Wingman

Shruti Kapoor didn't set out to build a sales tech company. She was working on the investing side at a fintech company called Peonier in India when she decided to get her hands dirty with startups. She joined as someone who "knew absolutely nothing about go-to-market strategies" but ended up building the sales team, going out to sell themselves, and getting early customers. That's when she hit a wall: some sales reps were crushing it while others putting in massive effort weren't hitting numbers. She wanted to observe their calls, but it became "too onerous." Calls got canceled. Time was wasted. "What if they could just record their calls and I could review them?" she thought. That spark, combined with frustration about getting customer voice back to her distributed product team, planted the seed for Wingman.

Shruti met Murli, an ex-Google engineer, through a mutual friend. He'd moved back to India wanting to start a company and was looking for a business co-founder. They spent a year and a half brainstorming before committing. Murli convinced his old Google colleague Shreeker to also quit and move back to India to join them. The founding team validated their idea by talking to sales leaders about what they'd do with call recording data. The real challenge wasn't just recording—recording exists for decades. It was figuring out the right use case. They started writing code in May 2018 and landed their first paying customer in October 2018. Five months to MVP and revenue.

Those first customers came from their network—co-building partners who gave useful feedback but didn't represent real product-market fit. The team's breakthrough feature was real-time feedback to salespeople on calls, a way to coach without being there. Excited, they hired a sales consultant to accelerate outbound. He set up 40 meetings with perfect-fit companies. They closed zero deals. "Something's not right," they realized. The problem wasn't the product—it was the perceived effort to adopt it. Sales enablement teams weren't used to writing short "battle cards" or thinking about content that way. The decision-maker and implementer were different people. And customers were being asked to make a bet on a product they hadn't even tried yet. For three months during Y Combinator, they iterated on positioning and product configuration, not massive rebuilds.

By late 2019, after fixing the onboarding friction, they went from close to zero to six figures in revenue in roughly three months. A Product Hunt launch and early PR helped, but what really worked was inbound. Shruti noticed salespeople are social—they ask each other for advice, share recommendations. The pandemic accelerated this: online communities like Slack groups, Reddit threads, and revenue leader forums became where buyers hung out. Instead of Shruti pitching, they got customers to share their experiences. A customer would comment, "I'm using Wingman," in a thread about conversation intelligence, and that carried 10x more trust than founder messaging. Wingman incentivized and nudged customers to participate without being pushy. They complemented this with Product Hunt, content (they did "fun memes on sales" on Instagram, educational posts), SEO, and personal branding for team members. The result: 90% of revenue today comes from inbound, mostly non-paid channels. By the time they explored acquisition conversations in 2022, they had over 300 customers, 60 employees, and mid-seven-figure revenue.

Shruti and the team didn't go looking for a buyer in 2022—they were preparing to fundraise. But within weeks, three buyers came inbound. Shruti realized the sales tech industry was consolidating and the timing made sense. Clary acquired Wingman at a 15-20x revenue multiple. All three co-founders stayed on. The business has scaled dramatically since the acquisition, and they're now on what Shruti calls "the good side of the sales tech consolidation."