In this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders podcast, Vijay sits down with Karthik Suresh—co-founder of Ignition and DoubleLoop.AI—to explore his unconventional journey from high-frequency trading to building one of the fastest-growing platforms in the AI agent space.

Karthik shares how early career lessons in finance shaped his product mindset, why user empathy became his north star, and how doubling down on positioning and messaging turned go-to-market into a product strategy.

You’ll hear how Ignition was born out of a gap in product marketing tools, why the team pivoted to DoubleO when GenAI exploded, and the exact steps they took to validate product-market fit—from leveraging community partnerships to gating product access behind payments.

Other topics covered:

• How to break into startups without prior experience
  
• The secret to founder-market fit and team dynamics
  
• Why most AI tools are vaporware (and how to tell the difference)
  
• Building brand trust through market education
  
• Why “pay if it works” is the next frontier in SaaS pricing

Whether you’re navigating an early-stage startup, experimenting with agents, or refining your GTM playbook, this episode delivers tactical insight with startup grit and product clarity.

Connect with Karthik Suresh on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthiksureshlbs/

Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijdam/

Listen To The Episode:

From Wall Street to Workflow: Karthik Suresh’s GTM Pivot into the AI Agent Era

I always start the show with the signature question, would love to get your thoughts. I know you’re not the traditional CTO, you’ve got a product and a product management background, so I don’t consider you as a traditional CTO.

But having said that, we’d love to get a peek into your product side of the world and test. So with that, how would you define and you go-to-market?

Yeah. So go-to-market, obviously, go-to-market means so many different things for different people. In fact, a go-to-market from a marketing perspective seems very different from a go-to-market from a sales perspective.

You have the same title. You talk to the person, they’re like, oh, I’m a go-to-GTM guy, and then I’m a GTM, and then he’s like, oh, I’m doing marketing, I’m doing sales. But from my perspective, at the end of the day, it’s typically about making sure you have a very clear idea of who you’re targeting, who’s your end customer, what’s your value prop, what’s your distribution strategy, what’s your pricing and packaging.

But more importantly, the two most important things for me are what’s your messaging and what’s your positioning. So it’s like when you have your ideal target audience, how do you message the product in which they get it? Because as a PM or as an engineer, I’m more worried about talking about features, like, oh, that product does this, that product does that.

But from a go-to-market perspective, it’s more about communicating to the users in a way they understand why they should use a product to solve their problem. The messaging is very important. And then positioning.

Positioning is like, okay, of all the tools given out there, why should they use your tool? What’s your differentiation? So getting those two things are very key.

And then of course, the final thing is the channels. What channels are you going to use to get to the users? So to summarize, who’s your end-user?

What’s the value prop? What’s your messaging and positioning? And where do you, and where and how you find those end-users in a repeatable manner?

Yeah, no, very good. I mean, I love the way you simplified it, quote-unquote simplified it, right? It always starts with the end-user first and foremost.

And what are the problems that they are struggling with on a day-to-day basis? There’s a plethora of problems, but then you as the product person and from a go-to-market perspective, which specific set of problems are you looking to solve? And what does your product do?

And articulating that through your messaging and even for them to reorient, for the user and buyers to reorient and get a sense of, hey, why should they even consider you? That’s where the positioning comes into play.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, the funny thing is like when you’re talking about it, it just occurred to me when I see a lot of these websites or ads, a lot of them are like, oh, this is how they’re all talking about how good the product is, how good the feature is.

Yeah.

But they never talk about the customer problem. Like I don’t care, you have this 20 features, right? So yeah, a hundred percent.

Yeah. I mean, that’s the biggest thing that I have, one of the biggest complaints from a go-to-market perspective where majority of the brands and the companies, they talk more about themselves versus the message of why someone should even care about looking at them in the first place or considering them. Right.

Exactly. That’s the biggest thing. Perfect.

I love this talk. Let’s get going. I know I’m excited about this conversation even more so now.

So with that, let’s step back, talk to us and listeners about your journey. I mean, all the way from maybe from your college days and walk us through your journey until what you do and who you’re serving today.

Sure. Yeah. So I was born and brought up in India.

I moved to the States to study at Carnegie Mellon. And my first job was in New York in algorithmic trading and high frequency trading space. So very different from what I do today.

But it was also like really transformational for me because those were some very shaky times after the financial crisis. And I was also a part of this company called Knight Capital Group, which had the highest trading loss ever. Like we lost like 400 million in 30 minutes or something like that.

And that was like getting that experience at such an early age made a big difference in the way I see the world. After being there for seven years in Wall Street, I felt like it’s more about taking money to make more money. There was no real impact, no tangible impact on the world.

So which is why I want to go into more building products. And I made the transition to tech. I did like an MBA in between just so that I can use that as a career switcher.

And then I transitioned from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. And when I got here, my first job was at a company called Kraft. I was the first employee.

And that’s where I was there till CESA. And that’s where I learned the art of the trade, we say that. So how do you find product market fit?

How do you pivot? And how do you go from zero to one? So I was there till CESA and it’s a CEC company, I think.

So I learned a lot. And then I was like, oh, I’m done with startups. I’m never going to work for a startup again.

And then joined Facebook. And then I was a PM at Facebook search and then PM at Facebook reality labs and had a lot of fun and very smart people. It’s a very different set of problems.

More of scale, which is product market fit. But then after a year or so, I was like, you know what? I want to go back to a startup or do something on my own.

So the itch never disappeared. So I met Derek, my co-founder through OnDeck. OnDeck is like a community of people looking to start companies.

So I joined OnDeck, I met Derek, and we were like, hey, let’s start Ignition, which is basically the first source of true platform for product marketing and product management. And it’s also kind of AI native. And we started Ignition in 2021.

That’s when we started. So it was a good run. We raised some seed round and we have some good customers, but the whole bet was product marketing as a function is going to expand in the coming years.

And there’s no tool serving product managers in a dedicated fashion. And so let’s do that. So that’s how Ignition was born.

But somewhere along the journey, what happened is Gen AI became a big thing. So that’s when the GPT 3.5. When GPT 3.5 hit, I still very vividly remember talking to Derek saying, hey, look, all the SaaS tools, we are in trouble.

Ignition is in trouble. But having said that, we were building AI for Ignition and we were like, okay, you know what? We got to pivot.

And that’s how 00AI was born. So we basically spun out 00 as a separate brand outside Ignition, which is now a horizontal platform to build AI agents for automating any business process. And then we’ve been building on it for the last X number of months.

And we went from zero to pretty quickly 304k in two, three months. And now we are continuing to grow that business. So that’s my journey so far.

Fantastic. Great journey. I mean, a lot of learnings.

In fact, you’ve already experienced so much in your quote unquote young career that many people aspired to. So congratulations to you on that. So let’s double click on a few things here.

I get Wall Street. I know, I understand why you left it. I mean, quick context.

So for me, I did my MBA from Cornell University. And of course, being in upstate New York, Cornell East Coast over there, which means I did bump into so many of the Wall Street job personality types. And I clearly could resonate to what you are sharing, which is, yeah, Wall Street is good.

I mean, from a money perspective, but is this what I want to do? And that’s the similar story for you, right? I mean, money, crazy hours, glitzy, glamor life, sure.

And bragging rights. But besides that, what is impact from an operational perspective? So that’s what led you to join, I believe it’s Kraft.

Is that right? Did I get that correct? Yeah.

So walk us, and especially the listeners, through your journey from the Wall Street finance oriented tech job to going as a product manager at Kraft.

So that’s quite a bit of a journey right there. So I think, so after my job in Wall Street, I tried interviewing for a bunch of firms here, and it was very hard to get any jobs or roles, to be honest. So I was trying to get a lead.

And some people do manage, but for me, I felt like, and also the roles I was getting was very junior or I had to restart from scratch. So I wasn’t really sure. And that’s when I’m like, okay, let me go to business school, even though I had a software engineering background and software engineering all my life.

And then I was like, okay, let’s go to business school, because it seems like that might be a better entry. And then the business school definitely helped me pivot my career from Wall Street into tech, which is weird because a lot of people from tech go to business school and go into finance. So I did the other way around.

After my computer science education, I worked for Wall Street. And after my business school, I worked for tech. It’s usually the other way around.

And then during my business school, I met a bunch of people and they all knew that, okay, I had this tech background, but I had no tech experience. So the only people who are willing to bet on me were obviously startups. So that’s why I found a startup, which is willing to take a bet on me.

And they were also very early. I was the first employee there. So I literally joined the founding team.

I just joined the founders. So I also took a bet on them. They took a bet on me.

So you got to take risks. I mean, it’s not very clear. Obviously, if you have five years or 10 years of product management PM experience, then you can go and say, hey, I want a PM role.

But if you have zero years of experience, you got to be very creative. You need to do a bunch of internships or projects or do free projects for founders and somehow brand yourself. And that’s exactly what I did.

And that enabled me to eventually get into, so I did a project for this company and they liked me. They hired me as a first employee. And then I started as on the business operations side of things, and then I moved to product.

So that’s my transition from Wall Street to being a PM.

Yeah. So even more intriguing is, I mean, I personally experienced it as well. I heard from so many of my peers and colleagues and friends in the industry, and especially being in Silicon Valley, you want to be in the startup.

I get that, but it’s extremely hard and it’s low probability for your first startup job to really click and take off, right? If in hindsight, I don’t know. First of all, at that point in time, did you have a formula of, okay, this is the right startup, right space, right trajectory, right market, and right founders?

Or is it like, okay, let’s go try and see what happens? What is the approach?

Yeah. So it really depends on your background, right? So I can talk about my personal experience.

If you already have some experience, you’re already here, then you should probably go and fish to make sure you like the founders, you like the market, and it’s growing fast. But for me, I had zero experience. I couldn’t choose.

For me, it was way for me to break into the industry. So I was willing, obviously the most important part for me was, I would not compromise was on the people, like the people are everything, like your manager and your team. So that’s one thing I was keen on.

But in terms of industry sector, I was very agnostic. I was just like, I just need a chance. I just need somebody to take a bet on me and I’m going to go all in and give my a hundred percent.

So that was, I was just looking for like a very broad, I just had a very broad net, but the only thing I was particular on was making sure that people are the good people who I can learn from, right. That was the main, but I know that like, and also in general, everyone should have the expectation that the startup stories are very glamorous. Like you see these founders make a ton of money and you were like, oh, I’m going to join this startup.

It’s going to be a rocket ship, but nine out of 10 times is going to fail. So you only hear the success stories. You don’t hear the failure stories, but that’s the norm.

You almost expect the startup to fail because that’s what happens. So you have to go with that mindset.

Yeah, totally. And then you mentioned something very important, which is the person, the manager or the team, the co-team that you’re going to work with. So sounds like that was your compass for, hey, I’m willing to take a bet and risk and join Craft.

That’s what I’m hearing.

Exactly. This is the founder, right? I mean, even now, actually that hasn’t changed.

Even when I started the company with Derek, I only started a company because I found somebody like Derek, somebody who I could get along with and somebody who I respected and admired. So people is everything, whether you’re in a PM job, when I was Wall Street, when I was founding companies, that’s one thing you should never compromise on.

Yeah. Yeah. I know we deviated a bit, but coming back to my earlier question, and by the way, I was the one who took you on a different path.

So let me shift this conversation back. So talk to us about your growth as a product manager at Craft.

Yeah. So then once I got into the PM role there, it was more about figuring out how do you keep user at the center of everything we do as a company? It’s again, that’s the commonality between GTM and product management.

At the end of the day, a lot of the times, if a founder has their own vision, right? I want to build this, I want to do this and so on. And then salespeople have their own kind of incentives because they just want to close the deal and get that commission.

Yeah. But you as a PM should be very steadfast and be the voice of the user in the company. It’s like, okay, I know you want this submission, but this is what users want.

I know if we build this one deal might close, but I don’t think we can serve repeatably a whole bunch of entire segment of users if I take the roadmap in that direction. So the number one role I had to learn is to use an empathy, being in the step of the user, interviewing and talking to users, figuring out where they fail and making sure to be an advocate for them in the company. It’s almost like you have an empty seat for the user and you are like the rep and then making sure to represent it.

So that’s the number one thing I had to learn. And it was not easy because initially the growth came from transitioning, being a feature factory manager, where I’m just adding this, okay, I’m going to add this feature, add this button, add this integration, add this, add that. And then like, hold on, there’s no common thread, none of this is attached to a specific user problem.

And then had to go through that whole process. And then they read a bunch of books, got mentored by some senior product folks to then focus everything based on the user. So that was like a big part of the journey.

Yeah. No, very good. And then you mentioned something which is the user becoming user centric and you just articulated how you transition into that.

It was like a natural, I mean, you start asking questions. Okay. Yeah.

These tasks have to be done at craft. You are doing it from an integration point of view or feature engineering or feature factory or something like that. And then you paused and asked a question, who is it really benefiting?

Who is benefiting from this? And how do I know that they’re really benefiting? So double clicking on that question.

So how did it go about finding the users, whom to talk to and how to have the conversation?

Yeah. So there’s obviously only, I can talk about on the Ignition side, which is like way more easier because it’s our own startup. So Ignition, our core persona was a product marketer.

And the first thing we did is we partnered with go-to-market alliance and product marketing alliance. So they have a PMA, they have a big community of PMMs. So the first step was like, it’s like first we define, okay, is PMMs the right audience to go after?

And answer is yes. Okay, great. Now, where do we find those PMMs?

Obviously, in our network, we have some friends we got on a call and talk to, but that’s not going to happen at scale. So then we’re like, okay, let’s go find communities. So then we found PMA, we partnered with them, we sponsored a few events, we had webinars, and that’s where we started and we got into the Slack.

And that’s when we started to get a steady stream of our ideal target persona and got on a call, identified what their issues are. And then even there, one of the biggest learnings there was even PMM is not a very well-defined role. So they’re, oh, it’s in some companies, it’s just glorified content marketing.

Whereas in some companies, it’s actual real PMM role where they have strategy, they’re setting the go-to-market strategy and have the budget. So there’s a lot of nuance we had to learn during that process. So, but the best way for us to go is see where they live and then go partner with that community or event or meetup or events, and then go find the initial set of users.

And that was with you and Derek at Ignition. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

But how did you gravitate towards product marketing? Why marketing?

Yeah. So I was a PM, Derek was a PMM. And I felt like PMs had a lot of tools like product board and Jira linear and all that, engineers have that.

But PMMs don’t have any tool. They just use monday.com or Asana. They just use very generic project management tools.

So Derek was like, no, there is a huge opportunity in this space to build something as a dedicated go-to tool for PMMs. And that’s how we started Ignition.

Got it. Very cool. So, and in between craft and Ignition, you took a detour to Meta.

So what is it like, and why do you jump into a large ship like Meta? And what was it like over there?

100%. Actually, I’m going to come back to that question. There’s one other point which occurred to me on your last question, how do you find the users?

I just want to let the audience know. So once we had this community of people, the second step we did to scale that is email marketing. So it’s basically, I mean, this is pre AI state.

So I don’t know how it is right now with AI based and I think email open rates have dropped quite considerably, but before the one other channel, which worked really well for us at scale was just sending cold emails and then setting up email dip campaigns and a five, six, five to seven follow-ups. And then, so that works. So anyway, so that was the obvious scale.

So our Ignition was initially was community driven, scale was email driven. So that’s how we source our users. Now, coming back to your next question.

So yeah, so I’ve craft, I did this for four years and I was tired and exhausted and I was kind of burnt out. And I was like, oh, startup was fun. I’m never going to do startup again.

This is not for me.

Yeah.

And I was like, I’m going to join a big farm and get paid well. And then, and that’s why I interviewed. And luckily I got an offer with Facebook and I decided to take it.

So that was the reason. It’s more me like taking a break and also like also trying also, I never worked for a big company. So I also want to experience it because I had no perspective of what it is to work for a large company.

So that’s how I ended up joining Facebook.

Got it. And then again, I would assume the same criteria, right? The right manager, the manager and you working together, that’s it applied.

Yeah. And also the, that applied, but since it was my first time joining a big company, I had no big company experience. I wasn’t, I didn’t really have a choice to make that I’m going to select this team as the other team.

So, but I had a veto though. I knew that if I didn’t like the manager, I would never, even if it’s Facebook or whatever companies, I’m not going to take it. Got it.

So that was more of a negative filter. It’s like, if this is not true, I’m not going to take it. Once it’s like, no, I only wanted to work for Instagram.

I only want to work for WhatsApp. It was not that it’s more like a negative filter. So, but luckily I got placed into a really good team, which was Facebook search.

And, and then yeah.

What does that product management experience like? I mean, what did that teach you over there?

Yeah, there that’s insane. Meta and I keep saying Facebook now it’s Meta because I was in Facebook days, but the fields there it’s because you can, you know, in startup, let’s say you ship a feature, you get, you have to wait such a long time to get any feedback in Meta. You have some even small AB tests, you have millions of users.

It’s just insane. I’ve never seen that kind of like, because they have obviously Facebook has a billion plus users. So a million is less than 1%.

Right. So it’s just like, you just have a small feature. You get instant feedback on something’s going wrong.

And then one thing which Meta did really well is analytics. They had the best analytics software where you could like measure like hundreds of metrics, starting with the overall session time of how much time you’re spending on the app to every, like how many times they click whatever feature and what is the journey like, what is the funnel? Like the whole thing could be measured, which was like crack for PMs, right?

Because those are the data you, it’s very hard for you to get as a startup.

Correct.

So I think I learned a ton of that as a product manager at Facebook. In fact, talking about that, it feels like that whole analytics team even spun out as a new startup called Statsig or something, which they took the analytics stack of Facebook and now they are prioritizing it and selling it from company to company.

Nice. Pretty cool. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, at that scale, it’s all about analytics and insights at various steps. And to your point, we keep talking about A-B test and as a early stage startup, yes, sure. I would love to do A-B test, but I don’t have that volume of users or can have a rapid pace, but at a company, at a large scale company like MetaR, Google or Amazon or Microsoft for that matter, it’s like you already have that set of users, you get feedback and you can instant A-B test testing.

Yeah.

And it’s in a SaaS startup, you don’t A-B test. It’s like an A-A test. Correct.

It’s just you’re just maybe convincing your CEO or somebody just to get a buy-in, but that step makes no sense because it’s not scientifically significant.

Yeah. Very cool. And then of course the startup and the founder in you, that age started growing again, bigger and bigger.

And that’s when you found Derek and talked about Ignition. Let’s talk about the pivot to double O, right? What led you and Derek and what is the hypothesis like and how did you validate and go into that direction?

Yeah. So now shifting topics here, I think Gen AI is such a big kind of a revolutionary shift in tech, which comes once in two decades, right? The last one was iOS.

If you remember when iOS came, everybody was building a mobile app and then everyone was talking about it. So the same thing is happening right now. So when there’s such a big inflection point in the history, all the previous mindset of building software completely changes.

You really have to reinvent yourself. What the software is going to look like post-Gen AI. And that’s where we started thinking about like, Hey, is this something we really want to work on?

And Ignition, do you think Ignition is even going to exist in a few years from now? And it’s less about Ignition, but generally the category of SaaS software, like software as a service, is that going to even exist? And we felt the answer was no.

There are going to be a few very dedicated, especially the ones which have source of truth, like for example, Rippling or Deal or stuff like that, they’re going to exist and thrive. But most of the other productivity tools, which Ignition was also was like, it doesn’t make sense for them to exist two years from now. So what are we doing here?

So we were like, okay, let’s build. So then we took a look, took a hard look at Ignition. We realized that we are building AI agents within Ignition, even before AI agents was a thing.

And we’re like, okay, that’s a big opportunity. So let’s bring that out as 00 and then create a horizontal platform for others to help build agents on top of us. Because we already have the know-how, we already built, we know how the infrastructure is.

So let’s just make it into a platform where you Vijay can come in and you can build a competitive Intel agentic workflow on 00, without having to worry about what an agent is. So that’s how 00 was found.

Understood. But again, how did you validate that? I mean, do you go, yes, you and Derek having that thought process is one thing, but you need an external sounding board.

Exactly. So in this case, typically you would run a process, right? Typically, let’s say I want to pivot from PMM to sales.

Then you go talk to your 10 friends and then maybe 50 people, see what their problem is, and then identify eventually the solution is going to work. But in this case, it was really obvious. In this case, it was almost like the market was pulling us because people were like, hey, I like the Ignition, but what is this voice of customer agent?

They’re like, what is this? I like this more. So it is so obvious that, and even when we launched, so then you launch a smoke screen, there’s no product, there’s nothing.

We just launched a website for 00. And then we had like hundreds and hundreds of signups on our website.

And they’re all coming from Ignition or even outside of Ignition customers or users?

No, outside of Ignition customers. So what we did was, so we had Ignition, which had 10 or 20,000 people visiting Ignition website a month. And we just added a banner saying, we are introducing 00 as a new product.

And people were not signing up for Ignition, but we are getting hundreds and hundreds. We’re getting like 10 to 20 signups on Ignition and hundreds of signups on 00.

Got it. I am actually right now on Ignition. I can see something big is coming, learn about it, get early access.

Yeah, exactly.

There you go. So that’s how we figured out, okay, we got to probably, there’s something here. Let’s spend more time.

Pretty cool. So you had volume, you had the search volume. I mean, you’re talking about scale, right?

Not just the initial hand built customer base. You had scale. Now, how do you test with that scale of traffic?

And so that was your validation. There you go.

Yeah. It’s basically like, so let’s say if you didn’t have Ignition, then what I would do, and this is more like for audience, I would run Google ads or Facebook ads or whatever it is. And then spend like some $500 or something like that.

And then drive a whole bunch of people to your website and see how many stick. And then see if you can get some of them on the call and then ask them why they actually signed up. And then that’s kind of how you validate.

But since we already had Ignition traffic organic, it was much easier for us to test the hypothesis.

Fair enough. So that’s good. So now we are in double O space and you already tested that.

So walk us through, I mean, you have like insane growth already, like a couple of months and what, 200, 300K in just a couple of months. So walk us through that. I mean, I’m also leading you to one of the key questions, which is a go-to-market success story.

And at a later point, go-to-market failure story. So this is clearly a success story. Walk us through the Ignition to double O success story.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, so the failure and success are not binary.

Usually like, you know, even at Kraft, they talk about, so Kraft right now is a supply chain risk management software. But I think when we started the company, it was more like we were selling company intelligence to hedge funds. And hedge funds was a great audience, but they would churn quickly.

Then we pivoted to sales. So that was a failure, kind of. And then we pivoted to sales people and sales work, but they weren’t willing to pay a lot of money.

So that was another failure. And then we pivoted to a supply chain and that’s where we found our first seven figure deal.

Sales people to supply chain, man, that’s entirely user-based and markets completely.

It’s the same product. So there’s two ways to pivot, right? Either the same product, you just change audience, or it’s the same audience, you test different products.

Correct.

So there at Kraft, the idea was like, it’s the same product, which is a company intelligence product, enrich a company, but you’re testing different audience and eventually. So I feel like at any startup, at least I’ve been part of, they’re always like some pivot. It’s very rare that it’s a first idea.

You just start and it just takes off. It almost never happens. You have to iterate and fail and then like, okay, get yourself back up and try and get your balance and fail.

And then finally until something works. So that was the story with Kraft.

And what does the timeline like for all this same product, but different use cases and space? What is the timeline for these experiences?

Three to six months, three to six months, because you’ve got to give it time because once you decide you want to do it, you need to change your website. You need to change your messaging. You need to recruit a new set of users, give them access to a product.

So it’s a six month cycle. So which is why you take money for two years, right? When you raise the seed round.

So the hope is in the two years, you can pivot and try, iterate as much as you can to hopefully eventually get that traction and you can raise a series A.

Correct. Yeah. Fair enough.

So we were talking about your point is completely valid. I mean, there’s no, it’s not binary, a success or a failure. And I intentionally put it out there and I get a spectrum of responses from the guests and more often than not, eventually a good chunk pivot to what exactly you said, right?

There’s no failure, failure. It’s more of a learning and a feedback to pivot to the next step. So going back to, I hear you on that completely go-to-market pivots, if you will, but coming to a go-to-market success story.

So expand on the double O success, the early success that you’re seeing.

Yeah. So the double O, I think the good thing about double O is we were building into a wave, right? So it’s almost like how Jeff Bezos was saying that, you just go on your surfboard and you just paddle and paddle and you just wait for the wave to come in.

And sometimes the wave never comes and you die or you find the wave, it just takes you to the shore. So in double O, the wave was already there. So you’re jumping right into the wave.

So you could see that market pool, people excited. We had no problems getting people to jump on a call or even put a credit card down. When people are willing to put their credit card down, that’s the biggest validation you’ll have.

So I think one of the things with double O, which I think again, it’s probably not normal for every business because for Ignition, it was not the case at all. For Ignition, it was a much harder sell and convincing people. On the double O side, the market was there.

The market pool was there. Market was literally pulling us. People were, even now we have such a long list.

We have more customers than we can sell right now. So I think the good thing about double O was picking a market where there’s already a huge demand and market pool and underserved products. So that’s how, kind of a success for double O.

Right. Yeah. Let’s just double click on that.

So I went to your Ignition site to get early access. I click on that and that landing page is still there by the way. It’s still live because you want to capture that organic traffic.

I’m sure. So it says, you don’t want to miss this. Our biggest launch yet is prepping for liftoff and then enter your email.

So what happens after that? So I go there, enter my email. Yeah.

Yeah. So once you’re going to enter the email, then we have our list. We have launches and we have our database.

We are tracking who is signing up and you obviously get an email, but basically we will reach out. If you are qualified, we will reach out to schedule a call with you.

Got it.

So I’m actually entering my email right now, but now you can go to the double O site directly because now you’re selling. So you can just sign up for the product right now.

Yeah. Fair enough.

This is more when double O was not a product. This was like nine months ago when we were just testing double O. Yeah.

Fair enough. And then, so I go there and then you mentioned something which really caught me attention and that’s the right way to do it, which is test and see if someone’s willing to pay money upfront and then build the product. So how did it go about doing that?

Yeah. So in this case, I think the first thing was like, so Ignition and double O are two different things here. So in Ignition, it was very clear what the problem is and who we are serving, which is PMM.

And we’re like, hey, we’re a go-to-market platform. We help you create go-to-market plans, competitive Intel and all that. But in double O, it’s a horizontal platform.

So the use cases are very broad. It could be like, hey, go through my calendar today and then see who I’m meeting, research that person and send an email to like, I’m doing contract management, review my contract to see if there’s any issues. So both are fine.

So which is like a different challenge for us from a positioning and messaging perspective. So on double O side of things, it’s more like we’re trying to figure out which of these use cases, there’s a real urgent need where they’re willing to put their credit card down. So early on, we had blocked access to double O.

In fact, we only gave access to double O if people were willing to pay for it. So we can use that as a filter to kind of filter out people who are not serious, to filter out people who are like, we’re like, okay, we’ll refund you. You need to pay us.

And if you don’t solve your problem in the first 30 days, we’ll refund you. So that’s the motion we took with double O. And so that really helps for all the people who signed up, for example, through Ignition.

We would get on a call and we’ll give them a demo of what double O is. We’ll maybe build them a workflow or agentic workflow for the current problem and then say, okay, now you want to use it. You got to pay for it.

Saurav Dixit Got it. So at the end of the demo call, towards the end of the call, you actually ask them to pay for it.

Exactly.

Saurav Dixit Got it. Understood. And then that’s a true testament.

First of all, you weed out the tire kickers versus the committed users. That’s one. And second is you’re validating demand, of course.

Saurav Dixit The only exception though is enterprise. Like, you know, let’s say it’s something Walmart comes in or some big company comes in. They obviously aren’t going to put down credit cards.

So for them, it’s more, it’s a very different day. It’s like, okay, if you’re serious bringing your whole team, let’s make sure you can get on a calendar. So that takes a different motion.

But for the most other self-serve, that one we talked about was the motion we used.

Saurav Dixit Understood. So you have, I mean, you have two different go-to-markets right now for double O. You have the individual users.

Maybe it’s a combination of solopreneurs or it can be others like small companies.

Saurav Dixit Small businesses.

Saurav Dixit Small businesses. And then you have the enterprises like a Walmart example. Fair enough.

And then you or Derek, and you and Derek will get on a call. It’s like a founder-led sales motion after that. Saurav Dixit Exactly.

For the enterprise, it’s founder-led sales. For the other, it’s mostly self-serve right now. Before we didn’t have self- serve, so we had to get on a call with everyone, which is painful.

But now we finally have self-serve right.

Saurav Dixit Got it. And then self-serve right now you’re offering like two weeks free trial.

Saurav Dixit Yeah, seven days free trial.

Saurav Dixit Sorry, is it seven days or 14 days? Saurav Dixit Seven days free trial right now. Saurav Dixit Okay, my bad.

Okay, so seven days free trial and then you ask them to pay. So that’s all good. Now, of course, your point, market demand is there.

Anywhere you jump either LinkedIn or any social media, you see a lot of agents and agentic workflows and a lot of startups coming up. So how are you looking to differentiate W versus the plethora of alternatives and competitors?

Saurav Dixit That’s a great, that’s a single, that’s a million dollar question because on one side, the market is huge and there’s infinite demand, it feels like. But on the other side, the competition is also insane. Because every mom and pop is building an AI agent startup right now.

So, and then obviously every YC startup, I think is like an agentic startup in this batch. So there’s like a ton of competition. But what adds fuel to the fire is the customers are not educated enough to make a decision on what startup is better than others because the whole agent concept is new.

So there’s a lot of market education we got to do. And I hope this podcast is also a way we can help with that. It’s like, one of the things I want to talk about is like, okay, how do you even differentiate?

You want to do customer support, there’s 50 AI customer support startups today. How do you figure out what one to use? I think where the differentiation happens is like how reliable it is, because it’s so easy to white code a new application today using cursor or bold or whatever you’re using and say, look, and it demos really well.

And then you’re like, hey, this is great demo. But the question is, you need to really check if they have real customers using it. But more importantly, are they expanding usage and not churning?

That’s I think the single biggest way to validate is like, okay, give me references, show me the customers who are not just using it, but also growing usage over time. That means your product is actually not vaporware, which I think 50% of the AI startups right now are vaporware. And then you need to ask for the references.

And then how accurate the answers are, especially if you’re in medical field, the accuracy has to be very high. So how accurate it is. So you have to do a pilot and make sure it’s accurate.

And then finally, there’s also the trust and enterprise and security issues, because a lot of people, they don’t want to share the data with LLM. How can you provide a really good firewall around your data? So you’re not leaking the data to the LLM models to get trained.

So there’s other issues there. So there’s a multi-step framework you need to use to evaluate an AI agentic startup, which neither the investors nor the customers have been educated to evaluate. So to coming back to your original question, unfortunately, there is no right answer.

We have to put in all the hard work to spend a lot of time on market education.

Fair enough. And how are you going about on market education? I hear you.

Clearly, there’s an education. I mean, let me backtrack. First of all, there’s a huge wave.

It’s almost, not almost, it is a formal factor, which is driving all this user base. Hey, there’s a big thing. I better test it out.

They’re all jumping into it head on. But then there’s also another element coming from, that’s from a user base. From a startup world, I can argue from startup world, it’s almost along that there’s a formal factor.

Hey, there’s a huge wave. I need to jump into it. But then there is a differentiator.

I mean, from a founder startup world and perspective, this is great. I mean, huge demand to your point that you mentioned a huge demand, a lot of traffic, people are buying. Now, how do I stand out?

This is where the whole brand to some extent, and a market education, it’s a complimentary thing. There’s a brand building that has to go on. And then there’s a market education aspect.

And then while doing this for you as founders, you’re trying to nail in into it. Maybe it’s a vertical or a horizontal, which use cases and then nail. So obviously, wrong approach.

It’s a hundred percent.

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Exactly the case. I mean, talking about brand, I feel like at the very early stage of the company, the founder’s brand is the company brand because the company has zero brand.

But eventually, how do you then build the double O itself as a brand? And that’s why we were very particular about picking a name which people like, and then associate double O with trust and reliability, and then have to grow that. And then on the other side, horizontal platform, you obviously cannot just focus on everyone.

So which are the one or two or three personas you’re going to pick to focus on and then to get to a certain revenue where you can then start expanding. So yeah, you’re spot on.

Yeah. Perfect. So what about the market education piece?

What is that pillar like for you and Derek?

Yeah. So the market education is, we do webinars every Thursday, for example, so if you go to the double O website, you’ll see a banner with a webinar. So a lot of people just sign up because we’re not trying to sell anything there.

We’re just going to explain, hey, what an agent is and how do you build workflows and all that, right? So we are doing that. And obviously, we are trying to get on all these groups.

We are trying to host events. If you see my LinkedIn profile, I’m basically a speaker in a lot of these agentic events aside. And so getting ourselves out in events and communities, doing webinars, so trying to really get the word out.

Again, we are very clear. This has nothing to do with double O. You don’t have to use double O, but educate yourself on what an agent is, how agents work and how to evaluate it.

Because once you do that, then you will come and use us. Correct. Yeah.

So, but the first thing is you’ve got to be AI literate. So how do you do that? And that’s what we are spending a lot of time on.

Understood. Yeah. So that is your go-to-market.

Yeah. Your double O’s go-to-market is exactly that. I mean, we talked about one angle, which is your user that PLG self-serve, and then the enterprise founded at sales for mid-market enterprise.

There’s also another element, which is the quote-unquote, there’s brand building. That is another key component. There’s content, which is your webinars and a lot of speaking and events.

So all those things eventually building into a cohesive go-to-market for you and for double O. So now I’m getting more to the execution piece, especially for the listeners out there who are founders themselves and who want to get better in their founder muscle, which is like, how are you and Derek thinking in terms of like the KPIs or leading indicators for double O, whether you’re going the right direction on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?

Yeah. So for us, the number one thing is like increasing usage, right? Increasing usage and retention.

So what does increasing usage mean? So we also, the pricing model also, that’s another thing we forgot to talk about. The pricing model itself can be a big advantage to your go-to-market.

So right now we are usage-based pricing, meaning you only pay what you use, but eventually we want to move to an outcome-based pricing. So you only pay if you’re successful. So that’s an innovation we are still experimenting.

We’re not there yet. But coming back to KPIs, the two main KPIs we use is like, if a user onboard and start building workflows, he or she is like, are they building more and more workflows every week? Are they now like, is it more addictive?

Are they using it in a consistent basing? If you do a cohort chart, you want to see the cohort of all the people who joined this Monday, then you do that for every Monday, you see that code expanding over time. That’s one.

The second is retention, like purely like how many customers who signed up three months ago are still active today, 60 day, 30 day, 60 day, 90 day retention to see all the people who signed up, how many are active today, how many are active 60 days, how many are active 90 days. And obviously there’ll be churn and drop off because people’s expectations are wildly different. Sometimes people think AI is magic.

They’ll do anything for you and sometimes, and then they come back. So there’s definitely a churn there, but overall you want to see expanding usage and the retention.

Yeah, fair enough. And for me personally as well, I’m a solopreneur. And so I’ve been grappling with, hey, I need to automate a lot of my workflows because I want to spend more time on more meaningful, meaty tasks myself.

And going back to which, so I was lost. Honestly, I was lost with a lot of AI agent chatter. I don’t know, there’s N8N, there’s you guys, a bunch of others, but now because of you coming on the podcast, I’ll admit it, right?

I mean, there’s a affinity, a brand affinity building up. So I’m going to try Dublow and I’ll see which of the use cases I’ll use. So that’s what, I don’t know why I came up with this or why I went down this track, but to your point, again, going back to go-to-market, okay, now it’s coming back to me, go-to-market, right?

About brand building. So this is the element of that.

Yeah, a hundred percent. The other aspect we are trying to position ourselves, we talked about messaging a lot and positioning. The way we’re positioning ourselves is we’re the only platform we are truly no-code, meaning you can go from a prompt, you type a prompt in English saying, build me an agent to write a blog.

You type it in and Dublow will build an entire agent workflow for you. So it’s not like other platforms where you need to know what an agent is and you need to drag and drop stuff, you need to have an engineer to build it for you. It’s none of that.

It’s truly no-code. So that’s kind of how we are positioning.

Actually, you’re spot on. That is one of the things that I was grappling with subconsciously, even though I know that I need to build AI agents, but that is a friction subconsciously within me. Hey, there’s a Zapier-like, which is okay, you need to know and then do a drag, drop, connect and all that.

But what you’re saying and what I’m hearing is Dublow is different in the sense, in plain English, I just type my workflow and in the backend, the agent and agent workflow is created. Exactly, exactly. Got it.

Okay, perfect. So you’re positioning and messaging is resonating with me at least.

Yeah, that’s great.

One in this podcast. Yeah, for sure. Okay, I’ll give it a shot.

So I know we are coming up against time over here. We can go on and on in so many different directions. But yeah, I mean, you did mention like mentors, even back at Kraft and others.

So who are the top two or three? I know there are several, but maybe mention two or three mentors and sponsors who really played a big role in your career.

Yeah, so I would say the mentors, obviously there’s a set of influencers online and those are famous CPOs. People are like, you can’t go and say, hey, any mentor needs, it’s going to be hard. You need to find them in your network and obviously you need to give some back.

A lot of them are actually, I was very lucky to have really good managers. I had this manager, his name was Chandra and Meta and he was a previous VP of product at Zynga and a previous CPO at Headspace. So I had a lot of product strategy experience.

So I had to learn and he spent a lot of time training me and teaching me. And also he had to do it as a part of his job, but also I was lucky to work for him. So a lot of the mentors actually came from, I mean, it started with advisors.

So that’s where I know you have an advisor equity. So we had a couple of really good advisors. So we had both at Ignition and Neon, but anytime we have a question, we just jump on a question.

So we had my previous CTO at Kraft is an advisor. So anytime I have a technical question, I just jump on, call and talk to him. And then we had a sales, really good sales advisor, John, we just talked to him and anything about sales, we just talked to him.

So it’s really for you to find the right mentors in your own network, but also somehow incentivize them. On the big tech, it was my manager or some kind of that, or on the startup, it was like you reach out to people, get some advisor equity or get them to put some money in startup either way, and then use their expertise to really get as much mentorship as possible.

Yeah, fantastic. And then the last question for you is if you were to turn back clock, what advice would you give to your younger self from a go-to-market perspective or even broadly?

Yeah, I would say go a little bit broader, but it applies even for a go-to-market is don’t be scared of taking risks. Your quality of life later on, and even your happiness and contentment and purpose is so dependent on you having the courage to leave your comfort zone and take risks early on. Risk in terms of career, risk in terms of geography, risk in terms of everything, risk in terms of trying to jump into something new.

It’s the single biggest, most important thing in life. Life is short, time flies. So don’t hesitate to take the risk or some idea you’ve been trying to pursue for a long time.

Do it today. Fantastic.

I’ve got nothing else to add to that. So it’s been a wonderful conversation, Karthik, and good luck to you, Derek, and the DoubleO team going forward.

Thanks, Vijay. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Modern B2B sales success lies in shifting from scripted selling to strategic listening—by elevating discovery calls and building trust through thoughtful messaging, Leslie’s approach turns reps into advisors and conversations into conversions.

Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Vijay interviews Leslie Venetz, a B2B sales strategist and founder with deep experience navigating outbound sales in enterprise environments. Leslie unpacks her journey from learning the ropes in sales to helping SaaS companies refine their go-to-market strategies with bold, focused tactics.

She emphasizes that real progress comes not from hustling harder but from selling smarter—prioritizing meaningful discovery conversations, segmenting accounts with care, and aligning messaging with executive-level pain points. Leslie’s methods helped one team double their close rate and trim nearly two weeks off the sales cycle by simply reworking their approach to AE discovery.

The conversation explores everything from the mechanics of outbound strategy to why building your personal brand on social media is essential, not just for visibility, but for attracting talent and creating credibility. Leslie challenges the myth of company loyalty and shares why, in today’s landscape, your reputation is your leverage.

Connect with Leslie Venetz on LinkedIn

Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn:

Listen To The Episode:

Earn the Right: Leslie Venetz on Building Trust in B2B Sales

The listeners love this prompt, the opening prompt, which is, How do you view and define go to market.

Ooh, I very much view go to market from an outbound sales lens, because that is my specialty. And I also spent the majority of my career penetrating the C suite, like the enterprise C suite. So I think that I do have a slightly different approach or a lens for GTM than other folks, which isn’t to say that I haven’t done a lot of consulting and advisory work for PLG companies. I know, I was the number one employee at a bootstrap startup for two years. So I have done the plg work, and I have done the early stage work, but when I think about where the biggest gains are made for my clients, it is in creating a go to market strategy that builds the the territory and the messaging and the Micro campaigns to ensure that they are going to market to the right people at the right time with the right messaging on the right channels. 

Yeah, yeah. Now I think you hit all the key aspects over there, right, which is the right messaging, even before the right messaging is the right segment, the right people, and the right channels. The one thing that you didn’t touch, upon which I hear from other guests, and which I strongly believe in, is, in addition to the market, the problems, the people, the channels, there is also the product or services, right? That’s fundamental. If you don’t have that, what is the offer that you’re taking to the market? 

Yeah, well, I am pretty lucky, because I am a founder, so I’m my own boss, and I’m also a solopreneur, so I don’t have some of the pressures that other folks might have to, like scale the client, tell I can serve. So I stopped working with folks that are pre-PMF or pre-revenue, yeah, so I don’t have to stress about that as much. 

Generally, if I look at like my retro from 2024, the majority of my long-term clients, people who were with me, like the entire year, at least, you know, like six to nine months of the year, they sat in the 30 to 50 million annual revenue bucket. And I also serve a lot of service-based companies that aren’t in a subscription model, that aren’t in a recurring revenue model, which is a slightly different flavor of GTM as well. So I am lucky. I’m going to call it lucky, because I have had the privilege of going up channel a bit and getting to work with companies that have a really solid product, and now they are struggling with maybe inbound leads drying up, yeah, or they simply don’t have the volume of inbound leads to get them to their next milestones. It’s a lot of instances of like, what got us here won’t get us there. So what? What is the evolution of our go-to-market strategy? Or a lot of folks that have grown through merger and acquisition, and so they just need to reevaluate their go-to-market strategy, but they have a pretty solid product Foundation, and often they have a pretty good reputation in their space.

Very cool, yeah, I’d love to dig into a lot of those points that you just mentioned, but let’s take a step back and for me and for the listeners, why don’t you share your journey, starting with day one of your career path, and what led you to what you’re doing today?

Yeah, day one of my career. Gosh, I had only been in Chicago for, I think, nine days. Okay, you just moved from Montana, like small-town Montana. I was born and raised there. I went to uni there and moved to Chicago without a job. But I did the interviews, lined up. I did the interviews. They were mostly with, like, not-for-profit organizations and for marketing jobs. And when I realized that those jobs were offering, you know, 20. $28,000 a year salary flat, and maybe, if you played all of your cards right, you might be eligible for an up to 3% raise in two years time. And I did not want that for myself. I did not feel that that matched my work ethic, my ambitions, my like the the curiosity and growth that I saw for myself, so I took a sales job, and in the back of my head, I took it, thinking, I’ll just do this until something better comes along. 

Like, I still sort of viewed sales with a degree of shame, like I just thought it was kind of like a trashy profession. Yeah, and I would it maybe took two weeks for me to realize that I was just I was really good at it. I really like doing it. I was having immediate success, so I fell in love with sales very, very quickly, and I then spent my career before becoming a full-time founder as an individual contributor. I spent much of my career in player-coach roles because I was often the first hire in the country, or in the region, or within a product line for a company. So I stepped up and built a team around me. 

The majority of my career I spent in sales leadership, but it was just a real gift of a career, and I didn’t understand it. Vijay at the time, I actually had like, shame isn’t the right word, but I had a lot of doubts about my expertise, or about, like, the validity or the credibility of my expertise, because I didn’t come to SAS until later in my career, and I came at a time where, like, it was SAS or bust, yeah. And I also spent my career selling a lot of different types of products to a lot of different ICPs. So I didn’t have this deep domain expertise because I’d sold to, you know, marketing agencies for a decade, or sold HR tech for a decade. And I thought for a while that that was a weak point, and then I realized when I started doing the work I do now, but as like a passion project, side hustle, that it was actually my core strength, okay, because I had all of these experiences from seeing all of these different types of products at different price points and different sales cycles in different industries and ICPs, and it put me in this really unique position to figure out sort of what would work and what sort of wouldn’t work, and what I should pull over and what I might need to tweak instead of yeah, here’s the playbook that I’ve used in my last four orgs. Let’s drop it here as well, and that’s what I’ve been doing the last three years for organizations specific to outbound go-to-market. 

Yeah. So let’s double click on something that you touched upon earlier, which is that you specialize in and your expertise is essentially figuring out the right target segment, mapping out the territory, the messaging, and using the right channels, and so on. So let’s segue into something more concrete, like, Who do you really serve? Like, where are your customers and clients, and why do they come to you? Like, what kind of problems did they come to you with?

Yeah, B2B, SaaS and B to B, and service-based organizations who are generating at least half of their net new revenue through outbound. So these are folks that are doing a lot of outbound, and they’re doing it in-house, yeah, and they the the stresses I should say that I hear when I’m on Discovery calls are things like my team just won’t make phone calls, like they’re skipping All of their phone call steps, or, you know, we used to get incredible results from our outbound, and it just like nothing converts. We’re just not getting the open rates, the replies, the responses that we used to or, you know, like I mentioned earlier, a huge one that I get is we used to get so much of our revenue from inbound, and now that we are out of that, like growth at all costs, or money was just flying in the air time, the inbound has dried up, and they need to understand how to generate revenue going directly to customers. So it’s a lot of woes around what used to work doesn’t work anymore, or I’m really struggling to get my reps to feel comfortable doing cold outreach, yeah, whether it’s proper social selling or cold cold. Calling or cold email, or even being direct on-site with events. But those are the two big, big kinds of buckets of woes I hear from folks.

Understood, and at what revenue point, like, what are your what is the typical revenue range for your ICPs? 

Yeah, you know, I’m in the process of going a little bit up channel, so right now, like my LinkedIn headline is 15 to 50 because it has a nice, memorable ring to it. But when I did my retro for last year, it was predominantly 30 to 50 million for consulting, like done with your consulting gigs and most of my kickoff and keynotes were 300 million to like 1.3 billion. 

Wow, that’s a big range. 

I know, I know. So I think my offerings are going through a bit of an evolution right now. And I, I love, love, love doing the done with you, consulting work. I like, you know, getting in there and like going deep with my clients and really making sure that together, we create a strategy, and then a set of processes to back up the strategy, and then a set of skill sets and mindsets within the team so that they can deploy the processes that back up the strategy. I love that work, but it is deeply time-intensive, whereas the keynotes are like, they really fill my bucket in a much different way. It’s so cool to see everybody leaning in and having these light bulb moments, and I get to travel, and it’s a higher profit margin. So we’ll see what happens when the book comes out. One of the things that is a privilege of being a solopreneur is that I really have this space to like listen to my audience, and I can react very quickly to what they are telling me they want more of or less of. So we will see what that means as my product evolves in 2026.

Very cool. So let’s make it even more real. So, something that I ask all of my guests is for them to share a go-to-market success story and then a go-to-market failure. I wouldn’t call it more like a failure, but more of an insight and then a pivot. So if you can share from your vast experience, Leslie, a go-to-market success and a failure story, and I’ll leave it to you.

.

Um, I will share a failure because it’s my own. Okay. Um, so one thing that I always tell my clients to do with their outbound is to set of baseline. So when you are creating your sequences, your messaging, your steps, etc, you know, do what you know works most often, get that data so you know what good looks like. And then from there, you know, you can iterate. You can be creative. You can be kind of unhinged. And because I am running a referral-based inbound funnel right now, I’m not doing a ton of outbound. Yeah, I didn’t have that like, what good looks for? I just skipped straight to unhinged. And I have a second company called Revenue Revelry. That’s a company that does live master classes, yeah, and so we sent out some emails for events, for our Arizona event, and I use TikTok-inspired subject lines for all of them, which I think is hilarious. The emails were so fun to write, they were so fun to send. I had a blast with it, but some of them were very badly received by sales leaders, who, I think, personally, take themselves way too seriously, and they probably are not a good fit for the tone, the tenor of the master class, which is pretty laid back and Pretty joyful, but it was like, like, no cap, say less, get ready with me. If you know, you know it was just that they were so funny. But that was a failure, like it did not general, did not generate the ticket purchases that I hoped it would. It did generate a few very angry email responses from people.

Wow, that’s funny and sad, but clearly you also taking some lessons from that. What were the lessons like from that, Leslie?

I mean, I still think I would do it again. 

Okay!

I’m being honest. I mean, it was a pretty small test batch overall, and it wasn’t part of a sequence. We just sent a single email out to people. And I think it’s always difficult, if not impossible, to gain the success of something unless you are running. It’s within a sequence, because we know that, like, one touch one email just isn’t going to do much, yeah, um, but it also was a reminder that salespeople take themselves so seriously sometimes, like, we are not saving lives. We do not work in the ER; we send emails to strangers and ask them to buy stuff from us. And that doesn’t mean that the work that we do isn’t important. It is important. It is an honorable profession. We do have this incredible ability to truly help our clients, but at the same time, it was a reminder to me and the core work I do at the sales led go to market agency to challenge my clients, to challenge my audience, like, with a reminder that like, sales should be fun. 

It’s allowed, like, we are allowed to, like, feel joy and have fun and be creative in the profession. And so maybe that goes back to the beginning, a learning would be set that baseline of data, so that you know what good looks like. And then don’t stop there. Be silly and be creative and have fun, because you never know what is going to resonate with your audience. And maybe this time, it was a miss with the TikTok-inspired subject lines. But the next time, maybe that’s how you run a, you know, a viral sequence.

Yeah, yeah. Now this is good. So let’s actually pivot to a go-to-market success story, and if you can share something that maybe you did while working with one of your clients, that’ll be a good learning experience for listeners.

Yeah, one of my favorite recent success stories is that it’s a long-term plan. I’ve been working with them for like, three years, but we recently redid the SOP for their AE discovery call process. It’s a fairly transactional price point. It’s a B2B SaaS product, and it’s like 198 to $298 a month is usually the package that that folks buy. Uh, MRR, yeah, like, you know, fairly transactional. And we rewrote the discovery process for the calls to be longer for much, much, much more of them to be the actual discovery and the needs analysis, and they do demo a little bit on the call, which don’t let Keenan hear me say, It’s okay to demo on the disco sometimes, but we transition To much better discovery and needs analysis and holding qualifying questions and the demo back towards the end of the call. And so when they get to the demo, they’re only demoing two to three features now, and they are asking much better questions. And the goal of this entire pivot was to get more one-call closes and to generally shorten the sales cycle. And I don’t know what the most recent data is, but the data from the end of Q1 was an increase from like, I should have looked this up before we talked, but it was something crazy. It was like a 23% overall close rate to a 45% close rate, and the sales cycles went down by 13 days. And I don’t remember the exact stat for how many more one-call closes they were doing, but significant. 

So I mean that’s crazy. Like that almost doubled the overall close rate and decreased the sales cycle by 13 days on an already pretty transactional product. So that’s a huge win, and that really came about by having a more robust pre-call plan so that the reps were showing up to the calls having not just done the research, but having set 15 minutes aside to connect the dots. So they’re saying, Okay, here’s what I found out about this client. What do I think it means for them? What does it mean in the context of our other clients and our offering? And now that I’ve connected those dots and I’ve developed a point of view, what type of questions am I going to ask them to highlight that expertise and share insights and relevant value? So it changed, I mean, it just completely changed the vibe of the call that they’re no longer getting on and sort of like interrogating the prospect to get the qualifying questions done before they switched to a demo that was just sort of like word bombing all the features. So that’s a really fun that’s a really fun one. There’s such a I just really love working with them, 

Yeah. So that act, that story, by the way, congrats to you and the client for that success. That. Actually reminds me of a common theme that I see with many of the clients that I work with, as well as in my previous work history and employers, right, which is sales people like SDRs, AES to less extent, but it’s mostly the SDRs, especially they are the ones who have to qualify the MQLs and then do the SQL and pass it on to their AES sales accepted leads and so on, and typically they just follow the script verbatim, very mechanical, versus intentionally and genuinely, make an effort to understand why someone actually reached out to know more about the product and a company, because there’s a human on the other end, try to connect with that human and then find out why did they even reach out, versus just from your uni direction lens, trying to sell, because that’s your job and you need to meet your day to day.

Yeah, I’m seeing the same thing with signals. Yeah, that people will get a signal, like somebody’s new to a job, or somebody you know raised around, and they don’t spend any time thinking about what that means. They just hit the send button on the Congrats on your series A email. And I, I think the the next evolution of elite like, what we will see the most elite, SDRs, AES, CSMs do is take the time to figure out what those signals mean, what those bits of research that we’ve collected mean, and really, you know, hopefully we have, like, bought all this time back because we’re using all of this AI to, like, speed things up and automate and delegate, etc, and hopefully that time will be repurposed into more intentional, strategic thought, so that we can show up to every interaction with our buyers having earned the right to their time and to their attention by having a point of view, by having An opinion that’s informed by the, you know, the dots that we strung together and why it’s meaningful to them.

Yeah. So what would be really helpful, Leslie, is if you can double click on what you mentioned in the sales script, and what you taught the sales people to do is spend more time listening and cutting short the demo. So, if you can spend some more time on the actual structure and how you actually coach them into doing it.

Yeah, um, so like, I guess the probably the easiest way to start answering that call is before I worry about the structure of the call. I worry about making sure reps are enabled with the skill sets to execute on this, structuring the script that I am teaching, and because this particular process was so heavily indexed on asking great questions and doing great needs analysis. The place that we started was actually with active listening, and we did two different active listening workshops. It’s one of my favorite workshops to run with clients. I start as many engagements as I possibly can with it, and I walk folks through a 4R framework. 

So the first is to reinforce those, like you know, verbal, nonverbal cues to tell the person you want them to keep speaking. The second R is resist. And this is where folks have most of their aha moments. Because when we think of active listening, we often conceptualize it as just the absence of talking or the absence of interrupting. And what I share with them is that active listening is really about showing restraint so that we can listen to understand, not just to respond. And that’s hard in all conversations, like with our family, with our friends, etc. It’s hard not to start renting space in your head with what you want to say next. It’s hard not to want to jump in and share your own relatable story. 

But I have found that in sales, it’s particularly difficult for two reasons. One, we have to resist the temptation to judge, and I don’t mean judge and like tis test, but like judge that we understand what they are saying, what they are trying to share with us, because we often hear the same things over and over and over again, and so it’s hard to not just assume that you know what they’re trying to communicate without doing the work of understanding and being sure. And I also think that part of what sellers have to resist is the temptation to jump into what they think is helper mode. Mm hmm, because they’re so excited you said something that I can help you, like, I have the answer. But what it feels like to the buyer is that we’re jumping into, like, hard sale mode. 

So I think that those resistance pieces are so, so, so essential. And then the next two steps. One is to restate, like, making sure that we actually got it right, that we did understand it in the way that they wanted us to. And then the final step is relevance, and that’s where you start doing things like the needs analysis, with storytelling, etc. But that resistance piece is so essential. And so when I’m teaching something like that specific discovery process, where I’m not actually teaching the process where I’m teaching those soft skills that underlie the sales techniques that I later want them to use.

Yeah, no, that’s good. I mean, I love the framework that you mentioned, and you also touched upon the key skills, which are active listening. And a lot of people misjudge and misunderstand what active listening is, and something else that actually caught my attention, Leslie is holding back, holding ourselves back from judging that that’s a big thing. It’s very easy to judge and also conclude that, hey, by the way, I think your problem is very similar to this XYZ customer that we have, and we can solve it for you. And here’s a product, and here’s a demo, pretty easy to get into that mode.

Yeah, it’s so interesting that that’s like, that’s what you picked up. Because one of the biggest areas of pushback that I get from sellers is around the value of storytelling, yeah? Because I’ll say, you know, one of the things that you need to resist is jumping in and telling a story, or, like, you know, telling your own relatable story, or even telling a customer story. And they’re like, Well, wait, like store, everybody says that storytelling is the most important thing that we’re supposed to be doing. Yes, and if we tell stories too early, we risk telling the wrong story because we don’t actually understand what they are trying to communicate to us. But more importantly, storytelling, especially when you are like telling your own story, versus a voice of customer story, is that you’re trying to skip the hard work, and so you’re trying to prove to the buyer that you understand by talking about yourself. 

Like, that’s not even the opposite of active listening, that’s just talking about yourself. But you’re trying to skip the difficult work of actually taking the time to understand and asking the questions to go deep by just telling your own story and hoping that they will believe that you understand. So I always think that’s really interesting, and that that one’s really personal to me, because that is the one I struggle with the most I want to, Oh, I totally get it because XYZ reason, or I get it because I did this project with ABC customer, so that, like that part of the resist framework is one that I still work on and I still put deliberate practice behind.

Yeah, no, totally. I mean, for me as well, because I’m a solopreneur myself, which means I also sell and have to sell, which I enjoy the process doing selling. And contrary to a lot of others, people’s opinions or understanding of selling is actually fun if you do it the right way. Selling is all about making a human connection and really understanding why someone was interested in even talking to you in the first place, and seeing and genuinely feeling that you can either help or you can say a polite no, and respectfully say a no so that you’re not wasting anyone’s time.

Yeah, I love that. That’s well said. 

Yeah. So that’s something that I and for me, it’s not that I mastered it. I continued to practice. And just this morning, right before this call, I was on a sales call, a discovery call with someone, a prospective customer, and I was sharing the proposal that I had, that I presented to my current customer. Not to say that, hey, this is the exact blueprint that I can do for you. Is just to say it’s more to show the way of operating and how I work, but also to show that these are the possibilities. And just doing that, it really opened up the doors of that founder, the CEO on the other end, saying, Hey, this is great by these are the problems that I’m struggling with. You make them feel comfortable so that they open up and share their problems from their end. 

Yeah, I love that example. Vijay, because you are blending the use of like, social proof and like lowering the zone of resistance, or, like, the fear of messing up by saying, Hey, here’s here’s my expertise. Like you can see that I have done this for another client.

Right! 

I’m not telling you to buy this. I’m just sharing this with you transparently so that we can have a like, open dialog, and that I can better understand what parts might serve you, what parts don’t like, you know, what’s missing. So I think that’s like a really beautiful example of blending, like some of the storytelling or the social proof or voice of customer with that process of needs analysis. 

Yeah, no, yeah. I think you said that very well, and that’s so true, right up until that’s just an example. And the reason why I want to share this is to share with the listeners and hopefully to your audience as well, that you’re coaching, which is around, there’s a way how you can help and put others to ease in the first place, put the buyer at ease, and they’ll automatically open up once they can see that you’re there to help them not trying to sell and meet your quota.

Yeah, yeah. The power of transitioning in the buyer’s mind from a seller who is just there to do a transaction right to a human who is there to get a win-win outcome for both of you is one of the most powerful sorts of conversational transitions that can happen in sales.

Yeah, no, for sure, so you mentioned teaching active listening. Are there any other critical skills that you want your students to learn about management? There you go. 

Okay, yeah, if we’re talking about sort of things that are considered, quote, unquote, soft skills, and I will say, Vijay, like one of the things that really gets me when I advocate for including time to focus on skills like curiosity and active listening and time management is that they are not often regarded as skills, meaning, like, if I told you that you needed to, you know, be 70% accurate on your free throw, or I told you that you needed to be able to code XYZ, you would immediately know that that would require practice. Like, just immediately, like, of course, in order to accomplish that goal, I would need to practice that. When we talk about soft skills, people often believe that you either have them or you don’t have them, yeah, which is, which is nonsense. That’s total nonsense. 

That is actually not true, certainly because of like, societal factors, you might be more empathetic at present or more curious, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot develop and hone those skills with practice. And so, so true for something like active listening. And I also find that’s extraordinarily true for one of my favorite time management skills, which is deep work and the ability to focus, yep, particularly with how many folks now identify as neurodivergent and know that they struggle with focus. I just like it breaks my heart when I’m working with reps and they’re just like, oh, I can’t focus. Or I just I can’t do that for more than five minutes, or I’m always distracted, or I feel like I have worked hard all day, and it’s the end of the day, and I have nothing to show for it, because they are multitasking in their hair, and they’re there, and they’re answering every slack and distracted by every email. So time management, more generally, is a skill that I love to work on, but specifically empowering reps to own their time and to practice deep focus, where, even if it’s not deep work, but even doing something like the Pomodoro Technique, where they are doing a single task for 25 minutes with their slack and their email and their phone and everything turned off, right? That is such an incredible hack that enables reps to work better, to enjoy work more, to feel more accomplished, and to be more effective. So that’s another I don’t I don’t feel like very many sales trainers are like, I’m going to come in and work on deep focus and active listening. 

But when I think of. What has enabled my success and the success of my teams over, you know, the 15 years that you know that I was in the corporate sales world, it’s those soft skills first, and then once those are mastered, it’s time to add specific sales techniques and sales hard skills on top of them. 

Yeah, no, for sure, it’s very counterintuitive, right? So a lot of people are wired by default that if they are not busy and doing a lot of things, which means they can move faster. Yeah, but it’s the exact opposite, which is, first of all, you need to pick only a few things that really matter. That’s number one, second is spending time on those few things will actually, actually make you feel and actually make you be more present, which means a task that normally takes like 10 hours, you would typically just take about two to three hours. If you really hone your deep work muscle.

You’re so right. You know, I did a time management session for a client just a few weeks ago. I’m going to be, I’m going to be live with them in Omaha next week. And you know, as we were preparing to live together, I just uncovered that sense that a lot of a lot of the rep have huge books of business, very transactional service-based sales again, and that the reps were just feeling so overwhelmed by their book of business. And what we are going to do live on site is like, go through a territory management strategy and work on like sales messaging and how much research they should be doing based on the tier and, you know, based on the propensity to spend but what I uncovered preparing for the in person work is that the sense of overwhelm and the lack of ownership of their time and of their calendar was going to be a big hurdle to accomplish the other work that we wanted to do. 

So I did a virtual time management session. And one of the things I always say during those sessions is that multitasking is a myth. And then I say, why? You know, like you’re not actually multitasking. You’re not doing two things. You are rapidly task switching, and the data clearly shows, just like you said, that it means you are doing both tasks worse, and that ultimately it will take longer to do both of them than if you just did one at a time. You were doing better. You would do them faster. And one of the reps DM me on LinkedIn afterwards, and they said that that was the first time that anybody had ever told them that, that they still thought like multitasking was, like, something that they should break about, or something they should be trying to do, something that was advantageous. And I get it because, like, circa 2010, I had multitasking as a bullet point on my resume. Right? Like we were told that multitasking was, you know, a skill set, and now we know that it’s, it’s quite the opposite. Multitasking is just detrimental to our success. 

Yeah, so continuing on the topic of improving sales and improving the pipeline. What aspect of pipeline building is, do a lot of salespeople actually overcomplicate or spend excessive time, or not enough time?

Oh, the list is long. It’s every aspect. Um, I would say either territory management or sales messaging. I think, if, I think, if it’s a sales leader, 

Yeah! 

I would say territory strategy, because most reps don’t choose their territory, like they’re given a set of accounts. And so I think, I think sales leaders get it wrong in helping their reps understand how to have that like CEO of territory mindset in approach to book of business. And instead, they’re just like, go down the list and put 10 new accounts into your sequence every day for reps, it’s usually sales messaging that they are just like twisting themselves into a ball of stress trying to write the most perfect sales message ever. And it is either, yeah, I’m your sales rep from XYZ company, and we sell an our company and our product because they’re trying to tell this person everything that needs to be told, or they’re like, four paragraphs, because they’re trying to communicate everything they could possibly need to say in one email. So it’s the good news is that it’s an easy fix. Mm, hmm. 

And, like, the immediate mindset, mindset shift for reps is, this is why we have sequences, take that one email that you’re trying to make perfect, and that’s actually everything that you’re going to say through every single like, sales message, touch, point, and channel throughout. The entire sequence, but it’s, it’s, I see reps putting so much pressure on themselves to write a perfect email. And first of all, there’s no such thing as a perfect email at full stop. That’s why we use a sequence, because different people respond to different types of messages on different channels, and ROI versus COI language, and all of that. So keep your emails short and simple, short, simple sentences. Optimize them for mobile. Keep them focused on what matters to the buyer. So like, really audit to reduce the I, my, we, our language, and remember that you have that entire sequence to tell your story. You don’t need to get it into one email. 

Yeah, very cool. And something else that I’m noticing, because I interact and speak with a lot of founders, and the big thing the founders want to do is invest more time in building the social profile and social following. It’s related to sales, but it’s actually pre-sales. And I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile, and you have, what about 47, close to 48,000 followers. So, tell us the story of how you did it, and any lessons that you can share with the listeners. 

Ah, thank you. I have almost the same on TikTok as well. So I’m really, really grateful to have a pretty big audience on two separate platforms, and I’m building YouTube right now. Good gosh, YouTube’s a beast. I think it is so smart for founders to have a social profile. And the way that I look at it is that it is not just a potential lead source, it is also an incredible recruitment tool, because folks will follow that founder and see what they’re saying and what they aspire to work for them, clamor to work for them. So if you’re thinking about how to get the absolute best talent into your pool, having a founder social profile, I think, is really helpful from a branding, social selling position. I mean, I run a 100% inbound and referral-based funnel, and most of my inbound leads ultimately come from LinkedIn. 

They first find me on podcasts, on webinars, on TikTok. So they they often find me first with video content, and then they follow me to LinkedIn, where I post every single day, and I have posted every single day for over 1500 days, so I have a huge amount of social authority and a really clear voice and perspective and sort of cache of knowledge that I’m sharing for free there, and then often they will see like a catalyst post and then message me, Hey, I’ve actually been working on this and you posted about X, and let’s talk about why. So, for founders and a founder-led sales model, being able to tap into that type of inbound lead that’s like an absolute no-brainer. But even if it isn’t that sort of straight line to leads, I think having a founder profile is so important, just for like, the credibility and the authority. 

I mean, we know based on what set of data you’re looking at that buyers are doing just a tremendous amount of research.

Yep! 

Before we even know they’re in the market, they’re doing a tremendous amount of research before we maybe even hear from them that they’re interested in considering working with us. And so having a founder with a clear, you know, brand point of view, perspective out there is quite valuable. But I would also add Vijay that there’s a big difference between social selling, which is the act of doing outbound on a social channel and brand building, yeah, which is an activity for inbound, like, I would say, like posting content and engaging in the comments and creating that brand That’s very Demand Gen, whereas like going into people’s LinkedIn DMS, like hosting LinkedIn live events and then following up with the people and creating sequences around that, that’s very lead gen, which I think is something that people struggle with on LinkedIn, because it really, really blurs the lines between sales and marketing and lead gen and demand gen.

Yeah, for sure, you touched upon lead gen, you touched upon demand. And there’s also brand building, which is sort of related but different, right? 

I mean, it starts with having a point of view that that’s the first and foremost. And once you have a point of view, you’re genuinely posting something that’s of value, and even before you get to that point, first of all, you need to continue to post and see what’s resonating and what’s not. And someone put it right. It’s a signal-to-noise ratio, because especially in the first few months, when you’re posting, you’ll start to see the signals and see what kind of posts resonate. Is it the value add pose, or education post, or entertainment pose, or hey, this is why I picked my entrepreneurial founder journey, right? There are all these nuances. And so where I’m going with this is, yes, in addition to demand gen and lead gen, there’s also the brand building, the following. And a lot of those are even like outcomes; if done right, those are more like the trailing indicators. 

Yeah, I just got a notification that it’s already five to three. This went so fast. I have to be live on LinkedIn at three o’clock. So we’ve got to wrap up with our last questions. This one’s so fast. This was so great. Thank you for the conversation.

Absolutely. And good timing as well, because I was coming up with my last question. 

Perfect!

So the question to you, I have Leslie, is, if you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your career journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?

Um, if I was gonna go back to day one of my career, I would tell myself that company loyalty is bullshit, and to not fall for that narrative, which that might be a kind of unpopular thing to say out loud, but one of the biggest injustices that I did to myself in my career was stayed with companies for too long because I thought, I thought loyalty to a company was, like, really important and would be rewarded. And that is unequivocally untrue for, you know, 99% of companies. So I would go back and I would say, like, only be loyal to yourself and to your integrity and to your reputation. Like, always stand true to your values. But that doesn’t mean that a company deserves loyalty from you if they’re not giving loyalty to you. 

Go-to-market is defined as a cohesive, interconnected machine involving sales, marketing, product, and customer needs working together like a flywheel. A successful GTM strategy centers on four key elements: understanding the customer’s pain points, delivering clear product value, ensuring ease of consumption, and aligning cross-functional teams toward common goals.

In this insightful podcast, Ramesh Prabagaran, a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and two-time founder, shares his journey from product manager to successful founder and CEO. With over 20 years in the computer networking industry, Ramesh discusses his experiences at Juniper Networks, his co-founding of Viptela (acquired by Cisco), and his latest venture, Prosimo. He dives deep into go-to-market strategies, the iterative process of startup development, and the challenges of finding the right customer segments and value propositions. 

Ramesh provides valuable lessons on fundraising, mentorship, and navigating the shifting landscape of cloud networking, with particular emphasis on product-led growth (PLG) and enterprise sales. His story highlights the importance of capital constraints, building the right team, and developing a cohesive, customer-centric strategy.

Listen to the podcast here:

Resources:

Connect with Ramesh Prabagaran on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramsba

Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijdam/

From Product Manager to 2x exited Founder: Ramesh Prabagaran’s Go-To-Market Success Playbook

So I’ll start off the conversation with the signature question, which the audience enjoys and listens to and value, which is, how do you view and define go to market? 

Ooh, that’s nice. Okay, yeah, yeah. I don’t think there’s like a single solid answer that you can get that’s consistent across the board, go to market. And if I put myself in the lens of a startup person, and as you, as you pointed out, I’ve done two startups, and so that’s kind of runs in my means and my arteries right now, yeah, go to market in a startup is quite different. What I mean by that is you need to have not just a well-rounded view. 

Yes, you have your sales, you have your marketing, have your product, you have your customers, all those things need to fit in and whatnot, but go to market in a startup is a very cohesive machine where you really can’t decouple these functions. One feeds off of the other. It’s almost like a flywheel where one feeds off of the other, and you just have a vicious cycle that you create. 

And so to me, I try to simplify things, because it’s easier to comply to comprehend. There really two things that you care about, right? All others are just meant to serve those two things. One is the customer. So you always put yourself in the shoes of a customer, and you think about two things. 

One is, what is the pain they’re going through, and what do they care about? 

The other one is the product that you’re creating, what is value it provides, and whether is it really easy to consume. 

And if you care and take care of these four things, what I’ve noticed is all the other things naturally fold well into this, which is my go-to-market, my outbound, my inbound, my product marketing, all of those things solve for one of these four things. And so to me, a good market in in a startup is really trying to nail these four questions that I just went through, and how do you effectively put the function together, staff them take care of the strategy appropriately to essentially solve for these four.

Right!

I’ve noticed that even if one out of these four is not solved properly, you have a broken go-to-market machine. And having gone through two startups, especially the last one, where we had about three iterations of go to market, I can tell you with absolute certainty that, and as you nail all four you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna get there.

No, I love it, and I love the way you actually broke it down into very simplistic, quote-unquote,  simplistic terms, but, but I mean, to your point, I mean, that’s how I see it. Also. It’s like you’re connecting two dots on one. It always starts with your ICB, the customer, and the problem, yeah, that’s one second is, how are you delivering value, either through a product or our service exactly, right? Everything else is in between.

Yes, exactly. And then those two don’t connect. Well, then you will see that manifest in the form of inefficiency or friction in the system or broken processes and whatnot, right? So, yeah, so it’s helpful, and this is these are the four things that are very easy to understand, very simple as well, but it’s hard to keep track of, right? Because you’re always in the weeds on so many issues that you don’t get to zoom out and look at, hey, are these four things? 

Yeah, yeah, no, it’s easier said than done, right? I mean, the first step is to get to that clarity that it’s these two or four or whatever you want to call it, right? These dots, connect the dots. But then doing it, executing it, is super hard, and that’s why it’s not easy from conceiving a startup idea to really seeing it grow.

Exactly! Yeah, and I can tell you, I’m sure lots of your listeners are either new to the startup world, or some are seasoned startup veterans as well, and you’ll see a remarkable difference in approach that people take to startups if you’re new versus if you’ve been there if you’re new. You feel the. Is everything. And then if you’ve done it one time, you will know that the idea is, like, 10% of the whole thing, execution is really where it is that, right? 

Yes!

I remember vividly. It’s like, we used to be so secretive about the idea. We don’t want to disclose this, that, and the other. The first time around, like, even to investors and except for customers, all others, you’re very secretive about it. The second time around is, like, I don’t care. Like, you can take my PowerPoint, and go run with it. That’s fine. It’s the execution that matters. So you learn a lot of interesting things along the way.

Yeah, speaking like a true and a proven 2x founder, right? And of late, this is something that I’m seeing, maybe you’re also noticing, right? And there are that small sliver of people and the go-to-market founders and practitioners who actually buy into that, 

Yeah!

it’s almost like it’s an open book, correct? Their entire go-to-market is an open book. And the way they challenge themselves is, hey, if someone can actually read these posts or blogs or whatever, and execute, which means my thinking is flawed. Yes, it’s that easy to replicate. Then there’s some serious flaw.

Exactly, exactly. So it’s the next level, double click, triple click, whatever that’s necessary that actually separates out success from things that are yet to hit success, right? I wouldn’t call them failures, and no failures in a startup.

Right. 

Just success in learning.

Fantastic. So this is a good opening conversation. So let’s take a step back, go back, zoom out, and walk us through your career journey. I mean, where do you start from a professional point of view, and what led you to what you’re doing today? 

Absolutely. Yeah, so for better, for first, for the last 20 years or so, I’ve been networking. Computer Networking has been the field I’ve been so focused on, and, of course, branching out from there is like security and data and whatnot, but computer networking has been the core focus. I spent about 10 years at Junpa, a flagship computer networking company, which is where I learned a lot of initial, initial things. And then, of course, being in Silicon Valley, you have the itch to start something. 

Fortunately, a few of us got together and got a company called Viptela off the ground. It was in the software-defined wide area, networking space, literally, few people have never done startups before, trying to figure something out. And it was a great ride. I went from being, quote, unquote, a no-name product manager in my own head to really finding myself. I had multiple, multiple roles, from strategy to product management. We’d never had a marketing person to market, to Technology Partnerships. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing in a startup, you wear multiple hats and you just get stuff done, right and so, so that was a great ride. In five years or so since the founding, we got acquired by Cisco, so I was given the responsibility to run roughly a half-a-billion dollar portfolio at Cisco, my product that we brought in and many other things, and that was a different set of muscles I started to develop there, but my heart was always in a startup and growing from A few 100 million to a billion, while exciting, it’s a different set of muscles that I did not want to build. And so give the keys to somebody who is even better equipped than me to run that. 

And then a few of us got my second startup off the ground, which is Prosimo this time, this is in cloud networking. So it was at the intersection of cloud and networking with a bunch of security and whatnot. And I thought, hey, second time around, it would be easier. Man, it wasn’t. First was all the confluence of external forces, which you naturally expect. 

But this time, it was a bit more acute. We started in 2019, so we had the wave of COVID, followed by kind of remote work, followed by kind of an acute focus on fundamentals, to a radical shift in the market, on focus, focusing on financials and fundamentals, right? And so things that you took for granted, started to change quite a bit. And so it was it was an interesting evolution. From that standpoint, the good market also was very different because we were talking to different sets of buyers. But fortunately, landed a lot of dozen coupled with a dozen global, 2000 logos, and then realized that, hey, no, this is better done in a large company. So we just sold that recently, and so, so now I’m, I’m trying to get some sleep back.

Get some sleep back. Well, said, yeah. 

So going back. I mean, let’s start with the first and most fundamental question, which is, why networking? What got you curious and why? 

Yeah, right.

So I always look for, anytime you start a company, you look for forces of gravity. I ask myself a very simple question, if we did not start a company to address this problem, is it that the problem goes away, or does the problem compound and start to get worse?

Ramesh, even before that, sorry, I didn’t phrase my question correctly. What made you get into networking in the first place? 

Oh, okay! Yeah, what made you get into networking.

So this is back in the 2000s I’m dating myself here, but back in 2000 or s,o that was the craze, blowing Internet growth and and all of the things associated with that, right? And so I wanted to be in a place that actually brought multiple things together. And so I found myself there in that space. And my master’s was in networking as well. And so now they gravitated towards towards this, right? And so I think it was just a fascinating time to be in the networking industry, back in 2000 with all of the explosive growth in different types of companies, the web coming online, and a whole bunch of things. Fast forward to today. It still continues to be exciting, even though I think AI is all the craze right now, but lots of fundamental things need to happen underneath the covers for the infrastructure to work. And I find networking a place where you can bring in solid architecture, solid reliability, solid care about and whatnot, and be as low in the stack as possible, taking care of bits and buys, or be as high in the stack taking care of application experience and so is a good place to kind of zoom in and zoom out, is what I like about it?

Yeah, no. Well said. 

I mean, if I were to go back to my time and when I started my career very similar, right? Something, maybe the time was right. It had to be right, obviously, because, in Silicon Valley, you had all the big names. So I joined Fujitsu, network communications, and networking, but in the application space, doing network management software. And back then, we had all the hot, hot, and hottest of IPOs and companies. Yes, you had the .com and bust, but you also had companies like Oni, Redback, Nortel, so many, so many of them back then. And fundamentally, that was your pipeline or infrastructure for the internet boom, as simple as that, 

Exactly, yeah. So yeah, after the semiconductor wave came kind of the networking wave before the cloud wave started to 

Correct. So mobile, and now it’s exactly correct, yeah, and so. 

So the natural progression was, kind of learn all of the fundamental things in networking. And then we saw some disruption in the first startup where, kind of the cost arbitrary, and going high capacity premium grade circuits, versus everybody being able to browse from anywhere over the internet. There was like 100 to one cost arbitrage, but all of the premium grade enterprise connectivity was happening over the premium grade. And then we felt, hey, why can’t you use the lower grade, but kind of get similar services right? And so the cost arbitrage there presented itself as a nice disruptive moment for startups to come in and dig into this space, right? And so anytime you look for that kind of wedge, right? Like, is there an industry transition that’s happening, or is there some disruption that’s happening that’s causing economics to break? And if the economics break, then that’s a good fundamental reason to jump into something. So we found the first wave in the SD Wan space with the cost arbitrage, and the second wave in terms of actual cloud, cloud networking, and so forth. 

Yeah, actually, that was my follow-up question, which is like you mentioned at Juniper Networks, that’s where you probably found your set of co-founders, maybe within our outside of Juniper Network. Yes, like, what was the discussion like? I mean, what made you guys jump into it?

Yeah, it was. It was interesting. It was so we were mostly focused on enterprise customers, mostly. Enterprises were building, take any large retailer, a large bank, or a large manufacturing, they have a whole bunch of locations, and they wanted to connect all these locations together. These locations had interesting bandwidth challenges because the number of people was increasing. Case in point, talking to a pretty large retailer that said, I have locations in Panama and Saudi Arabia and one other location where the quality of internet connection determines whether people come into work or not. And so we found ourselves like, hey, it’s like these guys are paying 1000 bucks a month easily on premium grade connectivity, but nobody’s coming into the office because they’re not able to get, like, basic internet access. So what’s the point of connecting to corporate applications when people. Will need to be able to also browse and then research and do things, right? And so when that breaks, then, it manifests itself in terms of offer disruption. And so, those are kind of the initial things that led to, led to the first company 

Got it. And so let’s double-click, right? So maybe the couple of you, the co-founders, had this idea, but then you didn’t have funding yet. Or, how did you go about the fundraising part?

Yeah, so maybe the first example, or the first company, was back in 2012 I’ll maybe give you a more recent one, which is the one from about five, six years ago, right? So, here the problem statement was slightly different, so I’ll just set the context up. And so it was, hey, there’s a seven-layer sandwich that was getting built in the public cloud. So if you contrast what happened in the data center. So you had kind of foundational networking, router switches, whatnot. Then you had like, load balances, and then you had like an identity, and then you had, like, security, and then you had application services. So there’s like, a seven-layer sandwich that was getting created inside the data center. What are the right reasons? Because it just evolved naturally. And so when folks wanted to move those applications into the public cloud, their time-tested, proven thing was to take exactly that same seven-layer sandwich, bring it into some software form factor, and bring that into the public cloud and so. And we look at that and say, That’s so wrong, because you have the ability to create something from scratch day one that’s clean and lean, and so why wouldn’t you? And it really boiled down to like, organization, friction, different guys owning different things, which we’ll come into in the good market context quite, quite soon as well. 

And so we found ourselves in a hand, this is an area that will get disrupted. And we found that the hyperscalers themselves were also struggling with this, because they wanted to give a nice playground that folks could build on in nice and modular and lean, but folks were just bringing stacks and stacks and stacks of software appliances and building the capability that way. So we started Prosimo to essentially address that problem. 

So at the root of it, think about it as if you keep the application in the center of the universe, what does that application need to talk to it needs to either talk to another application or it needs to talk to a user. It really boils down to that much infrastructure underneath the covers, networking, security, and whatnot is a means to an end to make that happen in the best way possible. And so we said, Let’s shift the focus to a higher level of that stack, where applications can talk to each other, or users can talk to applications, and the rest of the pieces we handle. And so this was the context, and we didn’t see there was any real good player that was addressing this. 

There were seven layers of the sandwich, and you had each vendor, vendors in each of those categories, trying to address but it wasn’t the lean way that we were thinking customers wanted to think about it. And so this is so this was the problem statement. So when we wanted to just the first thing is, like we look for forces of gravity. So we asked ourselves, if we didn’t solve this problem, what would happen if the seven-layer sandwich continued to be there? Or would something change? 

And we saw that the hyperscalers had enough investments happening that we found that this disruption was happening. The white space we found was the hyperscalers had a very purist view of how this needs to be done. And so they collapsed those things fairly quickly, and they only addressed it for themselves. And customers were increasingly getting multi-cloud so. And so and so there was a white space that we saw, and we said, nobody’s addressing that, so let’s go address that. And so when we sought initial funding, we fortunately had access to quite a few infrastructure-focused investors, and so we went there. 

And so the natural question was like, Why can’t AWS do this? Why can’t Azure do this? Why can’t GCP do this, right? Yes, they all can. They have armies of people, but would they want to? They’re good at building foundational blocks. So the example I used to provide was the enterprise customer. One needs a latte, the other one needs a cappuccino, and the other one needs an Americano. And what the hyperscalers give you are coffee beans and different types of milk and sugar. And each enterprise is forced to build their own right, like they have to make their own coffee. And so is that what you want to do right? And so we found white space in terms of being able to provide that latte, in terms of providing that cappuccino, and so forth.

Yeah! 

And so that’s kind of what led to us. 

Now, investors look at this differently, depending on kind of where their background is and how they come from. But fortunately, we landed a couple of really good, high-quality investors. One had been operating he was the C. CEO of SMB, a 500 company at that time. Now he’s the CEO of Intel. He just recently got the job of CEO of Intellibus. And then we also had one who, from General Catalyst, was a CTO of VMware, and so he had a very profound understanding of the evolution in that stack. So trying to find the right people was important, and so we found, then we got this upgrade.

Fantastic. So how did you go about getting your first set of customers? 

That’s a learning number, I would say, seven. By that time, we already made six mistakes. So let’s say, let’s start with learning number seven. Learning number seven is choosing your initial few customers when you want to build something is extremely important. And so right now, looking back, I feel like we did not choose the right, good sample set of customers. What I mean by that is I had 10 customers who were guiding us in terms of what to build in the capabilities and what value to offer and so forth. But they were all large enterprises, right? So you had some of the big S, p5, 100 global, and 2000 customers on our advisory, essentially helping us try to build this, right? 

Now that was good because, well, we got access to a whole bunch of care about customer challenges and whatnot. It was bad because I never balanced that out with the needs of the mid-market. Balance that out with the need for anything else. And so if you’re bang on right about your customers, and you can move forward with that, that’s great. That’s a playbook that works. But if there is any chance that you have to pivot, or if market conditions change and you have to pivot, then, and if you have a bad sample size of initial customers, then you’re pretty much stuck with that, because the initial assumptions matter a lot, right? Whether it’s what you build into the product, or what you build into the go-to-market, or what the value that you’re trying to deliver because since the audience was a large enterprise, we were trying to build a big hammer. 

And so anybody that had a small nail, yes, we can hit the nail, but we’ll also take out the board along with it, right? And so, yeah, we built, like duty capabilities, and so that naturally kind of put us in a corner and trying to only serve really large enterprises, right? And so looking back, that was one of the big learnings that we had, which actually manifested itself really well. 

So the knockout punch that we got was really when we got out of stealth and we went out to the market and said, what we did, which is essentially the version one of the go-to-market engine. To put it really, really bluntly, everybody said, amazing idea. We love the concept. I’ll talk to you in two years, like, what is this?

But didn’t you have design customers by then with LOI and all those?

Yes, we had so. But the thing is, because of the sampling bias we only had those out of the 10, five of them were doing beta and so forth. But those five, it wasn’t that that five could lead to the next 50 and so that five could have become 10. 

Yes, you could have found more, but in a startup, you don’t want that type of growth u want to get to the next 50, right? And so we found ourselves kind of back to a corner in terms of what we had built and the capabilities. So some of the learnings in there were again collapsing a seven-layer sandwich into one. Appealed to the CIO, to the head of infrastructure. 

But when you go one level down, budgets were still with the head of networking, head of security, head of cloud, and head of operations, and so we found ourselves trying to convince four different constituents about a common goal. So even though the CIO was aligned, the four different guys were not aligned. So that’s why everybody was like, Hey, come back in two years. Because I see this as very transformational. My CIO says this is great. All that is good, but let me talk about it for two years, right? And so, so the urgency in trying to move today was largely missing.

Got it so the buying signals were not there. 

So, yes, exactly, right. And so the buying signals for why I would do something today were not there. So that was kind of the first gut function in hindsight. It was like, how did we miss this, right? But at that time, when you are coming out of stealth as a startup, you want to plant the biggest flag possible on the largest possible mountain and make some noise, because you get to do that one time in the company’s history, and I felt like we got a good megaphone and said all the right things, but it just did not lead to immediate customer opportunities. So that was kind of version one of what I would call a failed go-to-market iteration. 

And. It didn’t fail because, because we weren’t able to get to the customers. It’s just that we were not able to get the customers to move. We were able to get to everybody who wanted to have a conversation. But it ended up being a project, yeah, as opposed to an immediate here-and-now, burning thing, right? And so the lesson learned was, hey, unless you have a here and now burning problem that somebody can act on today, and that is not cross-functional, you really don’t have, especially, especially as a startup, you don’t have, you know, you can’t really kind of magnify that, right? And so, so, so that was the first punch that we got in the boxing ring, and we said, okay, good, we can now start to so we said, okay, let’s not take a whole seven-layer sandwich. Let’s cater to at least one buyer. 

That’s interesting. And so we said, okay, who’s the this is the second iteration. So we said, Okay, we’ll cater to one buyer. We could have chosen between the networking, the security the the cloud, and the operational buyer. So we said, okay, operational buyer, no, because they are very reactive to things, and they’re not the ones in the front end making those decisions. And this was a transformative technology. 

So we said, that doesn’t match networking. We said I have done this networking play before. I know the networking guys, a little bit of that bias.

Yeah. 

So we said, okay, let’s not focus on networking. Guys, security. 

We said, okay, let’s choose between security and cloud. So we went and spoke to a whole bunch of security buyers, interestingly, and the vast feedback we got was, this is good, but two things came out from there, right? One is security never tends to be a very transformative conversation, because the risk appetite is not there. And so if you rock the boat too much, then you don’t know what you’re rocking, and then you open holes for others to attack. Nobody wants to do that. Demo one, the second one is the CIO tenure. The CISO tenure was, was a large factor, right? 

Because most of these guys are with the company for about one and a half to three years. And so as a CISO, they’re like, hey, I need to operationalize a strategy today, get that to a certain point, and then I need to kind of move to move to the next thing, right? And so this came beyond that scope. And so we really didn’t get the traction required, and we didn’t want to be in this science project land past the first iteration. So we said, okay, then maybe it’s the cloud buyer. So we went and spoke to a whole bunch of cloud buyers. And interesting, interestingly, the feedback was, yes, this was good. But there was one nagging feeling that we overlooked, and then the cloud buyers are like, Yes, this is good, because I have these fundamental capabilities I’ll get from the hyperscalers. You guys are augmenting that, correct? And so that is great, and you’re giving me homogeneity across multiple different hyperscalers. So that’s all good. But I think what we overlooked was the fact that these guys live and breathe with the hyperscalers all day long. And so only that delta functionality that is not offered is where they would even start to look for a third-party piece of software correct? And so not being Native was the biggest and the biggest

lesson that we learned, right? 

And so ultimately, in the end, it came down to a really simple thing that he said, when a car drives off the lot, if it has a radio in it, that radio stays in the car for 80% of the people, 

Right.

The other 20% that want some rise in nearly good fancy capabilities, are the ones who will end up switching, and we ended up being the 20% category. So we said, Okay, this is good. It’s better than version one, yeah, but it’s not going to give us, like, a huge amount of new logos. So we were able to land so there was one good data point, which is we were able to get a whole bunch of POCs. We were able to land the initial opportunities, but the land to the expand just ended up being a pretty big, pretty big lift. 

One more impression of your go-to-market there, 

Exactly, right! And so then we said, okay, you know what this is like. And so the other piece of this. And mind you when you say, go to market, this means our sales guys need to be armed with the right messaging, yes, our product marketing needs to come up with the core value.

Correct.

All built out of what the product can actually deliver. Unlike big companies, like small companies, if you say something, it better be true because otherwise you get one shot and you blow it. And so you make a whole bunch of changes in the product. You get your sales teams kind of armed. You have your marketing machine kind of tuned to that, which means inbound, outbound messaging, or imagine all of those things need to so you get to a certain point, and then you realize, oh my god, okay, I like this second iteration also, like it’s there, but I don’t think this is the play that we want to make, right? 

And from an online point of view, are we talking like three to six months? 

Yes, exactly. So each iteration lasted about, I would say three months, four months at most, yeah, but it does require a lot of calories, right, and fortunately, we were constrained in terms of capital. Fortunately, if we had more capital, we would have run multiple parallel go-to-markets, which actually is a bad thing to be doing because we were capital constrained. We said, okay, there’s going to be, like, a very small 4% 5% team. And so there’s like, one salesperson, one solution architect, one marketing person, myself, and one product guy. We said, we’re going to run this machine, which means in the morning, we’ll create the messaging. 

The guy will pitch that to the customers. Will get slapped around, he’ll come, provide the feedback, iterate over that, create the marketing messaging, try something, and then kind of just keep that client moving. And so in about, in less than a month, you get a good feel for the direction, and then what you’re pressure testing after that is really, can you move past that initial first meeting to getting to and landing a POC right? 

And so in three, four months, you pretty much know whether one such iteration is working. And we found ourselves, it’s like, hey, you know what? It’s better than version one, but this is, this is not this is not it, right? 

Like, and so you have this, you have this feeling that this is not it. So we said, okay, you know what, let’s take all the learnings from version one, take all the learnings from version two, and apply this. But this time we said, Let’s go after the cloud networking buyer, right? 

And so, and that was the disconnect. We saw, that the value inherent in the product appealed to the cloud guys, but many times they would have to go and ask for permission from the cloud networking team, and that was in the networking tower. So the guys that we initially overlooked, ended up actually being the guys to make the decision. So we said, okay, version three, now we got the core value. We know what’s really appealing. We know that the cloud guys love this because we don’t want them to be friction in the process. So we know they like it. The security guys like it because we have spoken to enough people, it’s just that they didn’t want to own it.

Right.

And so the budget is now with the cloud networking buyer. So let’s go run that play. And that play worked beautifully. Then we said, okay, cloud networking buyer, so we knew, if you’re the head of networking or the CIO, all the way down to kind of director of networking, to the architect too. 

So there were, like, multiple layers of the organization who resonated with what messaging, what capabilities of the product? How do we run a tight POC? How do you take care of external messaging? 

For the listeners who are not familiar with the names and brands and the cloud networking, so if you can just list out some of the names.

Yeah, absolutely. So Cloud networking. I mean, it was born inside of Cisco with the acquisition that was done, which is my previous product, and then from there, it’s a company called Aviatrix that came about, that started to build capabilities. And then Alkira was born, and then f5 started to get in, and then we came in, and then you have a slightly different. The approach to solving this problem from HashiCorp is completely kind of community-led, and has different GTM motions, and different GTM motion. And so you have, these are the kind of class of players. So we found ourselves with, okay, no, this is an enterprise play. We hadn’t built the capabilities to serve the mid-market just yet. So this is an enterprise play. Cloud networking is our buyer.

Right. 

The message that resonated with them, and this is here’s a beautiful thing, right? Initially, and even within Cloud networking, what you keep us number one number two, and number three really matters, right? In terms of value. So we said we wanted to be the best at something. Cost is not that thing. Like, this is 2022 right around the time when cost was not really, like, high up. So he said, Okay, we don’t want to keep the cost up. Networking guys care about reliability. But, like, do we really want to call ourselves the most reliable cloud networking solution? 

No, no, no, not really. So we said, we are the ones who give you the best possible application experience.

 right? Sounds good, right? Like, yes, we take care of the application needs, we take care of all of the networking required for that, and we give you the best possible application experience. 

Why do you move to the cloud? Because you want agility and you want experience. We’re giving you one of those things, and we give you at like great speed, this has got to work, right? So we enter the went to the market in that order, which is application experience, followed by reliability, cost and performance, and all of the good things around it. 

The part that we missed was the fact that nobody wants to admit no networking person wants to admit that they have an application experience problem. 

Yes!

It’s true. They all have it, but nobody wants to admit it, right? 

So we found ourselves in this weird thing because they would tell us in private conversations that, yes, I have like, Guys are screaming because this application is broken, the experience is bad, and blah, blah, blah, but in the demand gen and digital world, nobody wants to agree to that, and so we were not able to pull people in with that Message to have a conversation. Based on that, we were like, oh, man, this, like, we missed this, like, pretty badly. So those are, again, all the go-to-market iterations that you have, and we learn from them, and then we switch the order. And we said, okay, application experience is important. But then here are kind of the core networking care about agility and all of the cost control. And this was like 2023, at that time. And so suddenly cost started to come into the main focus. Because, right, we didn’t find a single customer that said, I’m happy with my cloud cost. Everybody was focused on that. FinOps guys were in the picture. So it helped us morph. And so, yeah, so if you look at the matrix, you have your product which needs to evolve. You have your customers who are slightly changing the balance of power. Also it was shifting a little bit. Cloud guys have some control. Networking guys have some control. So you had to play this very carefully, not to piss off either one, but side with your budget order, and then you add your macro forces, which is what I cared a lot about, like, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed. Everything needs to move to the cloud, you know what? 

Like, Cloud is now my biggest pain, because of my bills, and so I need to take care of cost control. 

So it’s a very dynamic environment, but that’s the beauty of it, right? You try different things and you see what works, and then do that champion.

So the buying champion, was the persona was the head of cloud networking, that’s correct? 

Yes. And so, we found that buying the personal cloud of the head of cloud networking was really organizationally in two different places, depending on the type of enterprise. If you were a super mature organization responsible for cloud the head of cloud networking was in the cloud organization, so they were part of the CCoE, or this cloud Center of Excellence organization. Their care about asking the head of cloud networking was somewhat the same, but somewhat different. In other cases, we saw that the budget was within the networking tower, and so was the head of infrastructure and networking owned the budget, and there was a cloud of the network, a head of cloud networking, and a player under the networking tower. So our go-to-market had to be slightly nuanced to take care of both because it’s great to do that one-on-one with a customer. You find out exactly where they are and you have the conversation. But in terms of what you put on your website, what you have in terms of your Demand Gen material, and whatnot, we found some interesting things there. 

Actually, let me double-click on that. That’s a very important point you just mentioned Ramesh, which is, that you can do this on a one-on-one basis, right? But if you were to do it in a multi, like a multicast scenario, like a website or a campaign, which person and which messaging Did you gravitate towards? 

Yeah, we honestly had to resort to AB here, yeah. So we did a bunch of AB testing, and we found that because not many enterprises were so Cloud forward by that time, the vast. Majority. So we went with kind of, who can we latch on to in terms of volumes. It was really for the former, which is the head of cloud networking, in networking. So we rotated towards that. There was a flavor of the website, a flavor of our messaging, which made sure we didn’t leave the other guys out, because if the transition happened, and then we would find ourselves completely caught off guard. And so we had to, we had to somewhat straddle. But we put, like, 80% of our eggs in one basket, the other 20% for the other which, which lends itself to, okay, you know what we said? Head of cloud networking, we have nailed, we have nailed the messaging. By that time, we had like, a few dozen POCs and few customer contracts. And so we said, Okay, this is proof enough that is working. And so we said, now it comes down to volume. I want to spend as little amount of time, energy, and resources to get the most number of high-quality connections into the company.

Right.

They said I don’t care whether this is a marketing-led function or a sales-led function. We had our inbound, we had outbound. All of the functions were there. It was a skinny team, but all the guys were working together to make that work. But we had a goal that we need to have high-quality conversations if we are spending time, then pre-screening should have happened leading up to that point, right? And so we said, what is the best way to do that? 

And there again, these are kind of micro-optimizations, or micro iterations that you do within your primary go-to-market motion. We had this brilliant idea that, hey, you know what a few, a few customers actually landed up on AWS Marketplace, spun up our product, and started to use it. And then by the time we actually got to know about it in terms of, like, meaningful usage, these guys were using the product already. So we got, we had our free version on the on the marketplace, and so we said, You know what? If savvy guys are there, then they might be able to do it. So let’s try a PLG motion. A product like growth motion. That makes sense. We have proof points as well that a few guys have done it. And so maybe we should, we should try that. So we put our focus together to create a plg engine and found the hard way that it would not work. And very simply, it came down to a plg motion. 

This was an aha moment that you get which does, really doesn’t help, right, to do anything other than just kill that project, right, which is a plg motion works when somebody is able to resonate with the problem that you have identified, that draws somebody in, is able to take action all by themselves, correct, in hopefully less than a day and see a value, yes, and see value in less than a day. 

And so we found ourselves in an interesting place where cloud networking belonged to a person. Yes, that person was able to do things, but in order to really play around with stuff and whatnot, you have your Iam controls, where the security person I had to go get permission from the cloud guys and whatnot. And so before you knew it, that enthusiasm fizzled away. And so even though we were like, Man, why? Why is this not working? It was because they could not do it in, quote, unquote, one sitting, right? You need to be able to deliver value in one sitting. And so this really didn’t help in terms of a plg motion, but what it allowed us to do is actually find out what brings. Because we had a whole bunch of people come in, 1000s of people actually would an ad on LinkedIn, or we had a DG campaign. People would come in, and they would land on the site, but then we were not really able to get them into, the the product, easily. And so we found that there was friction along the way, but we found that they were able to bring people incorrectly. 

We use that as a good awareness and a middle-of-funnel channel exactly.

Correct, right! 

And so you are able to bring people in. So we said we’ll bring people in using the appropriate messaging, but now we will not land them in the product, right? We will have a couple of filters ahead of that. So we will poke that off one into, hey, come, come, play around with it, right? You don’t need to kind of set things up in your infrastructure, but start to look at the value, at least. And so that became a relatively low-friction way to get people to experience the product. And from there, we were able to see a lot of conversions. The advantages. 

On that note, I was having the exact same conversation yesterday with another founder who was at about 1 million Arr, right, and he did something similar for his mid-market buyers, where he thought it was in the BI data connector space, and he thought he can do a PLG, right? And clearly it led to a bottleneck, where, because he had to get permission from other groups, they could not do it. But here’s where I actually applied the lens. It is still a PLG, but not self-serve.

Correct Exactly. It’s still Yes. 

So remove the friction so you don’t need to have like, active, outbound, AE, or outreach. You don’t need to have. Too much of a front end. I want to show you this demo, that demo, and whatnot, before you sign up for the POC so you’re able to remove that friction, yeah, but it’s not like completely unattended so you can start utilizing the product and get to scale. And then I’ll call you when, when you have a problem.

And so, yes, so self-serve part of it was missing. And the great distinction you bring up, which is that many people look at PLG and say, PLG and say, also have to come together. So I put, like, 1000 people on the front end, I get, like, I know, 15 people utilizing the product on the other end. 

No, it might be that you get 15 people who are ready, but then you still need to hand-hold them through..

The product to drive that initial top of the funnel, and then exactly the interesting motion.

Exactly, correct. 

Yeah. And so again, this is where I don’t think there was, like a playbook that we could follow. We had to write the playbook as we went. But it was a great experience because then you’re building enough capability to kind of address the friction in the system, remove a bunch of things, and so forth. So again, starting with we were in the boxing ring. Got a good punch when everybody was saying glorious things to actually seeing the go-to-market version work across three different iterations and landing there was a great experience. And we fortunately had a smaller team at the beginning by the time we get to we get to version three. Because something was working, we did have to pour some gas on it. 

And so I found that it’s hard to do iterations when you have more than a handful of people because when you have a handful of people, like a simple Slack channel or one call, you call and like, everybody’s aligned and across all the functions, everybody’s moving correct, even if you have an organization that’s like 2-3 people, now suddenly you have 10-15, people to deal with, and they don’t move the same way, the same velocity, right? And so optimizations and iterations are hard to do, and new-found respect for what large companies go through, right? Because you have a primary motion and you have to introduce a product by looking at it from the outside. I was always like, why does this take so long. But it does. We got a good flavor for that as well, yeah.

And in fact, the last point that you made, Ramesh, actually brings me to my next question. And did this should be very relevant, especially for the founders either CTC or Series B, right? 

So, do you have like, a guidance or a checklist? Like, when do you need to raise funds while you’re iterating on your first set of customers to your first 10, to your go-to-market iterations, and so on? Like, if you were to give like, a quick one to two, yeah. 

So I’ll give you the version that I think stands true today because the flavor of that has been changing rapidly over the last, I would say, 24 to 36 months, right? So right now, I would say, if you’re starting something first before you go get a single dollar from any investor, have the conviction yourself that this is a problem with a burning need, at least, at a minimum, a burning need and three potential prospects on the other end, if you’re not able to grab by yourself when you can do that without a product, you can do that with PowerPoint and concept in architecture and so forth.

Ideally with the LOI. 

Yes, exactly right. And so I deal with it with an LOI. So that’s a good litmus test to say that there is this problem has legs, and from there go. Don’t raise a series a do a seed or a pre-seed, because you want to build nothing in a startup works like lack of capital. Because if you know that the wall is closing in on you, it makes you focus on one thing and one thing only, and that really is both a blessing and a curse. 

It’s a curse, because when you have more capital, you try to do many things, you burn through capital, and then you’re laying those things. Didn’t work, but you wasted money along the way. But in this case, put yourself through a nine-month time horizon at that point and say, how do I convert these Lois into actual beta, which means I need to get my product really, really functional.

Right. 

Yes, it need not have all the bells and whistles, but it needs to start delivering value, right? And so deliver value. Get that deployed with your first few customers, and make sure that the endorsement for why they said they would have an LOI translates into actual usage. And so if that happens, then that’s a very good point at which you can say, I am now ready to raise the capital. So I can now start to look at a two-year horizon until then, I would strongly advise you to look at like a few month’s worth of a time horizon, because that puts pressure, enough pressure for the right reasons to make sure that you get to that point then you raise the first round and have a certain room to play with, because, at that time, the assertion, and this is to. 

Particularly in series A the assertion is, okay, what I have a line of sight to either a million or I’ve crossed that point one, one to 3 million. I’m operating in that, in that time, in that region. And I have, maybe my I’ve moved from founder-led sales to I can now have one or two sales guys really pick this up and run with it by mess by themselves. And I have enough of a pipeline now to substantiate that, to say that, okay, you know what, in the next year, I’ll be able to convert x to x to y.

Right.

The thing I would ask folks to caution and caution, not in a bad way, is to think about this carefully. Is, if you raise outside investment, there is a natural expectation you are now setting right, that in two years, you are going to be at like 2x or 3x of where you were.

Yes. 

And at the time of raising, if you don’t have that line of sight, don’t raise. 

Yes, that is what I would say. I had made the mistake of raising because we had access to the capital, and we had folks who actually wanted to put money in. But deep down, I was like, I don’t think I’ve cracked this just yet, but then you have, like, nice juicy capital, and capital can do to you. It gives you a lot more freedom to do things and whatnot. I got sucked into that a little, but that set us back a bit, right? 

And so I would highly encourage founders to look at it as, okay, in two years, can I really deliver on that 3x growth? Because that’s what everybody’s asking for. And so if you’re able to greatly raise the capital, is the right time to be raising capital as well, and then grow to that point, once you’ve passed the A going into the B phase, the B phase, I think the criteria has changed quite a bit. Earlier, it used to be that at B you could still figure out, say, you need to have a core market, but then there was no expectation that your channel was set up properly, your technology partnerships were there, but right now, I think the criteria for B is pretty, pretty high up there, right? It’s almost like you have to hit a double-digit way past your 10 million Arr, and you need to have a certain threshold and certain growth trajectory as well, right? And so keep the scrutiny pretty high, at B, and make sure again, you’re able to deliver on that right? Is never, I think people always look at it as if I’m not able to raise, it means I’ve failed. But it’s not the case, right? 

The alternative is far worse, where you raise and you pay up absolutely. So, I would rather you go down the more frugal path of preserving what you have, making sure something is working, and then growing, growing from there it and so in a very fast-moving market, if you have enough competitors, and you need to kind of outpace everybody else in terms of your spend in order to get to the growth, yes, then raise if it is. If you’re trying to still figure a few things out It could be technology partnerships. It could be an indirect channel or a direct channel. It could be some mega I always encourage folks, and I was looking at it as well, right? You want to have some behemoth in the industry that’s Betting on you at that stage because you have, what do you have? You have built a product, you have a few customers that are like big-name logos, or you have a volume of certain types of customers. You prove something. 

Correct.

That should be proof enough for somebody in the industry to take notice, take a bet on 

Absolutely!

And if you’re not able to, then, I think that’s a pretty data point that you have to take. 

And it’s a very hard one for a founder, right? Like, I crippled with this quite a bit for sure, six or seven guys like circling around, but nobody has leaned in just like the sign that even if it’s an MOU or an LOI or like a signed sign, something that says, like, I’m committing to this business over the next, like, one year, two years, right? 

Yes.

if you don’t have that in hand, I would say, ask yourself, like, what does it take to get there, right? And that would be the next thing to look at. So those are some of the wonderful, wonderful learnings that we have as well. 

Great checklist, for sure. I know we are coming towards the end of the show. Here we can go on and on round two later on this year. Who knows? So last two questions for you:, who are the one, two, or three people who really shaped and helped you, especially in the deepest and darkest moments? And, oh, wow.

Great. Great question. So I think I learned a lot from Praveen. Praveen Akkiraju who was the the CEO of Viptela around the time of the acquisition. He joined us quite late and led us through the acquisition. I learned a lot in terms of the organization’s process, and what to look for when. Have to put your foot down and when not. And most importantly, one that I learned, that I carry till today when in doubt, bet on yourself because we always have this thing that other people know better than you on things that you don’t know. And it is not until you try a few things you realize that everybody is in that same world. Nobody has the crystal ball there, right? 

And so when you find yourself in those moments, get expert advice. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Get expert advice, but go with yourself, right? Like, what is, what do you feel, especially if you’re the one to make the call, go make that call, right? And so, so I’ve actually kind of learned a lot from him along the way. Second, I would say it’s like a coho cohort of advisors, and not just one or two. I have probably about three, four guys who kind of, every time I have a conversation with them, I come back with, oh my goodness, like I’m getting that clarity that I need, right and they always say, like, I didn’t tell you anything that you didn’t know. 

And sometimes it’s just useful to just sound it out. Sound it out because, along the way, your brain works in a certain way to figure it out, like you have that clarity. And so my cohort of advisors, I lean on them quite a bit, and I deeply respect, what they’ve done for me as well.

And a lot of gratitude for that. So that’s, that’s number two. And the third one is just, that I’ve always looked at investors as people who provide capital and and just go away, right? I think the acute version, somebody says, Like a seagull. You go fly around, you poop, and you anyway, you go right? And so I’ve always had that impression. 

But there are a few who, in the darkest moments, have called me and said, like, I know I’m an operator. I have been an operator as well. And so I know what you’re going through. You can’t have this conversation, even with your own co-founder, and have this conversation with your wife. You can’t have a conversation with anybody else. So I’m here for you, in case you don’t want to have this conversation. And I’m like, Oh, this is so you need to have whether it’s a friend, it’s an investor, or it’s somebody who has skin in the game, importantly, not just a buddy that has skin in the game but can give you that advice and have them along with you.

In my case, I had one, to two investors on our board who actually were, where that, where that people, right? Like they would call and just check on me, just check on me to make sure that, yes, you know it’s okay. And they’re like, I’m not here to do that, because I put money in the company. I just want to make sure you’re okay. And so, those are, again, people that were there for me during my darkest moments. 

And so I’m eternal gratitude to those, to those folks, right? And so those are, those are my, my cohorts of people. And so naturally, as a result, having gone through this a couple of times, this is what I would recommend to founders who’ve been through this journey a few times give back. Like I have, it’s hard to give back when you’re running at 100 miles an hour, but post the previous startup, I actually wanted to consciously spend time giving back, right? Like and people are going through that, just be there for them, because sometimes you might have thought through a few things that they are yet to think through, and all you can offer is, like, maybe a couple of words, right? And that will help them. So it’s an ecosystem that helps itself, not expecting much in return, and so just gives back wherever possible.

Fantastic, especially the last piece is what really makes Silicon Valley stand out. Yeah, super hard to replicate that. Yes, any part of the world. I mean, you can do some scale, but not at the scale.

Yeah, exactly. And I must say that back to your previous question, Vijay, on who has helped me in my darkest moments, those were the guys who actually expected nothing in return.

Yeah. 

And that’s so, yeah, so that’s very hard, and the value is full of a lot of good people like that. 

All right, fantastic. The last question for you, Ramesh, is, what advice would you give to your younger self, 

Oh my God! 

Like, let’s do a time check, right and time point which is day one of your go-to-market journey?

Yeah. So tune out external factors.

I think that in the startup world, the yardstick should not be. How are you doing with respect to others, but rather, how are you doing with respect to what you did yesterday or last month? Because I’ve been in this so many times where you look at like, Hey, this guy is growing, that guy is growing. Why the hell am I not growing? It just goes down real. A bad rabbit hole, right? And ultimately, until you pull your socks up and say, What the hell, I did not do things that I did better last month to this month. If you can’t fix that, then nothing else matters, right? And so your first yardstick should be, what did you do better last month to this month? Right? And just be very honest with yourself and see if there is a natural progression there. So this means for that to happen, you need to tune out everything around you, right? And yes, it could be an AI craze. It could be multiple companies getting billion-dollar exits, and guys who started two years after you doing well, all those things don’t matter if you can’t show month-over-month, growth, just looking inward, right? So that’s number one. 

The second one is and I might come across as a really bad psycho for saying this, but put yourself in a deprived position. 

Yeah.

because deprivation causes clarity. 

Correct! 

I’ve seen that in so many cases, right? When you’re in a time crunch, you focus on one thing.

Yes.

When you are capital constrained, you focus on one thing. Deprivation causes that clarity to occur. Right? Because you know lack of action at that time meant existential crisis. And when the existential crisis is in question, you will do the right thing right. You may make mistakes, but you will end up doing the right thing and doing it fast. And so find avenues where, of course, don’t do this recklessly, but find avenues where you can do this in the best possible way. Just because you can get access to talent, time, people, capital, and whatnot, doesn’t mean you’re entitled to it. And so always take care of that, right? 

And so I would say where we operated the company, in the last year of the company, was very different from how we operated even in the first couple of years, right? And you say, usually you see that the first couple of years are the most intense in a startup, we felt like we were operating at a much higher velocity with the right amount of focus, just because we knew, you know what? Like that the walls are gonna close on us if we don’t get our things together, right? And so just put yourself in a situation where you have that natural lack of resources, lack of something, and that will cause you again, if you’re a betting man, bet on yourself and make sure that you can, you can come through that way. It’s not for the weak of heart, as you can imagine, because when the ground under you is going to get pulled at any moment. 

You don’t know when that is it. It does cause a lot of sleep deprivation, but, well, that’s the fun and thrill of a startup!

Trust the process, embrace resilience, and understand that challenges often lead to greater success.

Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Eli Rubel shares his entrepreneurial journey from tech startups to service businesses. 

Eli details his transition from chasing venture-backed dreams to creating lifestyle businesses that align with his personal values. The conversation spans his decision-making process, the creation of Matter Made and NoBoringDesign, and his newest venture, Profit Labs. 

Eli emphasizes his “tricycle life” philosophy—prioritizing work-life balance while building profitable businesses.

Connect with Eli Rubel on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/elirubel/

Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijdam/

Listen to the podcast here:

From Art School Dropout to GTM Powerhouse: Eli Rubel’s Founder Journey

Signature Question: How do you view and define go to market?

Yeah, sure. So to me, go to market. Very simply put,  would be, you know, what is, what is the motion with which you get your product or offering in front of your ideal customer? Flat out? Like, what are the channels? What are the means, methods, strategies, tactics, yep, all of that kind of in one very.

Cool, yeah, that’s a pretty crisp definition and view for sure. Now let’s double-click and triple-click on some of those things. Yet it all starts with who is your ICP. What are the channels that you’re getting and how you’re reaching them? There’s an entire spectrum of the buyer journey, beyond just adoption and even up to advocacy. 

There is also the internal aspect within either an agency or a SaaS company. It doesn’t really matter. There are a lot of moving pieces. So if you have to double click, and based on your vast experience and perspectives, like, where would you go in deeper in any of those or any other areas?

So when I think about go to market, I think about influence, because at the end of the day, especially with where the market is today, you know, it used to be the case that you could take people through this long buyer journey and kind of build trust over time and like there was enough capital around to fund that type of buyer journey? 

Yeah!

I think now, you know, we’re not It’s not growth at all costs anymore. It’s much more about, how to do we as efficiently as possible. Get someone to make a buying decision. And to me, that comes down ultimately to trust and influence. And so when I think about a go-to-market motion, whether it’s for one of my agencies or for one of our SaaS clients, the fastest path to that, in my opinion, is finding people who are influential, who have an audience that trusts them, and figuring out how to create some sort of win-win situation between us and them, such that they put us in front of their audience. Because either the conversion rates that I’ve seen when that play is successful are so much higher, and then the sales cycles are so much faster than if you’re talking about a traditional kind of full buyer journey, and it’s because you get to piggyback the trust of that individual.

Absolutely, in fact, it’s great and so relevant that you mentioned this exact piece, Eli, because I was actually working with, very closely with an Enterprise, a large enterprise client last week, and one of the key things that I emphasized is, how do you pull in quote-unquote influencers to accelerate your sales cycle? Right? That’s huge. I mean, you guys telling about yourself is one thing, but imagine your customer advocating on your behalf. So it’s a very similar parallel where you bring in an influencer and they show that point of view, or they take that buyer to the next relevant point.

Exactly, exactly, and every category has them right? Like, if you’re selling to Mark, if you’re selling to corporate marketers. Dave Gerhart, exit five, no-brainer, right? If you are selling to SMB tech founders or like Bootstrap founders, Adam Robinson or Santos, right? Like they’re just names that come to mind for pretty much any vert that you might be selling into, or buyer persona.

Yep, absolutely you touched upon all the people that I look up to on my LinkedIn feed every single day, multiple times a day.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, even for me as a go-to-market, practitioner advisor and consultant, right? So for me, it is about how I keep myself up to date and even question my own thinking. So that I can guide my clients and advise them in the right direction.

Totally!

Yeah, the role of influencers is critical, for sure.

And you can kind of follow it makes it easier to follow the general Zeitgeist in that category, right? Like, whatever those folks are talking about, tends to become the language that, like your average middle, middle manager buyers starts to use, because it’s like, okay, or even, or even executive buyers, like, they just, they hear it over and over again, and they’re like, Okay, that’s the cool new language that we should be using. That’s how we talk. That’s how we articulate this challenge or the solution to our you know, ELT and so I think it just makes a ton of sense to align with that fantastic.

Now, this is a great, great opening, for sure. So let’s take a step back, big picture rewind. Walk us through your journey. I mean, your career journey, and what led you to what you’re doing today and who you serve.

Oh, man, it’s a meandering story, so I’ll have to be careful not to let it be too long. But yeah, I mean, I started off as an art school kid, and actually dropped out of art school. I thought I wanted to be a photographer. Spent two years working in the nonprofit space after leaving school, and then I had what I call my quarter-life crisis. I was about 20 years old and realized that you know, I was like waiting tables in Los Angeles, doing the starving artists thing, and realized that that was not going to provide the lifestyle and future that I wanted. 

And so I read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, Yep, got super motivated starting read this was back when what was, this is like 2009, So back when TechCrunch was like everything it put folks in tech like that was, that was the source of truth for what was going on in the startup world. And so started reading Tech Crunch, and I was like, You know what? I’m young enough, I can figure out this software thing. I can figure out the internet. 

So I moved home, moved into my mom’s basement, and set, basically a rule for myself where I wasn’t allowed to leave the basement or move out of the basement until I’d started a tech company. So, yeah, just sat down there. Would go to coffee shops and just bang my head against the wall trying to figure out, how to break into this tech thing, and knowing that I didn’t have any qualifications to be an employee of someone’s company, I had to start something, and ended up starting a Contract Lifecycle Management tool called Glider. 

Raised VC money for that, yeah, and then sold that business in 2014 during my earn-out, I took basically a year off where I was, like, available to them. But it was the case that, like, culturally, my startup and the people who acquired us were like, oil and oil and water. And so thankfully, they didn’t call me very often. I took a motorcycle trip all through Central America, and there were many, many conference calls from inside of my helmet where they had no idea where I was. Is pretty great. And yeah, so that was, that was my foot in the door in tech. 

From there, I acquired an E-commerce business, ran that turned it around over the course of four years, and sold that to a private equity firm in 2019, and then that’s when I got into the crazy world of service businesses and agencies. I started my first agency that serves the tech market in 2019 called Matter Made, a performance marketing and demand efficiency firm lucky enough to partner with clients like Dropbox and Oracle, we created Looms, demand, Gen, org, and programs from scratch. Joe, the CEO, came to us through a trusted advisor of his and was like, we don’t have the demand gen function here yet. We don’t have a demand gen program here yet. Can you create that for us? 

And so we did, Loom.com, hop and product board, bunch, bunch of names that are pretty well-known. We helped them grow that demand through those types of programs. So that was Matter Made. Still is Matter Made, yeah. And then in 2023, I started, I saw this trend, like this was kind of deep in the VC winter, right? No, people were not investing, and budgets were frozen. Hiring, hiring was frozen. And had this thesis that a lot of these companies had just fired their designers, because designers are always seen as, like this, nice to have expense, right? And so I was like, You know what? I’m going to create an agency that lets people work with world-class design talent, but without having to hire them, yeah, and sell into the same audience that Matter Made is, you know, sold into right being like B2B SAAS and yeah, so that, but that that became NoBoringDesign is the name of the agency. We’ve done a bunch of really cool work over the last couple of years. That agency is now as big as my first agency. So yeah, it’s been a fun journey, and actually, I hired a GM to run both of those businesses, so I’m not even in those businesses anymore. I’m starting a third one, which we’re announcing in a week.

Very cool. Oh oh, my God. There are so many segues we can take in your entire journey, very few minutes over here, in the entire journey. So let’s start at the very beginning, right? I mean, college dropout, okay, but that’s fine. I mean, I kind of, and even the audience can relate to it, sure. But then you waited in LA restaurants, I get that too, right? And then you decided, okay, this is not going to get you to where you want to be, big, big, big ambition, big vision, and so on. And then you loved yourself in your parent’s basement, perfect. But then what happened between that point in time and starting Glider?

Yeah, a lot of like, sitting in front of a Moleskine notebook, yeah, at rainy coffee shops in Portland, Oregon, wondering, like, What the hell did I do this? How am I going to do this? What am I going to do? Yeah, first I’m going to put the company in strong air quotes here if you’re not watching the video. So the first company that I tried to start was the easiest way to describe what Squarespace is today. But I had this idea because I had come from art school, and I really knew how hard it was for student artists to get their work online like they had to hire an HTML and CSS like a front-end developer to build them a website from scratch. 

Yeah. 

So I was like, that seems ridiculous. Like, what if? What if we created some sort of templated website builder for student artists? And so I think the idea was great, the vertical was wrong, and I had a really hard time building it, because I didn’t know anything about how to get software built and who to work with, and so I was working with the wrong type of engineers, and I spent maybe six months working on that Before I abandoned it. 

And then after that, I worked on a consumer app that we actually did build, and it was a fully functioning app before I abandoned that, which was, again, kind of come from, coming from the student, artist lens, I was frustrated with this was back when everybody would just like, they’d go on a vacation, and then they’d put their SD card in their computer, and they’d upload every single one of the 500 photos that they took in Mexico to Facebook. 

I was like, Guys, this is, like, there’s this thing called curating your photographs, and it would be really nice if you could do that so we could see the ones that we actually want to see. And so this was, like, an easy way for someone to curate a collection of photographs and tell a story with them. And we had, like, tapped into Facebook’s graph, graph search. And you could search using, you know, plain language, like, Hey, show me all the photos of me drinking beers in Mexico with my friends. And it was like, this was before you could, like, now that’s very normal, but back then, there was no search on top of images. And then from that, you could curate your story. So I think it was ahead of its time in certain ways. And then it was also just like, not really that useful in other ways. But what was interesting about that that really paved the way to Glider, because I networked the shit out of Portland, I was taking as many execs and CEOs and founders out to coffee as I could, yeah, while I was working on that, and ended up throwing like this launch party that a bunch of people came to from the community. 

And so what the feedback that I ended up getting was like, Yeah, we knew this idea was never going to work for you, but it was cool to see how tenacious you were. 

Yeah!

About starting a thing!

Yeah. And they got when you say launch parties. Was it the launch parties for both of those ventures?

Just for the second one, the consumer, yeah. And so shortly after that, I got an email from the only VC in town, and they were like, Hey, you don’t know us yet, but we know you. You know we’ve seen you and we’ve seen you execute. We’ve seen you do this, this project. We think it’s a bad idea, but we would like to have a conversation with you and potentially back you. Some way. And so I went and met with them, and they basically gave me that same speech, like, Listen, if you’re willing to change what you’re working on, we’ll cut you a check right now.

Amazing, that worked on it. 

Yeah. I just want to interrupt that, right? I just want to tie this back to the conversation we started, which is the go to market definition, sure. So many nuggets and insights over here, which is you had the ICP. Initially, it was the students, yeah. After that, it was a consumer, yeah. And then the problem, so the match between the ICP, the problem, the offer, and the business model and the channel didn’t even get into the channel part yet. 

Yeah, right. 

All those things have to align. And doing these things for you, was a huge, a hand learning experience. You had to get through these iterations before you hit your yep, 

yep. Totally amazing. 

Yeah, sorry, I interrupted. Yeah. You were talking about Glider and how it got funded.

Yeah. So, so basically, it was a blank LA was it was a check with a blank idea, right? So they’re like, here’s this check. Let’s collaborate on what the idea is. While I was going through the process of closing that round of funding, I became really fascinated with the friction that was involved in the communication between myself, my counsel, their counsel, and them. It seemed like it should have been a pretty straightforward process, but then we were collaborating on these documents, and it was a little bit convoluted, and it was unclear if we were, you know, who’s looking at the right version of the document, or where do we stand in the process? And so I started to develop this, this question around, you know, is this how all legal document processes go like, is it always this kind of unclear? Yeah. And so I went out and interviewed something like 40 different law firms about, hey, how does this go with your clients? Yep. And the initial thesis was, we would help. We’d be like, a workflow and process engine around legal documents, and we’d sell it to law firms. 

Got it.

And so we started, that’s what we started to build. And we actually that’s what we raised money on. We went when it went out and raised money from True Ventures and a bunch of other folks in Silicon Valley. And pretty quickly we learned that selling to law firms was a really bad idea. But the problem we found was, was actually a problem for sales teams, right? Because they’re, you know, the easiest way to summarize this would be, think PanDa doc today, right? Or Aptus, or any of this kind of last mile of the sales cycle. You’ve got the verbal from the client. You know it’s time to send them the paper. And there’s a bunch of internal and external approvals that need to happen in order to do so. Then there’s negotiations that need to happen, red lines, yeah. And then ultimately, a signature, and then that needs to be routed to the right people afterward, yeah. And so at the time when we were starting Glider, DocuSign and Echo sign only did signature. They didn’t do any workflows. They didn’t do any approvals. It was just like documents finalized already sent for signature. 

And you found all these two-year interviews with the lawyers, the legal law firms, or even with sales teams?

With sales teams as well. Yeah, yeah. And so that’s where we pivoted from trying to sell to law firms. And it was like, Hey, we’re gonna sell to SaaS companies with large sales teams who have struggled with that last mile being a black box for their sellers, and ultimately for their finance teams. 

Nice, and you got them to be like, design customers, and then paid pilots and so on, the initial whatever, the reference customers.

Exactly, yeah, and then pretty quickly, so we were still in the like, we moving through exactly what you just described, you know, design partners, then paid, first paid customers, And right around that time, we had this company reach out to us out of the blue, and they’re like, a 30-year-old company that was one of the larger players in the CPQ space, configure price quote. They had customers like AmEx and Bell helicopters and just Hitachi Data Systems like just big, big old companies as clients, and they didn’t have anything on the contract management side of the house, and so they were, this is when Aptus was really big, and they were just getting beat, eaten alive by Aptus because they didn’t have contract management, yeah. And so they reached out and that the acquisition conversation was actually, it’s its own kind of wild story. I’m happy to go there if you want to. But they basically came in and were like, Hey, we’re gonna give you this cash offer. We need this for our business to thrive. And I had felt like I was pretty tired at that point and had been through quite the journey. And I wanted to get, you know, a base hit this, this was the base hit. 

So, very cool again, just tying back to the entire go-to-market story, which is, in this case, FPX, your acquiring company, I’m thinking, I’m assuming it’s FPX. That’s right, right? 

Right!

And they found a gap in their go to market to the customers, and there they were being eaten alive, better competition, actors and others, yeah, and so you provided that plug for them in their go to market. 

Yep!

Amazing. And yeah, you should actually spend like, a minute or two Eli on that whole acquisition offer, how you went back and forth, and then, yes, you just made the decision after that. 

Yeah, so it took me. It took me a number of years before I was comfortable sharing this story. But now I think it’s hilarious, now that I’ve had some successes afterward, I think it’s hilarious. So we had a technical founder that ended up basically lying about the process, the progress that was being made on the product, and we ended up having to replace him, and we were set back, like 12 months. We had to reboot the whole product with a new team, and so our traction wasn’t aligned to where it should have been based on, you know, the amount of money that was raised and the time we’ve been working on it. 

So when we went out to raise our Series A we just didn’t have the sales. We just started selling. We just started converting accounts to pay, yeah, and so, you know, compared to other series A companies, we just didn’t do, we didn’t look very attractive. And so our VCs were like, listen, it’s been a good it’s been a good try. Like, we’ll, we’ll cut you a check for the next thing you want to work on in a heartbeat. Why don’t we wind this thing down. Call it, call it a day. 

Right.

And, and, yeah, and you can tell us what you want to start next. And so before we had, before I had that conversation with them, they sent me the note like, hey, come to our offices. We want to talk about, you know, the future. And so I knew it was, I knew what the conversation was going to be like, yeah. And this was at the same time that Dreamforce was happening that year. And so I was like, obviously, in quite a depressed state knowing what was coming. I was like, fuck, I need, I just need to keep myself busy up until this meeting, so that I’m not like, sitting there wallowing in my own self-pity.

Right!

And so I just had a bunch of meetings. And one of those meetings that I took was this random corporate development guy from FPX who had sent me a note, and he was like, Hey, I see you’re going to be at Dreamforce. I’d, you know, we’d really like to connect with you. Can you meet for coffee? Like, great, happy to let’s do it. And so I show up to this meeting thinking it’s just going to be this one guy over coffee at the same Regis. And he, he’s like, Yeah, meet me on the whatever, the very top floor, yeah. And so I walk into this room, and the entire executive team for FPX is lining the route, like lining this penthouse suite, in suits. 

And here I am in my like, startup hoodie. Oh, this isn’t what I was expecting. They had, like, catering and so, like, yeah, “tell us about your business”. So I don’t know what got into me. Actually, it’s pretty typical of my personality, but what I did was I was like, You know what? This business is going to get shut down anyway. I might as well just send it with all the confidence in the world. 

Yeah, exactly. 

Why not? Yeah. And so I pitched it. I was like, Yeah, we’re out raising our Series A right now, which was true. Technically, yeah, we’re out-raising our Series A right now. You know, we’ve got all these great design partners that we’re converting into paid all of that was true. You know, here’s the future roadmap for the product, here’s how it’s solving problems. I was just like, really confident and optimistic in this meeting. Gave them a demo of the product. Like, great. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time to share this with us. Nice to meet you. I leave. Go straight to True Ventures offices right from that meeting, have the conversation where, like, hey, let’s spin this thing down. We’ll invest in your next thing.

Right!

And now I’m walking down the stairs of True Ventures South Park office, almost late for my flight, so I’m kind of like, running down the stairs. My phone rings and I answer it thinking it’s my Uber driver, because of a number I don’t recognize. I’m like, I’ll be right there. I’m literally running down the stairs. I’ll be out in front in a second. 

And the other guy’s like, Eli, yes. He’s like, Oh, this is Ron. You were just meeting with us over at the St Regis, yeah. Can you come back? Oh, wow, yeah. I was like. Like, no, I’m late for my flight to Portland. I can’t come back. And he’s like, I really think you should come back. And I’m like, I will miss my flight if I come back. And he’s like, our executive director wants to meet or executive chairman, I can’t remember what her title was, really wants to meet with you. And she’s here right now. It’ll be worth your time to come back. Yeah. And so I’m like, again, I don’t know what got into me, but I was like, fuck it. Yeah, sure. I’ll be there in 10 minutes or five minutes. It’s just so close. So I show up, and this woman is, like, draped in diamonds. I’ve never seen someone wearing so many diamonds. She puts out her hand. She’s like, my name is Audrey, and I buy your company. 

That’s it. 

That’s how she led with that. And I was like, well, it’s not for sale, yeah. And so kind of the same thing. I was like, I don’t know where that came from, but I told her it wasn’t for sale. And she was like, well, it will be by the time you land in Portland. Wow. And that was, that was it. They got, I got, they sent me an LOI, yeah, the next morning. And, you know, typical negotiation process, back and forth, but I got, so I went from the company was for sure gonna get shut down yes, to a cash offer. 

They ended up, I mean, I talk about this publicly, so I’m not sure they ended up buying us for $3 million cash, of which I kept, like 1.2 or something like that, 1.3 which for me, if you think about my story, as I had gone from waiting tables, yeah, it’s huge. Yeah, I was in credit card debt because I used credit cards to start the business before I got VC funding, and then I wasn’t confident enough to pay myself at a market rate, whatever. Anyway, long story short, it was a life-changing event for me, and it ended up opening a lot of doors after the fact, too. 

So an amazing story, and I’m actually so glad that we took the time and you actually shared the story. Eli, I mean, so many reasons, right? One is your mind is always telling you a big lie. The reason why I’m saying this is you think when I say you that your mind is shaping a story in our narrative for yourself, but the world outside will see a different value. In this case, FPX saw a different value for your company versus for you and your investors at the end of the road. Yeah, that’s one. 

And second, is your ability to just it doesn’t matter in what mental state you are. You still need to tell that visionary, the CEO, the founder, story that is key. That definitely played a huge role. And I think one other key takeaway for me and the listeners from the conversation is never to give up. It doesn’t matter how bad or gloomy the situation is, you never know how it transpires. Right? Going back to your previous two companies that you started, you threw a launch party. 

You didn’t have any expectations that you’d get funded by True Ventures for a different venture. Yeah, you didn’t know that totally right? And the same thing with this, it’s an amazing story. I am so glad and thankful that you actually shared this. El.

Yeah, of course!

Yeah, fantastic. All right, and we’re just getting this conversation started. We are just about halfway through that, and so many rich stories out of this. Now go to the next phase of your journey, which is NoBoringDesign, but in between you do your motorbike riding. Maybe that’s a conversation for a different podcast and insights. But going back to, I think you turned into an LP, became an advisor for different companies, and then you also started NoBoringDesign. What is that journey and decision-making like?

Yeah, so I started, it was Matter Made. Was the first company that I started after. Essentially the decision-making was like, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been chasing this dream of starting a massively venture-backed company, taking it public, you know, the typical Silicon Valley trade. And I’d been chasing that now for I think I was 28 so I’d been chasing it for eight years, and I just felt like I knew that I was ready to start a family and have kids, and I felt like I didn’t have the energy anymore, or the drive anymore to chase that dream to the extent that I would need to actually see it through, yeah, and that, to me, I was more interested in creating a lifestyle for that next stage of life, of having kids. And, you know, I called it the tri, the tricycle life, which was this vision that I had of, you know, chasing my kid. They’re they’re on a tricycle, riding down a tree-lined street, then I’m chasing them. 

And it’s the middle of the work week, the middle of the day. I’m not worried about anything, yep. And so I was like, How do I get there? 

Right? Like it does. I don’t need to take a company public to get there. Obviously, that would be one way to do it, but probably wouldn’t have a bunch. Of time and wouldn’t be so carefree, and I know it’d be a long journey. So surely there’s another way. And so that’s where I started thinking about starting a services business, which is what made me a no, boring designer. 

And it came from this kind of lazy place. I like to call it a lazy place, people laugh when I say lazy, that I’m lazy, because whatever I think I’ve always optimized for the most lazy decisions, and they work for me. Other people, they’re like, Dude, you’re not lazy. But anyway, I digress. So I was like, how do I make the most amount of money with the least effort? Yeah, and to me, service business seemed like a great idea, because it’s like, great I get to hire people who are smarter than me, charge more than they’re worth for their time, or not more than they’re worth, but, like, charge more than I’m paying them for their time. Yeah, that’s right, yeah, collect a margin, and I don’t like it, all I have to do is get land for the business, right? Obviously, it’s not as simple as that when you start to scale. 

But long story short, I started this. I started Matter Made with him with the ambition to bring home $40,000 a month. It’s like if I bring home $40,000 a month, that’s like an ungodly sum to me, like, there’s just I couldn’t possibly have any needs beyond that. And so that’s why I created a business model for that. And we got there in six months. 

Wow. 

And then I was like, Oh, shit, this is fun. I guess I’ll keep going. So I ended up scaling that business.

Well, I guess I’ll keep going. So I ended up scaling that business, actually.

Before we went there. So how did you land on the ICP and the problem and develop an offer for that?

Yeah, so the thinking was I have this network in B2B, SaaS, right? Venture-backed. SaaS, yep, from my first thing, and I remember how much I was kind of flying blind and stabbing around in the dark in the earliest phases of my startup journey around go-to-market marketing. 

And so I was like, I definitely could help founders shortcut some of those stumbling blocks that I experienced based on, you know, just based on my own journey. So it’s like, I look, I could look for people who were where I was however many years ago, right? And just help accelerate them, yeah. And so I was like, that’s great. So, like, that’s my ICP is early-stage tech. I’ll leverage my existing network, right? And I’ll help them with marketing and growth, yep. So, yeah. So that was, that was the initial thing. We would create demand gen programs, and then help execute those demand gen programs. And then over, over the years, we refined that into, we’re just really, really good with paid media and helping create the most efficient media programs possible, and that became our niche, and we ended up scaling Matter Made, which still is an agency today, to 4.2 million in profit at its peak in 2021 in three years. 

So that’s kind of like a huge departure from my initial goal of 40k a month in profit. And that’s when I was like, Oh, the agency thing is like, a secret, yeah, it’s kind of like a secret, like, and it’s funny because there’s as a like, I cut my teeth as a founder, like a tech founder, and I remember thinking, agency people are like scumbags. They’re just like, you know, it’s like, it’s like, this dirty word or dirty job, like, ooh, lifestyle business. What’s that? That’s icky. And then what I was on the other side of it, and I was like, holy shit. I like it, I made four times my acquisition price in a single year, you know? And I didn’t. I didn’t do any of the work. It was all just like orchestrating the work.

And were you calling yourself and pitching yourself as an agency in the initial months?

No, in the initial months, I was like a consultant. It started as a consultant, and then pretty quickly I was like, Well, shit, I don’t want to do the work myself. That’s exhausting. So then as then, it became an agency. Once I hired some folks, we got up to about 40 people, yeah. So, yeah, that’s, that’s the that’s the Genesis story of how I, how and why I shifted from tech to services.

Amazing. And then you saw that, you know, it’s quote, unquote, easy money, and you were clearly hitting your goals so easy that something I mean, what transpired you to actually start NoBoringDesign? Yeah, so meta-made.

Yeah. So you use the word easy, and I’m kind of smiling and laughing, not again, easy with quotes I should, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s a good it’s a good segue, because, you know, I think it’s easy to just talk about your wins and your successes, but it’s important to talk about the failures too. So Matter Made peaked in 2021 at 4.2 million in profit. And then all, but all of our clients were tech, every single one of them, yeah. 

And so when the Tech Winter came in 2022, and all the VCs pulled the plea, you know, Sequoia issued what was like their first memo since the first memo they issued back in 2008 right? And so everybody froze their spending and fired all their agencies. So we went from absolutely crushing it, we were my target for that year was 7 million in profit, and we were like, so certain that we were gonna hit that number. And then we went from that to losing $200,000 a month because we had this huge team, and suddenly had very few clients that stuck around through that tech winner.

Right!

And so we went from 40 people down to 5. It was the hardest part, the hardest phase of my career by a landslide, yep. And so I had these two designers on the team that I was basically going to have to fire, and I was like, I really don’t want to, I really don’t want to cut. I mean, I didn’t want to cut anybody, but I just finished cutting 35 other people. So I was like, I wonder if there’s a creative way for me to save these folks, and that’s where I mentioned it at the start of the episode, where I was like, I have this theory that everybody just fired their designers, and so what if we kept them around and created a separate brand and made them available to solve for the folks three months down After firing their designers realize, Well, shit, we actually still need design. 

Great. 

So yeah. So I went to my head designer and was like, Hey, here’s the reality of the situation. I’m willing to get creative and give it a couple of months. 

Yeah! 

Can you create a brand and a website for me in seven days? And so this was on a Thursday or Friday, and by Monday, I had mock-ups, and by the end of that week, it was live. Called it NoBoringDesign, because I could, it’s like, I need a simple name. Something’s very literal. Ended up being a, I think, great name, because…

An amazing name. 

Yeah, you get to use it for Nbd, for short, it’s kind of fun, and people remember it. So anyway, long story short, that’s how it started, and then within the first couple of months, we had landed our first 10 clients, and the business was already profitable. Started hiring other designers, and started building it out that team is now around 30 people, and we’ve just carved out a really great niche, helping both B2B and B2C companies. But really a concentration in B2B Tech stands out. You know, it’s like, how do you, especially in this environment, design ends up design, and ultimately what, what I mean by design is brand and you’re good at the market. It becomes a very cheap lever relative to the other levers, right?

It’s like, okay, I could spend $200,000 a month on Google ads or on LinkedIn ads, whatever it is. And if I look like every other provider that’s advertising, that $200,000 is not an efficient spend.

Correct.

But if I spend half that, and I have a real member, think, think, like a gong, for example, right? Really memorable brand, yeah, if I spend half of that dollar, but I have a really memorable brand that converts better, like I may get the same result, and the investment in the brand is so much cheaper than that, $100,000 every single month.

A huge market product, especially after you have product market fit, it’s huge. 

Exactly. So that’s where we found it. Our niche is helping, helping companies differentiate, and create that moat around their brand, both from, you know, the brand itself, the website itself, but also even like the ads. The creative so, yeah, that’s that there was NoBoringDesign. And now I’m about to launch my third agency. It’s called Profit Labs.

Do you want to give a sneak peek into it? 

Yeah, I’m sure by the time this episode goes live, well, when does this episode go live? 

In about a month. 

Oh, yeah, we’re good. So it’ll be live by then. So profit labs I created because I realized, as an agency owner, and I’ve got a bunch of peers, right, who other folks who have started agencies and services businesses, you know, the financial support that we get is usually from like a generic SMB accounting firm that just they, you know, they do the minimum, they do your books, they give you a P&L and then financial reporting package at the end of the month, and that’s it. But there’s so much more that goes into running an agency and making it profitable. And so I thought to myself, I really want to create an accounting firm, a finance firm that is built exclusively for service businesses, exclusively for agency owners, and helps them run more profitable agencies by surfacing insights that matter to them. Because that’s all we focus on. And so that’s what we’re doing. We help seven and eight-figure agency owners run more profitable agencies. 

Yeah, very cool. It’s almost, I mean, the brand that comes to my mind is like, what Gusto does for small to medium management roles. It’s very similar. You are, like, a fractional accounting and finance for agencies?

100%.

Yeah, very cool. All right, wow. I mean, we covered so much, just an initial part of the conversation. And here I am thinking about how we are yet to get into the meat of the episode, but I think we covered a lot of ground, I still want to dig into this, which is, if you were to go back in time either from your different companies, I think you covered enough from your different companies. But if you were to go back in time and look at your B2B SaaS clients, if you can share a go-to-market success story and a go-to-market failure slash learning story, that’d be amazing for the listeners.

I mean, go-to-market success story, Loom is obviously an easy one to point at, given their ultimate outcome and being there on the ground floor, I think Calm is another like the meditation app, we launched Calm for Work, yeah, Calm for the workplace. It was like B to B to C, and that was a really big success story. Oh, man, what’s a failure story?

I’m sure when you start talking about these two, something will come to your mind, yeah, start with these.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, do you want to dive into the specifics of those, or what? 

Yeah, so either Calm or the first one that you mentioned, which is Loom, yeah, just start, and then I can steer the conversation, sure. 

And I’m gonna preface this with like, a, this was almost five years ago now, four years ago now. B, I didn’t do any of the work, so these are my teams that were, that were working on these accounts, yeah, so it’s gonna be hard for me to go into like, specifics. 

Got it? Okay? 

I think I could, yeah, go ahead. 

Let’s actually start with, I mean, when you had the initial discovery, call the conversation with either Loom or Calm, what is it like? And then how did you and your team come up with what the engagement would look like and outcomes for the next three, six months? 

Yeah. So for both of them, we were basically walked into those deals by an advisor to the CEO, who had already worked with us and seen the results that we produced. For other folks, they were advising, yeah, and had whispered in the CEO’s ear essentially, like, hey, you need this, you know, you need this help, right? These are the experts. You know that you can trust them because I’ve seen their work in the past. Like, let’s get this done. Let’s get this solved. 

And so unlike other sales cycles, where we were starting from, you know, scratch and building trust and authority, that was kind of, I think my first meeting with Joe was like, here. He was like, here’s the lay of the land. We don’t really have anything. We just hired our first demand-gen person. But we don’t really, like, we don’t have any direction for them. We need someone who can come in and set the strategy, oversee the hires, oversee the work, and get us on the right track. Like, we’re not just, like, very, very early, early, early. And that’s that was, you know, at the time, that was the type of challenge we liked. We don’t do that anymore. We don’t work with the early stage anymore, but at the time, that was like so much fun, right? Blank slate. 

And, yeah, yeah. 

Yeah, got it okay, and they were at about a few 100k or even a million in revenue back then.

I don’t remember, but yeah, they hadn’t whatever revenue they were producing was not because they were marketing and doing demand.

Yeah, and the fact that they had the first demand gen, which most likely would be like a senior individual contributor, but they didn’t have the budget, not the need yet for like, a full-time director or VP of demand.

Yeah. And, I mean, I think, I don’t think Joe would correct me on this, but, like, I don’t think Joe would have known, like, he didn’t know what he needed or, like, what the roles would be, or how to get that set up like he was a green founder. You know, that’s not a dig. That’s just like how it is. I was a green founder at one time, too. So, yeah.

Fair enough. And then what was like, the first big, aha, big success that you delivered for Joe in demand, Gen.

This is where my memory is, like…

That’s okay. If it’s easier to talk about Calm, we can do that,

yeah. I mean, they’re all from the same era. 

Or we can move to NoBoringDesign on you, yeah?

Like a short version for Loom. I remember we did Loom. It was, it’s funny, Loom and Calm were both Loom, Loomfor the workplace, Calm for the workplace. And it was like a video series that we CO produced. We brought in this video team that we really like. We created these, like, really fun, kind of funny videos of someone using Loom to communicate in the workplace, kind of share the value proposition and illustrate. Because, you know, now, Loom is practically a verb, but back then, nobody knew what it was, so we had to introduce the concept of, like, why would you send a video message that also allows for screen sharing? Like, how is that valuable?

Right! 

And I remember that campaign just did super, super well, and that was kind of like the spark, the initial start off, like, okay, we’re onto something. Let’s chase this. Let’s chase this thread.

Absolutely. I mean, I love loom. I mean, I use Loom even to this day, and I’ve been using it for a few years now, and I still recall that maybe it was from the campaign, or from a different one, where the employees at Loom were actually talking about how they use loom, both internally for their status or weekly updates to the team, or even for sales calls. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. This is great stuff, and I’ll just make it easy on you. Eli, I know we covered a lot of go-to-market failure stories, so let’s not go there throughout a lot for sure. But yeah, as we come towards the end of this conversation and podcast, a couple of questions I have for you. One is if you were to go back in time and then look at, or think about, like, two, three, or four people that really played a big role in shaping and really pulling you up from your deepest points or most down points. Like, who were those people?

I think the VC who first came to me with that, you know, vision of what I could be and could do when I was still working on the stupid thing. Her name’s Angela Jackson. She’s, I’ve shouted her out many times before because she was really that first spark for me, the first kind of win-win in my sails, if you will. And then now, now that I have, you know, a little bit more years under my belt, I’ve started to even go back further than that and realize I have this friend. His name’s Rob Mizell and he and I met in photography school, and he was the one who told me that I had to read The Four Hour Work Week and a couple of other books too, that just like, absolutely changed the course of my life. So I think he, gets an absolute mention there as well. Yeah, and then yeah, there were, I mean, there are a lot of folks along the way. Timothy Young, who was the he found very successful founder, then the president of Dropbox, and now the CEO of Jasper. He was an advisor to my first company, to Glider, and just along my career has been a pretty pivotal person and a great support system, and just a great guy and friend and oh man, the list. The list goes on but we’ll leave it at that. I think that those folks at least encompass the vast majority of the beginning of my journey. 

Fantastic, great. So two questions, the last two questions. So. Wow. The one question that I wanted to get your thoughts on was, how do you think about launching Profit Labs, and what did you have to create, like, a point of view or a manifesto, and why did you come into existence? And what is your vision like? If you can walk us through that thought process? 

Yeah, I love it. So Profit Labs, the accounting firm and financial services firm for agency owners, the way that I do at this point, I kind of have a playbook for launching a services business. And the playbook is pretty straightforward. I need to absolutely identify who the influential cogs are, right, not cogs, but like, I think of it as, like, an influence map. 

So who are, who are the players who, if they buy in, or if they talk about me, especially if multiple folks within that world talk about me, that it’s just going to absolutely 10x our growth from what it would be if, if, if I wasn’t interacting with them.

Yeah. 

So that’s the first thing, and start networking with them, figuring out, like, what is the angle, what’s the win, win. Then cold email still works. It doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it still works and so, and I think there are interesting ways that I use that in the funnel. So, for example, I have a newsletter called profit labs weekly, where I share tips and strategies for agencies and service businesses to see how they can be more profitable. 

How can they produce more profit? And I give away a bunch of free resources and models and spreadsheets for all these things. And so I’ll use cold email to promote that. So instead of being in someone’s inbox, asking them for a meeting and pitching my shit. I’m just reaching out to these folks, but hey, most agency owners struggle with profitability. They struggle to be as profitable as they believe they should be. Here’s a free resource. Let me know if you have questions and just kind of bleed with giving. And it’s a pretty common phrase at this point, but it works. So, you know, eventually, then drip them closer to the offering itself. So cold email is another big one. And candidly, between those two things, like, if you’re starting a business like that from scratch and you just did those two things, yeah, that’ll get you to the first 20 customers. No problem. 

Absolutely, no, for sure. I mean, even though you call it cold email, that’s not really cold email, it’s actually a newsletter where someone has to opt into it, yeah, and yeah, nurture drip, offer value. And me, personally, I’ve subscribed to so many newsletters I’ve become attached to that founder’s thought process and bought products and services and coaching.

Totally, absolutely.

And that thing works.

Yep, absolutely! 

Yeah, great. 

So final question, if you were to go back in time and go back to day one of your go-to-market journey, what advice would you give to your younger self? 

Hmm, trust the process.

Simple, that’s it. Yeah, amazing, yeah, trust the process, yeah, and especially given what you just shared with me, Eli, and if I were to put myself in your shoes, only at a surface level, that’s all I can do, right? Like when your friend told you, hey, go read The Four Hour Work Week book. 

Yeah.

Versus you waiting at LA Tables restaurants and then deciding, hey, you know what? This is not it. I’m going, I need to start from the ground up and figure out what that is, all the different failures, and then somehow a higher power, or whatever, is actually helping you connect the dots, which you will not see it. Yeah, right. That’s how I see, I mean, and you aptly put it right across the process, you never know, but as long as you’re just putting in the reps. Yeah, I really feel that. Okay, this is the right thing to do. Yep, you don’t know. You don’t know the outcome, but it’s what it is.

Totally! 

It’s important to price for customers, not just the product itself, as humans ascribe value.

Dan shares his career journey, starting as a software engineer and transitioning into product management and eventually pricing consultancy. He emphasizes the critical role of pricing as a strategic lever in successful B2B SaaS go-to-market strategies, drawing on his extensive experience helping companies overcome common pricing challenges.

Dan provides valuable insights for B2B SaaS leaders looking to leverage pricing as a key component of their go-to-market efforts.

Connect with Dan Balcauski on LinkedIn

Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn

Listen to the podcast here:

Pricing as a Strategic Lever in B2B SaaS Go-to-Market: Insights from Pricing Consultant Dan Balcauski

Let’s get this rolling. So the first question, which I ask my guests, or my guests, is, how do you view and define go to market?

It’s an interesting question. Honestly, I don’t have a whole lot of use for the term, because go to market tends to be very vague and broad. When I hear people talk about it refers to sales and marketing functions in general, the way I sort of wrap my head around it, I think a lot more about like we have these roads here in Texas, your listeners who may have never visited the area, but we’ve got FM, 2222 and RM, 2342 so FM stands for Farm to Market, and RM stands for ranch to market. So these are the roads that the ranchers and farmers use to bring their products to the city to sell. So to me, that’s kind of where my head goes whenever I hear the term go to market. Like, what are the actual pathways and mechanisms that your product from creation, from the ranch or the farm into your customer’s hands?

I love it. I mean FM and RM. And you give us a little primer. So for all of us tech sense, who are not familiar with this road naming, terminology. It’s a fun thing, and I like the way you used it. Dan, it’s a pathway. I mean, farmers, and ranchers, have a quote, unquote products, and B to B. SaaS companies, they have their products now figuring out their pathway to get to the market. And that’s go to market. I love that. That’s a good take, interesting take, for sure, yeah, but clearly, I mean, there’s so many levers, so many variations, so many challenges when it comes to taking a product from an idea or a concept to the market. I mean, there are aspects around who is this product for. What kind of problems is this product solving, and what is it not that’s more of the external view, the competition view of the market dynamics, and so on? 

And then there’s an internal arg related, right? Right? And there’s also the alignment, which you did allude to briefly earlier, which is between product and marketing and sales. And if it’s a SaaS kind of business, you’re talking about customer success as well, typically. So your thoughts, having worked with organizations of different scales and in different industries.

I’m sorry, there was a long Prelude, but I missed the question in there. What is the question about? Like, where do people struggle with alignment?

Yeah, so from your vantage point, having worked in different industries and with different customers’ products, what are the little nuggets that you caught to the different things that I talked about, like the external aspects of go to market, and then the internal aspects of go to market. Any thoughts?

Well, you know, I mean, there’s, I have a lot of thoughts. I’m not sure exactly where you were. You were hoping to go with that, but in many ways, there are often as many internal problems as there are external problems in these companies, right? And so, you know, often, you know, one way to kind of just at a very high level describe what I do is like, Well, have you ever seen what’s on a SaaS pricing page? We’ve got to get to that answer, right? That would be the most succinct way to describe what I do, right? And so you think about, okay, well, that’s communicating a lot of things, right? And so a customer sees that and what do they understand? And what does that mean for them? 

Getting to that right? It’s because the problem tends to be that everyone maybe has a view at the executive table of what that should look like, except the Venn diagram of all their views do not overlap at all. So getting that internal alignment tends to be the real beauty challenge that I think a lot of people under-emphasize, or maybe it goes it comes as a surprise. So hopefully, you know this conversation could clear that up a little bit.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So let’s take a bigger picture. Let’s just zoom out a little bit, and if you can share with our listeners your career journey, like day one of your go-to-market journey, and the trajectories and paths that you have taken and what led you to what you’re doing today if you can share that.

Yeah. So I’ve spent my entire career to this point in the software world. I started more on the value creation side than the value capture side. So I started as an engineer, building products in and into engineering management, into product management. Ultimately, when I was a coder, I made the realization that the computer didn’t care how angry I got at it, it still wouldn’t run my code. And so I realized it probably was not the end result for B I became much more fascinated by how we created value for our customers and how that turned into dollars and cents for the business. 

And so ultimately pursued my MBA, and I spent a good chunk of my career on the product management side, increasing levels of seniority there. And, you know, I was very lucky when I was doing my MBA to be at a place where I found this out much later. But a lot of business schools don’t even have courses on pricing. Mine did. So I took, I took a lot of them there, not thinking that I’d end up having career pricing, just because I thought it was interesting, and then got thrown into the real world during my internship. I had an internship for a very successful Silicon Valley startup during my MBA program, and it was, it was like a blended product marketing, product management role, and one of the problems on the CEO’s desk was whether should do a freemium approach for their product and reselling sort of consumer apps through this sort of channel? 

And so, among several things, I worked on that summer. So I got my thrown in the deep end there. And then, you know, anyone who spend any time and either the product marketing side or product management side knows that, you know, sort of Batman and Robin. I’ll let you choose which is which, but they’re tied at the hip very close. And so while the organizations I wasn’t I was in the product management didn’t explicitly own pricing. We were a critical stakeholder. But what I found is a lot of my product marketing counterparts would be like, I’m really good at, like, doing content and messaging and positioning work. I don’t know if you have a business degree. Can you help out with this? So, you know, I made mistakes along the way but got pulled into those conversations. And, you know, over time, I finally took the leap and decided to get off of my own. Been running my consultancy project, really, for the last six years now, which is a little bit mind-boggling to say. Interesting.

Yeah, interested my journey is somewhat similar, at least in the early stages, where I started off as a software developer, and I love the way you framed it, which is the compiler didn’t really like the way you coded, and that’s a signal you Okay, something is off, and maybe you need to change paths. And so, yeah, so similar path where I started off as a software developer, and then went and did my MBA, and came back to Bay Area and did the different roles, product management, product marketing, the exact ones that you have been alluding to. And so for me, I was where, since I had a very quantitative, analytical background and a mindset, I was also gravitating more and more towards the product marketing side of things versus the product management side of things. This is where I started seeing that interesting friction, where I am better at Product Marketing compared to product management, but I don’t have any say when it comes to pricing, it typically goes to product folks. That’s what I’ve seen. So do you see that? I mean, that’s is that? How do you see it as well Dan? 

Well, I think one of the difficulties of running my current business is that there is not a consistent owner of pricing across B2B software companies. Yeah. So, you know, in as much as we like to talk about customer personas, etc, it makes it very difficult for me to create that because it’s like. Oh, the CRO owns it in this company. The CMO owns it in this company. The Chief Product Officer owns it in this company, and the head of the VP of Product Marketing owns it in this other company. Usually kind of the split I see, and it’s all about evenly split between those groups, I would make the argument that I think product marketing should own it. The product is not a bad place to own it. And just simply, the reason why is because I view pricing as a function of positioning, and usually product marketing is at least the keeper of positioning, if not the outright owner. They’re usually at a strategic level in the business. They’re keeping an eye on the competition. They’re very keyed into what the key messages are that are resonating with customers. And so it’s a natural place for it to fall from a strategic mindset. I generally disagree with having someone like Sales own it. You do not want to have, say, Dracula in charge of the blood bank. The incentives are not aligned in that case. No disrespect to my friends in sales, they have a very difficult job. But you also want to make sure that you’re balancing the short and long-term interests of the business as a whole in that strategic pricing function. But the product is really well suited to own it. The problem with the product is usually, I mean, they’ve got a million other things on their plate, and so they just don’t have the time to dedicate to give it sort of the rigorous treatment that it probably should in most cases. That’s probably the biggest flaw of having it in the product organization.

Yeah, fair enough. And looking at your LinkedIn profile, yeah. So after your MBA, you did, or during your MBA, you did your summer internship, and that’s where you found your calling towards pricing looks like. And then you went to solar events, did the product management, and grew up the ladder. So if you can share your experience and stories from SolarWinds.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of experience there. So, you know, one of the things that was interesting about SolarWinds is it was, you know, it’s a software business. First of all, when everyone hears the term, they immediately think it is like, Oh, do you guys do renewable energy or some sort? No, no, it’s a software business.

The company, it’s funny because it’s now just, actually, within the last week, changed hands again to another private equity firm. It IPOs, it goes private, and IPOs goes private, and it just went through another transaction. However, the company itself operates very much like a private equity firm. It looks like a software business, but while I was there, we were acquiring three to five companies a year and tucking them into the broader portfolio. 

And so what would happen is we would buy a whole company, slot it into our go-to-market model, and most of that team would sail off into the sunset with their giant bags of cash. And then, you know, as a product leader, you know, at any one time, I was managing between two and four products simultaneously, that all had been separate companies. So it was a very interesting experience to get a lot of reps of seeing what early stage companies, you know, the good and the bad around product management, around product marketing, because you inherit a lot of those decisions, and then have to, you know, make them work in The new system. And so very excellent experience. You know, it was kind of a rocket ship when I was there, but, but, yeah, many of those times where, you know, I was helping to plan the Hey, what is the, what is the feature roadmap? 

How are we going to sell this thing, etc? But then, you know, having getting pulled in on these pricing conversations, because there’s, you know, Product Marketing counterparts, very smart, but kind of to that to that point before, right? It’s not that, again, who should own it, product management, product marketing, sales, like very few people, if you go through a product management training, either through pragmatic or any number of places, very rarely have a pricing component, right? 

You go through a product management thing, and they teach you, alright, here’s what Agile is. Here’s how to write JIRA tickets. Here’s how to do some customer discovery and product marketing. You know, very rarely are they getting actual, real explicit training and pricing. So I think it’s kind of, you know, it doesn’t say anything about the people. I think it says about pricing as a function. It’s still relatively nascent for most folks. So, yeah, there’s a ton of stories I could go into, like, while I was there, not sure where you want

Yeah, I’m really curious, like, at what point in time, or was that like a phase that actually called you out or pulled you into the pricing aspect?

Yeah, let me well, you know, I had a bunch of different sort of sporadic experiences along, you know, both the journey, sort of when I was in my internship, as well as, you know, solar winds and beyond. So. So after spending years as a product leader in SaaS, I took a year and a half sabbatical to go travel the world and amazing reset. But as I was traveling, I kept on asking myself, what’s next? I thought I’d start a product company, but couldn’t lay an idea. I truly believed in but I didn’t believe in myself, so I started looking at what others were doing in the consulting space. That’s when I noticed something. I started seeing a growing trend of fractional CFOs, CMOs, and even chief legal fractional components. So, no one was talking about a fractional Chief Product Officer. So I thought, either this is a brilliant opportunity or a terrible idea. It turned out to be a terrible idea because I quickly ran into a fundamental problem. 

So, like, product is the crown jewel of a tech business. All right, so think of it. You know, product management, Microsoft was the first people to have, I think the product manager. I think they call them program owner titles at first, where they brought it over, but they borrowed the concept from the CPG companies like Procter and Gamble, and you’re the leader who had brand managers, 

Right.

Well, the brand is the core asset of a CPG company. The tech and product are the core assets of a technology company. And so it’s not like finance or marketing, where a lot of early technical teams view, you know, maybe those functions, as you know, purely operational plug-in roles. So CEOs aren’t generally looking for consultants or advisors to own their product strategy. If they do think they have product strategy issues, they’re looking to fire their current CPO and hire their full-time replacement to solve it. So, you know. So I was, I was out there with this positioning, you know. And I think, you know, like anything else, it’s very difficult to sort of understand what real market demand looks like until you’re sort of out there doing it. And you know, I was taking on different consulting projects, and your thing kept coming up, which was pricing. 

And you know, even I did this kind of intermediate pivot where I was kind of focused more specifically on retention, but then I saw a lot of poor pricing and packaging were at the root of a lot of customer churn issues. And something else, I started getting inbound interest, asking people, asking if I could help them with pricing. You know, even though I wasn’t sort of explicitly, sort of pushing that and, you know, realized that a van was there, and I realized, you know, the market wasn’t looking for this fractional CPO. They were actively seeking help with their pricing and decided to make the pivot. And so, you know, just because something makes sense to you, I think the lesson here is, you know, it doesn’t mean there’s demand for it, you know. But you know, people don’t wake up thinking, I need someone to help me with my product strategy, but their CEOs do wake up thinking we’re leaving a lot of money on the table with our pricing. And I learned that, you know, pricing is a problem. Customers are willing to bring in outside expertise to solve so that’s how I ended up leaning into the pricing. 

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I mean, I was not actually planning to cover this, but I think you added a lot of value. And the reason why I want to emphasize this to our listeners, especially is a lot of times, especially folks coming from the product world, they always think when they hear the word or term product market fit, it’s typically in the concept of like a SaaS product and a market fit. But in your case, what you shared, and this goes to any other services and even fractional folks or solopreneurs, even if there is no software product component to what they’re looking to offer. 

At the end of the day, they still have to figure out, quote, unquote, the product piece as service packaged as a product, right? And this is where you had to go through the different iterations to figure out. You enter the original thesis and positioning of a fractional Chief Product Officer, which was your quote, unquote product. I mean service as a product or product as a service, right? But that was not the case, and you had to go through those same iterations that any startup is more familiar with. I mean for folks, typically, when they think about startup founders, they think about like software or software products, but it’s the same thing, right? Even for fractional and services, people to figure out their product market fit, they had to go through the same iterations.

Yeah. Service market fit, right? It would be the same plugin thing. Yeah, you’ve, you’ve got to find a pain point that people are, you know, looking to actively bring in folks to help solve and, you know, I there’s definitely, I could add layers to that story. I think one of the things that you know, maybe is counterintuitive, but if there’s, there are other folks who are, who are trying to go down this, like this was an interesting tweak that I had to use because I’d spent a bunch of time in product roles doing customer discovery right. And so one of the one of the things that you do in those types of conversations is really trying to understand, hey, what are the what are the top pain points those people are trying to deal with in their current roles? 

Yeah, um. So the early mistake I made when I was, you know, trying to do that as it applied to that business was, although I might be properly identifying the top issues that that senior executive is, Chief Product Officer, Chief Customer Officer, whatever it might be is, is dealing with that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to bring in someone from the outside to solve it. 

So this was a big problem with looking at something like customer retention, because, you know, maybe the Head of Customer Success, or chief customer officer actually owns that, but that’s, that’s also why they’re there. So, you know, it’s, it is one of these nuances, right? I mean, and you could hopefully that’s valuable, as folks sort of think about, like, Okay, well, people keep telling me as a pain point, but they’re not spending money on it, or they’re not hiring my, you know, a big fan of jobs to be done. I use it a lot, right? So you’re hiring a person or hiring a product, yeah, you know, it’s like, okay, why are they not hiring my product to do this job for them? It’s like, oh, because this is something that they don’t want to be. They don’t. They’ve been hired to do that themselves, right? So, so, you know, a lot of lessons learned there. And again, I don’t say to folks that it’s impossible to go out there and do fractional, cheap product officer, just that I was not smart enough to figure out the way to make that compelling. 

Well said, Yeah, well, said, and then you transitioned and went on your own path, and you created product tranquility. That’s the name of your company. So if you can share like, who are your ICPs and what is the recurring theme or pain point, why people keep coming back to you and your services?

Yeah, so we work with, I would say, primarily, B to B. Scale up, B to B. SaaS companies scale up in like the 20 to 50 million ARR range, typically for CEOs, founders, and their executive teams. These companies are past the kind of startup phase, but they’ve really sort of got some amount of repeatable model. The products hit a certain level of maturity where they are starting to deal with issues, like they’re maybe going after new customer segments that they weren’t before, or their product has gotten to a level of complexity where it needs to be divided up into multiple different kinds of offers or tiers, right? Maybe they’ve just been sort of adding one size fits, and they keep on adding and adding, and they’ve got a, you know, a big, you know, thing that does a lot, but it’s very difficult to explain, or, you know, maybe certain segments of their customers often don’t value and so you end up having to do unnatural things with discounting in order to fit things into deals, etc, because you don’t, you don’t have the right fit for different kind of customers that you’re now covering. 

Also, at this point, you may become a Multi-Product, either organically or inorganically. And so ultimately, what folks see is that there’s a lot of these pricing and packaging issues ultimately are negatively affecting ARR and net revenue retention, especially. And so, you know, help them get clarity on who their customers are. Do a lot of work around your segmentation, and how they communicate their value. Do you know what alternative understanding, what alternatives customers are concerned about? Alternatives customers are considering, and how do you know the structure, pricing, and packaging?

Understood. So let’s make it even more concrete. So and so for with each of my guests, I asked them to share a success story and a failure story in the go-to-market space. And this actually makes it even more concrete for the listeners in terms of the nuances, the challenges, and how people overcame in their expert area. So if you can share a success story and a failure story, and then talk about your pricing approaches in that context, that’ll be great, Dan.

Yeah, so I’ll actually give you a two-for-one because it’s a failure, but also a success. I generally believe, right? If I look at a tree, I don’t criticize the tree because of all the directions it didn’t grow. I only look at the tree in its hole. So we are we’re always finding a bunch of things that don’t work in order to find ways that do so. I say one of the most common mistakes I see a lot of SaaS companies make is treating pricing as an afterthought, something to figure out, like right before launch, rather than an integral part of their product planning process. So I work with a company who has built a new product. Like many companies, pricing wasn’t a priority until they were kind of deep in the launch process, and so six months before launch, the head of product needs to put together an executive update deck. They get to the pricing slide and think, Well, we charge X for our current product, so we. 

Put 2x the on the new one, so no research, just a number on the slide. Yeah. So fast forward four months. Everyone’s been seeing this 2x number in their weekly exec updates. Now they’re two months from launch, and someone asked, like, Hey, we’re launching soon. Like, how confident are we in this pricing? And the Team suddenly realized, well, not very. They had just thrown a number on his slide, like, six months earlier. No real research behind it. So that’s what they end up calling me. And so there’s like, here’s where this gets interesting, like, so we go, we do the market research and find out that the market is actually willing to pay 4x, like, double what they planned. Oh, great. Great news. Yeah, right, but not, not for me. 

So what shocked me was the internal reaction. So despite 2x being, you know, completely arbitrary, the executive team had become emotionally anchored to it. They were, like, uncomfortable with the idea of charging, you know, 4x more than you know they’re or actually double more than their customers would have been, right? And so it’s a perfect example I see all the time where, you know, we think business decisions are purely rational, but you know, humans have interesting relationships with money. So that’s when I realized something important. So you know, pricing anchoring isn’t just a customer issue. It happens internally too. So even though, you know, the original price point had no basis in research, you know, it had been repeated in internal meetings for six months, you know, everyone had unconsciously latched onto it as reality. So I presented a much higher point that was supported by market data. Instead of seeing it as an opportunity, the first instinct was skepticism, Oh, it’s too big of a jump. 

You know, our customers don’t pay this much and, and what you’ll find is, like, in those situations, like, you’ll just, you’ll attack the research, like, what? Okay, well, now everyone becomes, like, a pricing methodology expert, of like, well, yes, dig it. Yeah, exactly right. And you’re like, you’re like, wait. Like, what do we like, we’re arguing against pure arbitrariness, like how we actually would have done the research. And I was like, well, that methodology is flawed when, yeah, the problem is, is, like, you’re the original thing was just pulled out of a hat. So, so, but somehow you can’t question that part. So, so pure anchoring bias at play? You know, just like, I’m sure everyone should ask your parents. I am sure they tell you exactly how much a gallon of gasoline was when they started driving, right? And that’s the price it should be, right? You know, the gas today is so expensive. When I got my first car, it was only 49 cents a gallon, right? And so, you know, I guess what, you know, I learned a bunch of that experience. You know, the first is that your pricing is just about data. It’s a lot about psychology. 

And, you know, if you don’t prepare, you know, not only consumer psychology, which I think it’s a lot of the attention in, you know, the, you know, there’s, there’s plenty of stuff around, like, Why do you have all these anchor prices, etc, get the $2,000 bottle of champagne on the price list, right, but, but you know, you also have that internally in the stake stakeholder. And if you don’t prepare stakeholders well for unexpected results, they’ll reject them. Attack the methodology, attack the messenger. So now, when I work at companies, you know, I make sure to ask them upfront. You know, it’s like, hey, like, if we go do this, if we come back showing customers will pay 3x or 4x more, what would you do or asking them, like, hey, like, where do you think the reasonable range will be? 

As you’ll learn a lot about where folks’ heads are at right up front, that’ll help you prevent some of, those surprises, and that conversation before the research starts is crucial. And I think you know, ultimately, you know that’s sort of within that you know, particular domain of, you know, anchoring, within the building. But I think that you know, the real lesson here for folks as well is that pricing is not something you figure out two months before a launch, right? It’s part of the product development process itself. And so if you wait until launch the test pricing, you run the risk of this, you know, these internal assumptions becoming, you know, gelling like concrete before anyone has done any actual work. And that can be as difficult as anything else, right? There’s those, those biases and those anchors are really quite powerful.

Great start.

Yeah, in fact, couple of thoughts, I’ll let you drink a sip of water, but you shed a lot of nuggets over there along the way, Dan, and a couple of thoughts come to my mind. Is so similar to when I was in my role as a product marketer. I typically played the role of taking on the ownership for beta program definition as well as recruiting, and I’m talking about a version one product, so at least in that environment, I could get the buy-in and. Part of the executors, the product leaders, and the marketing leaders. Product marketing has to be involved from the concept stage, especially when it comes to positioning and messaging. That was relatively easy. 

But then I also took the extra step of figuring out, okay, we are looking to launch a product, but how do we know how much your customers are willing to pay for that? And that’s where I also did pricing validation and pricing experimentation during and with the beta customers doing the beta program. So that’s something that I did. And going back to your point, I’m completely on board, 100% with you that folks should be thinking about pricing from day one when the product idea and a concept are being really thought about and people are going to invest in building a product not one or two months before a launch. That’s super.

Yeah, yeah. 

And so, president, why do you think pricing is overlooked? I mean, at least people are getting around and pulling in forks for the positioning and messaging piece is what I’m seeing. But the pricing piece is still a great area.

It’s a great question. I have hypotheses. So you know, on the P and L, you’re going to have all your expenses of the business, yeah, the, you know, CTO is going to get the bill from AWS, you know, how much your engineering salaries cost, right? You know, but that revenue number at the top, you know, it. Uh, you know, it’s price times quantity. Everyone just sort of, I think their eyes glaze over. They don’t think about they think it’s just that prices as a constant. For the most part, there is a lot of focus on acquisition. So changing the, you know, p times q, there’s a lot of focus on the Q, Yeah, gotta get more leads. 

Gotta gotta write more people in the funnel. Yeah. And you know, why is that? I think you know, one is pointing back to what I was talking about before. A lot of folks kind of view pricing as black magic, Voodoo. And so if you know, I don’t know it’s sort of working, and I don’t know how to make it any better, and I don’t think anybody else does either. So if it ain’t, you know, don’t, don’t touch it, right? I don’t even know if it’s broken, so I’m just gonna leave it. I’m gonna leave it alone. And so they don’t really, you know, when you look at that P and L, right, you don’t see that your opportunity cost is a line item, like, well, you know, if you were priced correctly, right, instead of your revenue being x, it could have been 10x. Doesn’t show up on the P and L. And I would hesitate if any accountant actually put that on the P and L. 

I don’t think that they’re necessarily in the best position to make that forecast, either. And you know, but I would say, you know, the misconception there is, there is a lot more science than it is a black box. There’s definitely some art to it. As any marketer knows, humans are squishy, right? We have psychological things. We respond to certain words in certain ways, right? And you know your colors are gonna drive different you know, amount of conversion, call to action clicks, right? But you know, we know that there’s no reason why the green button versus the orange button, why the green should win, but for some reason it does. 

And so, yes, there is, there is an, you know, an art to it as well. But there’s a lot of science, and I think just folks have not been, you know, as educated on the science, and also, right? It’s this, it’s this hidden opportunity cost. So it’s just kind of out of sight, out of mind. And then, you know, if you don’t have a lot of folks who have done it before, or, you know, they’re not getting pushed to really look at it, then it can be, you know, it can be a blind spot.

Yeah. And it’s interesting, right? I mean, people experience a product and a price variation depending on so many factors. So taking an example that each and every one of us can relate to, it takes a cup of coffee, and the same cup of coffee in a 711 has one price point. The same cup of coffee in a cinema hall will have a different price point. The same cup of coffee at events or even in the airport will have a completely different price, the same product, and it all boils down to how much that customer is willing to pay in that scenario.

Exactly. Value and willingness to pay are relative and contextual. They are not an absolute. Is not like Planck’s constant out in the universe, where we could just scientifically measure it. It is a it is a measure of desire, right? And that desire is framed by, you know, my needs at the time and the other alternatives I have available to me.

Yeah, completely. And I would imagine those are the things that you would do in your research, part of your customer research, as to come up with here is a price point, and this is what is backed, does the data that backs that recommendation? Is that a fair statement, Dan?

Yes, correct. And so, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of different, you know, methodologies we could talk through in terms of, you know, ways that you get pricing data and ways that we validate that, et cetera. One of the things that, whatever sort of methods you use, one of the things we were just hinting at, is that value is relative to the there’s there’s no external arbiter of value. Value isn’t valued like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And so, you know, the first mistake that we make in the idea of pricing our product is pricing our product versus pricing our customers the product. The product is just a thing. It’s just, it’s inert, it’s bits, right? It has no, it has no value. Human, the humans ascribe the value. 

Maybe someday our AI overlords will ascribe the value, but for the purposes now, like we humans ascribe the value, yeah. And so in order to do that, we want to better understand our customers. And so when we look at, you know, whatever methodology you choose to defend, western, a conjoint, or any number of other ways you may think about framing pricing questions, one of the insights that we are most valuable coming out of there is, what are the dimensions that discriminate customers that value this a lot versus those that don’t value it? 

Uh, you know, or value a little or not at all. 

Yeah!

Right, because those are oftentimes just as important because we want to always spend time, you know, anyone who’s done marketing for any amount of time, all leads are not created equal. Some people have high urgency. Some people have no urgency. And like the sales guys, they love it when you give them a high-urgency customer, they hate it when you give them a no-urgency customer, right? So it’s better for the business. It’s better for everyone. If we target our entire go-to-market lever at the people who most need our product. And so even if around the edges we say, well, okay, we can’t get nine digits of precision of how much this person would pay for this product, but you know what, we could see giant bands between groups, and that’s going to affect which markets we go after first, where we spend our marketing dollars, the positioning, you know that we have, we’ve we get only so many messages we could put on the homepage. Yes, right? The ones that we’re going to put are the ones that want to be increased, are willing to pay more, and also the ones that resonate with the people who say they value this the most. And so that pricing data can be useful throughout the entire go-to-market funnel.

Absolutely. And there’s also, as you’re starting out, that specific story with the customer and a client of yours. I mean, I was thinking, and these thought processes came to my mind, right? 

So if you have a price point for your existing product and you want to launch a new product, typically they go by, okay, 2x that’s fine, and that’s because the sales guys are comfortable selling at a 2x value, and even for the maybe it’s a product, and even the marketing folks and the finance folks, but then imagine when you propose it’s not 2x but 4x. There is a reconditioning of the sales process and how you position that product, all of those things now will have to change, because, again, going back to the same cup of coffee and different price points, it boils down to how you’re positioning the environment and what you’re creating.

Well, we just went through this, so folks, give me a more concrete example of this, one of the big news stories in my pricing world, and I think for most of the people who are in technology, it was recently Open AI released their ChatGPT Pro tier. Yeah, so their plus tier was what they had before. It was $20 per user per month, and then all of a sudden, they launched this $200 per user per month, and it made headlines. Made headlines for a lot of different reasons. One is that Sam Altman said he just picked it out of a hat. This is also the man who is fired by his board for not being consistently candid with them. So I don’t know whether I completely trust that that was exactly how they got to that number. They have enough money to hire some consultants, so maybe they got some external advice, or he maybe just pulled it out of the hat. 

But okay, you have, this was the exact same situation you have as the situation I described, where you had a new tier with a new value proposition. And what did opening I do? It’s 10x it’s not 4x it’s not 2x it’s 10x what it is. And you know what? People are paying for it.

Yes, and they see a lot of value, yeah. 

And people are paying for it, right? And so it’s, it’s an interesting, you know, example, I think everyone can see where it’s like, okay, you know, because, again, right? There’s a lot of emotion. No matter how you grew up, rich or poor, everyone has interesting relationships with money. We as product leaders or product marketers. We’re immersed in our product every day. We know what the roadmap is. We know all the features it doesn’t have yet. We know all the bugs have been reported by customers. So we know all we know where all the bodies are buried in the architecture and how it won’t scale. And so we look at this thing and we’re like, I can’t charge customers for this, right, right? 

But that’s, that’s the wrong view. It’s not about you, it’s about your customer, your customers desperate for a solution, and whatever they’re they’re willing to take on, Oh, that. Oh my god, this solves this problem. Because my alternative, instead of paying, you know, open AI, whoever $200 per month is to go, you know, hire a consulting agency who’s going to charge me whatever, $500 an hour to write this research, run this research report. This is an incredible value. I’m excited to pay for this. I’m so excited. I’m going on Twitter telling all my friends how much I’m paying them because it’s such an amazing deal. So I think, you know, we need to understand that that, again, going back to this pricing, anchoring emotional bias is like we have this sense that, oh my god, people are just going to think our customers are going to get with the pitchforks. And look, that happens. We could talk about examples like, you know, Reddit with their API charging, or there was unity with their gaming platform provider, right? They do. 

And, some of these pricing changes end up on the front page. The New York Times, and there are lessons to be learned there, and they make very they made some very bad mistakes, but it is possible to create tiers that are significantly different than what you’re currently charging. 

Absolutely no.

Strategic partnerships can be the catalyst for business growth and long-term success. In this episode, Emir Elliott-Lindo highlights the significance of cultivating strong relationships with partners and how collaboration can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. 

Emir delves into the essential steps for fostering these relationships, from identifying the right partners to establishing clear communication and shared goals. 

Learn how leveraging partnerships not only creates new business opportunities but also helps brands gain credibility, expand their reach, and innovate together. 

Connect with Emir Elliott-Lindo on LinkedIn

Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn

Listen to the podcast here:

The Power of Strategic Partnerships in Go-To-Market: How to Foster Relationships and Drive Growth With Emir Elliott-Lindo

Signature question:

So yeah, as always, I always start the podcast with the signature question, which is, how do you view and define go to market?

Great question. And it’s possible to say it’s probably specifically pertinent from a partnership standpoint, you know, where, where I live, if you will. So for me to go to market, you know, it’s really kind of the full end in kind of a comprehensive strategy and approach to for an execution plan for a company, you know, it’s kind of how they use it to deliver their products or services to their customers and to drive business growth. It’s not only just about sales and marketing anymore. It’s really kind of cross-functional in approach that lines, product, marketing, sales, customer success. 

And, you know, an area that I’m particularly interested in is partnerships, because partnerships are very cross-functional, yeah, right. And so many organizations have struggled with, you know, with partnerships, a part of go to market or not. It’s actually core and integral to go to market, especially in this space, where, in the day and age, where, you know, B2B, selling is, customers is, you know, they have their stacks. They’ve invested in complex technology and things like that. It’s so important to have the appropriate to ingrain partners into the go-to market, whether that’s, you know, the selling motions, whether that’s working with marketing from a product or content or brand standpoint, finance, all sorts of areas. 

So ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, it’s about, you know, go to market. It’s about your company’s strategy and how you execute it.

Yeah, now I love the fact that you touched upon the important aspect which a lot of folks overlook, which is it’s cross-functional. It’s not just sales and marketing. It includes products. It includes customer support, customer success, and other functions as well. So that’s really, really key. Fantastic. Yeah, so curious. I mean, when is the right time to think about partnerships yeah, especially depending on the product phase and the product maturity. So when is the right time to bring in and look at partnerships?

I mean, I’m a, I’m a big proponent, and, you know, our company, we do this where I’m a big proponent of bringing in thinking about partners, you know, from day one, right? Because there are so many different types of partners, and whether that’s, hey, I’m a chief product officer, and I have to think about, am I building on top of Azure, AWS, Google, etc, right? Type of thing. That’s one aspect of, how am I going to build, and then can I take advantage of the engagement and marketing and alignment opportunities with those companies, right? So that’s one example, right? Another would be, how am I going to deploy, deploy my solution? Or do we build a service organization? Or do we actually work with, you know, some smaller boutique partners, or GSIs or things like that, depending right on the size of the company, et cetera, but to do our deployment, thereby reducing our cost of delivery, right? 

Thereby, you know, allowing us to have a higher valuation. So I think about it day one, whether you execute on it day one. Yeah, sometimes you might, you might say, hey, we know we’re not going to do this, but we’re not. We’ll but once we get to 10 million in ARR, here’s our plan, right? Just be cognizant of the when why and how you’re going to partner at that stage of the growth, of your company. So from day one,

A great point. I mean, I love the fact that, especially if you’re thinking about building it in the cloud, you need to first of all, think about which partner, and which cloud platform you want to go with. And then also, as you said, right, from a technology point of view, yeah. Why this specific cloud platform as an example, right? Google versus Azure versus AWS and so on. And as you’re thinking about that, also the distribution and being on their marketplace? 

Yeah, well, distribution is, you know, first, do I start off with a referral, right? Do I join their marketplace? Many times, companies will say, Hey, I’m going to start and I’m going to put a like, an agency, reseller package together. And you know, one of the things that we say is, that’s fine, that’s that’s fine. But once again, know why you’re doing that. And also it’s not always about you, meaning, you know, companies will say, hey, I want this. Retailers, because I want access to their client base. Yeah, a more, more powerful way, more impactful way would be, hey, how do I help you? Agencies build your business around our platform, thereby helping them drive their service revenue, right? And guess what? You’ll get access to their customers, clients, as they call it. And then the other thing that will end up happening is, as they’re pitching, whether they win or not, they will recommend you, right? Because, so yeah,

I know we got into a lot of details already, so let’s take a big picture. So talk to us. I mean, enlighten the listeners and myself about your career journey, like from day one of your career and what led you to what you’re doing today, around partnerships and doing it on agency.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So it’s funny, I’ve, I’ve got, I’ve been doing partnerships since about 1999 so about 25 years. And, you know, kind of get into that in a little bit. But, you know, my journey started. I’ll go back to when I was, when I was a little kid, right? I was, I grew up in Oakland, and, you know, a single mom for part of my life before she married my stepdad, who’s my dad, in a predominantly black community. However, I went to school in an area called Danville, which, back in those days, was primarily not a black community. I think I was, you know, in my high school, at my high school, probably one of maybe 20 black kids you know, out of out of probably 15 1600 kids. 

I say that because it provided me with an interesting perspective of being able to quickly be able to communicate with different types of people to make sure that you had integrity, empathy, and things like that, and really just becoming a trusted person relatively quickly from there, kind of, you know, obviously, went to college, all that kind of stuff, and I started my official career at Xerox back In those days, back in, you know, the 80s and early 90s, early to mid-90s, some of the top sales programs were Xerox, IBM, and any of I would say that, companies, Lucent, you know, at the time, Pac Bell, things like that.

So why sales? Just curious. Why did you pick sales back then? 

Well, I thought it was back then. I thought it was going to go into, like, advertising or communications or something like that. But back in 94-95, the economy was horrible. And so, you know, not a lot of jobs out there. And so, you know, I stumbled upon this Xerox agency that was like, hey, we need some sales folks. And ended up, you know, taking the job. And what’s interesting there is, once again, it continued to reinforce, I’d say a couple of things. One kind of Hey, you have to have integrity. You have to, you know, treat people well. I can tell you many stories about how, you know, I was walking around, knocking on doors, trying to tell Xerox copiers, and I go to a business, and I’m going into an office, little old ladies kind of walking up to me. 

The elevators are about to close. I stop it. I hold it, yeah. It gets on my competitors in the elevator with me, with this person. We go up. Guess what? She’s the person that was either the office manager who I needed to meet with, yeah, or she was the gatekeeper to the President, to whomever, right? Guess who got the meeting. 

Of course!

I treat people well. I don’t care if you’re a janitor or CEO, you’re still a human being, right? Treat people well. And so I’ve always done that. In fact, with Buddy, my mark, a newcomer, who was at Accenture and WPP and other things, he becomes mayor, making everyone feel like the most important person in the room, even the janitor. And then he executes on our business. Initiative, and that’s one of the critical pieces too, which is when I was at Xerox, and when I was at Alcatel Lucent, things like that were really about also the delivery. Like, right? If you say something and you’re going to do it, do it and show that impact. And so I bring that in moving forward. I ended up, you know, working, working at Siebel, where I manage the Deloitte Alliance globally. Interesting enough. That was a kind of a, I would say, a languishing partnership at Siebel, and quickly, within about a year and a half, two years, with the likes of folks like nada and Paul Clemens and other folks who are Deloitte, we were able to make it the number one selling GSI the last year or two that Siebel was in existence, and that was, you know, yes, Accenture and IBM were doing more revenue, but Deloitte was the one that the sales teams wanted to engage with. 

I’ve been at Jive, where I’ve managed relationships with Accenture, I’ve managed regional relationships, and probably one that’s critical is I ran the alliances team at Marketo for about three and a half years. So that’s our strategy, Facebook, LinkedIn, saps, and the agencies. I personally signed WPP up with Mark Reed and other folks, Accenture, etc. And I guess that would, I would kind of boil it down. I’d say, in this age, where I’d say I came at the tail end of, kind of, I’d say alliances 1.0 which I would categorize as primarily channels, right? A lot of channels, it was just a different distribution model. Usually, it was a salesperson that you just said, Hey, own these five, five folks, you know, I’d say alliances was more of the kind of wine and cheese, that’s what they kind of used to call it, right? And then when I joined the Siebel, you know, and, you know, there was a, what’s it called, a Harvard Business Review written around, I would say that was the first real kind of alliances, 2.0 if you will, around, go to market plans actually being tied directly to revenue, when not and Driving sourced and, co sell revenue and creating solutions offerings. 

I’d say Siebel was probably the, you know, kind of the cutting edge, if you will, of there. Luckily enough, I was actually, I think whether it’s the end or beginning part of, I’d call it partnerships or ecosystem 3.0 which were kind of Marketo when you think about having our launch point ecosystems, having large ecosystems, and you know, early adoption of marketplaces around you, being able to have regional partners, channels and big Strategic Services, partners in big Strategic Tech with, once again, that larger ecosystem around you. 

And so I’d say that that’s kind of 3.0 and we’re entering this age, I would say, of kind of partnerships 4.0 or ecosystem, you know, 4.0 where, you know, lucky enough, we’re starting to, I would say, be invited to the boardroom, I think as part of go to market partnerships, is definitely more ingrained into what companies are doing. We can talk about that a little bit later. And the last piece, I would say is, if you think about HR, when did they get the seat at the table, when they had a system of record right marketing, when did they get a seat at the table? 

You know, back in the 2000s they had systems of record, marketing automation systems, and things like that, partnerships, I would say the time is ours right now. However, the question is, are we going to have our own system of record, or is it more of we have systems, but we need to make sure that our metrics and KPIs are pushed to the right places, whether that’s CRM whether that’s a dose of bow for you know, like a for LMS system, whether that’s pulling and pushing information from a gain site, as an example, like, how are those APIs being used for your technology partners and your ISDS, and where do you want to lean into those? So it’s, it’s an interesting time, and we’re collaborating more now than ever, which, once again, has led me to fractional and strategic partnerships the cool thing about having fractional is at the team, and I can bring all that goodness of you know, maybe my services, expertise, and strategy, or some of my team who has technology or partner program build or partner marketing, and we can bring that all to bear for many of our clients. So we’d love to actually hear your thoughts on fractional at some point in time, kind of the rise of fractional. Know right now in the market?

Yeah, no, definitely, I will definitely share my thoughts and views on that. But just going back to your career story, Emir, it’s very interesting, and I love the fact that you actually called out what sales is truly about. Two things, right? Sales are about making others feel good as a human, that’s super important, but at the same time, the second and more important is delivering on what needs to be delivered, or what you said you’ll deliver for the client. Yes, it’s those two things, 

But in order to do that, you have to use two of these, not one of them. 

Yeah, totally. But that’s the thing. I mean, I’ve seen really top-tier sellers. They excel at both talking, but more so at listening, yeah, for sure, right? And that’s key to really understanding the person, the human, not just a fire at a company, yes, yeah. And then eventually you transition into more alliances and partnerships. That’s a good transition. It’s kind of..

I kind of just fell into it. And all in all reality, I was a direct seller at Lucent, and I was working with the if you remember, the E-business innovators, the science and bias, and all those companies. And once again, like I was, I was selling to them, but I was also working with mentioning his name, again, Paul Clemens and Mark Whalen, who’s CRO box, all that kind of stuff. I was working with them, with Chris, Chris Lockhead, the CMO of science, who’s, you know, one of the, you know, one of the most amazing CMOS out there, and Lucent at the time, was like, Yeah, we need somebody to manage some of these partners, these companies. And they’re like, well, Emir’s been selling to him. Maybe he should be an alliance person. And I was like, What is this alliance stuff? Yeah, you know. And I was interested enough. I was actually told by my manager at the time that I shouldn’t do it and that I would fail. And the VP of the West region, James say, who he’s the one that brought me in was like, I got your back. Go, if that’s what you want to do, go, you’ll be successful. And have been doing it since 1999.

Very cool. It’s all the accidental path or accidental discovery of where you’ll truly shine. And you also called out something else, which is the backing of someone at the leadership level. Yeah, that’s important as well.

Yeah, that’s important, not in your career, but also as part of go to market and partnering and things like that, you know, support and sponsorship and all the rest of that. 

So, yeah, no, very cool. So on a lighter note, like, what is your family? I mean, you’re you even you mentioned you have two daughters, and you’re married, and so what do they think? And how would they describe what AMR does for a living? 

Yeah, thank you for that. Well, it’s funny. I think my wife, she’s a CRO and has worked with her teams implementing SAP and workday, and she’s worked with Deloitte and Accenture and PwCs and things like that of the world. And she gets it funny enough, so she probably gets it better than most people, which is great. My kids, however, it’s pretty funny. I would know they kind of get what I do. But when they were younger, they would say stuff like, you know, dad, dad gets a lot of people, lot of different people from different companies together, usually tied to those marketing companies that this is obviously, when I was at Marketo, those marketing companies that you know when like, you receive a note, or you look at something On the web, and then you go to Facebook, you go somewhere else, and all of a sudden, you know, you see that same ad. They go, he does. He basically works with companies that either built that or the technology for that, but not in a creepy way. So now they get what they are doing, and it kind of makes me laugh, because now, you know, I have both of them in college. One of them had a happy birthday. Chloe, she’s turning 20 today. 

She specifically, right now, is starting to apply for internships and summer internships, and she’s applying to BCG, KPMG, Deloitte, and some different management consulting firms and things like that. And she’s saying, Ah, I’m now getting what you do. So it’s pretty cute. 

So yeah, and looks like your daughter is going. Based sounds like that. I mean, especially, essentially it’s she wants to get into, like the consulting world, at least, to try it out, and coming back to partnerships, working with GSIs, especially these global system integrators like Accenture Deloitte of the world, they’re super critical, yes,

yeah, 

yeah. So, it will be exciting to see kind of where they land, and yeah. And so, you know, as parents, you support them, so

Yeah. So coming back to your question, I didn’t, I was not ignoring your question. So coming back to your question about fractionals, and my thoughts on fractionals, I mean, honestly, my personal take, I’m not a big fan of fractionals for myself. But having said that, I’m working with a good friend of mine who was a CMO at real and scale-up companies, and now he’s exporting the fractional route. So just seeing the value that fractional leaders can bring to especially the early stage companies and startups where they’re at a point where the leadership, or even the board, thinks it’s not the right time to invest fully, for example, into like a marketing leader or a partner leader, but they want to test the waters right? 

Funnily enough, incident, I did have a fractional engagement for myself for a major part of last year, where the Chief Product Officer at a company that’s based in Detroit, and as you can imagine, is based in Detroit, which means they are serving the automotive industry. Wonder, yeah, and she wanted to test the waters with a product marketing leader, I mean, wanted to test the waters whether the organization is ready for a product marketing function. And obviously she’d want to invest in a full-time employee, right? And so, going back to the question, I think there’s definitely value, for fractional uh services and and, but personally, where I am for myself, I want to start building productized services. Oh, I’m making that transition this year in 20.

We’re going to dive into that. We’re going to dive into that. Yeah, but it’s interesting, because with the rise of the rise of fraction. I think that they’re probably one early stage to your point. You know, whether it’s HR, finance, partnerships, staff, product marketing, etc, definitely a value in the earlier seed series, interesting enough, I would say there’s also, having been inside 100, $200 million companies. There are also opportunities because I can tell you, there’ve been times when I’ve said, Hey, here’s what our strategy should be. And then our company brought in an external strategy consultant or consulting firm. And guess what? They gave him the same plan that we did, just probably, you know, some other details, but underneath. But it’s interesting because I think that you know, the Rise of fractions, whether fractional, whether it’s any, any specific area, is critical, because it helps you get up and running. And many of the folks have expertise in this space or can help you, even if you’re a 45-50000  million dollar company, can help you, kind of look at efficiencies, look at other opportunities and things like that. 

So, yeah, totally right. When I was an employee, I used to wonder why the C-level staff, where the executives spend, like, hundreds of 1000s or even millions of dollars on bringing in consulting companies like the Mckinseys, the BCGs, and Bains ,and so on. And then now I’m on the other side, and I see the value, and there’s a reason why, right, yeah. Anyway, that’s a whole different topic 

That is, that is session number two, yes, 

Exactly. All right. So coming back to your company, I’m looking at the name. So it says big friends, company partners, and you specialize in alliances and partnerships. Is that right? Correct?

Correct. Okay, we, yeah, yeah. 

Who do you serve like, and why are ICPs? 

Yeah, yeah. So I would say our ICP would be, it’s probably a couple, a few lenses you can look at first is size and company, right? So typically, we work with those companies that are, you know, doing, you know, two, three to 10 million in revenue, and that’s 10, 15 million, and that’s kind of one stage, right? That’s typically kind of your look, looking to make your first bite at the partnership Apple hires, kind of higher. Moda, your top sales rep, or something like that, to be, your head of alliances or something. And then, you know, they go out and kind of try to learn it, if you will. And so we come in as kind of that first alliance, quote, unquote higher, because we can bring in different, you know, the team. So you’re getting kind of a team. And so we can think about like I might have my point of view, right, my major and minor, Andy might have his. And so we can come up with the right solution for our clients. The other piece, so the next one would be those companies kind of in that 20 to 50 million that are looking they’re starting to scale, if you will. And you know, how do you, how do you engage with a sales force, if you if you’re working within their app exchange, how do you get engaged with AWS?

How have you had a couple of service companies now? How do you start to create proper enablement and and go after larger services companies, or look at global deployments, and then the last would be those companies, probably 100 to 500 million, that are looking at kind of a full refresh of their of their partner ecosystem, kind of strategy and plan and things like that. So that’s the company. Then there’s a lens on the actual roles within who we engage. Typically, we’ll engage with the CEO. Most of the time our sponsor is the CRO once again because they’re looking at, you know, how do you create pipeline generation, acceleration of revenue growth, and things like that. But once again, we always want to have access to the full executive team. 

So CEO, CFO, CMO, Chief Product Officer, and services, we think of ourselves a little bit differently than kind of your traditional consulting firms, because many will kind of say, Hey, here’s our framework, here’s our PowerPoint. Thank you. Right? We think of ourselves more inside out, and so when we work with our clients, we have their email, right? So I would have an email as part of that company or access to Salesforce, so then we can actually be ingrained in that company to help them drive, once again, the outcomes that we all agreed to. So the other piece is, so when you think about, kind of the, I’d say the four stages, we kind of will do we’ll do, like a maturity or growth assessment, we’ll build their strategy. You know, if you’re looking at, like tech partners, what’s your stack, and what are the categories, and who are those companies within the category that you should be leaning into, and then prioritize which ones might be more of the Hey, you’re going to go to market with these, but these other ones, they should build integrations. They should still be part of your ecosystem. And maybe it’s a little bit of one of those kinds of tactical things we will do the execution, the management, and execution. So we’ll build partner programs, things like that. We’ll manage their service partners, and at the end of the day, what we do is we’ll help hire or train our replacement at any of these companies. So, but at the end of the day, it’s about, you know, aligning go-to-market strategy and driving that impact. 

Very cool, yeah, looking back at your extensive career, both running your own company, as well as the different executive leadership roles that you have taken on or took on earlier, and if you go back and look at all those like, clearly, there were going to market success stories and go to market failure stories. So if you can share with our listeners both, like a success story and a failure story, I’ll let you choose which one you want to start with, but yeah, it’ll be good if you can cover both.

I guess I would look at everything as being every, opera, every success, there are things that you could fix. And every failure, you know, there’s things that you can learn from, if you will. So sure, I would say, you know, it’s, you know, from a go-to market success standpoint, one of the ones I’ll talk about is when we were at and actually there was a little bit of a failure in there for us, a tweak, and then we brought it back. But when I was at when I was running partnerships at Marketo, one of the ones that Phil was like, you gotta go. We need a big GSI. I want Accenture Deloitte, and I want a big, big agency or two such as WPP or Publicist, something like that. 

And, you know, had a deep relationship with the sixth century and Deloitte and things like that. Unfortunately, we couldn’t partner with Deloitte due to some audit items, you know, with our VCs, which is standard with some of those companies where they when they audit, you can’t partner with. They officially, but Accenture. We were working up to sign the we were we were developing our partner Alliance agreement. We had enabled resources. We had opportunities and deals in the hopper and it and, you know, we had Rob Davies, Ryan Dubey, Ryan Walzer, a whole bunch of folks with this within Accenture and Accenture Interactive. And the fantastic thing is, mean we were, we were doing, we were building, doing, account mapping, account planning. In our early days, we had built a go-to-market where we were one of the areas that we wanted to lean into from a marketing automation standpoint, that is the alignment between marketing automation and E-commerce. 

So we were looking at Hybris, and we were developing an offering around that. This is where the quote, unquote might be small, a little potential failure that we were able to pull up the game. So we had been selling with Accenture, on a client, on a potential prospect, with our services team, and there was literally we had everything agreed. We were having joint meetings and things like that. It was Friday when we found out that the prospect had decided to go directly to Marketo, PS. PS was high five in like, Hey, we got this. We got this. That following Monday, Accenture was flying out to sign our agreement. They heard about that. I got a call, and they were like, till you guys figure this out, we’re not signing any agreement with you guys. And so I had to get Phil and Jason Holmes and a bunch of other folks together. Interestingly enough, this is where I’d like to think of things as more positive. We were able to kind of come back and say, hey, you know, mea culpa. We put some guardrails and some guide guard rails and guidelines in place, and we were able to sign the agreement. A few months later, they ended up sponsoring the Marketo summit in a pretty big way as a platinum sponsor, yeah. And you know, we went out and you know, we’re closing deals across multiple regions, not only just North America, but we were closing some deals in the UK, Germany, and other places. So great ended up being a great partnership. And still, you know, work and talk to many of those folks to this day, when I think about failures.

I actually had a question on the market and Accenture story that you shared, and great story, by the way, for me, I was aware of those when I said those like, like alliances and partnerships. Especially it takes me back to my days at SugarCRM, where we had our head of partnership our CMO and CRO Clint Oram and Juan, and whenever we were in discussions about launching a new product or planning for our next annual conference, it was all about partnerships, right, and ensuring that the partners get their deal, both in terms of pipeline revenue as well as spotlight. And you mentioned the market and this client trying and having a professional services agreement directly with the market or bypassing the future prospect of GSI so curious like, How can I mean, obviously, you had to play the bring us all in together and mend the relationships, if you will. But, what advice would you give, especially for those who are I mean, it’s obviously because there are people within the company who want to get the deal for themselves right, versus going through a partner because it’s a miss on their side. 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s, that’s as it’s, it’s the constant struggle of awareness and all that kind of stuff. Because, as we know, compensation and metrics drive behavior, right? And so I would say the first piece is you have to make sure that your executive staff, starting with the CEO, is aligned with, here’s how we’re going to engage with our partners, right? Because the reality is, they have a choice, right? Yeah, there were multiple marketing automation systems that they could have used, right, to pick their clients. Um. Um, they picked us because of the not only solution, very robust solution, but also the strong relationships and things that we had with them and we, and we mutually delivered together, which is, you know, which you know, many times the partners, they have a long history with their clients, right? And so I would say it starts at E staff, right? Have to be, make sure that they’re aligned. Have to make sure that, this is why we do a lot of steering committees or governance committees with your executive staff. Whether that’s, you know, monthly, quarterly, it can’t just be, you know, set it and forget it, right? 

You do your readout at the end of the year, or beginning of the year, and then you don’t come back to the east staff until the same time the next year. And so being able to come in and say, Hey, here’s where we’re leaning into here’s our strategy, here’s what we’re going to do from a services standpoint, and the CEO and CRO, head of services, saying, Yep, this is what we’re going to do, and here’s how we potentially will compensate our account managers or AES or our professional services team if they bring in a partner, so it’s not going to impact their compensation. 

That’s always a great thing. But also, there’s a little bit of enablement in education within companies that say you can do this, right? You can go sell and you, if you take it on yourself, guess what? That services partner, typically, as an example, is sitting with the CMO or the CRO or the CEO, building their strategy, and their digital transformation. Yes, you might get your small deal, but that could be taken out in a year or two, and they could replace it with something else. And so that’s why it’s imperative for the awareness internally, for folks to say, hey, here’s why you’re going to partner, and here’s the value to you. It’s going to help you uncover opportunities. It’s going to help cross-sell and upsell. It can help you get into deeper relationships. These partners can be friendly. They’re not here to take deals away from you, 

Right.

In fact, if they are enabled, they’re incentivized, because they want to get their people working on those opportunities, so then they can go find more. 

Yeah, yeah, cool. 

And that’s why they want to create solution offerings and things like that. Because of that, because then they can rinse, repeat, 

Yeah, not totally. And are these typically caught at, like, a deal desk review situation or, like, when are these really flagged directly versus partner?

Yeah, so as early as possible, right? If we work with marketing as an example to start the process of, hey, if we did an event, or whether that’s a webinar, whether that’s sponsoring something, can we capture that as a partner opportunity, not necessarily led yet? Yep, right. So partner opportunities, so then we can keep an eye on it. Then it goes down to once it becomes a lead and we’re working with sales, you know, this is where it comes in. We want sales to reach out to us and say, Hey, we understand that. You know, this services company or this technology company is potentially at this client. Can you get me and get me introduced to them, right? That’s why things like cross beams are great, you know because that helps to start to identify, you know, where other partners are in your accounts, even before you’re even marketing. But you gotta create that awareness. 

You have to teach, talk to, and enable them how to have those conversations with their clients, right, or their prospects. Who are you, who are yours, who are your services companies, who are doing your implementations, who’s building your strategy, and what other technology to use? That’s all information that the salespeople should be putting into their CRM system, Salesforce dynamics, whatever, and that should be that should flow to your partner team. So then we can start to go, Oh, hey, I know that slalom, or whoever is there, let me connect our AE, put together an account plan, execute on that account plan, and the services partner might get the services or the services we get the SaaS revenue, 

Right!

And we’re all happy. And then we go, now, how do we do this again? 

Yeah, yeah, cool. All right, let’s go back to our earlier go-to-market failure story. You are just about getting started on that. 

Yeah, I would say it’s learning right? So we had a client that was built on Salesforce, and interesting enough, and this is where I talk about, you know, challenges. But how do you, how do you, you could turn those into successes too, but, and they were interesting. Enough about that, they were like, Hey, we’re going to lean into Salesforce, but we’re probably going to switch to AWS at some point in time because we think we’ll get more out of it. And they brought, you know, brought big friends in, and we went, Whoa, hold on you. You have a gold mine, not that, you know, get your AWS chief product officer. 

You gotta do what you got to do. But we’re like, you have all these customers that have implemented or engaged with you from a Salesforce perspective, and the previous year, I think they’d had only about maybe 10 conversations with Salesforce. We came in and went, hold on. Let us pull together a plan. Let us engage with our partner, the account manager. We’re able to keep them at the summit level or get them to the summit level. That year, we ended up having over 75 conversations with their field, with our field, to go out and drive the pipeline together. And once again, many times it’s, it’s its pipeline. Sometimes it’s just, it’s the sharing of information, right? 

We had one Salesforce AE who said, Listen, I’ve sold everything I can at my customer, I will get paid because you’re built on Salesforce. I’ll get paid a little bit for what you do, but it’s, it’s not, it’s not, it’s minimal, right? I can, I can go out and buy, you know, some iPods or something like that, but, but what she said is, she goes. Part of the reason I’m doing this is I need to keep service her competitors, service now, Microsoft at the time, right? I need to keep those out of my clients. So she shared a boatload of information on the customer’s strategy, procurement process, how much budget, and things like that. Our AE was over the moon going, yes, they can’t get me in there. They can’t introduce me. But this is all the information that I needed to go sell my deal. And guess what, six months later, sold an enterprise-wide deal to, this client. 

Very cool. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. 

So I know we are, so that’s a failure to success, right?

Good stuff. So I know we are coming to the end of our conversations. So going back again, going back to your career and all the different stages and all that. I mean, what resources or people or mentors really shaped and played a big role in your career transitions? 

That’s a big one. So let’s see people that are shaped. I’ll start that. There are a few there. So you know, starting with my pops, Donald Lindo, you know, the hardest working man in the business. But you know, he taught me from, from, from day one, right? Shoot for the stars. You’ll read, at the minimum, you’ll reach the moon, right? And so, you know, it’s kind of one of those like, push yourself every day. Believe in yourself. And yeah, some days do we have? Do we question? Yeah, but it’s always, he’s like, just keep on pushing. Does not matter. And so I’ve always kept that in my mindset and the funny thing is, at the end of the day, he’d always say, you know, I love what I do. He goes, don’t get me wrong, and he goes, make sure you love what you do. He goes, but I do this. 

And you know, one his one point, he was doing what he did for two he was in the Navy. He was working a weekend job, and he was doing it for his family because I got to do this for my family. And he goes, when we want to do that San Diego trip, because we, I was in the Bay Area, he’s like, this is why I do this, right? So I can enjoy it with you guys, and we can do what we want to do. And so I always take that to heart, just family, work hard and, once again, and he’s a big integrity person as well. Second person, there are actually three. Paul Clemens mentioned him a couple of times. He’s been integral to my career. He was the first person when I was at Lucent, working with him when he was at Scientist kind of almost, you know, whether he knew it or not. Kind of teach me or enable me on how to do this partner job, the right type of thing, pulling together joint proposals, putting together value props of their services with our technology tied to call centers and things like that. 

And you know, he’s been a proponent of mine for years. And back when I was at Siebel, he and a guy named were my two sponsors, and we were able to grow that. And you know, he’s at Deloitte. He’s been there for years, ran the Salesforce practice, ran the line. Is, and I think probably the biggest thing is his belief in me kind of gave me the confidence to go, you know, along with James say, Dad, to go, you know, what? I can do this. 

And that was kind of the foundation of my partnership career, to bookend it on the people. One of the other kind of integral folks is a guy named Tony, namelka. He was SVP of strategy BD at Marketo. He’s been at Adobe PeopleSoft Oracle, running kind of their eight APAC regions in Japan, master strategist. I’d heard about him for years and ended up going to work for him at a company called Badgeville. He pulled me over to Marketo to kind of be a player-coach and build up the alliances team. And so they really emphasized the importance of aligning partner strategies and metrics with the broader that’s what we talked about at the very beginning, broader go-to-market goals, understanding those key metrics and how it relates to CAC, LTV, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, his mentorship really kind of helped me develop. 

And to go, you know what? I can talk to all these other executives. I don’t have to be afraid to go in and talk to our CFO as a partner manager or partner director. And I tell partner leads, to this day I go, they’ll talk to finance, they can be your friend, right? So…

Yeah. 

And in terms of your other question, or the other one is, you know, how do I stay up to date? I will say I need to read more, and that’s something that’s on my New Year’s resolution. For example, the in-revenue capital folks have their cheat code book coming out. Definitely going to be checking that out, reading that when, when I get it from Amazon, when it hits my doorstep, type of thing. But in general, the way I stay on top is one having conversations, whether it’s like this, I had one earlier with guy Lou Taylor. We were talking specifically about partner metrics and how they relate to E staff if you will. And we were talking about our perspectives, and given my point of view, he gave me his point of view, and started to align on things. And so love learning from other people, especially when you can go to things like a pavilion, or you can engage with folks like winning by design or Arcadia leadership experience, partnership leaders, all organizations that have a ton of good information, a lot of great collaboration. People want to talk. They want to learn new things. 

So, you know, those are some of the podcasts I talked about, you know, some of the podcasts I listened to. What is it? Follow your differences with Chris Lockheed, with Jason Yerba and his wife, Sam, friends with benefits and, you know, all sorts of other things. I, as I said, the one place I gotta do is, you know, I gotta, I gotta pick up one of these. And more than I, than I have. There’s a ton of great content out there. 

Yeah, no, I, I mean, you, you emphasize something which I want the listeners to take away from this podcast, which is, there’s never a point in time, or there should never be a point in time where you stop learning. The moment you stop learning, your career stalls or goes down, right, and the ways you can learn is through people like the mentors that you mentioned, Elliot, There are even books that you are looking to pick up and increase throughout this year, and podcasts, right? And podcasts, plus even communities like the pavilion that you mentioned, great community, or go to market, for sure, exactly. And there’s, and there was, I will say, you know, there are some great 

There’s a lot of great LinkedIn on LinkedIn and other places. A lot of great content that I do read, you know, type of things and weather and you know, Forster and Gartner and other places have some good stuff. So just, you know, try to try to be aware and stay ahead of the game so that my gray matter doesn’t, you know, atrophy.

All right, so the final question to you is, if you were to turn back the clock, what advice would you give to your younger self? And I mentioned I’m thinking about and what I want to think about is like day one of your go-to-market journey. What advice would you give to yourself, the younger Emir?

Well, first, and I’m just going to give a shout-out because this was a question, I know we talked about, but you know, I’d say, make sure you’re working with your product marketing team. Shout outside, but I truly do believe that they’re the keepers of the positioning, the messaging to go to market for a company, and that’s integral for partner teams to go. How do I make sure my partner segments are aligned with those and when, when I have a message out to those partners of, why partner with Dot? Dot, dot company? Right? I can say, you know, hey, here’s why, you know, name one ship paradigm, here’s why you should be partnering with us, and here’s the value, and here’s the positioning messaging of our company, and why it relates to you, right, typically. 

So I just know that. But you know what I mean, like, it’s like, PMM is definitely something integral, and I also bring them into my meetings as an example, many times when we’re developing solutions with, you know, in the example, when I was given about Accenture earlier, actually when I was doing some stuff with Deloitte when I was at Siebel always had my PMM there when we were going, Oh, hey, we have Siebel component assembly. We have this new solution. What? What is the solution? We ran a workshop with Deloitte right then built our PMM team, the offering, and we went out to market together, and that was with my product marketer sitting, you know, sitting right by me, co-piloting with me. 

So fantastic. So I appreciate the shout-out.

So but, but, so that’s, that’s number one. But from, from, from day one, I would say there’s, there’s probably a couple of things. One is, especially younger in your career, you try to do too much. And I would just say, focus and do fewer things. Well, instead of trying to do a lot of things, especially when in a place where you’re in an area where I was completely new right to partnerships, and I’m like, Yeah, I can do all this, yeah, really just focus, because then you’re able to drive kind of that measurable impact, and then, and then you move to the next metric, or KPI, and deliver there. 

Second, I would say, is, you know, second confidence, don’t I would say, maybe earlier in my career, I might have been a little bit cocky, is what it is. Sometimes at an early age, age you are confident, not only in the kind of yourself and everything that you do, but also many times when, especially when you’re younger in your career, you have some you have great ideas, especially when I came out, like, we have great ideas, but it was always like, the E staff and leaders that that, you know, kind of, yeah, executed on those or kind of said, Hey, here’s what we should do. And you just kind of went, Okay, the amount of times that I had an idea in my head, and then my VP or somebody above went, Oh, hey, here’s what I think we should do. And I’m like, I’ve been thinking about that for months, right? So, you know, just, you know, don’t be afraid. You know, everybody, we’re all human beings. Open your mouth. Don’t get fed, type of thing. 

So, yeah, yes, able to see now get put your ideas out there and the end with this one, which ties back to fractional, which is in this kind of ties to that, which is the amount of times I kid you not, I remember driving on 280 in the Bay Area having a conversation with Christine Myers and Adam Marlin when I worked with him at Lucent, and literally that we were going, know what? 

Maybe we should jokingly, we’re like, maybe we should form alliances, R Us, right? A fractional life. This is back in Yeah, 2000, 2002 right? Maybe I had another conversation with my buddy, my James. We talked about BD and partnerships and building and, you know what? 20, 2019 when I found big friends, you know, it’s like, Should I’ve done it sooner? Yeah, type of thing. But you live and learn from the experiences that you have out there. But I wouldn’t give up my experiences of that habit, Siebel, Marketo jive, etc, for anything so

sure. 

Great, great piece of advice there.

Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Gururaj Pandurangi shares groundbreaking insights on evolving GTM strategies, focusing on problem-centric selling, scalable outreach, and building trust to drive business growth.

They explore how trust-building conversations and validating problem statements with potential buyers can lead to co-creating impactful solutions.

Listeners will gain practical knowledge on building trust by addressing key problems, validating challenges with ideal customer profiles, leveraging automation to overcome cold outreach limitations, and adapting to modern sales and marketing dynamics.

Listen to the podcast here:

Bootstrapping to Scaling Revenue to Exit:  GTM Conversation with Gururaj Pandurangi, 3x Founder

Signature question: Which do the listeners love, which is how do you view and define go-to-market? 

That’s an interesting question. So typically if you had asked me this question about three, or four years back, I would have had a very different answer. 

And my answer has been evolving pretty much on a year-on-a-year basis. This is my current answer. And maybe we can look at how I thought earlier as well. 

My current answer is that GTM is necessarily a set of practices that brings your product or service to the market, engages with the customers, and when pretty much your customer’s trust. I’m not talking about practices like, hey, this needs to be done by either the sales or the marketing teams, or it’s done by the product management team, or you need to have a separate org for sales and marketing. 

I’m talking about a set of practices that a company will employ to get its products distributed across the market. 

I love the way you phrased it and how you started, which is evolving.

I think that that’s the key. And I wish a lot more people realize that go-to-market is never ever stationary. It’s always evolving. 

I mean, the first thing is our own understanding as a leader or as a practitioner, the go-to-market thought process will evolve, which you alluded to. And second is go-to-market, the motion itself will evolve for every company, every stage, every year. 

Yeah. 

And I think, you know, maybe to not so much harp on that, a couple of years back, I should think, and I came from an engineering product management kind of a background. And I should think that, hey, we build a product, we hire, you know, some sales guys, some marketing guys, you know, they’ll talk about it, they’ll go to roadshows, and it’s their problem. They’ll do the selling, they’ll do the positioning, they’ll do the marketing. Essentially, there’s a separate team, a separate practice, and a separate set of incentives for them—let them deal with that.

My evolution has been that, hey, that doesn’t work, at least in the last maybe three, four, or five years. The entire company has to figure out how to make this happen with product-led motions coming into play over the last four to five years, which has evolved significantly.

Product has become more and more central, rather than something you build and then throw over the fence to the sales and marketing team to sell. My evolution has been that, hey, this is a company strategy, not necessarily an org within the company. 

Correct. That’s super important, right? It’s not a marketing or sales version of go-to-market; it’s a company product or service go-to-market. It’s about how each of these functions works hand-in-hand across the board—from product conception or product team to marketing, to sales, and if it’s SaaS-oriented or even service-oriented, like post-sales and support, and so on.

Very cool. I’m sure we’ll dive into a lot more detail about all these nuances. So let’s take a step back. Big picture, why don’t you walk us through your career trajectory, history, how you started your professional career, and what led you to what you’re doing today?

Yeah, that’s a great question.

I don’t have a simple answer to this, but let me walk you through my career journey. Half of my professional life after graduating in engineering and completing my master’s, I spent working as an employee, either in engineering or product management roles at larger companies, building large-scale SaaS services—either building version-one products for Microsoft or Oracle or various other version-one products. For the second half of my career, I’ve been building startups.

I’ve founded or co-founded two companies, built and scaled them, they got acquired, and now I’m building a third startup called ThriveStack. That’s why my answer to your previous question has evolved. Having been an employee for half my career and a founder and GTM leader in the second half, I had to relearn many things. At Microsoft, for example, you’re building a product, and when you talk to customers, they already know about some of the things you’re building because of the toolchain and marketing chain that’s been established. It’s very receptive. In contrast, at a startup, you have to build everything from the ground up.

So that’s my career in, you know, less than a minute. 

Yeah, I love the way you split it up—first, you were an employee in different functions, and then you became a founder, starting companies and having successful exits.

Let’s double-click on a few of those. Interesting, you say that, Gururaj Pandurangi. Similar to your experience and thought process, even when I was at Microsoft a decade or so ago, and I was a product marketing lead for one of the products there, I recall a conversation where my manager said to me, “Hey, Vijay, you know what, you should go and launch, and you’re responsible for the go-to-market for this product.”

I was super excited. I mean, back then, 10 to 12 years ago, being responsible for go-to-market was super exciting, and I thought, okay, this is great.

But lo and behold, during the process and project initiative, I realized that it was more about ensuring the checklist was maintained. It’s a bill of materials with all these terms, right? 

That’s true. 

I think you probably realized this as well.

You know, now when you look back at it, the word “launch” itself is a very loaded term. If you’re in the product marketing world, it might be a checklist of marketing things that you have to do. If you’re in engineering, launch essentially means a set of release activities you do.

If you’re in sales, you have a set of automations or bring in your Rolodex of customers and talk to them. The word “launch” has bearings in different ways; it means different things to different people.

Yeah. And which is why I think, you know, product marketing manager (PMM) roles have become kind of a glue across these organizations.

Yeah, so rightly put.

Yeah, yeah. So I’d like to double-click on your transition.

You were at Microsoft and large companies, and then you grew up the ladder in engineering and product management roles. At what point in time, or what was the inflection or motivation for you to go down the whole founder and startup world? What led you down that path?

There were many different reasons. First of all, I’ll give you maybe a snippet of time.

I was working on Bing, and Bing had just launched, and we were integrating an ads platform. I was growing the API and the index layer underneath. So I was building essentially the platform strategy towards it.

Yeah. We were getting attacked by various bots. We also took over Yahoo search and Facebook search.

Right.

So we were essentially becoming a syndication partner to all of these search engines that were out there. I was spending about 70–75 hours a week on it. My wife and I had just had a baby.

I talked to my managers and my wife, and I decided, hey, you know what, instead of me spending about 70–75 hours a week working for somebody else, why don’t I try my hand at building something of my own? I had no clue how to build my own thing. So a buddy of mine at AWS and another at Hortonworks sat down, and we started brainstorming.

He said, you know what, all of us have a cloud background—why don’t we build something in the cloud? We spent about a month and a half looking into it.

As we talked to more people, we realized they wanted backup solutions. They had some things in the data center and wanted to use the cloud as a backup. We pretty much bootstrapped a backup and recovery product.

If you had a data center, you’d back it up into AWS or Azure and take it from there. Three or four months later, we started doing meetups here in Seattle. The cloud was being built here in Seattle.

So many people from around the world came to Seattle to meet and have conversations. At one of these large meetups, we presented the idea of a backup—we didn’t even have a product. We said, hey, wouldn’t it be nice if we could click a button, get the backup here, and route the traffic over to the cloud at the fastest pace?

We showed them some mocks at our meetup, where about 150 folks were there. After the 45-minute conversation, we were stormed with questions.

We had so many conversations that same day, we decided to build a company around it. We didn’t have a product—we had mocks. We weren’t even thinking of building that mock; it was just more of a “what if this was there?”

Yeah, that’s an amazing story.

The reason is that a lot of founders have passion and go down the path of starting a company, but more often than not, they end up building a product and then figuring out ways to sell it.

Yeah. 

Since you flipped it and started with, hey, this is the concept—what if you were to build a product? Is there a demand for this?

Right. So what led your team of three co-founders to go down that path? It’s not natural.

To go build a product?

No, to go down the path of finding and validating the demand for an idea.

Well, it was incidental. Two of us were engineers, and one of us was a product manager.

We were just thinking out loud. We wrote some things on a whiteboard, called up a few other folks in our co-working space, and asked, “Hey, what do you think of something like this?”

Every single time we had a conversation like this, a bunch of folks would gather around and ask, “Can you do this? Can you do that?” If we had done this in isolation—sitting in an office and racking our heads—we would have gone nowhere.

The impetus was being in a crowd of people who wanted something like this, and we were there incidentally. I would have done it completely differently if I had money.

I would have actually rented an office and then brainstormed there. But I think it was actually a good practice to be in a group of people, potential prospects, and potential customers and brainstorm with them. 

Yeah, yeah.

And it sounds like you did the initial fundraising after I mean, you guys were bootstrapping until then. For the first startup, we did not raise funds. Actually, we had no idea how to raise capital.

We had no idea how to sell. So all of us were engineers or product managers, we essentially were builders. 

Avian Corporation.

No, it was called Avid. And a bunch of MSPs, including Accenture, Avanade, and all of those guys were also participating with us. And they essentially said that, hey, we have a customer who has a massive data center, could we use your product, you know, and, you know, paint it up with our service.

So Accenture actually made a proposal, they actually sent us a written proposal on that. And they said, if we can do that, you know, we can try about 600-700 virtual machines that exist in our data center. Push up, you know, right now, we’re doing this manually.

And if we can use your product to do this in like two days’ time, that will be a significant savings for us. And we could use that savings to fund some of your products. So that was their proposal coming in from their side.

We actually did not prospect it from them. And we found it very interesting. You know, it’s like, hey, I had never worked with partners.

You know, I was thinking that if, you know, is partner-led strategy, even, you know, even existing, I had no idea. 

Yeah. 

But then I realized that this is possible.

So and we said, yes, we negotiated on, you know, who’s going to own it, who’s going to take the money, you know, essentially, all the people who are associated with that. We won that. And we got Infosys, you know, coming and knocking on our door.

We had Avanade coming and knocking on our door. And we didn’t have a product. We had, you know, we had bits and pieces of it.

And we started getting all these requests. So what we did at that time is, you know, taking a bunch of interns from, from UW, from Berkeley, from Stanford, we’re all here in Seattle. We just grabbed them and said, hey, you know what, let’s put a seven to eight-member team of interns who were very hungry, very, you know, raring to go.

We put them into a room, we start calling the shots. And I was still employed. And I decided that, hey, now’s the time for me to quit.

Nice. Yeah. 

Yeah.

So of the three people, who are founders, two of us quit, and one did not. And one was, you know, moon, you know, doing moonshots with us with, you know, doing this moonlighting actually helped us quite a bit, you know, Amazon or AWS became one of our partners as well. He was working at AWS, and he got connections into AWS S3 and the virtual machine team.

So, you know, nothing wrong in, you know, having moonlighting and people, people say, I think all the Y Combinator folks and accelerators folks and say, hey, go 100% full time is not necessarily needed. If you can leverage the position that people are in, you know, there’s nothing like it. 

Yeah, there are always two lines of thought, right? Maybe even more, but definitely do one thing.

And then you’ll figure out a way it’s almost a parallel or a story where I believe the captain burns down the ship and puts all the sailors on the boat or something, and they need to figure out a way to just figure it out, I mean, go out and explore. There’s no turning back. The other is you’re still in your full-time role, but then you’re vetting out the demand, validating the idea, and then seeing that there are people willing to buy.

And once you see solid traction, then you move. Yeah, yeah. I would rather put this into a slightly principled framework.

I would say that if you’re going to say, I want to build a company, you have no idea, no demand, and saying, hey, I have a bunch of money, I can raise capital, you know, let me go ahead and start building a company. And then I’ll figure out what the problem is. Then I’ll figure out what the solution is.

You know, that’s not the right motivation to start a company. You know, your motivation should be that there is a need in the market. Nobody else is building it.

Why don’t I go build a company? I’ve seen more and more companies who have been successful with the thought that nobody else is doing it, right? Or somebody else is doing it, but not doing it the right way. Let me actually set the right path. I think that’s probably the founder-led mode, you know, mostly that I’ll see.

But if the motivations are, I want to go on a lot of money, I can go build a startup, sell it, you know, not the right way to go at it. For sure. And you did mention about Accenture helping you guys bootstrap.

So did Accenture and other partners come out of the meetup that you mentioned? Or how did they find you guys? Yeah. So we had one of the Accenture solution architects in the meetup. These were some nerdy guys, you know, saying, hey, I’m doing this.

I’m running some commands like this and taking this, you know, and we went on a discovery mode with them, you know, even at that time, like, could you tell us how do you currently do it? Right. What is it that you can improve from your side? We just had a thought that, hey, it should be like a click of a button and you should, you know, that’s like a high-level vision, but we had no idea on how people were actually doing it. There were quite a few folks in the industry who were doing it.

And once we put it out there, you know, we got lots and lots of requests from Europe, from Australia, from places where, you know, we had not even thought about. And we wrote the GitHub blog, you know, GitHub wasn’t existing as such at that time, but we started putting it out there on Reddit on, you know, on various places. And then we started receiving, you know, that, hey, this is how we do it.

Can you show us how you do it? So it was not necessarily a sale. It was more of, I wanted to learn. Can you help me learn? 

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Love that mindset. And then what is the transition like to Avian? 

Like, oh, yeah. So we built this, we built this and it got acquired by a group of investors, mostly because we were earning a lot of money. And, you know, every single deal that we used to get was a one-off deal, right? Accenture would say, hey, there are 700 things that we want to run, you know, in two days’ time, if your product can do this, we’ll pay you so much.

And we would happily take it. But the next month, you know, it would not be a recurring revenue. So we’re building the product and we’re burning, you know, quite a bit of our own internal cash.

When I say cash, we were paying the interns a little bit, and the founders were not getting paid as much. So we wanted to have a livelihood. And out of the blue, someone came in and said, hey, we are actually building a product company, which we’re backup and recovery is just one of the elements to it.

Would you be willing to either partner or co-sell or get acquired, right? And we started, you know, opening our thoughts to it. And they essentially, you know, even before they talked, they actually sent us a letter of intent to go acquire. After that, it was acquired, and we started to get a little bit of revenue on a recurring basis.

The three of us would sit down alongside the interns. They actually did not take the team. They took our product and they built a team around it.

Got it. 

So we started with the IP around it. They acquired the IP, the product, all the code, you know, all of that.

So we were sitting around twiddling, hey, we are getting some money now. What do we do? And then, and we were working on small projects, you know, Accenture was there, Avanade was there, Microsoft was starting to get involved, AWS was starting to get involved. And then the AWS team actually proposed to us that, hey, you’re local here in Seattle.

We have about seven different large clients who are migrating there, you know, all their workloads in the data center to the cloud. We don’t promise you much, but could you become our solution architects? Be the front-facing, because you guys know much better than some of our solution architects. Could you actually go help with that? So they paid us handsomely.

And we went to T-Mobile. T-Mobile, you know, had about seven data centers at that time. And they asked us, how we migrate or rebuild into AWS. And AWS paid us, you know, for that work.

And then, then later T-Mobile said, hey, you know what? No, we will pay you. We want to accelerate. This is going too slowly.

So they started paying us. 

Okay. 

When I say paying us, we were on a 1099 contract.

We had no company. And then we decided, hey, you know what, let’s start a company.

So we registered for Avian at that time. And our first contact came in from AWS. It took us almost two and a half months to get registered as a partner of AWS.

And then T-Mobile, Safeway, Nordstrom, and a whole bunch of other things started happening. 

And did Avian focus mostly on solution services? 

On services. 

We were at that moment, we knew that cloud is the, you know, the next big thing.

Right. 

But we had no idea how a smallish company or a set of small folks could build a solution that can be relevant. So we started getting our hands and noses dirty, you know, by working, doing hands-on exercises, migrating it, running DevOps scripts, and all of that.

And almost a year and a half later, T-Mobile asked us that, hey, now you’ve built about seven applications in the cloud, we want to go production. And for that, we are inviting PwC and KPMG, two different products. We would want them to go to the security and compliance.

And we want to make sure that we will go live with these products being compliant. And they asked us, can you automate security? On a daily basis, run these scripts. And this is what the CIO told me.

Can you on a daily basis, run a script, which looks at all the issues, you know, on a security basis, work with these teams, I will give you some teams, you know, and you can hire your own team as well. Go fix it. And on an everyday basis, you report back to me that all of these are getting ready to be productionalized.

And they offered us $3 million. And I said, well, we actually went in and looked at if $3 million was too little or too much because there’s almost half a data center’s worth of applications were moved over to AWS. And we realized that there was not much margin in that it looked like large money, but we had to go build a team towards it.

We actually went back to T-Mobile at that time with a proposal: what if we build a SaaS product that you license, and we’ll take your $3 million now? But half of that will go to building the SaaS product. And we will give you the licensing fee for the next two years for that.

We need it in the next four months. If you build a SaaS product, it’s going to take more than nine to 12 months. And we’re not ready for it. 

So we went on Nordstrom came along, we had another contact with Nordstrom, they had a very similar request on Azure. Nordstrom was an Azure partner. And then we started seeing this over and over again. 

So we, you know, I decided that I’ll take a small, small team to actually productionalize, build a product, a SaaS product, and use it internally, right to do all of these things so that we can reduce the repeated pains that we would have. Yep. So we built it, we deployed it, we actually in T-Mobile actually gave us the consent to use it internally. 

And we actually use it internally. And then we trained a bunch of teams, you know, without actually selling anything, we had a services contract. And then we said that, hey, this portion of that is the IP of T-Mobile will not use it. 

But this portion of that is our IP. Yeah. And we will, we’ll take it out. 

We went to Microsoft, and Microsoft liked it. And they said, can you do this within Azure, Azure, Azure Security Center? 

Yeah. 

So they paid us, you know, about a million and a half to go build, you know, security policies and things like that within Azure. 

And they said, for that, you can build your product on top of the Policy Center, and we will go market it. 

Oh, wow. 

Right. 

And boom, we said, yep. Well, let’s go build, and register a company. So very cool. 

A lot of these things, I mean, one pattern I’m seeing is a lot of these like your startups, the exits are very natural. It’s not like you’re forcing, hey, I need to make a transition or the team needs to make a transition onto something else. It’s a natural evolution, all driven by customer demand. 

I mean, customers are asking for it or partners. 

I think that is my core belief as well, you know, which is why I think I mentioned to you early on if we were to go this in isolation, we’ll actually never build anything of this sort. We will have to sit down with people who are actually using or having pain, right, day in and day out.

Right. 

That has been my path, you know, until now. So I went ahead and built the company, and Microsoft invested in us. 

Deloitte risk advisory teams invested in us. And Microsoft actually got us the first 50 customers through their marketplace. So we were starting to get deployed at Walmart and various other large things. 

And our team was really under the pressure at that time, you know, or go to market was, was easier with partner-led.

Right!

But our product was not ready to scale for such large things. So Gartner told us, either go, you know, raise a lot of capital or get acquired. 

And we said, No, we can’t raise so much capital because or, you know, or what we are doing is about a million, million and a half. And if we were to do something of that sort, we would only raise about four to 5 million, right? That’s not sufficient, you know. So the term she thought that we got was about four to $6 million, you know, raise. 

And then suddenly, you know, we had seven different offers in 2019 from large network companies to acquire us. We said no to all of them. And we kept saying no to it about like five or six times, Zscaler came along and they told us to run it as a subsidiary. 

Think of it as a separate company. 

Yeah. 

Having these milestones, we will invest and we will own all of your IP in two years’ time and will transition after this particular milestone. 

And we said yes, that that made more sense. Other than just acquiring at an early stage that way. 

Very cool. 

And all that exists also happened naturally. I mean, just as you articulated, right, the buildup of the company, the startup services and products, as well as the exit, all of them happened naturally. It was a pull. 

It was a pull. Yeah, there was no, we never went out to raise capital, you know, outside of the fact that we need money. And Microsoft took us to M12, their own internal teams. 

And they say, based on what you currently have, we can actually you know, so even that was more of a pull.

Right! 

Because we essentially told no, we can’t scale to Walmart, you know, Walmart, the actual cost of running Walmart was about one and a half million dollars for us, just the product, hosting costs, to solve Walmart. And Microsoft said, hey, you can charge about four to $5 million to Walmart. And we can fund half of it. 

And, and, you know, and we said, yeah, we can do that. But we had to go build and accelerate the product towards that, right? So we had this push and pull and push and pull. And, you know, tear your hair apart at that time. 

But, you know, that was the case. 

And throughout this process, I mean, partner-led growth, as you articulated before, it’s always been a partner pull-like, you never sound like you never really have to build out a formal sales team, because your partners are doing all the selling on your behalf and co-marketing as well. 

Yeah, as a startup, yes. 

After we got acquired, you know, Zscaler was a 100% sales-led company. 

Sure. Yeah. 

And, and, you know, we got the, you know, we had to finetune ourselves to this kind of emotion, I was not really acquainted to, you know, hey, you know what, we’ll not talk to customers who would not pay us, you know, at least about $30,000. Correct. You know, I was always hungry, hey, even if you’re ready to pay 5k, you know, 3k, 4k, 5k, we will take you in, because I need the money. 

Yep. 

With Zscaler, it was like, well, our sales and marketing costs are so damn high, that there’s an opportunity cost of working with small customers.

Right?!

Or even if they’re large customers, if they’re ready to pay only like three to 5k, we won’t even take it, we will say no to them. 

Right. 

And that’s where I saw that sales-led motion was very expensive, expensive to build. It was also very linear, the more people that you would get, or you will add two quarters or three quarters later when you will see the return of investment, you will not see the return of investment within a quarter. So it has a lag time, right, you know, of getting the investments, you know, and even those would be half or one-third of the spend. 

Right. 

So the cost of acquisition was, you know, was a massive, you know, deal, which is why I got acquainted with this concept of, as Gary Olson from, from Harvard Business School, he keeps talking about growth at all costs. And I had a conversation with them. 

And then he ingrained in me that this is not going to work over a period of time, you know, profitability and growth need to all come together. Yeah. I started seeing, and I’ll probably even ask this to you, and you talked to a lot of GTM leaders out there as well. 

I see there’s a mix, you know, you can’t just do partner-led growth, you can’t just do sales-led growth. 

Right. 

You know, and definitely you can’t do, you know, product-led growth, you know, as its own single silo, or you will have to combine them together.

Have you seen that happen? You talked to a lot of GTM leaders out there as well. Do they mix them up? Y

eah. So from my own experience, as well as having spoken with leaders from big companies like Clary, Asana, and the likes, and even started like Y Combinator founders, it’s always been a combination, right? No one go-to-market motion really works by itself. 

It’s almost like you need to figure out your channel, make it work, and then layer on and add the next channel. And that’s what I’ve seen work well. Even though that is the intent, a lot of go-to-market leaders, again, it’s not in their hands completely. 

They need to spread and make sure that they’re laying the ground for the next, but at the same time, not lose focus on the sales-led. 

That’s what happened to me. I think I have an interesting story for your audience as well.

At Gscaler, we were a hundred percent sales-led. We would leave money on the table. If it is, you know, anything less than 30K ARR, the SEV deals we would, or the sales team would, you know, would say no to them and walk away. 

We started seeing smaller upstarts, started to build more like product-led motions, self-serve motions, and they were ready to take in a hundred dollars a month, $500 a month, you know, to begin. And then six months later, they will go three times the size or five times the size. And we got hit in, you know, in a quarter, pretty much in four months time, we lost about 17, 18 different prospects that we thought we could actually close. 

And they actually went to the smaller upstarts than us. That’s when, you know, leadership at Gscaler asked me, hey, could we actually layer a product-led growth motion on top of sales-led motion? I spent about like four months making that happen. And I failed at it.

I failed miserably at it. I spent, I’m guilty of, you know, of spending so much money without actually understanding how this motion actually works. I spent about a million, $1.2 million in building or rebuilding, refactoring the product for self-serve, helping coach or GTM teams, and, hey, you know, users will come. 

You had to go and talk to the companies, you know, and upsell them. Conceptually, it made more sense, but we had such a horrible pushback from the sales team. Our product was not ready to do something about that. 

So refactoring cost itself was about 750K, you know, for us to begin with. And then our sales team was like, hey, if this is self-serve revenue coming in, and it is like $1,000 or $2,000, why do you want me to be part of it? To build your own team towards the self-serve motions. So it was like getting squished between a rock and a hard place. 

I have actually not seen a successful product-led growth motion layered on top of a successful sales-led growth motion. That has been my, you know, my bigger appeal, which is why I’m building, you know, ThriveStack, you know, to essentially enable and straddle between those two, PLG and SLG, start with really PLG, and then being able to go and expand it with human-led expansion. 

Absolutely. 

I mean, in fact, the story that you shared, thank you for sharing that story. That’s really critical. The reason why I say that is, that it actually reminded me of my own experience when I was hired at a CSP startup to lead product-led growth. 

And the CPO and the CEO at that time, they were like, they were selling with inside sales, selling to small businesses at about $1,000 ACD or so. And then they did a little experiment, and then they were able to channel and drive individual users to product-led growth. And that’s when they’re quote-unquote convinced that we can start adding product-led growth. 

But when I got in there and started looking under the hood and looking into all the details, that’s when I started realizing product-led growth is a good, attractive magnet. I mean, it’s almost like a trend or it’s like the thing that people want to latch on to the next big wave, if you will. But it’s an entirely different mindset and a different mindset that has to be adopted across the leadership team first will also mean making sacrifices on who you’re going to serve and on the sales team.

And I mean, you have to go, you are absolutely right. You have to get away from the mindset that you’re only selling to the buyers. It really starts from there, you know, that your users, you’re serving to the users. 

You are building the product in such a way that the users are benefiting, you know, from the very get-go, rather than selling it, you know, top-down, this becomes a bottom-up motion. It’s a very different mindset. You’re absolutely right.

Yeah. Some of the really successful companies that have done superbly well are Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, and Dropbox, they’re still more individual. But the key thing is, that they go all in and start, they have the DNA of a PLG first. 

And then once they start seeing within an account, there are like 10-15 users, then they layer on the sales-led on top, talking to the top layer saying, Hey, by the way, did you know that like 5-10 of your team members are doing it? Let’s now talk at the account level versus the user level. 

Yeah. I think, let me make a prediction, you know, based on what you just said.

In 5-10 years time, all the large sales-led companies, you know, they’re anyways getting stagnant at this moment, the growth, you know, growth is tapering down, you know, they are growing, you know, high, you know, high single digit, you know, too low, you know, double-digit growth for most of them. I would imagine that if you take a very similar set of products, a very similar set of things, make a copy of that, from a concept standpoint, but build it like a self-serve motion, and compete with them, you’ll actually win. Yeah. 

And I’m seeing that happen in the cloud security space. Right. You know, they’re getting outcompeted, you know, with smaller upstarts. 

I’ve seen that happen in the financial or fintech space. I’m seeing that happen in healthcare tech, in edu tech, across the board, you take the bigger piece, and you compete with them with a product-led growth motion. Because the bigger company will not be able to change their DNA, the smaller company can actually accelerate with product-led and then add sales, you know, to grow much faster. 

So it’s very likely that over a period of time, we will have a world where end users become the king rather than selling a top-down, end users will now have a choice to go pick the problem that they have, pick the solution out there, get started, and then over a period of time, latch on to do more things. 

Yeah. 

And I see that that future is coming much faster than what we could imagine. 

Yeah, sure. And product-led growth, for all its promises, as well as the pitfalls that it has, definitely is still a very attractive go-to-market motion. And I was in talks with this company. 

I don’t know. Yeah, they were primarily product-led growth. And we use them. 

Oh, there you go. So. So when I was talking to a couple of the go-to-market leadership folks over there, they were explaining their primarily product-led growth. 

The majority of them are small to medium businesses across different functions. And they’re figuring they’re still figuring out the right ways to layer on the same. Yeah, yeah. 

I think that’s the market. Layering on sales-led motions or human-led expansion, I generally start to call it that way. You already have a pipeline, you have a pipeline of customers who are using your product, and they’re already paying you. 

Yeah. 

This is no different than the sales team going and saying, hey, you know what, this is a land deal for 30k, 40k. Next year, we’ll talk to you for 100k. 

Right. And you can expand towards that. 

Yeah. 

It’s just that in this case, in the case of product-led, the deal size might be a lot smaller. So you’ll have to fine-tune your upsell strategy. So hey, these are the things that you’re using. 

These are the things that you’re not using. You know, and this is an enterprise deal, an organization-wide deal. And we’ll give this to you. 

So the upsell motion becomes a lot easier with product-led than with sales-led, which is why I see a path, you know, in the future. Why is ClickUp being successful? Why is Canva being successful? Why is Figma being successful? Not just in entering the user market, and the users are essentially the prosumer buyers, but they’re also able to go and attract larger enterprises and do larger deals. 

Right. 

So Calendly is doing larger deals with large sales organizations. Figma is doing large deals with larger companies. It’s not just one license, two licenses. 

They’re selling, you know, 150, 300 licenses at once, add AI on top of it, and they’re able to upmarket it. So I think that’s a natural way to do it. The converse, on the other hand, is actually very difficult. 

If you’re a sales-led motion, it’s extremely difficult. In fact, it’s almost impossible to layer on PLG. I don’t see companies being able to do that.

And here is why. I mean, I’m talking about it from a firsthand experience that I shared earlier with the Series B startup. And here is why, right? I mean, first of all, if you are inside sales or sales led overall, the way the product is designed, the way the buyers are, quote, unquote, educated to use your product, or even be aware of your product is one way. 

It’s a path A, let’s say A, versus if you were to design a product-led growth from the ground up, the way you’re going to think about how the user will be, first of all, aware of your product, how will they convert from a free trial signup to activation to purchase? It has to be all self-serve, and self-driven for the most part. So you’ll be designing your content, you’ll be designing your features, you’ll be designing your dashboard. So UI and UX will be completely different. 

And there’ll also be a viral effect, a network effect that has been built in ideally. That’s an entirely different thought process in the DNA compared to a sales-led. one 

And not just that, I’ve experienced this firsthand, which is why I’m building the infrastructure for ThriveStack around enabling product-led motion from the very start. 

So tenant creation, in the sales-led world, tenants are being created by the sales guys sending a note to the operations team, hey, go ahead and create this tenant. For a B2B SaaS company, you’d have to automate the tenant creation. I’ve seen, and I’ve talked to many of the companies, the number of signups, fairly outshines the number of conversions, almost to 9x. 

90% of the signups do not convert. Forget to convert, 90% of the signups do not even activate.

Yeah, exactly.

So you’ll have to go build a cleanup process that, hey, you know what, there are so many signups that are coming in and the signups will happen. Most of them will be abandoned. They will go start something if they don’t find any value. 

Nobody will go ahead and say, hey, please cancel my account. They just abandon and then go away. So cleanup on a B2B SaaS is major. 

Abuse is predominant. And I’ve seen, and I talked to one of the prosumer companies, one of the B2B SaaS companies who went product-led, they had 60% or 57% of the signups that were happening were all malicious. Either coming in from fake domains, you know, people are just, you know, they could be competitors. 

They could be somebody else. They could be bots. They want to go look at what you have built, you know, so these signups are coming in. 

These domains are from inboxes, which are temporary.

Right.

They are also duplicates. For example, vj at abc.com is the same as vj plus one at abc.com. So all of these things, I would factor them as the baseline self-serve infrastructure. Also add the product analytics to it. 

Also, add along the signals associated with who’s using the enrichment. So I see that if product-led growth has to become a mainstay, all the growth tools are there in the market, which are just on the GTM side, like even enrichment, lead management, all of that, they all need to shift left. They all need to be inside the product now. 

They should enable the product in order to become a lot more self-servable. So I see, you know if we combine the baseline infrastructure and what you mentioned as the UX associated, the dashboards are different. Onboarding is different. 

There’s a UX part of it, and there’s an infrastructure part of it. I think both of them should go hand in hand, which is why I think it’s extremely difficult to do both of them together, like sales-led motion and product-led motion together. Yeah, absolutely. 

I know we can go on and on on several of these topics, right? But just doing a quick time check, I think we covered a lot of ground here. Just moving on to the closing section of the podcast, like, I think you did answer this in many ways, like what resources or communities or people have shaped and helped in your overall growth? I think meeting and talking to prospects is one of the biggest learnings for me. 

Yeah, I listen to a lot of podcasts. You know, on weekends, I’m a very early riser. So, you know, from 5, 5.30 in the morning, you know, get some of the chores done, and I’m listening, especially on the weekends, I’ll be listening to one and a half to two hours of podcast, and I whiteboard. I’ll just scribble off things and then take off my mind. 

I do attend, you know, and sometimes I speak at various industry events and throw out an idea that, hey, this is possible. And then look at the reaction. I’m looking at, you know, whether people are agreeing to it, disagreeing to it. 

And I do the same and somebody speaking, I actually go and talk to them, say, hey, you’re right or wrong, you know, and express my opinion, regardless of whether that opinion is good or bad. 

Yeah, 

I’ll get something out of it. So I’ve been an active learner for quite some time on that particular front. 

I’ll probably leave it at that. Very cool. And then the final question to you is if you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your go-to-market journeys, what advice would you give to your younger self? That’s a very interesting question. 

So don’t build a product. If you don’t understand the problems, it’s a lot better. In my younger days, I would think about a solution.

And I would try to retrofit what the problem is. But I think that’s wrong. I would go tell my younger self, if you have 10 hours of time, spend about eight to nine hours of time just understanding the problem, not the solution, the solution will come out of the problem very soon. 

I think the second thing I’ll probably tell, you know, myself is to understand the problem, talk to at least 30 4050 odd folks who are actually experiencing that problem. They may not necessarily pay you, right? And don’t go behind them to say that, I have a solution to sell, you know, I think you have a problem, you know, go ahead and buy my solution. It’s probably a bad, a bad approach, you know, get in bed with them, if you can, on the problem space, right? 

And I’ve seen that a lot more successful. And every single time I’ve put my seller mode, or have my team go sell, sell, sell, I’ve seen that the market pushes back. But when I talk about, hey, this is the problem.

And these are the potential solutions. How are you doing it today? What pains do you currently have and that just opens the door. We had a conversation yesterday. 

And then I essentially, asked one of the founders who’s in Germany, how do you currently do it today? And like, hey, I take this, I take this, I do this and this. What if, you know, instead of me presenting a solution, this was readily available? Let’s say, these six things that you mentioned, there is a solution, right? How will your life be? And then suddenly, like, do you think that’s available? I said, Well, let’s assume that it’s available, right? And it opens up doors, it opens up conversations, it opens up a lot of trust. So I would, I would teach myself over and over again, harp on the problem, not on the solution. 

And then focus on building trust in the problem, not the solution. 

Absolutely. I mean, that actually reminds me and brings to my mind, something that I want to share with the listeners as well as I put together a thesis around a new offer. 

And then I approached it with Hey, is this even valid with my buyer ICPs? And lo and behold, I took a similar approach, which is here are the different problem statements. Do any of these resonate with you? They said yes, and then added more to it. And in the next, I said, Okay, imagine this solution exists.

Would it resonate or will it work in your environment? Yeah, they said yes. And if you were to build a business case, how would you build a business case? 

Yeah, 

That naturally leads them to a Hey, by the way, you know what, I’m in need of this right now. Can we talk? 

Yeah, yeah. 

I think, you know, you know, one-on-one conversation is actually very difficult. In a one to many conversations actually a lot easier, which is why industry conferences, events, you know, are, are actually the better way to sell, you know, than essentially sit down in a one-on-one conversation talking about, you know, like a cold call, I get a lot of cold calls, you know, my inbox gets filled, my email, my LinkedIn, you know, gets filled with almost 150 plus cold emails every single day. Yeah, right. 

And when I look into that, all of them are selling the solution, nobody’s really talking about the problem. But I think that that thing is going to become more problematic. Today, I see 150. 

And maybe a year later, also, I’ll probably see about 3000 4000 cold emails or cold calls like that. I don’t know the answer to that. That doesn’t work for me. 

I get spammed a lot. When I think about if I have to go build an AiSDR team to be able to do exactly the same things. You know, I’m very hesitant about that part of it. 

So you’re absolutely right. But it is not scalable. Exactly. 

That, you know, on a, on a one on one basis, my evolution to the next step of GTM is how can I do what you just said? Yeah. But, you know, 1000 a day, right? 10,000 a day? 

Yeah. Yeah. 

And, you know, and if there’s any solution there out there to all the listeners as well, reach out to me, I’ll leave my email ID, you know, down there. 

Yeah, that’s a solid note, in terms of how we wrap up this podcast, which is how we started. Again, going back to the key notion, GTM is constantly evolving. 

Right? 

In our case, it’s the last example, which is how do I evolve this GTM motion to now automate and scale! So I’ll stop on that.