Create The Market

Vihaar Nandigala sold his first startup at 19, interviewed for Y Combinator at 2am from a Shanghai hotel lobby, and met his co-founder on a Bollywood dance team at Michigan. Now he's building Orange Slice, an autonomous sales copilot that finds prospects already showing buying signals, in one of the most crowded corners of B2B.In this episode of Create the Market, Jared Robin and Peter Engleman dig into how Orange Slice is positioning against Clay by expanding who gets to do go-to-market at all. Vihaar explains the shift from GTM engineer to GTM operator, why he thinks ease of use is the real category wedge, and how the company hit $50K MRR within weeks of launching to the public.What we cover:00:00 Creating New Markets: An Introduction01:02 The Founding Story of Orange Slice03:46 Insights from Corporate Sales Experiences06:28 The Unique Journey to Y Combinator09:13 Positioning and Vision for Orange Slice11:54 The Language of Go-To-Market Strategy14:23 Explosive Growth and Customer Feedback17:00 Connecting Buyers and Sellers: Insights from Paul Graham19:32 Building a Community and Content Strategy22:12 The Art of Go-To-Market Execution27:12 Creating a New Category vs. Building a Better Product30:45 Final Thoughts and Future DirectionsTry Orange Slice: https://orangeslice.aiFollow Vihaar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vihaarnandigala/Create the Market is conversations with founders who didn't go to market, they created it. Hosted by Jared Robin (RevGenius, Revenue Creator) and Peter Engleman.Subscribe for new episodes on category creation, GTM strategy, and building in noisy markets.#GTM #SalesAI #CategoryCreation #B2BSales #YCombinator

Amos Bar-Joseph built two B2B companies on the unicorn playbook. For his third, Swan, he hired nobody and turned his own conviction into a movement.

Ashley Wilson didn't name her category in a marketing session. She heard customers say the word "orchestration," claimed it publicly, and held the line until Forrester put it on a Wave two years later.

Tyler Denk was 24, employed at Google, sitting in his parents' basement with 49 cents in his bank account and ten months of nights and weekends behind him.
He also had a few thousand people on Twitter who'd been watching him build the whole time.
Everyone he respected said email was dead. Substack had won. MailChimp had just sold for $12 billion, which everyone read as the category closing.
Tyler launched Beehiiv anyway.

Today: $30M ARR, 50,000 active senders, 10 billion emails delivered. He's saying it's just starting.

Anis Bennaceur built an AI-native sales intelligence platform that made a category king irrelevant — not by outspending them, but by building for an era Gong wasn't designed for.

This is the first edition of Create the Market — conversations with founders who aren't competing for existing demand. They're building demand that didn't exist before.

Patrick Thompson, co-founder of Clarify, walked away from a comfortable life
at Amplitude, second kid on the way, because he saw a $280B category
that hadn't had a genuine rethink in decades. Two years in, his customers are
posting on LinkedIn that they haven't updated their CRM in three months.
Not by accident. By design.