How Cbinsights CEO Anand Sanwal grew Cbinsights to $145.8M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

all right good morning everybody all right good we're doing good um I got 110 slides I got 20 minutes so we're gonna go it's 97 things not to do in your SAS company so I'm not going to talk about startup valuations I'm not going to talk about Venture funding anything of that sort I'm coming off a cold so apologies uh uh if I uh if I have to grab some water at times so let's jump in a little bit about me I won't read this all to you my my prior startup experience of Interest was a company called cosmo.com if any of you are in the first.com of New York we had a revolutionary business model where we would buy things for two dollars and sell them for one dollar and we tried to make it up in volume and uh that didn't work uh so that's that uh if you don't know CB insights thanks for the kind words earlier we're building a technology Marketplace our goal is to connect technology companies with advisors investors acquirers and customers and we do that by just assimilating a gargantuan amount of qualitative and quantitative information basically trying to make sense of the technology economy so I'll jump in uh a disclaimer right so this is there's going to be things I'm going to say here and some of you may disagree with you'll be offended by uh and that's okay these are not laws these are just my learnings of building a SAS company over over many years uh this will be useless for these folks you can just read it uh entrepreneurs if you believe how many of you are bootstrapped in this room all right nice uh you know if you care about your personal brand and you really if that's what you know like all that is nonsense so I it won't be good for you all all right uh this is the general thesis of this presentation I love this Charlie Munger quote my goal is to try to share with you the things the stupid things we've done so you avoid doing stupid things um and some of them again won't be relevant to you hopefully some of them will be so let's jump in uh and I'm gonna go quickly since I've got a lot of slides why did you say slide 55 all right um don't take advice from non-customers you know talk to people who have to live with the consequences of the feedback they give you uh either don't tolerate High performing you're on a team you have a you know and I we had some remarkable sales people from a performance perspective they were cancerous to culture they were jerks to our sdrs you have to get rid of those people that metastasizes in an organization um this one's a little bit nuanced so we tend to talk about averages so if you have a sales team you're like oh what's the average AE selling what's the average SDR doing what you actually want to look for is what what people will call positive deviants so the people who with the same amount of information and the same training are actually over delivering and that's who you want to study right and sometimes you end up talking in averages and you don't want to be average so you know focus on positive deviance uh you know this you gotta all stop uh don't half-ass onboarding of new teammates uh you know people make a decision about whether they feel like they can build a career in your organization in the first 30 days and so that onboarding experience and when you're you know when we were five people 10 people it was just like here's your laptop go and that's fine like don't over engineer it I'm talking some of this some of this is stage relevant um but you got to spend time on onboarding new teammates and making sure that they're set up to be successful I don't believe you have to raise VC all of the VC is the best marketed money that's what it is at the end of the day right uh the odds that a VC alone is going to change the trajectory of your business is close to nil uh it is capital so revenue is the best funding don't be pressured into raising VC this might be a common theme uh this one you know for those of you are bootstrapped when people call you a lifestyle business just you should call them an on the spot um uh don't waste money on PR to get customers uh you know and maybe this relates to the next point I I think the key here with PR is to go for Relevant media so everybody wants to get that or a lot of people like to get that little Tech crunch thing as seen on TechCrunch in the bottom of their website most of your customers don't live on TechCrunch so go find where they live and if it's in some supply chain magazine or some other esoteric thing like go there like all this chasing and paying we hired a PR firm we fired a PR firm like it's gonna you know again at the right stage maybe it makes sense but early days um you know we're kind of in that 100 million ARR category and we don't have a PR firm still so you know maybe maybe when we're 200 or 500 we'll be there uh you know there's going to be good days there's gonna be bad days there's gonna be people who are gonna say you're the uh you know just don't like don't you know get high on your own Supply um uh you know don't get fixated on losses like if you're building something that's good you're gonna lose a lot right like the amount of rejections you take uh on any front is significant and like I'm wired this way to really get kind of uh in my head about losses and that like can be really destructive and if you have a team it's destructive as well uh yeah you know sometimes your Market we thought we were going to sell primarily into VCS and bankers and what we realized was it was large Enterprises and we had to we learned that only by talking to lots of customers I think that's the benefit of being bootstrapped for sure because you don't have this sort of War chest your customers are your investor um uh at the same time you can't be promiscuous promiscuous about your Market forever so being opportunistic is really good in the early days but we had a we had a period where we were 12 people and I think we had three products and like that's just a not sustainable way of growing we had to we had to pick a lane and So eventually you know we we picked the lane and luckily that's been going all right uh you know self-explanatory you got to have a plan you know irrespective of how smart somebody is uh this is a big one never higher Under Pressure so we've had a a senior VP role available or a marketing role open for 15 months and the team's like hey this person's pretty good can we just hire them like never do that if you ever hire under pressure you will regret it right like we just got to get somebody in seat if you don't love them when they join you're definitely not going to love them in six months um it's hard to do this but uh culture is driven by what you tolerate and it's by the people that you hire as well as who you let go and it's hard to let go of people but uh great people see that you're not doing that and they you lose faith in you as a leader uh this one's funny uh for the how many of you had a 10 person or less company right so like I'll see 10 you know that I'm just picking on that size where they're like okay we have a CTO we have a CFO we have a CIO and it's like guys like what the are you doing right like you got to have titles that make sense that help you scale right if somebody's gonna be a CTO when you're three people and then you get to 30 and that person no longer is relevant in that role then you're gonna have to top them they're gonna look like they took a demotion it just creates all sorts of adjective and anxiety that you can avoid by just giving people reasonable titles like and and when you go if you sell the Enterprise and you show up and we're like a 10 person company and here's our C Level like you look like Jokers so don't do that um don't be afraid to hire expert advisors I did payroll this is the worst probably one of the worst things I did I did payroll by hand for the first four years um just horrible idea don't do that uh if you have a bad advisor get rid of them um this one uh like there's always like the the soup of the day in startup land right and like everybody's like oh what are they doing and like you got to do what's right for you um everybody you know Evernote was hot until they weren't Dropbox same like everybody goes to these phases and so don't take the advice that comes from luminaries or you know Founders who are good at sort of talking about what they do as gospel you know assimilated into what you do and then adopt it uh it never gets easy uh this doesn't matter we've been out funded by numerous competitors uh they've all uh they've all failed or aren't doing very well so money is just oxygen it doesn't buy you the ability to execute and I think that's really important it's really important I think to make sure the team knows that too because they'll be like oh do you see somebody just raised 50 million dollars like what are we gonna do like just stick to what you're doing and you know uh in some markets maybe you need Capital but I don't think in a lot of B2B markets especially in SAS it's necessarily what determines winning um again something I'm really bad at you can't just celebrate the humongous wins like small wins...