How the best do it

Teardowns of what specific companies actually did, and the judgment calls great operators make.

What founders use for how the best do it, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

  1. The founders describe coining inbound marketing as an old game versus new game framing, then choosing SMB over enterprise to... Crucible Moments Podcast · 40 min HubSpot: An Underdog Helps Invent Modern Marketing, and Then Takes on Goliath Sequoia Capital with Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah In 2 answers
  2. A sitting CIO explains how he actually finds and evaluates startup vendors, including that roughly 80% arrive through outbound.... The Neon Show Podcast · 62 min How Startups Can Sell to Big Companies ft. Karthik Chakkarapani, Zuora Siddhartha Ahluwalia
  3. Podcast · podcast episode SaaS, Chennai, Acquisition By Freshworks and Building Rocketlane with Founder, Srikrishnan Ganesan Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Srikrishnan Ganesan
  4. Vembu walks through the actual mechanics: the pivot after the dot com crash, ManageEngine turning profitable on Google ads, and... Mixergy Podcast · Full episode "The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur" Talks About How He Built Zoho Into A Bootstrapped Powerhouse, with Sridhar Vembu Andrew Warner with Sridhar Vembu
  5. Has the diagnostic that is genuinely useful: if people cannot tell what you do, or you get compared to the wrong competitors,... Intercom Podcast · Full episode with transcript Ambient Strategy's April Dunford on what marketers get wrong about positioning Geoffrey Keating with April Dunford
  6. Founder led selling with the receipts: 500 personalised cold emails in a month, a first customer signed before the product... SaaS Club Podcast · Full episode 3 Years of Zero Traction Then Finding Product-Market Fit (Whatfix, Khadim Batti) SaaS Club with Khadim Batti
  7. Goes deeper than the article on how to actually run a willingness to pay conversation, plus the maximise, penetrate and skim... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · Full episode with transcript The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher) Lenny Rachitsky with Madhavan Ramanujam
  8. The tactical half of her thinking: founding documents, operating principles, titles, and how to actually get a large team... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · Full episode with transcript Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe) Lenny Rachitsky with Claire Hughes Johnson
  9. Podcast · 90 min 2X SaaS Founder: How To Sell Global Tech Products From India | Sharath Narayana Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Sharath Keshava Narayana
  10. Podcast · Full episode 7 Myths About Selling B2B SaaS In India ft Unicommerce Founder Kapil Makhija Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Kapil Makhija
  11. Podcast · 90 min These 90 Minutes Will Teach You Everything About SaaS Business | SaaSBOOMi Co-Founder Suresh Sambandam
  12. This is the episode where the failure comes first: why Fashnear did not work, and then the step by step of power user analysis,... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · Podcast episode with full transcript Vidit Aatrey Founder & CEO Meesho on Building a Category-Defining Startup Vidit Aatrey
  13. The second S-curve is the part most retellings skip. Once existing WhatsApp resellers ran out, the pitch changed to starting a... The Neon Show Podcast · About 60 min Vidit Aatrey, Founder & CEO, Meesho Vidit Aatrey
  14. The definitive first customers account: guest posts with publication specific beta invite codes, 4,000 dollars in month one,... The SaaS Podcast Podcast · About 49 min From Guest Blogging to $8M ARR with SaaS Content Marketing Paras Chopra
  15. The richest India origin account of moving from founder led selling to a sales organisation, with the actual price ladder, the... The SaaS Podcast Podcast · About 54 min 7 Steps to SaaS Go-to-Market Fit After Product-Market Fit Khadim Batti
  16. Batti on category creation and building a global go to market flywheel from Bengaluru while targeting US buyers from the very... Indian Silicon Valley with Jivraj Singh Sachar Podcast · 49 min E115 - Mastering Global GTM w/Whatfix's Khadim Batti Khadim Batti
  17. The research that came before the product is quantified here: 80 plus customer interviews, more than 200 hours of recorded... The Founder Thesis Podcast Podcast · Long-form interview The Architect of Onboarding: Srikrishnan Ganesan and the Rise of Rocketlane Srikrishnan Ganesan
  18. The honest sequel: why the inbound playbook that worked at launch had to be abandoned for outbound and in person selling once... SaaS Scaling Secrets Podcast · About 42 min Ditching Traditional SaaS Playbooks with Sri Ganesan, CEO of Rocketlane Srikrishnan Ganesan
  19. Where the motion came from: the Ola number masking call, 350 inbound SMBs at 10 to 15 a month, the rupee pricing experiments,... The Neon Show Podcast · 59 min Exotel, SaaS startup serving clients like Ola, Swiggy, Zerodha Shivakumar Ganesan
  20. The useful half is where Simons says the model breaks and enterprise advocates became necessary, which stops this being read as... Inside Intercom Podcast · About 30 min How Atlassian built a $20 billion company with a unique sales model Jay Simons
  21. This is the segment selection episode: the rabbits and elephants analogy, fewer than 1,000 merchants at Series A, and why 20... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · Podcast episode with full transcript Razorpay's Journey From a Small Startup to a Big Brand with Co-Founder and CEO Harshil Mathur Harshil Mathur
  22. A slide by slide walk through the actual 2014 deck, which had no founder slide and won on problem clarity, useful if you are... SeedToScale by Accel Podcast · Podcast episode Breaking Down Razorpay's Original Pitch With Harshil Mathur Harshil Mathur
  23. Figma's first go to market hire walks the whole arc from stealth to monetisation, including how the bottom up motion eventually... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · About 1 hr An inside look at Figma's unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) Claire Butler
  24. Kramer talking through when to hire, why to start with a generalist, and why product marketer and growth marketer are genuinely... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · About 1 hr How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1) Emily Kramer

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The questions

GTM teardowns 16

How named companies actually got their first customers, and what they changed to scale.

How did Freshworks sell to the US from Chennai without a US sales team? 5 → How did Zoho build a global GTM engine without ever raising money? 4 → What did Postman do differently to get developers to adopt before it ever sold anything? 5 → How did BrowserStack get its first millions in revenue almost entirely on word of mouth? 6 → How did Zerodha become India's largest broker with no ads and no sales team? 5 → All 16 questions in GTM teardowns →
How great operators think 16

The mental models, the judgment calls, and the non-obvious moves behind good go-to-market.

What did Slack's "We don't sell saddles here" memo actually change about how they sold? 5 → What does April Dunford say most teams get wrong about positioning? 3 → What does Gong's call data actually say top sellers do differently in discovery? 3 → When should you add a sales team on top of a self serve product, and how do you avoid breaking it? 4 → When does a founder stop selling personally, and why do the best ones hire two reps instead of one? 4 → All 16 questions in How great operators think →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →