Dealpad Revenue & Funding (2024)

Introduction guys dealpad.io is launched in 2021 they're doing 200 000 a month today in Revenue up from a hundred thousand a month just a year ago and total revenue in 2021 that first year was 400k Adam's done this a couple of times he knows what it's like to bootstrap to many millions in Revenue to keep his options open that is what he's doing today with 160 customers again dealpad dot IO is helping you understand how to get your whole team organized around a sales process specifically the buyer collaboration platform for sales teams hoping it to end this year at 2.7 million bucks of AR he's got a team of 16 people five Engineers four sales reps two carry a quota as he looks to continue to scale hey folks my guest today is Adam Baker He is building dealpad dot IO which is a buyer collaboration collaboration platform for sales teams he's a three-time SAS founder X Salesforce VP of sales he's been there he's done that Adam you ready to take us to the top hey Nathan how are you doing yeah of course hi Mr I'm good what does that mean buyer collaboration platform for sales teams yeah that's that's really important because it's a differentiation um that I think most sales teams aren't really thinking about so today most sales teams have invested in what I would call internal um software for their sales team so gong Outreach Clary a CRM we're we are an external um a kind of a piece of software that sales teams use to align with their buyers so it's it's by a collaboration so we're we're very much focused on picking the the the sales team up at the point that a deal becomes an opportunity and taking them all the way through to closing that with a customer so it's by a collaboration and give us an update you came on in July of 22 you said you had about 100 customers how many today yeah we've got about 160 now just over 160. so we've we've doubled Revenue this year that's okay I think you told me Revenue last time I was 1.2 so you're at 2.4 run right now about 2.3 yeah 2.3 Monthly recurring revenue that's great and still uh wait let me see yeah you're basically bootstrap you had 120k seed back in the day right so yeah we went through uh we went through textiles um and they they put some money um that's it that's all though right that's it and you have to remind me did you invest a bunch of your own Pro I mean you've had success did you invest invest a bunch your own personal money in the MVP or no yeah I did yeah yeah how big of a risk did you take back then um not a huge amount like hundreds of thousands not like you know Millions okay it's all relative you know someone out of school is gonna go hundreds of thousands oh my God that's so much somebody else is gonna be like oh that's pennies you know all right so you risk your own money um that was you know you launched I think you said in 20 late 2021 early 2022 right yeah late 21 we we launched the platform we were building it from the beginning of 21. um essentially in our first year which was 2021 we we booked about 400k of ARR um last year we did um about 1.2 yeah and this year we're going to finish on about two points anywhere between 2.7 and three that's great where is most that growth come from you know 100 customers to 160 170 what channels are you using well we've been to your conferences a couple of times um thank you thank you that genuinely worked very well for us um so I think events have worked well um for us um we we find that um we're able to meet the right people at these these events and show them the platform um we do a lot of um our work on LinkedIn um our buyers all on LinkedIn um so we're quite intentional about how we use LinkedIn what does that mean what do you do on LinkedIn um so we've got a really nice hack um where we will find um somebody that we believe is our ideal buyer and is and can be an influencer so they're not just uh you know Chief Revenue officer they're a chief Revenue officer with a big Network and and we we gauge that by how many followers they have and then we'll we'll Link in with them and we'll follow them um and the way that most people have particularly the height people with the high follow-up followers is you don't connect with them now and you follow them but what it means is that um you do follow them so you don't have to wait for a connection and now you get all their posts and so what we're what we're looking for is who's commenting on those posts who's liking those posts how relevant are they to us and then we build out and expand our kind of spear influence that way yeah manually you're clicking on an influencers post and seeing if they got 200 likes you're looking at every single like and then how do you do that well yeah we um we've got we have got some software that automates a bit of it but a lot of that is manual um what's the software I use and we're using this stuff called connected okay okay and your bike they're doing well you like them yeah yeah it's pretty good it's pretty good um but a lot of the work we do with this is manual and so um our sdrs carve out um a piece of their day every single day to do this inside LinkedIn and how many sdrs uh we've got four and then what how much time do you require they do this on LinkedIn uh an hour a day 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 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 raise they sold 22 percent 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 wow okay okay so four hours and then how does connected support what they're doing so connected will automate the Outreach that we have to them oh I see yeah I see so we'll we'll find them because that needs to that almost needs to be you know are they are they are ideal buyer you know what are they speaking about what you know what what topics are they are they kind of liking and posted on um is this relevant to us so that needs to have some kind of human um kind of element to it and then we'll use connected to automate any Outreach we have to them that's connected dot IO right yeah exactly connector.io yeah yeah okay so how many there's four sgrs What's the total team size today um we're 16. stick once okay flesh out the rest of the team for me how many engineers yeah so we've got um five Engineers um we've got um Kim and I so Ken's my co-founder and CTO um we've got um one product One Design 2cs for a four sdrs okay the the sdrs carry a quota or only the eight the two uh A's only the AES carry quota yeah I see I see how did you I mean you've done this now you built uh your last company to four or five million bucks of ARR before getting the deal pad imagine you use a sales team there as well when you hire these first two quota carrying reps how do you go about setting their quota and how much time do you give them to ramp to that quota before you say you're not doing it you're fired yeah so all of the early sales I found of that for me so I I do all the sales initially um and when I get to a point where I'm kind of you know I'm on a limit um and I know then how much I'm booking um I will then that that kind of is one of the first kind of triggers for me to want to go out and hire an AE in terms of um quota it depends on how much you pay them and and so so typically you know if I'm paying an AE 100K I want I want 600k in Revenue back from that a year that's 100K base or base plus commission base plus commission so so essentially that we're we're paying them 200k if they deliver um 600. okay it's 100K base if they get 600k quota Target hit then they get another 100 count top out so OTE On Target earnings is 200k for that AE yep exactly so we walk between six and 750k back um and there's a ramp obviously so in in in in kind of you know one it would we wouldn't expect 750 from them um but we would over over the kind of as we went into year two are you guys remote or in person we're all remote how do you deal with document control you know the sales team puts together a script that works well but then you have a new sales person that doesn't know the script exists so they make another document before you know it you don't know what the master documents are you don't know where the official scripts are how do you manage that yeah it's pretty straightforward I've got a process now down um and so a number of things that go into that one is that we record all of our sales calls um both the meetings that we have on Zoom um but also the calls that we make and the cold calls and so we optimize and um everyone's software uh which is the HubSpot what you record from HubSpot um yeah yeah yeah yeah and so we we have weekly reviews where we we play back the calls I sit and listen to a lot of the calls as well um and so we can coach and we can really optimize on you know what how do we get to a repeatable script where it's working most of the time so it doesn't it doesn't matter about who it is if anybody says this it's probably going to work um it's just a time thing and you go through it and optimize it but we record everything so and we play everything back so what is your Cadence is it every Friday for two hours you listen to recordings as a sales team yeah it's once a week um once a week um two hours two hours and when do you do it Monday Wednesday Friday we do it on a Wednesday two hours on Wednesday interesting and how do you like okay if you listen to a call recording in HubSpot and it's 20 minutes and you have a bunch of notes from it where do you document like the changes you want to see made and then test the week after if that sales are up to use the updated script like how do you create that Rhythm yes so we've got a master document in we should drive Google Drive um and so we've all got access to it and so it's uh an iterative um kind of document that we um that we update um we have a point now we don't change it that much yeah there are tweaks um but I mean it was like really iterative for for a long time how many pages is that Google doc um I'm just curious order of operations yeah it's probably five or six pages at the moment okay interesting and what are the SEC what are the major sections of that document is it like call scripts um call objection handling like what are the headers in that document yeah so it's opening I think the opening part of the call is the most important because it's going to give you the opportunity to talk um you know a lot of our um a lot of sdrs I see just get hung up on a lot and and so you know you don't even have an opportunity to say what you're doing I think the second thing is um how do you cut through people that aren't listening and we'll just give you a an answer to say they're not interested but they don't know what they're what they're not interested in because they haven't listened to you so how do you get them to listen so what's the value prop what's the compelling statement that's going to surface some pain that's going to give you another 30 seconds to talk to them so we look at opening we look at um that kind of the whole value statement it's going to open them up a little bit we never ask close questions so we're always asking okay and questions to try and open them up so give me example of a closed question oh um did you have a good day today and give me an example of an open question um how's your day ah I see okay so how how was your day you're gonna say yeah it was great I did this I did this the weather was pretty but whatever um a close question is you know did you have a good day today yes no um and so we always try to open up with a question that's going to help us explore a pain that they might have um and um a really a really great opener that we we um that we use is um hey Nathan we speak to lots of people like you every day and this is what we hear are you seeing the same thing right are you asking your teams to do anything differently you know how are you thinking about this this topic yeah right now um and so we we try and show them that you know we do speak these similar people every day and we are hearing these the similar things is it the same for you and how are you thinking about it um do you subscribe to a Target talk time in other words if there's a 30 minute call will you look at each con say hey sales rep do you talk for 60 of the call that's too much get under 20. so we try and keep those we call them so our this stage is a cold call and we try and keep that down to 10 minutes max and and so either we try and qualify them on that first call um if we need more time we'll set that as a second step um but typically we try and optimize that call to qualify them either in or out and if it's in then right get your calendar out let's just go into a deeper Discovery it's probably going to take 35 to 40 minutes um and we'll do this with some some of the wider team yep yep if you were to pick a book that most accurately captures what you believe about how sales should be done at dealpad what book would that be for example at founder Pap it's definitely Neil Rackham spin selling yeah um so I think it would be Challenger the Challenger said um you know we are uh you know particularly in in our Market um our buyers don't necessarily know they've got a problem um and so we need we need to challenge them on it we need to challenge them on what they're doing today because we know that we can optimize what they do and you know you'll have a sales team um that will say we've got all the software We need oh so you're heading quota well no we're not all right right where where is the gap here is it top of the funnel is it is it inside the deal in mid funnel um and and really try and understand where the Gap is for them and and really try and challenge them to think about where that Gap is and then what's missing you know what could you do so yes oh great so you did an 80 year last year fantastic but you know if we could get you another 30 and you you know you did 110 what would that mean to your business how could it grow faster how many more people could you hire and so it's not necessarily about what you're doing today it's about what you're missing and and and you know what we get how where we can get you to yeah that's the challenge yourself that makes good sense are you so what's the plan for the next year do you anticipate raising or do you think you'll stay basically bootstrapped um I mean I've obviously this year along for a long time now I mean we'll we'll for as long as we can um but I think there'll be a point where um we can accelerate quite heavily if we do start to bring some money in and that doesn't mean necessarily that we'll raise you know we could definitely and we could we could do a whole bunch of stuff right um but I think it will probably make sense for us to to bring some money in um at some point next year yup yup interesting well you go you obviously know me well you know what I'm always biased towards debt but how do you think about debt versus Equity if you want to raise money next year I think it depends what you want to do right so I think that if um if you if you really genuinely think that you could build a a hundred million dollar business then you're probably going to want to go out for bench of money because you're going to need to raise two or three times um and debt probably won't help you do that over the longer term I think if you if you think and you're happy to build out a 20 million ARR business um and flip it for for 200 million um then debt could be a really good opportunity for you because you don't have to go out and raise all those Venture rounds and you retain the equity you just now that you always says it's so weird the way you phrase the last minute of you speaking is like there's nothing wrong with a 20 million dollar company that you sell for 3x there's a that's a great way to get rich there's so many ways there's so many buyers let me tell you that 99.9 of companies don't get past 10 million like you know if you're if you're a business that's sitting on 10 million ARR right now you've got a great company and and you know you can get that to 50. you can probably get it to 100. it's I think the expectations of these venture-led investors particularly are just completely skewed to these unicles and these outliers and and it doesn't help um Founders who are building great companies who are you know 10 or on their way to 10 million Revenue could probably get to 20. I mean if you sit down and spoke to 99 of software Founders today and you said hey look I'm gonna get I'm going to get the 20 million AR on you can flip for 200 million are you okay with that they will bite your hand off for it yep yep 100 100 it's difficult to get to and it's a fantastic achievement uh well Adam listen I miss hanging out with you hopefully I'll see you at the next SAS open or we'll meet up at a Soho house somewhere or whatever but in the meantime let's wrap up here with a famous five number one your favorite book um oh I'm reading um thank you for being late I'm reading that remember number two is there a CEO you're following or studying not at the moment number three favorite favorite online tool besides your own um favorite online tool um we're into Apollo right now yep number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven seven okay and situation married single kiddos single daughter okay and you I think get a birthday I think you're are you 48 or 49 now I'm 49 49 nice okay last question something you wishing you when you were 20. um go slower is the thing that I'd probably coach myself on guys dealpad.io is launched in 2021 they're doing 200 000 a month today in Revenue up from a hundred thousand a month just a year ago and total revenue in 2021 that first year was 400k Adam's done this a couple of times he knows what it's like to bootstrap to many millions in Revenue to keep his options open that is what he's doing today with 160 customers again dealpad dot IO is helping you understand how to get your whole team organized around a sales process specifically the buyer collaboration platform for sales teams hoping it to end this year at 2.7 million bucks of AR he's got a team of 16 people five Engineers four sales reps two carry a quota as he looks to continue to scale Adam thanks for taking us to the top awesome thanks Evan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the found under shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 pm Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slash and meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya

Intro hi everyone I'm Adam so in the next 20 minutes I'm going to just talk to you about three things um one is some mistakes to avoid that I've seen consistently that kill sales deals and IES make them all the time even the best AES make them um the other is to know your ICP and how important really understanding who your ideal customer is if you don't understand that you're not going to scale sales and then finally um some some kind of tactics and processes that I've implemented to win complex deals so a bit about me I'm a three-time software founder I've generated 20 million of ARR across my three companies I'm currently building deal pad which helps sales teams generate revenue and I've also been a sales leader at Salesforce Intuit and three kind of 60 70 million ARR SAS companies and across that period of time about 20 years I'm actually quite old you know you wouldn't really know it but um I've built a process to help my sales teams win more of the deals they're working on and as product differentiation gets increasingly blurred and competitive pricing kind of almost Wars you out of the market the one reason that you'll win more deals is your sales process so that's what we focus on at dealpad and that's what I'm going to talk to you about today in terms of what you can do to implement some ideas in your sales process that will help you win more deals so I like this I'm a Founder I'm an entrepreneur so this is a great graph for Founders but it's also really true for sales people right one minute we're brilliant we've got all the confidence in the world we think we can go out and close that one million plus um kind of ACV and the next minute we're really and we can't do anything and and so the the line is there just keep working because you're going to get there and so I don't know how many Founders in the room but this is great for Founders and it's definitely great for sales people Five Mistakes so the five mistakes that I've seen across the um across my time in selling software over the last 20 years except in the first pain that you see this is super important and AES really good AES don't do this but the average AES do and what I mean by this is you're going to talk to a buyer probably not your champion and you're going to find a pain and that pain probably sits locally inside the organization it's probably not a global pain it doesn't sit across the company and what you really need to understand here is if you accept that pain you're losing Revenue massively you're leaving it on the table and so drill in and I keep telling my age to drill into the plane because the first second third pain you see is not the real pain you need to make sure that you've got access to the executive team is this problem business critical does it sit across the organization and that's where you're going to start to build out really high value deals and AES miss that because what they do is get excited when they hear that first pain and they dive in for that it's not a bad thing so there's nothing wrong with this it does mean that you're now going to be in an organizer and we had an AE that sold into Oracle and we had a seven and a half thousand ACV deal in Oracle nuts right but we put the but they were happy because your son Oracle is a customer but Oracle didn't know anything about this deal it was some guy sat in wherever he was in Poland and you know needed something that we we delivered but we it was try now going back into Oracle and selling through that organization it was impossible Oracle stayed at seven and a half thousand pound customer we couldn't we just couldn't upsell them the next is do not invest time in deals if you don't have executive sponsor I see this so often sales people spending time in deals where they don't have access to buy an authority they've got a champion they've got someone that loves the product they're Evangelical about it but you can't get access to the exec sponsor pull out immediately I won't let my team sell into a company if we get past qualification We Do not sit Discovery unless we get exec sponsor access it's one of our conditions if if you want a demo if you want to go through Discovery with us we need to have exact sponsors on that call otherwise we don't move forward and if they want to buy from us then they'll do that if they don't then they won't really important you can waste hours of time in deals that don't close because you don't have access to the people that actually are going to sign this off the third one is demoing too early if you demo early before you've gone through really deep Discovery you're forcing yourself to get embroiled in feature selling because you're just showing people features that's what a demo is the demo should come at the end don't show your products until you've actually gone through a discovery you've identified the pain you've agreed with your buyers that we are a solution that can solve that pain now great what does this look like who's going to use this let's get them on a call let's show them the product but you don't need to see the product until we actually agree that we can solve a problem for you and we know that we can solve it as well and that takes time if you're demoing on that first call you're embroiling yourself in feature selling and not value selling and so again your ACV is going to get low you might close the deal you might not walk away from this that deal and think oh God that was awful because you've got a new customer but you're leaving revenue on the table allowing the buying team to dictate the process this is a hard one particularly as you get into more complex um kind of higher Enterprise type deals most buyers are very fairly sophisticated these days and they have their own process one of the things that we've really focused on at dealpad is how to align with the buyer through the process so you're partnering with them and so it's not me selling to them and it's not them running their process we do this together and it's it's a game changer but make sure that you know your team aren't just telling you what's going on in this process and you have no control over it because that's the worst place you could be as a salesperson and then finally is not quitting fast enough staying in these deals that you don't think you're going to close really really important one of my teams I think I've got a slide number one of my teams wasted two and a half thousand hours one year selling it into deals that we didn't close across that team if we redeployed that time into deals we thought we could win or had a better chance of winning you know I think we delivered about 75 of our annual quota that year we could have smashed through it if we'd actually redeployed the time we wasted in deals that we didn't close so close fast and the benefits from doing the right thing are very small in sales that benefits from pulling out really quickly are massive it's discipline trying to coach a sales team to leave a deal and walk away from an opportunity is hard but it's in the long run it's the best thing to do so how do we find our ICP well the first thing you need to understand is why are customers buying from you a typical if I asked nine out of ten AES a typical answer would be well we've got an Erp system that helps automate um accounting well that's not why customers are buying from you customers are buying cash flow because with your Erp system they get cash in the bank 30 days faster that's what they're buying from you understand what customers buy from you deal pad customers buy Revenue they want to close more of their Deals they want to book more Revenue that's why they come to us they don't come to us because we've got Mutual action plans and we've got a buying experience platform they come because we have the ability to help them generate Revenue that's what they're buying to really understand what your customers are buying from you and again it's um it's something that gets overlooked quite a lot when we started our ICP um for all of my companies really we look at kind of understanding what the pain we're solving is how critical is it what happens if we turn this off what are they doing today you know what tools are they using why is it inefficient why is their life not where they need it to be today we really try to understand the pain we're solving from our from our ideal customer and then we look at the customer themselves who are our buyers you know what do they care about we actually go personal on this and we go deep and we really want to know who they are this is probably not even work related we just want to understand who our ideal buyer is and what they look like and it makes a big difference so let's go into how we won Ultra complex deals so there's a few things here um 47 of Enterprise sales deals don't close because you don't have access to the buying committee 18 of competitors had stronger relationships so these two are people related so we're looking here at almost 70 percent of deals that don't close are people related and it just goes to show how important it is when you're sitting out talking about a sales opportunity you have the right people at the table and you have you are able to access them if you don't it doesn't matter how good your solution is how good your story is it won't close 17 no decisions how can you affect no decisions it's the it's the biggest killer of you know of most mid-market deals is no decision we're not going to do anything and it you know it's a challenge and there's no real answer to no decision it's it's more about how you partner with that buyer because if you can partner with them you can take them through the process together you're more likely to force a no decision into into a decision which will mean they'll buy from you Opportunity Cost and this was the 2000 um and a half hours loss what's the what's the opportunity cost of your sales team set in deals that aren't going to close and then Champion everybody gets a champion everybody has Believers the one thing that I see a lot of AES misses the coach the coach for me is the most important person in your sales process your Champion is probably going to be the influencer they're going to be the ones that are going to get the exact team to the table your Believers are the people that really want this because they see the pain they feel it every day they live the pain you're going to solve for them but your coach that's the person that's going to take you through that process that's the person that's going to tell you you know what we've had this competitor come in and um you know they've got a really great relationship with the CEO or I was sat in a meeting last week and um you know great sentiment about your product but X Y and Z is a little bit um you know a little bit skeptical you need a coach inside that business you need to understand how they're thinking finding the coach is difficult but it's the most important role you can have I believe in any mid-market to Enterprise sales motion and then you've got Mutual action plans and this is um a kind of a bit of a demo for deal pad um so mutual action plans if you don't use them are a really great way of aligning through the process with your buyer on everything that needs to happen with deal pad you can lock in everything that needs to happen here you can bring all the people in place your buyers bring each other in so now you don't need to go out and find your buying team you're discovering your buying team through the process because your buyers add them in and then it locks in for this task so everything now is not built on intuition so if I ask my sales team before deal pad to forecast and they say to me well this is going to close on the 30th of April and these are the reasons why that's full of optimism and intuition so my CRM pipeline is just built of optimism now when I do my deal my deal reviews and we've got deal pad I'm actually saying do we have everything aligned with our buyer everything locked in all the people we need and has any dates slipped that's how we forecast now and it makes a massive difference and then finally for on the this place it's about value it's taken your buyer through a process and not just running the process that your buyer wants you to go through have a process whatever it is this is what ours looks like ours is a kickoff and an exact sponsor meeting we start there like I said we don't go any further unless we've got exact sponsor and then we kind of build out you know workshops we interview people you know we want to understand who our users are we want to understand what their problems they're solving are and everybody that we speak to in that team will have a different reason for using it everyone and understanding what those reasons are are going to help you solidify that deal when you go through the process This was um a uh I asked my customer if I could share this and they agree with me so um this is a closed one from um one Q4 2021 before one of our cars this is one of our first customers before they um use the iPad they took the iPad on in their first quarter that's their close one no and that's that that's the next quarter by building in a process by allowing your buyers to partner with you by doing the right things you're going to close more deals look the best person to sell your platform is going to be your founder it is it doesn't matter if you're the chief sales officer you're the VP of sales whoever you are in this room if you're not the founder I can tell you the best person to sell your product is going to be the founder if your founder isn't involved in sales and your company is less than 100 million in Revenue you want to campaign and make sure they get involved in sales because they will they will be the ones that will help you close those big deals 100 that's not even up for a debate if your founder is not involved um in your sales process you need to get them involved in your sales process and when I think about my personal Outreach I you know I do cold Outreach and I get 70 more response from the people that I um reach out to the my SDR team that tells me that I should probably do more of it and it's hard to do more to be an SDR when you're running a business right but I see it works and and it's just gravitational it's because my sdrs are way better than me at what they do I can I can guarantee it but because I'm the founder and I've got the CEO title it just helps me get a response and it's my job because it's my company to do whatever I can to generate Revenue and um yeah and and you know the sea level relationships um became the difference to Us closing a million ARR contracts um in my previous business um you know I spent the equivalent of probably about I know 100 hundreds of hours um with with our big top Enterprise customers helping my team close them flying all over the world to do it and it's not easy but it makes a difference so I just want to talk to you very quickly about a process um that we build at a deal pad and so we take the com the prospect from um the kind of the very first engagement where you build out these personalized buying experiences and you curate all of the content and materials that your buying team need to have in one place and now you've got your buying team in your buying team invite each other in so now you've got all the people involved and you go through the process together and you won't really understand intent fast so you've got analytics that will show you how your buying team are engaging through your process where the gaps are do you have all the right people in in your team you know where do you need to really focus in you can collaborate with them so you're building a two-way sales process now you're not sharing documents on email chasing them up for introductions you're actually partnering with them and again I can tell you from experience if you're in a vendorship with five three or five other vendors almost guarantee you today this will probably change but today most vendors are sharing documents on email on gdocs on SharePoint they're chasing their buyers up from a buyer to have that on three or from three or four vendors it's a massive headache if you can partner with them and you can show them how easy it is to work with you you're way more likely to win that deal and that's why as I go back to one of the first things I said building a sales process that will become your differentiator in winning more deals is critical when you're selling software today so that's how much how long that was um but come to us come to our booth we'd love to give you a demo of the open talk to you about what we can do um we've got free Mutual action plan templates free SAS playbooks come and get them um we'd love to talk to you thank you so much foreign

Introduction hey folks my guest today is Adam Baker he's the founder of four B2B SAS companies and two exits he's currently the founder and CEO of churley doai and deal pad. iio he boot drop chle to 6.5 million bucks in ARR and in six months has generated $400,000 in ARR for deal pad Adam you're ready ticket us to the top hey how you doing good to see you good so my obvious question is churley seems to be killing it why go get distracted with deal pad well um ch's doing well I think we we really rid a wave on churley during um the last two years where where companies were doubling down on retention uh and and timing for us was was very good obviously um companies really wanted to understand the root cause of why their customers left they really wanted to kind of keep their customers so we um we on board it a we went from a 1.5 million AR to about six million AR um in in that period what period oh so from um from June 2020 until April this year so wow some two years yeah strap no outside Capital no outside Bootstrapped Capital at all Tot so you own 100% of that business um no I don't um I own 85% of that business okay who's it what 15 15% as your your engineers or what yeah so our employees um earn uh earn a bunch and uh and we've got um I've got some advisers that I've given shares to Etc but you know with have no outside funding at all that's amazing so when you see a deal like like paddle buying profit well you know now that that profit well retained product just the retain product is doing about 400,000 bucks a month so they're about your same size um you saw the exit price do you look at selling chly on the back of that yeah you know M you know mainly I'm focused on building journ I I exited my last company way too early and I think if and it haunts me a little bit I think if ID held on um for another four or five years I I I would have probably 10x the valuation I got out of my last company so I'm uh I'm a little bit paranoid about getting out too early which might not be a good thing but tell us that story real quick what was that first company you thought you sold to sold too early yeah so that was my second Venture my first company was was acquired um way back in 2007 um my last company was called blotter and and we were we were acquired um by the guardian Media Group and um it was we were we were basically authenticating news footage for news rooms all over the world and it was we were kind of you know doing fake news before fake news was even coined as a ter and and um there were only two players in our market and one was acquired about six months before us and it made me panic um thinking how many exits can there be now and um and we were really in the kind of the news media content space there's not a lot of m&a happening in that space so um I I I kind of went in with both feet um and and exited uh it was a good result um don't get me wrong it was a good outcome but I think if I'd held in I I I could have you know built that company to a considerably higher um valuation we we we to that yeah interesting well you've been there you've done that it makes sense now before move into deal pad on terly today Currently serving 100 customers how many customers you have and are they mainly B2B SAS all b2bs and um we've got about 90 customers 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 valuation data out from over 287 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 valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder paath 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 realtime valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise 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 we'll go in here and look at all the 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 founder path.com for / products SLV valuations or if you go to founder path.com and hover over products click on get your valuation 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 there's some concentration Monthly recurring revenue right I mean with 90 customers 6.5 million Revenue you got some big customers yeah we've got big customers the the one of the things I like about the business one of the things I really get frustrated about this business and why I'm founding dpad um is it's extremely complex and and so this is not offthe shelf software so we've built our our models um you know we've we've got proprietary algorithms but we have to customize everything and so when we go into a company um you know our services cost usually 3x is our SAS cost so we're not so our our Revenue isn't just on um isn't just SAS it's SAS plus services to implement I and it just takes so long and and and I get I just get bored with it and so we're we're carrying on journe definitely um you know building a great company um but dpad you know um is a combination of my work really over the last 10 years of helping my sales teams deliver quotas and and make sure they hit Clos dates on time so we can forecast well and and and and whilst the two companies and two products are very separate there's definitely a lot of um Synergy and and I can see that the the two products unifying at some point where we take a a pro you know a kind of a a product to Market where it's you know we're going to help you um win customers with deal pen and close deals and we're going to help you retain them and we're going to show you how to ah retain them so I can see you know somewhere in the future potentially there's there's the opportunity for us to to to go out with a joint prop but at the moment they're very separate um and um you you know so so I've been using the dill pad kind of model behind it for years to help my Sal teams and and um consistently see that it helps and so we're we've turned that into software and the the validation we've had so far has been phenomenal that's amazing let me um I want to spend the second half of the show all on Deal pad on the chly stuff you mentioned SP between service and SAS what would you say this like if if someone listen I'm really asking if someone listening right now wants to sign up what's like the minimum AR they have to have to value out of it what are they going to pay you on the service side and what are they probably going to pay you on the SAS side honestly I couldn't tell you because it varies customer to customer based on the size of the customer complexity data sets data maturity um typically though um we're running at about 70% AR on SAS and then about 30% on onetime services to implement that I see and the 70% SAS are you taking like a percent of retained revenue or is it a flat fee it's a flat fee oh that's nice that's different than the market yeah yeah so we decided not to take that route because um well for for a lot of reasons but I think you then get into lots of contractual disputes and I've had this before where um companies would then start to to debate about you know who how much revenue they've actually got from us or if they if they acquire an organization and their revenue ramps because of the acquisition does we do we include that or not um you know it just gets really messy so we we kept it really clean um we're happy we've Tak you know a decent sess um fee and we think that's fair for us and fair for our customers yeah no it feels very I mean it's so I mean just trying to do math 6.5 million total 70% is SAS so about 5 million is pure SAS 1.5 you could call as services but that 5 million SAS split among 90 customers would mean the average customer there is paying what $50,000 acvs right that's super healthy yeah yeah yeah it's good yeah okay so someone needs to really have like five 10 20 million bucks in AR to to get comfortable paying a $50 annual fee right yeah we've got customers lower than that on eror okay okay but but yeah I I think typically the size of our our customers when I look at them are around about the you know that that that type of level yeah yeah okay let's go into deal pad so you're building this internally it's helping your sales team out chle now how many sales folks out chle were using the first version of deal pad um we had eight using it at chy okay we've had 100 using it over over the the last 10 years um 500 or probably more than that but at chy specifically about eight ex use it and so when did you so it's now you've spun it out as its own entity do you have customers on that that are not from your other companies oh yeah all of them are I mean I don't have any repeat customers we've had to go out and and build out a sales motion from scratch and all of our all of our prospects and all of our customers are new oh wow okay it's very diff we're we're talking to different types of customers um so with dpad our Sweet Spot um are companies software companies again B2B um but where there's anywhere between five and 50 million AR um we we think that we can really help that segment um where there's an Enterprise sales motion but also where there's complexity in the sales process where you're managing multiple stakeholders um where you are you've probably got an average contract value annual contract value of 10K upwards um so it's you know not trans ction or it's not you know kind of you know you know docy sign who are just kind of trying to you know sell 50 $50 seats um it's but it could be Doc if they go into Enterprise and start to sell you know their Enterprise suite and so yeah so so our our ideal customer is very different to uh although they're both B2B SAS very different to churley and so when you look at just deal pad the customers paying for the software you just described what are they paying on average per year or per month again it depends um it depends so so it depends on what they buy from us um so we've got so dad has a kind of a solution set of um account planning of um kind of buyer alignment so there kind of a two-way buying process that they can they can Loop into and then Mutual action plans and and so um it depends what they want to buy a lot of our customers um initially go for the middle of that they they want to they want to actually understand what's happening in a deal and I think this is where this is where I see that we customers get most excited so inside their CRM whether it's sales force or HubSpot or pipe Drive um you know they're relying on intuition because ultimately the the the CRM can only tell you what's in the pipeline what data they have right they can't actually look into a deal and tell you at what what point that deal is at and how it's being evaluated what you know and and and um that's what we do so that's where we that's where deal pad comes but B are we talking like a 100 bucks a month or a th a month or 10,000 a month what's like The Sweet Spot yeah so average um I guess average investment into Dill pad is going to be somewhere around about the 12K so about a thousand bucks a month a thou okay okay perfect and and then you're are you upselling you're obviously upselling based off features it sounds like are you upselling based off anything else seats number of deals anything else no just just features just features okay interesting okay very cool and then again when obviously you've been building this for it sounds like a long time internally at other companies when would you say that that you started the company though uh we we started deal pad about two years ago um in terms of building the software um actually that's not true sorry we started building the software about two years ago and we started deal PAD as a company about eight months ago okay that's that's amazing and then so you've got customers on your site some hoot Suite uh fresh fresh books fresh Works Etc how many total customers are you working with today um we're working about 100 at the moment oh wow so I mean that's impressive and eight months you sent up 100 customers how are you what's your go to market right I assume you're using deal pad for your sales motion but what's your go to market yeah yeah deal pad helps a lot um so all outbound at the moment we've not really focused on any inbound because for me that was an investment we weren't really sure what we'd need to produce and what would work so we've just really focused on outbound um and we've got a team of sdrs we um deploy I guess three software um kind of vendors in our in our sales stack that help us go out and Prospect well um and and that's been it really it's just been a case of let's get leads in let's sit great qualification and Discovery calls let's really understand the pain we're solving um and and and let's solve that pain repeatedly for our customers that makes sense and and all these 100 customers are paying again about a thousand bucks a month yeah on average that's great so you're what 120 Grand a month in an mrr uh yeah yes but we we um we we're not M we're AR uh okay so you got it so you're well said differently you know about what is that 1.5 1.6 million something right in yeah if we place it over the course of 12 months yeah yeah yeah wow okay that's impressive that's really impressive um so yeah I mean zero to 1.6 million AR in eight months again that's super impressive now obviously you've you've eating your own dog food you use a tool so you know what's needed what does your team look like today at deal pad how many full-time yeah it's small uh we've got nine folks here n and bootstrapped right y totally bootstrapped again um are we gonna get stay bootstrapped you think um honestly I don't know he has a term sheet right now that's what that face means he's sitting on a term sheet right now I I I I think that there's a huge there's a huge white space with DPed um what's the offer what's in the term sheet how much we we we don't have an off yet all right fair enough what would make you decide I mean you're already wealthy right you could fund this yourself what would make you decide to go ahead and and raise VC yeah I think just like I've said there's a huge white SP at the moment we're not really we've got a few customers in the US um actually we've probably got about 20% of our customers in the US but that's a market I really want to um move into um that's going to take money um I think as well you know we're focused very much on software at the moment but there's you know I mean every organization in the world with a sales motion um could use deal pad and get value from it at that level of scale we'd have to we'd have to find money you know um and so let's let's see how it goes I mean if we can bootst this to 10 million um which is what my plan is AR um then we might be able to make some different choices about you know rather than going out raising money we could do it a different way we'll see I love that and are all most clients are they all B2B SAS all B2B SAS at the moment that's awesome I love your focus it's all be be SASS and and how did you get the MVP built do you have Engineers full-time or use a Dev shop neither um so well so I found there there was a um by the way if you're looking for a co-founder there's a great um it's called zhaw and it's a it's a really great platform for finding co-founders so I I basically just registered on there signed up they wanted me to pay off the bat and I'm like well I don't even know what this site is but I did it and I found a I found a co-founder we I I probably did a beauty parade of about 25 um technical people that wanted to cound wait how do you spell it it's Z Hawk yeah I think so I've proba we got that wrong um you can I'll I'll ping it to you after this and you can edit it out try right now because I'm almost certainly got that wrong um but I think you're I think you're I think you're thinking about Starhawk doio Starhawk there yeah yeah yeah and so yeah good good research and um and so I I very specifically needed a technical um co-founder um because I'm not I'm not a technical founder and U met Kim my my founder he was at Facebook and uh and and so Kim was a um a program manager at Facebook and prior to that he'd been a um lead at King on Candy Crush W and we we just hit it off and um he you split evenly you go 50/50 or what yeah 5050 yeah and so um you know he was the first person in the 25 or 30 that I've met and I'd spent quite a lot of time in conversations with people that we he just got it and um and he's built the platform um you know from almost from scratch and um you're using my models uh but he's you know he's gone and built the platform from scratch and and you know the for both of us I think you know we decided to go 5050 and and you know despite it being my concept and something that I've been using and I verified and I had the domain expertise I I I I wanted Kim to have 50% of this because I wanted him to feel that he had shared ownership and and me that was really important for him it was also really important well we're we're we know you have great playbooks we're excited to have you come to speak on September 1 in Austin you're going on stage at a.m. this the headline there the email templates that turnley and deal pad used to break uh 10 or grow to 10 million bucks in AR so we're really excited to to learn that stuff you've got playbooks for everything huh no I wouldn't say everything but um particular all right fair enough Adam let's wrap up here with the famous five number one last book you read um uh What the Dog Saw What the Dog Saw number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh question probably not at the moment okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building deal pad besides one of your own tools yeah Lusha Lusha yeah number in love with Lusha right now yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh quite a lot um nine nine love that and situation married single kids um single kids how many kiddos uh I have a daughter who's 26 and a grandson who's one oh wow that's pretty darn cool all right and how old are you uh I'm 48 48 last question something you wish knew when you were 20 um oh BL me um so many things um don't raise money early guys there you have it he built churley he built churley about 6.5 million bucks bootstrap 70% that revenue is pure SAS working with 90 customers but now he said you know what I've got to spend this tool called deal pad out which is sales enablement helps you track these deal flow the deal flow over time it's growing this from0 to $1.2 million run rate here in just under 89 months which is incredible found as Co founder on start Hawk they split at 5050 totally bootstrap serving 100 customers today he wants to bootstrap it up to 10 million bucks we'll see what happens Adam thanks for taking us to the top see you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares backend dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu CAC LTV you name they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m. central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the Sass World whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at Nathan la.com slack in the 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