Your GTM Foundations Are Probably Wrong | Vihaar Nandigala

Vihaar Nandigala, co-founder of Orange Slice, argues that the modern go-to-market tech stack is bloated with bundled tools that do 27 things poorly instead of one thing well. Having tested over a thousand sales tools, Vihaar suggests a future where sales infrastructure relies on robust data layers and highly specialized, verticalized AI agents rather than logging into dozens of platforms. He challenges the current obsession with hyper-personalization, noting that no magic combination of words will force someone to buy if they don't actually have the problem. Instead, he envisions a future where prospecting operates like a content recommendation algorithm. AI will handle the heavy lifting of matching buyer intent and timing, while sales professionals focus on what humans do best: building relationships and creatively solving problems. As a result, the SDR role will transform from a grindy mass-outbound function into high-level, relationship-driven nurturing.

Discussed in this episode

• Why bundled go-to-market tools that try to do everything usually result in a suboptimal, bloated user experience.
• The shift toward separating the CRM database layer from the UI layer to reduce noise and increase customization.
• How Ramp built its own custom internal sales terminal to optimize reps for their specific selling methodology.
• Why hyper-personalization matters significantly less than finding customers who already have the problem at the right time.
• The limitations of static contact databases and why the future of prospecting relies on custom, live internet scraping.
• How the future of AI prospecting will mimic content recommendation algorithms that automatically match buyers and sellers.
• The transition of the SDR role from manual, mass outbound activities to strategic relationship building and nurturing.
• Why advice from other startup founders regarding go-to-market strategies should be taken with a grain of salt.

Episode highlights

1. 1:30 — The problem with bundled sales tools
2. 3:45 — Treating CRMs as just a database layer
3. 6:15 — Ramp's custom internal sales UI
4. 9:20 — Why mass AI sequencing is failing
5. 12:10 — The origin story of Orange Slice
6. 15:30 — Why personalization cannot fix bad timing
7. 18:45 — Live scraping versus static databases
8. 21:10 — Building sales skills in SMB environments
9. 24:00 — The future of AI-native prospecting
10. 27:15 — How the SDR role will evolve

Key takeaways

• Stop buying bloated tools; choose niche software that solves one problem perfectly.
• Personalization is useless if the prospect doesn't actively need your product.
• CRMs should be treated as backend databases, not necessarily the UI.
• The future of prospecting is a matching algorithm, not mass cold sequencing.
• SDRs will shift from mass outbound grinders to strategic relationship builders.

Transcript

the the worst tools I've definitely tried have been those tools that just try to bundle everything and do everything at once. You did one thing really well, but now you want to try to capture everyone's market share, instead of doing one thing well, you do 27 things shitty. Generally for sales teams, there should just be one or I think two tools and every other tool should kind of connect into those tools. Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by none other than Revenue Reimagine.

Today's guest is Vihar Nundagala, who is the co-founder of Orange Slice. I love the name by the way. A YCS25 startup that just raised $5.3 million to help sales teams find customers who already want to buy.

Vihar's tested over a thousand sales tools, that's a lot of numbers, built an exit startups before graduating college and is now building AI agents designed to cut through go to market noise and surface real buying intent. We're going to talk about signals versus noise, the future of prospecting and what happens when the next generation of founders redesign sales from first principles. Vihar, thanks for joining the show. No, thanks for having me guys.

I'm super stoked to talk about everything sales. Awesome. VR, I really appreciate it. And right in the initial piece like testing a thousand sales tools.

Like I thought I tested a lot of sales tools. I get out the sales tools. What did that experience teach you about the current go to market landscape and the state of go to market? Yeah, so I've tried every I think tool out there in the sun.

Um, and what it really the the key lesson I learned is the bar for go to market sales tools is actually very high. A lot of them are actually a lot better than you think, um, which is surprising. And I think that's also why we have so many tools because there's so many different functions of sales that need to be optimized. And that was actually a big lesson I don't think people actually realize just because there's a lot of tools you assume actually a lot of them aren't very useful.

But I I always felt like each tool had their specific niche they did very well. And with those the but the biggest problem is just juggling all those tools and I'd say even before juggling them just education, knowing about what tool is good for what is one of the hardest parts I see other young founders and other people starting their sales orgs really struggle with of, hey, I want to do this sort of niche sales activity, you know, what are the tools that are really great for this? Um, and so just trying out all the tools just lets you as a person understand, okay, um, you know, enrichment tools are great for this. This is great for contact information.

You can kind of orchestrate your own um sales and and organization. So I'm I'm going to push back a little bit um, because I'm feeling a little spicy today. So I work I I I I worked with a company that had 37 sales tools for the reps to log into. No no exaggeration, 37 sales tools.

And I hear you on niche and I I can certainly argue on the bar being high for go to market sales tools versus not. Maybe you've tried some better tools than we have, um, but I've tried some things that I'm like I don't even know how the 37 layers of approval allowed this to hit the product. But consolidation, like do you really as a founder want to have to log into a different tool for every different part of go to market that you want? Or does someone just need to get top of funnel right?

Middle of funnel right? Bottom of funnel right? Yeah, no, I definitely agree with you that you kind of have this um tool exhaustion where you really shouldn't be logging into 27 different tools. Um, 37.

But yeah, not even 27. 37. Yeah, that's that's how big it is. Like I can't even imagine like generally for sales teams, there should just be one or I think two tools and every other tool should kind of connect into those tools.

And so when I think of more sales tooling, I actually think of it as sales infrastructure of like, hey, what are the actual infrastructure layers, um, we we set up our sales org with. And so when I talk about a lot of these tools, um, often times, they're just integrated into the standard, um, CRM space, or wherever the wherever the reps operate. So a lot of those tools actually I think bubble up, or at least the ones that I try and and find a lot of value from, I'm not the biggest fan of of connecting and logging into a thousand different tools. I'm very big on the future of sales being super interconnected in between tooling, but then obviously each vertical is just a different provider, um, that you just set up one time and then you never log into again.

Yeah, and it'll be super interesting to see what ends up happening even in the realm of like a CRM for example. So I know you're you're taking on like signals and data. But if we think about basics, the things that we use the most has been CRM from like the beginning of time from a sales perspective. But if we're honest with ourselves, like it's just a big database.

Like, so like do you put a UI that really is specific for your organization on top of a database like superbase or, you know, sequel, like you could do something super simple. And is that where it's going to end up going because these these CRM, or these let's just tell them go to market technologies are trying to be everything to everybody, and then they're just creating noise. Yeah, definitely I agree. The the worst tools I've definitely tried have been those tools that just try to bundle everything and do everything at once because often times they're just doing everything suboptimally or I find out they're just wrapping another tool and I can do it cheaper with that other tool.

I mean, that's what happened with the various sales engagement platforms, right? Like they started with sequencing and then they moved to, well, I do this and this and and I I do everything. Uh, Clary and Copy are probably Dale and we talk about these folks a lot, the two biggest examples. It's like, you did one thing really well, but now you want to try to capture everyone's market share, and instead of doing one thing well, you do 27 things shitty.

Yeah. No, yeah, I think that's a similar thing on how we feel when we're testing new sales tools. If they're really just specific and and niche and verticalized, usually they're they're very good at the actual tasks they want. All the generic platforms have always I think they're great for beginners or or maybe, you know, solo entrepreneurs that need sort of bundled services and reduced friction.

But for anything serious sales org, it's always it's always good to break down and and figure out what infrastructure works best for each company. Um, and to to talk to Dale's point as well on the, um, I'm actually forgetting, what was the original question? It was, oh, the CRM layer. Uh, and so that's actually an interesting one I I've I've thought about a lot of, you know, is this idea of can you vibe code a certain interface on your your database as a sales org and make it super customized?

And I think a great example of this, I don't know if you guys have actually seen, but Ramp actually created their own internal like sales hub for their sales reps. Um, which was really great. Cool. Because Ramp's a I think a $30 billion company now and they're so big, they realize like, oh, our method of selling is so unique and we want to optimize our sales reps for it.

They created their own sequencers, intent signals, all of these things, and their own like custom dashboard um that sits on top of and connects to all their internal tooling, like CRMs, sequencers, and that's where a lot of their sales reps live in like this custom, um built sales terminal, which I which when they released that, it was super interesting, and I think it was like a point towards the direction of, okay, a lot of teams because the cost of software is going to down for UI and things like that, we can start to customize it really with our for our sales reps. But I do think CRMs and those database layers are are so fundamentally important as infrastructure because they're things you can't do wrong and they're things you can't vibe code really well, those like basic features that I think they'll always be around there for a while, but I I'm curious on you guys' stance. Dale Dale will tell you CRMs are going away. Um, or need to go away.

Really? Well, I so so here's the thing. So we've been working with a lot of clients and they're starting to experiment across like how do you, where do you put the data, right? And so we're building things, we're building prospect dossiers for clients, we're building like things that are integrated into the process that you don't necessarily like you can't go out and buy you could buy a tool like the thousand tools that you tried, but it it like it may be good at one thing, but then it's got like eight other things.

So you have like you have like the Venn diagram of like all the overlap that's happening. And so as we're deploying our our or building the architecture with the clients on this, they start saying, well, we want to put it in the hubspot. And I'm like, okay, you don't need 85,000 fields in hubspot and like storing like contract like all the contract contract pieces because other people need to touch the contract. Like why are we putting things in places that other people need to touch, like operations or finance or and then you're going to get a a a CRM license.

Not CRM, take CRM out of it. I actually think like the data stores, um, like snowflake or some of these other big data store places will probably be better to store the data on, then have an integration layer, then have a UI layer. Like the UI layer is like becoming such a commoditized piece. Mm.

Yeah, I actually generally agree with that. For context, we use Superbase internally as our CRM. Right. Because it's There's As your CRM?

Yeah, as our CRM of all of our deals are tracked into there, all of our customers are tracked into there. Um, it's much more it's efficient because it's built as a database first, right? Not as a CRM face first. And and fundamentally CRMs are just databases with that UI sprinkled on top for sales reps to manage.

And we kind of just have agents like Claude code and just interact with our superbase instance and our CRM through Claude code as we've seen a lot of the go-to-market community adopting. We're sort of big believers in that vision. It's it's it's much more optimal and and at least how we we work. We we have a client that's using Hubspot Hubspot's uh stock supports this conversation by the way, if anyone looked at it recently, but I digressed.

We we have a client that's using AirTable to manage all their uh CSM stuff, which I don't recommend well, I don't recommend it if you don't have a UI on top of it, right? So you you have people like writing directly to the database with like no no uh no control, which is another big problem that we're going to end up having. So let's let's let's let's shift gears a little because we can certainly talk about CRM forever and we can make big enemies of um our partners. Love you, Hubspot.

You're wonderful. Um, let's just say tomorrow morning, you get a mandate to look at, you know, tools out there and make 80% of them disappear. Which category, Vihar, do you think we would miss the least? Like what do you think just has got to go?

Oh, man, that's a good one. Hmm. I actually wouldn't choose CRM for this because it's so core infrastructure for so many sales teams that operate through it. And a lot of a lot of the tools I think of like they just do that one thing really well that you kind of need whether it's be a sequencer, a lead nurturer, um, or just tracking deals, call recordings, like gongs are super important of the world as well.

It's um, our sequencer still important? Do we still do we still need the outreach and the sales lofts of the world? That's I think that's the one that in my mind, I was like, okay, that's probably in my head the least useful one. Because I do think sales is moving towards a direction where it's like cold emails basically a version of paid marketing.

And also I think as AI catches up into the because AI has caught up in the sequencers. If you have people using AI to mass outbound people, I think as AI catches up to the inboxes of people, like a lot of that stuff will just start getting screened out. I mean, listen, a a certain, um, company today who did, they were a dialer first, just launched their AI sequencer. So like all we're doing is throwing more shit out there, right?

Like I'm going to just AI sequence you. Why why do we need people? Like at the end of the day, like I just need one machine to tell me who to reach out to, what to reach out to, when what to say and how to say, and then you get your email and it's still garbage. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it it's a big problem we've seen too and we've seen a lot of sales transition back to like this in-person, um, events, conferences, ABM, sort of social plays doing a lot better than these mass automated outbound sequencers. And even for us, that's also why at Orange Slice, like we don't have our sequencer, because we don't want to push our users into just now sending mass emails, because it is a thing that we don't think is the future of sales. It's like, go out, talk to those customers, show up in person, really resonate with them, listen to understand their problems, and I guarantee you if you provide value to them, things will work out. Versus sending an email every three days at the same time, every morning, 8:47 a.

m. With the same exact copy to everyone else of saying, hey, we did this for X company. Would you want to try? Now, I'm good.

I don't really want to try just yet. Right. All right, let's shift gears. Um, so we're talking about tools.

Orange Slice is a tool. What was that core insider or that epiphany or that aha moment that said I want to build Orange Slice? And then separately, I want to know about the name. Yeah, so for context, um, me and my co-founder, we met at the University of Michigan, and I think we were very sort of scrappy entrepreneurial spirit, um, all throughout college, starting different businesses.

And I ended up selling my last company and the next thing we we sort of tried, um, he was the first person I pulled onto as my roommate in college. I said, hey, let's work on something together. The first thing we tried was actually in the go-to-market sales space, because that was always the toughest thing for me as a founder of with my previous company. I spent probably 80% of my time on go-to-market and sales.

Um, and so for context, we were selling to restaurants. We were um building a lot of custom scrapers. We were scraping Google Maps, figuring out what restaurants we needed to target, scraping reviews and things like that. And so we tried to bring that expertise to other companies.

So for a while, actually, just for a whole year, we were an agency of how do we help customers and our clients find perfect fit customers. And so for us through that learning phase, a lot of the tools we used, we use a lot of the major ones. Think of like the Apollos, um, even tried out ZoomInfo, even tried out Clay. And we always felt like there was no reason that that our customers shouldn't be able to do this and we needed to do this for them.

And so what what we were trying to build is is I'd say the tool we wanted when we were first starting as a GTM agency. It was like, okay, I just want an easy way to get my ideas and these really creative thoughts into actual sales workflows and implementations. And for us, it was it was constant iteration through these tools of like, okay, what do I need to connect? How do I set this thing up in Clay?

And like those are the pain points we were really feeling as a go-to-market agency where we really felt go-to-market, especially how competitive it is, should only be limited by like the ideas you create. Of like, oh, I want to do this go-to-market thing that's very unique. It shouldn't really be limited by how do I set these things up. And with AI sort of coming around the corner, it was kind of the perfect time for us of like, okay, let's start building our own platform.

And we actually just used Orange Slice internally of servicing these clients um as the only go-to-market tool we used. And then we have only just recently launched it to the public for other people to try out as well. People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win.

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It's something you really needed, you really wanted. And then you uh, you you deployed it out. So why why the name? Oh, yes, Orange Slice.

There's actually not too much of a of a rhyme or reason. The original story, I think we were on our couch in our living room, um, in our dingy college apartments and we were kind of looking at names and domains, and we've recently just saw Lemon Squeezy, a company bought by Stripe. We're like, wow, you really can just name your company anything. So that kind of opened the door for us of being like, let's just be fun and creative.

I think that's way more interesting than, you know, a capital partners LLC sort of name. And so we decided to go with Orange Slice because a lot of the vision we want to build is an operating system that's malleable and changeable for sales people. So a play on words of OS and we decided Orange Slice is a fun afternoon instead. Oh, I like that.

Love that. Do you even What's the biggest? Oh, orange is my favorite color. Um, I think that's also why I pushed for my co-founder.

I was like, hey, I love oranges, my favorite color, it's super fun and exciting. And he actually was like, this is a horrible marketing color, bright orange, it's like, doesn't fit with anything. But uh, we decided still to stick with it. Actually, there's a lot of companies that will go down that path, like Consensus did a big orange push.

Falcon's orange. One of our clients is like orange and blue after the Broncos. So. Oh, that's cool.

That's kind of it's kind of interesting. Yeah. Um, what's the biggest misconception about intent data or AI-led prospecting that you you've uh run across? I think the biggest one I've seen is like personalization, like really really matters or affects offers and targeting.

And I think a lot of people get too stuck on how can I ingest, you know, hey, I saw your dog in your last LinkedIn post. Here's my offer. And people fall down that rabbit hole, especially founders that aren't sales oriented, where it's really not the thing that's going to make the person buy the product. There's no magic combination of words you can say to force someone to buy something they don't want.

And so like the most important layer is really just targeting. How can I figure out someone has this problem internally and we we're the solution, and then provide them value, and deals feel so much easier that way. I think any buyer feels so much more at ease than getting cold called at 5:00 a.m.

in the middle of the night. Um, and so like as as a person that also buys products, that's sometimes I have these problems and sometimes I have a vendor come to me and say, hey, we solve this. And it's like, wow, perfect timing. This is exactly what I needed.

And personalization really didn't do jack for me in a lot of these emails I see. It's a a lot more timing and do I just truly have the problem? So I think that's the biggest misconception I constantly see. So that's that's the perfect tie in.

Um, and timing is everything, right? I I've bought a lot of software and it is hitting me at the right time. So when we talk about finding customers who already want to buy, E.G.

timing, what does that mean both technically and practically? Yeah. So on the practical side of things, it very it seriously varies per industry. And I think founders should really get in tune with their customer persona, their ICP, really understanding the pain points of when they have this problem and then understanding like, oh, what are the current signs of them having this problem?

I think as people have noticed um hiring signals for a certain role they they look to automate or is a great basic one-size-fits-all sort of solution, but you really can get niche with um oh someone has a bad Google review that mentions this and I solve that sort of problem. And so really understanding what the pain points and what those signs of pain points for founders, um is the key way to figure out how we target people that have the problem and are already looking for a solution you're targeting. And the signals, I think we we've done crazy signals for clients of um, anywhere from, you know, scraping outages maps to figure out, you know, if a company has an internet outage, can we sell them, you know, internet coverage? And and really targeting based on your specific vertical.

I really don't like to pitch a one-size-fits-all signal because I I generally don't think it exists. Um, and then in actual technicality, what that looks for after you find and understand your pain point and ICP is it's a lot of custom scraping. I I don't think the future is these big static contact databases with um data that you just pull from. I think in the future, every company and every salesperson will be live scraping the internet for all the information they need as soon as they need it.

And so like that's what we kind of try to build as a platform of, can we have a salesperson that's non-technical just write a sales script of being like, hey, I need this information right now. And and this is super important for for me to understand if this person needs our our service or product. And so we kind of build that technically if we have AI write these very technical complex scrapers with all the infrastructure we used to build as an agency that we used to manually write. And giving that access to now the modern day salesperson and the sales the sales reps to do a lot of that pinpoint targeting themselves, because they often tend to be the most creative people.

They understand of after being on a couple hundred sales calls, you'll understand, okay, this is the the type of person that converts super easily. They have these XYZ traits, but a lot of times they're they're gated by they can't actually get access to those leads because they can't write those scrapers themselves. So how do I get access to that data? And so we're trying to bridge that gap and I think that's technically also how we do it.

Yeah. That that's that's really interesting. Actually, a lot of times earlier in my career when I was selling, I would always ask somebody if they came inbound or they found us. I was like, I always try to ask them, what was the thing you were thinking about before you tried to find us?

Like, what was that problem you were trying to solve? And a lot of times they can't remember what it is, but if you can find out like right before they're searching whatever they searched to find you, that's the real need in the market for whatever you're selling, product or service. Exactly. Um, Vihar, you've already built and exited a company before finishing school.

What did those early ventures teach you about building products like today based on your past experience? Good question. Yeah, for Yeah, for context, the last company I started was called Kitchen Connect, and it was a ghost kitchen company. We would fill basically chefs into restaurant spaces to um use those restaurant spaces.

And during this is in the midst of Covid. So it did very well based on a timing sort of situation of all these restaurants were empty. And like I said before, 80% of my time in that business was sales. It was door knocking on these restaurants, pitching them, hey, do you guys want extra revenue?

It was showing up to these restaurants. Exactly. Um, showing up to restaurant conferences, pitching all these people. And for a lot of it, it's what I realized is a lot of time I would spend on non actually talking to customers, a lot on the scraping, figuring out who I talk to, what are the restaurants I hit today, in what order.

And a lot of that looking back, I just don't think was necessary if I had Orange Slice back then. And so I'd say it taught me a lot of the fundamentals of as the founder of that company, it was all bootstrapped and just ran by me and even when exited, just ran by me and some contractors. Um it really taught me how sales worked. I was truly the only sales rep for that company and I just lived the problems, a lot of the problems I'm solving today.

So it really set me up to build this company in that sense of actually just living the problems of all the back end research of trying to figure out if this restaurant actually needs has time or space for an empty chef to fill in. Yeah. That restaurant space is um, it's a tough space. I spent a lot of time in that space.

Um, I enjoy that space a lot. You um, you you worked for much larger companies back in the day, like the small little company called JP Morgan. Um, if memory serves me correct. That's very different than startup land.

And I think, you know, often times we talk about how you can't take someone out of a big giant company and expect them to be successful in a startup where there's a lack of red tape and there's a lot of ambiguity. And generally speaking, I do believe that's very true, but I think there are some things that carry over. How how did that time at JP Morgan like help you think about, you know, markets and scale and like what you want to do moving forward? And back and counteract that with like the scrappiness that you talk about?

Yeah, so it was a completely different switch for me. Um, it's actually where I really got close to my co-founder. We were both roommates in New York while we were working. He was working at Ramp and I was working at JP Morgan.

And the biggest reason of why I decided to actually work for a very very big company is you see how those companies operate too. Um, and I think as a lot of college grads and I see more startup founders just, you know, want to start companies, often times you don't see a lot of the B2B problems in the world until you actually work for a B2B company and see, um, okay, wow, this is the whole B2B side of things. A lot of young founders I see are very B2C focused because they're only a consumer and they've never really worked anywhere, so they don't understand the pains of working in a bigger organization, so they can't solve those problems. So for me it was always like a tactical step in my journey of I really wanted to first of all work for a great company, and then also see what it's like and the systems, um, understanding if on how to set up these these systems, manage people, set up structure, is always something you can take away from these really big companies that they're big for a reason, they've done things well in the past.

And so learning from their sort of um, learning from their models on how they operate and how they're still successful, I think also helps you scale a company as well. But very much so, it it's a very different culture where you are given a set tasks and you you basically follow those tasks. There's no ambiguity or scrappiness, I think. Overall, everyone goes from 9:00 to 5:00 and clocks out.

And Check the box. Yes. Exactly. Where there's many differences, but there's also I think a lot of things you learn through those big companies.

And so there's pros and cons, I always like to say. And how I've approached life is I'd like to just experience as much as possible and hopefully synthesize that and help me build the company that I'm looking to build. And I I generally think if I didn't go through that experience, Orange Slice wouldn't understand how giant B2B sales processes work of like a six to nine month enterprise cycle, because like I've seen a lot of those internally. And so being on the other side of the coin, you start to understand a lot of those dynamics where I only did, you know, very SME sort of deals of selling to restaurants.

And so it gave me a lot of a a clear scope and picture of the full world of sales. It's it's funny. I think SMB, people shit on SMB all the time, right? Oh, you know, you just sell SMB and like I sell enterprise.

Dale sells enterprise, so I can make fun of like Dale's time at Oracle. While SMB is super high velocity and certainly your deals are lower, I would argue SMB can be just as hard if not harder than enterprise for a a variety of reasons. Um, I sold into restaurants for for years. I worked for Toast.

Um, and it was one of the hardest sales I ever had. But you you learn a skill set that I think is very transferable to enterprise. That said, I don't think you could go from enterprise to SMB successfully. I think that it it's virtually impossible.

I totally agree to that like it's such a different game when I looked at it of um just convincing people. You don't have really have key decision makers and and thinking about the org dynamics and and giving them materials to pitch internally. SMBs, it's really just you know, talking to the owner and seeing if they can get them on your side. And often times, the owners aren't their job is not to evaluate tools and to optimize.

It's just focusing on their business. So there's so many different things you have to think about when you're selling to both different structures. Um, I couldn't relate to that more of it's so so different. Yeah.

Let's uh let let's talk about the future. Um, so prospecting, God willing is going to change uh over the next few years. Let's zoom out five years. What does prospecting look like in in in a truly AI native world?

I think in in five years, truly AI native, I've always made the analogy to how content looks now. I think content is very AI native. Of your feed determines, you know, who you what content you like. And for the most part, it finds content I like more than I actually choosing the content.

And I think prospecting is still so far behind in that in that sense of where we're still trying to manually figure out is this person a good customer for us. And in the future, AI should be doing a lot of that heavy lifting. And then it should be a sort of content algorithm, but instead like a sales-led algorithm where we have these suggested buyers that are usually very good and it gets the algorithm gets better over time as you sell and give more data about your company. Um, and it should just be on autopilot.

And then you go through the act of actually just making the sale happen. And that's kind of how I see it versus now, it's it's very manual. Of us building lists, us trying to georize what is the best fit for our company, looking us looking at our internal data, mapping those metrics out to signals possibly. Um, us talking to our our actual sales leads, like Dale mentioned, just asking, hey, how did you find us, et cetera?

And this manual process, I think hurts both buyers and sellers where sellers are just like overloaded with tools and then buyers are are just overloaded with volume and constant sort of spam messages and all these people. And just kind of how content feels really great now today, of like, I just get the content only I want, and it's amazing. I think sales will move then into that direction of buyers and sellers will just be connected through AI. And we we don't have to actually go through a lot of the the hurdles of listening to messages that we um products we don't want.

So does SDRs go away? I don't think they do. I think they fundamentally change. The role changes, right?

Where I think sales reps will always exist because at least what I've seen, sales is so relationship based. Often times we're buying products from people we trust and that we test with and from relationships we formed over time. And I actually think a lot of sales moves towards that um that lens of us actually using products and vendors that we trust or know about. And SDRs, their their job doesn't become, um, you know, talking to people and and sending more emails and more cold calls, but it becomes, hey, we have this super high intent sales algorithm of all these customers that we know want our product.

Let's start nurturing them. You know, how can we set up events with them? Start building trust and rapport? I think the whole role shifts and I think even SDRs that do a lot of cold calling will say, they're definitely probably excited for a shift like this to happen as well, because cold calling, cold email can be brutal.

Terrible. So tough. It is so tough. Um, I'm I'm a bit curious as you guys have gone into your your next evolution.

Like what for you, so you've you've built this initial piece. Originally, you were thinking about like, how do we do something that's more approachable for Clay from from like a Clay perspective? Then you're going into the evolution of signals. Like where do you see your product evolving over time where you're not going to get sucked into the vortex of like where everyone else is doing everything?

Yeah. Yeah, for us, our our path is very clear. Like our our mission is just to connect buyers and sellers at a way more efficient rate than sort of volume and current tooling. So that might change over time or is flexible.

And right now, that's like sequencers and we really don't think that's the future. It's the reason why we haven't really built in that sort of direction. And for us, I think in the future, it'll be this sort of middle layer of kind of how we all have um a platform of choice for content, whether that's be YouTube, Instagram, Netflix. I think there'll be a platform of choice for, you know, finding sort of sales leads and prospecting.

And hopefully, like Orange Slice is that place where we'll get such a great recommendation engine. And I think all those recommendation engines are eventually powered by data. That's why we're saying in the data layer first, of how can we collect really great data? How can we scrape and get really great buying signal?

And then eventually abstracting that all away of just showing you great customers for your company and not having to actually input and type the things you want is the evolution and kind of how our progression and why we actually started with an easier to use version than Clay, because I think the data layer is the fundamental thing that makes these content platforms really, really great at the recommendation engine. And there you have it. All right, we're going to we're going to switch into some rapid fire. Um and wrap it up.

So 10 words or less ideally, if you had to start over with $0 today, what would you build? I would be a go-to-market agency. Um, it's the last thing I did. We did really well with that.

Wow. I think go-to-market is my passion and also a lot of my skillset. I think I've spent a couple of years now in this industry. I understand a lot of the verticals and I think skills compound.

And so if you took all my money away from me, I would still have those skills of what tools to use and what scenario and I can give that a lot of that feedback and and expertise to clients. So even though people um go-to-market agencies are really really competitive, it's it's a space I really love and breathe, so. What's what's a piece of advice that you took that you wish you didn't take as a startup? That's really a great question, Dale.

Oh, time he had some value to the fam show. But the I think the biggest one is especially being in the uh Silicon Valley, the YC community. You'll hear a lot of advice from a lot of companies of we did this this way. And what what I've come to learn is um actually you shouldn't really listen to anyone's advice.

You should take it with a grain of salt and the and and also their experience in mind, but a lot of the advice I ended up hearing um for certain companies was very company specific. Um so of of how a company, I think in sales it's very very common of a company said, you know, I use this cold email copy and it did really well for me. Or I did this strategy of scraping and going to these sort of events. And every time I've seen that or tried it internally or tried it with customers, it's just never been the case.

Um so I think advice especially in the go-to-market sales motion is never one size fits all. A lot of times it's experimentation of throwing stuff against the wall, seeing what sticks, and then like juicing whatever that whatever stuck against the wall and trying to get as much value from that. It's a point in time. I I think that's the problem.

Like there's too many variables that happen in the space. And it's like, you can you can narrow down some of the variables, but there's too many dimensions to say like this is going to work for your company at this point in time, which is why I find it funny that people go after like all these old older advisors or people that are like I did it this way back in like the even the 90s, 2000s, like, okay, Yeah, like direct mail was very big and it's like some things change. Um which is interesting. Or or direct mail might come back, right?

That's true. I've been actually theorizing. If you do it right. If you do it right.

Vihar of Orange Slice is the next billion dollar company. What changes in sales? I think in sales, the It doesn't exist. No, I think people like you are actually way more important for sales organizations.

Because now you're not bogged down with the actual um building. Now you're sort of limited to thinking about how creative we can get with revenue and and sources of revenue. So people like you guys where you've seen and tested so many things become I think a hundred X more valuable because that will be the true limitation for sales companies. So how can for our specific use case, what revenue sort of metrics and revenue systems can we put in place that are super valuable.

And so I think what changes for us is completely the SDR, AE sort of pipeline shifts from a lot of this manual putting hours in, grindy sort of sales motion, to being more creative, more high-level thinking and building these systems, um through natural language. And I think that's how if we're a billion dollar company, that's the things that changed in sales. There's a lot less sort of grindy work and there's a lot more creativity that needs to be pushed. Yeah, I love that.

I I actually was listening to a podcast or some um, some content and they were basically saying, as we evolve in the the world, like as we evolve through this process with AI, forget about, forget about they were talking about sales, but what they were saying is that it's a one-to-one basis where sales people, executives, people can be more creative because you can fail a lot faster, you can test a lot more things. Like there becomes this like iterative cycle. I just wonder in the world, like are people really super creative, one? And two, um, can they get their mind wrapped around the change, the the speed at which change is going to happen?

So it's it's yet to be seen. Um, last one, as we wrap up, Vihar. Dream vacation destination. Dream vacation.

I haven't taken a vacation in a while, but I would say Michigan is is is up there. It's where I'm from. I always like to go back home. Um, I think a a cool place to to travel that I haven't been, um, probably South Africa.

I was to be completely honest. I've never been to Africa. And I think it's a lot of people, um, are are falling in love with Asia and traveling in Asia, but I don't see too much love um to Africa and I'd always love to see a sort of safaris, animals, open plains, things like that. Um, very I'm a very nature person being from the Midwest and Michigan.

I love that. Vihar, thank you for sharing all of your knowledge. Thanks for talking outbound. Thanks for talking Orange Slice.

Uh, other than LinkedIn, where can people find you? Where can people learn more about Orange Slice? Yeah, so you can learn more about Orange Slice at orangeslice.ai.

It's free to try. We have a self-serve. It's uh, you can sign up, no credit card. Play around.

We're always looking for feedback and and to make the product better. Um, you can find me on LinkedIn and Axe are are primarily the two social platforms I use. I'm not too big into social media, but I'm trying as a founder now. I think it's super important to post more content.

And I'm I'm thinking, um, learning from you guys as well of how you guys do content, podcasts of I got to get into that game as well. You guys do it really well at Revenue Reimagine. And um we're also really active in Slack as well. So if you want to join our Slack on our company website as well, we answer questions.

We host office hours every Friday. We love talking go-to-market um and then talking with agencies as well. Yep. I can say like the slide channel is real.

Like there's there's some really good people in there. There's some really good like conversations happening. I enjoy that that Slack channel. Cool.

Vihar, thanks for joining, man. Thank you guys so much.