How Mattermore CEO Matt Shenker grew to $990K revenue with a 9 person team in 2025.

guys matter more. wants to help managers run their remote sales teams he comes from a coaching background just brought on his co-founding CTO he's got two weeks to get that thing live and then start asking some of these beta users to start paying he started focusing on this about a year ago and has paid the bills with Consulting and coaching on the side we'll see where it goes from here hey folks my guest today is Matt Shanker he's the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at mmore he's been a licensed therapist Medi meditation teacher and management trainer for 10 years last two years man has been working with his co-founder Dev the first AI co-pilot for B2B sales managers Matt you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right very cool so this is a very very very crowded space right so how are you standing out are you focused on a specific Niche or what's the what's the unique angle yeah so I think there's there's two ways to really look at companies that are trying to stand out right now one is what's your vertical right there's a there's a lot of people who are taking uh Ai and software and trying to solve a problem and are shooting really really wide uh and so I think one thing that's really interesting right now is to look at what specific verticals are people stepping into are they solving a specific problem for a specific person or are they building a solution that is trying to solve a problem and still hunting for who exactly they're segmenting into so I think one thing that we're seeing with the space is there are a lot of people that fall in that second category that are still more of a solution looking for a problem to solve and so one differentiator for us is we have a very specific problem for very specific spefic people remote sales managers who are selling STA and the reason for that is because they have sales teams that are hurting and there's a massive potential for impact with a product like ours the other big differentiator is when you say AI what do you mean let Matt let me push on that for a second so remote remote sales managers selling SAS so like right now we're all my founder path is remote uh you know we sell the software Founders and we have a Google doc where every Friday everyone goes in and reports their metrics right pipeline things like that pretty straight why do we need AI awesome uh do you have a specific sales team and if so how many people are on that sales team it's just three of us cool and so is it is it specifically people who are like a sales roll or is it basically people who arear multiple hats uh S Sales rolls a part of the funnel right lead to lead to mql mql to demo demo to close awesome do they all have the same manager yes me awesome so a key thing that we've found when we talk to sales reps as well as their managers is there's a massive problem with within sales one is it's an inherently stressful job so other than teachers and nurses sales consistently report the highest stress levels out of all occupational groups which makes sense for anybody that's done sales right you're you're making calls all day you're getting rejected you're hustling it's it's a stressful high pressure situation what we find is most managers of salespeople aren't actually trained for getting the most out of their management interactions with their sales reps however that's the number one predictor of how stressed out somebody is not how responsive their customers are that week not how many deals they're closing that week it's the health of their relationship with their manager and what we find is most managers are so busy getting stuff done that they're not actually showing up to calls with their reps in ways that are actually rejuvenating and co-regulating for one and two they massively underlever asynchronous communic and ways that they can be creating trust and motivation with the people that work for them based on the ways that they're interacting with them for good reason because who has time all day to be pausing and thinking about okay how's Mike doing today what could I possibly message Mike that's not just like a blanket hey Mike you got him go and get them today proud of you how do I actually give him a specific personalized positive reinforcing message that's relevant to tasks that he's doing today so where AI comes in is on that front end which is what's actually happening with my team maybe there's things happening in our CRM or our Outreach data that I don't have time as a manager to go in and look at in in the two minutes I have between tasks uh or there's things actually happening on slack or Microsoft teams whatever asynchronous communication that we have ai can actually grab all of that data bring it right to me as the manager instead of like I I've never had someone say I want to buy AI what they have as a problem and then you as a Founder use Ai and your software to solve that problem right there's a very difference can you just give me a story of how a customer is currently using you and ignore AI sure so one way to look at it is we we have teams that let's T tons of teams that are just selling software right and so what's happening is can you can we talk about a specific like customer that's using you today whether it's beta or P or whatever yeah I'd prefer not to use a customer by name okay do you have customers using the product today yeah the the product is very much in beta so we we do have we do have customers but none that I want to you know use them by name on a podcast 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 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 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 the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder paath dashb 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 well 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 valuation 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 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 okay so are you beta so I guess are you still guys still pre-revenue today trying to figure out what the angle is going to be before you launch the pay wall exactly okay so I guess help me understand and if you don't to talk about people actually using you today talk about where you found them so how are you getting beta users yeah so it it started out with referral uh for a long time I was a trainer of sales teams as my my co-founder was in Enterprise sales he had a a mobile app development agency and then was was Hardcore in different sales roles throughout his career so we have a deep network of people who are in sales positions and so what we did was we we did six week Sprints where we would interview a 100 sales teams uh one right after another we did that for four consecutive batches and then we went back to that Network and we said okay now we want to show you what we found through these conversations uh and we we have some recommendations for you and what we did was we just began talking to people and then giving their cro or their sales managers basically just reports based on our interviews and then we would offer them different products that we had built really low code no code beta tested proof of Concepts uh one of those being uh a post call report so most managers of every kind of role aren't actually trained on how to be a manager and so one of the things that we did was if you use gong or you use otter any sort of thing that just automatically creates a transcript we can extract the transcript with an API and with automated prompts that we've built along with uh some of our academic advisers we've given fractional basis points in the company to they help us build some rubrics and specific prompts that then we just fed into Claud as an llm and so we could narrow in we could say this is what a good manager looks like here's a transcript from this call give this person feedback on what they did that was a driver of Effectiveness and adaptability and what was a drainer of Effectiveness and adaptability all of which we informed with Rub we fed into it and within a matter of seconds we're able to email somebody a post call report like hey as a manager here's the feedback that no director ever gives you and no employee ever gives you so that's one sort of feature and functionality of what our product offers people uh and in the back end obviously that the AI there is an llm but there's all sorts of data that's out there that's hard to connect and access in 2014 there were like 400 sales enablement tools now we're in the matter of thousands of sales enablement fast schols and so being able to connect all these different data sets for managers and deliver them to them to actually guide them on very specific things like here's what you need to do to be a better manager for your team I guess sorry just just to jump in I mean win pointing to their llm are ones that have billions and billions and billions of rows of data and proprietary data set that's not an angle you're going to be able to win on right so so what I'm trying to understand is what is a secret sauce that Matt is bringing to the equation that other people do not have and you you've mentioned your app a couple times so I guess help me understand like what is the what's the status of the product today I see on your careers page you've got job openings for a founding CTO and founding engineer have you been able to get engineer sort of convince them to jump in and start writing code yeah so our founding CTO comes from a long experience of being a director of AI for other companies just came from a company uh I won't advertise but was building AI models for the medical industry be able to connect all this data of medical research to be able to deliver back to people so that somebody doesn't have to go searching for specific type of medical research we can do the exact same thing uh for two different sets the front end it's what's actually happening with your sales team your CRM data your Outreach data any tools that you're utilizing asynchronous communication and what's happening on your calls as a manager one-on-one and team syns to be able to turn all of that into data and connect it all the back end it's what is the actual behavior science we don't have a Gap when it comes to what does it take to manage well you don't have to go ask the right mentor to be able to be told of what effective management looks like we have strong data and the behavior science that actually shows us don't your background I don't mean to cut you off but I I think I get what your angle is and it's a short pod what I see is behavioral therapist consultant like things of that nature why isn't this just why can't why does this have to have ai in the title and be software I mean why it sounds like you're passionate about this why not just go be a coach and for for remote sales managers because this this isn't a coaching problem so the the problem the problem that we have is that we have access to all of the knowledge that we need and we don't have the right systems that have harness that all of those knowledge sets so one what's happening with the sales team and two what should I do as the manager you don't need a coach to solve that problem and in fact what we found through years coaching sales managers was even when you have a coach a massive visibility problem which is if I ask okay how did you do this week Nathan compared to last week you can look at your output from your sales team but we can't actually look at the specific Concepts that we talked about as a coach were you implementing those more often and if you were which ones were actually moving the needle so what we're doing is not just creating a coach that can live with you as a sales manager we're creating more metrics about what's actually happening with your team what are the actual outputs of your relational interactions as a manager so you don't just have to send somebody an engagement survey twice a week we or twice a year what you can actually do is get immediate continuous contextualized visibility on how engaged is your team how effective are you as a manager what is the exact action you need to do right in this moment to uplift your team more not something you want to talk about where I can share Hara Business Review articles with you two weeks from now or we can unpack whatever happens to be present with you in your mind as a coach and the time when we're having the conversation Matt I'm very lost on what the product is trying to do it sounds like it's it's like show us what your sales team should be doing on a daily and there's like dash of Consulting so I'm trying to drill and figure it out I can't but my hope is obviously that you guys do well have the product launch when do you think you'll launch the I mean the website right now I can't get past anything except a career page when do you guys think you'll have an MVP live MVP live pro probably six to nine months from now we're going to start off really small with uh some of the customers that we already have running Pilots with them really showing the impact of the product there why does it take I mean why does that take so six to nine months is a long time to spend on MVP yeah well because we don't want to start with a publicly facing product what we want to start with are the customers that we've we've built relationships with now and go in and have a have a deeper impact rather than shooting really broadly right from the hip to begin with what we want to do is take take our product and work really in depth with a small number of customers as we then continue to iterate and improve the product and then once we show strong about not just the base of what it can offer but the the full scope of what it can offer then that's when we'll actually expand out to a more accessible MVP well when do you I mean my whole thing is is like you know early stage Founders um eventually got to ask for money and if people don't pay then you gotta go the wrong thing right so winner you're ask for money and put the pedal to the metal and see if you're on to something yeah well that's something we can do right from the beginning uh what's nice is that we we we have a CTO who is confident that two weeks from now we'll have a we'll have our our intern MVP that we could actually go we can go to cro we can go to Sal teams we could say here's what we can offer you specifically uh but we're not going to go out and start selling that to thousands of people right from the get-go what we want to do is make it a much more personal experience running a few Pilots where we can use it as an AET tool of course course I me that's how you should launch but I mean I guess when did so you recruited your engineering co-founder um yeah when you said two weeks to get a an MVP live you'll then put that in front of your beta users how long have you personally been working on this when did you when did you launch yeah my co-founder and I have been working on this for about a year now where we've been running interviews testing different GRS of groups of concept talking to technical folks accumulating our advisers that sort of thing okay and how do you I mean a lot of startup Founders they've got to figure out very creative ways to keep their personal living expenses low while they run the test and they get the MV Etc so like what have you done to either keep your cost low or do something on the side to get money or go raise Capital how are you paying your personal bills ain't that the truth well the the nice thing is you know I'm a licensed therapist a coach and a trainer and so at random points basically where we've said okay you know what we we actually need money right now we've been able to turn to clients within the St space and say all right we're taking in coaching clients we're taking consulting jobs we're taking training gigs uh the problem with that as you know is it's uh it's there's always this tradeoff of okay if we're doing that then we're taking time and attention away from the business and what we're trying to push forward but like you said sometimes you know you got to pay the bills so you actually have a place to live all right well we'll see what happens man we're rooting for you let's wrap up with the famous five number one your book favorite book The Alchemist Palo number two is there a CEO you're following or studying a CEO I'm following your studying not not any one specifically the one that's lighting me up the most right now is a guy I just talked to this week Dan suer he's the he's the CEO of rewind AI really love what they're building uh number three uh what's your favorite online tool for building matter more my favorite online tool it probably depends on the week of what we're whatever we're working with honestly right now it's slack just because I'm in there so much talking to my co-founder and number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night sick all right and what's your situation married single kids single all right uh and how old are you 30 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 everything is figureoutable guys matter more. wants to help managers run their remote sales teams comes from a coaching background just brought on his co-founding CTO he's got two weeks to get that thing live and then start asking some of these beta users to start paying he started focusing on this about a year ago and has paid the bills with Consulting and coaching on this side we'll see where it goes from here thanks so much Matt for taking us to the top thanks Nathan take care one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1M 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 it 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 SAS 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 in the 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' support all right I'll be in the comments see you