He launched a free product for enterprise customers—then grew to $12M ARR in 2 years. | Bhaskar Sunkara, Founding CTO of AppDynamics

Description

Bhaskar was employee #1 at AppDynamics, which was sold to Cisco for $3.7B. He and co-founder Jyoti found a way to change how enterprise monitoring tools worked. From tracking low-level code metrics that ops teams didn't understand to monitoring what the business actually cares about.

In this episode, Bhaskar breaks down how that one insight won them Netflix and Priceline as early customers, why they ran production POCs that no competitor would dare try, and how a free download called AppDynamics Lite generated over 60% of their leads—in an industry where getting started normally took weeks of professional services and six-figure contracts.

Why You Should Listen

• Why selling to developers is operating on hard mode.
• How one-day POCs became the killer enterprise sales weapon.
• Why freemium disrupted an industry that required weeks of professional services to get started.
• How they grew from $2M to $12M in revenue in just one year post launch.

Keywords 

startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, AppDynamics, application monitoring, enterprise SaaS, B2B sales, finding pmf, freemium strategy, Cisco acquisition, production POC

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:11:33 Choosing the ICP
• 00:20:37 Landing Netflix with Freemium
• 00:28:44 Growing from $2M to $12M in Year Two
• 00:30:10 The Free Download Strategy That Generated 60% of Leads
• 00:32:04 Days from the NASDAQ Bell—Then Cisco Offered $3.7B
• 00:41:28 The Moment of True Product Market Fit

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