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Today we’re excited to talk to NachoNacho CEO Sanjay Goel about how a serendipitous friendship can change into the perfect business model.

NachoNacho - A one-stop-shop for buying and managing SaaS - Alchemist: Founder Stories

Published on 
February 9, 2021

When you hear the name NachoNacho, what do you think it is? Well, that’s the young startup that offers businesses the ability to consolidate and manage all their subscriptions in one account, right? Yes, but that’s not even half of it. And while NachoNacho may mean business, founder and CEO Sanjay Goel had something else in mind for the scrappy company’s title. 

In Hindi, NachoNacho translates to dance dance. That’s the whole point to NachoNacho. To make its users happy and to bring them such joy that they just want to get up and dance. With a fun and clever name like that, you may not be surprised to hear the exciting origin of how Sanjay himself got to where he is today. And how NachoNacho will soon be the Amazon of B2B SaaS.

Sanjay received his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. From there, a fellowship from UCLA brought him to Los Angeles to receive his MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Ever the busy-body, Sanjay then went to Japan to work for SECOM as a robotics research engineer. 

Sanjay Goel, CEO NachoNacho
Sanjay Goel, CEO NachoNacho

He returned to America to leave engineering behind and chase a career in finance. He landed himself a job at BARRA (Berkeley), the portfolio modeling company revered by asset managers. He then moved to New York City and found critical success working his way up the ladder and eventually becoming a Managing Director at Citigroup. After achieving what he wanted in the world of finance, he eventually moved back to Silicon Valley to found his first startup, Ideas.com. It was even featured in a live CNN interview. But after the tech crash of the early 2000s, Sanjay eventually returned to finance and moved to London, landing many high-level jobs at several banks throughout the rest of the aughts. 

His second startup eventually came to fruition in Berlin, where he founded Oximity. A couple of years on, he moved back to Silicon Valley to grow the startup further in the US. In 2016, Oximity was acquired by Scribd, a subscription service. In many ways, this would lay the foundation for his third startup.

If you’re starting to get the impression that Sanjay moves around a lot, you would be right. Over his extensive and ever-changing career, he’s lived in six countries: India, Mexico, Japan, UK, Berlin, and the U.S. Not impressed yet? Consider the languages he is proficient or conversant in, including Spanish, Hindi, English, Japanese, French & German.

This kind of movement and ever-changing interest in learning new things led him to become somewhat of an amateur athlete and adrenaline junkie. To this day he enjoys sailing, skiing, scuba diving, windsurfing, flying helicopters and airplanes, and most importantly rock climbing. Why is rock climbing the most important? Because this is where fate would align for both Sanjay and Alan Szternberg and NachoNacho would be one step closer to being born. 

While Sanjay was off conquering many business paths for almost 20 years, Alan was also an ever-curious trailblazing soul. He founded the companies Gooplus and Mirabelle before meeting Sanjay, has lived in several parts of the world, and enjoys all of the same sweat-ridden, pulse-racing hobbies. Coupled with the fact that he is a brilliant full-stack developer, Alan would become the brains behind the backend of he and Sanjay’s startup. Their uncanny similarities proved that the two were not only kindred spirits but the perfect business partners. Enter NachoNacho, stage right. 

At its heart, what they built together is equal parts a subscription management application and a marketplace for subscriptions. Businesses start by managing their existing subscriptions, but then can seamlessly buy new ones from their marketplace at substantial discounts. What seems like an obviously good idea now took many months of research and exploration. But that's the hallmark of a good idea - it should feel like it was an obvious play the whole time. 

Today, you could draw similarities to companies like G2 Crowd and Capterra. But the truth is, there is no competition. These platforms only have relationships with SaaS vendors. NachoNacho is a true marketplace with direct and long-standing relationships with both businesses as buyers and SaaS vendors. 

“NachoNacho is the best version of every similar tool, combined with the nicest team that could build it.” Dan Giaime CMO,  Delight Rewards

Manage your current subscriptions as a buyer, and find other subscriptions you may like in their marketplace based on what you already use. Simultaneously, a seller can feel comfortable knowing that their product is going to a consumer who wants to use it. As if this harmony couldn’t be made better, both sides benefit from a secure experience where their privacy is the highest priority. NachoNacho carries brands like Copper, Canva, Monday.com, and AWS to name a few. And with investors like Magic.fund, Brainstorm.vc, Leonis.vc, and Alchemist Accelerator, you know they’re a safe bet.

With NachoNacho, there is no more wasting money on duplicate subscriptions within the same company. No more company coffers are being diminished by paying for a SaaS product you haven't used in years. Instead, save your money and spend it on subscriptions you actually need for the work-life you actually want. It all kind of makes you feel like you want to get up and “dance dance” doesn’t it?

About the Alchemist Accelerator

Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.