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From Sleeping in Auto Shops to $33M: How Revv Cracked the Code on Vertical SaaS Sales

Most founders talk about grinding in the early days. Few have literally slept in their customers’ workplaces while building their product. Adi Bathla, CEO and co-founder of Revv, took customer obsession to an extreme that landed him in the emergency room multiple times—and ultimately helped him build an AI platform for auto repair shops that’s raised over $33 million.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Adi shared the unconventional go-to-market journey that transformed Revv from a hard-coded demo into a company onboarding over 100 auto shops per month with sales cycles compressed from 21 days to just 3 days.

The Breaking Point That Sparked Everything

Adi’s entrepreneurial journey began early. At 16, he built a SpaceX prototype for NASA that won an international award, planting what he calls “the entrepreneurial bug.” But it wasn’t until 2022 that he reached his defining moment.

“I reached a breaking point in life where either I was going to start a company or be on the sidewalk,” Adi explains. “There was no plan B.”

The auto industry wasn’t his first choice—it was a family connection that opened the door. His family runs a national auto parts distribution business in Houston, Texas, working with dealerships across the country. When Adi looked at the industry through fresh eyes, he saw massive opportunity.

“I was just a kid in the candy store looking at how much there is to build for the industry,” he recalls. What drew him in wasn’t just the market size, but the fundamental principle he’d adopted early: “Build technology for industries that run on pen and paper or where technology doesn’t exist, rather than software for software.”

The “Why Now” That Changed Everything

Timing in startups is often attributed to luck, but Adi identified a perfect storm of regulatory and technological shifts that created urgent market demand.

“The best birthplace of startups is when there is a government regulation or a functional change or net new technology that didn’t exist before,” he explains. “And for us, all those three things kind of came together at the same time.”

The catalyst was government-mandated automatic emergency braking required in every vehicle by 2029. This regulation accelerated manufacturers’ adoption of advanced driver assistance systems across their fleets. According to Adi, “AAA did a study back in 2018 that more than 98% of net new vehicles being manufactured had these systems equipped in them.”

The result? Cars evolved from mechanical devices into what Adi calls “computers on wheels.” Repair shops that once worked on fenders and bumpers now needed to handle sensors, cameras, and modules with the precision of skilled engineers.

“Your average technician that is used to doing work with the fender, the quarter panel, the bumper, is now expected to do work that is akin to a skilled engineer with lasers and targets and mats, repairing components like sensors, cameras, and modules,” Adi explains.

But the real challenge wasn’t just the complexity—it was the data problem underlying every repair decision.

The Brutal Early Days: Sleeping in Auto Shops

Adi’s first customer acquisition approach was refreshingly honest about its crudeness: “I built an outbound message and started shooting in the dark.”

When shop owners responded, he showed them something that barely qualified as a product—hard-coded screens with basic input and output functionality. The response surprised him.

“I experienced something that I had never experienced before, which is even with a bare bones input in output out hard coded screen, folks started bringing their friends, they wanted to buy the product on the spot,” he recalls. “And I hadn’t felt that pull from any type of customer in any market before.”

But there was a problem: he was selling a product that didn’t really exist.

The challenge went deeper than organizing complex repair data. “It wasn’t just simply putting together a complicated data infrastructure,” Adi explains. “Answer wasn’t just putting together that data, but it was also about the interpretation of the data, you know, and that interpretation lived in the heads of highly trained technicians.”

This realization led to one of the most extreme customer development approaches in recent startup history. Adi convinced experienced technicians to share their knowledge, but it required unprecedented commitment.

“I took a plane ticket and I showed up at their shops, I started sleeping in their shops and quite literally downloading their brains while my co founder was shipping code every single night,” he explains. “And that level of attachment with the industry, that level of grit, we actually ended up in the emergency room multiple times.”

The extreme hustle paid off. Shop owners recognized authentic commitment to solving their problems. “The industry felt that, they felt that these are the people who are here to actually solve a problem for us and they are working hard to solve the problem for us,” Adi reflects. “So they give us a shot.”

The Insight That Changed Everything

The breakthrough that separated Revv from failed vertical SaaS attempts came from a core realization about workflow integration.

“Meeting an offline industry user where they are in their workflow rather than asking them to move towards your way of doing things” became Adi’s guiding principle. Instead of building another platform that shop owners would need to learn, Revv integrated deeply with existing infrastructure.

“The thesis was shops operate on two core pieces of infrastructure, a scanning tool and estimatics,” Adi explains. “And instead of giving them a third platform that they have to spend time learning, integrated deeply with their existing tech stack.”

This approach transformed user adoption. “Rev now integrates with both of them, runs in the background and within seconds gives them actionable insights around systems, equipped components, impacted procedures to be performed step by step instructions, and builds a perfect claim package for claims reimbursement purposes as well,” he details.

The Mathematical Rebuild of Sales

As Revv scaled, Adi faced a challenge that breaks many fast-growing companies: transitioning from founder-led sales to systematic go-to-market.

“After finding Product Market Fit, I think what you go through is a breaking point at the company, which is you’re transitioning from family led sales to your go to market notion,” he explains. The transition was brutal. “I was sleeping on average of three hours a night and there was no choice but to do that.”

But rather than accepting suboptimal performance, Adi made a decision that would become central to Revv’s success: completely rebuilding their sales motion with mathematical precision.

“We did a complete overhaul of our go to market motion,” he explains. “And what I like to call it is a mathematical rebuild of this go to market motion.”

The results were dramatic. Sales cycles compressed from 21 days to under 3 days, and monthly shop onboardings grew from 20 to over 100. The key was understanding that their audience operated differently from typical SaaS buyers.

“Our users are folks repairing cards with their hands. They don’t really have time to hop on video calls,” Adi notes. “Hopping on a zoom call is not widely accepted and just normal for auto repair shop technicians and owners.”

The solution focused on getting prospects to demos as quickly as possible. Once there, “the demo is engineered to showcase how deeply integrated it gets into your existing workflow and it pulls your existing repairs and shows them the roi, shows them the liability protection,” Adi explains. This approach achieved a 60%+ demo-to-close rate.

The Philosophy of Constant Rebuilding

Perhaps Adi’s most valuable insight for other founders is his approach to scaling challenges: embrace the pain of rebuilding systems repeatedly.

“The most important go to market decision to make, which I’m actually making again, is to rebuild it completely,” he explains. “There’s no shame in admitting that what worked from the 0 to 5 journey is going to not work for the 5 to 25.”

This philosophy extends beyond sales to company building itself. “You absolutely get sucked into a vacuum where you now have to go through the journey of transitioning from founder to founder CEO,” Adi reflects. “And that journey is as hard, if not more, compared to the zero to one journey.”

His advice for founders facing similar transitions: “If I were to do it again, I would actually make that transition sooner than I did.” The key is overcoming scarcity mindset. “You are conserving cash, you are trying to maximize every single minute and second of your time as well. But investing in repeatable systems, operational systems, sales and marketing a bit early on to graduate yourself to higher impact areas of the business is something that I would change.”

The Vision: Connective Tissue for Global Auto Repair

Looking ahead, Adi sees Revv evolving far beyond its current AI platform. His vision positions the company as infrastructure for an entire industry transformation.

“I see rev as the connective tissue that powers the total repair for the global auto repair industry,” he explains. “And the auto repair industry doesn’t need more technology. You know, it needs technology that talks to each other and works in a way that it gives them the time back to focus on the car and the customer.”

This vision reflects lessons learned from the industry’s fragmented technology landscape. “All of them were built to be these walled gardens,” Adi notes about existing solutions. Instead, Revv aims to become the integration layer that connects disparate systems and workflows.

Lessons for Vertical SaaS Founders

Adi’s journey offers several tactical insights for founders building in traditional industries:

Meet customers in their existing workflows. Don’t force behavioral change—integrate with established processes and infrastructure.

Use regulatory shifts as market catalysts. Compliance requirements create urgent pain points that make solutions essential rather than nice-to-have.

Embrace extreme customer development. Understanding complex industries requires deeper engagement than typical customer interviews.

Rebuild systems repeatedly as you scale. What works at one stage will break at the next—plan for systematic rebuilding rather than incremental optimization.

Focus on business impact over features. Traditional industries care more about ROI and liability protection than technological sophistication.

Revv’s success from 2 to 75+ employees in 24 months demonstrates that unsexy industries often offer the most attractive opportunities for founders willing to do the hard work of truly understanding their customers’ worlds. As Adi puts it, the key is providing value to society in industries that run on pen and paper—and being willing to sleep in those industries’ workplaces until you get it right.