I don't sell hours or opinions. I take the one thing that's stuck, write down what changes, and stay until it does.
Hi, I'm Saral. Sixteen years building products, two companies of my own, and these days the investing side too.
Story & track record
Every sentence up there is one I've said out loud about my own company. Some of them more than once.
I spent eight years on the wrong end of that. We knew what was going wrong, but nobody owned the outcome enough to stop it.
Before we start, I write down the thing you should be able to point at when we finish. If I can't name it, I don't take the work, and I've turned engagements down on that basis.
2010
MegaSoft Solutions
My first customers ran petrol pumps. They'd never bought software and had no reason to trust a twenty-two-year-old with a laptop — and being Gujarat, they told me exactly why. You can't fix what you haven't correctly named.
So nothing here starts with a plan. It starts with a diagnosis.
Let's talk2010 – 2012
Co-founder, MegaSoft Solutions
Three products for businesses buying software for the first time.
2012
Kevalam
Kevalam ran almost eight years, most of it spent pulling a services company toward products — a move that fails more often than it works. What nearly stopped us wasn't strategy: every urgent client request rearranged the roadmap, until the product was whatever the last angry email had asked for.
I can stand up a product function in ninety days because I spent eight years watching what happens without one.
Product Function Setup2012 – 2020
Co-founder, Kevalam
Services company moved into products. Over 100 projects across five countries. Team grown past 35 people.
2015
Koops
Koops was field automation software for small businesses. Profitable, and never funded.
The rating and the downloads aren't the numbers I care about. I designed the freemium structure myself, and around sixty percent of signups turned into paying customers. That came from working out what a user had to feel in the first session, and refusing to ship anything in the way of it.
Activation is where most retention problems actually live.
Product Function Setup, or Fractional if you want me in the seat2015 – 2020
Co-founder, Koops
Field automation SaaS, profitable without outside money. 10,000+ downloads at a 4.3 rating, highest in the category.
2020
Kevit & Xoxoday
Two companies in, I suspected I'd been getting things wrong, with no way to check from inside my own business. So I went and worked in other people's.
At Kevit I ran two no-code NLP chatbot platforms — one for a Netherlands market unlike anything I'd built before, and where my AI work starts. At Xoxoday I took an API business at ₹280 crore GMV to 8x growth, because zero-to-one and one-to-ten are different sports, and I wanted to have played both before advising on either.
Breadth is the reason I can tell you which function your problem is actually in.
Fractional CPO or Head of Product2020 – 2021
Head of Product, Kevit Technologies
Two no-code NLP chatbot platforms, one taken from zero to one. 15+ engineers plus design.
2021 – 2023
Lead Product Implementation, Xoxoday
API business at ₹280 crore GMV, near 33 million dollars. 8x growth in 15 months.
2023
Plutomen
Plutomen had engineers, customers, and a roadmap that lived in somebody's head — no process, no way to decide. I built the function; three products shipped after, priced with sales and implementation in the room so it wouldn't get undone later. The part that mattered was the handover: somebody else owns that function now.
Ninety days isn't a target I picked. It's how long this took the last three times.
Product Function Setup2023 – 2024
Lead Product Manager, Plutomen
Product function built from nothing on an XR connected-worker platform.
2024 – 2025
GrowthX Fellow · Ambassador, Product-Led Alliance
2025
Forward Share
I'm a founding venture partner at Forward Share Ventures now, having finished VC Lab's Venture Institute — which changed how I read a company in the first ten minutes. What I didn't expect: good companies get passed on for reasons that never reach the founder, who then rewrites the wrong slide.
Somebody has to tell you which one it was.
Raise Readiness Diagnostic, and Investor Materials Build2025 – now
Forward Share Ventures
Founding Product Advisor, then Founding Venture Partner for product and growth.
Now
RaiseOS
I built RaiseOS after watching founders run a fundraise on a spreadsheet and stamina — 1.25 lakh scored investor records, twenty-one agents for the parts founders keep postponing. The same logic runs through every engagement here: it ships with a Claude plugin that holds your context, so the thinking doesn't leave with me.
You should own the machine, not rent the operator.
Every engagement, included2025 – now
Founder, 88 Labs
2026
VC Lab Venture Institute · Building RaiseOS
—
Not in the bio
The hardest stretch of both my companies wasn't a product problem or a money problem. It was the months when every call landed on me and nobody in the building could disagree with me usefully. Founders mention this last, usually right after saying they're fine.
That's what the free hour is for, and why I cap it at ten people instead of pretending I can do fifty.
Founder Circle, freeSuperpowers
Most engagements use two or three.
01
I can tell you whether you have it. If you don't, I can tell you which of the four usual reasons is yours.
What you get: a read on which of the four you're in, the evidence behind it, and the order to fix things in.
Four problems hide behind one question. Wrong buyer. Right buyer, wrong problem. Right problem, wrong wedge. Or fit that exists and is wasted by a funnel nobody has opened in a year. Each has a different fix. I've made this call in six companies, two of them mine.
02
I've walked into companies with no product function and left one running behind me.
What you get: a product function your team runs without me, and the person hired to own it.
Rituals, roadmap process, prioritisation, discovery cadence, spec format, metrics, and the first product hire, with someone else driving by the time I go. Discovery is where most of it lives: interview guides that can disconfirm something, and a cadence the team keeps when the quarter gets busy. AI made this harder. Building got cheap while learning stayed expensive.
03
I've built the funnel where the product does the selling, and I have the conversion numbers to show for it.
What you get: a mapped activation path, a free tier with an edge you can defend, an upgrade trigger tied to real usage, and the two numbers worth checking every Monday.
Activation decides most of what happens downstream and hardly anyone instruments it properly. The work is what a new user has to feel in the first session, where the free tier stops being generous, and which usage signal predicts retention rather than merely correlating with it. This came out of Koops.
04
Ten minutes with your deck tells you what four months of silence would have.
What you get: a scored diagnosis, a ranked list with warm paths mapped, and a fix list in the order it should be done.
Investors pass for a short list of repeated reasons and rarely say which one. I score the narrative, metrics, model and data room against what your stage is expected to hold, then tell you which missing thing is doing the damage. The target list comes out of RaiseOS: 1.25 lakh funds, angels and accelerators, scored and ranked.
05
I was building conversational AI in 2020. I build agentic systems for SMEs now. I know which demos are still running a year later and which ones die the week the pilot ends.
What you get: one job worth automating, an architecture with its failure modes named out loud, and a way to measure whether it still works after the pilot ends.
An SME has no data team, no clean data and no patience for a pilot that only demos well. The work is picking the one job that runs every week, designing the agent to do it rather than advise somebody else to, and building the harness that tells you whether it holds up on real inputs. It has to sit inside the tools they already run on. Azeon's guardrails were built to survive a regulated buyer. SMEs need that rigour without the ceremony.
06
Six ways in, each scoped to an outcome, each with a plugin you keep after I'm gone.
Engagements
Before we start, I'll tell you what you should be able to point at when it ends. If I can't name that thing, I won't take the work.
Free
One hour a month · ten founders
One hour a month, one to one, ten founders at a time. One condition: send your problem statement and the data before we meet, so the hour goes on the problem instead of on context.
The outcome: one decision you were circling gets made.
Seats open at the moment. When the ten are taken, I'll say so here.
You keep: a skill that answers in my frameworks rather than general startup advice. Free, and it stays free.
Ask for a seat$500
Two to three weeks
Two to three weeks. A ninety minute session to open, a walkthrough to close. In between I score your narrative, deck, metrics, model and data room against what investors at your stage actually ask for, and hand you a ranked target list with cheque bands and warm paths. You leave with a fix plan in order.
The full $500 comes off the raise sprint if you start within sixty days.
You keep: a plugin that re-runs the scoring and refreshes the target list next quarter.
Book the diagnostic$1,000
Three to four weeks
Three to four weeks. Deck, narrative memo, financial model review, and a data room assembled and gap-closed before anyone asks for it.
The outcome: you can send everything to a partner tomorrow without apologising for anything in it.
You keep: a plugin that redrafts your materials as the story changes.
Diagnostic and materials together · $1,250
Start the build$1,500/ month
Three months
For companies where product is happening and nobody owns it. Rituals, roadmap process, prioritisation, discovery loops, metrics stack, and hiring the person who takes it over.
The outcome: in ninety days your team plans, decides, and ships without me in the room, with a named person accountable for it.
You keep: a plugin that runs the process after I leave: specs in your format, backlog scoring against your constraints, and the hiring scorecard.
Start the ninety days$1,500/ month
Six months
I run the round with you. Weekly call, pipeline discipline, outreach drafting, materials rewritten against real objections, meeting prep, diligence and support through close. Delivered on RaiseOS, so pipeline, data room and cap table sit in one record. Three-month minimum to start smaller.
The outcome: a run process instead of a hopeful one. At any moment you'll know who's live, who's gone cold, and what the next move is with each of them.
Retainer only, no success fee. A success fee pays out whether or not you were ready, and I'd rather stay free to tell you to wait two quarters.
You keep: a plugin wired to your RaiseOS account that drafts per investor, tracks who's gone cold and writes the monthly update. Nothing sends without your approval.
Run the round with me$3,500/ month
Plus advisory equity · six-month minimum
Six-month minimum, around forty hours a month. I hold the seat, make the calls and carry the outcome with you. What you're paying for is the seat rather than the hours. This is the one for founders deciding alone.
The outcome: the decisions get made on time, and somebody other than you is accountable for them.
You keep: a plugin built around your stack and your data, with a record of what was decided and why.
Talk about the seatStart here
Bring me the one that's stuck. If you're raising, two to three weeks and $500 tells you why investors are quiet and what to fix first.
The honest comparison
I'm not the right call for everything, and it's worth knowing where the line is.
| Criterion | Me | A typical advisor |
|---|---|---|
| Founded and run companies with own money at risk | Yes, two | Rarely |
| Works across product, growth and the round | Yes | Usually one of them |
| Names the outcome before the engagement starts | Yes | Rarely |
| Holds the seat and owns the decision | Yes | No |
| Available full-time when you need to scale headcount | No, I'm fractional | Not the comparison |