Ignite Startups: Building AI That Runs Marketing for B2B Startups with Harsha Vankayalapati | Ep238

Imagine if your biggest growth bottleneck wasn’t product, talent, or capital, but the sheer chaos of modern go-to-market. Too many tools. Too many channels. Too much guesswork. Now imagine handing that mess to an AI agent that actually knows what it’s doing.

That’s the bet Harsha Vankayalapati is making. Former Microsoft engineer, two-time YC founder, and now co-founder and CEO of AgentWeb, Harsha is building autonomous AI agents that run go-to-market execution for B2B startups, from content and SEO to paid ads and outbound. His contrarian belief, sharpened by hard startup scars, is simple, GTM execution, not ideas, is what kills most companies, and AI is finally good enough to fix it.

In this episode, we unpack what happens when founders stop duct-taping together CRMs, agencies, and automation tools, and instead let agents do the heavy lifting.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

00:01 – Introduction to Harsha Vankayalapati & AgentWeb

02:00 – Origin Story: From India to Microsoft

04:20 – Getting into Y Combinator & First Startup Pivot

08:50 – Why Go-To-Market Is the Real Bottleneck

11:50 – The Idea Behind AgentWeb

14:00 – Product vs Distribution in B2B

16:10 – Pretotyping & Validating Demand with Paid Ads

18:20 – The Core Pain AgentWeb Solves

21:15 – Why Now: AI, CAC, and the Attention Economy

24:50 – What AgentWeb Has Solved (and What’s Still Hard)

27:50 – Autonomous GTM vs Traditional Marketing Automation

31:40 – Human Taste vs AI Execution

34:20 – Reliability Challenges with AI Agents

38:40 – Benchmarks vs Real-World AI Performance

40:50 – Ideal Customer Profile for AgentWeb

43:30 – Early Traction & Signs of Product-Market Fit

45:10 – Onboarding, Pricing & Managed Service Model

49:50 – The Future of Agentic Go-To-Market

52:50 – Rapid Fire: Strong Opinions & Hard Decisions

56:00 – Long-Term Vision & Closing Thoughts

Harsha’s journey, from building enterprise workflows at Microsoft to watching his own startups stall on distribution, leads to a sharp conclusion, the future isn’t just vibe coding products, it’s vibe growing companies.

Pull quotes:

“Go-to-market isn’t an idea problem, it’s an execution problem.”

“If we don’t fix how products reach people, mediocre products with great marketing will win.”

From newsletters to neural nets, this conversation connects Harsha’s past building systems at massive scale to a future where founders might never need an agency again, just the right agent.

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