Startup Spotlight #124: Hightouch
Hightouch is a data platform that helps you sync your customer data from your data warehouse to your CRM, marketing, and support tools.
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I got the chance to speak with Kashish Gupta, Josh Curl, and Tejas Manohar, co-founders of Hightouch, about what they are working on at their startup, and any advice they have for emerging entrepreneurs.
Hightouch is a data platform that helps you sync your customer data from your data warehouse to your CRM, marketing, and support tools.
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Startup Spotlight: Hightouch
Problem: Business users can’t get data into their tools without an engineer’s help. This can take weeks to months and usually involves writing brittle pipelines that require frequent changes and maintenance.
Market: Anyone who relies on using ETL for getting data from the data warehouse back into SaaS tools. Key customer archetypes include (but are not limited to) marketing ops, sales ops, and revenue ops.
Solution: Hightouch.io syncs customer data from your database, data warehouse, or data lake into your sales and marketing tools. Simple paste a SQL query into Hightouch, map the columns in SQL to the columns in your SaaS tool, and your data will sync without writing any code.
Team: Our founding team consists of Kashish Gupta, Josh Curl, and Tejas Manohar.
Recent Success:
Gupta: Taking customer feedback and building exactly what they want. We work really hard to put aside our egos and biases, so that when customers tell us that they like our idea but they’d rather have “_____” we listen to them and we present those ideas to the next customer. That’s why we were able to pivot 5 times to get to where we are today. Each successive pivot made us faster and stronger, and we became much better at listening to customers. One key thing we learned is that people are nice when you tell them “I’m working on a startup and here’s my idea.” We learned to ask them questions and understand their needs more open endedly, and we were surprised to find that what we were selling in past pivots was not their top priority.
Recent Struggle:
Gupta: For the longest time our company was worth 4M$. Growing up as an immigrant, with English as my 2nd language, my perspective on money was quite different as a recent college grad who moved to the Valley. I was struggling to raise any capital at the 4M post-money, until the day I read this NYT article. I realized my perspective on money was so different from the VCs I was talking to. That was the day I decided that we were a $10M company, and because we started to value ourselves more, investors did too and we raised our preseed.
In Feb 2020, I was assaulted and recovered through a concussion for many months during the pandemic while shutting down our travel business. It was because of the support of my cofounders and the rest of the team that Hightouch was able to emerge a much stronger company than it ever was before. I transitioned to doing my work on pencil/paper + over the phone, to minimize screentime, and it really strengthened the bond between our team as we really began to back each other up.
Founder Advice:
Gupta: It’s probably been said many times but most startups fail not because of the business or market forces, but because the founders give up. Nothing really matters more than resilience and the bond between the founding team. If you can uphold that and keep each other going, keep an open mind and you will eventually find something that works. Startups work this way: nothing happens for a long time, and then suddenly everything happens all at once. This applies to fundraising, customer traction, hiring, everything. My dad always used to say: put yourself in the right place, and the right time will come. You have to create your own luck that way, and being a founder is probably a really good way to put yourself in the right place.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Gupta, Curl, and Manohar: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Randeep Singh, Founder of AON3D: AON3D makes affordable industrial 3D printers designed for printing high performance thermoplastics, including PEEK, PEKK, ULTEM™ 9085, polycarbonate and more.
Colin Webb, Founder of Sauce Pricing: Sauce boosts restaurant delivery sales by up to 40% with dynamic pricing.
Shiva Suri, Founder of New Lantern: ???
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