When to Pivot Your Startup: Walking Away From $2.5M Revenue | Gaurav Bhattacharya, Jeeva AI

We had $2.5M ARR and 50 customers. Then we pivoted everything. Gaurav Bhattacharya shares how splitting his team in two led to 10,000 users in 9 months - and why knowing when to walk away is as important as knowing when to persist.

🎯 What you'll learn:
• How to decide when a "good" business will never become great
• The two-team strategy: keeping lights on whilst proving new product-market fit
• Why pattern recognition is the most underrated founder skill
• How to pivot without killing team morale or burning investor relationships
• The shift from enterprise sales to PLG (and why it required completely different muscles)

⏱️ Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro: The $2M decision
1:30 - Pattern recognition as a founder superpower
3:00 - First startup: Healthcare AI exit
5:00 - Second startup: The data platform that stalled
8:00 - Going to the board to call it quits
10:30 - The $2.5M ARR dilemma
12:30 - Splitting the team in two
15:00 - Inspired by Brian Chesky's two-team strategy
17:00 - Finding escape velocity with Jeeva AI
19:00 - Founder mode vs manager mode
22:00 - The Slack pivot story as inspiration
27:00 - Shifting from enterprise to PLG
32:00 - From 5 LinkedIn posts in 5 years to 5 a day
36:00 - Advice: Believe in yourself & focus on activation

👤 About Gaurav Bhattacharya
Founder and CEO of Jeeva AI. After successfully exiting his first healthcare AI startup, Gaurav spent 5 years building a data intelligence platform to $2.5M ARR before pivoting to Jeeva AI - a sales intelligence tool that grew to 10,000 users in 9 months.
Connect:   / gaurav-agentic  

🎙️ About Peer Effect Podcast
Hosted by founder coach James Johnson, featuring frameworks and strategies that actually work when scaling a business. We interview successful entrepreneurs to extract practical insights that founders can apply immediately.

🔗 Links:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0U3ebhi...
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast...
Website: https://peer-effect.com/
LinkedIn:   / the-peer-effect  
James on LinkedIn:   / jameswgjohnson  

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