Our first customers were the exception — Apurva Mehta<br>Our first customers were the exception<br>June 5, 2026 We started Responsive in April 2023 to build a platform for running event-driven Kafka applications. By April 2025, we decided to abandon that plan. In between those two points in time, we achieved some meaningful milestones, the most important of which is closing real customers and making real revenue (we crossed $1M run-rate revenue for a time).
Through this journey, we got a first-hand education in one of the cardinal rules of startups: if a great team with a great product meets a bad market, the market always wins. Of course, we knew this rule going in. Every founder worth their salt does. But like most first-time founders, we hadn’t internalized how it applied to us.
Here’s the story of how we eventually figured out we were in a bad market.
Our story
Part 1: Starting fast
We got out of the blocks really fast. Our original product solved scalability and reliability issues with Kafka Streams, a popular stream processing library. Our founding team had built a lot of the core technology of Kafka and Kafka Streams at Confluent, and we understood the problems users were facing really well.
Even so, we were really surprised that it only took us a couple of weeks to find a company that was struggling with the reliability of their Kafka Streams apps and wanted to talk with us about a solution. We didn’t have a website or a product. We just messaged a person who was talking about their problem on the internet, and got a response. It was literally our first outbound message!
From there, things went really well. By June 2023, we had built a product for this prospect, and they were trialing it. By October 2023, they signed a high five-figure contract and were ready to go to production. I still remember sending them their API keys in a 1Password note. They literally onboarded to production with that.
We really felt we had strong product/market fit. Our first outbound resulted in a deal. And we still didn’t have a website!
Part 2: The good months
In parallel to building our product and onboarding our first customers, we started investing heavily in our marketing in the fall of 2023. Our strategy was to invest in high-quality and deep technical blog posts on how to solve reliability and scalability problems with open source Kafka Streams.
This content didn’t exist on the internet, and we were the best team to write it. We were also nudged by one of our customers, who kept telling us to convert our long Slack messages explaining the internals of Kafka into blog posts. They said they would appreciate this content.
The bet was that if people were struggling with reliability and scale of Kafka Streams apps, they would land on our blog. And once they did, they would learn about our solutions to those exact problems, and we could start a conversation that would lead to a sale.
Blog Search Traffic
250
500
750
1,000<br>organic search clicks, 2025<br>Oct '23<br>Jan '24<br>Apr '24<br>Jul '24<br>Oct '24<br>Jan '25<br>Apr '25<br>post publication date
Our deepest guide (a 25-min read)<br>was also our single biggest traffic driver.<br>dot size = read time:
2 min
12 min
25 min
WHAT WE PUT IN<br>30 posts · 99k words · 5.3 hrs of reading<br>Sep 2023 – Apr 2025<br>WHAT WE GOT OUT (2025)<br>649,585 impressions · 5,721 clicks<br>blog posts: 80% of clicks
The graph above shows how our content performed on Google search in 2025. You can see our top 3 posts by click-through were published during the fall of 2023 and spring of 2024. And these 3 posts were focused exactly on the problems our product solved.
So we had people who had the same problems as our first customer showing up on our website looking to solve those problems. We believed we should start seeing a flood of customers once we learned how to convert this top of funnel.
Then, around June 2024, we introduced usage-based pricing and landed our first expansion. The usage growth of our initial customer cohort combined with usage-based pricing meant our revenue growth accelerated sharply through the end of 2024.
Revenue over time
peak
$1M annual revenue run-rate<br>Apr '23<br>Oct '23<br>Jun '24<br>Dec '24<br>Aug '25<br>Mar '26
decided to pivot
Apr 2023First prospect
Jun 2023Product built, first trial
Oct 2023First customer in production
Jun 2024Expansion + usage-based pricing
Jul–Aug 2024First sales hires
Aug 2024 – Mar 2025Hunting new logos
Mar 2025New logos don't materialize
This made our business look great. And indeed we felt great. More importantly, it gave us the confidence and runway to run the real test: could we turn this early pull into a repeatable sales motion?
Part 3: The cracks
However, at no point since we launched our website were we able to repeatably convert our website traffic to customers. This was the first clue that something was wrong. We had way more social proof and a far more polished product than a year earlier. Yet closing customers felt like it was getting harder.
In the...