy changes weakened Facebook ads, the agency shifted its focus to influencer marketing and ended up managing programs involving more than 10,000 influencers, all handled manually.

The manual workload overwhelmed the team, and the tools already on the market struck them as pricey and outdated. That gap convinced Yash there was room for something simpler, cheaper, and easier to use.

To test the idea, he emailed close to 2500 people in his target segment and held roughly 35 calls with e-commerce founders and marketers just to hear their frustrations, with no selling involved. He then pre-sold the product to five early adopters at $99 each before any code existed.