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Episode Highlights
00:00 Creating New Markets: An Introduction
01:02 The Founding Story of Orange Slice
03:46 Insights from Corporate Sales Experiences
06:28 The Unique Journey to Y Combinator
09:13 Positioning and Vision for Orange Slice
11:54 The Language of Go-To-Market Strategy
14:23 Explosive Growth and Customer Feedback
17:00 Connecting Buyers and Sellers: Insights from Paul Graham
19:32 Building a Community and Content Strategy
22:12 The Art of Go-To-Market Execution
27:12 Creating a New Category vs. Building a Better Product
30:45 Final Thoughts and Future Directions
Clay built one of the hottest companies in go-to-market by inventing a job: the go-to-market engineer, the person technical enough to wrangle a powerful, complicated tool. Vihaar Nandigala's entire company is a bet that the job shouldn't have to exist.
"If we want to capture the whole market and build a trillion-dollar company, everyone needs to use it," he told us. "The best way to do that is having people just talk to the product like a friend, like a coworker, and have it do all the actions." Clay made something powerful and hard. Orange Slice is Vihaar's bet that powerful and easy were never really a trade-off, and that you can have both.
It's a bold vision from someone who met his co-founder on a Bollywood dance team at University of Michigan. After graduating, Vihaar and Kishan went off and learned go-to-market from opposite ends. Kishan landed at Ramp and watched one of the best growth teams in the world aim only at people who actually needed the product, while Vihaar went to JP Morgan and watched a sales motion with, in his words, "a lot of optimization left on the table." Orange Slice is what happened when they put those two views in the same room.
And it's working. Six weeks in, they cleared $50K MRR. While still mid-YC-batch, Paul Graham wrote his first angel check. The story is good, but the playbook underneath it is the better one, so let's break it down.
1. Reframe the user, not just the product
The sharpest move Vihaar made wasn't a feature. It was a noun. Clay's users are engineers. Orange Slice's users are operators.
"It's creativity that drives the best go-to-market operators we've seen," he said. "You're not limited by how do I set this up?, how do I connect these tools? It's thinking, what is the best workflow, typing that in, and seeing it virtualize in real time." And he didn't invent the word in a positioning session. His users did. They started describing themselves as operators instead of engineers, and he listened. That's the whole trick: the category language already existed in how customers talked, and he just claimed it.
2. Chase sales-market fit before you automate anything
Everyone talks about product-market fit. Vihaar's version is sales-market fit, and he has a three-step order of operations he'll repeat to any founder who asks:
- Nail the messaging first. "Spin up a bunch of copies of how you pitch it, pitch it to 10 or 100 people, synthesize the feedback, and find the messaging that resonates." Talk about the pains, not how the product works. At Kitchen Connect he got the door slammed on him, literally and metaphorically, 10 or 20 times before the pitch clicked.
- Then do things that don't scale. The grindy, unorthodox, in-person stuff big companies can't afford. He used to show up at restaurants right after close and pitch in person. That's where the best messaging gets found.
- Then automate, and scale it to the moon. "Too many people jump straight into automation without figuring out how their service works. Even YC founders do it. They jump to automation without first understanding the pain."
He frames the whole thing as art, not engineering. "Go-to-market is more artistic. You're throwing a thousand things at the wall, one sticks, and you squeeze all the juice out of that one thing."
3. Create the category instead of building a better mousetrap
Early on, Orange Slice positioned itself as a better Clay and went after Clay's users. It didn't work until they stopped competing and started expanding. "Building a better Clay eventually turns into a new market," Vihaar said. The people flocking to Orange Slice were never going to learn Clay in the first place. They were too intimidated by the learning curve. So the real market isn't a slice of Clay's, it's bigger than Clay's.
His advice to anyone eyeing the space is blunt. "My first piece of advice is don't start. It's insanely hard." If you ignore him, two rules: only build here if you've actually sold before, and pick one specific problem you hit while selling and hone that one thing. The founders who pivot out either never sold or never picked a niche.
The framing that made him light up came mid-interview, when Jared compared it to Airbnb. Airbnb didn't build a bigger hotel market. It captured all the people who would have slept on a couch because hotels were expensive and booked out. Orange Slice is doing the same thing to prospecting: not a bigger Clay, a bigger pool of people who can now prospect at all. "I'll probably steal those exact words," Vihaar said.
There's a bigger version of this he got from Paul Graham, too. The real leaders in connecting buyers and sellers aren't Apollo or ZoomInfo. They're Google Ads and Meta. Google makes its money selling intent, not search. So Orange Slice doesn't measure itself against sales tools. It competes with any way a customer gets customers. That's the difference between building a tool and building a market.
Orange Slice is live, self-service, and free to try at orangeslice.ai. Vihaar reads every email: vihar@orangeslice.ai.