Utkarsh Singhai
ProductsPortfolioIQ self-serve
All products
SynapticDirector of Product · 2024–26

PortfolioIQ self-serve

A self-serve version of PortfolioIQ, so VC funds could sign up on their own. Before this, every customer came through a sales call.

Role
Director of Product
Company
Synaptic, Series B, backed by Vy Ventures and Felicis
Timeline
Oct 2024 – [Month] 2026
Team
12 across product, engineering and design, 4 reporting to me
PortfolioIQ’s website: “AI for Portfolio Ops, Done Right”, with the app below

PortfolioIQ’s website. The chart and companies in the app preview are sample data.

Impact

Self-serve became 75% of the sales funnel in three months.

75%
of the sales funnel from self-serve
Within 3 months of launch
30%
revenue growth, with the new AI features
[Over what period?] · [OK to publish?]
[X]
[Funds signed up without a sales call]
[Time window]
[X]
[Time from sign-up to first value]
[Before → after]
Context

Venture funds only bought software through a sales call.

Synaptic sells deal discovery and portfolio tools to venture funds, using alternative data to spot fast-growing startups. PortfolioIQ is its portfolio-monitoring product, and every customer came in through sales. [Why the market only bought this way.]

My brief was to scale PortfolioIQ for large funds and also give smaller funds a way in. I thought smaller funds would happily sign up on their own if we let them, and pushed for a self-serve version against the grain of a sales-led company. [What you saw that made you think funds would sign up on their own.]

Problem and users

[What a fund couldn’t do before self-serve.]

[The user’s situation in one or two sentences.]

Primary user
  • [Who: e.g. analysts or partners at smaller funds]
  • [How they evaluated tools before]
  • [What was broken: long sales cycles, no way to try it]
The business problem
  • [What the sales-only model cost Synaptic]
  • [Which funds it couldn’t reach]

Research: I aligned the founders on a new roadmap built from user research. My loop was research, then a quick coded prototype, then testing it with users before we built it properly. [How many funds you spoke to and the finding that changed the roadmap.]

My role

I found the gap, made the case for self-serve and led the launch.

What I owned
  • Spotting the gap for a self-serve product in a sales-led market
  • Making the case to the founders for the move to self-serve
  • The product roadmap, built on user research
  • The AI pipeline that reads VC documents with OCR and LLMs
  • PortfolioIQ for large funds [and the LP version with Sequoia-HF as design partner, if you can name them]
What the team owned
  • [Engineering: team size and who led it]
  • [Sales: how they worked with self-serve leads]
  • [Design]
Reported to
[Title]
Team
12 across product, engineering and design
Direct reports
4
Customers
[Can you name Lightspeed and Generation IM?]
Key decisions

Three decisions behind the pivot.

Launch self-serve in a sales-led market

The choiceBuild the first self-serve product in the category.
Options considered[e.g. a free trial behind sales, a freemium tier]
Why[The evidence from research]
What happened75% of the sales funnel came from self-serve within 3 months.

Read portfolio documents with OCR and LLMs

The choiceAutomate pulling data out of the documents funds get from their portfolio companies. [Which documents?]
Options considered[Manual entry, a vendor, rules-based parsing]
Why[The reasoning]
What happenedTogether with self-serve, it helped close key deals and grow revenue 30%. [How: new customers, upsell, retention?]

[Decision 3: one that didn’t work]

The choice[What you decided]
Why it seemed right[The reasoning at the time]
What went wrong[What happened]
What I changed[The fix]
To confirm: is the document extraction pipeline part of PortfolioIQ self-serve, or a separate product? If separate, it may need its own section or page.
The product

[One line on what a fund gets in its first session.]

[The sign-up to first value flow, in two sentences.]

[Screenshot: sign-up flow]
[Flow 1: sign-up. How many steps, how long.]
[Screenshot: document upload and extraction]
[Flow 2: upload a portfolio document and see the extracted data.]
[Screenshot: portfolio dashboard]
[Flow 3: the dashboard a fund lands on.]
1
Upload
[Which documents: reports, cap tables, updates]
2
OCR
[What it reads]
3
LLM extraction
[Which fields it pulls]
4
Review
[How users check and fix it]
5
Dashboard
[What they see]
[OCR service][Model][Data store]
Execution

[How the launch was sequenced.]

[How self-serve launched and how sales adapted to it, in one or two sentences.]

  1. Oct 2024Joined Synaptic as Director of Product
  2. [Date]User research and the new roadmap
  3. [Date]Self-serve launched
  4. [Date + 3 months]75% of the sales funnel from self-serve
  5. [Date]Document extraction shipped
  6. [Month] 2026Left for Kellogg [where you left it]
Results

[One line on the business outcome.]

[Chart: share of the sales funnel from self-serve, by month]
[Source and definition.]

[What the 75% means in absolute numbers, and what happened to conversion and deal size.]

[What came from your work versus the market and the team.]

[A quote from a fund or the founders.][Who]
What I’d do differently

[One line summarising the biggest lesson.]

  • [A lesson about bringing self-serve to a sales-led market]
  • [A lesson about aligning founders with research]
  • [What you’d do differently]