Saket Saurabh, Co-founder and CEO of Nexla, shares insights on penetrating the enterprise market without prior experience. He reveals his bold 'Enterprise First' approach that attracted big names like Instacart and LinkedIn. Saket discusses the innovative 'Magic Moment' live-coding strategy that clinched major contracts and the difficult decision to cut founder salaries to achieve profitability. His consultative selling techniques and lessons from Nvidia's Jensen Huang offer valuable guidance for navigating complex sales cycles in the SaaS landscape.
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insights INSIGHT
Enterprise First Forces Better Architecture
Targeting enterprises first forces you to solve the deepest version of a problem and builds a platform that can scale down later.
Building for SMBs first risks missing core complexity and producing a product that fails at scale.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Lead With Questions, Not Pitches
Approach meetings as learning conversations, not pitches, and ask smart questions to surface the real problem.
Listen more than you sell to shape product direction and earn technical buyers' trust.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Live Coding Created A 'Magical Moment'
During an Instacart demo Saket's co-founder live-coded fixes in an hour session to handle unexpected data quirks.
That on-the-spot demo created a 'magical moment' that convinced the customer the team could deliver.
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Saket Saurabh closed Instacart by live-coding a fix during the pitch—and that "magical moment" became the foundation of his founder-led sales playbook. In this episode, early-stage B2B SaaS founders will learn how Saket closed the first 15 enterprise customers himself using a consultative founder-led sales approach.
Saket breaks down exactly how to navigate complex corporate buy-cycles without a sales background. You will learn why he went "enterprise first" instead of starting with SMBs, how to overcome the "we can build it ourselves" objection by creating magical demo moments, and why founder-led sales is essential for connecting product, market, and customer needs.
In this episode, Saket also shares the "zero salary" pivot that made Nexla cash flow positive before their Series A—and why founders must do sales themselves before hiring a team.
🎯 Founder-Led Sales Connects the Dots: Unless founders sell deals themselves, they can't fully understand how product, market, and customer needs intersect.
🪄 Create "Magical Moments" in Demos: Saket's co-founder live-coded a fix during the Instacart pitch—solving problems on the spot closes enterprise deals.
🏢 Go Enterprise First: Architecting for SMBs first prevents you from understanding enterprise-grade complexity. Nexla went straight to Fortune 500.
🤝 Consultative Founder-Led Sales Builds Trust: Don't pitch—listen. Saket's first goal in meetings was to understand if the prospect saw the same problem.
📉 The "Zero Salary" Pivot: Saket and his co-founders cut salaries to zero to reach cash flow positivity before their Series A.
💰 Price Against Internal Cost: Calculate what it costs the prospect to solve the problem internally, then price at a fraction.
Chapters
Introduction & The "Profit" Quote
What is Nexla? (Solving the Data Fragmentation Problem)
The Origin: From Ad Tech to Data Infrastructure
The Contrarian Strategy: Why "Enterprise First"?
Landing the First Customer (Instacart)
The "Live Code" Founder-Led Sales Demo Strategy
Figuring Out Enterprise Pricing & POs
Founder-Led Sales: Closing the First 15 Customers
Overcoming the "We Can Build It Ourselves" Objection
The Pivot: Going "Zero Salary" to Hit Cash Flow Positive
The SaaS Podcast: Build, Launch & Scale Your SaaS