(8/7) GTM orchestration platform for product-led team

Welcome to the 8th edition of the Geeks Of The Valley (GOTV) Newsletter where we share our written memo on startups that have yet to raise any funding or announce it publicly, new startup ideas from some of the most original minds in tech and VC, and also episode of the week from our own GOTV podcast!

🏢 Venture Insights

Team 👥

• Rishen Kapoor: Previously Investor @ Sequoia Capital, Lead PM @ CleverTap (Series C, raised $76m from Accel, Tiger Global, Sequoia).

• Ruchin Kulkarni: Previously Investor @ Sequoia Capital, Business analyst @ Mckinsey.

• Rohit Khanna: Previously Principal engineer @ CleverTap, Head of Product @ Story.ai (Backed by Index, Gradient Ventures & angels; David Helgason (Unity), Alex MacCaw (Clearbit) and Quinn Slack (Sourcegraph)).

The Sparks ✨

• The rise of modern B2B GTM.

Image by ProductLed

• Earlier, outbound marketing was used by SaaS companies to generate leads. Teams of highly compensated SDR would spend countless hours a day cold calling / emailing leads asking whether they’d be interested in the product which could cost thousands of dollars to try it out.

  Moving towards the early 2010s saw the hike of paid marketing (inbound), where the search engine provider divert traffic to the site depending on the search terms that customers were already looking for. However, it’s still not enough to convince the customers to pay for that, without trying the product out.

• Hyper-segmentation will determine the success of Product-Led Growth (PLG) sales.

  A deep understanding of how users behave is crucial and could serve as the ultimate differentiator between each competitor. However, given the state of the existing tool, it looks very hard to achieve this. This is where Toplyne comes in place with the idea of a “GTM orchestration platform” where they put together user signals (eg: behavioral, demographic) to business results (eg: new sales, upsell opportunities).

💡 Startup Ideas

• 1. Erik Torenberg, Co-founder @ Village Global & On Deck.

Erik Torenberg @eriktorenberg

Request for product: Masterclass for Wikipedia. A site that reliably has the best explanations of concepts by the most appropriate experts, all accessible to the curious beginner.

• 2. Blake Emal, CMO @ Copy.ai.

Blake Emal @heyblake

$100B startup waiting to be built: Financial literacy for middle schoolers.

3. Greg Isenberg, ex-Growth advisor @TikTok

GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg

Free startup idea: Spotify but ONLY for artists that have less than 10,000 monthly listeners Make it community-first with intimate spaces for artists to build community Once the artist hits 10k listeners, they "graduate" to Spotify What do you think?

💡 Episode Of The Week

A Tsinghua University Schwarzman Scholar and Masa Son fellow, Wilfried Buiron is the Founder & CEO of Singapore-based, Zaapi an e-commerce enablement startup backed by Flash Ventures aiming to democratize access to e-commerce for Southeast Asian MSMEs. Prior to founding Zaapi, Wilfried spent time at McKinsey & Company and multiple Chinese startups and founded a successful D2C watch brand, Atelier Wen between Beijing and Hong Kong.

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Thanks for reading! See you next time, geeks 👋

If you know anyone that you’d like to be featured in our podcast, feel free to send a note to geeks@geeksofthevalley.com or reach out here!