How SalesChoice Bootstrapped for Eight Years on the Salesforce AppExchange Before Pitching Its First Round (Interview with CEO Cindy Gordon)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Doctor. Cindy Gordon. She's the CEO and Founder of saleschoice, an AI SaaS company for B2B sales and winner of the 2018 Digital Transformation Award for AI Disruption. A former venture capitalist, Accenture partner, Xerox GM, and Citibank VP. She's the 2017 Sarah Kirk Entrepreneur Year and CADACEO Innovation Winner and the 2017 Startup Canada Entrepreneurship Award at both regional Ontario and national levels. Doctor. Cindy, are you ready to take us to

00:24the top?

Cindy Gordon

00:25>> Well, Nathan, with your leadership, I'm ready to go.

Nathan Latka

00:28Alright. That was a that's a heck of an intro. You've won a lot of things. Let's see if that's translating into business success here. What is saleschoice doing? Is it a pure play SaaS business?

What SalesChoice Does

Cindy Gordon

00:36>> It is a pure play SaaS business. We mainly focus on analyzing Salesforce datasets to predict sales forecast outcomes, with trusted AI practices.

Nathan Latka

00:47Interesting. So does that mean your main growth channel is the Salesforce AppExchange where Salesforce, you know, installations add you on top?

Salesforce AppExchange as Growth Channel

Cindy Gordon

00:53>> Yeah. Yeah. We're only integrated with the AppExchange at this point, although we have an open API. Mhmm.

Risks of Platform Dependency

Nathan Latka

00:59Walk me through that. Know, it can be nice to be attached to a whale, but it's also risky. If Salesforce acquires one of your competitors, they say, Cindy, you can't be in our store anymore. Hasta la vista. And you go, what the heck? Do you ever worry about that risk?

Cindy Gordon

01:10>> I don't know if that happens too often. I think within the ecosystem, ecosystem I I mean, I'd love to hear your perspective, but I haven't heard those stories. I think it definitely opens up a channel, you know, challenge where you have to then continue to be suboptimal in the Salesforce channel and obviously, you know, integrate into other channels. But I don't know if you'd be booted off. I think that would have an impact on your business.

01:35>> Don't think they're that unreasonable.

Pricing and What Customers Pay

Nathan Latka

01:38Well, walk me through the backstory here, right? So you launched the business. Obviously, folks are paying you for your tool to get more insight into their sales pipeline. What are they paying on average per month to use the technology?

Cindy Gordon

01:48>> We're priced at CAD50, so we're not a premium provider. A lot of the times there are some customizations just given that we're only going after mid to large enterprises. So there can be some PS drag. You know, AI, know, will always have a few different config points, right? It's not like a consumer at play, right? There's a lot of focus on ensuring that the model is stable, it's reliable, that you also aren't going to get data

02:18>> drift. There's increasing security aspects as well that are going into the audit side of these models.

Nathan Latka

02:26And so when you say 50 per month, I assume that's maybe per seat. But on average, when a new logo signs up, what are they paying on average per month all in, would you say?

Cindy Gordon

02:33>> Well, obviously, terms of target, we're we're getting we're looking for an average transaction about a 100 k on an annualized basis is kind of our sweet spot.

Nathan Latka

02:42Got it. Would you say that's a fair average today or that's what you're striving towards in the future?

Product Vision and Expansion

Cindy Gordon

02:47>> I think we're still learning in all sincerity, Nathan, you know, because, you know, we started off just doing the opportunity scoring and the forecasting, but we've pushed beyond that. So our software is only three keystrokes, so that's quite remarkable. So our UI is very clever. And we've moved into the behavioral analytic insights where we're doing psychographic profiling, sentiment mining, so exposing the emotional intensity through NLP methods. So I wouldn't want us to just say forecasting. I

03:19>> think our vision is very much now around ending revenue uncertainty in all its dimensions. So it seems like every time we build something, we see another additive aspect to increase the model. And it's, you know, it's endless, right? You know?

Nathan Latka

03:35So so, doctor Cindy, just to be clear, you're moving upstream. Your your average is not yet a $100,000 ACVs. Maybe you're only doing maybe $4,000 or $5,000 a month per account, but you are moving upstream as you add on these additional features. Is that accurate?

Cindy Gordon

03:46>> No. No. We we basically are averaging a much higher ratio than four ks a month on our clients.

Nathan Latka

03:53Okay, so you're already at like a $100,000 ACV average across your current base. It's not just a goal for the future. Yeah. Oh, I see. I like to get a sense of where people are moving. Are you trying to go deeper into your current base, move more enterprise, or open your top of funnel and actually serve more customers at lower ARPUs?

Enterprise Focus, Not Small Business

Cindy Gordon

04:12>> I don't think we're going like, first of all, our the kind of use case that we have, it only will really work well with mid upper mid market and large enterprise. Got it. So we're not a small business play at all.

Nathan Latka

04:24Yep. Okay. Fair enough. And tell us the backstory here. When did you launch the business?

Founding Story and Timeline

Cindy Gordon

04:28>> I launched the business in terms of this model about 2013 or the end of twenty thirteen. And then we did a patent filing that took us a year, took us all to assemble our engineering team. So we started to come into the market probably around late twenty fourteen, early twenty fifteen, would be the time horizon where we felt we had a good base.

04:53>> And people to pause in sales has always been an interesting dynamic. I think Gartner Group's done some great work on increasing the visibility of advanced analytics on large data sets. But you can certainly see that in every sales cycle, you are educating the clients very much so.

Nathan Latka

05:13Doctor. Cindy, when you say patents, it sounds like you're really heavy engineering. What's the total team size today and how many engineers?

Cindy Gordon

05:19>> I don't disclose all our engineers only because of all of the folks that are out there to coach them. So I don't want names.

Nathan Latka

05:27I'm just curious how many you have.

Cindy Gordon

05:29>> Yeah. No, I don't disclose a lot of that detail. I mean, a lot of that can be seen on Owler and things like that or checking out. But I don't usually disclose too much on the privacy of the company at this point.

Nathan Latka

05:40What does Owler say?

Cindy Gordon

05:43>> I don't know. I'll let you check.

Nathan Latka

05:46You're gonna make me do the work here live so we should pause while I go look up the number on Owler and then read it back to you?

Cindy Gordon

05:51>> If you want. That's all.

Nathan Latka

05:53Okay. Let me go do that then. Give me a second.

Cindy Gordon

05:56>> No. It's just that we're privately held, Nathan, and I think that's

Nathan Latka

05:59No. No. I'm I'm not I'm not asking for private information. This is you just mentioned out I mean, this is public. Owler is public. Right? LinkedIn says you have 14.

Team Size

Cindy Gordon

06:07>> We're all up we're all up all in. We're probably about 20 here, if that's helpful. I just won't go too deep.

Nathan Latka

06:11Well, it's exciting. Mean, that's exciting. Right? I like to a lot of people say, know, they're AI machine learning, but they have one engineer, and I'm going, ah. Yeah. That's that's baloney.

Cindy Gordon

06:18>> Yeah. So we're we're yeah. We're past that. Was a point where we were at that point, though, for sure.

Self-Funding: Own and Family Capital

Nathan Latka

06:24Yeah. Fair. Fair enough. Now tell me more about how you got this going early on. It sounded like you were really in build mode for two years pre revenue back in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. How did you fund this early on? Was it your own capital, or how'd you do that?

Cindy Gordon

06:35>> Yeah, no, it's my own capital, our families. Mean, I've been privileged to have had a number of good successful careers, you could take a little bit more risk, right? There's also being a former VC, obviously, if you can bootstrap, that's in your best interest for your valuation and the dilution. So I've kind of seen all of that in the good, bad, and the ugly. So that was very much a purposeful strategy, was to see, could we

06:59>> build it? Could we actually start to secure revenue? Could we start to self fund? Make some sacrifices along the way, make sure that the engineers are well looked after, and we've been able to retain our talent, which has been great, right? So now we're at the stage where it's a matter of, okay, time to scale up further and also differentiate. It's a fast moving market. That's why we're probably streaming more into the advanced behavioral analytics side

07:27>> of things because we've got our predictive layer built. We've got our prescriptive coaching insights layer, and now we're adding on the advanced sort of behavioral insights, which is interesting. But you can't get there unless you get the solid foundations and you know that the data will have the insights that you need to drive to that more guided selling actionable. So you're not just, you know, surfacing crap. It's so easy to surface crap with these AI agents

07:57>> and salespeople have zero, they have zero patience. If you're not delivering value from the get go, you it won't last.

Nathan Latka

08:06So Doctor. Cindy, you get this to market in 2014. I assume maybe you sent your first customer that year as well. You now have six, seven years of growth under your belt. How many customers are you now serving today?

Cindy Gordon

08:17>> I won't disclose that, Nathan. Again, we're privately held. That's information that I don't disclose. I'm sorry.

Customer Logos: Purolator, Rogers, Aspen

Nathan Latka

08:22No problem. Are there any logos you put on your website where you feature case studies that you can talk about?

Cindy Gordon

08:27>> Yeah, of course. Purolator would be our largest account. We have

Nathan Latka

08:31How do you say that? Sorry. Pure what?

Cindy Gordon

08:32>> Purolator would be it's a $2,000,000,000 company. So that's one of our largest accounts where we're running all of their insights for all channels in the company and very referenceable. So yes, it's on our website with a great deal of pride.

Nathan Latka

08:49Yeah. No, this is great. You have Purolator, Quartz, Aspen, Rogers, Mondo Versature, RelationEdge. So you have at least 10 customers here, at least 10 enterprise customers you have listed.

Cindy Gordon

09:00>> We have a number of customers. Yes.

Nathan Latka

09:03Yeah. Well, again, I don't wanna dig into your private stuff. I'm just literally trying to respect you and say this is what's on the website. You have at least 10 listed here.

Cindy Gordon

09:10>> Yep. We have at least that many.

Nathan Latka

09:12Is there a sector you're focused on specific? Like is pure later and going deeper into that space a focus for you? Are you really serving anyone that needs the sales intelligence tools?

Vertical Focus: Logistics and Tech

Cindy Gordon

09:21>> That's a good question. I think we've decided we're going to really double down hard on just two industries. I think we've maybe gone a little bit too broad. I think the two that are the most promising are probably the transportation logistics and probably the broad technology sector. They just have higher adoption ratios in terms of, you know, they usually have a lot of data as well and they're not still working through understanding data science or advanced

09:51>> analytics. Like they're kind of ready to take the next step, right? And that's what's really important with finding the right kind of customer. They need a lot of data and they have to have a fair bit of process discipline in the culture so they've got more data quality that's been optimized.

Bootstrapped Today, Raising Next

Nathan Latka

10:08Now, this makes a lot of sense. Now, you mentioned the importance of being bootstrapped and you saw it firsthand being a former VC. So are you bootstrapped today or have you raised capital?

Cindy Gordon

10:16>> We're just starting to peak out. There comes a point where in order to scale faster, you need even deeper resources. So we are starting to do our pitches and get out and be visible.

10:29>> I would let's put this, but there's never enough time in the day to balance being an operator and raising capital. But we are poking our head out, Nathan, and hopefully over the next six to twelve months, we'll have secured our first round.

Nathan Latka

10:44And take me into your head a little bit. Again, you saw both sides of this. So when you go out and think about how much is the right amount to raise, how do you think about what that amount is? What's right for you guys right now?

Raise Target and Plans

Cindy Gordon

10:53>> I think probably a raise between 2,000,000 to $3,000,000 is probably a good target. Typically, can't get a firm in unless you're raising at least a million, right? So we've kind of got an overall goal. We don't need a lot of capital. I just want to be able to scale up harder in terms of sales and marketing. And, you know, definitely the Series B round would probably be a much bigger injection. I think you have, you know,

11:21>> at this stage, you're wise to build it out more, validate more, make sure you've got a well oiled machine that can be repeatable in terms of your sales coverage. And that's one of the hardest things. Right?

Nathan Latka

11:32Do you have that? Do you have at least one full time AE that's like hitting a quota you're comfortable with scaling around that same model?

Cindy Gordon

11:39>> We have a name. When we have an AE, we actually have a few people in sales now. I don't think that it's in that repeatable zone. I think that's the one that we're still figuring out hard, right? Sometimes there's so much sales DNA and the CEO and Founder, right? And that's also translating, I can't be in all the sales calls, right? Yep. We have learned a few things. We've learned that because to sell AI and advanced

12:04>> analytics, you have to hire probably an engineering base and also an MBA is not a bad idea because the kinds of people that we like to hit, we don't sell low, right? So these decisions usually have to be able to have a good discussion with a VP of sales or a CRO. And a traditional BDR, they're not gonna be able to do that, right?

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Habits

Nathan Latka

12:27Doctor Cindy, this is exciting. Yeah. We look forward to watching you go out and get the raise done. I also love it if you stay bootstrapped and you go to $4,000,000 to $5,000,000, $10,000,000 revenue and come back on and give us an update. But in the meantime, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Cindy Gordon

12:40>> Oh, you're making me think. Maybe Good to Great. I know that might date myself, but I do like

12:46>> That's a good one.

Nathan Latka

12:47Number two, is there a founder you're following or studying?

Cindy Gordon

12:51>> Oh, I think everybody's at least I'm watching Elon Musk, not to, you know and I obviously, Steve Jobs. I mean, I think everybody followed. I still follow Bill Gates. I still follow the Google guys. I mean, you know, in terms of new, new folks that are emerging, Well, I think the Uber story with CEO leadership or the challenges was an interesting one to follow-up.

Nathan Latka

13:13Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business?

Cindy Gordon

13:17>> Favorite online tool for building the business? Well, I guess I use Salesforce every day, so I guess I better

Nathan Latka

13:23That's a good answer. That's a good answer. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get?

Cindy Gordon

13:27>> Last night, I think I had four and a half. I I had a proposal to work on, so I jumped out at 04:30 and think my husband was a little bit upset. But I, yeah, so it varies, but I usually try and get at least six, seven hours, but it does vary if there's some things crunching or your head's, you know, exploding.

Nathan Latka

13:44And Doctor. Cindy, what's your situation? Sounds like married. Any kiddos running around?

Cindy Gordon

13:47>> Yeah, we have two kiddos. They're they're still running around, but they're definitely they don't need much babysitting anymore.

Nathan Latka

13:55And can I ask you how old you are?

Cindy Gordon

13:57>> No. You can't. Well,

Nathan Latka

14:01I ask that question because it gives people other other inspiration. Other people with two kids who are married can jump on and do it. But if you don't wanna share, that's totally fine. Last

Cindy Gordon

14:08>> even my mom doesn't say that, and she's in her early eighties, and we always say we're 16, you know, and holding.

Nathan Latka

14:15Alright. Last question. Take us back to your 20 year old self. What's something you wish that she knew?

Cindy Gordon

14:20>> My 20 year old self wished something that she she knew that I didn't I don't know now.

Nathan Latka

14:25And just something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Cindy Gordon

14:28>> I wish I knew back when I was 20 how explosive technology was going to be, because I think I would have spent more time. I did some earlier programming, but I think I would have stayed deeper in the tech stream before going into the business stream. But, you know, obviously, I've kept learning. But, yeah, I think that would be one thing. I mean, it's just pervasive. Right? So if you don't understand tech, you know, you're you're

14:53>> probably a relic.

Nathan Latka

14:55Guys, there you have it. Saleschoice.com, helping you get deeper insights into your sales pipeline, your funnel, and closing how your salespeople are performing. She launched the business back in 2013, bootstrapped up to today, looking at raising, call it, 2 to 3,000,000 in the next twelve months. We'll see what happens. She's serving at least 10 customers, and she's averaging right now about $100,000 per contract, so very much an enterprise motion. You can assume from those numbers that

15:15they're north of a million dollar run rate at this point with their team of 20 as they continue to scale. Cindy, thank you for taking us to the top.

Cindy Gordon

15:21>> Thanks, Nathan. Really appreciate the time and my apologies for being late.

Nathan Latka

15:27One 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 one

15:52p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two 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 SaaS world, whether it's

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