Doubling Revenue Monthly: Inside Kintsugi’s Product-Led Growth Engine for ‘Boring’ B2B Software
Sales tax compliance is nobody’s idea of a viral product. There are no social sharing mechanics, no network effects, no gamification possibilities. It’s the definition of boring B2B software—necessary, complex, and deeply unsexy. Yet Kintsugi built a product-led growth engine powerful enough to double revenue month-over-month. The secret? Surfacing a problem people didn’t know they had, then making the solution immediate and frictionless.
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, revealed how they turned compliance software into a PLG machine by identifying a hidden crisis and building instant value delivery into every interaction.
The Hidden Crisis Nobody Talked About
Most PLG playbooks start with a problem people know they have. Slack for team communication. Figma for design collaboration. Notion for documentation. Kintsugi faced a different challenge: their target customers didn’t realize they had a problem.
The customer discovery revealed something critical. 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,” Pujun explains. “But all that was happening in the background was they were just collecting sales tax and they were really sitting on a massive liability.”
Read that again. Thousands of businesses thought they were compliant. They’d enabled collection. Money was being deducted from customers. It felt like the problem was solved. But they weren’t filing returns. They weren’t remitting payments. They were sitting on growing liabilities that would eventually explode—usually during acquisition talks.
“For e-commerce, more often than not the margins are so super thin that really if you want to make an exit, that’s the only way to get a large payout,” Pujun shares. “And typically that payout happens when you get a five to six x multiple on your current revenue. But the other thing that we found out was when these e commerce businesses were trying to get sold to larger players, sales tax would come up time and time again. And this was the number one way where larger companies would basically reduce the amount that they were willing to pay to these startups to acquire them.”
That’s the hook for PLG. Not a problem people are actively searching to solve, but a crisis that, once revealed, demands immediate action.
The Three-Minute Aha Moment
Traditional sales tax compliance providers made onboarding deliberately slow. Two to three weeks was standard. Sales calls, data collection, manual processing, back-and-forth with account managers. The friction was a feature—it justified the high price and created switching costs.
Kintsugi inverted that completely.
“We decided to basically flip the script and flip the table on the problem space and say, we are going to build a sales tax engine that is empowered by AI, where with three clicks and three minutes, we’ll be able to show your sales tax liability and exposure versus our other competitors in the space,” Pujun explains. “They take two to three weeks to just onboard a customer.”
Three minutes versus three weeks isn’t incremental improvement—it’s a different product category. But here’s what makes it PLG: the three minutes delivers the scariest, most valuable insight immediately.
“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 notes.
Think about what happens in those ten minutes. You connect your Shopify or Stripe account. The AI analyzes your transaction history across jurisdictions. Then it shows you a number—how much sales tax liability you’re sitting on that hasn’t been filed. For many businesses, that number is terrifying. Tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes hundreds of thousands.
That’s the aha moment. Not “this tool is useful”—but “I’m in serious trouble and didn’t know it.”
Value Before Extraction
Here’s where most companies would insert a paywall. You’ve seen the problem, now pay to solve it. Kintsugi took a different approach.
“There’s no onboarding fee, nothing associated. And then we get into this fear of, ok, how do we convert them into paid clients and whatnot? But really we truly believe in providing value to the customer first,” Pujun shares.
This philosophy pervades the entire product. No credit card required to see your liability. Everything exportable to CSV so any CPA can audit it. Transaction-level transparency on what’s being collected and where. The product is designed to prove its value before asking for commitment.
This matters more in compliance than in typical SaaS. Trust is the product. “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 explains. That’s not just transparency—it’s enabling customers to validate the product’s accuracy before buying.
The conversion mechanism becomes obvious: once you see your liability and verify the numbers are accurate, the question isn’t whether to fix it but when. And Kintsugi makes fixing it trivially easy—registration handling, automated collection, filing, remittance, all programmatic.
The Educational Moat
PLG in boring categories requires a different approach to content. You’re not teaching people how to use your product—you’re teaching them they have a problem.
“I think given that we are trying to approach this problem differently, we have done a lot of hard work on improving the website, providing educational material about sales tax, and really creating value for the end businesses before trying to extract any acv or any amount of money from them,” Pujun shares.
This educational content serves dual purposes. First, it drives top-of-funnel awareness about post-Wayfair compliance requirements. Most founders still don’t understand that the 2018 Supreme Court ruling changed everything about sales tax obligations.
Second, it establishes Kintsugi as the expert. When you’re teaching people about a problem they didn’t know existed, expertise becomes the primary differentiator. The content isn’t “use our tool”—it’s “here’s why this matters and how the landscape changed.”
Software Leverage Enables PLG
Here’s the crucial point: Kintsugi’s PLG motion only works because they built actual software, not a service layer.
“We spend, I think, 65% to 70% in R and D,” Pujun notes. “Meanwhile, other companies run like agencies.” That R&D investment created the automation required for instant onboarding. Agency models can’t deliver value in three minutes because humans need time to process data.
The AI engine computes liability across 48 jurisdictions instantly. The integrations pull transaction data automatically. The compliance logic runs programmatically. None of this requires human intervention, which means each new user costs almost nothing to serve in the trial phase.
That unit economics breakthrough enables aggressive value-first positioning. When serving a trial user is essentially free, you can provide deep value without worrying about conversion rates. Some will convert, most won’t, but the ones who convert have seen enough value to trust the system completely.
The Growth Payoff
The PLG strategy delivered exactly what you’d expect from product-market fit with growth mechanics built in.
“Ever since we were publicly available, we have been doubling in revenue month over month,” Pujun reveals. That 100% month-over-month growth rate is the signature of PLG done right—efficient customer acquisition, short sales cycles, and product velocity that creates its own momentum.
The company scaled from three people to 47 in ten months and “quadrupled in revenue ever since we raised our Series A.” More telling: they recently secured additional funding “at two x the valuation of what we raised our Series A at.” Investors recognize PLG economics when they see them.
The Pattern for Boring B2B
Kintsugi’s playbook works beyond sales tax. The pattern applies to any boring B2B category where:
- Customers don’t realize they have a problem (surface hidden liabilities)
- The incumbent solution is high-touch and slow (automate everything)
- Trust is the primary barrier (provide value before extraction)
- Compliance risk creates urgency (make the crisis visible and immediate)
The lesson isn’t that PLG works everywhere—it’s that PLG can work in categories that seem fundamentally unsuited to it, if you build the right hooks. Surface problems people didn’t know about. Deliver value instantly through automation. Build trust through transparency. Make the path to solving the crisis obvious and frictionless.
Sales tax compliance might be boring, but the growth mechanics are anything but.
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