"The TAM was under $100 million. We built anyway."

Bhanu Chopra started RateGain with $150,000 in personal savings, no institutional backing, and no knowledge that venture capital even existed. What he had was a niche no one else thought was worth chasing.

In this episode of SaaS from Scratch, Vani Kola sits down with Bhanu to unpack how a consultant who was just trying to find cheap flights on business trips ended up building the integrated tech stack behind Expedia, Booking.com, Marriott, and 3,200 of the world's top travel brands. TAM today: $90 billion. TAM at entry: a fraction of that. He entered anyway.

What the episode covers:
— Why starting with a small, defensible niche isn't a limitation, t's the only real strategy
— How RateGain pivoted from a Kayak-style consumer site to B2B SaaS because Expedia called and the money was running low
— Why domain expertise is overrated, and why Bhanu now actively hires people who have never worked in travel
— The shift from subscription pricing to outcome-based models: charging hotels a cut of every booking delivered, not a monthly fee
— What "land and expand" actually looks like when executed over 20 years across an entire industry vertical
— Why founders obsessing over TAM in year one are asking the wrong question at the wrong time

This is a masterclass in patient category creation. How to enter small, stay close to the customer, and keep expanding the problem you're allowed to solve, until the market you're in looks nothing like the one you started in.

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