7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Kintsugi’s Journey to Doubling Revenue Monthly
When Pujun Bhatnagar quit Facebook to start a sales tax compliance company, most people thought he was crazy. Sales tax? Really? But two years of doing tax filings by hand for ten different companies taught him something competitors missed: the entire industry was about to be disrupted, and whoever moved fastest with the right approach would win.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Pujun Bhatnagar, CEO and Co-Founder of Kintsugi, a sales tax automation platform that’s raised over $8 million, shared the GTM playbook that took his company from zero to doubling revenue month-over-month. Here are the seven lessons that actually matter.
- Do the Unsexy Work Before You Write Code
Most founders want to jump straight into building. Pujun did the opposite—and it became his competitive moat.
“In the two years leading to the pre seed fundraising, I was doing sales tax by hand for ten different companies just so that I could understand really the ins and outs of what needed to be built,” he explains. This wasn’t placeholder research. It was systematic immersion into every edge case, every pain point, every workflow bottleneck that would later inform product decisions.
The payoff? “We started writing really our first line of scalable code after pre seed fundraising. Before that was all MVP.” When they finally built, they built right. No pivots, no wasted engineering cycles, no rebuilding core infrastructure because they misunderstood the problem.
For B2B founders, the lesson is clear: if you’re building in a complex space, become a practitioner first. The months you “lose” doing manual work will save you years of building the wrong thing.
- Interview Your Way to Product-Market Fit
Customer discovery sounds obvious until you see how most founders actually do it. They talk to ten people, find some validation, and start building. Kintsugi took a different approach.
“We had this massive spreadsheet of 15 adjacent ideas that we wanted to build in. And we just did, I think, 300 to 500 interviews to essentially figure out what we wanted to build,” Pujun shares. This wasn’t spray-and-pray customer research. They were systematically pressure-testing hypotheses, segmenting user bases, understanding what people currently used and why they were frustrated.
The result? They didn’t just find a problem worth solving—they found the specific angle that incumbents couldn’t defend against. When everyone else took two to three weeks to onboard customers with service-heavy models, Kintsugi could show sales tax liability “with three clicks and three minutes.”
- Find Your Unique Unlock (And Make It Obvious)
Every successful GTM strategy has a “why us, why now” answer that’s impossible to ignore. For Kintsugi, it was brutally simple: they could do in minutes what took competitors weeks.
“We are the only software in the space which actually has a get started button on the website and where people can actually, seven clicks or three minutes, they can get onboarded and see their sales tax liability within ten minutes without talking to a sales personnel,” Pujun explains.
This wasn’t just faster—it was a different category of product experience. While competitors operated like agencies, shipping data to offshore teams for manual processing, Kintsugi built “a sales tax engine that is empowered by AI.” The contrast was so stark that it became self-evident value.
Your unique unlock doesn’t need to be AI or automation. It needs to be the thing that makes prospects say “wait, you can do that?” within the first 30 seconds of seeing your product.
- Build Trust Through Radical Transparency
In categories where trust is everything—compliance, finance, security—startups face a trust deficit that features alone can’t overcome. Kintsugi’s approach? Make trust mechanisms so visible they become features.
“Everything that we show on the website can be exported by a click of a button into a CSV that any CPA can audit,” Pujun notes. But they didn’t stop there. “We offer what is called the Kintsugi guarantee for all our premium clients that if by any chance, if we show the wrong value, then we cover sales tax penalties up to the contract value.”
The most interesting trust mechanism? Financial transparency. “While other companies withdraw money from your bank account three weeks prior to making your sales tax payments, we believe in transparency through and through,” he explains. “We show each and every transaction on a jurisdiction level how much we paid to each jurisdiction and it comes out of their direct bank account. So we do not sit on that pile of cash.”
That last point matters more than it seems. Competitors sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in customer funds created inherent mistrust. Kintsugi turned what could have been a revenue opportunity into a trust-building decision.
- Leverage Product-Led Growth in “Unsexy” Categories
Sales tax compliance is not a viral product category. Yet Kintsugi built a PLG motion that works. How? By solving a hidden pain point that created immediate, visible value.
The insight: businesses using Shopify and Stripe would turn on sales tax collection and “erroneously think that these different e-commerce or ERP platforms were filing sales tax for them. But all that was happening in the background was they were just collecting sales tax and they were really sitting on a massive liability.”
This created a perfect PLG hook. Show founders they’re sitting on a ticking time bomb (unfiled sales tax), quantify exactly how big that liability is, and make fixing it frictionless. “We truly believe in providing value to the customer first,” Pujun says—and that value is concrete, scary, and immediately actionable.
The lesson for founders in “boring” B2B categories: PLG works when you can surface a problem people didn’t know they had and provide instant clarity on how to fix it.
- Invest Heavily in R&D While Competitors Run Like Agencies
Most founders in service-adjacent categories eventually face the build-vs-buy decision. Do we automate everything, or do we use offshore teams and high-touch service to scale faster? Kintsugi made a clear choice.
“We spend, I think, 65% to 70% in R and D,” Pujun notes, contrasting this with competitors who “run like agencies.” This wasn’t just about better margins—it was about building a defensible moat. Service businesses don’t scale exponentially. Software does.
The validation? “Ever since we were publicly available, we have been doubling in revenue month over month.” That growth rate isn’t possible with a service-heavy model. It requires product leverage.
For technical founders, the implication is clear: if you’re in a space where competitors use manual processes, building actual software—not a thin layer over human labor—becomes your sustainable advantage.
- Time Your Market Entry Around Regulatory Chaos
The best GTM opportunities often hide in plain sight during periods of regulatory change. The 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair Supreme Court ruling created chaos across 48 jurisdictions, and established players were “caught with their pants down.”
“By November of 2019, 48 jurisdictions including DC and Puerto Rico had passed regulations around whether or not people should collect sales tax,” Pujun explains. This wasn’t a gradual shift—it was a compliance crisis that forced thousands of businesses to figure out new obligations they’d never had before.
Timing mattered. Kintsugi didn’t launch immediately after the ruling. Pujun spent two years understanding the problem deeply, watching incumbents struggle, and identifying exactly where the gaps were. When they finally launched, they weren’t guessing—they knew precisely where the pain was and how to solve it better than anyone else.
The Compounding Effect
What makes these lessons powerful isn’t any single tactic—it’s how they compound. Deep domain expertise informed which problems to solve. Hundreds of interviews revealed the specific wedge that incumbents couldn’t defend. Radical transparency built trust that enabled PLG. Heavy R&D investment created product leverage that enabled exponential growth.
The result? A company that went from three people to 47 in ten months, “quadrupled in revenue ever since we raised our Series A,” and recently secured additional funding “at two x the valuation of what we raised our Series A at.”
For founders building in complex, regulated, or “unsexy” B2B categories, Kintsugi’s playbook offers something more valuable than tactics: a framework for turning perceived disadvantages into competitive moats. The market might not be sexy, but the growth trajectory can be.
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