Hello folks,
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I’m Karthik, one of the co-founders of Luru.

People often ask me why we built Luru and what was the push for it. The truth is there was never that single push. It was a problem we all had lived through for a long while in our previous stint and tried to solve in bits and pieces. It needed a better solution.

In the last decade, all 4 of us have been on a journey together of scaling a company from 0 to 65 million dollars in various roles. I was the Chief Revenue Office, Sanjeeth headed Marketing, Sid was the CTO and Anand the CFO and Head of Strategy. That we were bootstrapped for most of our times added to the challenge of running a revenue org that was efficient and not bloated. 

At the core of running an efficient revenue org, was the challenge of better decision making and the availability of data for these decisions. We would want all the data in our CRM so that we could plan better, execute better and make faster decisions. But it never happened. People hated entering data. We tried “soft” techniques of coaxing people to do it, incentivising and mandating. But it just moved from lack of data to lack of useful data problem.

We needed a better way and we approached it from first principles. CRMs are great databases. But it comes with a lot of friction to use. Sales reps need to switch context to access it, or have to click a hundred buttons to achieve a simple task. It was not a cake walk for leaders too - making process changes, setting up new workflows were just complex. We needed a better solution. 

CRMs came with APIs. We decided to simplify the interface to the CRM by writing scripts and layers on top of these APIs. The basic premise was  “let us simplify the CRM and take the CRM to where the user is - email, meetings, chat etc". What started as weekend hacks slowly evolved into a suite of products that the entire revenue org was using. The availability and quality of data in the CRM drastically improved once the friction was removed. We were closing deals faster, getting visibility into important deals and our planning and forecasting got a lot better.

When new folks joined the company or when we showed this to other folks in the ecosystem, we kept hearing “Oh! What is this product? This is so useful” That made us think that “maybe this is a product most revenue orgs would love, and not just us?” So when we decided to start up, this became an idea that we wanted to think about deeper. We spoke to hundreds of sales reps, sales leaders and revenue operations folks and turns out most companies had similar struggles and needed a version of what we had built.

Based on these inputs, and our own thesis, we’ve built Luru - a zero friction sales productivity workspace. There are incredibly useful tools in the sales stack, but they need to lend well into the workflows of sales folks, not the other way around. We want to make the interaction with the revenue tools as frictionless as possible in many innovative ways.

Thanks for trying out Luru. You can write to me directly or ask me if you have any questions at karthik@luru.app