The 3 skills early B2B founders can't fake — Sriharsha Guduguntla

Sriharsha Guduguntla, Co-founder and CEO of Hyperbound, shares his journey of navigating an early-stage startup pivot and the harsh realities of the B2B tech landscape. Originally building a product in the crowded AI email automation space, the Hyperbound team realized that regardless of how good their AI copy was, the email channel itself was suffering from declining engagement. This prompted a hard look at where AI could solve a more fundamental problem, leading them to tackle the notoriously reactive world of sales training. Harsha highlights a critical flaw in modern sales coaching: the over-reliance on post-mortem analysis through call recordings. He argues that simply telling a rep what they did wrong after a lost deal is like telling a basketball player to 'shoot better' after watching game film. Instead, athletes spend hours in the gym shooting free throws. Hyperbound brings this 'gym' concept to sales, allowing reps to run hundreds of AI-simulated practice scenarios to master objection handling before they ever speak to a live prospect. Beyond product strategy, Harsha details his philosophy on lean growth and founder development. Despite having traction and going through Y Combinator, his team waited eight months before making their first hire, insisting on maximizing their bandwidth before adding headcount. For early-stage technical founders, he emphasizes that theoretical leadership studies should take a backseat to mastering the three non-negotiable skills: selling the product, coding, and talking directly to customers.

Discussed in this episode

Why the Hyperbound team pivoted away from building an AI email automation tool due to declining channel response rates.
The fundamental difference between reactive coaching using call recordings and proactive preparation via AI simulations.
Why sales reps need to practice simulated scenarios hundreds of times, much like athletes practicing free throws.
The three non-negotiable skills for early-stage founders: selling the product, coding, and talking to customers.
How going through Y Combinator forced technical founders to learn enterprise sales cycles and speak effectively with investors.
The strategy of staying lean and delaying the first full-time hire until eight months into the company's traction.
Why building a better product in a saturated market isn't always enough if the underlying channel is deteriorating.
The value of learning leadership and management skills through trial and error rather than relying solely on self-improvement books.

Episode highlights

0:00 — The three critical skills for B2B founders
1:30 — Sriharsha's background and Hyperbound's origin story
3:00 — Pivoting away from the crowded AI email space
4:45 — Why traditional sales training needs a proactive upgrade
6:30 — The athlete analogy: game film vs gym practice
8:15 — Facing the reality of declining cold email response rates
10:00 — Differentiating AI simulations from reactive call intelligence
12:30 — Evolving from a technical engineer to a sales-driven founder
14:20 — Learning sales motions and investor relations at Y Combinator
16:00 — Balancing growth and staying lean before your first hire
18:30 — Rapid-fire questions and Harsha's hidden musical talents

Key takeaways

Pivot quickly when the underlying channel or market dynamics deteriorate.
Shift your sales coaching from reactive post-mortems to proactive simulation practice.
Founders must master selling, coding, and talking directly to customers.
Stay lean and only hire when your current workload becomes completely unmanageable.
Learn leadership through real-world mistakes, not just theoretical self-improvement content.

Transcript

When you're an early stage startup, there's only three things that matter and that's uh you know, selling the product, coding, and talking to your customers. Period, right? Uh if you can master those three things, you will evolve into the leader that you want to be. Welcome back to another episode of The Revenue Reimagined Podcast.

We are stoked. We have with us today Sri Harsha, Gooda, Gutala, who is the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbound, YCOM alum from summer of 2023, and formerly he was on the Salesforce Einstein team working on their AI chat builder. She's also a former founding engineer at Bloom, which was a financial education startup. And with his background in conversational AI and EdTech, he shared with us and we'll share with you that he's super excited to be building the next generation of sales coaching and training, which we all know is a space that desperately needs some help.

Sri, thanks for joining us, man. Awesome. I appreciate it. Happy to welcome.

Yeah, thank you so much. I I'm uh very happy to be here and really excited to get this thing going. Yeah, I Adam passed the first test, he was able to say your last name, and first name, so. I I asked before we started recording, I went through it five times with it.

Awesome. I feel that. Sri, that's not your last name. Yeah, I'll just say Sri because I will definitely mess up the last name.

So, um, so uh, one of the things we like to talk to founders about as we go through this conversation is the origin story. Like, why did you guys build what you're building? What was the connection? You've done a lot of interesting uh work through conversational AI in the AI space.

So, why go after this and why are you so passionate about it? Yeah, 100%, Dale. I mean, it's uh, I won't lie, it's been a long journey to get here and uh, you know, finding a gap in Sales Tech is is uh one of the most difficult things to do because you know, it's notoriously like just super overcrowded, very saturated. There's 100 different clones of the same product.

So, it it was not easy finding uh the problem that we did. But, you know, I can tell you what happened is like we went through Y Combinator last summer. Uh for people that aren't familiar with Y Combinator, it's a startup accelerator. Uh and you know, we we raised our first seed round after Y Combinator.

And uh yeah, through that, we were actually working on a different idea before this. Uh it was like an email automation, you know, Lavender, Reggie, competitor essentially, right? And uh that product, we had a really good product, we had a lot of customers. Problem was that the email channel is kind of at a downtick right now.

Right? So, we decided, you know, maybe this wasn't where we wanted to be for the next 10 years. And so, we uh just talked to our customers back then, talked to over hundreds and hundreds of sales leaders and found that training uh was just one of the most difficult things to do. Right?

And uh we really we the question that we asked just naturally, because we're both engineers, we're not sales people by trade, so uh we're like, why don't you just build an AI that you can practice with? Right? Because that's what we did. When we started our company initially, we built this chatbot internally that we'd practice like objection handling with, because that's just how we do things.

And uh, you know, naturally, we talked about that with sales leaders and they were like, huh, like, could you build that for anyone? And we're like, probably, right? And that's how kind of Hyperbound was born. And you know, we built the first bot back then, showed it to a bunch of leaders and it's evolved over time.

Product is uh just way ahead of where it was on day one, so just really really glad that we found something uh that's that's solving a real need. Yeah, you know, it it it's interesting when you look at the space, first off, I'm glad that you didn't go into the email space. Um, I think that it's crowded, um, it's confusing, and I think that even with AI, um, I would say it's gotten worse, not better, uh, unfortunately. Like, the emails I get from AI are so obviously AI.

Um, hey Adam, I hope you're doing well. Uh, so I'm glad you pivoted away from that because I think that when you look at where the need is and where AI could help the most, it's definitely in like training and developing and how do we bring it all full circle. Um, but a lot hasn't been tied into, right? Like, sales training is this underappreciated, undervalued, uh, thing in orgs that it's like, oh, well, we'll we'll just hire some enablement person and they'll like put together a slide deck on training.

Like, talk to me about your philosophy on training and how it comes full circle with Hyperbound? Because I I think it starts with that philosophy, right? Like, what should training be? Yeah.

100%. So, the way we think about it is, you know, you have tools like Gong and Intention and all these, you know, call recording tools that claim to coach your reps and clone your best performer, right? And in some ways, I makes sense, right? You you you're basically taking these calls, analyzing them, figuring out what went wrong, what you could improve on, and then trying to impart that advice back to your reps, trying to close the loop, right?

But the but the problem with that is it's reactive coaching, right? You're doing this all after the deal completed. And so it's more like a postmortem rather than like a proactive approach, right? So, what we're trying to do at Hyperbound is basically just change the entire way training is done, right?

Like instead of, you know, trying to go fix everything after the deal has closed, after you've lost it, actually taking a more proactive approach and preparing for it ahead of time using a tool like Hyperbound, where you can jump into a simulated environment, practice for that scenario before it even happens, right? And being able to anticipate that. So, you know, now what you can do is use tools like Gong to basically anticipate what scenarios might come up and proactively prepare your reps for those situations in the future, right? So, when you say philosophy, I wouldn't say there's anything too complicated here.

Every sales leader knows that practice and preparation is very key to, you know, having a successful sales call. It's just that up until now, there was no way to really implement that or, you know, actually go out and build these simulations. And we've kind of built this tool that makes it very easy to build those scenarios and build those simulations for your reps to practice. Yeah, it's super important to to get the practice.

We were actually we just um launched our uh a conversation with Larry Long Jr. and he was talking about like if you're not practicing, if you're not executing, if you're not doing it when everyone else is looking on the side, like, not on game day, but actually when you're should be practicing off hours, then uh you're not going to be successful. So, uh I I love that you're doing it. I think it's right for uh disruption in this industry, and I think it's needed heavily.

Um, one of the things that many of our founders that we talk with deal with are are these setbacks. So you talked about one of your setbacks, which was, hey, we went down one path on the email marketing or the email front, but found that was a it's not going to be something that worked out well. What's another setback that you guys uh ran into that actually became a set up for success in in the future of of Hyperbound? Yeah, so, you know, I I think it was just being very real about the situation of email.

You know, like, when we first started it, like we we were just, you know, as most engineers or technical founders tend to be, it's like, okay, if we build a better product, uh we can we can succeed, right? So, our goal was just, let's just build a better product than Lavender, let's just build a better product than Reggie.ai, right? And uh, who who has also totally pivoted, by the way.

Yeah, they're all pivoting. They're all pivoting for sure. And you know, we we we knew that we could build a better product because it's it's not that we don't have the technical skills to do so, uh but it was more like, uh, can we actually build uh build a product that just writes better emails? And and we did so, right?

We did that. But I think uh the problem was even with really good emails and really good content, uh, they people were not getting the response rates that they wanted, right? And that's a big problem uh that we just could not solve or overcome. So, uh we we just realized, we just had to come to the hard truth that like, okay, this is not our fault.

This is just email as a whole right now, right? So, customers we found were just starting to move to other channels, and primarily, like, you know how it is, 2024 has literally been the age of cold calling. Like, it's people are just jumping on the phones now more than ever. So, it's just a really great time for us to jump into this space and uh and see see what we can do to disrupt it.

So, I I agree with you 100%, um, that people are jumping on the phones more than ever. And as someone who does take cold calls, Dale doesn't. I do. Um, but as someone who does take cold calls, I can tell you they're not getting a whole lot better.

Um, I I have a stepson that is just started a BDR role, um, for the very first time ever, and I could tell you the training he got was like, here's your lead list, go listen to a couple Gong calls and go make a phone call. Um, so there wasn't a whole lot of training, which is frustrating. So what you're saying resonates to me deeply on a on a on a personal level. How do you differentiate um, what you're doing from the Gongs of the world, other than like, oh, you know, you could just, you know, it's real time and proactive versus reactive.

But to me as a sales leader, it's more than that, right? Because most sales leaders are going to say, well, I have my team go, you know, listen to Gong, and then we manually role play, like, how would you handle that scenario? How is how is Hyperbound different? How are you changing the game?

Yeah, so, you know, the whole point of Hyperbound is So, here's the thing, right? It's like, if you take like the athlete example, right? So like, right now, the athletes, like, let let's take basketball because I'm a big basketball fan, right? Now, you you play a basketball game and you actually go home, watch the tape, you review it, you like review with the coach, right?

And then you go out and try to not make those same mistakes the next game, right? But if someone just told the player like, hey, just shoot better. Make sure your free throw, make sure you make your free throws, right? Are they actually going to go do that in the real game, right?

What they're going to do is they're going to go to the gym, shoot a thousand free throws until they get it right, right? Even you even see pros like, you know, the best players in the world, like Steph Curry, LeBron James, they have been shooting free throws for 25 years. And they still shoot them. Every day.

Yep. Right? So, I think the point that we're trying to get across here is, you're doing the post analysis, that's great, right? And you're telling your reps, like, here's what you need to improve on, here's what you need to do.

Now, how do you actually get them to do that? How do you actually hold them accountable, like, the how do you actually hold them accountable to what they're doing after that, right? Because there's no way to know unless they hop on the next call, mess that one up also, and then you have to go tell them again and remind them again, right? But Hyperbound, you can actually just build a simulation inside of Hyperbound and tell them, hey, go go do a simulation of this 100 times, and I'm going to go verify that you did it correctly because we're going to have all the AI score carding.

In fact, coaches don't have to do much work to actually analyze these calls, we're doing most of the heavy lifting. And that way you can see, okay, is this rep qualified? Have they figured out how to handle this objection? Are they certified, essentially, right?

So, it's just a way of giving people like, oh, you know, like, a way to practice, like I've been saying the whole time, essentially. And and that's like the big differentiator between Gong and us. Like, I wouldn't even say we're really competitors, you know. True.

Uh we're on very different sides of the table. Yeah, and I think um I think there is a place where you guys can kind of coexist because what they're doing and where you guys are going, I think you're two different, uh, it's like a niche play. Um, so as a founder, one of the things I'm curious about a lot is the evolution of your leadership style. So, you were an engineer to begin with, you started doing engineering.

Now you're moving into like a founder role, which arguably should always be the best sales uh resource in the company. So, how is, you know, how are you evolving as a leader for your organization, um, as you guys grow? People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win.

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com. That's a great question, and it's one of the things that I'm actively working on as well. You know, it's the nice part is, when you're an early stage startup, there's only three things that matter, and that's uh, you know, selling the product, coding, and talking to your customers. Period, right?

Uh, if you can master those three things, you will evolve into the leader that you want to be, right? Because you're going to become the expert in your space. You're going to become the person that's closest to your customers, that knows them in and out and what they want, right? So, I don't really think of it as like, like, you know, this whole self-improvement journey where I got to read all these books or like learn how to become a leader.

I see it as, okay, let me focus on the three things that will get me to become successful, get me to become the expert that I want to be, and, you know, over time, uh those skills are going to develop and those are going to come uh as we build the company. Of course, there's a lot of other things that come with this, right? I eventually we're going to have a big team, we're going to have employees that we're going to have to manage. So, there's going to be some leadership skills that I'll need to kind of learn on the fly as we do that.

So, I'm looking forward to it. Uh I've always been one to take a challenge, so I'm really excited for that. Awesome. Yeah, and I think it's good like breaking things into smaller chunks like threes, like I think people can digest that, so I I I think that's a good strategy and I think founders listening to this uh conversation, like, start breaking things into smaller pieces and don't try to take everything all together.

I I like that advice. Exactly. Yeah. I want to I want to double-click on the on the leadership because, you know, you talked about things that a lot of people I think overlook that as you grow, you're going to have a team and you're going to have to hire people and, you know, there's other skills that you have to learn.

We we talk with a lot of founders, both on this podcast and off this podcast. Um, and coach a lot of founders through that growth. How are you looking at, um, resources or coaching or guidance on like to learn those skills? Because it's not as simple as saying, oh, I'm going to, you know, pick this book and it's going to teach me how to be a better leader.

It's going to teach me how to manage people. Like, do you have a group of other founders that you interact with? Like, talk to me a little bit about that leadership evolution and how you're going about it. That's a great question.

Yeah. So, you know, lucky enough for us, having gone through Y Combinator was a huge huge push in the right direction, right? Like, when we joined YC, uh we I've never done a sales call in my life. Uh so, uh it like YC definitely, you know, prepared me for a lot of the scenarios that that were going to come up, prepared me for how to speak with investors, how to uh actually uh you know, take a sales call, how to run a sales cycle, right?

Like, just some of the basics. Uh and, you know, a lot of it comes down to just uh applying it and seeing it kind of unfold in real life, right? Uh and I I won't lie, like, even a tool like Hyperbound helped me a lot with preparing like our own tool helped me uh become a better sales person, right? Uh and on top of that, I would also say, you know, like, I can't speak to like employee management and all that stuff right now.

We have one employee at the moment. So, it's it's hard to say that that's still one to manage though. Exactly. I mean, this guy all the time and it's like it's tough.

It it's tough. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say, you know, what that's going to look like down the line, but, you know, I'm always one to kind of just, um, adapt, learn on the fly, like, I, you know, I'm not trying to force anything or or trying to go out and watch a bunch of self-improvement videos to improve. Like, I believe that doing it, going through it, making the mistakes, that's the only way to learn.

Awesome. Adam, at Revenue Reimagined, we believe in giving back to the community. You've been gracious enough to provide a gift to the audience. Uh, why don't you tell them what it's all about?

Yeah, 100%. So, basically, you know, I we built a lot of bots on Hyperbound. We have thousands and thousands of bots that we built over the period of the last couple months. So, you know, I would be very happy to build a custom bot for everyone that watches this podcast.

And uh we can uh we'll we'll have that built for you and That's a lot of that's a lot of bots. A lot of bots. And yeah, we'll have like a link that you can actually access and start uh talking to the bot and try selling to it. And we'll have a scorecard as well to see how well you do on the call.

I love that. That's super cool. We'll uh we'll we'll drop that in the show notes. I I want to talk about, you know, as you grow, especially coming out of Y Combinator, um, times have changed over the past, I don't know, 18 months or so.

Excuse me. And now it's really important to balance growth versus like sustainability, right? Um, it used to be go hire as fast as you can, as many people as you can, and go spend as much money as you possibly can because God knows we're just going to get the money back. Um, and now that's changed to we want you to grow quickly, but it has to be in the sustainable, slow, steady manner.

How do you balance that growth versus sustainability? And what are some of like the hard choices you've had to make in doing so? That's a great question. Uh, you know, I am a first-time founder, so, uh, you know, there's a lot of things that I am kind of learning through making those mistakes and and and, you know, making uh, ta-taking bold steps that are kind of scary at times, right?

Uh but I think the one mantra that we've had at Hyperbound and I think thanks to YC as well is just been basically be as lean as possible and do things only when you need them, right? So, what I mean by that is, if, um, let's say like hiring, right? Pretty much every company that went through our batch during YC had already hired people, like they had, uh, like, you know, multiple engineers, they had people contracting for them, they had designers, all that kind of stuff. We didn't hire until two weeks ago.

Our first employee came two weeks ago. This is eight months into the company, right? And it was very much intentional, right? Not that we didn't need the help.

Of course, we needed the help. Uh but I think Otto and I have always been just advocates of like, let's do as much as we can with the resources that we have. And when we reach the tipping point where we can't handle it anymore, that's when we're going to hire, right? And so, even after getting traction for the company, first month and a half, January, February, uh, you know, even like first week of March, like we were like, okay, we can do this, we can do this.

Until we reached a point where we're like, we have way too much work and not enough bandwidth, and that's when we decided to hire, right? So, that's the way I like to think about it, at least uh in terms of like how to balance the growth and sustainability. It's more like, let's uh, let's spend money when we need it. Let's get employees when we need them.

Let's buy resources as needed. Uh it's it's never like uh uh we're never going to do anything because we just feel like it or, you know, something like that. It's always going to be as Smart. Love that.

Love that. Let's wrap this thing up with a little bit of rapid fire. Uh an answer a word or two. Let's uh let's let's fire 'em off.

Uh so, first one, um, if you weren't in tech, what profession would you be in and why? That's a great question. So, most people don't know this, but I actually have a YouTube channel and an Instagram and a Tik Tok, where I basically make covers. Like, uh, you know, I'm a sing I like to sing on the side.

Uh I also play the cello and and the piano a little bit. And so yeah, I just love to make covers. I've done a couple music videos here and there, so yeah, catch me on YouTube. Very cool.

That's super cool. We'll answer your question, I would love to become a musician, uh, if not for tech, but that is like definitely a pipe dream. Cool. Nice.

What is uh what's the one word you would use to describe your startup journey so far? Yeah, um, that's a difficult one. I'm just going to cop out here and say, difficult. That that that that's okay.

Don't don't overthink it. Don't overthink it. Yeah, I mean, I I think it's not easy for sure. So.

Yeah, difficult. Hey, that's good. Um, what's the first app you check when you wake up? That's a good question.

Oh, no. This is going to be bad. LinkedIn. It's okay.

I I I I it wasn't always LinkedIn. It used to be like Facebook or Instagram, uh Yeah. Uh now now it's LinkedIn for sure. All right, last one, and I'm going to bring it back to you wanting to, um, have a career in in music.

What is the one song that comes to mind that gets you in the zone for work? Yeah, that's uh, that's a tough one, too. I mean, I have a lot of songs that I like. But yeah, mostly mostly like, I actually sing a lot of Indian music.

Like, Hindi music, Telugu music, uh Tamil music. Yeah. So uh yeah, like there's actually a lot of uh Hindi music that I love to listen to uh that most people watching this podcast probably don't know, but, you know, uh yeah, that's that's my go-to. I love it.

Awesome. Dale Dale's going to let me wrap it up. I was waiting for him to wrap it up. Sri Harsha, thank you so much for joining us, talking about your founder journey, uh talking about your product, your company, your leadership, um, and where you guys plan on going.

We're excited to uh follow along. Where can folks find you? Where could they learn more about you? I'm going to guess LinkedIn, but I don't want to steal your thunder.

Yeah. No, thank you so much for having me, Adam and Dale. Uh basically, if you guys want to reach out to me, feel free to just message me on LinkedIn or uh feel free to go follow our Hyperbound page on LinkedIn. You can also visit Hyperbound.

ai to try out try out some of our free demo bots on our website. And uh if you are absolutely dying for a demo, just uh shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll be happy to prioritize you. I love it.

Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Cheers.

Thank you.