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 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  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. 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. Podcast · 90 min These 90 Minutes Will Teach You Everything About SaaS Business | SaaSBOOMi Co-Founder Suresh Sambandam
  15. 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
  16. Video · Interview Vidit Aatrey on Building Meesho, India's Top Reselling Platform, with Adora Cheung Vidit Aatrey
  17. 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
  18. 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
  19. 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
  20. Video · About 70 min Paras Chopra: How To Build A Successful Startup In India | Sold Wingify For $200 Million Paras Chopra
  21. The company's own timeline, so you can see the compounding rather than take it on trust: 4,000 dollars in month one, 25,000 a... VWO Blog Article · About 10 min read Evolution of VWO over the last 10 years VWO Blog
  22. The endpoint, with hard numbers: roughly 50 million dollars in annualised revenue, 6,000 clients across 90 countries, and never... TechCrunch Article · About 4 min read Everstone acquires bootstrapped Indian startup Wingify for $200M Manish Singh
  23. 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
  24. Video · About 1 hr 9 min How they built a $600M SaaS Company? Ft. Khadim Batti & Vara Kumar Namburu - Co-founders, Whatfix Khadim Batti

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 →