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. A useful breakdown of the signals Postman used to decide a company was ready for a sales conversation, such as many developers... Reo.Dev Article · Long read Postman's Sales Playbook: Scaling Enterprise Sales Without Breaking PLG Reo.Dev In 2 answers
  2. Datadog's own VP of Marketing describing the dual motion and, more usefully, saying you have to actively reach out to the... OpenView Article · Short read An Inside Look at How Datadog Reached $500M in ARR (and Counting) Kristin Hillery In 2 answers
  3. Five GTM bets from an Indian founder who reached $600M+ ARR, including spending $45k early to find which inbound channel would... SaaStr Article · ~10 min read Building A Global SaaS Empire: 5 Bets That Paid Off with Freshworks Founder CEO Girish Mathrubootham Girish Mathrubootham
  4. Practical on the first US sales hire, hiring for adaptability rather than a quota record at a big brand, and on testing... Efficient Capital Labs Article · ~10 min read Unlocking the US Market: A Guide for Indian SaaS Founders Efficient Capital Labs
  5. Gives you numbers to aim at on your next call instead of vague advice: roughly 11 to 14 questions, spread through the call... Gong Labs Article · short read Effective strategies for successful sales discovery calls Chris Orlob
  6. Krish is blunt that inbound marketing was the whole strategy, chosen because Chennai gave them no access to a Silicon Valley... Insight Partners Article · long read How Krish Subramanian built global SaaS unicorn Chargebee out of India Insight Partners
  7. The best single profile of how Zoho funded itself, split into WebNMS, ManageEngine and Zoho.com, and built a talent pipeline... Forbes India Article · Long read The Bootstrapped Buddhist: How Sridhar Vembu built Zoho Harichandan Arakali
  8. Vembu explains the segment choice in his own words: go to the customers who find the premium products unaffordable, then grow... Thought Economics Article · Long read Sridhar Vembu: How He Bootstrapped Zoho to $1 Billion Without Investors Vikas Shah
  9. Asthana says plainly that Postman built customer success instead of a sales team early on. That one staffing choice explains... OpenView Article · Short read Postman on Designing for the End User and Product-led Success Abhinav Asthana
  10. The founder saying it in his own words: no ads, no sales team with targets, not much marketing, and about 1,000 people while... Nithin Kamath (Substack) Essay · Long read Inside the making of Zerodha Nithin Kamath
  11. A quick companion to the podcast, with the origin of the inbound insight and the counterintuitive calls laid out in five... HubSpot INBOUND Article · Short read Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah: How They Built HubSpot HubSpot (Guy Raz interview recap)
  12. Fills in the part the founder interviews skip: how the team formed out of Zoho, how they picked recurring billing, and the... SeedToScale (Accel India) Article · Long read The Early Story of Chargebee: Why it's Better to Start with People, not Ideas Prabhakar Reddy
  13. Seven concrete lessons with the numbers attached, including the 15 minute time to value and net retention above 140 percent.... aakashg.com Article · Long read Datadog: The Archetypal Example for SaaS Product-Led Growth Aakash Gupta
  14. The memo itself, published by Butterfield. Read the primary source rather than the hundred posts summarising it, because the... Medium Essay · Short read We Don't Sell Saddles Here Stewart Butterfield
  15. The method behind the talks, with a Positioning Canvas you can actually run a session against. Short enough to finish in a... aprildunford.com Book · Short book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it April Dunford
  16. The 2025 refresh across 326,000 calls, which is more honest than the famous 2016 number: won deals sit near 57 percent talk... Gong Article · Short read Mastering the talk-to-listen ratio in sales calls Gong Labs
  17. The clearest thresholds anyone has published for this decision, plus the warning that matters: the pipeline your new sales team... elenaverna.com Newsletter · Long read Why, When, and How to add Sales to your Product-Led Growth motion Elena Verna
  18. The reasoning is better than the headline: with one rep you cannot tell whether success or failure came from the person or the... SaaStr Article · Short read When You Hire Your First Sales Rep, Just Make Sure You Hire Two Jason Lemkin
  19. The four failure modes (feature shock, minivations, hidden gems, undead) give you vocabulary for a conversation most teams keep... First Round Review Article · Long read It's Price Before Product. Period. First Round Review with Madhavan Ramanujam
  20. Over 100 pages of it are worksheets, templates and real example documents rather than prose, which is why go to market leaders... Stripe Press Book · Full book Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building Claire Hughes Johnson
  21. Has the number that makes the point: over 80 percent of Rocketlane's 600 plus enterprise customers are in the US. Also carries... Forbes India Article · Long read SaaS startup Rocketlane is going global Siddhant Konduskar
  22. A ground level account of what Indian founders actually run into when they set up in the US, down to the go to market starter... SaaSBoomi (Medium) Article · Long read Onward to building a strong US-India SaaS corridor: The Rise of #IndiaSaaS Avinash Raghava
  23. Shows what Zoho's engine looks like now: 25 plus offices in regions people usually emigrate from, local hiring, local pricing,... diginomica Article · Long read ZohoDay 2024: Zoho's local approach to global expansion Phil Wainewright
  24. Includes the detail that matters most: a tweet from the creator of jQuery brought 10,000 beta users in three weeks. Developer... Accel India Insights (SeedToScale) Article · 22 min read Ritesh Arora of BrowserStack on thinking global and scaling up Anand Daniel

Show the next 24

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 →