How Dealpad Reached $2.3M ARR with 160 Customers in 2023 (Interview with CEO Adam Baker)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, dealpad.io was launched in 2021. They're doing $200,000 a month today in revenue, up from a 100,000 a month just a year ago. And total revenue in 2021, that first year was 400 k. 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 a 160 customers. Again, dealpad.io is helping you understand how to get your whole

00:22team organized around a sales process, specifically the buyer collaboration platform for sales teams, hoping it to end this year at $2,700,000 of ARR. He's got a team of 16 people, five engineers, four sales reps, two carry quota as he looks to continue to scale. Hey, folks. My guest today is Adam Baker. He is building dealpad. Which is a buyer collaboration collaboration platform for sales teams. He's a three time SaaS founder, ex Salesforce VP of Sales. He's

00:48been there. He's done that. Adam, ready to take us to the top?

Adam Baker

00:52>> Hey, How are you doing? Yeah, of course.

Nathan Latka

00:53I'm good. What does that mean buyer collaboration platform for sales teams?

Adam Baker

00:58>> Yeah, that's really important because it's a differentiation that I think most sales teams aren't really thinking about. So today, most sales teams have invested in what I would call internal software for their sales teams. So Gong, Outreach, Clari, a CRM. We are an external

01:20>> kind of piece of software that sales teams use to align with their buyers. So it's buyer collaboration. So we're very much focused on picking 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 buyer collaboration.

Nathan Latka

01:39And give us an update, you came on in July of 'twenty two, you said you had about 100 customers, how many today?

Customer Count and Revenue Update

Adam Baker

01:45>> Yeah, we've got about a 160 now, just over a 160. We've doubled revenue this year.

Nathan Latka

01:52That's okay. Think you told me revenue last time was 1.2. So you're at 2.4 run rate now?

Adam Baker

01:56>> About 2.3. Yep.

Nathan Latka

01:582.3. That's great. And still wait. Let me see. Yeah. You're basically bootstrapped. You had a hundred hundred and twenty k seed back in the day. Right?

Adam Baker

02:05>> Yeah. We went through we went through Techstars and and they they put some money in.

Nathan Latka

02:10That's it. That's all though. Right?

Adam Baker

02:12>> That's it.

Nathan Latka

02:13And have to remind me, did you invest a bunch of your own per I mean, you've had success. Did you invest invest a bunch of own personal money in the MVP or no?

Adam Baker

02:19>> Yeah. I did. Yeah. A bit.

Nathan Latka

02:21Yeah. How big of a risk did you take back then?

Adam Baker

02:24>> Not a huge amount. Like, hundreds of thousands. Not like, you know, millions.

Nathan Latka

02:28Okay. It's well, it's all relative. You know, someone at a 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? Alright. So you risk your own money. That was, you know, you launched, I think you said in '20 late twenty twenty one, early twenty twenty two. Right?

Revenue History: 2021 to 2023

Adam Baker

02:43>> Yeah, late twenty one. We launched the platform, we were building it from the beginning of twenty one. Essentially in our first year, which was 2021, we booked about 400 k of ARR. Last year, we did about 1.2, and this year, we're gonna finish on about two point anywhere between two point seven and three.

Nathan Latka

03:02That's great. Where's most of that growth come from? You know, a 100 customers to one sixty, one seventy, what channels are you using?

Growth Channels: Events and LinkedIn

Adam Baker

03:10>> Well, we've been to your conferences a couple of times. Thank you. Thank you. They've genuinely worked very well for us. So I think events have worked well for us. We find that we're able to meet the right people at these events and show them the platform. We do a lot of our work on LinkedIn, our buyers are all on LinkedIn. So we're quite intentional about how we use LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka

03:35What does that mean? What do do on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn Influencer Prospecting Tactic

Adam Baker

03:37>> So we've got a really nice hack where we will find somebody that we believe is our ideal buyer and can be an influencer. So they're not just a chief revenue officer, they're a chief revenue officer with a big network. We gauge that by how many followers they have. And then we'll link in with them and we'll follow them. And the way that most people have, the high people with the high followers, is you don't connect to

04:05>> them now, you follow them. But what it means is that 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 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 sphere influence that way.

Nathan Latka

04:23Not manually, you're clicking on an influencer's post and seeing if they got 200 likes, you're looking at every single like, and then how do you do that?

Adam Baker

04:30>> Well, yeah, we have got some software that automates a bit of it, but a lot of that is manual.

Nathan Latka

04:36What's the software that you use?

Adam Baker

04:38>> We use a software called Connected.

Nathan Latka

04:41Okay. Okay. And you're like, they're doing well, you like them?

Adam Baker

04:44>> Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. But a lot of the work we do with this is manual. And so our SDRs carve out a piece of their day every single day to do this inside LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka

04:57How many SDRs?

Adam Baker

04:59>> We've got four.

Nathan Latka

05:00And how much time do you require they do this on LinkedIn?

Adam Baker

05:03>> An hour a day.

Nathan Latka

05:05Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

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06:14not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

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07:28interview. Wow. Okay. Okay. So four hours. And then how does Connected support what they're doing?

Adam Baker

07:34>> So Connected will automate the outreach that we have to them.

Nathan Latka

07:38Oh, I see. Yeah. I see.

Adam Baker

07:40>> So we'll find them because that needs to that almost needs to be,

07:45>> are they our ideal buyer? What are they speaking about? What topics are they kind of liking and posting on? Is this relevant to us? So that needs to have some kind of human kind of element to it. And then we'll use connected to automate any outreach we have to them.

Nathan Latka

08:02But that's io, right?

Adam Baker

08:04>> Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

08:06Connected. Io?

Adam Baker

08:07>> Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Team Breakdown: 16 People

Nathan Latka

08:08And so how many there's four SDRs. What's the total team size today?

Adam Baker

08:13>> We're 16.

Nathan Latka

08:14Okay. Flesh out the rest of the team for me. How many engineers?

Adam Baker

08:18>> Yeah. So we've got five engineers. We've got Kim and I. So Kim's my co founder and CTO. We've got one product, one design, two CS, four a four SDRs. Okay. Two.

Nathan Latka

08:37Do the SDRs carry a quota or only the eight to two AEs?

Adam Baker

08:42>> Only the AEs carry quota.

Nathan Latka

08:44Yeah. I see. I see. How did you I mean, you've done this now. You you built your last company to 4 or $5,000,000 of ARR before getting the dealpad. Imagine you use the 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?

Founder-Led Sales and Hiring AEs

Adam Baker

09:02>> Yeah. So all of the early sales are founder led for me. So I do all the sales initially. And when I get to a point where I'm kind of, you know, I'm on a limit and I know then how much I'm booking, I will then, 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 quota, it depends on how much you pay

AE Quota and OTE Structure

Adam Baker

09:27>> them. So typically, if I'm paying an AE 100 ks, I want 600 ks in revenue back from that AE a year.

Nathan Latka

09:36That's 100 ks base or base plus commission?

Adam Baker

09:39>> Base plus commission. So essentially, we're paying them 200 k if they deliver 600.

Nathan Latka

09:46Okay. It's a 100 k base. If they get 600 k quota target hit, then they get another 100 k on top of So OTE on target earnings is 200 k for that AE.

Adam Baker

09:53>> Yep, exactly. We want between 6 and 750 k back and there's a ramp obviously. So in kind of year one, we wouldn't expect 750 k from them. But we would over the kind of as we went into year two.

Nathan Latka

10:09Are you guys remote or in person?

Adam Baker

10:11>> We're all remote.

Nathan Latka

10:12How do you deal with document control? You know, the sales team puts together a script that works well, but then you have a new salesperson that doesn't know the script exists, 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?

Remote Work and Sales Call Review Process

Adam Baker

10:25>> Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. I've got a process nailed down. And so a number of things that go into that. One is that we record all of our sales calls, both the meetings that we have on Zoom, but also the calls that we make, the cold calls. And so we optimize every What software? Which is HubSpot. We record from HubSpot.

Nathan Latka

10:48You can record in HubSpot.

Adam Baker

10:50>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we have weekly reviews where we play back the the calls. I sit and listen to a lot of the calls as well. And so we can coach and we can really optimize on how do we get to a repeatable script where it's working most of the time. So it doesn't matter about who it is, if anybody says this, it's probably gonna work. It's just a time thing and you go through

11:15>> it and optimize it, but we record everything. And we play everything back.

Nathan Latka

11:18So what is your cadence? Is it every Friday for two hours you listen to recordings as a sales team?

Adam Baker

11:23>> Yeah. It's it's once a week. Not on Friday, once a week. Two hours.

Nathan Latka

11:28Two hours. And when do you do it? Monday, Wednesday, Friday?

Adam Baker

11:30>> We do it on a Wednesday.

Nathan Latka

11:32Two hours on Wednesday. Interesting. And how do you like, okay. If you listen to a call recording in HubSpot and it's twenty minutes and you have a bunch of notes from it, where do you document, like, the changes you wanna see made and then test the week after if that sales rep used the updated script? Like, how how do you create that rhythm?

Sales Playbook: The Google Doc

Adam Baker

11:48>> Yeah. So we so we've got a master document in we shoot drive, Google Drive. And so we've all got access to it. And so it's an iterative kind of document that we update. We're at a point now where we don't change it that much. There are tweaks, but it was like really for a long time.

Nathan Latka

12:10How many pages is that Google doc?

Adam Baker

12:13>> I don't know. Can tell you.

Nathan Latka

12:15I'm just curious order of operation, five Yeah.

Adam Baker

12:18>> It's probably five or six pages at the moment.

Nathan Latka

12:20Okay. Yep. Interesting. And what are the major sections of that document? Is it like call scripts, call objection handling? Like what are the headers in that document?

Adam Baker

12:29>> Yeah, so it's opening. I think the opening part of the call is the most important because it's gonna give you the opportunity to talk.

12:37>> A lot of SDRs I see just get hung up on a lot. And so you don't even have an opportunity to say what you're doing. I think the second thing is how do you cut through people that aren't listening and will just give you an answer to say they're not interested, but they don't know what not interested in because they haven't listened to you. So how do you get them to listen? So what's the value prop?

12:59>> What's the compelling statement that's going to surface some pain that's going to give you another thirty seconds to talk to them? So we look at opening, we look at that kind of the whole value statement, it's going to open them up a little bit. We never ask closed questions. Questions. So we're always asking open questions to try and open them up.

Nathan Latka

13:17We'll- Give me example of a closed question.

Adam Baker

13:19>> Oh, did you have a good day today?

Nathan Latka

13:24Give me example of an open question.

Adam Baker

13:26>> How's your day?

Nathan Latka

13:28Ah, I see. Okay.

Adam Baker

13:29>> Yep. So how was your day? You're going to say, yeah, it was great. I did this, did this. Weather was pretty shit, but whatever. A closed question is, did you have a good day today? Yes, no. And so we always try to open up with a question that's going to help us explore a pain that they might have. And

13:48>> a really great opener that we use is, Hey Nathan, we speak to lots of people like you every day, and this is what we hear.

13:58>> Are you seeing the same thing?

14:01>> Right? Are you asking your teams to do anything differently? You know, how are you thinking about this topic? Yeah. Right now. And so we try and show them that, you know, we do speak to these similar people every day and we are hearing these similar things. Is it the same for you and how are you thinking about it? Do you subscribe

Nathan Latka

14:21to a target talk time? In other words, if it's a thirty minute call, will you look at each call and say, hey, sales rep, do you talk for 60% of the call? That's too much, get under 20.

Adam Baker

14:29>> So we try and keep those we call it so this stage is a cold call and we try and keep that down to ten minutes max. And so either we try and qualify them on that first call, if we need more time, we'll set that as a second step. 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 go into a

14:55>> deeper discovery. It's probably going to take thirty five to forty minutes, and we'll do this with some of the wider team.

Nathan Latka

15:02Yep. Yep. If you had 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 Founderpath, it's definitely Neil Rackham's spin selling.

Challenger Sale Philosophy

Adam Baker

15:14>> Yeah. So I think it would be challenger, the challenger set.

15:21>> Particularly in our market, our buyers don't necessarily know they've got a problem. And so 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'll have a sales team that will say, we've got all the software we need, so you're hitting quota. Well, no, we're not. All right, so here's the gap, right? Where is the gap here? Is it

15:45>> top of the funnel? Is inside the deal and mid funnel? And really try and understand where the gap is for them and really try and challenge them to think about where that gap is. And then what's missing? What could you do? So yes, oh, great. So you did an 80% year last year, fantastic. But if we could get you another 30% and you did 110%, what would that mean to your business? How could it grow faster?

16:09>> 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

16:18>> where we can get you to. That's the challenge itself.

Fundraising Plans: Bootstrap vs. Raise

Nathan Latka

16:23That all makes good sense. So what's the plan for the next year? Do you anticipate raising or do you think you'll stay basically bootstrapped?

Adam Baker

16:31>> I mean, I've obviously this to you for a long time now. I mean, bootstrap for as long as we can, but I think there'll be a point where we can accelerate quite heavily if we do start to bring some money in. And that doesn't mean necessarily that we'll raise, we could debt finance, we could do a whole bunch of stuff, right? But I think it will probably make sense for us to bring some money in at

16:54>> some point next year.

Nathan Latka

16:56Yep, yep, interesting. Well, 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?

Adam Baker

17:05>> I think it depends what you want to do, right? So I think that if

17:10>> you really genuinely think that you could build a $100,000,000 business, then you're probably going to want to go out to venture money because you're going to need to raise two or three times. And debt probably won't help you do that over the longer term. Think if you think and you're happy to build out a 20,000,000 ARR business and flip it for 200,000,000, then debt could be a really good opportunity for you because you don't have to

17:35>> go out and raise all those venture rounds and you retain the equity.

Nathan Latka

17:38You just nailed it. Yeah, it's so weird. The way you phrase the last minute of you speaking is like, there's nothing wrong with a $20,000,000 company that you sell for three X. That's a great way to get rich. There's so many ways, there's so many buyers.

Advice on Building to $20M ARR

Adam Baker

17:52>> Let me tell you that 99.9% of companies don't get past 10,000,000. If you're a business that's sitting on 10,000,000 ARR right now, you've got a great company and you can get that to 50, you can probably get it to a 100. I think the expectations of these venture led investors particularly are just completely skewed to these unicorns and these outliers. And it doesn't help founders who are building great companies who are 10 or on their way

18:24>> to 10,000,000 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 going to get you to 20,000,000 ARR and you can flip for 200,000,000. Are you okay with that? They will bite your hand off for it.

Nathan Latka

18:41Yep, Yep. Yep. A 100%. A 100%.

Adam Baker

18:43>> It's difficult to get to and it's a fantastic achievement.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

18:47Well, Adam, listen, I miss hanging out with you. Hope you guys see you at the next SaaS open or we'll meet up at a Soho house somewhere or whatever. But in the meantime, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book.

Adam Baker

18:57>> Oh, I'm reading thank you for being late. I'm reading that right

Nathan Latka

19:03Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Adam Baker

19:07>> Not at the moment.

Nathan Latka

19:08Number three, favorite online tool besides your own?

Adam Baker

19:13>> Favorite online tool. We're we're into Apollo right now.

19:17>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

19:18Number four, how many hours of sleep do

19:19you get every night?

Adam Baker

19:21>> Seven.

Nathan Latka

19:22Seven. Okay. And situation, married, single kiddos?

Adam Baker

19:25>> Single daughter.

Nathan Latka

19:27Okay. And you I think you had a birthday. I think you're are you 48 or 49 now?

Adam Baker

19:31>> I'm 49.

Nathan Latka

19:3349. Nice. Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Adam Baker

19:38>> Go slower.

Nathan Latka

19:40Guys, go ahead. Go ahead. No.

19:43No. Go ahead.

Adam Baker

19:44>> Go slower, I think, is thing that I'd probably coach myself on.

Nathan Latka

19:47Guys, dealpad.io was launched in 2021. They're doing $200,000 a month today in revenue, up from a 100,000 a month just a year ago. And total revenue in 2021, that first year was 400 k. 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 a 160 customers. Again, dealpad.io is helping you understand how to get your whole

20:09team organized around a sales process, specifically the buyer collaboration platform for sales teams, hoping it to end this year at $2,700,000 of ARR. He's got a team of 16 people, five engineers, four sales reps, two carry quota he looks to continue to scale. Adam, thanks for taking us to the top.

Adam Baker

20:25>> Awesome. Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

20:26One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We

20:33call it deal or bust. One founder comes on three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central.

20:59To 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 SaaS 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

21:20you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS 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 You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in

21:42the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. 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

21:59guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.