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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Embrace a Contrarian Mindset for Impactful Problem-Solving:
Ravin's journey underscores the value of questioning conventional wisdom and seeking impactful work. Founders should identify and focus on problems that align with their passion for making a significant impact, even if it means taking unconventional paths.
The Importance of Early Customer Feedback for Product Direction:
Credal's pivot from an AI application to an AI security product was catalyzed by straightforward customer feedback. Engaging early and honestly with potential users can reveal critical insights into your product's true value proposition, guiding more informed decisions about product direction.
Creative Outreach Can Lead to Breakthrough Opportunities:
The story of Credal's first significant customer win through a personalized outreach email in Klingon illustrates that creativity and personalization in sales efforts can differentiate your pitch, even in a crowded market. Tailor your outreach efforts to stand out and resonate on a personal level with potential customers.
Rapid Iteration and Flexibility in Early Stages:
The ability to quickly pivot and adapt based on new information or feedback is crucial for early-stage startups. Credal's swift action to refocus their product offering after recognizing a misalignment with market needs exemplifies the agility needed to find the right market fit.
Build a High-Talent, Focused Team:
Ravin highlights the significance of maintaining a high bar for talent acquisition, even if it slows down scaling. A small, highly skilled team can achieve rapid growth by staying focused on solving real customer pain points. Founders should prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to building their team.
Conversation
Highlights
From Failed Product to 30% Monthly Growth: Inside Credal’s Pivot to Enterprise AI Security
Most startup pivots happen gradually. But for Credal, it took just one brutally honest customer feedback session to realize they needed to completely reinvent their company. During a pilot of their AI chief of staff product with a 100-200 person company, executives were asked how much they’d pay. The responses were devastating: “$20 a month… maybe $10 a month.”
In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Credal founder Ravin shared how this moment catalyzed their transformation: “You watch that, especially as a Founder of a company, and you realize, oh, no, something has gone horribly wrong. We’re off by two orders of magnitude on the price that we need here.”
Instead of trying to optimize a failing product, this clear signal accelerated their pivot. As Ravin explains: “If they’d said, oh, we’d spend $200 a month or $300 a month, maybe we would have continued barking down that wrong tree… The fact that we were so far off from what could plausibly work actually accelerated our realization that, okay, this was not going to work.”
The path forward emerged from analyzing what customers actually valued during their sales conversations. While few cared about an AI chief of staff, their security features consistently sparked interest. This insight led them to refocus entirely on AI security.
Their first enterprise customer came through an unconventional approach. “I emailed the CISO of Checker and on his LinkedIn, like, he kind of mentioned that he spoke Klingon,” Ravin recalls. “And so this like outreach email I sent in Klingon…” This creative outreach landed them a meeting, but there was one problem – they didn’t even have a demo yet.
The team scrambled to build one overnight, met with Checker the next day, and signed a three-month pilot that converted into a six-figure enterprise deal. This validation proved transformative. Today, Credal is growing 20-30% monthly and processes over a million LLM queries per month.
What’s particularly noteworthy is their growth came almost entirely through inbound interest, not aggressive outbound sales. After their initial outreach campaign, Ravin notes: “We actually did not do any outbound for the longest time until literally the start of this year.” Instead, they focused on documenting customer use cases: “We would work with these customers, we’d solve a problem, we’d write a case study up about it, and then the head of platform engineering at some 10,000 person public financial services company would reach out.”
This approach stemmed from a deep understanding of their ideal customer profile (ICP): platform engineering leads at large technology companies trying to roll out AI applications while navigating security concerns. Rather than pitching features, they focus on the fundamental challenge these leaders face – getting AI applications from proof-of-concept to production while satisfying security requirements.
Looking ahead, Ravin sees an even bigger opportunity: “What I actually believe we are building is very different, I think, to people in general think… from my perspective, what we’re really building is the safe and access controlled data environment for your AI employees. Because we believe that five years from now, every company is going to have hundreds of these AI employees running around doing work.”
The key lesson for founders isn’t just about being willing to pivot – it’s about recognizing when customer feedback is so definitive that continuing down the current path would be futile. As Ravin puts it: “If you stay ruthlessly focused on talking to actual customers, understanding the actual pain points and solving those actual pain points. Everything else, like, will fall into place.”
This rapid transformation from struggling product to explosive growth shows how powerful clear negative feedback can be – if you’re willing to act on it decisively rather than trying to incrementally improve something customers fundamentally don’t value enough.
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