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.