Most founders face a critical strategic choice: enter an existing category or create a new one. But what if you could do both? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Achu Ravi revealed how Kula is simultaneously competing in an established space while carving out an entirely new category in HR tech.
Playing in Two Lanes
After raising $14 million and working with 30+ paying customers, Kula has developed a unique dual-category strategy. “There are two things which we are building,” Achuthanand explains. “One is called a school of circles. Another one is cooler outreach.”
This isn’t just a product strategy – it’s a calculated move to capture market share while building something entirely new. As Achuthanand notes, “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.”
When to Create a Category
Kula’s decision to create a new category with Circles came from a clear market gap. “There are tools which are mostly system of records like applicant tracking systems which basically supports the referral use cases, but none is built for tailored made recruiting referral use cases,” Achuthanand shares.
The key insight here is that existing solutions treated referrals as a feature, not a core workflow. This represents the perfect opportunity for category creation: when existing solutions treat a critical problem as an afterthought.
When to Compete in an Existing Category
With Kula Outreach, the company chose to enter the established recruiting automation space. But they did so with a crucial differentiator: “We are the only system of action tool which solves for recruiter workflows,” Achuthanand emphasizes.
This highlights when to compete: when you can fundamentally reimagine how to solve an existing problem. Rather than building another applicant tracking system focused on organizational workflows, Kula focused specifically on recruiter workflows.
Building the Right Foundation
The success of this dual strategy relies heavily on deep market understanding. Before founding Kula, Achuthanand spent years “looking after all of the leadership recording teams, primarily hiring for sea level executives and board members for Stripe globally.” This experience informed both when to create and when to compete.
The Technology Evolution Advantage
Timing also played a crucial role. “If you look at Martech, if you look at sales tech, those businesses are very far ahead in terms of the adoption of technology in their day to day use cases,” Achuthanand notes. This technology gap in HR created the perfect opportunity for both strategies.
Market-Driven Decision Making
The decision to pursue both strategies wasn’t arbitrary. Achuthanand explains the market shift that created this opportunity: “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.”
Execution Strategy
Kula’s approach to executing this dual strategy involves:
- Focusing on tech-forward companies: “Most of them are also being very product driven companies rather than a service driven company.”
- Targeting companies under 1500 employees
- Adapting the sales approach based on company size
- Building for global scale from day one
The Future Vision
This dual-category strategy aligns with Kula’s ambitious mission. “Our mission at Kula is to sort of make every single one a recruiter within the organization,” Achuthanand shares. “Recruiting is a team sport, not an individual sport.”
For B2B founders, Kula’s approach offers a valuable lesson: the choice between category creation and category competition isn’t always binary. The key is identifying where existing solutions fall short and determining whether that gap requires a new category or a reimagined approach to an existing one.