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 you gotta make sure you recognize people and make sure that they feel like you know you're there kind of behind them irrespective of it being big or small uh this one would probably change my view on this a little bit older um we used to sell the startups in the early days and maybe this has evolved but you know they die they churn they require lots of support they don't have a lot of money so it's kind of like the perfect SAS help um um uh you know lowest price product in the market you know generally again none of these are laws I think this one generally is path sucks uh you know so getting cute with pricing so this was CB insights pricing like early early days um and so we'd end up having these absolutely ridiculous conversations with customers because they were like oh I want the limo plan and I want and you just the whole conversation kind of sounded ridiculous right so like and nobody's buying you because of your cute pricing I think before this we had like Doberman pitbull Chihuahua and it was just like it it was all just kind of stupid and we spent so much time thinking about what dogs to put on the pricing page and like all of that energy could have been reallocated to something that was actually useful um you know you got to talk to customers you got to ask them Point Blank you got to give them uh a lane in which to give you honest feedback most people actually are nice and they want to see you succeed but they also are reluctant to give you really really hard feedback and so you just if you ask hard questions of them meaning where you say I want honest feedback where you just say what what makes our product suck like they're like okay this is that type of conversation right but you got to be willing to listen and not be and not be defensive in those moments uh don't respond to trolls I do it I shouldn't uh don't worry about perfecting your Tech too early so again this one changes with scale but in the beginning I remember we used to have conversations about like oh we got Tech debt we got Tech debt and I was like hey we don't have any Revenue like I don't care about tech debt right like let's go get some revenue and then we can solve all this Tech debt nonsense we keep talking about um over time as you get revenue and stuff you do have to pay that down so again this is you know as companies evolve this will change uh you know and beat it I guess most of you are B2B anybody not B2B okay very few in B to B the beauty of B2B marketing is the bar is so ridiculously low like your competitions marketing is probably unbelievably forgettable right like they put out like stuff that like when people sell the B2B they're like I have to talk in this like ridiculous way that nobody ever in their real world talks like that so just try to be human you ultimately are selling to a business which is made up of humans if you just keep that in mind you'll be better than 95 of B2B marketers out there uh plg ABM whatever you know uh you have to eventually train your Biz Dev and CS teams in the beginning they can sit next to the founder and learn through osmosis but eventually you're going to need to have some sort of regimented way of building habits habits build systems systems build expertise expertise is what helps you win again you don't want to prematurely optimize for this but eventually you'll need to get there I'm really behind on time all right hire customer success early we didn't do that this one's big uh you know something's not right oh this function's not going well hey we're just going to hire somebody and they're going to fix it there's no one-hire Messiah it doesn't work out you have to have a fundamental understanding of the problem before you can just go hire somebody rarely to somebody just kind of work out that way uh do hardcore reference checks on your execs if you don't get effusive reference checks don't hire that person right if somebody that you're hiring at the senior level especially can't put together five people who are going to say that the best things in sliced bread like that's a problem um if you're going to meet with VCS you're you are pitching whether you think you're pitching or not you're pitching VCS private Equity whatnot there's no like coffee chats like they're making an evaluation of you down the road or now as to whether they're going to do something with you so if you're going to meet with them be ready for pitching uh don't price based on competition Channel Partnerships I think you know it depends on stage early days Channel Partnerships aren't great uh when you talk to customers when you if you're how many of you are founders who are selling still so the big thing I had to learn was like I used to think oh if I go and talk a lot during the conversation that's a good conversation and actually in a 30-minute conversation if they're talking 20 to 25 minutes that actually means I'm asking questions I'm actually getting insights from them so don't dominate uh in the beginning you know the founding team and the engineers are the product management team uh I think folks if you try to Outsource product management too early bad recipe uh you got to ask for the sale I'm no by no means a natural sales person I sold the first couple million of CBI subscriptions and one of the things that was really hard for me was just are you gonna buy you want to buy right I just I was like Hey they'll tell me when they're ready like no no you got to go and push the you got to go push the pace and if they say no that's great cut them off your list and go to the next one um this is if you sell into Enterprise you'll get a lot of these Jokers who come around who are like I want to partner just run away from these people if they have no money they are time wasters and tourists and they're like trying to look Smart in front of their boss and they generally are going to do nothing for your business so just run the hell away from these people uh don't worry about scalability of everything like elegant systems are nice and they're sort of intellectually interesting sometimes you just gotta put it in an Excel spreadsheet and grind it out uh you know read the stuff by Jeff Bezos on competition we spent so much time trying to get number one on Hacker News unless you sell developer tools like totally useless right we would get we did get there a couple times our Google analytics traffic site and then we just got you know a bunch of people who said our product sucks in the comments so that was fun um uh uh don't try to innovate in HR so your your focus is to build a product and your Innovation should be in the product so I see companies who are like oh we're doing a three-day work week and your dog gets pedicures and all this other crap it's like nobody cares like the people who actually care about that stuff are not the people you want as teammates in your business you want people who are there to do the work that helps customers and if like dog pedicures and other sabbaticals after your second week or whatever are the thing like you gotta not do that uh you got to be able to sell it yourself like again just like product management you can't Outsource early you have to you have to kind of be able to do it on your own uh you're gonna see good leads you're gonna see bad leads focus on the good ones don't worry about don't try to convert people right try to tell people who are already of your religion just try to get them over the Finish Line converting people who aren't irreligion that's a lot of work it's really painful uh you know don't build product by committee is probably the best way to say this one uh I see this a lot I'm probably in the in the opposite like you know this personal brand thing like if you're trying to build a business build the business right like you know your personal brand if it's additive to the company sure but I see people Founders who like this the stuff they do on Twitter especially is completely unrelated to their business and it's like if I'm a teammate looking at what you're doing I'm like what are you are you here for the business or are you just here to like you know be an influencer so I think that's something to be it's important uh don't try to act like a salesperson there's no one way to sell have conversations uh uh VC nonsense uh the big thing here is that like in startup land Google and Facebook are extreme extreme outliers right I hope CBI becomes one I hope many of your companies become one of them but they are by by definition outliers most exits of technology companies or sub 200 million dollars so you read all of this VC survivorship bias in the media like most of us are not building those two companies right unfortunately right so like just play the odds a bit um we have a newsletter which is pretty successful uh but we spend a lot of time thinking about should we do video should we have a clubhouse Channel all this like if you know instead of planting new seeds water the seed that you've already planted right if something's working lean into that and then when you exhaust that which takes a while then move on uh pointless networking I yeah I mean just self-explanatory uh like this is I guess related to pointless networking uh uh I say generally it's a waste of time I really like Nathan I really like SAS Founders so this was a good one to do but you're you're reach in the in a in online is just so much more significant uh don't ever have you there's I think I've been I've seen one panel discussion in probably a thousand that's actually good like panel discussions by definition are garbage because everybody agrees with each other so don't participate in them they're just they're useless for the speakers they're useless for the audience it's like a it's just mutually self-assured destruction um uh focus on the essential few ruthless prioritization is really important man I got a minute uh all right this is if you haven't seen this post Christoph Johns has this post about how to make 100 million dollar business and it's really clarifying because it just tells you how to think about your business I'd recommend finding that uh I think it's another thing like I feel like failure is okay failure is okay is this whole like Mantra now like yes it happens but like don't make it okay uh don't make it okay within your team uh you know just this is what our chubby brain is the CB and CB insights so we started off as this this was our first logo so it's never going to get worse than this uh and so don't worry about it and we've done okay uh clients will not tell you what to build uh we talked about this people care about what's in it for them right and so uh they don't care about you they don't care about your product they don't care about your story they care about the problem you're going to help them solve and you always have to keep that front and center uh when you're hiring somebody if you're ever doing a pros and cons list that tells that means you shouldn't hire them immediately if it's like well they're okay at this and they're bad at this it's like no no you're it's over right it's not a hell yes uh sorry your culture becoming Brown so this is an important one if you ask everybody what their favorite color is you're going to say red you're going to say blue you're going to say purple somebody's going to say green and when you mix that all up the color you get is Brown and that's the problem with cultures if you give everybody input into what the culture is going to become you're going to have a ship around culture and so what you got to do is say nope this is our culture and we're going to spike on these two colors and that's it and if you want to be part of that and it gets you excited you come here and if you don't you don't come here but we're not building a ship around culture so this is important we mess this up and it takes a while to undo this so you just want to get it right from the beginning uh Executives who come in who want to do reorgs are it's a problem right because they're like they actually don't want to do any work they're just like I don't have the right people let me move the deck chairs around let me get new people in and then 10 months later you're like that person actually is an idiot right but you didn't realize it because they were doing all this like you know all this like moving of deck chairs around the place like don't let people come in and who are like oh the thing I wanted because it sounds good it sounds fancy you can put good power points together this never works never second guess your instincts they don't become a feature Factory uh with leaders they'll say sometimes I delegated it to somebody you can delegate and like there's this you know Mantra of empowerment right like you should Empower your team at the end of the day if you're a manager you still have to deliver so you can't be like well I gave it to I gave it to Joe and he didn't do it it's like well no that's your problem you have to deliver that so you can't say I delegated it and abdicate away your responsibilities and you have to hold your leaders accountable for results and that's what managers and leaders have to do uh yeah pedigree's overrated when you see somebody who's taking a lot of L's like you know hey I was at a startup it failed my prior startup had this problem and you look at their resume and it's just like a string of losses like don't hire that person like you don't want that Juju around you right you want like you want like people who are winners around you right like you get one I mean I was at a failed startup so I think everybody should get one right you've got a string of losses like that's that's problematic um martech and sales tax vendors are so good at creating problems that don't exist and so what you're going to end up buying is a lot of expensive software that you don't use for a problem that they've convinced you to buy so just be very very careful of sales and martech vendors they're exceptional I'd hire people from there because they're really good at making up problems and selling you you don't need which maybe you want to do in your company but don't don't uh don't hire them uh you got to be performance driven uh another one mediocre managers will often say like oh no the system's a problem I gotta go buy this system and then we'll be good uh I love this quote a good Craftsman doesn't blame as tools right you can't let mediocre managers be like oh I gotta have this new XYZ system of record look that's never the problem the problem is you the manager um every situation is different uh best practices are for losers full stop they're for people who want to be average like nobody who follows best practices builds great companies or builds exceptional companies if you want average results go follow best practices the beer test is a weird one uh like do you want to have a company of people who get stuff done or do you want to have a fraternity right like I I don't care I don't I like my leadership team we all get along I don't know if we'd all be friends like in day-to-day life but they're awesome at what they do and that's what I need them there for and hopefully they think I'm decent at what I do right but I'm not trying to start a social club award-winning marketers this is I think very specific to marketers like you'll see it on LinkedIn it's like I need people who get work done who don't want to be on the speaking circuit winning Awards right so like this is a weird like clout chasing phenomena in certain functions uh you only have 100 of equity guard it like like a you know like a rabid dog right like don't give away I talked to a Founder earlier this week he's like I'm gonna go in nine percent of my company for 170k and I have 150k in mrr or ARR and I'm like what in God's name are you doing um uh they're not going to change your likelihood of success uh when you're letting somebody go they should never be surprised uh if they if they're surprised that means you failed or your manager failed because you didn't set expectations that were clear for them this is a bad look it's a bad way this is the kind of thing that like is corrosive to an organization don't tolerate underperformance uh results is all that matters relationships are important but results for managers are key uh you're gonna have to some people that were great from one to two aren't gonna be great from two to four uh 90 days to get up to speed for execs is way too long uh they should be contributing in 30 days right like I need to do a 90-day listening tour that's you got to get in there and get some done quickly uh if you haven't if somebody has never let somebody go they're not a good manager at scale like if you haven't haven't had the hard conversation that's a problem uh perks become entitlements your kombucha your cold brew all that stuff when the market turns and you take it away people freak out so just be careful about what you give in the beginning because it's not it's not a perk it becomes an expectation very very quickly uh speed is a weapon run quick interview processes if somebody says no to your offer initially Just Let It Go by convincing them you're always going to be if they do come you're always they're they're always going to be wondering do I make the right decision you're always going to be wondering are they happy there's already enough overhead in a startup you don't want to deal with all that you need drivers you don't need passengers it never gets easier and don't blindly follow this advice um so uh you know I'm a random guy here you don't know me I don't know your business just make sure what's right for your business uh final thing if you don't get the newsletter please get it a lot of people like it and if you're a B2B startup and you want to reach uh customers vendorbriefing.com tell us a little bit about your business it's free and hopefully we'll get you some customers if you want investors maybe acquires we can help there all right that's it thanks sorry for going over