Your portfolio company Billvik Invoicing (ARR Rs 30 crore, growth 55%, CAC payback 15 months, Rs 1,500 a month) faces three competitors at ARR Rs 80, 22 and 12 crore, growth 30%, 90% and 120%, payback 11, 24 and 30 months, and price Rs 1,200, 1,900 and 900. Where does Billvik win, where is it exposed, and what should the board push on?

Billvik wins on balance: second-best payback at solid growth. Its exposure is Rival C, which grows 120% at a 40% lower price. Rival C spends about Rs 2.50 to win each rupee of ARR against Billvik's Rs 1.25, so its growth is bought and depends on funding. The board should push for win and loss data against Rival C, a test of a cheaper tier, and a payback ceiling so Billvik does not chase Rival C's growth at Rival C's cost.

If you run one of four tea stalls on a street, you watch two things about each rival: how fast its queue is growing and how much it spends to get people into the queue. For software companies those are growth and CAC payback, and putting them on one chart with size as the bubble shows who is buying growth and who is earning it. Price is the third lens: it tells you which customers each rival is aiming at. The answer to a portfolio and competitors question should land on a position, an exposure and an action, not a feature list.

Payback in months tells you how many months of a customer's gross profit it takes to recover the cost of winning them. At similar gross margins, payback divided by 12 is roughly the rupees of sales and marketing spent per rupee of new ARR: Rival A spends about Rs 0.92, Billvik Rs 1.25, Rival B Rs 2.00 and Rival C Rs 2.50. Rival C added about Rs 6.5 crore of ARR last year and spent around Rs 16 crore to do it; Billvik added Rs 10.6 crore for about Rs 13 crore.

Billvik wins in the middle. It grows almost twice as fast as Rival A and acquires customers at less than two-thirds of Rival B's cost. Its exposure is the low end: Rival C charges 40% less, already has about 11,111 customers against Billvik's 16,667, and at today's growth rates would match Billvik's customer count next year and its ARR in about 2.6 years. Those rates will not hold, because a 30-month payback needs a lot of capital. But if Rival C raises a large round, it can keep buying the small-business customers Billvik also targets, and price pressure would hit Billvik's growth before it hit its margin.

Three things. First, win and loss data against Rival C, by deal size: if Billvik is losing small accounts to a cheaper product, the board needs to know before it shows up in growth. Second, a controlled test of a cheaper tier with fewer features, watching whether it wins new customers or just moves existing ones down. Third, a payback ceiling, for example no channel above 20 months, so management does not answer Rival C by matching its spending. The limit of this read is that payback and growth are trailing numbers from each company's own reporting; the board should ask how Billvik's team measured the rivals' figures before acting on them.