CEO Gururaj Pandurangi on How ThriveStack Redefines B2B SaaS Growth with Hybrid GTM Tooling
Exploring the vision and innovation behind ThriveStack's success
Note: This interview was conducted by Jason Malki, originally published on SuperWarm and has been reproduced in its entirety to reach a broader audience.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Gururaj Pandurangi, a three-time entrepreneur and now the CEO of ThriveStack.ai, a product designed to help B2B SaaS companies grow rapidly and efficiently. They are at the forefront of industry transformation with their integrated tooling approach.
Gururaj shared valuable insights from his experiences on having his previous startup getting acquired by a large public company, rapid growth with large-xLarge customers, and challenges in capturing SMBs and medium-sized enterprises. These experiences were instrumental in the development of ThriveStack.
What motivated you to launch your startup?
Having founded two companies before, I understand that building a product is now easier than ever, but successfully distributing it, differentiating it, reaching the right audience quickly is crucial for growth.
In my previous venture, a 100% sales-led growth (SLG) cybersecurity company, we regularly secured $250K annual deals with large enterprises. However, we struggled to capture SMB and mid-sized enterprises, leaving a gap for competitors using a Product-Led Growth (PLG) approach to chip away at our market. Our sales and marketing costs were also quite high.
Sales Team Reluctance: Sales teams were hesitant to engage with potential customers generating less than $30,000 to $40,000 in annual revenue, leaving a gap that product-led companies quickly filled.
Customer Preferences: Buyers increasingly prefer to try products on their own without engaging with sales teams, and do 90% value-discovery even before they talk to the Sales teams.
Friction in Sales: The traditional sales process involved cold calls and lengthy demos, which were less appealing to modern customers who valued a frictionless experience.
We tried to compete, investing a million dollars in enabling self-serve products and revamping our GTM playbook. But it wasn’t enough. My leadership team wasn’t ready for the shift, and we gave up.
I realized then, and now more than ever, that there’s a better way — by combining both PLG and SLG approaches.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
We are building ThriveStack, a product growth platform for B2B SaaS companies. It is a new category of integrated products allowing SaaS companies to scale their product distribution by combining Self-Serve growth motions (end users can sign-up, try their products w/o talking to sales) and Product-Led Sales (Sales/CSM teams engage with users at the right time for conversion, upsell and retention). There are 100s of point-solutions in the market to solve disparate pieces of this puzzle. We decided to simplify it.
What we build is a compound startup with three products, integrated from the start, aiming to compete with and replace over 15 point-solutions in the market.
Our vision emphasizes that while vertical SaaS can quickly attract a few customers, horizontal SaaS is a long-term strategy.
Though initially complex, we have the potential to secure significant deals. Sure enough, we draw inspiration from successful companies with compound startup strategies like Rippling, Atlassian, HubSpot, and Intercom, which continue to grow and thrive.
What has been your top challenges when growing your startup?
Our top 3 challenges include:
Balancing Innovation with Customer Needs: The market is saturated with numerous siloed products. Our differentiation lies in making the entire process of growth engineering simple, structured, and customizable. This requires a delicate balance between short-term customer demands and long-term innovation.
Educating the Market: While existing point solutions are effective, they often slow down progress due to the significant effort required to stitch them together, operate multiple tools separately, and deal with a lack of a unified data layer. We need to educate the market about these inefficiencies and how our integrated approach can overcome them.
Bootstrapping: Building three products simultaneously with bootstrapped resources — covering everything from employees to hosting costs — has been a significant challenge. It requires careful capacity management and relentless focus on our goals.
These challenges have pushed us to continuously innovate and refine our approach frequently.
What are your future plans for your startup?
We are focused on achieving product-market fit while maintaining our bootstrapped approach. Despite receiving numerous unsolicited offers from venture capitalists, we are committed to holding out until we reach a significant product traction milestone.
Our strategy includes accelerating customer activation month-over-month by streamlining our product onboarding process to enhance self-service capabilities, thereby driving exponential growth.
Additionally, we are dedicated to building a strong community around our brand to foster loyalty and deep engagement among our users.
Furthermore, we are preparing to implement scalable go-to-market strategies to propel our growth to new heights.
Exciting times lie ahead for our startup.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
As a 2x+ entrepreneur, I’ve learned valuable lessons from his previous ventures.
One key takeaway is the importance of product distribution. Building a great product is essential, but getting it into the hands of users is equally crucial, if not more.
At the early stages, Founders should allocate at least 30% to 50% of their time to distribution efforts.
Balancing Product and Distribution
“Founders should allocate at least 30% to 50% of their time to distribution efforts.”
Gururaj Pandurangi, CEO, ThriveStack
How can our readers follow you on social media?
My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gururajp
I post regularly to our SaaS Growth Newsletter (read by over 45K subscribers):
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!