How Zams’ Pivot Could Displace Zapier—If They Nail the Story
I talked with Zam’s CEO and learned about their pivot. Then, dug deep to uncover if they’re telling the right pivot product story.
Picture staring at your Stripe dashboard.
Annual recurring revenue (ARR) just crossed $3M. It took your lean team about three years to achieve this feat—a feat the over 90% of SaaS startups that die before year one can only dream of. Your B2B customers are happy. So happy the raving success stories you’ve published feels surreal.
You have two options:
Keep refining your product; aim to reach $5M ARR
Overlook the $3M ARR; pivot to solve a different problem.
Most founders would double down on option one.
But Nirman Dave courageously chose the latter.
After two calls with him, this deep dive is my investigation into what prompted Dave to pivot from Obviously AI (that had crossed $3M ARR at its peak) to building Zams. Importantly, I’ll unpack how that bold pivot could enable Zams to displace Zapier-like tools for GTM teams—if they nail the product story.
If you’re SaaS founder or product marketing manager (PMM), you’ll walk away with insights on how to gauge the market for when to pivot. And how to nail a compelling product story for the new problem(s) you solve after pivoting.
Inside Today’s Deep Dive
When Revenue Growth Feels Insufficient
The Bold Pivot to Building Zams
Could Zams Displace Zapier?
Zams’ Long Road Ahead
Genius Needs No Interpreter
The 40% vs the 60% Proof
Why Command Center Falls Short
Product-Led Storytelling: Where the Real Moat Begins
Zams Needs a Story Anyone Can Repeat
The Inertia of “Category Assumed” Copy
Make’em Visualize, Don’t Make’em Assume
A Final Word for SaaS Founders & PMMs
Words count ~4,600 | Estimated read time 16 mins.
Hi I’m Victor Eduoh, and welcome to Product-Led Storytelling, my weekly deep dive newsletter on product storytelling, becoming a better SaaS product storyteller, and excelling as a product marketing manager (PMM).
When Revenue Growth Feels Insufficient
Let’s be real for a second.
Most SaaS founders dream of waking up to $3M ARR after just $10M in total funds raised. That number alone is supposed to validate your product, your market fit, your team’s grind. Exhale. Celebrate. Double down, right?
But what if hitting that milestone feels less like a victory and more like a warning siren? That was the reality for Nirman Dave.
On the surface, Obviously AI had everything stacked in its favor. Revenue? Growing. B2B customers? Sending in glowing testimonials. Product? Doing what it promised—delivering predictive analytics through automated (even revolutionary for a product built in 2020) machine learning.
You’d upload your sales data, click a few times, and—at least in theory—get answers to your biggest retention or upsell questions. But behind the Stripe dashboards and case study screenshots, Nirman noticed something off.
He saw an invisible tax on customer satisfaction—one that most startup founders only realize when it’s too late.
He told me on our call:
“So the reason we kind of made the change was not just because of the market landscape, but more because of the speed of value.”
He felt it: Product adoption was slow. The “Aha!” moment was hidden behind months of onboarding, data cleaning, and technical legwork. The “ROI” customers paid for was real but painfully delayed.
Nirman broke it down for me in a way that stopped me in my tracks:
“Because with predictive analytics, the speed of ROI was a year, like at least one year. Customers would’ve their data cleaned, their custom models built, then they would want us to further optimize the model, all that kind of stuff.”
Pause for a second.
Imagine you pay five—and sometimes six—figures for an AI automation tool, only to wait twelve months before you feel like it’s working. Sure, a few power users might tough it out. But for most, that long haul between purchase and payoff is murder. Unearthing the root cause, however, required foresight.
It wasn’t (just) about features, or UI, or even quality of the AI model.
Nirman pieced it together this way:
“The predictive analytics space is a space of unknowns... we’d work with these customers, we’d build these predictive models and we’d say, ‘hey, here’s an 85% accurate model, really good. They’d be very excited.’ But they would say, ‘is there a way we can get it to 86? Can we get it to 87%?’ And then that stretch for like a couple of point percentage accuracy would take us the whole year... it kind of drags on for years.”
That’s when his team realized something crucial.
Growth alone wasn’t enough. Happy stories and revenue milestones meant little if customers had to wait months to get that jolt of value they came for. In AI SaaS, speed of ROI isn’t a metric — it’s an existential moat.
So, Nirman did the unthinkable. Instead of doubling down on incremental improvements, he reoriented around a single metric:
How fast can a new user experience real value?
“So the speed of value was the real reason we decided to kind of not double down on building and growing Obviously AI.”
To me, this is the key lesson most SaaS folks sleep on, but must take seriously, especially as AI becomes even more powerful. Revenue milestones are proof you’re solving a problem people care enough about to pay for.
But speed of value?
That’s the difference between good and category-defining AI-powered solutions. That’s how you build real momentum—the kind that pulls you miles ahead when competitors are still obsessing over their next pricing tier.
Long story short: Revenue growth is wonderful. But if reaching it with an ‘AI solution’ that automates the manual work involved still takes months to reach value, maybe it’s time to listen to your visionary gut feeling.
Nirman Dave’s team did just that.
The Bold Pivot to Building Zams
Nirman’s team built predictive analytics models that reached 85% accuracy in 2020. Think when enterprise AI adoption was still in its infancy. It’s possible they could’ve improved Obviously AI to the point where it delivered 99% predictive analytics models had they forged ahead. I mean, that could’ve meant a lot as customers were asking for just 1–2% better versions.
About the same time, the hype around AI agents was starting to go nuclear. Think late 2023, every other newsletter, every VC cold email, every LinkedIn post screaming “AI agents now automate work!”
Nirman felt two truths beginning to collide:
Building and getting each customer’s unique models to over 90% accuracy still required several months and years in some cases.
Increasing the accuracy of those models didn’t change that they were still predictive analytics models. They helped Obviously AI’s customers know what to prioritize; they didn’t get the work done for them.
Customers still had to roll up their sleeves.
Think of it like being given the correct map for driving from San Francisco to New York. Yeah, you’ll know the routes to take and avoid. But you’d still have to choose a sound car, make plans for gas, and actually drive the car.
Sure, the smartest model dashboard might predict who’s about to churn. But who’s going to write the emails, update Salesforce, coordinate follow-ups, or actually move the revenue needle?
Nirman saw this void.
He called out the “map versus car” problem.
Predictive analytics was just the map:
“They helped Obviously AI’s customers know what to prioritize; they didn’t get the work done for them.”
So, could they pivot from being just a mapmaker to literally driving the car for customers? Cue the birth of Zams—the AI platform designed not to suggest what to do, but to *actually do it.*
It was gutsy. He didn’t look at the $3M ARR and say, “Let’s coast.” He challenged himself. To build something that didn’t just pay lip service to automation, but embodied it.
“The main thing here is, you know, when it comes to traditional automation workflows, they’re very deterministic. They’re like, you have to say, if this happens, go do this. And that’s what you build on tools like Zapier. And the bigger challenge is that there are so many different settings you open like Gmail or you would connect your Salesforce. There’s so many different settings you have to kind of adjust and evaluate and things like that.”
You could see the problem crystallizing.
Zapier-like tools let you stitch your process together, stitching the “map” for your team. But teams still needed to input rules, logic, and handle brittle configurations every time something changed. The work wasn’t really automated. It was scaffolded—built for tomorrow’s headaches.
And that’s where Zams was born: as a direct counter to this friction. Nirman explained the inflection point to me, almost like he was reliving the moment:
“With Zams, the speed of value is like 5 minutes. Right? Like you connect all your apps and data sources, you say, go run this and it goes ahead and does the job...the speed of value was the real reason we decided to kind of not double down on building and Zams instead.”
Let’s pause there.
Five minutes.
Not weeks.
Not months.
Not “after onboarding and deep technical setup.”
It’s a radical promise for any SaaS founder to make.
Yet, Nirman was willing to burn his ships and sail into this unknown. If Zams could do for sales and GTM teams what Zapier did for general workflows, but offer them instant value, the game would change.
As Nirman said—this is key:
“For the very first time you see the system just figuring things out and doing things as opposed to creating very detailed in-depth ‘if this; then that’ rules and logics and that kind of stuff. And that I would say is our biggest aha moment when users use Zams as opposed to something like Zapier.”
In practice, this meant Zams wasn’t just helping sales teams set up rules for lead assignment, reporting, or CRM updates. It actually *understood* outcomes. You could literally describe your desired result.
Said Nirman:
“All your instructions are in natural language. All the commands, and everything is a natural language. Even tomorrow, if you want to change something, you don’t need to hire someone that knows Salesforce or knows your CRMs or knows your tools. You just go to ZAMS and say, oh, in case the salesperson has not entered their background info, don’t consider them in the mix, right? Like something like that. Or send them an email telling them to update their background info. You literally say that in plain English.”
Can you picture that?
After Nirman demoed Zams to me, I was shocked because I hadn’t seen anything like it. And I’m dead serious. Immediately, I started asking…
Could Zams Displace Zapier?
Instead of digging through integration docs and endless “if this, then that,” you type exactly what you want in plain, everyday language—and Zams gets it done. GTM teams aren’t tied up writing scripts or wrestling with APIs. They’re back to working deals, closing revenue, moving the needle.
This doesn’t just help teams move faster. It changes who could run automation. Suddenly, a RevOps leader doesn’t need her own dedicated Salesforce admin to make the team more efficient.
Nirman chirped in:
“It’s very easy to adjust, manage scale, and also share with other people that may not be the most technical,”
Imagine the domino effect across a busy mid-market and enterprise sales org. Faster automated work done. Fewer bottlenecks. More action—less waiting.
But the shift went even deeper. Nirman believed companies needed to change not just their process, but their mindset:
“What is the future of automation going to look like?...going from thinking in steps to thinking in outcomes and how that’s going to change the workflow. Now you need people that can’t just stop at executing steps, but can really understand the business and think at a very high level in terms of strategy...those orchestrators will not just be people that say, ‘if this; then that.’ They’re going to be people that say I understand the business, I understand the customers and this is the outcome that we need every day as a team and set up those outcomes from scratch.”
That’s what separates a category leader from “yet another SaaS.”
Zams isn’t just trying to be another automation tool—it’s a platform for orchestrators, not just executors. The kind of foundation that lets your team instantly act on their best ideas, not just tinker around building integrations.
Now, if you’re a SaaS founder or PMM reading this, here’s the heart of the lesson: Speed to value isn’t a fancy metric. It’s the oxygen for GTM success in the age of AI. If your biggest wins take a year to show up, you’re inviting someone else—maybe even Zams—to show up and outpace you.
This isn’t hypothetical, either.
Nirman shared,
“What took us one year at Obviously AI has taken us like two months at Zams.”
Two months.
That’s the difference between building something that helps, and building something that wins. Zams was born out of a founder’s stubborn refusal to settle for revenue alone. Nirman bet that speed—real, instant value—would be the next SaaS moat. His team burned their old playbooks and built the product they wished existed: Less theoretical, more executable.
Less waiting, more doing.
Which brings us to the natural question—and the rest of this deep dive. Zams can get work done in plain words, not through rigid, ‘if this, then that,’ workflows in ways tools like Zapier never quite can’t.
But can they truly replace Zapier-like tools? Let me put it this way: Are they telling the right product story capable of wooing target prospects away from using Zapier-like tools toward adopting Zams instead?
Zams’ Long Road Ahead
Here’s where the plot thickens. For all of Nirman’s visionary pivot, for all the rapid “aha” value packed into Zams, I wasn’t singing their praises after my first call with Nirman. And not even after I first visited their website.
I know what you’re thinking. All those upgrades. All those pivot engineering sweat. Revolutionary instant get-work-done in plain English. Surely customers are flocking in droves to switch from Zapier and its copycats, right?
From my investigation, not quite.
And that stings.
Let me get honest.
When I landed on Zams’ website, I saw the headline:
“The AI Command Center for B2B sales teams.”
I blinked.
Scanned twice, hoping I missed something.
Then came the subtitle:
“Top reps use Zams to automate tasks across HubSpot, Slack, Clay, Apollo, Gong and 100+ tools, saving 20+ hours per week and closing 3.2x more revenue.”
Nice numbers. Feels big.
But you know what I didn’t feel?
That visceral “hell yes, I need this” electricity that jolted through me the moment Nirman actually demoed the product on our second call. That instant urge to pull out my credit card and exclaim, “Why am I still doing things the old way rushed through after his demo made me visualize Zams’ value?”
Why did I feel that on the second call, but not on the first call or after visiting their website after Zams’ website after that first call?
It hit me as I sat through the 2nd call.
And that’s the curse of the high-context demo.
One-on-one, Nirman walked me through use cases, breaking years of painful process into a five-minute “wow, that’s solved!” moment. But on the website, Zams just sounded…like another automation tool. Another dashboard promising to save time and make money. Yawn.
That’s where most founders and product marketers fumble the handoff. You build something new, something truly category-bending. But when you communicate it, you use the language of the old category.
You somehow still talk about automations. And still about integrations. You try to sell people what they already think they need—better, faster, stronger. But you don’t invite them to see the world with fresh eyes.
You don’t give them a story so clear and intuitive, they can tell it at lunch, in the elevator, in their next budget meeting—without a founder handholding them through each nuance.
That is the product story gap.
And it’s fatal in crowded, commoditized markets.
Throughout my years working at the intersection of product, narrative, and content at VEC Studio, I’ve seen this again and again. Founders chase the “what” and “how” of their technology. But the “why” gets lost in translation.
As a result, prospects bounce off at the top of the funnel because there’s no clear promise for them to see themselves in. Investors are sometimes to blame—funding comes with strings: “Show me growth, not just great reviews.” Teams obsess over metrics, not momentum.
But let’s break down why that doesn’t move prospects to buy.
Genius Needs No Interpreter
Let me take you back to my second call with Nirman. No flashy decks. No “magic quadrant” charts. Just real, scrappy “let me show you how this makes your Monday morning better” demos.
He described the typical GTM lead routing nightmare.
“If you wanted to build a lead routing automation inside of a tool like Zapier, you’d have to define every single thing that you can think of. It took our customers like two to three days of full-time work just to set something like that up.”
While saying the above words, he typed in plain English; then, made me watch as Zams connected apps and got the work done in about a minute.
No if/then logic gymnastics.
No “go find your Salesforce admin.” No “hope someone doesn’t leave a field blank and break the flow.” Just “assign my new healthcare leads to someone with healthcare experience” in plain English.
And then he upped the ante:
“Tomorrow, if you want to change something, you don’t need to hire someone that knows Salesforce or your CRMs. You just need to go into Zams and say, ‘in case the salesperson has not entered their background info, don’t consider them in the mix.’ You literally say that in plain English. And Zams just figures it out and does the job.”
I wish you could see my facial expression.
That’s the level of delta between “what’s possible” and “what most SaaS teams endure” that gets me fired up to write these long reads.
Yet, on the site, all I saw was “AI Command Center.”
You know what “command center” conjured for me? More dashboards. More toggles. More things I have to manage. Not “holy crap, this thing just gets it.” Not “I’m just one sentence away from done.”
The 40% vs the 60% Proof
Let’s look at the numbers. Nirman shared that, after pivoting from Obviously AI, about 40% of their existing customers transitioned to Zams. Sixty percent didn’t, even though their sales and GTM teams would likely benefit most.
Think about that for a second.
You’ve just built the AI product you wish existed for years—the one that, in every live demo, generates “I need this now” energy from people like me. But when you go to the broader customer base, the majority doesn’t move.
That’s not a tech failure.
That’s a story failure.
It proves a hard truth: If your product story doesn’t get prospects imagining and instantly saying, “Wait, my team could finally be free of X pain just by typing it out?!”—you’re not closing the gap.
You can wow in demos ’til you’re blue in the face as Nirman wowed me on our second call. But that goes nowhere if your top-of-funnel experience tells a story so ordinary it fades into the white noise of “save time, close more.”
Why Command Center Falls Short
Let’s talk psychology for a second.
“Command Center” is the kind of language that excites vendors, not time-starved sales and GTM leaders.
I buy software, too. And if I’m anything like others, B2B buyers aren’t dreaming about Command Centers. They’re dreaming about the day their stack stops fighting them. The day new reps ramp in a week, not a quarter. The day “I wish this just worked the way I want” becomes reality.
But when I first saw ‘The AI Command Center,’ my mental model was that of an ops lead sitting in front of a 4K monitor, juggling dials and levers. Like it’s Big Brother for business, not “AI, take these few words about what I need and get the work done and off my plate right now.”
And when I read “Top reps use Zams to automate tasks across HubSpot, Slack, Clay, Apollo, Gong and 100+ tools, saving 20+ hours per week and closing 3.2x more revenue?” I didn’t immediately see myself. I saw a vague promise and some bold numbers. But *how*? Why is it 3.2x? What is happening under the hood that Zapier or Make or whatever can’t give me?
Specificity wins hearts.
But only when wrapped in a simple, visualizable product story.
Product-Led Storytelling: Where the Real Moat Begins
This brings me back to the heart of my philosophy: Product-Led Storytelling. Not just because the phrase rolls off my tongue, but because it’s what distinguishes a new category creator from just another feature-machine.
Let’s use a simple analogy.
Imagine you invented the car in a world of horses and carriages. Your website headline reads, “The New Standard in Ground Transportation.” You feature stories of “Top travelers arrive 50% faster!”
Some adopters get it. Most don’t.
But then, a friend gives their neighbor a ride in the car.
The neighbor gets out, grinning. That night, in a bar, the neighbor corners five friends and launches into the story:
“Guys. You just sit in it, turn a crank, press something called a gas pedal, and... it *moves* by itself. You get to town in six minutes, not an hour.”
Suddenly, the magic isn’t about “the car.” It’s about getting your time back. Never shoveling manure. Six-minute commutes, not one-hour treks. What moved the needle wasn’t the “car.”
It was the right story, as told by a real human, in the words someone would use to convince their spouse, their boss, their skeptical uncle.
That’s what Zams needs.
Zams Needs a Story Anyone Can Repeat
When Nirman demoed Zams to me the second time we talked, I left that call buzzing. I literally couldn’t sit still. I walked to the kitchen, found my wife, and—without thinking—blurted out:
“You remember Albato, the product I said I switched to from Zapier, right? Imagine if I could just tell it, in normal English, what I wanted, and, boom, it does the work. No rules, no logic, no spaghetti workflows. Imagine I could route all my new leads or summarize every Zoom call, incoming email, or prep a deck, just by asking.”
She was still nodding slowly when I blurted out again.
You know how I often miss emails sent from our son’s school? I could just tell Zams in plain words to summarize every incoming email from Enobong’s school and send it to my Slack so I never miss anyone again.
As I was talking, I typed it into Zams and showed it her:
She got it in ten seconds.
She’s a fashion designer and not even into tech like that.
But she got it immediately.
When your product’s story turns every excited user into a repeatable storyteller anyone can understand, you’re onto something.
How many sales leaders and GTM prospects land on Zams, see “AI Command Center for B2B sales teams,” then bounce? Do they go to a friend and say, “I found this awesome tool that’s an AI Command Center?”
Not likely.
They probably have no idea what it even does for them.
But tell them, “It’s the only tool where you can ask for what you want, and it just does it—all your sales tools, all your data, in normal language. No rules, no building blocks, no Zapier-like automation management headaches.”
Now, that’s a story they can carry into their next team meeting.
The Inertia of “Category Assumed” Copy
It’s not unique to Zams.
Most SaaS founders, especially after a pivot, fall into the trap of “category assumed” copy. They use the jargon du jour. AI, automation, command center, 3x ROI. But in doing so, they force prospects to project themselves into the product, instead of painting the vivid “after” for them.
Even the 40% of existing Obviously AI customers who successfully migrated had context and hand-holding. Nirman admitted as much:
“I don’t think we went there with, like, this great big sales pitch of, like, why we—and they—should do AI agents. It was really like, ‘look, this is the direction the world is going now. This is the direction where all of our customers have seen the biggest ROI.’ They realized that, and they were like, you know what? That makes a lot of sense, sign me up!”
Fine for users close to Nirman and the product, or with a champion inside. But to penetrate the mass market, to cross the chasm, you need a story that jumps off the page—instantly relevant, instantly visual.
Make’em Visualize, Don’t Make’em Assume
Here’s where Product-Led Storytelling shines. It’s an approach that forces you not just say “what” your product is. Instead, it forces you to go the extra mile of immersing prospects in the “why now?” and “how is my life different?”
It paints before and after in high-res color.
If I were guiding the product story for Zams, that’s what I’d explore. And it’s not rocket science. It’s the same demo-magic I felt, made portable.
I’d toe the path of:
“Imagine your next rep onboards to Zams. No playbooks, no training weeks, no brittle logic diagrams. They just connect their tools, type, “Every time a healthcare lead comes in, assign it to a rep with healthcare experience and DM them the details,” and Zams does the rest. Change the rules tomorrow? Type it again. Zero friction.
Better yet:
“Wish your CRM updated itself after every call, logging notes and next steps—and prepping your next recap deck for you? Just say it. Zams does the work.”
I won’t just call it a command center. I’ll call it “AI that listens, understands, and acts—no coding, no workflow rules, just plain English.”
That’s the story a busy RevOps or sales leader retells at lunch. That’s how you get adopted with the same viral velocity as an “everyone gets it” app like Slack or Zapier got in its heyday.
A Final Word for SaaS Founders and PMMs
It feels odd to write this—singing the praises of a product so unique, yet worrying that the world may never experience that “aha” unless the product story gets sharper, simpler, and far more human.
Disruption isn’t earned by raising the $10M Nirman’s team have raised so far from building Obviously AI to pivoting to Zams. It’s not even earned by solving a problem in a way no one else has before. It’s won at the story level—in the words your best user whispers to the next prospect, that prospect repeats to their boss, and eventually finds its way into the boardroom.
As you build, iterate, and race for your own ARR milestones, don’t lose sight of the story you’re telling the market. Great tech needs great storytelling to reach escape velocity. Not the “AI Command Center,” not just dollars and decimals. The “why you, why now, why not wait one more quarter” story.
I coined Product-Led Storytelling for a reason.
Because the right product, told the wrong way, rarely wins. But the right product, told in a way anyone can imagine themselves *already* being better for using—that is how you eclipse what came before. That’s how you make the market yours, not just in revenue, but in influence.
Zams has every right to win. But, just like too many innovators before, unless they nail their product story in a way that turns every prospect into a walking, talking demo of what’s possible the *instant* they hit the site, they’ll risk getting mistaken for yet another dashboard in a sea of automation.
I know the pain. I’ve seen too many “nearly” moments. Don’t be the founder who needs a calendar block for every lightbulb to go off.
Craft and evangelize a product story that carries itself. One that walks into the minds—and the meetings—of your buyers long before you do.
That’s how Zapier should be worried. Not at a product level. At the story level. The kind you can’t stop retelling. The kind that makes time-starved, feature-blind, results-hungry B2B folks say: “Show me. Don’t tell me.”
That’s the one metric, and the one moat, that still makes all the difference.