How 1,000+ customer calls shaped the AI ​​implementation of the outbound business

This isn’t David Park’s first rodeo. The veteran founder and TechCrunch Startup Battlefield reader is certainly battle-tested in the business arena. In this episode of Build Mode, Park joins Isabelle Johannessen to discuss how she and her team intentionally iterated, raised money, and scaled Narada. This enterprise AI solution uses large action models to automate complex, multi-step workflows across business systems.

On the face of it, Narada has everything an investor could knock on its door: a dream startup team of experienced researchers and staff from Stanford and Berkeley, big-name corporate clients, and a product that works. So in 2024, when Narada applied for Startup Warfield, the team was surprised at how little fundraising it had done. That choice was by design.

“We wanted not to waste a lot of money,” Park said when asked why they waited to raise money. “Because I believe that if, again, if you have a lot of money in the bank and you are not close to the product market, you are tempted to spend money on things that do not help you transform the company in the right way. It removes the conflict to do many wrong things.”

The park was previously established by and came out of Coverity. That first experience taught him one important lesson he took with him at Narada: Take the time to talk to your customers before you do anything else. Park said that in the early days, he and his co-founders weren’t focused on reaching out to VCs, but instead the three made more than 1,000 customer calls to deeply understand what their pain points were. Once the problem became more clear, the solution became more focused. These teams needed an AI product that could talk to them like a human and trust them to take multiple actions at once.

“If you want to build a real business, ask the hard questions, right? Spend time with customers, not just in sales, because when you have that contract and that purchase order, that’s just the beginning, right?” Park advises looking at those early conversations as more than sales calls: “And some of those clients we connected with ended up being multi-million dollar deals, right? And it’s always easier to sell more to a company that has already chosen you and has some level of trust.”

As a veteran founder, Park has a fundamental belief that to build a company properly, the customer should be at the center of every decision. Because at the end of the day, no matter how trendy, interesting, or well-received your product is by the industry, if people won’t pay for it, you won’t succeed.

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Isabelle Johannessen is a great host. Build Mode produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience Development is led by Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.