Founder’s Deep Dive S1 E7

Becoming a Category Creator in Customer Success Management with Sreedhar Peddineni of Gainsight

25 Feb 2022

You finish your exit, you get financial security, you hang up the boots and go on a vacation. 

With each company you’re on a treadmill, no – you’re on a conveyor belt, for another 7-10 years. 

What if you have already exited two businesses, will you do it again?

If you have to do it again, what’ll be the motivation behind it?

From being a pioneer in the ‘on-prem to cloud journey’ with his first startup Host Analytics, and a category creator of Customer Success Platform with Gainsight, Sreedhar Peddineni is now on to a category disruption play in his 3rd start up GTM Buddy.

Gainsight was the world’s very first company to have launched as a customer success platform, when customer success as a function didn’t exist.  Why did they proceed building it when there was no buyer in place? Today as you know even a 10 member startup will have someone looking after customer success. That was not the case when they started. 

Gain more insights on category creation, category disruption, a serial entrepreneur’s perspective on building a world class team of experts and how to look at industries for insights that you may otherwise miss and more wisdom in this episode.

Here’s more on what’s in store for you. Tune in, Happy Gaining more Insights!

About the host

Suresh Sambandam

CEO, Kissflow

This episode’s guest

Sreedhar Peddineni

Co-Founder, GTM Buddy & Gainsight
Key Takeaways
  • How much investment is required if you’re venturing into category creation?
  • How to build a 100M ARR company, Gainsight style?
  • How to sell to the leading SaaS businesses in the world, predominantly in the Bay area.
  • Scaling too fast, too soon can be counterproductive, why?
  • How do you decide on the right pricing, that you don’t sell at $4k price point to a customer when they could actually be paying a few $100k conservatively?
  • 3 years into building the business, their ARR is under a million –  What’re the 2 factors which kept them going?
  • Insights on product led category creation. Which are good examples of companies which have done cost-effective product led category creation?
  • How to go about investing in a world class team of experts
  • What’re the nuances to look for when you build a sales team who can sell $1M+ compared to selling $100k+
  • How to analyze an industry  – from a serial entrepreneur’s perspective?
  • Imagine your product pricing is $19 per user presently, when you launched it years back it was $3. How will you migrate the old customers to the higher price band?
  • Early stage ACV movement from $12k price point to now $300-400k