Understory Unfiltered: Santosh Sharan - From ZoomInfo to ZeerAI

TLDR: The $5,000 product that killed a $350,000 business model

Santosh Sharan helped grow ZoomInfo from $8 million to nearly $100 million by packaging the same data as Dun & Bradstreet at 1/70th the price. He's since worked with 30+ go-to-market companies including Apollo and RB2B, developing a repeatable framework for scaling from $5M to $25M.

Listen to this episode to learn why copying successful playbooks between companies always fails, how market disruption consistently attacks from the bottom up, and why Santosh predicts two-thirds of SaaS companies will shut down in the next 24 months.

Meet the guest: Santosh Sharan, founder and CEO of ZeerAI

Santosh Sharan is the founder and CEO of ZeerAI, bringing deep expertise from scaling multiple go-to-market companies. His career spans senior roles at ZoomInfo, Apollo, and RB2B, where he developed repeatable frameworks for taking companies from $5M to $25M in revenue.

His engineering background (14 patents) combined with go-to-market expertise gives him a unique perspective on how AI is reshaping SaaS competition. At ZoomInfo, he helped pioneer the shift from relationship-based selling to data and automation-based approaches that disrupted incumbents like Dun & Bradstreet.

Chapters

[00:22] Why go-to-market is fundamentally broken: nothing works anymore and incremental fixes won't help

[02:54] How ZoomInfo beat Dun & Bradstreet and why Apollo succeeded against ZoomInfo

[09:29] Why data growth has nothing to do with data quality

[11:05] How individual employee brands now outperform corporate handles on LinkedIn

[13:02] How a polished executive and wild west founder built RB2B together

[16:53] What traders bring to entrepreneurship: seeing risk as opportunity

[22:57] Why the same growth strategy never works twice, even for experienced operators

[27:06] How experience becomes baggage when starting over at zero to one

[29:20] Why 30-person teams will generate hundreds of millions in revenue

[32:47] Why AI commoditization will eliminate two-thirds of SaaS companies

Key Insights

Traditional go-to-market channels have fundamentally broken, requiring complete overhaul rather than optimization.

Santosh describes feeling like "nothing works anymore" across traditional sales and marketing channels. "The salesman doesn't work, the tasks that you put in or activities, they don't proportionately result in the right outcome anymore," he explains. Email responses have plummeted, phone calls go unanswered, and marketing channels show declining effectiveness.

This mirrors the transformation he experienced 15 years ago at ZoomInfo when relationship-based selling shifted to data and automation. SaaS leaders facing these challenges can't solve them by optimizing existing processes. The market demands a complete rethinking of go-to-market strategy for an AI-driven, hyper-connected environment.

Data wars follow predictable disruption patterns, always attacking from the bottom of the market.

When ZoomInfo entered against Dun & Bradstreet, they offered the same data at a fraction of the price ($5,000 vs. $350,000) packaged as a self-serve product. "We took the same data. I can't claim our data was any better than Dun & Bradstreet, likely was much worse, but we just packaged it on a product," Santosh recalls.

This opened the SMB market that DNB ignored. Later, Apollo applied the same strategy against ZoomInfo at $99 compared to ZoomInfo's $30,000 minimum. Premium vendors consistently avoid fighting for their "worst customers" because protecting high-margin contracts is more profitable, creating openings for hungry competitors to attack from below.

Data company differentiation comes from packaging, pricing, and go-to-market strategy rather than data quality.

Most data providers source from identical databases, making differentiation through accuracy nearly impossible. "Data sale or growth in data has nothing to do with data. It's everything to do with packaging and pricing and differentiation," Santosh emphasizes.

ZoomInfo created a self-serve product where none existed. Apollo won with $99 subscription pricing versus $30,000 annual contracts. When products become commoditized, competitive advantage shifts to business model innovation and customer experience.

Consumption-based models are now disrupting the disruptors.

As we discuss in the episode, even Apollo faces cannibalization from consumption-based pricing models. Tools like Wiza offer pay-per-use without minimums, and Clay operates on credits rather than subscriptions.

At Understory, we've seen this pattern repeatedly: companies that won by undercutting incumbents on price eventually become the premium vendor that new entrants attack. The cycle accelerates as data becomes more commoditized and buyers expect flexibility over annual contracts. For SaaS growth leaders, this signals the importance of building defensibility through coordinated execution rather than relying on pricing alone.

Individual employee brands now matter more than corporate brands for B2B companies.

"When was the last time you ever listened to what Google's company handle said on LinkedIn or a Microsoft's company handle? Like nobody listens to them. They have no followers, nobody cares," Santosh notes. Meanwhile, individual employees at these companies command significant followings and influence.

Personal brands cut through noise more effectively than corporate messaging, especially as AI reduces content creation costs while increasing volume. This shift represents a fundamental change in how B2B companies build awareness and trust, moving from marketing departments to individual storytellers.

Successful partnerships thrive on complementary differences, not similarities.

Santosh's corporate polish and Adam Robinson's entrepreneurial boldness created unexpected business value. While Santosh approaches risk cautiously, Adam "gets excited and says, what is the best thing? How can I turn this?" because his trading background taught him to view risks as opportunities. "I like people who are exactly like me. I have more respect, like all of us are wired to think that way. But in business, it's great to work with people who are sort of very different than you," Santosh explains. Their RB2B partnership succeeded because they brought different skills and perspectives rather than duplicating expertise.

Growth strategies must align with team strengths and competitive weaknesses, not borrowed playbooks.

Despite successfully growing multiple companies from $5M to $25M, Santosh emphasizes that "the same playbook never ever works" when applied directly to new companies. At ZoomInfo, programmatic SEO generated 40,000 monthly leads. The same strategy produced minimal results elsewhere as Google adapted.

At RB2B, growth came through storytelling because Adam excelled at narrative building. At Apollo, PLG worked because the team consisted primarily of engineers. "We need to really understand who we are and be the best in one strategy rather than be mediocre with somebody else's strategy."

Experience can become baggage in zero-to-one company building.

Starting ZeerAI from scratch has proven more challenging than scaling established companies, despite Santosh's extensive experience. "Experience is also a baggage, right? It creates confirmation bias because now I have 25, 30 years of doing so. I know what success looks like, so I keep looking to do the same thing," he reflects.

Experienced executives know too much about potential failure modes, making them risk-averse compared to younger founders who "don't know better" and willingly "run off the cliff." Seasoned operators launching new ventures need to balance strategic knowledge with the experimental mindset that zero-to-one building requires.

Small, hyper-efficient companies will dominate future SaaS markets.

"There's gonna be like 30 people company doing hundreds of millions in revenue," Santosh predicts, pointing to companies like Cursor and Lovable as early examples. This efficiency comes from AI automation, better tools, and hyper-connected markets where great ideas spread instantly.

"Good ideas are going to get oversubscribed. It's going to travel instantly. So you run into a good company within 24 hours, starting from you, tell somebody, somebody else tells somebody, somebody posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, 24 hours, 10 million people know about." The traditional venture model breaks down when leverage through automation, not headcount, becomes the primary advantage.

The window between idea and competition has collapsed to hours.

In the episode, we explore how tools like Lovable have compressed the timeline from concept to functional product. As we discussed, watching Lovable's $200 million Series A announcement immediately triggers the question: how many people are watching this same video, thinking the same thoughts, and already building competing products? The answer is hundreds, maybe thousands.

For SaaS companies, this means defensibility can no longer come from the product itself. It must come from go-to-market coordination, distribution advantages, or domain expertise that can't be replicated in an afternoon.

AI will eliminate two-thirds of SaaS companies through product commoditization.

Many SaaS companies that raised money during COVID at inflated valuations face extinction as AI democratizes software development. "With AI you can make a duplicate or a cheap replica of Salesforce within two weeks. Because what is Salesforce? It's just a database with some HTML around it, with some services," Santosh explains.

Tools like Lovable already enable entrepreneurs to recreate complex software products in days rather than years. Companies that survive will need defensibility beyond their software functionality: network effects, data moats, or domain expertise that can't be easily replicated.

Want more insight on navigating SaaS disruption? Listen to the full episode on YouTube and subscribe to Understory's podcast for more insights on go-to-market strategy and SaaS scaling.

Looking to build coordinated go-to-market execution while your competitors struggle with fragmented strategies? Book a call with Understory to discuss how allbound coordination can help you cut through the noise.