signal-based-selling
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UserGems Failed at Resale, Recruiting and Influencers - Then Turned Job Changes Into Pipeline
Twin brothers Christian and Stephan Kletzl spent years building products nobody quite wanted. Their fourth idea found a warm lead hiding in plain sight - and became a pricey AI command center for revenue teams allergic to cold outreach.
Linda Lian Learned to Read the Room - Then She Built One for the Internet
The Common Room founder turned a lonely childhood, a critic’s career and an AWS blind spot into a new way of seeing buyers - then carried that idea into Zoom.
Austin Hughes Is Turning Outbound Sales Into a Product Problem
The Unify co-founder went from finance to product by following a simple instinct: shrink the experiment, watch the signal, and build distribution with the care usually reserved for software.
Alexa Grabell
Alexa Grabell turned a sales-operations workaround into Pocus, helped name a category, and sold the company to Apollo. Her story is a case study in turning messy data into a clear operating thesis.
Common Room
The AI GTM Platform: Complete buyer intelligence. Real pipeline impact.
Pocus
Pocus is an AI-powered product-led sales and revenue intelligence platform that helps go-to-market teams turn scattered product usage, CRM, and intent data into prioritized action. Founded in 2021 by Alexa Grabell and Isaac Pohl-Zaretsky, the San Francisco company tells sales reps which accounts to work, who to contact, and what to say by surfacing high-intent buying signals and generating AI account plans. Used by product-led companies including Asana, Canva, Miro, Monday.com and LaunchDarkly, Pocus raised $23M in seed and Series A funding backed by a16z and First Round Capital, and was acquired by Apollo.io in March 2026 to power Apollo's AI-native GTM operating system.
Maximus Greenwald
Maximus Greenwald is the co-founder and CEO of Warmly, an AI-powered revenue orchestration platform that helps B2B companies identify, prioritize, and engage high-intent buyers in real time. A Princeton CS & Public Policy grad and ex-Google PM (where he helped build the famous 'Where's Waldo' Google Maps Easter egg), Max survived seven major pivots over five years to turn Warmly into a signal-based selling category leader with $3M+ ARR and $21.5M in total funding. Known for his mantra 'slope over y-intercept' and his 'Purple Cow' series on remarkable entrepreneurs, he is one of the most candid voices on the realities of finding product-market fit.
Orange Slice AI
Orange Slice AI (YC S25) is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform that uses real-time web signals to find high-intent prospects for B2B sales teams. Co-founded by Kishan Sripada and Vihaar Nandigala — who met on a Bollywood dance team at the University of Michigan — the platform lets sales teams generate targeted lead lists using plain English, enrich existing lists with live data, detect niche buying signals before competitors, and manage pipelines through conversation. Backed by $5.3M in seed funding co-led by 1984 Ventures and Moxxie Ventures, with Paul Graham as an angel investor, Orange Slice has attracted 5,000+ sales and RevOps teams including Oracle, Confido Health, Pirros, and Glass Health.