Managing the state of pipeline with multiple bins with appsrc

I have two pipelines that I’m trying to merge into one that look something like this:

pulsesrc ! appsink \
appsrc ! pulsesink

appsrc isn’t always fed data immediately (and may stop at times).

The pipeline doesn’t start on it’s own and I would like to run the appsink bin without the appsrc being active. If I manually start the appsink when it’s in the paused state, I can make the pipeline start. Is there a better way to manage the states of the elements?