Meta description: “Get an inside look at how Kula built a thriving B2B SaaS business by ignoring freemium, targeting founders directly, and other counterintuitive GTM strategies shared on Category Visionaries.”
The traditional B2B SaaS playbook suggests freemium models, broad market appeal, and standard sales motions. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Kula’s CEO Achu Ravi revealed how breaking these conventions helped his recruitment automation platform secure 30+ paying customers and $14 million in funding.
1. Skip Free Users, Start With Payment
While most SaaS startups chase user growth through free tiers, Kula took the opposite approach. “We have 30 plus customers and yeah, that’s timely. It and all of them are paying customers. We don’t have any premium users or trial users,” Achuthanand shares. This strategy ensured every customer interaction provided meaningful feedback and revenue.
2. Sell to Pain, Not Company Size
Instead of targeting companies based on employee count or revenue, Kula focused on a specific type of organization. “Most of them are also being very product driven companies rather than a service driven company,” Achuthanand explains. This focus on company culture over size metrics helped identify customers who would derive the most value from their solution.
This insight came from understanding a fundamental market shift: “Earlier organization post jobs and we as a candidate will probably go and apply and pray that they respond to us. But now candidates are not actively going and applying for opportunities, and opportunities basically being seized by the talent folks within the organization.”
3. Adapt Your Sales Motion to Company Stage
Kula developed a sophisticated approach to sales targeting based on company maturity. “We generally focus on organization less than 1500, that’s our sweet spot,” Achuthanand notes. But within this range, they created two distinct approaches:
For early-stage companies: “organizations between one to 50 or one to 60, generally the founders are the decision makers and they are the core paying owners.”
For growth-stage companies: “organization which has more than 50 above, we typically tap into the head of recruiting or their first recruiter or their sourcing organizations.”
4. Create Categories Where They’re Needed
Rather than forcing their entire product into an existing category, Kula split their offering based on market needs. “There are two things which we are building. One is called a school of circles. Another one is cooler outreach,” Achuthanand explains.
This dual approach allowed them to pioneer new spaces where needed: “The one which we are building on Pula Circles is a completely new category that is mostly on referral set of things… But for Pula outreach, there is already an existing category called as a recruiting automation.”
5. Build Global From Day One
Instead of starting in a single market and expanding later, Kula took a global approach from launch. “We are a global company from day one. Most of our customers are distributed between North America, EMEA, APAC as well as India markets,” Achuthanand shares. He adds that they are “function agnostic, region agnostic as we solve for the recruiter workflow problems, not on the discovery side or any region specific side.”
The Vision That Ties It All Together
These GTM decisions weren’t made in isolation – they all support a broader mission. “Our mission at Kula is to sort of make every single one a recruiter within the organization,” Achuthanand explains. “Recruiting is a team sport, not an individual sport.”
This mission-driven approach to GTM addresses a fundamental gap in the market: “We are the only system of action tool which solves for recruiter workflows,” Achuthanand emphasizes. Current tools focus on organizational workflows – moving candidates through stages, managing interviews, and handling onboarding. But they miss the recruiter’s daily needs.
Looking Ahead
Kula’s next phase of growth builds on these early GTM lessons. “The next path forward for us is mostly around concentrating on the midfunnel,” Achuthanand shares. By maintaining their focus on recruiter workflows while expanding product capabilities, they’re demonstrating how strong GTM fundamentals can support sustained growth.
For B2B founders, Kula’s journey offers a powerful reminder: sometimes the most effective GTM strategies come from challenging conventional wisdom and staying ruthlessly focused on solving specific customer problems.
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