Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talked to Shruti Kapoor, the co founder and CEO of Wingman, a SaaS product that helps sales teams get better results by providing them with real time insights from every sales interaction.
In 2017, Shruti was working for a fintech company in India and ended up running a sales team.
But she constantly struggled to get the CRM to work the way their team needed and she couldn't find a good alternative solution.
So she and two friends got talking and decided to start their own startup.
The following year, they launched the first version of their product.
But getting customers was a struggle.
When they started out, their first 40 meetings with prospective customers resulted in zero sales.
Despite the rocky start, they've grown their SaaS company to multiple seven figures in ARR and in 2022 sold the business.
In this episode we talk about the struggles and challenges the co founders faced while starting and building their SaaS business.
What they did after failing to close even a single sale after 40 meetings with prospective customers.
How they've used online groups and communities to find customers by getting their existing customers to post and talk about them.
And we talk about how they've used SEO, content marketing and social media to create an inbound marketing engine that drives over 90% of their revenue today.
I hope you enjoy.
All right, Shruti, welcome to the show.
Shruti Kapoor (01:50.910)
Thanks Omar.
Glad to be here.
Omer (01:53.310)
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Shruti Kapoor (01:57.630)
Yes.
Selflessness is overrated.
Yeah.
I feel as you become a founder, you need to realize that you can't just expect people's goodwill to get you through.
You need to make sure that you're always thinking about what's in it for them and spelling it out and trying to actively create the what's in it for them.
And I think that's an important lesson in life overall, not just for founders.
Omer (02:26.410)
Tell us about Wingman.
What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're hoping to solve?
Shruti Kapoor (02:32.570)
Sure.
So Wingman is a platform that analyzes all of the sales interactions with three main goals.
One, get sales folks better coaching feedback.
Two, to enable them in real time.
So as they're going through a call, if you could get the feedback versus waiting for the manager to review the call a week later, and then maybe have a coaching session two weeks from there.
And three, it enables people to get a full picture of what their pipeline looks like, where their deals are, so that they can go and make sure that they're doing everything that they need to do.
Omer (03:09.630)
You launched the business in 2018, but the story starts a couple of years before that.
So why don't you tell me how you came up with the idea for this business?
Shruti Kapoor (03:23.710)
Absolutely.
So I actually landed somewhat by chance or by mistake into sales.
So I was previously working on the investing side for a long time, decided I wanted to get my hands dirty with startups, joined a fintech company called payoneer, and figured that I would be best suited to figure out their go to market strategy.
Knowing absolutely nothing about go to market strategies at that point, what that meant was working with the product and the marketing teams, and of course, creating the sales team, going out and selling myself and trying to get those early customers for payoneer in India.
And through that process, I kind of realized some of the challenges that I'm trying to solve with Wingman.
One of them was definitely not knowing why certain sales reps in my team were doing so well.
And some reps who were putting in a lot of effort were still not getting the numbers.
So I think that's kind of where I got curious and said, listen, I want to join your calls.
But then it becomes too onerous.
One out of every two or three calls will get canceled.
You waste so much time.
And so I was like, what if they could just record their calls and then I could go back and review it?
But the other challenge was that because we were a distributed team, we had product and marketing sitting in Israel and then sales sitting in every country that they were selling to.
And so the other challenge that I was frustrated by is getting the voice of customer over to product.
So I think both of those, as I thought more and more about it, I was like, if we could only have these calls recorded, archived, searchable, that would be a gold mine.
And that's where the journey started.
Omer (05:12.160)
But you didn't do anything right away, did you?
It still took some time before you, the founding team came together and then you built the product.
Shruti Kapoor (05:20.960)
Yeah.
So, I mean, I was.
I think I was at payoneer only for a year and a half or so.
And so I think that process, you know, kind of started at that point.
Of course, before we formally launched, we spent a lot of time getting feedback from different sales leaders, trying to understand what would people do with Data like this, what is the right way to think about?
How do I get value out of this data?
Because we understood that this was valuable data, but this is such a large volume of data.
The last thing we wanted was that you have all of these call recordings and then, you know, nobody is listening to it.
So I think we spent some time in just understanding what the real challenges were, validating that it wasn't just a problem for me and then, you know, trying to kind of build our own mvp.
What would an MVP look like?
Omer (06:12.320)
Do you have one or two co founders?
Shruti Kapoor (06:14.080)
Two co founders.
Omer (06:15.280)
I got confused because I went on Crunchbase and they were like, two, two of you.
But I think there's three of you.
Shruti Kapoor (06:22.220)
Yes, there is three of us.
Omer (06:23.740)
How did you guys meet?
How did you come together?
Shruti Kapoor (06:25.820)
One of my co founders, Murali and I, we got introduced to a common friend.
Murli had just, you know, left his job at Google in the Bay Area and moved back to India because he wanted to start up.
And, you know, at that point he was, you know, he was just scouting around for ideas, thinking he wanted to partner with somebody from a business background because he's of course, a great engineer and technical person.
That's the context with which we got together.
And you're right, it took some time for things to come together.
So we met almost a year and a half before we started up.
And so through that period we were just hanging out, getting to know each other, brainstorming on a bunch of ideas, trying to validate, invalidated a bunch of ideas.
And Murli and Srikhar have known each other since their first jobs out of college and they were also at Google together.
And so Murali was very clear that he would want Shrikhar to also be part of the team when we started off.
And he managed to convince Shrikhar to also quit his job and move from the Bay Area to India to start this up.
Omer (07:31.000)
Did you look at the market in terms of competitors?
Because there must have been similar products out there, right?
So what did you see when you did the research and then why did you decide that there was still an opportunity here for you to build something in our space?
Shruti Kapoor (07:47.260)
The two biggest competitors were Gong and Chorus, even at that point in time.
But both of them, when we started looking at the space in 2017, were still relatively early stage companies.
And the concept of conversation intelligence and how do you use this data and what do you use it for?
Was also relatively early.
At that point.
What we felt was nobody had a clear thesis or understanding of how to use this data.
And we felt that the winner wasn't just because somebody decides to record calls and transcribe them, because recording of calls has existed for at least a few decades.
We felt that the real innovation or where the business needed to be built was in identifying the right use case for the data and being able to make sure that you're able to deliver that value quickly.
And we felt that that was not answered when we started building this out.
And you know, when we were trying to validate whether or not that was answered, we went and also spoke to some of the customers who were using the competitors products because we wanted to understand, like, hey, if you're using this today, does it solve everything for you or are there still gaps?
And through that process, we identified that there were definitely things people were struggling with.
And I think that was also an important learning in just knowing that, you know, what people say they will do in an ideal world versus what people do is dramatically different.
Right.
Like, I know we are all familiar with new year resolutions and how they land up.
And that was exactly the case with sales coaching, where, you know, I think the products were built on a promise of saying that, hey, sales managers are motivated to do sales coaching and I will build a tool to help them do sales coaching better.
But the fundamental problem was that sales coaching doesn't happen as often as people would like to.
Omer (09:40.220)
You've gone out, you've talked to some potential customers, you've looked at the market, the landscape, you've figured out what you believe is the opportunity and the kind of product you need to go and build.
How long did it take to build that 1.0 version of, or the MVP, I guess, of Wingman.
Shruti Kapoor (09:58.380)
So we actually started actually writing code in May of 2018, and we had our first paying customer for the product in October of 2018.
And you know, in between, we, of course, you know, we're still kind of had some working versions of the product.
But yeah, that was the timeline.
Five months.
Omer (10:18.560)
So five months to build the product and get that first paying customer.
Yeah, I mean, that sounds great.
You know, you ship the product, you already got one customer, you get excited and you're like, wow, we're going to be closing more and more of these deals.
But from what I understand, it wasn't that straightforward when you, you talked to a lot of potential customers and you didn't close any sales.
So tell us about that.
Shruti Kapoor (10:43.340)
Yeah, so I think the first thing was we got an early customer and that was of course, exciting.
And we managed to assign a Couple more customers after that.
These were all customers from our network.
So these were not customers who we did not know.
And therefore these were really useful customers as co building partners and for giving us early product feedback, et cetera.
But what we wanted to do was to, of course, and you need to do that is make sure that you actually also reach out to customers who are buying the product for the sake of the product and don't necessarily know you.
I think the first challenge that we hit was even with these friendly customers that we had early on, they were not using the product the way we would expect them to.
So we were hitting the same roadblocks in terms of product usage.
And that was baffling.
But I think that was also our own lesson in understanding that what people say they would do and what they actually do is different.
And so we had to go and really sit down, understand what their workflows look like, tweak the product, understand what is the first wow moment we could deliver them and how do you make that repeatable, et cetera.
So there was some work required there.
The second thing we did was, like I said, we kind of went and spoke to people who are using the competitors products and understood what were the challenges they were facing.
Was it a product issue or was it just setting the right expectations?
And then what we did was once we felt we were ready to kind of scale, scale up at that point, we launched a dramatically new feature for the product, which was this whole idea of being able to give real time feedback to salespeople while they were on sales calls.
And we felt that that was going to hit the nail on the head that was going to allow people to actually coach without being there.
And we were ready to take it to the market.
So we got a sales consultant to, to help us accelerate that process of reaching out to new customers.
And that person set up great meetings for us.
He set up 40 meetings with our ICP companies and we sold exactly zero to those 40 customers.
And we were like, something's not right.
And that was really, really tough because we felt at that point we had a good product, we had a real differentiation.
And we were talking to the people that we wanted to be selling to.
And so that was the point where we were like, there's something that we need to go back and think about.
And I think what we realized at that point is what the product does and what the promise is.
Sometimes as founders, we tend to oversell the promise as well.
But what we don't account for is how the customer is Thinking about it in terms of their implementation cost or effort required to get value out of it.
That was the challenge that we were facing in getting people to adopt this new real time feedback mechanism.
Once that became clear to us, we were able to go and make changes to say, how do we make this easier and quicker to get value out of?
Omer (14:15.180)
Give me an example of that.
So if a customer looks at the product, I mean, first of all, having 40 meetings and closing zero sales is got to be exhausting, right?
But once you've figured out, okay, there's this potential issue here in terms of the perceived effort that these customers or these potential customers have in terms of adopting the product.
Give me one example of that.
What was it that you realized they were seeing as difficult to implement and get started with?
What did they have to do that they didn't want to do?
Shruti Kapoor (14:54.480)
Yeah.
So I think in this case it was around creating content on a new platform.
And what we needed sales enablement to do was to create these battle cards.
If somebody says, you know, talks about discount and we want like these three talking points to show up for the salesperson and that was what we needed sales enablement to do.
But this wasn't something that they were used to doing because they're used to, you know, creating content either for trainings, which is typically long form or you know, self service content, which is, you know, these detailed documents.
They're not used to writing like three bullet point pieces of content.
But the other struggle that they had was they did not.
They were also not kind of sure whether they knew what content they needed.
Right.
So to them it seemed like they needed to invest in something without fully understanding how that would work or how that would get them results.
And I think it was also a case of the stakeholder who was going to be the decision maker versus the person who needed to actually implement the product and get value, were different people and we didn't kind of know how to navigate that well.
And I think that was a reflection of, you know, us as founders, because none of us had actually worked in SaaS.
Right.
None of us had actually also worked in a situation of understanding how a multi stakeholder, you know, product adoption cycle looks like.
And you know, how do you kind of navigate that from a sales and post sales point of view?
Omer (16:26.140)
If you're putting a product in front of a customer and they can get up and running, they can onboard in 15 minutes and start using it, that that friction is very low.
But when they have to do all of this work, maybe even kind of think differently about their own processes and documentation.
And then they're doing all of this, but basically they're making a bet that all of this work would be worth it for this product that they haven't even tried yet.
Right.
So that's, that's kind of a difficult leap to make.
So, so how did you solve that?
I mean, that's.
I think this is something that a lot of SaaS founders go through, that the perceived work, even though the customers might not say it.
And it sounds like the 40 or at least the 39 people you spoke to weren't that explicit about it, but I think it's a common problem.
So how did you go about solving it?
Shruti Kapoor (17:30.380)
Yeah, and it took us some iterations.
What we eventually landed up at was identifying the pockets in the product that required the minimum setup from customers and only pitching for those to get people started on.
Right.
So in our case, like with the, with the real time feedback and, you know, just having a real time note taker there, we identified that, you know, giving feedback on behalf behavior did not require any setup.
So I could have something that tells them that, hey, you've been on a long monologue, and we didn't need the manager or anybody else to do any work.
Similarly, we could get them to bookmark parts of the call in real time without managers or setup needing to do work.
So one was identifying pockets that required minimal setup and using those as the hero examples in those sales conversations versus using all these complex things that required a ton of setup set up as the hero example.
So it was easy for somebody to say, oh, I can instantly get value without putting in a lot of effort.
And then if I wanted to put in effort, this is what I could do.
So essentially constantly being very diligent about saying, how do I create a wow moment with minimal effort so that then the person, once they see the value, then they will put in the effort.
I think the second thing we did was just taking away a blank canvas approach and saying, we will give you enough in the canvas so that you only need to fill in the blanks.
So basically creating all sorts of templates that made it much easier for people to say, oh, okay, I only need to write these three bullet points.
I know what the use case is.
And in some cases we would even use different methodologies, different sales information that existed to create that set of templates and initial things for them.
So again, trying to give them value before we asked them to invest effort,
Omer (19:28.990)
how long did it take to, to figure that out and make Those changes to the way you were pitching the product and presumably changes to the product as well.
Shruti Kapoor (19:42.029)
Yeah.
So, you know, we spent like three months and this was largely during also our time at Y Combinator in having those 40 conversations.
We came back after that and we, you know, what we said was, let's go and just continue to try to sell the product and maybe we'll just iterate on what value we are selling.
Right.
So we were still trying to figure out the positioning value, etc.
And so at that point we did like a bunch of more larger scale launches.
And through that feedback cycle, we realized that there were some people who were buying the product and not using it for this specific use case.
So we were like, you know, the first thing we did was became open to saying that we could have different packages of the product for people who might have different levels of tech readiness.
So that allowed us to at least start getting some customers who did not necessarily want this complicated feature and who did not care that there was maybe not a big differentiation story, et cetera.
Right.
And in the meantime, and thankfully the changes that I talked about weren't so much product changes, they were more positioning and config changes that, you know, we didn't need longer cycles for.
So we were able to quickly iterate on that.
And like we spent, you know, the next four, five months just saying that we'll just, you know, customers who are interested in buying, we'll just try to listen to them understand what they are buying for, what they're using the product for, versus trying to get people to adopt everything that we are trying to build on day one.
And I think that really helped in, you know, getting to the juicier parts of the product.
Omer (21:27.510)
Let's talk about YC a little bit.
How much revenue were you doing at the time when you applied?
Shruti Kapoor (21:32.630)
Oh, we kind of just launched this version of the product.
It was like, I would say close to zero.
Omer (21:40.710)
And this was the first time you guys applied and you got accepted right away?
Shruti Kapoor (21:45.340)
We had applied previously with a different idea, but yeah, with this.
This was the first time we applied.
Omer (21:50.860)
I know founders who haven't been accepted because they didn't have any customers.
Like, what was it?
What do you think was different about Wingman?
Shruti Kapoor (21:59.580)
Yeah, so one, we did have like our first three or four customers who were working with us at that point.
I think the second point was that we were very clear about what our differentiation was and that was around saying, can we actually help people scale coaching.
The third thing was that I think we had Also spent time and energy in understanding how we might be able to use our geographic advantage and distribution to actually deliver better value for the customer.
So in our case, so there were basically things around saying how do we make sure that we are going to continue to be competitive and it's not just about one feature versus another.
And I think those were things that YC really cares about, like what is your long term chances of success and
Omer (22:49.720)
why once you made these changes to the way you were pitching, positioning so on, how did that affect your close rate when you were talking to customers?
Shruti Kapoor (23:01.560)
This was roughly towards end of 2019.
We started seeing that we were, we were able to win much more.
So we kind of went from, I said close to zero to six digits in revenue very quickly at that point.
And that was within the matter of those three months or so.
From there on, we kind of felt that what was working for us was having some sort of inbound funnel or customers.
Because what had worked in getting some of these was we did a product hunt launch and some early PR that happened around yc.
And so what we realized was that we then wanted to start building on that inbound engine because maybe we were not ready for some larger customers.
We needed to still build more trust in the market, but we could still be selling to the smaller end of the customers to start with and then work our way up.
Omer (24:08.180)
What did you do to start building the inbound piece?
But also, why didn't you just start doing outbound?
Why didn't you just start cold emailing prospects and trying to generate leads that way?
I mean, you were the salesperson, right?
So was that something that, you know, you.
Why, why did you rule that out?
Shruti Kapoor (24:28.740)
Yeah, so we didn't rule that out.
We tried both in parallel.
Right.
It's just that we saw more success with inbound and all along the way we've kind of always kept both the engines running.
I think outbound allows us to do more targeted campaigns, quickly, test out messaging, etc.
Which we then very often use even for our inbound funnel and marketing overall.
We did also get some customers through the outbound engine early on.
But what we realized was that inbound seemed like what could be much more scalable.
Of course, early on it was me as the only person doing sales and marketing and SDR and all of those fancy things that we have teams for today.
And I think therefore my approach was to say how do I spread the message across based on what I understand about the sales leaders buying behavior.
And I think that's something that People miss on sometimes, you know, you kind of reach out to multiple people for advice on, hey, how did you get your first 10 customers or your first 20 customers?
And people forget that, you know, if you're selling to a salesperson versus to a developer, you know, the way they buy a product, the way they evaluate a product, the way they think about the product is very, very different.
And so what we realized was that salespeople, one are very social, right?
And they like to talk to each other and they like to get, you know, inputs from each other.
And a lot of what happens in sales is through word of mouth.
And so we kind of just doubled down on that and we said, hey, where are people giving each other advice and sharing this?
Right?
And so this was already, you know, by now we are already in the times of the pandemic and we are beginning to see that, you know, there are all these online communities that are popping up.
And I think that landed up being very fortitious for us because we were then able to get spread that word of mouth using those communities, those online selected platforms versus just trying to do Google Ads or G2 ads, et cetera.
Omer (26:45.900)
Which platforms were you focused on?
Shruti Kapoor (26:49.900)
Yeah, so this was lots of revenue leaders, slack communities that existed.
There are lots forums where revenue leaders exchange advice.
There were Reddit threads that our customers saw where people are asking questions around say price of a competitor and they were like, hey, we use this tool and this is why.
And so it was very, very niche targeted communities through which we then built the word of mouth.
Omer (27:22.920)
One thing that a lot of people do, which isn't particularly well taken, is going into a new community that you just join and just start pitching your product.
So what was the approach that you took?
If you were telling people about Wingman, how did you get to that point where you were doing it in a way that people were more receptive to it?
And I think when you and I were talking, you were saying that you were also getting customers as well to help with amplifying this word of mouth.
So just tell me a little bit about that because there's a right way and a wrong way to do this.
And I want to kind of figure out what you did.
Shruti Kapoor (28:06.240)
I think broadly it wasn't us talking about us, right?
In most cases it was our customers talking about us.
And that had two benefits.
One, of course, I mean that builds trust at least 10x more than if I went and said I have a great product versus a customer saying hey, I'm using this.
They don't even have to say anything else.
Even if they say, if there's a thread around, hey, what do you use for doing this task?
And somebody says, oh, I'm using this, you're much more likely to go check it out versus saying, hey, I'm the founder of so and so.
And we also do this.
So I think through that what we were really looking to do was just amplify the word of mouth from the customers.
Right.
Like in a real life situation, we would have expected this to happen through events and through casual networking, social settings.
What we were thinking of was just, hey, today nobody can step out because of the pandemic.
How do we leverage what exists in terms of still spreading the word of mouth?
It literally started out that way.
Some of our customers initially found some threads saying, hey, I saw this discussion, would you want me to say something on this?
And we were like, oh, that's fantastic.
And so it was not us posting about ourselves, I think, which definitely helps.
And I think our role in that was really just identifying where those discussions were happening at some point and then nudging our customers if needed to say, hey, do you mind just sharing what your experience has been.
Yeah, and I think that worked.
One of the lessons that we, that I overall learned in that journey of getting the first five customers to trying to scale that up through inbound was what you really need throughout that journey.
One thing that is common is how do you build trust and as you try to scale, how do you amplify that trust through various ways.
And I think that was a big learning also from saying that, hey, we hired the sales consultant early on, that person was able to set up meetings for us, but we are not able to close partially also because that trust doesn't translate.
And especially if you're hiring somebody part time.
I think that was a big lesson.
And therefore, as we went through this journey, we were always very conscious about, hey, how do we build trust?
And how do we continue to scale the ways for building trust?
Omer (30:29.810)
And so today the majority of your revenue is coming through inbound, which I think anybody listening to this who hates the idea of going out and selling to customers, having a business that's vastly driven by inbound.
Sounds great.
Give us a sense of the size of the business right now in terms of revenue, customers, size of team.
So people listening to this can understand how much volume and sales you're actually driving through your inbound engine.
Shruti Kapoor (31:02.740)
Now we are more than 300 customers around, I think 60 employees at this point and mid seven digits in revenue.
And you Know, majority of that has come through inbound and even within that majority of that has been, you know, non paid channels.
Omer (31:22.600)
So what else are you doing inbound wise to generate that revenue aside from, I mean, the community piece?
That's great.
I assume there's still some of that going on, but that that's not the largest driver of your sales, right?
Shruti Kapoor (31:38.380)
Yeah, I think as you scale, you realize that different channels only scale to a certain extent and therefore the strategy needs to keep evolving as you hit different levels of scale.
Today, of course, we do invest a ton in content.
Our approach to content has been can we do something that people actually laugh at or relate to versus some more corporate jargon?
And I think that has landed well.
So, you know, we do partnerships on Instagram, around, you know, fun memes on sales, things like that.
Just a bunch of educational and thought provoking posts on social media.
So I think social media is one channel that helps us build brand and be present in conversations.
And I think the other piece has.
So, you know, the other piece has definitely been SEO as well as, you know, things have scaled up and I think today we have a pretty strong game there.
And I think the third piece has definitely been, you know, continuing to focus on personal brand, you know, for the leaders and for other folks in the marketing team, because I think that's super important.
And so we make sure that, you know, folks are visible.
And yeah, I think personally I've probably, you know, interacted with a lot more people, been on several social campaigns, podcasts, etc.
And that I think again helps, you know, create that recall and brand.
Omer (33:10.770)
You sold the business in 2022 to Clari.
How did that come about?
Were you looking for a buyer?
Shruti Kapoor (33:21.740)
No, we were not.
I think at that point we were thinking more about a fundraise.
As it transpired, it seemed like sales tech was on a consolidation spree.
We were definitely getting that feedback from the investors we were talking to as well.
And within a matter of couple of weeks, we happened to get inbound interest from three different buyers.
And we hadn't started thinking about it, but you know, I was like, hey, maybe there is something here.
Let me just go and dig a little bit deeper.
And so that's kind of how that conversation started.
And I think, you know, as a founder, that was something that I was open to at that point.
Just in terms of, you know, the fundraise cycles.
You know, it always makes sense to consider an acquisition, you know, before you do a fundraise where, you know, you can't really get acquired immediately after a fundraise, because your investors won't be very happy about that.
So I think in that sense, the timing was good.
And so I decided to take a pause and just explore that a bit.
Omer (34:28.010)
And then.
Are all three of you still working at Wingman?
Shruti Kapoor (34:32.090)
Yes, all three of us are still working at Wingman Clary now.
And I think it's been an interesting journey.
We've definitely seen the business scale dramatically in the last six months since the acquisition, and that has been encouraging.
And I think it's exciting to see that we are on the good side of the sales tech consolidation right now.
So I think that's also been great.
Omer (34:59.580)
I also want to talk a little bit about.
You mentioned fundraising.
How much money have you raised from the house?
I think you raised a seed round and then that was it.
Shruti Kapoor (35:12.690)
Yeah.
So we just raised around the YC demo day, and that was like a $2.3 million seed round, and that's the only money that we raised.
Omer (35:22.130)
And then did you later go out and try to raise more money or.
Shruti Kapoor (35:29.490)
Yes.
So I think sometimes people advise that you should constantly be raising and at the same time not raising.
And I think it's very, very hard to follow that advice.
Fundraising can be pretty distracting.
We did try to fundraise in mid of 2020 or so.
And then I think what we realized was with the pandemic and sales teams getting laid off, we were seeing ups and downs in our own business and in the revenue numbers.
And what that eventually meant was it it wasn't the greatest time to try and fundraise.
And then I think later, a lot of times, investor sentiment impacts these things.
And then as it happened, the second time that we tried to fundraise was in the middle of the.
When we started, things were stable, but then suddenly the whole delta variant came about.
And especially in India, it was pretty bad, and investors were just focused on helping people actually survive.
And it wasn't again, the greatest time to fundraise.
So what you realize is that sometimes you can't really control the timing on these things.
In hindsight, if it works out, then it's great if you're able to fundraise at the top of a valuation cycle.
But very often, as many things in business, it lands up being a little bit of luck.
Omer (37:03.100)
It sounds like despite the fundraising challenges, you had a little bit of luck on your side at the right time.
Shruti Kapoor (37:09.660)
Yes.
Omer (37:10.220)
So in terms of the acquisition, I know you're not going to tell me how much you sold it for.
Can you give us A ballpark, a range, something.
Shruti Kapoor (37:17.900)
Yeah.
So the way we thought about the acquisition was, of course, in terms of multiples.
And I think for us, we were looking at kind of a multiple around the 15 20x range.
And that, to us, seemed like what we wanted.
And we got that.
Omer (37:41.670)
Nice.
All right, let's get onto the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Shruti Kapoor (37:46.790)
Okay.
Omer (37:47.510)
What's the best piece of business advice you've received?
Shruti Kapoor (37:50.470)
Find the context of the advice, not just the advice.
Omer (37:53.750)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Shruti Kapoor (37:56.310)
The Chris Wass book on negotiations.
Omer (37:59.350)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Shruti Kapoor (38:03.450)
Imposter syndrome.
Omer (38:04.810)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Shruti Kapoor (38:08.170)
I follow the Savers routine in the morning.
It stands for silence, affirmation, visualization exercise, read and scribe.
Omer (38:19.209)
I've never heard of that before.
That's good.
I like that.
All right, what's the crazy or new business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Shruti Kapoor (38:28.090)
Find a substitute to plastic.
Omer (38:30.410)
A substitute?
Oh.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Shruti Kapoor (38:35.610)
I've had multiple fractures.
I've probably broken every limb in my body.
Omer (38:40.730)
Yikes.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Shruti Kapoor (38:45.050)
Board games.
Omer (38:46.730)
Great.
Well, thank you, Shruti, for joining me today and sharing your story.
If people want to check out Wingman, they can go to try wingman.com.
is that right?
Shruti Kapoor (39:01.930)
That's right.
Omer (39:03.050)
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Shruti Kapoor (39:06.490)
I'm on LinkedIn.
You can look for Shruti Kapoor and maybe just add Wingman there.
I should be the one who pops up.
Omer (39:12.410)
All right, we'll add a link in the show notes as well to your profile.
Great.
Well, thank you so much for the time, and I wish you and the team the best of success.
Shruti Kapoor (39:21.050)
Thanks, Omar.
This was fun.
Omer (39:23.130)
Cheers.
