The Exchanges

Q Only one in that category that's pivoted to a very successful and give a very successful outcome to all the stakeholders. So maybe you can tell us about the journey. Where did this entrepreneurial gene come from?

A Okay. Yes. Um, so I, I was born and brought up in, not even in Bhopal actually. There's a small town called Sagar in MD. Uh, I cannot even ascribe a tier to it. It's a tier three or tier four. So I was there till 16. And then came to Bhopal by happenstance. And that's when I got to know about IIT and everything else. So, um, got into IITK. But I think the entrepreneurial bug sort of comes from my mom because my mom, while she was in Sagar, she tried a bunch of things. We used to have a cow at our home. Um, she tried selling milk. She tried doing like a snacks business, a lot of things to sort of, um, supplement the income of the family. And now in hindsight, I can say those were not good markets. And so nothing succeeded. Sagar itself was like a very, Um, poor city in some ways, but seeing her in action kind of inspired me and sort of put that bug in me. So yeah, when I was in IITK, I, I, I was interested in startup from that time itself, when startups was not a thing. I think the only startup people knew of at that time was Flipkart in India. Um, So I was always interested in startups. I was, I kept in pace with, you know, what was happening in the world. Um, and after that, I joined ITC. I spent three years there, and the main reason for joining ITC versus some other options that I had was, um, it's a hands-on job. So it's technical, it's managerial, but also you're doing thi…

AI assessment note: “I think the entrepreneurial bug sort of comes from my mom”

Q Which, which would be the top 10 players in MarTech, if you had to name today?

A Top 10 players? Oh, I think the undisputed king of MarTech is, are always HubSpot and Adobe, right? They are the big ones. Uh, then I would say Salesforce is there. Then right now, I think the big sort of startups that are to watch for, Clay is definitely one, right? Absolutely crushing it. Um, there is, uh, uh, Unify GTM, which is a, you know, BDR outreach platform. There's HockeyStack, which is, again, a customer of Goldcatsby, their customers too. And, uh, it's in, in the attribution space, but they're expanding. So I think those three startups are, are something to watch for, for sure. Um, And then there are some existing SaaS incumbents like Sixth Sense, you know, it's, it's kind of become a must have in that stack. Um, Gong is another one, right, which is, which straddles the boundary of both sales and MarTech. So I think those are the key players.

AI assessment note: “I think the undisputed king of MarTech is, are always HubSpot and Adobe”

Q And then, uh, did you raise your next round then?

A Yeah, so the moment this started happening, we could see that trajectory, so we said, okay, it's a good time to raise. We went to raise another round, and the short story there also is that we were actually thinking, but while we were thinking, we were approached by two very blue chip funds, and I can't name them because of confidentiality, but they sort of pushed us into fund raise, and this is something that I tell founders that you should never get pushed into fund raise, because if you're not prepared and those things don't convert, then you are kind of caught unawares, and that's exactly what happened. Those two funds were, we went to the partner meeting, Um, so we were like, okay, we are all set. We are going to get money from this, this fund, and it will look great on TechCrunch and everything. And then suddenly news came out that Hopin had raised a two hundred fifty million round, which in those times was insane.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so the moment this started happening, we could see that trajectory”

Q And what, if you have to summarize, what was the thing that worked really well in your go to market?

A In a GTM? Um, so I think one thing that worked amazingly well in a GTM is, is that we, is something we did actually after the customers were closing. So we had a, an unusually large post sales team. So we had a very healthy ratio of CSMs to customers. We had a support team. We had an implementation team, professional services, and all of that. And we could have always argued to have, to having a smaller team. But what that did was that customers felt supported a lot at every point of time. We also measured NPS, like a religion, really. So we had an incredible word of mouth, honestly. At every point when we did our analysis of where we are getting pipeline from, about 50% or more of that pipeline came from word of mouth. And those were not referrals where a customer is making an introduction, but we used to ask people like, hey, how did you know about Goldcast? And they would say, hey, so and so your customer told me about you when I was on, you know, on the treadmill with them or something. So that I think we got really well and something I take with me, like keeping your customers happy is the best go-to-market strategy.

AI assessment note: “one thing that worked amazingly well in a GTM is... an unusually large post sales team.”

Q Um, and what was the GTM to get Mailchimp and Thoughtspot?

A So MailChimp was, uh, honestly, like a complete outbound, like I showed. It's a complete outbound, but because we had already had a bunch of high-flying startups, even though smaller, it gave us a little bit more warmth, uh, to reach out to them. Once you have one or two logos in that space, then you can get more logos. Um, and I think our first big enterprise customer was honestly GitHub, which came in, fell into a lap by chance early on. Um, but then we use that GitHub thing to get GitLab and, and a bunch of other customers. So every segment requires its own social proof creation, but the main thing to concentrate on was just like set of two or three customers. You can just somehow win in that segment, get, make them super happy, use them to get more customers.

AI assessment note: “So MailChimp was, uh, honestly, like a complete outbound”

Q But how many people were doing it? A large prosumer business.

A Yes. So at that time, there were not many people because it was still very early, right? Chat. This was like within the first year of ChatGPT launch. So, um, there were a bunch of prosumer people who were doing it. The products were kind of half baked at the time. No one was there in enterprise or in bigger companies. And, uh, and so we committed to that product and building that product as a standalone PLG Seltzer product, which we had never done in life. And the reason was that, that we wanted to lead with that product, show it, have people use it, and then arrive at our moment that this is the only company which is doing the creation of the product video as well. Like, the webinar and virtual events, they, they account for about 60, 70% of the content that's created in BtoB. Um, so it has to, it has to, like, flow from there into this product, and we were already doing it. Otherwise, you have to download a five gigabyte video, or it's painful. So, So we committed to that, and the natural conclusion after that was that we had to cut the burn, because this not only was a product change, but also a repositioning of the company, because we could no longer say we are just a webinar platform or a digital events platform. So we did that soul searching of positioning, rebranding, et cetera, and we had to a layoff to increase our runway.

AI assessment note: “So at that time, there were not many people because it was still very early”