Founder Interview
How Pipeline Signals Reached 8 Paying Customers at $2,500 a Month Within Days of Launch (Interview with Co-Founder Jamie Shanks)
- Interview Date
- July 28, 2021
- Interviewee
- Jamie ShanksCo-Founder
Company Metrics at Interview Time
Active Customers (2021)
8
Avg Revenue Per Customer (2021)
$2,500 per month
Team Size, shared with Sales for Life (2021)
20
Engineers (2021)
2
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Jamie Shanks during this 2021 interview and are a historical snapshot. Pipeline Signals has since been dissolved. See Pipeline Signals Inc’s current numbers.
Key Takeaways
- 01Pipeline Signals launched just days before the interview and already had 8 paying customers
- 02Customers paid between $2,000 and $4,000 a month, averaging $2,500, by credit card on a monthly subscription
- 03All 8 early customers came from existing Sales for Life relationships
- 04The go-to-market play gave away 10 free signals to each named account on a target list Jamie wanted to grow to 10,000 accounts
- 05Pipeline Signals was bootstrapped with no outside capital, owned 50/50 by Jamie Shanks and his business partner Amar
- 06The team of 20 was shared across both businesses and globally dispersed
- 07Two of the twenty teammates were engineers
- 08Jamie's goal was to reach $100,000 MRR within 12 to 18 months
- 09Pipeline Signals was structured as a separate legal entity from Sales for Life
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Active Customers (2021) | 8 | Founder interview, 2021 |
| Avg Revenue Per Customer (2021) | $2,500 per month | Founder interview, 2021 |
| Contract Type (2021) | Monthly subscription, pay by credit card | Founder interview, 2021 |
| Team Size, shared with Sales for Life (2021) | 20 | Founder interview, 2021 |
| Engineers (2021) | 2 | Founder interview, 2021 |
Growth Breakdown
Customers
Customers: Pipeline Signals launched a couple of days before the interview with 8 active customers. All 8 came across from Sales for Life's existing customer base, after the product had been run as an alpha and then a beta inside Sales for Life. The target market was primarily the tech and telecom space, which Jamie called Sales for Life's "bread and butter".
Pricing and Revenue Model
Pricing and Revenue Model: Customers paid a monthly subscription by credit card, averaging $2,500 per customer per month across a $2,000 to $4,000 range. The price moved with the number of accounts a customer wanted monitored and how often the report was delivered — daily, weekly or monthly.
Team
Team: A team of 20 globally dispersed teammates worked as a shared services model across both Pipeline Signals and Sales for Life. Two of those teammates were engineers.
Funding
Funding: Pipeline Signals was bootstrapped with no outside capital. It was owned 50/50 by Jamie Shanks and his business partner Amar, the same split as Sales for Life, and Jamie said the two were kept as separate entities because they travelled on very different horizons and enterprise values.
Growth Strategy
Free Signals Outbound Play
Free Signals Outbound Play: The primary go-to-market tactic was giving away 10 free signals to each named account on a target list Jamie hoped to grow to 10,000 accounts, primarily in tech and telecom, with intelligence going out every month. Jamie credited the play to "Henry at ZoomInfo" and said its point was to prove the opportunity cost of the compelling events a prospect's sales team was not mining.
Existing Customer Base as Launch Pad
Existing Customer Base as Launch Pad: All 8 founding customers came from Sales for Life's existing relationships. The product had been run as an alpha and then a beta inside Sales for Life, and those customers were, in Jamie's words, "excited" to have it as a standalone service.
Automated Sales Process
Automated Sales Process: Jamie described the play as "an automated sales process that seems to be working", run at scale against the named account list.
Separate Entity for Better Unit Economics
Separate Entity for Better Unit Economics: Pipeline Signals was spun out as its own company because, in Jamie's words, "the unit economics are completely different than a sales training business and it really needed to be in its own entity". He added that managed services were trading far above sales training businesses, which left the door open to "a variety of different financial vehicles to scale the business".
Best Quotes
“Pipeline Signals right now has eight customers active. MRR ranges between 2,000 and 4,000. The average is 2,500.”
“We launched it actually a couple days ago.”
“They came from existing Sales for Life customers who were excited to be able to, you know, we had been enabling an alpha than a beta, and kind of battle testing it within Sales for Life, but then with the ability to roll it out as a standalone company, because the unit economics are completely different than a sales training business and it really needed to be in its own entity.”
“Our go to market, we're using a singular sales play that is working extremely well. And it's a sales play that Henry at ZoomInfo did. Essentially, you're giving away bits of value and intelligence every month to a set of named accounts you want to win.”
“The bait is giving away 10 free signals to each account on that list, ideally developing a list of up to 10,000 accounts over time, primarily in the tech and telecom space.”
“Our goal is in the next twelve to eighteen months to be able to do 100,000 MRR.”
“20 teammates. Our teammates are all globally dispersed. We do not have teammates sitting in North America as an example, but we have teammates all around the world. And 20 teammates is a kind of a shared services model between two businesses.”
What Happened Next
This interview caught Pipeline Signals in its first days of commercial operation in 2021: the product had launched a couple of days earlier, its 8 active customers had come across from Sales for Life, and it shared a 20-person team with that training business. Pipeline Signals has since been dissolved, so the figures here are the earliest snapshot of a company that no longer trades.
View Pipeline Signals Inc’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction: Sales for Life and the Origin of Pipeline Signals
- 1:23Social Selling Origins and Sales for Life's Early Days
- 1:55First Revenue Year and Early Enterprise Customers
- 3:03Sales for Life Customer Base and Business Model
- 4:56Pipeline Signals: Customers, Pricing, and Launch
- 6:16Where the First 8 Customers Came From
- 6:55Ownership Structure and Bootstrapped Financing
- 7:48Where Capital Would Be Deployed to Grow Pipeline Signals
- 8:33Free Signals Go-To-Market Play and CRM Integrations
- 9:20Revenue Goals for Both Businesses
- 10:34Last Month's Combined Revenue and Profitability
- 11:17Team Size, Global Structure, and Engineers
- 11:52Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Personal Life
Introduction: Sales for Life and the Origin of Pipeline Signals
Nathan Latka
00:00Hey folks, special guest today, Jamie Shanks. He's the CEO of Sales for Life, a learning and a service company. They're pioneering social selling training program for mid market and enterprise companies. They've trained over 250,000 sales reps in dozens of industries. They recently founded Pipeline Signals, a BPAS company that mines signal intelligence from LinkedIn for any accounts in our customers to addressable market or sales opportunities versus risks. Jamie, are you ready to take us to the top?
Jamie Shanks
00:27>> Fantastic. Thanks for the invite.
Nathan Latka
00:29This sounds like you enjoyed training 250,000 salespeople on like a one time pay for the class module. And then you're like, you know what? I sort of like SaaS better. Let's launch Pipeline or Signals.
Jamie Shanks
00:39>> Yeah. Over the years, Sales for Life was a onetime project based revenue business, and we've tried our darndest over the years. The customer lifetime value will be on an average of about two and a half years now, ARPU 80,000. But, yeah, it started out project based revenue, and we've done our darndest to make it, stretch it out. But what was happening as a training business was people were asking, can you just do for me? And so
01:07>> this managed business managed service of Pipeline Signals was born to be able to mine that intelligence on their behalf.
Nathan Latka
01:16Very interesting. So give me a bit of a backstory here. When did you launch Sales for Life?
Social Selling Origins and Sales for Life's Early Days
Jamie Shanks
01:23>> So I actually merged my own consulting firm with Sales for Life, which was at that time Toronto's first sales recruiting company. So it had nothing to do with the training space. And at that same time when I merged in in 2012, I self discovered and pioneered this concept called social selling. So the ability to actually prospect using LinkedIn and built the world's first curriculum on it for global enterprise. And our so basically, our first revenue in
01:52>> that topic was in the year 2013.
First Revenue Year and Early Enterprise Customers
Nathan Latka
01:55And how much revenue did you do that year? It's always a fun question.
Jamie Shanks
01:58>> $390,000.
Nathan Latka
02:01You remember it. You have right on the money.
Jamie Shanks
02:03>> Hey, you know, I prepared for this interview. I know.
Nathan Latka
02:08$390,000 back in '20 And
02:16so what did that look like? Who did that come from? How many customers?
Jamie Shanks
02:20>> So at that time, I originally didn't have much of a plan other than helping local Toronto businesses. And I got really lucky that content marketing started to explode. And immediately, XO Communications, Level three Communications, Oracle, ADP, Thomson Reuters, kind of picked up our blogs, invited us in for training, and we jumped we jumped multiple levels very quickly. We went from the SMB to the global enterprise in leaps and bounds in months, and we stayed in the
02:52>> global enterprise and global mid market. And although now we're even going downstream opposite of most companies, But we primarily serve the global mid market global enterprise from that day forward.
Sales for Life Customer Base and Business Model
Nathan Latka
03:03Okay. So so so today, how many customers do you have on just the training program? Ignore Pipeline Signals.
Jamie Shanks
03:12>> Yeah. So the average year, we're servicing anywhere between twenty five and fifty. We'll call them programs or projects. Now one customer might have let's use Thermo Fisher as an example. Might have a launch in Americas, EMEA, LATAM, APAC. So we'll have these cohorts of 25 to 50 customers in a year.
Nathan Latka
03:33I see. And sum all that up for me last year, what was total revenue across the whole business?
Jamie Shanks
03:38>> 2,200,000.
Nathan Latka
03:392.2. Okay. And was any of that Pipeline Signal at that point or no?
Jamie Shanks
03:45>> No. So Pipeline Signals was a service that we were using as a reinforcement after certification. So what was happening is we enable sellers to sales generate or self generate pipeline at scale in ninety day time horizons. Once they do so, they have to defend it in a case study, but then they needed this intelligence as a tailwind behind them, and that's when Pipeline Signals well, COVID kinda fast forward the idea that, well, hold on. If you
04:15>> took us off airplanes, why don't we think about what else could we do and use that opportunity to build pipeline signals?
Nathan Latka
04:23Yeah. So so is COVID good or bad for you? More people are doing sales on Zoom. I imagine you mean you should have seen a spike, right?
Jamie Shanks
04:29>> Yeah. So we were prepared years in advance. We were one of the first sales training companies to self develop our own learning platform, online learning platform. We also moved to virtual instructor led five years ago. So the live part of our service offering was 10% of revenue, was speaking engagements, sales kickoffs, and quarterly business reviews, but that was 80 flights a year for five years in a row. Take that time back. My business partner, Omar, and
Pipeline Signals: Customers, Pricing, and Launch
Jamie Shanks
04:56>> I looked at this holistically and said, well, we have other services businesses we wanna create. The managed service side that has greater scalability and, you know, the total addressable market is endless. Let's develop that because our customer sentiment is we can't turn this tap off once we start.
Nathan Latka
05:18Interesting. Okay, so so how many people today are paying for Pipeline Signals and what's your pricing model there?
Jamie Shanks
05:25>> Yep, so Pipeline Signals right now has eight customers active. MRR ranges between 2,000 and 4,000. The average is 2,500.
Nathan Latka
05:35That's what they're paying per month on average?
Jamie Shanks
05:37>> Per month, yes. It's a payment gateway, pay by credit card. And the idea is that the price fluctuates based on two variables, which is the the volume of accounts around the world they'd like us to monitor existing customers perspective and white space. And then the other leverage point would be a time horizon of the report. Do you want it daily, weekly or monthly? So you know, it's kind of like micro transactional, and stacking that MRR per
06:07>> customer over hopefully a lifetime.
Nathan Latka
06:09Yeah, mean, eight customer is $2,500 a month. You're doing what $20,000 a month in revenue there and just launched it this year. Nice.
Where the First 8 Customers Came From
Jamie Shanks
06:16>> We launched it actually a couple days ago.
Nathan Latka
06:18A couple days ago. Okay. So where did you get those first eight customers from? Were they service folks? They
Jamie Shanks
06:23>> came from existing Sales for Life customers who were excited to be able to, you know, we had been enabling an alpha than a beta, and kind of battle testing it within Sales for Life, but then with the ability to roll it out as a standalone company, because the unit economics are completely different than a sales training business and it really needed to be in its own entity.
Nathan Latka
06:47But why build it inside of the same business? Or is it already spun out as a separate entity altogether like?
Ownership Structure and Bootstrapped Financing
Jamie Shanks
06:55>> Yeah. Pipeline Signals own website locked and loaded.
Nathan Latka
06:58But what about like like the cap table? Is it the same ownership? Is it the same c corp in Delaware?
Jamie Shanks
07:03>> Yeah. So we're Canadian based organization, Sales for Life owned fifty fifty by Jamie Shanks and Amar Chef. Pipeline Signals owned fifty fifty by Jamie Shanks and Amar Chef.
Nathan Latka
07:13Both of
Jamie Shanks
07:13>> those own businesses.
Nathan Latka
07:15No outside capital?
Jamie Shanks
07:17>> No outside capital.
Nathan Latka
07:18That's great. Would you raise capital?
Jamie Shanks
07:22>> So that's one of the compelling events and reasons for separating the two businesses, they travel on very different horizons, and enterprise values. So because of that Pipeline Signals managed services are trading exponentially greater than the lack of sales training companies that go for sale. So because of that, we potentially would consider a variety of different financial vehicles to scale the business.
Where Capital Would Be Deployed to Grow Pipeline Signals
Nathan Latka
07:48And where let's just let's not go down to like, would you raise VC and how much? If you did have more money, where would you spend it to grow Pipeline Signal?
Jamie Shanks
07:56>> Our go to market, we're using a singular sales play that is working extremely well. And it's a sales play that Henry at ZoomInfo did. Essentially, you're giving away bits of value and intelligence every month to a set of named accounts you want to win. And so you're enticing them with a fish on a lure to say, here are compelling events that your sales team are probably not mining and and engaged in. And you're proving the opportunity
08:25>> cost of what they're missing. And so you do that at scale. And so that's basically
Nathan Latka
08:31So so what are you giving? What's your bait?
Free Signals Go-To-Market Play and CRM Integrations
Jamie Shanks
08:33>> The bait is giving away 10 free signals to each account on that list, ideally developing a list of up to 10,000 accounts over time, primarily in the tech and telecom space. It's where we've been our bread and butter at Sales for Life, and then scaling it from there. And it's an automated sales process that seems to be working. So that's part a. And then the second part where we deploy capital would be in connectors and integrators
09:02>> because we are an intelligence play. Our intelligence is best served within our customer CRM, SalesLoft, Outreach, and so forth. So making it more seamless for our intelligence that we gather to be flown into our customers'tools of record.
Revenue Goals for Both Businesses
Nathan Latka
09:20And so how much revenue with these two things now working side by side do you think you'll do this year?
Jamie Shanks
09:25>> So our goal is in the next twelve to eighteen months to be able to do 100,000 MRR.
Nathan Latka
09:30Okay, but what do you think you'll be in December this year?
Jamie Shanks
09:32>> December this year, our plan would be to get ideally halfway there.
Nathan Latka
09:37Okay, and where were you at a year ago?
Jamie Shanks
09:40>> With Sales for Life or Pipeline Signals?
Nathan Latka
09:42Because Pipeline Signals Sorry, sorry.
Jamie Shanks
09:43>> Yeah, was thinking for the combined couple days ago.
Nathan Latka
09:45Yeah, I know that. But now what I was asking is, both businesses this year, how much revenue do you think you'll do?
Jamie Shanks
09:52>> Oh, combined. So Sales for Life will do 2 to $2,500,000. Then let's say we can get this to a $500,000 run rate at Pipeline Signals, you're looking at three. So both businesses, what I'm most proud about what we've created is while we grew compounded growth at Sales for Life at about 24% CAGR over that time horizon, we grew EBITDA at 29%. And our goal right now while we sit at 25% EBITDA, our goal is a 50%
10:24>> EBITDA in both businesses. So it's really being able to get to that scale in pipeline signals as well at a 50% EBITDA.
Last Month's Combined Revenue and Profitability
Nathan Latka
10:34So Jamie, just to break that down, right? So last month, how much total revenue did you do across the whole business and how much went to the bottom line?
Jamie Shanks
10:41>> Total revenue in last month for Sales for Life,
Nathan Latka
10:45the whole business.
Jamie Shanks
10:48>> Well, it had been 200 give or take $200,000 Okay. And make 50% net net margins at the bottom.
Nathan Latka
10:55Got it. So 100 is $180k is Sales for Life and then 20 ks is the MRR from Pipeline, so $200 and then you're taking basically $90,000 to the bank bottom line cash flow.
Jamie Shanks
11:05>> Give or take. Yeah.
Nathan Latka
11:06What as a founder, cash flow is a great thing to have. What you choose to do with this is another story. Do you reinvest in the business? Do you pay it out to yourself as dividends and your co founder?
11:14What do do with it?
Team Size, Global Structure, and Engineers
Jamie Shanks
11:17>> Listen, Amar and I do well, but we plow a lot of it back into product development. We plow it back into marketing. So most of it is getting reinvested.
Nathan Latka
11:30Okay. And what's the team size today? How many people?
Jamie Shanks
11:33>> 20 teammates. Our teammates are all globally dispersed. We do not have teammates sitting in North America as an example, but we have teammates all around the world. And 20 teammates is a kind of a shared services model between two businesses.
Nathan Latka
11:48How many engineers?
Jamie Shanks
11:49>> Engineers, two.
11:51>> Two. Okay. Got it. Interesting.
Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Personal Life
Nathan Latka
11:52Very cool. Heck of a story here. Let's let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.
Jamie Shanks
11:57>> Favorite book right now is called The Boutique by Greg Alexander. If you're in ProServe, it's like a must.
Nathan Latka
12:04Number two, is there a founder you're following or studying?
Jamie Shanks
12:06>> Well, I kind of study the story of Sales Benchmark Index, which Greg was the founder, Matt shares as the CEO now. It's want to be like them one day in the future.
Nathan Latka
12:16Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own?
Jamie Shanks
12:20>> It's got to be LinkedIn. I mean, put all my money on LinkedIn.
12:23>> Yeah.
Nathan Latka
12:24Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night, Jamie?
Jamie Shanks
12:27>> Seven and a half. I've been tracking my sleep for three years and I'm pretty religious about understanding my sleep.
Nathan Latka
12:34Number four, our last question here. What's your situation? Married, single kiddos?
Jamie Shanks
12:38>> Two kiddos, eight and seven and married.
Nathan Latka
12:42Married. And how old are you?
Jamie Shanks
12:44>> I'm 42.
Nathan Latka
12:45Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
Jamie Shanks
12:48>> Wish I knew I was 20 is, don't be afraid to fail and don't try to please everybody. Do things for yourself, not for other people.
Nathan Latka
12:59Guys, there we have it. Sales for Life launched in 2013 with $390,000 in total revenue that year. They've now scaled up to 2,200,000 last year on the agency side and then launched an internal SaaS tool. It's called Pipeline Signals. It's already doing $20,000 a month in revenue, should grow to about, call it 30 to 40 thousand dollars a month in revenue by December. And this year, they'll close out somewhere around $3,000,000 in total revenue spread across between thirty
13:20and sixty customers. They're profitable last month, the $200,000 top line took about 80 to 90,000 to the bank, which they'll then go and reinvest. 20 people on the team right now as they try and help you automate your sales process and pull signal from the noise on your hottest leads. Jamie, thanks for taking us to the top.
Jamie Shanks
13:35>> Thanks a lot, Nathan.
Nathan Latka
13:37One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call 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 1PM
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