Software Engineer turned Founder. I help founders to ship SaaS products faster.

With experience leading engineering teams at multiple early-stage startups, I’ve seen firsthand what it takes to build and scale successful products.

At 19, my entrepreneurial journey began by selling pre-built sales funnels for digital agencies, where I quickly learned the importance of customization in business. Since then, I’ve experimented with various startup ideas, learning valuable lessons at every stage.

I launched Cold Pitch, a tool that personalizes cold emails 9,000% faster than an SDR. My latest product, Commentify, automates LinkedIn comments, turning engagement into conversions.

Through these experiences, I’ve learned that building a profitable business requires access to distribution or capital.

💬 If you’re a founder looking to validate your SaaS idea or launch your MVP faster, let’s work together to get your product to market quickly and efficiently.

Mithun Kumar

Nalin Senthamil

Hi, I'm Nalin, Founder & CEO of Storylane. 

Storylane lets marketing and sales teams build product demos in minutes. Today, we're serving 3000+ customers and growing rapidly.

In this era of remote sales, buyers are making quick decisions and Storylane empowers companies to drive growth through their product. 

I'm passionate about building delightful products through technology and wear multiple hats like that of a SaaS dreamer, exec, and advisor.

Founder & CEO

Drive product-led growth (PLG) with Storylane platform so buyers can self-experience your product - and get quality lead in your pipeline.
 
At Storylane, we enable Marketing and Sales teams to show their product in an engaging and delightful way. And the best part is that it only takes on 15 mins to create one of these demos and add it to your site. 

Not only are we the most affordable demo company on the market, we also offer a free trial so don’t take my word for it! Signup today and create your first demo today completely free.

How to get started -
If you would like to create your own demo today, message me or hop on to the storylane.io website to schedule a demo or start a free trial.

We just wrapped our offsite in Langkawi. The entire team flew in from 25 cities and spent three days breaking down how to get to $20M ARR. We split the target into 5 buckets:

- PLG growth
- Sales-led growth
- RepX, our new AI sales agent
- Expansion of existing accounts
- Retention and churn reduction

Each team came in with their own number. What they genuinely believed was achievable from their side.

Then we spent the next day debating it. Back and forth. Pushing on assumptions. Stress-testing the math.

Then we aligned.

This matters more than people think.

A number handed down is a target nobody really owns.

When each team builds their own number and defends it - they go home believing it's achievable because they're the ones who said it was.

From there, we broke 12 months into quarters. 

Five variables tracked constantly against one North Star metric.

That's the whole system.

Founder & CEO @Storylane - Build Killer Product Demos

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We’re spending $3.3M on marketing at Storylane in 2026, AGAIN, because...    
Short answer: It’s working.    

Long answer: 

2 years ago, we'd set up a booth at a conference and people would walk right past.

Today, they stop.
"Oh I've heard of Storylane."

That’s brand compounding. 

Here's how we are spending the budget:

→ Paid Ads - $1.2M (36%)
→ Conferences & Events - $550K (17%)
→ Customer Marketing - $350K (11%)
→ Influencer Program - $250K (8%)
→ Community Sponsorships - $250K (8%)
→ Outbound - $250K (8%)
→ SEO - $200K (6%)
→ Social & Creative - $200K (6%)
→ Partnerships - $50K (2%)

5 things changed from last year:

> More outbound. We're moving upmarket, reaching buyers who aren't in our LinkedIn circle yet.

> 2x on brand social. Higher organic ROI. And, now building brand for our newest product RepX

> Cut Influencer program by half. Realized scaling profitably is hard. 

> Customer marketing is new. We hired specifically for this because community-driven growth in 2027 has to start being built right now. These things take 6–9 months before they pay off.

> Partnerships is a small experiment. Might work, might not.

Everything else stays the same:

- Every channel has clear KPIs
- Underperforming channels get cut
- Winners get more fuel

We're profitable. That gives us confidence to take bigger swings.

But we still track every dollar like it's our own.
Because it is.

Just hit 20,000 followers. A year ago, I had 6,000. This isn't a "how I grew my audience" post. Here's what sharing content did for us over the past year:

1. Hiring got sharper.

3 of our best people joined because they already understood what we were building. No pitch needed. They'd read the posts, followed the journey, and showed up ready. That's a recruiting advantage money can't buy.


2. Unexpected doors opened.

Demo automation, remote culture, the angel-strapped model - writing about these brought conversations I couldn't have manufactured. Founders, operators, investors. Real ones.


3. Brand trust compounded.

Every post about how we operate - 3 salespeople at $10M ARR, no VPs, no board pressure - became a signal to the market. Customers started showing up already aligned with how we work. That changes the sales dynamic completely.

--

Honestly, it’s never really been about the follower count.

I'm a two-time founder. 
One company raised $200M and failed. 
One is at $10M+ ARR, profitable, and growing without burning other people's money. 

These stories matter.

So I’ll keep sharing - not to build a following, but because someone earlier in the journey might learn from the wins and the mistakes.

Thanks for being here.

And here's to the next 20k. 🥂

In my first startup, we raised $200M and spent six years trying to make it work.

Looking back, I should have left 2–3 years earlier.

Not because the team didn’t try hard enough.
Not because we didn’t believe.

But because at some point the opportunity cost of time becomes the real risk.

You can raise capital again.
You can rebuild teams.
Markets change all the time.

But the years you spend forcing something that stopped making sense — those don’t come back.

That experience came back to me last week.

A founder I met told me he’s shutting down his company and returning the remaining capital to investors.

His reasoning was simple:

"I could burn the rest trying more pivots. I'd rather return the capital now and start fresh later."

We glorify the "never give up" narrative so much in startups that we've made quitting feel like failure — even when it’s the most rational decision left.

Sometimes the real founder skill isn’t persistence.

It’s judgment.

Knowing when to push.

And knowing when the smartest move is to stop.

Someone asked me yesterday: "What worries you most at $10M+ ARR?" 
My honest answer:

Defensibility.

Can someone build what we built and replace us?

Today? Absolutely.

That's the reality every founder faces but nobody talks about.

You spend years building something, then realize someone with enough capital can replicate it in months.

Especially now with AI.

My strategy:

→ Brand.

We are spending $3.3M on marketing this year. 
For brand recognition.

So when someone searches our category, they think of us first.

→ Multi-product.

Expand into the full workflow of the customer.

One product = easy to replace.
Multi-products = much harder.


That's what we're doing.

I only hire salespeople when my existing reps tell me they’re drowning. Not when I feel like we need more people. At $10M+ ARR with just 3 sales reps, here’s my biggest advice about scaling sales teams:

More reps don't automatically mean more revenue.

If you're not growing the pie, you're just splitting it.

What actually scales revenue is building a center of excellence in your sales team.

You raise the bar for your current reps before bringing in new people.

Here's how:

→ Give them better tools (demo automation, conversational intelligence, AI for research)
→ Remove admin work that wastes their time
→ Automate follow-ups and pre-call prep
→ Let them own bigger quota with smarter processes

When you do this, your first few reps start thinking about expansion, not just hitting baseline quota.

They become the standard.

Now when you bring in someone new, they join a cohort where the bar is already high.

That's the center of excellence.

Most founders hire because it feels like progress.

They think: more people = more revenue.

Not always.

More people = more complexity, higher burn, split focus.

--

Specific signals I watch to track the team's bandwidth:

- Follow-ups slipping
- Deals falling through cracks in CRM
- Close rates dropping from lack of focus

Even then, I don't rush to hire.

First I ask: 

Can we automate this? 
Can we give them a better tool?
Can we remove this step entirely? 

I'd rather raise the bar.

The center of excellence is the only way to scale without losing quality.

My biggest regret as a founder: I should have left my first company 2 years earlier.

Because I can't get that time back.

Everything else you can rebuild - skill, money, reputation. 

Time is the one thing that's gone for good.

So when people ask me how to pick or leave a startup, here's what I actually tell them:

1. Start with who founded it.

A first-time founder will make a lot of mistakes. That's not a criticism, it's just reality. If you want a higher probability of things going well, a second or third-time founder has already paid for those lessons. They're not re-learning the same things from scratch.

2. Will you be surrounded by high-agency people. 

Watch for:

- Too many unnecessary leaders. 
- Lack of urgency
- Are people skilling up

3. Watch how transparent they are.

Watch whether they share:

- How the ARR is actually moving
- Where the business is struggling
- What's not working and why

Visibility builds trust.

If numbers are hidden, that's your signal.

Most people join companies for the obvious things - exciting problem, smart team, learning opportunity. Those are table stakes. Everyone says that.

You usually can see some of those in the interview. But you can see them pretty quickly once you're inside.

Do the research and pay attention to second-order things.

Think twice before saying churn is a CS problem. Look at what actually causes a customer to leave, and you'll see the issue usually runs much deeper than most founders think:

- Marketing attracted the wrong ICP from the start
- Sales overpromised to close the deal
- Product didn't deliver what was sold
- Onboarding never set them up to succeed

By the time CS is involved, the damage is already done.

They're not the cause. They're just the ones holding the bag.

The same pattern shows up everywhere in most companies.

Pipeline is dry? Blame marketing.
Deals not closing? Blame sales.
Retention dropping? Blame CS.

It's almost always wrong.

At Storylane offsite last month, I set one goal for the entire company: hit $20M.

Not: sales, hit this number. 
Or marketing, hit that pipeline.

Every function is owning a piece of it.

This changes the dynamic completely.

When sales is struggling, marketing asks how they can help.
When retention slips, product leans in.
When pipeline is thin, everyone feels it.

Nobody can hit their individual goal unless the company hits its collective one.

That's the only structure I've found that actually kills the blame game.

Accountability without isolation.

Raising $200M taught me something I wish more people talked about:
We glorify the fundraising story way too much.

The "raise big, grow fast" narrative dominates tech.

The other side - the slow burn, the layoffs, the realization that capital doesn't equal PMF - that part gets quiet.

I lived both sides.

At my first company, we raised $200M. 
Then we laid off 250 people. 
Then we shut down.

At Storylane, my co-founder and I put in our own money, raised a few angel checks, built an amazing team, and grew to $10M+ ARR without board pressure or a unicorn-or-bust mentality.

I'm not saying don't raise. If your business needs institutional capital to reach its potential, make that call.

But a lot of founders make the wrong call because they only have one data point.

So here's the other side:

→ Capital doesn't buy product-market fit
→ A $200M runway can burn faster than a $2M one if discipline isn't there
→ The founders who "won" quietly - profitable, lean, in control - rarely make the news

Both paths are valid. 

But you can only make a good decision when you've seen both clearly.

Most people haven't.

We got our whole team together to launch a product at 1 am.

It was during our offsite in Malaysia.

The timezone worked in our favor.

So we hit go on RepX - Storylane's new conversational demo product.

Here's what it does differently:

Most websites track the obvious signals:

- Clicks
- Pageviews
- Time on page

None of that tells you what a buyer actually needs.

RepX tracks what matters:

- Questions asked
- Objections raised
- Demos Viewed

A buyer lands on your site and instead of navigating a static page, they have a real conversation with RepX.

It reads their persona, use case, and industry - then surfaces exactly what's relevant, including the right demo from your library.

Every company has a website. Not every website does anything when no one's watching.

RepX is how your website works the night shift.

Last week I met a founder building in a category with three dominant players.

He was trying to figure out how to "beat them."

My advice: first decide what game you’re playing.

When you enter a crowded market with strong incumbents, you typically have two paths.

Option 1: Raise big and compete head-on.

* Raise significant capital
* Hire aggressively
* Move fast and try to outgrow the leaders
* Beat them at their own game

You might still build something strategically valuable — but this path usually requires serious capital to work.

Option 2: Stay lean and build something uniquely valuable.

* Keep the team small and strong
* Build a great product with clear differentiation
* Maintain healthy margins
* Raise little capital
* Stay profitable

Instead of trying to outspend incumbents, you build something so strategically valuable that when the market consolidates, you're the obvious asset.

Here’s the key difference:

From Option 2 → you can always move to Option 1 later.
From Option 1 → it's very hard to go back.

So if you're unsure which strategy your market supports, default to Option 2.

Both paths can work.

The important thing is knowing which company you're actually building.

For every B2B company, your website is your first product - not the software you're building. It’s where everyone lands first. And right now, no one treats it that way.

The experience across 99% of B2B sites looks like this:

- Someone visits. 
- They scroll. 
- Maybe they click a demo button. 
- Maybe they fill out a form.

Then they wait.

Wait for a sales call. 
Wait to actually see the product.
Wait for someone to get back to them. 

That's broken.

In 2026, people don't want to wait.

They want to see what you're building now.

That's why your website needs a voice.

Not a chatbot that answers FAQ questions - a voice that can actually show your product, run discovery, qualify visitors in real-time.

Every visitor that lands on your site has intent.

But you're forcing them into a linear flow.

Why make them wait?

What if your website could:

→ Qualify them instantly
→ Show them the exact features they care about
→ Answer their questions in real-time
→ Move them from curious to interested in minutes

That's table stakes for 2026.

If your website can't have a conversation, you're losing deals before sales even knows they existed.

That's what we are changing with RepX (conversational demos) Storylane.

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