Tushar gave his app away for free. It spread to 200 locations. Almost nobody used it, and nobody paid a single dollar. So he started charging from day one, with a one-month pilot that rolled into a full annual contract. In Q4 2025, his team closed more revenue than in the two years before. Delightree just raised $25M.

In this episode, Tushar breaks down the three questions he used to qualify every customer, how turning a dusty ops binder into TikTok-style training became his biggest source of leads, and why his best cold email was a screenshot of the prospect's own logo.

Why You Should Listen

• Why free pilots kill real feedback, and what to offer instead.
• How to qualify a customer on pain, budget, and outcome before you sell.
• Why you should ignore feature requests that muddy your go-to-market.
• How a screenshot with the prospect's logo beat every other cold email.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, Delightree, Tushar Mishra, franchise software, frontline employees, customer onboarding, customer qualification, outbound sales, cold email, net revenue retention, AI training

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:03:18 The Brand That Flew Him to Dallas
• 00:06:59 From Review Software to Delightree
• 00:12:10 A Free App Nobody Used
• 00:13:31 Ruthless Customer Qualification
• 00:16:56 From Ops Binder to TikTok-Style Training
• 00:22:50 More Revenue in One Quarter Than Two Years
• 00:26:52 A New Demo After Every Call
• 00:30:27 Which Feature Requests to Ignore
• 00:37:07 The Cold Email With Their Logo

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Hermann wanted to build Stripe for phone plans. Every carrier said no and investors passed. So he plugged into an aggregator with terrible economics and sold to kids' smartwatch makers losing 30 to 40% of devices to returns. That niche paid for his seed and Series A. Then AT&T opened the door. Today Gigs powers phone plans for Revolut, Klarna, Nubank and Cash App and wins 90% of the deals it goes after.

In this episode, Hermann breaks down why a small niche with a sharp pain point beats a big market with a mild one, how a founder tells a 15-year story to investors without losing them, and why landing an enterprise customer is statesmanship, not salesmanship.

Why You Should Listen

• Why 30 to 40% return rates made kids' smartwatch makers the perfect first customer.
• How building on an aggregator with no margin got Gigs its first deal with AT&T.
• Why you should borrow another company's story until you have your own.
• How working every layer of an enterprise at once wins 90% of deals.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, Gigs, Hermann Frank, embedded telecom, eSIM, telecom API, fintech, enterprise sales, founder led sales, niche markets, Y Combinator, Stripe for telecom, storytelling for fundraising

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:02:03 Product Market Fit Three Times
• 00:06:21 From Berlin Wi-Fi to Stripe for Telecom
• 00:16:10 No Carrier Would Talk to Them
• 00:19:35 Kids' Smartwatches With 40% Returns
• 00:24:11 Why Fintechs Want to Sell Phone Plans
• 00:30:22 Telling a 15-Year Story to VCs
• 00:37:18 Statesmanship, Not Salesmanship
• 00:43:33 Stay in Sales Longer Than You Should

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Daniel Saks built AppDirect into a marketplace moving upwards of $10B a year in gross merchandise value. Now he runs Landbase, an AI go-to-market company with data on 40 million startups, and it just raised a $30M Series A. So when he talks about cold outbound, he is not guessing. He is reading what actually happens across millions of messages. He also spent two years in a windowless room building an app store for Bell Canada that launched to crickets. Harley from Shopify messaged him: the Bell business app store has less traffic than my intern's blog.

In this episode, Daniel breaks down what response rates on cold email actually look like today, how to build a living TAM map instead of paying a consulting firm a few hundred thousand for a dead one, and why three touches get you 90% of the result while five gets you flagged as spam.

Why You Should Listen

• Why product market fit is never won once, only re-won in each new niche.
• How a 2% email response rate becomes 8-10% on a tight enough list.
• Why you should not run outbound at all until people can look you up.
• How to hand an agent your CRM and call notes so it tells you who to call today.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, Landbase, Daniel Saks, AppDirect, outbound sales, cold email, AI SDR, go-to-market, TAM mapping, agentic AI, sales development, B2B marketplaces

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:02:28 Product Market Fit Is Magnetic Momentum
• 00:04:44 The Bell Launch Nobody Came To
• 00:14:24 Leaving the Company He Built
• 00:16:27 Training a Model on What Outbound Works
• 00:26:36 Start With a Living TAM Map
• 00:34:09 Who Gets Your Time, Who Gets Autopilot
• 00:39:50 The Response Rates to Actually Expect
• 00:49:26 The Biggest Outbound Mistake

Send me a message to let me know what you think!