CEO & Co-founder @Hyperly | Helping founders acquire clients through LinkedIn funnels | Building Hyperly — Social Selling platform | Learn about my 4-week Linkedin Sales Cohort

Most early-stage founders don’t need a sales team.
They need a system — one they can run themselves till $1M.

I’ve built and sold two companies. The first one taught me how hard sales is without a plan. The second one taught me how to fix it.

Now, I help AI, SaaS, and IT Services founders build Founder-Led Sales Engines that work in the US — without hiring too early or burning leads.

What I build with founders:

- Clarity on ICP & messaging

- Lean outbound & LinkedIn systems

- Email + DM + Cold call playbooks

- AI-powered sales tools

- Founder-to-closer mindset shifts

It’s not about closing more — it’s about knowing what not to do before $1M.

If you’re in the 0–$1M zone, let’s talk systems.

Want to see how I build founder-led sales systems?

Download the exact 0–$1M Sales Playbook I use with AI-SaaS & IT founders selling into the US:

👉 https://www.elephantedge.academy/playbooks

Just the real frameworks that work before you hire a sales team.

Venkatesh M.

I’ve officially partnered with GTM Partners to enable founders build $1M US GTM engine.

In 2025, I worked hands-in-hand with 5 different companies, as a Fractional VP Sales, to help them move from ad-hoc selling to a repeatable B2B pipeline in the US.

All of them and many founders I've been having conversation with, had the same question..
- How to sell AI products to SMBs in the US
- How to sell Agentic AI services to mid-market clients
- How to crack enterprise sales with deal sizes >$250K for the first time

The reality in 2026:

Without sales + distribution and the know-how to achieve the first $1M in revenue, there is no next stage, nor a serious funding conversation.

Partnering with GTM Partners gives me deeper leverage to help founders crack the US market in the right way at the right speed. 

If you’re building for the US, this is the work I’m focused on.

Thanks to Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown for the partnership and trust. Thanks to my team at Elephant Edge | Fractional VP Sales Leadership for making this happen.

-----------------
I’m Venkatesh M., Fractional VP Sales. I build and run US sales teams for 50–200 employee companies, from first hire to first $1M, until it works. DM me if cracking the US market is your #1 priority in 2026.

#founder #GTM #USSales

Fractional VP for AI-SaaS & Tech Startups Scaling to $1M+ | US Market GTM & Sales | Certified GTM OS Partner

I Help Non-Tech Founders with Tech Leadership | Founding Director @ ThinkAlt Tech

Goutham is a passionate Entrepreneur who lives and breathes Mobile App Development. His passion towards building apps led him to start ThinkAlternate Technologies, fastest growing Mobile App development company in Bangalore, India.  
He is process driven and makes sure his clients always get the best in class products for their business, while primary focus being growth of his clients business.

He is a highly energetic leader who goes above and beyond for a product success. He has so far built more than 100+ Apps for customers in India, USA, UK, France, Japan, Gibraltar, Canada and various other countries across the globe. 

Goutham also guides and hand-hold startups by being their fractional-CTO. 

You will find him in his element when he’s talking about business, building mobile apps, swimming meditating, travelling and finally being himself with a good cup of coffee and a non-fictional read. 


ThinkAlternate Technologies

★ One of the fastest growing Mobile App Development Company known for executing complex projects.

★ Certified development team.

★ Process driven framework for timely delivery and lifelong support.

Our In-house product success team can help you build your dream product in lighting speed.

Goutham Iyyappan

Entrepreneurship is a marathon.
But too many of us forget there are two races.

Monday to Friday, we’re constantly running:
Deadlines. Decisions. Payroll. Clients. Growth.
A never-ending work marathon.

But this weekend, I ran a different one — with my family.

And it hit me:
If we don’t finish the weekend marathon with family and loved ones,
we start the next work week already exhausted.

Data backs this up
	•	Founders working 60+ hours/week are 2x more likely to burn out
	•	Chronic imbalance reduces decision quality by ~20–30%
	•	High-performing leaders protect recovery time as seriously as execution time

Work will always demand more.
Business will always feel urgent.

But weekends are not a pause button.
They’re the recovery lap that lets you run faster, clearer, and longer.

Run hard during the week.
Run meaningfully on the weekend.

Because the real win isn’t just building a great company —
it’s having the people you love run alongside you while you do it.

#EntrepreneurLife #WorkLifeBalance #FounderMindset #Leadership #MarathonNotSprint #family

AI Powered App Development | Scale Your Mobile Apps to 1M+ Users

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The RISE Sangam5 Summit — a strong validation moment for us.
Spent time at the RISE Sangam5 Summit, speaking with founders, product owners, and operators across industries.
What stood out wasn’t inspiration — it was pattern recognition.

Over multiple conversations, the same mobile app challenges kept coming up:
• A consumer app handling ~50K MAUs where crashes increased after every release, but the team couldn’t trace which change caused it
 • A scaling startup whose AWS bills doubled in 3 months, with no clear visibility into which services or APIs were driving the spike
 • A product team spending 2–3 weeks every month just stabilising the app, delaying roadmap features quarter after quarter
 • An ops team reacting to 1-star reviews on the app store before internal alerts even triggered
 • Founders knowing something is wrong with retention and performance, but lacking one unified view of app health.

These are exactly the problems we’ve been deeply working on.
Conversations like these reinforce why we’re building MIRSA — an AI-driven platform focused on mobile app health, performance, root-cause detection, and long-term maintainability, not just development.

Grateful for the candid discussions and the shared learning.
 Looking forward to continuing these conversations beyond the summit.

If you’re a product owner dealing with scale or stability issues, you’re not alone — and this problem is very real. The need is urgent. And product teams are clearly looking for better answers.

User Retention is the second largest problem  for product owners. 

Want to cut user churn by 20% in Q1?
Fix these first:
	•	Onboarding friction
	•	App performance lags
	•	Feature discoverability

Your growth budget starts with maintenance.
Not marketing.

Get your App Health checked today: 
https://lnkd.in/gDGGA5Vg

Start 2026 with clarity. 
January is always about optimism in product teams. 
New goals. New features. New bets.

But if your app didn’t perform in 2025 — if users churned, reviews dipped, or your support inbox was constantly filled with complaints — then the best growth strategy isn’t to build more.

It’s to pause. Step back. And fix what’s already broken.

Because under every underperforming app is usually a neglected layer of:
	•	Crashes that were deprioritized
	•	Lags that got normalized
	•	Features that users never really understood

This year, the smartest product leaders aren’t pushing for more.
They’re pushing for better.

Better experiences. Better performance. Better reliability.

This Jan, fix your app’s foundations before adding anything new.

We built MIRSA for exactly this — to give you a clear, prioritized view of what needs fixing and why.

Free App Health Audit → https://lnkd.in/gDGGA5Vg

Most apps don’t fail because users don’t want the product.
They fail because the app lies in its first 60 seconds.

Your app doesn’t have a growth problem.
It has a UX honesty problem.

Here’s what I mean
The most common UX mistake killing mobile growth
Product teams design for what they wish users would do,
not for what users are actually ready to do.

So apps:
Ask for sign-up before value
Explain features before outcomes
Show dashboards before wins
Push permissions before trust
That’s not UX.
That’s wishful thinking wrapped in design.

A real pattern we see across apps we maintain
Across 150+ mobile apps we’ve worked on:

Apps that delay login until after value
→ see 20–45% higher activation

Apps that reduce first-screen choices to one action
→ see 30%+ better Day-1 retention

Apps that show progress before commitment
→ see lower uninstall rates in the first session

No ads.
No ASO tricks.
Just honest UX.

UX truth most teams don’t want to hear
Users don’t trust you yet.
Your design must earn that trust, not demand it.

Every early ask should answer:
“Why should I give you this?”
Time.
Data.
Attention.
Permissions

The simple UX rule that scales acquisition
Value → Proof → Commitment
If your flow is:
Commitment → Explanation → Hope
You’re bleeding users.

Quick self-check for founders & product teams
Open your app and ask:
What does the user gain in the first 30 seconds?
What do we ask before they gain it?
Is the first CTA helping the user or helping us?
If those answers don’t align,
your growth metrics won’t either.

Good UI makes apps usable.
Honest UX makes apps grow.

#ux #ui #design #mobileapp #android #ios #

“Just one more feature.”
The most expensive sentence in product development.

Every designer has heard it.
Every product team has said it.
Very few realize how much growth it silently kills.

What “just one more feature” really means
To the roadmap, it sounds harmless.
To the designer, it means:
One more decision for the user
One more screen to explain
One more edge case to handle
One more place users can get confused
Designers fight complexity.
Roadmaps reward features.
That conflict never ends well.

The hidden cost
Across multiple industry studies and internal audits:
47% of users abandon apps due to complexity or confusion
Apps with feature-heavy first sessions see up to 30–40% lower Day-1 retention
Products that delay clarity in the first minute experience higher uninstall rates than poor performance issues
Users don’t leave because features are missing.
They leave because value is buried.

A real example we see repeatedly, products add:
- Advanced filters
- Secondary dashboards
- Power-user options
All before the user experiences the core win.

Result:
- Onboarding grows from 3 → 6 steps
- CTAs multiply
- Designers start explaining instead of guiding
- Activation drops, but roadmap “looks impressive”
vThe app becomes feature-rich and user-poor.

The designer’s silent frustration
Designers:
- Reduce cognitive load
- Simplify flows
- Remove friction
- But are asked to fit everything in.
So clarity loses.
Complexity wins.
And UX takes the blame when metrics don’t move.

How we are different at ThinkAlternate
We follow a simple, non-negotiable rule:
"No feature ships unless it earns its place in the user’s first success."

What that looks like in practice:
- Features are gated after the Aha moment
- Roadmaps prioritize time-to-value, not feature count
- Designers have veto power on cognitive overload
- We measure UX success using activation, retention, and support reduction
- “Later” features are parked intentionally, not force-fit

Result:
- Higher activation
- Fewer confused users
- Designers design clarity, not compromise

Great products are not built by adding features.
They are built by protecting simplicity.
If your roadmap celebrates features
but your users struggle to get started,
your growth problem is already designed in.

What’s the one feature you knew would hurt UX
but still had to add?

Photo: A shot with some of the best designers that I know.

#UXStrategy #ProductDesign #MobileAppDesign #AppDevelopment #Android #Ios

If your app metrics don’t translate to revenue or retention impact, they’re vanity metrics.

I’ve seen teams celebrate:
• DAU growth
• Feature adoption
• Release velocity

While quietly losing:
• Paying users
• Session depth
• App Store ratings
• Marketing ROI

Real example (sports app, Bay Area):

On paper:
• Crashes affected only ~2.4% of sessions
• Average API latency looked “acceptable”
• Infra costs were “within budget”

So the issues were deprioritized.

But when we mapped metrics to outcomes, the picture changed:

• 2.4% crash rate = 18% of premium users affected
• 1.6s delay during live-match flows = 11% higher session drop-off
• Background retries increased infra usage by ~38% during peak events
• App rating dips during match days directly impacted re-installs

Same metrics.
Very different conclusions.

This is why I strongly believe:

Crash rate alone is a useless metric.
Latency without context is misleading.
Infra cost without user-value mapping is dangerous.

The only metrics that matter are:
• Crash impact on high-value users
• Latency impact on conversion-critical flows
• Cost per retained active user
• Stability during real-world peak usage
• Performance variance across geographies and devices

Anything else gives false confidence.

High-performing product teams don’t ask:
“Is the app stable?”

They ask:
“Which instability is hurting growth and revenue right now?”

That shift alone changes:
• Roadmap priorities
• Engineering focus
• Cloud spending decisions
• Release confidence

Strong opinion:
If your dashboards can’t tell you what to fix first for maximum business impact, you don’t have observability — you have noise.

Curious to hear from founders, CTOs, and product owners here:
Do you currently map app performance metrics directly to business outcomes — or are they still living in separate worlds?

Most product teams try to “buy” users.
The smartest ones design users in.

UI/UX is not about aesthetics.
It’s one of the strongest user acquisition levers in a mobile app.

Let me share a real case from one of our apps at ThinkAlternate 

A successful Consumer-facing Android App was facing was some critical problems
•	Paid installs were increasing
•	Organic installs were flat
•	High drop-off during onboarding
•	App Store conversion stuck at ~18%

The product worked.
But users weren’t staying long enough to care.

What we changed (UI/UX only — no growth hacks)
	1.	Cut onboarding steps from 6 → 3
(Removed explanations users never read)

	2.	Replaced text-heavy screens with visual hierarchy
	•	Clear primary CTA
	•	One decision per screen

	3.	Reduced cognitive load
	•	Consistent button placement
	•	Predictable navigation
	•	Fewer “thinking moments”

	4.	Aligned App Store visuals with in-app reality
	•	Screenshots showed real flows
	•	Not marketing fantasies

No ad budget increase.
No ASO keyword changes.
No feature additions.

The impact (within 45 days)
	•	App Store conversion: 18% → 31%
	•	Organic installs: +62%
	•	Day-1 retention: +27%
	•	Cost per install (blended): −38%
	•	Support tickets related to “confusion”: −41%

Same app.
Same market.
Better design.

The real insight most teams miss

User acquisition doesn’t start with ads.
It starts with clarity.

Every confusing screen:
	•	Increases uninstall probability
	•	Wastes paid traffic
	•	Kills word-of-mouth before it starts

Good UI/UX:
	•	Shortens time-to-value
	•	Improves store rankings indirectly
	•	Turns users into referrers

That’s compounding acquisition.

Strong opinion (from seeing 150+ apps)

If your growth team and design team don’t sit together,
you’re leaking acquisition money every single day.

If you’re a CEO, CMO, CTO, or Product Owner and organic installs have plateaued,
look at your first 3 screens, not your ad dashboard.

That’s usually where the answer is.

If you want, comment “UX” and I’ll share:
	•	The exact checklist we use before redesigns
	•	Or how we audit UI/UX purely from an acquisition lens
No pitch. Just patterns that work.

70% of App Churn Happens for Reasons Most Teams Don’t Track

Most teams think users leave because of features, pricing, or competition.

In reality, a large chunk of churn is caused by experience breakdowns that never get escalated.

Across multiple app audits we’ve run, a consistent pattern shows up:

• Users who experience 1+ crash are far less likely to return
• A 1–2 second delay in a core flow materially increases drop-offs
• Performance issues hit high-intent users first, not casual ones
• Infra cost grows faster than revenue when inefficiencies go unchecked

And yet, most dashboards still focus on:
• Downloads
• DAUs
• Feature usage

Recently, when we audited a sports app
On the surface:
• MAUs were stable
• Crash rate was under 3%
• Marketing spend was increasing

But retention was quietly slipping.

When we correlated app health with user behavior:

• Users hitting a live-match latency spike had ~12% higher session abandonment
• Crash-affected sessions included a disproportionate share of subscribed users
• Background retries inflated cloud usage by ~30–40% during peak events
• App Store ratings dipped specifically on high-traffic days

Nothing was “broken.”
But trust was eroding.

That’s the real problem.

Most performance issues don’t kill apps overnight.
They bleed growth slowly.

This is why the best product teams track:
• Crash impact by user segment, not averages
• Latency on revenue-critical flows
• Cost per retained active user
• Stability during real-world peak usage
• Performance variance across devices and regions

Strong opinion:
If your app metrics can’t tell you why users leave before they complain, you’re already late.

Growth isn’t just acquisition.
It’s sustained trust at scale.

Curious — for product teams here running live apps:
Do you actively connect app performance metrics to retention and revenue, or are they still reviewed in isolation?

Top 3 Quora Questions for Product Teams in Jan 2026. 

Q: What should product teams focus on in 2026?
A: Reliability, retention, and recovery. Not features. Not redesigns. Start with an app audit. 
- MIRSA provides insights on what’s really holding your growth back.

Q: Is it worth maintaining an old app or building a new one?
A: Fixing a high-potential app often brings higher ROI than building from scratch. If retention, UX, or bugs are blocking growth — solve those first. 
- MIRSA helps teams prioritize fixes by impact.

Q: How do I improve my app’s performance in the new year?
A: Run a full health audit. Check logs, crash rates, user feedback, task completion. 
- Tools like MIRSA automate this, helping product teams fix what users actually feel.

UX designers are not failing.
They are being set up to fail.
If you’re a UX/UI designer, this will sound painfully familiar

The problem product designers face (but rarely say out loud)

You’re expected to:
“Improve engagement”
“Reduce drop-offs”
“Increase conversion”
“Make it intuitive”

But you’re not given:
Clear business goals
Ownership of outcomes
Authority over flow decisions
Time to validate assumptions
A seat in growth conversations

So you end up designing beautiful compromises.

What actually happens inside most product teams
Designers design clarity
Stakeholders ask for features

Designers remove friction
Product adds “just one more thing”

Designers fight cognitive load
Marketing adds another CTA

And when metrics don’t move…
UX gets blamed.

A pattern we see across apps we work on
Across 150+ mobile apps we’ve audited and maintained at ThinkAlternate:
In 70%+ apps, UX decisions were overridden late
In 60% apps, designers never saw retention data
In 50% apps, UX was evaluated on opinions, not metrics
Yet the expectation was still:
 - “Design should fix growth.”

The uncomfortable truth designers know
UX cannot fix:
Unclear positioning
Fear-driven product decisions
Founder anxiety
Feature-first roadmaps
Growth goals with no constraints
But designers are still asked to try.


What great designers actually want
Clear outcome definitions
Early involvement in problem framing
Access to real user behavior
Freedom to say “this will hurt users”
Respect for UX as a growth function, not decoration

Strong opinion (from working closely with designers)
If a designer is only brought in to “make it look better”,
the product has already lost.
Great designers don’t just design screens.
They design decisions.

For founders & product leaders reading this
If your UX team feels defensive instead of confident,
it’s not a talent problem.
It’s an environment problem.

Designers:
What’s the one UX decision you knew was right
but had to compromise anyway?
Drop it in the comments.
Let’s make this conversation visible.

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The Battle

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