Rohit Bhadange

The through-line

Rohit Bhadange's consistent argument is that sales tax is not a software problem, it is an education and trust problem that happens to need software. He frames the market with a macro number: the US collected roughly $650 billion of sales tax in a recent year against an expectation of a trillion, so "the government is missing $350 billion that they should have gotten" [1]. Sales tax typically makes up 30 to 50% of state tax revenue, and with consumer spending dipping and states doubling their auditor headcount, he sees a collection wave arriving for businesses that have quietly assumed the rules do not apply to them [1]. His answer at Zamp is a managed model where small and mid-market e-commerce and SaaS companies "do not have to touch any part of the sales tax process" [1], which in practice means around 20 to 30 hours a month back for the customer and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of avoided out-of-pocket exposure [2].

The second through-line is how that gets sold. Because most prospects do not know they have a problem, he treats content, teaching and personal presence as the primary growth engine rather than a brand exercise, and he has been explicit about the arc from founder-led hand-to-hand selling toward an inbound and partnership machine [1][2][5].

On why so many businesses are out of compliance

He divides non-compliance into three buckets. The largest is simply a lack of education: smaller businesses do not realise sales tax is their issue, which is why most sales calls "it's not really selling to the business it's more they're coming to us like hey like we know this is an issue but we don't really know why this is an issue" [1][7]. The second and smallest is resourcing, where companies know the risk but cannot staff it, particularly because legacy tools are self-serve platforms that "don't teach you any sales tax but you're kind of expected to know sales tax to run the platform," so owners let it run and deal with it when an audit lands [1]. The third bucket, which he says is bigger than the second, is companies already paying a provider but who configured the account wrong at the start, mis-registered, mis-taxed products or failed to account for marketplace orders: "when the setup is wrong from the beginning it compounds the issue Downstream," and without a second set of expert eyes they believe they are compliant right up until they are not [1]. A survey Zamp ran with a couple of thousand participants found about two-thirds of brands did not feel ready for the sales tax burden of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and anecdotally he puts the non-compliant or at-risk share of businesses at half or more [1]. Among Zamp's own 400-plus customers signed in a year, roughly half came from legacy providers knowing exactly what they needed, and half arrived needing to be taught why it mattered [1].

The consequences he describes are asymmetric. Fail to charge the customer and the business pays the tax out of pocket, potentially 5 to 10% of margin, compounded across a seven-year look-back period, or in Texas indefinitely [1]. Collect the tax and fail to remit it, which he says happens as an innocuous working-capital mistake, and it becomes tax fraud with potential criminal charges attached [1][7]. He has also pointed to the operational edges of this: marketplace sales counting toward thresholds in many states, the difficulty international sellers face navigating the US system, a case where improper collection left a company owing $4 million in back taxes, the conversion damage from charging incorrect rates, and what founders need to have in order before selling a business [8].

On Wayfair and what changed in 2018

He treats the 2018 Wayfair versus South Dakota Supreme Court ruling as the origin of the modern problem. Before it, a seller without people or warehouses in a state did not have to charge sales tax there, which meant a $1,000 couch from Wayfair with free delivery beat the same couch in a South Dakota furniture store carrying tax and delivery charges, and the state collected nothing [1]. The court declined to act retroactively but let states set their own economic nexus thresholds based on transaction counts or dollar volume, and that is what pulled SaaS, e-commerce and CPG companies without physical retail presence into the net [1][7]. His read is that governments then gave sellers four or five years to normalise and have since switched to enforcement, pushing auditor-hiring initiatives to close the gap [1].

On education as go-to-market

Since the market does not know it has a problem, he built demand generation around teaching. The programme is deliberately multi-channel: founder-led content, because a founder or CEO has distribution into their own network; owned content on the website ranging from ebooks to blog posts answering something as granular as the sales tax rate in a particular city; and webinars with partners, newsletters and events as boots-on-the-ground work [1][7]. The point of the granular content is trust rather than traffic, showing prospects "we're sharing as much as we know about it to best equip you" so that Zamp is the known party when the moment comes [1]. He frames the underlying challenge honestly: "we were in a really complex space it's compliant it's not sexy but how do we make it so that it's more accessible to people and less scary" [2].

On earning trust in a category where mistakes are criminal

Trust is the recurring word. He started publishing content within the first couple of months precisely because "asking somebody to trust you is one thing but demonstrating that you actually know something and then having them trust you is another thing" [1]. The hiring plan followed the same logic: the first five of six hires came out of the sales tax world, most of them from legacy providers, with the single exception being the product hire, brought in deliberately with a fresh set of eyes to build something innovative [1]. Getting the first five customers he calls one of the hardest things a company does, and Zamp leaned on existing relationships to do it, including an early customer that came from a portfolio company he had invested in and knew personally [1][2]. His summary of the space is blunt: "everything is trust based," and it has to be maintained and over-invested in over time [1].

On software plus people

He rejects the pure self-serve model for compliance and puts Zamp alongside Justworks, Deel and Gusto as a platform layer with an expert services layer on top [1]. The argument has three parts. Doing everything for the customer produces a better outcome than handing them a tool. The SaaS market has matured past one-size-fits-all, and finance buyers, CFOs and controllers in the weeds, want white-glove setup tuned to their business [1]. And services fix "The Leaky bucket problem," where a company works hard for distribution and then churns customers who were mis-qualified or under-supported, so human coverage becomes the moat [1]. His own experience as a long-time Gusto customer is the proof he reaches for: with that level of service, there is no reason to leave [1].

On content, consistency and the metrics that actually matter

He came to LinkedIn from a Wall Street culture where the platform was a professional network rather than a publishing channel, and posting twice a week initially felt excessive [2]. Pushed to daily, he posted every day for around four months and went from roughly 3,000 to 15,000 followers in about five [2]. Two craft lessons dominate: the opening two lines have to capture attention or nothing else matters, and you have to write about what the audience cares about, since "initially I was writing about things that I cared about and I think that's very different than writing about things other people care about" [2]. The same content, framed differently, reaches a different audience [2]. His system is deliberately light, an Apple Notes list where ideas move from work-in-progress to done, captured at dinner or walking down the street, plus weekly metric reviews and first-hour tracking, with post structure iterated from what worked while topics range across sales tax, company stories and why raising money may not be the best thing [2].

On the psychology, he thinks fear of judgement is the real blocker, and that once you accept that half your audience does not care, most of the rest will not notice typos, and a stubborn 1% will criticise regardless, you can just publish [2]. He puts it in engineering terms: "I see it the same way as shipping product like just ship things and iterate I think content is the same" [2]. The metrics point is the sharper one: likes and comments are "not the total number of people who are paying attention to what you do," and he notes that customers, partner leads and referrals almost never engage publicly, while strangers at conferences and dinners tell him they read everything [2]. He now watches impressions rather than engagement [2]. The highest-value effect, he argues, is not direct lead generation at all but staying top of mind with investors, adjacent agencies and other founders who send business, and being the first name someone thinks of when the need finally arrives, as happened when the head of product at Gainful, one of the largest brands Zamp has signed, messaged him after following the content through a Shopify migration [2].

On phases of growth, founder-led selling and partnerships

He describes an under-discussed "negative 1 to zero phase" before zero to one, where you are close to selling vapourware and the only thing carrying you is whether your team is credible enough that someone will take the risk [2]. It took roughly six months from launch before he was comfortable pushing wider distribution, with reporting depth for larger customers built out after that [2]. In that first stage the work is understanding customer needs, adapting the product and roadmap to them, and founder and exec BD on the ground: testing outbound, working conferences for 30 leads at a time, dinners, referrals [2]. He repeats advice he was given, that for something like the first 500 customers the founder simply has to be involved, while conceding that ground game stops scaling once you need 100 leads a month [2].

The second phase, once product-market fit is established, is building an inbound engine and a partnership engine, and he is clear about why partnerships are the leverage point: accountants and bookkeepers already hold the client relationship, so "why are we reforging that relationship when we could Forge that relationship with these individual accounting bookkeepers," taking a one-to-many approach [2]. The open question he is working on is how to invest to go from 50 or 100 leads a month to 300, 400 or 500 without simply throwing money at it and losing efficiency [2]. He does not think the founder ever fully stops showing up in person: "founder CEO generally should be on the ground because CEO is the face of the company," relationships forged online do not hold the same way as those made in person, and customers notice when the CEO turns up despite the company having thousands of accounts [2]. He accepts this is temperamentally hard for some people, but is unsentimental about it: "you kind of have to be comfortable with the uncomfortable if you're going to be CEO" [2].

On venture funding versus building a brand

He is candid that the funded path has costs, questioning whether a founder is ready for "this like rat race of or this constant hamster wheel of consistently raising money," which then puts investors in the seat of evaluating your idea and potential [2]. The alternative he sketches is the consumer brand route, hitting profitability relatively early and then accessing revolvers and facilities to fund growth, which gives you control sooner than a SaaS founder gets it, though he closes the comparison with the observation that "The Grass Is Always Greener" [2]. Zamp itself has raised $14 million, including a $10 million round [1][6][7].

Takeaways

• The macro case for the category: US sales tax collections ran about $650 billion against a trillion expected, and since sales tax is 30 to 50% of state revenue, states are doubling auditor headcount to close the gap [1].
• Non-compliance splits three ways: businesses that do not know the rules exist, businesses without resources to manage it, and, larger than the second group, businesses on existing providers whose accounts were misconfigured from day one [1].
• Wayfair versus South Dakota (2018) let states set economic nexus thresholds, pulling e-commerce, SaaS and CPG sellers with no physical presence into collection obligations [1][7].
• Under-collecting can cost 5 to 10% of margin out of pocket across a seven-year look-back, while collecting and failing to remit carries potential criminal charges [1].
• Hire for credibility in a trust-based category: five of Zamp's first six hires came from the sales tax industry, with the product hire deliberately brought in from outside for fresh eyes [1].
• Compliance needs a services layer, not just software, both because finance buyers want white-glove setup and because human coverage fixes the leaky bucket of churn [1].
• Write for what the audience cares about, not what you care about, and judge content by impressions and referral top-of-mind rather than likes, since customers and partners often never engage publicly [2].
• Founders should stay on the ground for the early customer base and keep meeting customers and partners in person even at scale, because relationships forged online do not hold the same way [2].