Ready to build your own Founder-Led Growth engine? Book a Strategy Call
Frontlines.io | Where B2B Founders Talk GTM.
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.
Recommended Founder
Interviews
Don Gossen
CEO & Founder of Nevermined
How Nevermined coined “AI commerce” in 2023 to create category language before market adoption | Don Gossen
Harry Xu
CEO and Co-Founder of Breeze ML
Harry Xu, CEO and Co-Founder of Breeze ML: $4.6 Million Raised to Create the Future of AI Governance
Johannes Peeters
Co-Founder & CEO of VoxelSensors
Johannes Peeters, Co-Founder & CEO of VoxelSensors: $7 Million Raised to Build the Future of Spatial Computing
Jae Lee
Co-founder & CEO of TwelveLabs
How TwelveLabs sells AI to federal agencies: Mission alignment over process optimization | Jae Lee
Ashley Montanaro
CEO and Co-Founder of Phasecraft
Ashley Montanaro, CEO & Co-Founder of Phasecraft: $22 Million Raised to Build the Future of Quantum Software
Douwe Kiela
CEO and Co-Founder of Contextual AI
Douwe Kiela, CEO and Co-Founder of Contextual AI: $20 Million Raised to Build the Future of Enterprise Language Models
Deon Nicholas
CEO & Co-Founder of Forethought
Deon Nicholas, CEO & Co-Founder of Forethought: $92 Million Raised to Power the Future of Customer Support with AI
Ryan Sevey
CEO of Mantium
Ryan Sevey, CEO of Mantium: $12 Million Raised to Help Teams Deploy and Monitor their AI Process Automations
Alon Talmor
CEO & Founder of Ask-AI
Alon Talmor, CEO & Founder of Ask-AI: $20 Million Raised to Power the Future of Enterprise AI
Jason Corso
Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Voxel 51
Jason Corso, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Voxel 51: $15.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Developer Tools for Machine Learning
Joe Witt
CEO & Co-Founder of Datavolo
Joe Witt, CEO & Co-Founder of Datavolo: $21 Million Raised to Unlock the Potential of Unstructured Data for AI
Ian Cairns
CEO & Co-Founder of Freeplay AI
How Freeplay built thought leadership by triangulating insights across hundreds of AI implementations | Ian Cairns
Phillip Liu
CEO of Trustero
Phillip Liu, CEO of Trustero: $8 Million Raised to Build the Future of Compliance AI
Jorge Penalva
CEO & Co-Founder of Lang AI
Jorge Penalva, CEO of Lang.ai: $40 Million+ Raised to Build the Customer Experience Operations Category
Inna Sela
CEO & Founder of illumex
Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO & Founder of illumex: $13 Million Raised to Power the Future of Enterprise LLM Deployments
Sud Bhatija
Co-Founder & COO of Spot AI
Sud, Co-Founder & COO of Spot AI: $93 Million Raised to Build Video AI Agents for the Physical World
Patricia Thaine
Co-Founder & CEO of Private AI
Patricia Thaine, Co-Founder & CEO of Private AI: Over $11 Million Raised to Help Organizations Anonymize PII to Achieve Regulatory Compliance
Jorge Torres
CEO and Co-Founder of MindsDB
Jorge Torres, CEO and Co-Founder of MindsDB: $50 Million Raised to Enable Developers to Integrate Machine Learning into Applications
Meryem Arik
CEO & Co-Founder of Titan ML
Meryem Arik, CEO and Co-Founder of TitanML: $2.8 Million Raised to Revolutionize LLM Deployment
James O’Brien
Co-Founder & COO of Ducky AI
James O’Brien, Co-Founder & COO of Ducky: $2.7 Million Raised to Build Internal Data Search for LLMs
Sumanyu Sharma
CEO & Founder of Hamming AI
How Hamming AI accidentally created a new category by focusing on customer problems instead of category creation | Sumanyu Sharma ($3.8M Raised)
Malte Pietsch
CTO & Co-Founder of Deepset
Malte Pietsch, CTO & Co-Founder of Deepset: $45 Million Raised to Build the Future of LLMs
Michael Louis
Co-Founder & CEO of Cerebrium
How Cerebrium generated millions in ARR through partnerships without a sales team | Michael Louis
Jonathan Dambrot
CEO and Founder of Cranium
Jonathan Dambrot, CEO and Founder at Cranium: $32 Million Raised to Power the Future of AI Security
Gabriel Bayomi Tinoco Kalejaiye
CEO and Co-Founder of Openlayer
Gabriel Bayomi, CEO and Co-Founder of Openlayer: $4.8 Million Raised to Power the Future of Machine Learning Testing
Adi Bathla
CEO & Co-Founder of Revv
Adi Bathla, CEO & Co-Founder of Revv: $33 Million Raised to Power the Future of Auto Repair
Richard Potter
Co-Founder and CEO of Peak
Richard Potter, Co-Founder and CEO at Peak: $118 Million Raised to Power the Future of AI-Enabled Businesses
Justin McCallon
CEO and Co-Founder of Callidus Legal AI
How Callidus scaled Google ads from 3 to 40 leads per day | Justin McCallon
Vahan Petrosyan
CEO & Co-Founder of SuperAnnotate
Vahan Petrosyan, CEO & Co-Founder of SuperAnnotate: $53 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Training Data Infrastructure
Alan Cowen
CEO and Founder of Hume AI
Alan Cowen, CEO and Founder of Hume AI: Over $17 Million Raised to Measure and Improve How Technology Affects Human Emotion
Nilo Rahmani
CEO & Co-Founder of Thoras AI
Nilo Rahmani, CEO & Co-Founder of Thoras AI: $6.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI-Powered Infrastructure Optimization
Amr Awadallah
CEO & Founder of Vectara
Amr Awadallah, CEO & Founder of Vectara: $53 Million Raised to Build the RAG-as-a-Service Category
Matt Theurer
CEO & Co-Founder of HyperSpectral
Matt Theurer, CEO & Co-Founder of HyperSpectral: $8.5 Million Raised to Power the Future of AI-Powered Spectral Intelligence
Tanay Kothari
CEO and Co-Founder of Wispr Flow
How Wispr Flow manufactured viral moments by personally onboarding 500 users on Google Meet | Tanay Kothari ($56M Raised)
Ofer Ronen
CEO & Co-Founder of Tomato.ai
Ofer Ronen, CEO & Co-Founder of Tomato.ai: $12 Million Raised to Build the Accent Softening Category
Suman Kanuganti
How Personal AI scales enterprise contracts by selling to COOs and business users first | Suman Kanuganti ($16M Raised)
Alex Levin
CEO & Co-Founder of Regal AI
Alex Levin, CEO & Co-Founder of Regal AI: $82 Million Raised to Transform Customer Communication with Voice AI
Ryan Alshak
CEO & Founder of Laurel
Ryan Alshak, CEO & Founder of Laurel: $55.7 Million Raised to Build the Future of Gen AI for Timekeeping
David Plon
CEO & Co-Founder of Portrait Analytics
David Plon, CEO & Co-Founder of Portrait Analytics: $10M Raised to Build an AI-Powered Thought Partner for Institutional Investors
Kostas Pardalis
Co-Founder & CEO of Typedef
Why Typedef starts go-to-market activities during the design partner phase instead of after | Kostas Pardalis ($5.5M Raised)
David DeWolf
CEO & President of Knownwell
David DeWolf, CEO & President of Knownwell: $2 Million Raised to Build the Future of Commercial Intelligence
Sauraj Gambhir
Co-Founder of Prior Labs
Sauraj Gambhir, Co-Founder of Prior Labs: $9 Million Raised to Build Foundation Models for Structured Data
Nikola Borisov
CEO & Co-Founder of Deep Infra
Nikola Borisov, CEO & Co-Founder of Deep Infra: $9 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Model Hosting
Krishna Gade
CEO & Founder of Fiddler
Krishna Gade, CEO & Founder of Fiddler: $68 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Observability
Mike Conover
CEO & Co-Founder of Brightwave
Mike Conover, CEO & Co-Founder of Brightwave: $6M Raised to Build the Future of AI-Powered Investment Research
Igor Jablokov
Chairman of Pryon
Igor Jablokov, Chairman of Pryon: $50+ Million Raised to Build the Future of Enterprise Knowledge Management
Damien Garot
Stellar of Stellar
Damien Garot, CEO & Co-Founder of Stellar: $9.3M Raised to Build the Future of Reliable Internet Connectivity for Autonomous Vehicles
Anand Gopalan
CEO and Co-Founder of Vayu Robotics
Anand Gopalan, CEO & Co-Founder of Vayu Robotics: $12.7 Million Raised to Build the Next Wave of Robotics Solutions
Darko Vukovic
CEO & Founder of PolyAPI
Darko Vukovic, CEO & Founder of PolyAPI: $5 Million Raised to Transform Enterprise Middleware Through Native Code Developm
Bob van Luijt
CEO and Co-Founder of Weaviate
Bob van Luijt, CEO and Co-Founder of Weaviate: Over $67 Million Raised to Power the Future of Vector Databases
Aron Kirschen
CEO of SEMRON
Aron Kirschen, CEO of SEMRON: $7.3M Raised to Build Ultra-Efficient 3D AI Chips
Jonathan Corbin
CEO & Co-Founder of Maven AGI
Jonathan Corbin, CEO and Co-Founder of Maven AGI: $28 Million Raised to Build the Future of Customer Experience
Tony Zhang
Founder & CEO of Tera AI
Tony Zhang, Founder & CEO of Tera AI: $8M Raised to Build the Future of Robotics Operating Systems
Davit Baghdasaryan
Co-Founder and CEO of Krisp
Davit Baghdasaryan, Co-Founder and CEO of Krisp: $19 Million Raised to Build the Voice Productivity Category
Krish Ramineni
CEO of Fireflies
Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies: $19 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Meeting Assistants
Abhishek Sen
CEO and Co-Founder of NumberEight
How NumberEight books 45 targeted meetings per conference while avoiding booths entirely | Abhishek Sen
Barbara Lewis
CMO of Coactive AI
The Siebel vs Salesforce Truth Every B2B Marketer Should Know
Deirdre Mahon
VP of Marketing of super{set}
Why Marketing Beats Sales Hiring at AI Startups
William Gaviria Rojas
Field CTO & Co-Founder of CoactiveAI
William Gaviria Rojas, Field CTO & Co-Founder of CoactiveAI: $44 Million Raised to Build the Future of Multimodal AI Applications
David Reger
CEO of NEURA Robotics
David Reger, CEO of NEURA Robotics: €185M Raised to Power the Future of Cognitive Robotics
Jeong-Suh Choi
CEO of Bobidi
Jeong-Suh Choi, CEO Bobidi: Nearly $6 Million raised to Deliver Better, More Inclusive AI Solutions for Developers
Behnam Bastani
CEO & Founder of OpenInfer
How OpenInfer discovered unexpected government traction by focusing on data ownership pain points | Behnam Bastani