If you’ve worked in sales or account management, you know acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one. Yet most CRM systems focus on new business acquisition, not relationship nurturing. Ram Ganesan, CEO of Kaboom.ai, saw this gap and built a solution for existing customer relationships.
In a recent conversation with Todd Gagne on the Startup Stories from the Treehouse podcast, Ram shares insights from his journey from electrical engineer to accidental salesperson to AI startup founder. His story offers valuable lessons for founders looking to identify overlooked opportunities and leverage AI to create real business value.
Ram’s entrepreneurial journey began with a “kaboom” when, at age nine, he tried to create an electromagnet by connecting a wire directly to a power outlet in his Mumbai home. The experiment blew a fuse, but instead of punishment, his father bought him an electronics kit the next day.
This early lesson in curiosity and experimentation set the tone for Ram’s career, which included electrical engineering in India, software engineering, and founding Sorian Technologies, which he sold to private equity in 2018.
During the earn-out phase post-acquisition, Ram discovered a crucial insight leading to his current venture:
“Existing accounts don’t follow the same sales motion as acquiring a new client. It’s a different set of actions, cadence, and rhythm, and it’s suitable for automation because of the knowledge and data from an existing account.”
When tasked with growing revenue without additional resources, Ram turned to existing accounts and was surprised that it unlocked unexpected revenue. By the time he was done, his team achieved almost four to five times revenue and seven to eight times EBITDA with no investment.
This revelation and the growth of generative AI led to the founding of Kaboom.ai.
Most CRMs today focus on pipeline and opportunity management—not relationship management. Kaboom.ai addresses that gap, helping companies uncover value in existing accounts through several key capabilities:
Understanding the connections between your organization and clients is essential:
“A relationship is a team sport, not an individual sport. You need to understand the layers of those relationships.”
Kaboom visualizes these relationships with color-coding for relationship quality and line thickness for interaction frequency. This helps account managers ensure they have the appropriate connections at the right levels of the client organization.
The key innovation is using AI to sift through vast amounts of unstructured data—emails, meeting notes, earnings call transcripts, market news—to uncover relevant insights:
“What if the AI does this continuously and nudges you? The AI packages all this unstructured data and sends it to you in a bite-sized manner.”
Instead of requiring account managers to remember follow-ups or research client updates, Kaboom proactively alerts them:
“The AI can say, ‘It’s time to meet with Todd because he is about to decide on this RFP or your frequency should be once a month, and it’s already forty-five days.'”
This approach elevates the performance of less experienced account managers and makes star performers more effective.
Ram discovered Kaboom’s opportunity by noticing that CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot weren’t designed for existing client relationships. He explains:
“They’re built for pipeline and opportunity management, not relationships.”
Founders should examine established systems and workflows in your industry to identify shortcomings. The most promising opportunities are in addressing gaps in existing categories.
Kaboom is taking an innovative approach to pricing by directly tying it to revenue outcomes:
“We’ll help you increase your top line with your existing account base. Period. We’ll share your pain. We’ll price it to impact us if you don’t grow.”
While Ram acknowledges they can’t eliminate base pricing, this outcome-based model demonstrates confidence in their product and aligns incentives with customers. For founders, consider how to structure pricing to reflect the actual value delivered instead of charging for access or usage.
Ram describes himself as “the accidental salesman” with an engineer’s mind but a salesperson’s heart. This combination gives him a unique advantage:
“I understand the product’s dark underbelly. That makes me a better salesperson because I can sell confidently, and I know where I’m embellishing versus where I can rely on the team.”
Ram suggests that technical founders in customer-facing roles approach sales as a problem-solving exercise:
“I call mini closes what you call micro steps. We engineers break down sales into steps. It’s a project management or engineering problem.”
When asked what advice he’d give his younger self, Ram offers two insights:
Focus: “I did too many things for too many clients because you wanted business. The ability to say no is equally important. Learn to say no when you should.”
On anxiety: “The anxiety we all have, especially as entrepreneurs, is self-inflicted. It’s not as dark and scary as you make it. Our mind can be our worst enemy.”
Ram envisions Kaboom becoming “the account operating system” within five years. It will expand beyond sales to include customer success, project delivery, financial forecasting, and more.
The company is experimenting with features like health scores (metrics of relationship quality and financial health) and “signals” that identify patterns and tendencies based on industry, client size, and buyer characteristics.
Kaboom’s approach is interesting due to their model-agnostic, cloud-agnostic technology. They’ve designed their system to deploy within a client’s private cloud using the client’s preferred LLM, recognizing security concerns around sensitive customer data.
A theme emerges about the complementary relationship between AI and human skills. Kaboom aims to enhance the capabilities of account managers rather than replace them:
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Making experienced managers more effective
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Elevating inexperienced team members
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Ensuring consistent follow-up and relationship management.
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Surfacing insights hidden in unstructured data
This approach acknowledges that the human elements of relationship building—empathy, trust, strategic thinking—are vital, while AI can process vast information and identify patterns.
Ram’s journey from curious child to AI entrepreneur shows how combining technical expertise with business acumen uncovers opportunities. By focusing on an overlooked aspect of customer relationships and applying AI thoughtfully, Kaboom is addressing a genuine pain point instead of using AI as a buzzword.
Ram’s approach offers a valuable template for founders looking to incorporate AI into their products: identify workflow inefficiencies, leverage AI to process unstructured data at scale, and deliver insights that enhance human expertise.
Ram puts it as: “Find gold in your backyard.”
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