Offering proof-of-concept trials in production grabbed enterprise buyers' attention.
Bhaskar S. · He launched a free product for enterprise customers—then grew to $12M ARR in 2 years. | Bhaskar S... · PMF Show · Mar 30, 2026 · at 23:43
Bhaskar Sunkara, co-founder of AppDynamics, explains how the startup convinced enterprise IT operations leaders to adopt their software over legacy monitoring tools.
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“And the third thing we said, which was, I think, surprising to a lot of people is that why don't we do a POC in production, right? That was the biggest thing that I would say got people to take notice because they're like, they're this sure of what they built.”
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“What we said was, let's only do production. Let's not even bother to have a dev version. Let's not even bother to have like a test version, et cetera. Let's only do production, and there's only one cost. So if you want to run it in development, we can give you…”
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