How Abstrakt CEO Greg Reffner grew Abstrakt to $5.3M revenue and 113 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is greg rafner is one of the very first power users of conversional intelligence as an account executive he fell in love with how technology enabled his success as abstract's leader his vision and why is to help every sales weapon leader avoid the pain of missing their number you can follow along at his website it's abstract spelled a b s t r a k t dot ai greg you're ready to take us to the top yes sir absolutely thanks for having me nathan all right who who were you working for were you where you were selling these you know using these conversational intelligence tools yeah so i was working for a company called act on software back when marketing automation first kind of took off back when hubspot was becoming that thing and um act-on was a very a company that was known for being early adopter of technology and so we we started using gong actually back when they had like a football player on their website on their homepage i think we were one of the first handful users of gong like seven years ago wow yeah no no act on well that makes tons of sense there so you were using gong um so i guess help me understand now what you're building today as it relates to what you learned from using gong at act on yeah so with um with gong it's an amazing tool uh they've obviously done very well for themselves as one of my first customers described it gong is like finding the black box after the plane's already gone down tells you what went wrong tells you what happened but it does nothing to actually kind of stop losing the opportunity and i wanted to do something about that and so with abstract um we're a real-time conversational intelligence software where based upon what you're telling me nathan as my customer or prospect abstract is in real time telling me what i should be saying what questions i should be asking how to handle those objections so that i don't lose the opportunity and we do all that through natural language processing a little bit of machine learning and some some fancy algorithms anytime someone comes on and mentions machine learning algorithms my follow-up question is always the same uh both of those tools are useless unless you spend a lot of time training them and you have a very large data set to feed into them which usually requires someone to do a lot of freaking work have you figured out a way to have someone be able to get value from this and avoid having to do all that upfront work and if so what is it yeah so um no secret we just found a creative way to tap into google's library and data already and so um typically the way most companies tap into google's library and natural language processing capabilities um results in the capabilities not being able to be used in real time and so we uh as one of my engineers would say stumbled into a creative way to tap into that um and access that data in real time yeah you're talking about like the natural language ai from group from google right yeah correct but but the question still is the same right for every company let me just be very specific for a second if you're trying to sell uh mode.com which competes with looker maybe mode knows that because they're selling to developers don't say the word pricing until at least minute 25 but if you're selling to a cmo maybe you're a company like hubspot selling to someone you need to say pricing the first three minutes who's training the system to know 25 minutes first three minutes got it great okay thank you for clarifying nathan so candidly we're too early in our data set to have that information um we suspect in about two years we'll be able to start making those recommendations to our customers based upon the data that we have but right now the system is configurable per customer so if you're a looker you're configuring the system to say what you want a rep to say when it hears xyz objection or question right so as our customers are configuring the system it's helping us build that data set to then be able to here in the future kind of start to make those recommendations oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay that makes complete sense to me so what are companies paying you on average for months to use your technology 100 per user per month and our average customer has about 15 16 number 16 seats in the in the product okay guys that's about 1500 a month on average yes sir interesting when did you start building this what year uh so we started almost two years ago to the week um so early march of 2020 okay 2020 got it um and how did you fund the mvp uh great question um so convince my wife to let me take a decent chunk of our savings account out and uh kind of get a proof of concept built and with that proof of concept i went and raised a small kind of friends and family angel round from local investors here in arizona and uh that got me to my mvp that we launched on april 1st of 2021 okay get get real with me here because everyone goes through this right it's the conversation with the spouse going baby how much are we going to put into this startup and and they're going honey i'm working a full-time gig to support this crazy idea you're working on like if it doesn't work out i'm gonna be pissed uh how what how much was it we're talking like 10k or like a thousand sixty thousand dollars sixty okay interesting yeah and was that meaningful for you guys like was it gonna be stressful if you lost 60 grand or is that like play money for you um so we have so what's funny is at the time my wife was pregnant with our first son and um and we knew we wanted to have a second child and so she's now pregnant with our second child and congratulations thank you and so she's a full-time mom and so yeah that's not it wasn't uh insignificant for us to make that investment because if i lost it that lost our cushion that lost you know that that risked potentially having my wife go back to work and not be able to take care of our children um so it's super stressful i mean it's uh but the way i kind of explained it to her i was like hey you spend 60 grand on your college education that you don't use anymore so i get to use 60 grand for abstract that's so funny okay and how many how many weeks or months did it take you to get the mvp to a point where you could sell it so what's crazy is we got the one of our product out on april 1st and we weren't expecting revenue until like october november of 20 sorry just to be clear that's like five weeks from start from first lineup code to launch no so we spent about a year so march of 2012 next april to next april 2021 so it took us about a year to get the product to the place where we were like let's go get give it to customers um and on april 1st we got you know production ready product and...