5 lessons from my journey at Yellow.ai

Today marks the end of my four-year tenure at?Yellow.ai . There is a lot to say — I joined them as the first PM and was lucky enough to see the company grow from a few to 1500+ customers. However, I will prioritise and share the five key lessons I learned that have shaped me into who I am.

Shoutout to the founders (Raghu ,?Rashid ,?Kishore ) & early folks at Yellow, for being amazing mentors & giving me a shot at these opportunities ??

1. The Magic of Selling??

This was in 2019 — one month after I joined — my first role as a PM (I was a dev before). The presales+product team at Yellow.ai consisted of one person — yours truly!

We got into conversation with GCC of a Fortune 500 company, and the stakeholders from their end were completely product-focused. Over the next 2 months, I created over 50 documents (RFP, comparisons, architecture, security, etc) & did almost 10 demos with different teams. We were in close competition with a few other vendors but ended up winning that deal for 350k+. This deal taught me how code eventually gets converted into money through value creation.

It has been a luxury to work deals with seasoned sales leaders like Haren, Tejes, Raghu, Neil B, Neale, Shawn, TJ, and many more leaders. It is inspiring to see the team’s crazy expansion in APAC and the recent wins from our NA teams — the preparation that goes in, and the thrill of winning is just addictive.

If there is one thing I have learned about SaaS from my time at?Yellow.ai , it’s the beauty of sales. Understanding your prospects’ pain points and seeing their eyes light up when you give them a magical demo is one of the most fun things! Sales taught me — people generally don’t mean what they say, a “no” isn’t really a “no,” and how to handle losing a million-dollar deal and winning one in the same way (shoutout to Raghu — our CEO!).

2. The Joy of (Ambitious) Building???

Circa 2019, our first 100k+ deal — we had pitched the customer a feature where we could train their bots on 10,000+ documents. While we had done a few PoCs— this was the first time we were going to deploy this at such a huge scale.

The task to accomplish this fell upon me, and to be honest, I was quite clueless. I practically hustled — reading hundreds of pages of docs to understand the content, learning about knowledge graphs, and what not. Given how early we were, we only had 4–5 engineers, and our only NLP guy was too busy working on the core platform.

As an MVP, we hacked together a completely non-AI solution where we manually converted docs into structured tables and searched through them. That bought us a few weeks while I wore the HR manager’s hat and hired ourNLP wizard Uday from Angellist.

With Uday on the team, we moved much faster. Within a week, we stumbled upon the current model that we use. Multiple iterations and hundreds of hours were spent on design, testing, and fine-tuning to make it enterprise-ready. This product went on to become one of our differentiators & helped us crack several large enterprises, & open up new geographies.

I believe we could do this, only because we worked very closely with the customer — I made 3 trips to their Kuala Lumpur office to talk to their users, execs, & really understand the pain point. This taught me how to build 0–1 products, that an MVP doesn’t need to be perfect, how a product evolves, and how to rally the team to believe in themselves and be close to the customer.

3. The Power of Action??

As we grew in 2020 and 2021, things were chaotic, to say the least. I remember once complaining to Rashid about how I was stuck with driving adoption of our HR bot (Bumblebee), because of so many external factors. He patiently listened to my rant for 10–15 minutes and then asked one very simple question — “So what are you gonna do about it?”. This taught me how to own the situation & focus on solving the problem, instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.

Similarly, six months back — Kishore and Rashid pushed us(PLG team) hard to “not be defensive,” “set aggressive goals,” and “generate more outcome.” At that time, I protested, but in a week, things changed. A few days of reflection helped me identify that we were getting in our own way, by assuming some things are not solvable. We became more action-oriented, decided to focus on fewer things and to just do what it takes. We were at least 5x more productive as a team.

4. Creating Something from Nothing???

A year ago, when I took charge of PLG, Apoorva, and Murali had already done a great job of getting a few customers to build their own bots and were now trying to productise things. The day that I took the responsibility of driving PLG at?Yellow.ai , the first thing I had to do was read a book on it because I had no clue of what it was, other than a general definition!

The shocker came when we compared our onboarding with that of the next five competitors. The scope of this problem was so wide, team size was zero, and nobody else in the company knew what PLG means (we had been completely enterprise-focused so far). Our task was cut out for us, but we had no idea where to even start.

Over the last year, we successfully built the customer support, technical writing, community management, product & engineering and growth teams to drive PLG in Yellow.ai. We set up the complete instrumentation, improved the product, launched a free trial, and got users from 15+ countries building bots. While PLG is a much longer journey, we are def in a much better shape than we were a year ago.

This taught me how much a group of talented, mission-driven individuals can achieve if they work on a meaningful cause, even when faced with a ton of uncertainty.

5. The Real Point of working in (and building) Startups???

Last year, I got an opportunity to move to San Francisco to help setup our US sales motion, and travel to multiple cities to train our partners and sales teams. From living alone in the US for six months to staying up till 1 am PST for working with India teams to taking several early morning flights) — I learned how much each of us are capable of pushing ourselves!

Meeting our partners in the US, Mexico, and Columbia taught me how technology is a great levelling force. No matter which country, class, color, etc. people are — if a product solves their problem, they’d care to use it & spend their time on it. (side note: It’s fascinating how there are such huge communities built today around tech products like Figma and Notion, which if you think about it — is just a bunch of code).

While the adventures were rewarding, what made the journey fun was the people. The founders took a bet on many of us, and we did the same with several team members. It’s so good to see when the folks we hired outdo and surprise us!

Finally, each of our ability to positively impact a colleague’s life & hopefully inspire them — by being a mentor and friend — is what really gives meaning to all the daily chaos.

What makes yellow.ai special?

Throughout my journey at?Yellow.ai , people have shown some amazing winning traits, but two, in particular, have stood out -

1. The ambition + iron will to go for what others would dismiss as laughable
2. The humility + desire to accept mistakes and constantly learn

I believe this is what has brought us the love of 1500+ global customers in the last four years, made us a category leader, and got us on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. From having an unstable coding-based bot builder four years back to the powerful no-code platform we have today, the product has transformed.

The point is — none of us could see this four years back, at least not me. So — no matter where we are, one thing I can say for sure — it?always?gets better because we — as a team — make it better. I believe we are hardly at 10% of what?Yellow.ai ?can be and can’t wait to see how much better it gets. Can’t wait to see us grow into a more and more successful company over the years ????

As I always say — Let’s paint the world Yellow! ??

Signing off ??

Shubhi (Linkedin )