Vihaar Nandigala, OrangeSlice.ai: CoFounder @ OrangeSlice.ai

[snorts] >> Welcome to another YC Wisdom pod. We have Vihar Nandyala with us today. He is a co-founder at Orange Slice, which is a cool company.

I like the dude already and only spoke once. He's, yeah, part of the YC Summer 2025 batch, raised 5 million already, is an ex-JP Morgan. So, just let's have you on, Vihar.

Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to? >> [snorts] >> Yeah, I appreciate the intro, Charles. Um, so, yeah, my name is Vihar.

We're building in the in the sales space. And we're trying to make go-to-market easier and a lot more accessible for everyone. I'm building the most complex go-to-market workflows just through natural language.

And a bit about me is I'm from Michigan. I born and raised in Michigan and also went to the University of Michigan. It's also where I met my co-founder.

And we sort of just moved out out to San Francisco to sort of chase this really big idea. Right. How old are you right now?

>> [snorts] >> I'm 23 years old. 23, so you started your first company 2019. You were like 16.

Just Gather, tell us a bit more about that one. >> [snorts] >> Yeah, yeah, I was um, I started that company when I was pretty young. I think when I was about 18 years old.

Um, sort of freshman in in college. Um, and oh, wait, no. Just Gather was actually, yeah, when I was 16, actually, in high school I started.

Um, and so, that was my first ever company and it was sort of getting my feet off the ground, trying to build a product, actually get customers. The whole idea um, about it was trying to get people into actual physical places to host and making hosting events a lot easier. So, we would basically automate the planning of where do I find a venue, how do I get entertainment to an event and make it a lot easier for people to host events and and sort of Just Gather, like the name says.

Right. It's funny because I often see teams among founder, right? Like the first companies that they started.

Uh, and usually simple stuff. It's either like meetups if you're like in the sort of tech area. I also did some meetups.

There was never a business model behind it. I wanted to launch an app that was called Velox. That was uh, to facilitate people meeting and making friends with one another.

I guess it'd be Bumble was the the category leader in that one didn't exist back then. Um, my first business was like mobile car wash, right? And it's a it's pretty horrible story.

We bought like um, a full pickup truck and all the equipment to wash all these cars, but we were scared shitless of sales, right? Like we have all these pamphlets and we couldn't knock on doors. So, it never even lifted off the ground.

And >> [snorts] >> I think it brought so much shame that I went and and found like a sales job after that and really began understanding sales and building an armor with that. That was my main lesson with that one. What was the first lesson you got from uh, your first couple of startups?

>> [snorts] >> Yeah, I think sort of similar thing where um, my first couple companies were these sort of cliche classic ideas. And I think I tried everything from, you know, meetups, social networks to um, mobile app development, games, um, everything in in between. And the the first big lessons and kind of things I wish I knew earlier was just how important the sales function is to startups.

I think most entrepreneurs are really creative and they like building products. But so much of the business is marketing and getting that product in users' hands and also taking that feedback. I think my first couple companies I really struggled with that the latter of of actually talking to those users, getting those first primary users.

I was too obsessed with the idea, the vision, building the thing. And I didn't focus on actually like getting that feedback or or getting those users. And hence also a reason why I'm building in the go-to-market space, solving a lot of the pains that I had before.

What about BitBasel, mobile app for grandmothers? You picked that ICP right off the bat. >> [snorts] >> Yeah.

So, that one was I was right after Just Gather. I started to learn how to code. I started making apps on the App Store.

And um, I think a a big a big >> [snorts] >> sort of evolution for me was understanding kind of what um, who actually plays mobile apps. So, originally I thought, you know, I'm a young kid. I I love sort of Tetris, these block puzzle games.

And I thought other young kids would be playing it. But mostly when I sort of got customers for that app it was actually through a middle-aged women and grandmothers were sort of the best demographic. And I used to do a bunch of UGC TikTok marketing um, through grandmothers on these like grandmother influencers.

And that's how that app sort of got traction. Um, which is quite unorthodox. You don't expect that.

But only after starting talk to users, starting collecting the data, you see those patterns emerge. Hm. Yeah, one other lesson because I went with odd ICPs.

Less odd than that, I'll say, right? Like my first company was a BTC. My first serious one was a nootropic, right?

Like a pill you take for better memory, energy, cognition. Uh, it was students. Um, students, I mean, pros and cons, right?

Like some of them are are I don't know. They're not focused. They don't give a about like improving their brains, most of them.

You're different, right? Like you're sort of Ivy League background, I would say, a little bit. Um, but like most students don't give a about their grades.

That's what I found out with that one. Then we began building a supplements for entrepreneurs. Uh, that was a bit too broad.

Um, and then my first realtors, right? And realtors, it's good because it's like a closed ecosystem. You can make a lot of money from these people, but what I found [snorts] out with time is that they're not real entrepreneurs.

And that created a lot of frustration with me. So, nowadays like one of my main [snorts] lesson that I've started really putting forward like pretty much since, I don't know, 5-7 years is work with an ICP that is very similar to you. Do you feel uh, that you had that insight sooner or later?

And are you applying this insight with Orange Slice? Are you working with people similar to you and your background? >> [snorts] >> Yeah, definitely.

Where um, a lot of our our closest and best customers are are actually in the go-to-market space, a lot of these go-to-market agencies. And then also kind of what I've learned as well, um, of of of seeing the Orange Slice evolve over time is uh, kind of working with really people in that area. We used to hire and take feedback from people really not in sales or just whoever was using the tool.

But when we really narrowed it down and only started working with go-to-market agencies, we saw sort of saw the product feedback become exponentially better uh, really sticking to that niche. Right, right. And you started that one recently.

I think you were like a research assistant not so long ago, summer analyst at JP Morgan. Do you feel you're going to stay in the entrepreneurial path forever? Are you sold on that journey?

Or is the 500k a year banking job still lurking in the background? >> [snorts] >> No, definitely, yeah. That I had a a brief detour in my entrepreneurship journey working at a one of the biggest companies in the world.

And I personally actually enjoyed it. I think sometimes there's people maybe villainize sort of jobs, but I actually personally enjoyed my job and it was very, very enjoyable. And maybe in the future that's what life holds for me.

But right now I think especially with the boom of Yeah, maybe not as well. But we're kind of at the boom with AI and specifically this go-to-market problem. I really do think that space is so it's evolving so quickly and it's going to change in the next couple years so much that I I so naturally started building in this direction.

And then we sort of got a bunch of funding and it just had forced me to sort of quit my job. It never was um, I don't want to work at this job. I I need to sort of start something by myself.

It was always um, I was just very entrepreneurial and I started something on the side. And slowly that caught fire. And then it was sort of a bigger opportunity than the job I was working at.

And that's kind of what pulled me away. Yeah. And why I like Orange Slice is one, the ICP thesis.

You're targeting folks similar to you, meaning you understand them more. But another meta flywheel that you have is that you're into GTM, so you should build your own GTM in a very good way with Orange Slice, which is like meta into meta, right? The downside, like I told you last time, is that there's a lot of YC companies doing that.

So, there is competition. Even I'm building a SaaS in that space. How are you distinguishing yourselves from all these others?

Yeah, sales tooling is definitely I think one of the most crowded spaces in entrepreneurship just because sales is a massive problem and a lot of people face that problem. And so, I think for most companies they sort of come into it because it's a easy product to sell, but a hard product to deliver on on on actual value. And so, you see I think every YC batch there'll be a couple of sales companies.

And for us, we've kind of taken a different route of I think there's a very common um, a lot of people are doing automated outbound AI SDRs. We're kind of starting more from the grounds up. Um, and and I think our big thesis is that that outbound is is a great avenue to grow.

But when you're sort of building sales infrastructure, um, you kind of want the tool to be as flexible as possible. And with a lot of tools they focus on on one specific niche doing one thing very well. One thing we're trying to do really well is a lot of go-to-market workflows.

And that's where we see the market headed towards. We don't think um, sales in the future will just be um, Um, know, an AI SDR or or or 20 different SaaS tools, it'll be like a central hub and connecting a lot of those SaaS tools and that's kind of what we're building Orange Slices towards. Tell me a bit more about the fundraising barge.

Raising five mills for a guy at your stage of life is pretty impressive. Uh, how did that happen? And was it mostly you, your founders?

How do you guys complete one another? Yeah, so I I have a great co-founder, Kishan, and we sort of have great complementary skill sets where I did a lot of door knocking, um, B2B in person sort of sales, the direct one-on-one selling, and he has a great product background. And so, we kind of really really matched on on that aspect.

And honestly, both of us can do either or and substitute for each other in any way, but having those natural strengths has really played into our partnership. And it it made fundraising I'd say a lot easier and a lot stronger because we had a really strong team. I think we had a really strong thesis as well in the space of we positioned ourselves as more of like an anti-AI SDR company.

Um, we didn't really think those companies will get too big, and we really think there's more creative ways of of creating revenue for teams and being the place to facilitate those more creative ways, whether it's for your your your example of, you know, having people sign up for podcasts and nurturing those leads. Like that's a a beautiful example of of creative ways to sort of help GTM and revenue teams that isn't an AI SDR, which I'm super bullish on. And all of those sort of And that's kind of our whole thesis.

Like you should kind of get creative with your GTM. And that was kind of the vision we pitched. And fundraising really kicked off when we had our first angel investor.

Paul Graham was our first angel. Really? Yeah.

Yeah. And Let's go. It was really exciting.

It was actually during the middle of the YC batch. We guys just got an email from him saying like, "Hey, he's in town. Um, he liked our sort of idea and and vision.

Was wondering if we want to do office hours." Um, there was sort of no initial pitch and we went over to his house, placed out on his Sat outside his, um, balcony, um, or or patio for about an hour just talking about sales, where we think it's headed. And he was really intrigued by our sort of anti-thesis idea, and he really thought the idea could become really big. So, at the end, he just offered like, "Hey, I'd love to invest in you guys." And that sort of kicked off fundraising.

We hadn't even fundraised at that point. Um, and then that really just sort of helped us. And as most people will say, fundraising is kind of a momentum game.

And I think more and more investors are kind of seeing the are starting to agree >> the lottery on on day one. PG is like my favorite human being on earth. Like this guy doesn't get better than that.

Exactly. Exactly. Man, that's impressive.

Uh, yeah, from there I think like everything sort of waterfalls. Dude, you have PG on your cap table. Um, no, let's let's double click on that.

I mean, he doesn't invest in most companies, right? Like what do you attribute, uh, him investing? It It must have been more than just the company because like we talked about, uh, there's a bunch of these YC companies trying to do exactly what you're doing.

So, did you sell him? Did your co-founder sell him? Like let's double click on that for a second.

>> [snorts] >> Yeah, it really wasn't a sales or sort of investment pitch. It was It was truly just office hours. So, we were talking to him about the problems of the business, um, the good the parts about the business, and then kind of where we think the direction was headed.

And and also how we grow the business. And so, it was very collaborative in that sense of he gave a lot of feedback and ideas of, "Oh, this is kind of where we've seen previous sales tech and sales tools go, and this was like the evolution." Gave us a lot of the history about sort of connecting buyers and sellers, and that really helped us out. I think overall, I I couldn't tell you there's probably not a specific thing PG liked about us, but I'm sure he saw the how we were thinking about the space in in a sort of first principles or unique sort of way we were thinking about it.

That made him want to invest in us. And that was, uh, what, six months ago, nine months ago? Dude, I think your sound cut off.

Um, can you double-check? Uh, audio, you all Yeah, I think your sound cut off. Here, can you hear me now?

Yes. We missed that last part. Can you go at it again?

>> Oh, now I can't hear you. Let me see here. We can hear you.

Yes. Okay, perfect. I can hear you.

Yeah, we can hear you now. Okay, good. So, that was six, nine months ago, you were saying, can you repeat that part?

Uh, yes. So, for us, um, we were talking about sort of Paul Graham investing, it was, um, I think he he sort of saw what we or how we were thinking about the problem and we were approaching it in a unique way. Yeah, we got that.

Um, and and that was six, nine months ago, right? Or something like that? >> Yeah, that was about nine months ago.

This was before we were even raising the round, a couple months before we raised the round. Nice. What has happened since since then?

How did you leverage like that traction to keep on having, uh, wind in your sails and keep on moving forward? >> [snorts] >> Yeah, so we raised a round. We spent a lot of time building product in stealth, um, because at the time we were actually, uh, an agency.

We didn't have a product to to sell. We were using the tool internally, dog fooding our own product. So, we serviced other customers using Orange Slices, trying to find them customers and and setting up go-to-market workflows.

And the big thing we saw was that was the best way for us to just learn and iterate on the product. And then we slowly onboarded a couple GTM agencies, and they've been working with us, giving us constant feedback. And then we recently only launched publicly about a month or two ago, um, back in December.

How many YC companies dog food, uh, go with the drinking their own champagne strategy, and can all models do that? >> [snorts] >> I think it depends on the type of product you sell. So, if you sell a product for enterprises, then obviously as a startup, you probably shouldn't be using your own product.

But in our case, since we were selling a tool that was very flexible and that was for any go-to-market team, we decided, oh, yes, let's do we're the perfect team to to sort of test it out because we're doing a lot of go-to-market. Um, and so for us, it only made sense. And especially for I think most go-to-market tools, if they're not dog fooding their own product, I'm usually not very bullish on the team because, you know, I'm sure they have to do go-to-market internally.

And if they don't use their own product, it's not a good sign. Show me some exciting stuff that you've built for yourself. I think like yesterday I gave you like a quick, uh, demo of my stuff, right?

And like all the cold email stuff and my crazy calendar. Um, by the way, this is not only with podcast approach, right? Like even when I don't do podcast approach, it's always sort of fully booked.

Um, I'm extremely bullish on the podcast approach. You're bullish on that. Uh, what channels have yielded the most for you, and what have you built that is impressive, right?

Not only from a results side, but like how much you how much energy or few energy invest and how much you get on the other side. Yeah, it also varies per company. So, like the things we do I I don't think sales is a one-size-fits-all solution.

Um, but a lot of the ways we use Orange Slices internally is managing inbound has been a really really load off our shoulders of everyone that comes in, scoring, figuring out who they are, what type of stage they are in, what sort of theorizing what tools they would need to use Orange Slices the best. Like does this person need a customized Loom? Do they need to hop on a call?

Do we need to build a workflow out? Or do we need to send them some case studies? Um, so having a lot of those workflows automated saves a lot of our team a lot of time.

And then also, um, not just managing inbound, but also managing outbound as well of outbounding to people that we want to partner with, especially the GTM community, uh, of people that who want to try the tool or beta test. A lot of our first go-to-market agencies that we got on the platform, we got through sort of cold outbound as well. So, those are multiple ways.

We do a bunch of things from, um, scraping LinkedIn commenters and and and trying to nurture our founder-led posts to get those clients in the cycle. Any go-to-market flow works super well in Orange Slices. Those are a couple of the ways we set it up internally.

Right. Yeah, I want to double-click on the inbound stuff, right? So, you must have got a lot of inbound traction just from the round that you raised and all the press, right?

Uh, on LinkedIn, did you crack that code, and if so, how? Yeah, for us, I wouldn't say we we've cracked the code on LinkedIn just yet. We're still in the early phases of posting consistently.

And for us, it's not even I'd say a big generator of traffic. It's more of a a paper trail of these are kind of the things we're working on, and this is kind of how fast we're shipping, and then this is also the cool unique ways people are are building stuff in Orange Slices. And so, we kind of like to have it as like a knowledge base of looking back and saying like, "Oh, you know, this is this is where we were a couple months ago, and hopefully years from now we can look back as well." So, we kind of we actually don't do it for any specific go-to-market reason, but more for a brand building authenticity.

People can kind of see more of our journey. And that's how we generally approach LinkedIn. Right.

So, how much leads are you getting on a daily basis, for example? >> [snorts] >> Yeah, we we we kind of are are completely booked on on every day. We're running, I think, about 10 to 15 demos.

And Nice. honestly, it it it depends also on the the type We have super different customers from go-to-market agencies to startup founders to, you know, revenue operations at big companies like Yahoo. It's it's it's kind of all all varied and that all comes from a mix of things.

It's I always have seen and now I'm more bullish on it that inbound and outbound are actually not separate, but they kind of go in hand in hand. Like outbound people will, you know, check a lot of your inbound content and then inbound people, um, yeah, they sometimes only I get activated through an outbound message, as well. Right.

Hmm. 10 to 15 is a lot, man. I'm still trying to think like where do all of these people come from if it's not like referrals or maybe existing users that referred you, which is usually a very good sign.

You and I we've talked about like some of your ICPs, right? Like GTM agencies. I also target GTM agencies and I think it's genius to target them cuz there's so many, man.

They're like, uh, 15 to 20k. That's why my company GTM Ventures, uh, right now it's only probably 10 to 15% of my revenue uh, because everyone and their cousins are doing that, right? Like raising as a service via cold emails way more profitable or pod fire.com in which we leverage podcast to actually, uh, get people lean.

Um, [snorts] it's a very sound thesis, but I've also found find out that these GTM agencies, for example, they're a bit frisky on the budget side of things. There's tons of tools that are offered to them. ICP so far.

Yeah, for us, sorry, can you repeat the last part? I think >> agencies, uh, they might use Clay, right? Over you.

Um, what what kind of feedback are you getting from that audience so far? >> [snorts] >> Yeah, for us it's it's actually been Clay's a great tool. We actually used to use Clay, as well, but the the biggest reason I think a lot of them are are trying us out is the time iteration to build a lot of these complex tables sort of drastically goes down when you have an agent doing it on your behalf and can do it asynchronously.

So, that's been a major value add for the agencies and then also we're kind of expanding the market. As before go-to-market has been kind of gated behind people that have to learn a lot of these complex tools and these workflows. We're now expanding the market to encompass more people.

The the sort of Well, actually one of our users and and one of our sort of mentors put it like this. Jared from Rev Rev Genius said it in this way of we're trying to do what Airbnb did to hotels of like expanding the industry. You know, there's there's room in go-to-market where hotels are, you know, like Clay.

It's like they service go-to-market people that are really really deep in tooling, but what if there's someone that really cheaply wants to, you know, crash on someone's couch and we're kind of building that platform where you can run simple very simple go-to-market flows just with natural language from the small medium business owner to the startup founder. And so, we're trying to expand the market for go-to-market. And how soon how soon could we get a recursive agent that doesn't need you in the loop and can get you sales on autopilot?

Yeah, it's, um, I'd say actually in a matter of minutes. Orangeslice is also free to try at orangeslice.ai and, um, we give you some free credits and you can just type in the chat the recursive workflow you guys are looking for and it'll and it'll build it up and and start running. But my question is is it truly recursive or do does it still need you in the loop?

Uh, why can't it improve on itself and get some statistics of its effort and, uh, try to improve do something better? Yeah, it can it can do that, but we actually haven't seen the best results from that of the agent sort of improving themselves. We've kind of seen the best go-to-market, um, people and the best sales leader as we've started to realize go-to-market is more creativity than it is engineering.

Uh, once you set up the systems and if you just have the AI agent try to figure it itself out, it always kind of recurses to the mean. It kind of does what everyone else is doing because that's kind of how it's trained and that's not how you get sort of maximized super and like 10x results. So, the best go-to-market leaders I think define the strategy, go let the agent go test it, see the results and then keep throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks and then just scaling up what sticks.

What's next for you this year? What are your objectives? Where do you want to take the company?

Yeah, for us it's a lot of product work. I mean, product is really core to our business. Um, I I truly am a believer in in best product wins over time.

And then also spending a lot of time marketing getting the tool out there. We've been building in in stealth for quite a while now and now having a self-serve product, we kind of want to get into the hands of as many people as possible and then we can learn as much as possible, as well. Got [snorts] it.

Thanks for being on Vihar today. Where can people find out more about you? >> [snorts] >> Yeah, so you can try Orangeslice.

It's free at orangeslice.ai. Um, we give you some free credits, play around with it. We also have a Slack.

Um, super responsive on Slack. If you want to shoot me a message of feedback or things you want in Orangeslice, I've always reply through there. But those are the best ways to reach us and and try out the tool.

So, that was Vihar and Charles for another YC with