Bala (Balasubbhramaniyam Ayyaswaami)

Bala (Balasubbhramaniyam Ayyaswaami) is VP of Marketing at KITABOO, a B2B SaaS digital publishing platform. He owns go-to-market across five publishing segments: K-12, trade, associations, content aggregators, and professional training. Five buyers, five sets of economics, one team. He runs it from Chennai with people spread across India.

His approach is unfashionably narrow. Pick one problem you are personally stuck on. Build until it works. Move to the next one. Nothing gets a budget until it has already saved somebody a week.

An example. Segmenting event contacts by hand took four people seven days and still mis-tagged the accounts that mattered most, at seventy to eighty percent accuracy. He had no engineering background. He took a free two-day training session and built a classifier that takes an email address, a company name, or a website and returns the correct segment along with its reasoning. For more than 2,000 Frankfurt Book Fair exhibitors and attendees, seven days of work became three hours, more accurately than the manual process ever managed. It also ended the internal fights over lead ownership, which he counts as the bigger win.

He is direct about the accounting. The return was time given back to his team, not revenue on a slide. Most of what he built before it failed. He publishes the failures alongside the wins because the publishing industry already has enough case studies where everything went according to plan.

He runs KITABOO's presence at the industry's major events, including the Frankfurt Book Fair and the London Book Fair, and works the accounts that decide whether digital publishing actually reaches readers or just gets announced.

He is interested in the same thing, whatever the subject: what did you build, what did it cost, and did it survive contact with your own team?