ARTICLE AD BOX
For years, the story of Indian technology had a familiar shape. We built the back office for the world. We wrote the code, ran the support desks, managed the infrastructure that kept other people’s companies humming. It was a good story, and a profitable one. But it was always someone else’s product getting sold, someone else’s brand on the box.
That story is changing, and it’s changing in a place most people aren’t looking. Not in the funding announcements or the unicorn league tables, but in the unglamorous middle of the software buying journey, where a procurement manager in Dubai or a CIO in Houston sits down to figure out which of forty vendors actually deserves a demo.
I’ve spent enough time watching how businesses buy software to know one thing for certain: the hard part was never building good products. India has plenty of those now. The hard part is getting found by the right buyer, at the right moment, in a market eleven time zones away where nobody has heard your name yet.
That gap, between a capable product and a paying customer who lives in another country, is where most ambitious software companies quietly stall. And closing it is, frankly, the most interesting problem in B2B tech right now.
The buyer changed before the sellers noticed
Here’s something that gets lost in the noise about AI and automation. The B2B software buyer has fundamentally rewired how they make decisions, and most vendors are still selling like it’s 2015.
Walk through how a purchase happens today. A business needs, say, a new CRM or an HR automation tool. Nobody picks up the phone and asks a salesperson to explain the category. They open a browser. They read comparisons. They look at category listings, scan reviews, dig into a buyer’s guide, maybe watch a founder talk about the product on a podcast. By the time a vendor’s sales team ever hears from them, the buyer has often already built a shortlist, and if your name wasn’t on the page during that research, you were never in the running. You lost a deal you never knew existed.
The research backs this up almost uncomfortably well. Across studies of B2B purchasing behaviour, buyers are routinely shown to complete somewhere between half and two-thirds of their decision-making before they ever speak to a vendor. Gartner’s widely cited work on the buying journey found that buyers spend only a sliver of their time, around 17 percent, actually meeting with potential suppliers, and when several vendors are in the mix, any single one might get just 5 or 6 percent of the buyer’s attention. The decision is made in the dark, in the tabs you can’t see.
This shift has a brutal implication for software companies chasing global customers: visibility during evaluation is no longer a marketing nice-to-have. It’s the whole game. If buyers decide in the research phase, then the research phase is where you win or lose. Everything else is theatre.
Why “global demand” is harder than it sounds
Now layer the geography problem on top.
A software company in Bengaluru or Pune might have a product that genuinely competes with anything out of Silicon Valley. But ambition runs into friction the moment it crosses a border. A buyer in Riyadh searching for a fintech tool, or a manufacturer in Texas hunting for an ERP, isn’t going to stumble onto an unknown Indian vendor’s website by accident. There’s no brand recall. There’s no category presence. There’s a trust gap, a discovery gap, and a “I’ve literally never heard of you” gap, all at once.
The conventional fix is to spend your way out of it; pour money into paid search and ads in the target market and hope enough of it sticks. Anyone who has run those campaigns knows how that goes. You burn budget buying broad, top-of-funnel clicks from people who are nowhere near a decision. The cost per genuinely qualified buyer climbs into the absurd. And for a bootstrapped or early-revenue company trying to crack a foreign market, that math simply doesn’t work.
What these companies need isn’t more traffic. It’s the right traffic; buyers who are already in motion, already evaluating, already in the category. That’s a completely different proposition.
The marketplace as a discovery layer
This is the part of the story I find genuinely compelling, and it’s where an Indian company quietly built something the global market needed.
Think of what a software discovery marketplace really is when it works. It isn’t a directory. It’s the place buyers go to decide. They land there to compare two products head-to-head, to see who ranks in a category, to read an honest buyer’s guide, to figure out what “good” even looks like in a space they don’t fully understand yet. The platform sits exactly where the decision gets made – mid-funnel and bottom-funnel, the evaluation and shortlisting stage – rather than chasing the vague awareness layer at the top.
For a software vendor, being present on that platform during that exact moment is worth more than a thousand generic impressions. You’re not interrupting someone’s day. You’re showing up precisely when they’ve raised their hand and said, “I’m looking for something like you.”
And the audience on these platforms isn’t tyre-kickers. When you look at who visits a serious B2B software marketplace, the picture is striking: the largest share are CXOs and VPs, followed by IT managers and business heads — the people who sign off on technology spend, not interns doing homework. The traffic skews toward product detail pages, category pages and buyer’s guides, which is to say toward intent, not idle browsing. These are buyers with budgets and a problem to solve.
That combination of decision-stage moment and decision-maker audience is the difference between a marketplace and a billboard.
India’s surprising new role
Here’s the twist that I don’t think gets enough credit. The company that built one of the largest of these B2B software marketplaces did it from India and is now using that engine to help software companies everywhere reach buyers everywhere.
A vendor doesn’t have to be Indian to benefit. A SaaS company in the United States looking to expand into the Gulf, an African fintech firm wanting to land enterprise clients in America, a Middle Eastern ERP player chasing demand across three continents, they can all plug into the same discovery layer. With listings, comparison placements, category presence and trust signals already living where buyers research, a company in one part of the world becomes discoverable to high-intent buyers in another, without having to rebuild brand recognition market by market from scratch.
That’s the genuinely global piece. A platform born to serve the Indian software ecosystem has matured into infrastructure that routes international demand, software companies in India, the US, Africa and the Middle East finding customers in India, the US, Africa and the Middle East. The buyer doesn’t care where the marketplace was founded. They care that it helped them make a smart decision quickly. The vendor doesn’t care either. They care that they got found.
It’s a quietly subversive flip of the old outsourcing narrative. India spent decades being the place where the world’s software got built and supported. Now an Indian platform is becoming part of how the world’s software gets discovered and chosen. Same engineering culture, same operational discipline — pointed at a completely different and arguably more valuable problem.
What this means if you’re building
If you run a software company with global ambitions, I’d offer one reframing that has changed how a lot of founders I’ve talked to think about growth.
Stop thinking about demand generation as a megaphone and start thinking about it as placement. Your job isn’t to shout louder than competitors in a foreign market where nobody knows you. Your job is to be present, credibly, in the handful of digital rooms where your future customer goes to make up their mind. Visibility in those rooms’ compounds. Recall builds. The shortlist starts including your name. And eventually the inbound starts arriving from buyers who feel like they discovered you themselves — which, not incidentally, is the most powerful kind of lead there is.
The companies that understand this early will quietly pull ahead of competitors who are still spending fortunes interrupting strangers. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their product, which is genuinely good, can’t seem to find customers across the water.
The world’s next great software stack is being assembled right now, one evaluation at a time, in buyer journeys spread across dozens of countries. The interesting question isn’t whether your product is good enough to be in it.
It’s whether you’ll be visible when the buyer goes looking.
English (US) ·