Five tips to hit the ground running and make an impact quickly.
A decade of experience in B2B tech showed Uday Chakravarthi a gap in the market. He founded Clinch AGI to fill it.
His expertise paid off – Clinch raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding and went from idea to revenue in six months. In Uday’s experience, startups typically take at least a year or two to reach this milestone.
During his time as a product leader at Microsoft, Zillow, and Atlassian, Uday identified the inefficiencies that tend to slow down go-to-market (GTM) teams, such as repetitive tasks and siloed customer insights. When the AI conversation exploded in late 2022, Chakravarthi saw potential. Could “AI teams” handle this busywork for actual people working in marketing, product, and sales?
He went from idea to action with Clinch, which uses generative AI to automate processes and free up marketers for more collaborative, high-impact work. Here, he shares five key ingredients that helped him get to where he is today.
Hire the right team first
“Every team member at an early-stage startup can make or break its success,” Chakravarthi says. He recommends identifying the crucial skill sets that will propel your team to success, and hiring there first.
For Clinch, that meant engineering and AI research experts. “We didn’t look for people without any weaknesses,” Chakravarthi says. “But we did look for people with at least one superpower (such as machine learning), who could raise the bar for the team.”
But even as he focused on these crucial specialty roles, Chakravarthi prioritized flexibility and adaptability, too. “The startup journey is very different from working at a large organization,” he says. “Every day you’re dealing with different things, from fundraising to building product. We’ve chosen individuals who can wear multiple hats, and that really helped us accelerate our work.”
Stay close to the customer
“Product market fit comes when your team deeply understands the problem you’re solving,” says Chakravarthi. “We got there by making sure that our teams were always part of the customer conversation.”
But listening is only half the battle – it’s even more important to put the knowledge you gain into action. Uday credits this as a key reason Clinch went from $0 to revenue so quickly. “As we developed the product, we worked closely with customers to listen and learn about their problems,” he says. “Then, we maintained a relentless pace in implementing their feedback and refining the product further.”
For example, Clinch’s first customer used the product to send up to one hundred emails at a time. But after interviewing that customer, Chakravarthi’s team realized they needed better visibility into how those emails performed – otherwise, they’d need to jump through multiple tools to see open and click-through rates. “Based on that key insight, we built those metrics into the product,” Chakravarthi says.
Chakravarthi believes this approach is especially important for onboarding. “You only get one or two chances with a potential customer,” he says. “If you lose them in onboarding, you might not get them back.”
Find investors with the domain expertise to understand your vision
To understand your problem space — and buy into your ability to offer solutions — Chakravarthi has found that having investors with expertise in the market is just as crucial as having the right employees for moving a startup forward.
“Clinch raised half a million dollars fairly quickly, in a pre-seed round from Angel investors from tech and AI companies,” he says. “Because these folks were from similar industries, they understood the challenges faced in the B2B space.”
This domain knowledge also helps investors make informed bets on a company’s future. “Clinch AGI’s vision resonated with our investors,” Chakravarthi continues. “We weren’t just showing them what we’d do in the next three to six months, but a three- to five-year vision and why we are the right team to start on it now.”
Set milestones to measure go-to-market success
Every product leader knows that you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Chakravarthi suggests applying that philosophy to your go-to-market strategy by choosing milestones that will indicate whether you’re heading in the right direction.
“For example, when you’re pitching the product to a potential customer, are you consistently finding champions and booking follow-up meetings?” Chakravarthi asks. “If yes, then your solution is probably resonating with them quite well, and you’re on your way to product-market fit.”
Using these kinds of checkpoints is crucial to ensuring your team’s work is actually bringing your startup closer to its goals. “If founders miss these milestones, they may end up building a misaligned product it’s too late to come back from,” Chakravarthi explains.
Understand that tools make or break culture on flexible, distributed teams
Clinch’s team members are located everywhere from India to Australia to both coasts of the United States. As Clinch scales, Chakravarthi has prioritized building a flexible, autonomous culture, which he credits with helping him attract top talent.
But it does take careful consideration – and just the right tooling – to build culture and drive results on a distributed team. “We established clear guidelines on how to work and communicate effectively as a team, and chose a toolstack that would enable that,” he says.
Clinch relies on Jira for prioritization, aligning all team members’ work into company-wide weekly sprints and integrating with leadership’s main channels, like Slack. Because live meetings are expensive and cumbersome across time zones, Loom has become a go-to for internal and customer conversations. “It helps us foster a sense of connection because it’s audio- and video-based, not just a message,” Chakravarthi explains.
Finally, Clinch switched from Notion to using Confluence to scale their team more effectively and find information and spaces with ease. “All our teams can effectively use the tool for documentation, and the templates make processes like onboarding smoother,” he says. “The live collaboration that happens in Confluence, whether it’s text or whiteboard, is almost like being in a room together.”
For Chakravarthi, it was crucial to choose a connected platform like Atlassian, that could adapt and evolve as Clinch grew. “What we didn’t want was to waste a lot of time context-switching between different tools,” he explains. “We wanted a suite of products that work together, to help us scale effectively as we get more people on board.”
Interested in more Startup Stories like this one? Check out Atlassian for Startups and the Atlassian Startups Community, where we share advice and insights from founders who are leading lean teams to tackle hard problems.
Special thanks to Genevieve Michaels for her contributions to this story.