Founder Interview
How SalesPlaybook Reached About $700K in Revenue with 50 Customers in 2021 (Interview with CEO Manuel Hartmann)
- Interview Date
- December 2021
- Interviewee
- Manuel HartmannFounder and CEO
Company Metrics at Interview Time
Revenue (2021)
$700K
Active Customers (2021)
50
Price per Customer (2021)
$800-$1,800 per month
Team Size (2021)
8
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Manuel Hartmann during his December 2021 interview with Nathan Latka and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. The 2021 revenue is what he expected the year to close at, not a booked result. No currency is named anywhere in the recording: he gives every figure as a bare amount ("700 k", "90 ks", "150 ks", "10 to 20 k"), and SalesPlaybook is based in Switzerland, so the amounts may have been quoted in Swiss francs rather than dollars. See SalesPlaybook’s current numbers.
Key Takeaways
- 01SalesPlaybook generated approximately $700K in revenue in 2021
- 02The company had 50 active customers at the time of the interview
- 03Customers typically pay $800 to $1,800 per month, billed semiannually or annually
- 04The team grew from 2 to 8 people, with over $150K invested in the coaching platform
- 05SalesPlaybook is 100% bootstrapped with no plans to raise outside capital
- 06Client Boost Bar went from 0 to 2,000,000 in booked ARR in 15 months through the program — a customer's result, not SalesPlaybook's revenue
- 07Manuel Hartmann founded SalesPlaybook in 2019 after being the first sales rep at AI SaaS company Onedot
- 08Manuel pays himself $90K per year and takes no distributions, leaving earnings in the business to target $10M ARR
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (2021) | $700K | Founder interview, Dec 2021 (currency not stated on tape) |
| Active Customers (2021) | 50 | Founder interview, Dec 2021 (currency not stated on tape) |
| Price per Customer (2021) | $800-$1,800 per month | Founder interview, Dec 2021 (currency not stated on tape) |
| Team Size (2021) | 8 | Founder interview, Dec 2021 (currency not stated on tape) |
| Year Founded | 2019 | Founder interview, Dec 2021 (currency not stated on tape) |
| Platform Investment (2021) | $150K+ | Founder interview, Dec 2021 (currency not stated on tape) |
| CEO Annual Salary (2021) | $90K | Founder interview, Dec 2021 (currency not stated on tape) |
| Customer Lifetime (2021) | 3-4 months, now signing first 12-month deals | Founder interview, Dec 2021 (currency not stated on tape) |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
Manuel Hartmann reported SalesPlaybook would generate approximately $700K in revenue for 2021.
Customers
SalesPlaybook had 50 active customers at the time of the interview. Customer lifetime had improved significantly, with the company moving from three to four month engagements to signing first twelve-month agreements.
Team
The core team grew from 2 to 8 people. SalesPlaybook also introduced the concept of lead coaches, external specialists who are not employed by the company but take customers through specific journeys such as sales hiring.
Funding and Founder Pay
SalesPlaybook is 100% bootstrapped with no plans to raise outside capital. Manuel keeps his own salary at $90K per year and leaves earnings in the business rather than taking distributions, including over $150K invested into building the coaching platform.
Growth Strategy
Coaching Platform Investment
SalesPlaybook invested over $150K into building a scalable coaching platform to move beyond pure consulting. This allowed the company to deliver standalone knowledge products and group coaching alongside one-on-one engagements.
Lead Coach Model
Rather than hiring all coaches internally, SalesPlaybook introduced a lead coach model where external specialists, such as top recruiters or experienced sales leaders, take customers through specific journeys. This allowed the team to scale expertise without growing headcount proportionally.
Attracting Top Sales Leaders as Part-Time Coaches
Manuel described recruiting the best sales leaders from successful startups to become coaches for two to four hours per week or month. This made high-caliber sales expertise accessible to early-stage B2B startups that could not otherwise afford or attract such talent.
Founder-Led Validation Before Hiring
A core principle Manuel teaches is that founders must sell the first five, ten, twenty customers themselves before hiring sales reps. This ensures a repeatable process exists before scaling the team.
European Market Focus
SalesPlaybook built a strong position in the European B2B startup market. Manuel noted that geography made the company largely non-competitive with North America-focused firms such as Uvaro — they are "really strong in North America" and SalesPlaybook is "really strong in Europe" — with the two about to jump on a partner call.
Best Quotes
“We're probably at around 50 active customers, so customer lifetime was back then around three to four months, which is signing our first twelve months agreement. So customer lifetime for some customers is increasing drastically.”
“No. They're typically paying... semiannually or annually, like, investing 10 to 20 k. So pretty much, like, 800 to $1,800 a month.”
“Probably around 700 k.”
“Killing it right now is, for example, Boost Bar. They went 0 to 2,000,000 in booked ARR, annual recurring revenue in fifteen months. So they started literally at zero CRM.”
“The core teams came from two to eight people, but we invested 150 ks plus into the coaching platform, so at a scalable knowledge, basically standalone knowledge, like information product, and building a coaching platform.”
“I think that the first do is make really clear you have a halfway repeatable process, right? Like, founder does it first, so you need to validate, you need to sell the first five, ten, 20 customers, depending on ticket size yourself.”
“No. Bootstrapped. 100%.”
“I don't take distributions out of the company, so my salary has remained the same for the last seven years, pretty much like 90 ks. I want to leave it in a company so we can build a 10,000,000 ARR company in the next four years.”
What Happened Next
This interview captures SalesPlaybook in December 2021, when Manuel Hartmann expected the year to close at around $700K in revenue, with 50 active customers and a team of eight, all bootstrapped. The figures here are a historical snapshot reported at that time and do not reflect the company's current state. Visit the SalesPlaybook company profile on GetLatka for the most up-to-date metrics and any subsequent funding or growth milestones.
View SalesPlaybook’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Company Overview
- 0:23What SalesPlaybook Actually Does
- 1:14Customer Count and Contract Evolution
- 1:492021 Revenue and Cumulative Sales Milestone
- 2:12Consulting vs SaaS and the Coaching Platform
- 3:01Customer Success Stories: Boost Bar and Others
- 3:53Manuel's Background and Credibility
- 4:35Team Size and Bootstrapped Status
- 5:11Personal Finances and Long-Term Vision
- 6:36Top Dos and Don'ts for Scaling a Sales Team
- 7:53Competition and Partnership with Uvaro
- 8:51Famous Five Rapid Fire
Introduction and Company Overview
Nathan Latka
00:00Hey folks, my guest today is Manuel Hartmann. He's the Founder and CEO of SalesPlaybook, building Europe's number one sales acceleration platform for B2B startups. They've got 170 startups using the technology today, combining knowledge, coaching offers, and talents. Bootstrapped to the first million bucks in revenue in under three years help customers go from 0 to 2,000,000 in booked ARR in under fifteen months and more. Manuel, are you ready to take us to the top?
Manuel Hartmann
00:21>> Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me.
What SalesPlaybook Actually Does
Nathan Latka
00:23So just to be clear, if my audience falls in love with you and they're a European based SaaS startup, they might hire you to help them scale. You're sort of like an outsourced SDR firm. Is that right?
Manuel Hartmann
00:33>> We're not outsourcing SDRs, so we're not done for your business, but really a sales coaching platform. You think kind of in CoachHub, but really specific for B2B startup sales in SaaS.
Nathan Latka
00:44Okay. So they can't you won't help them hire a rep, but you could coach their current reps?
Manuel Hartmann
00:48>> We we can help them hire the rep. We can help them write the right sales position contract, put them in touch with top recruiters in Europe, help them attract the right talent by being very specific. As for a lot of startups, that's not the case. They just say like, I need more bodies like to work in sales.
Nathan Latka
01:05Interesting. Okay. Now, when you came on a year ago, well, almost a year. Oh, yeah, was about a year ago. You had about 30 customers paying $500 a month. Where are you today?
Customer Count and Contract Evolution
Manuel Hartmann
01:14>> We're probably at around 50 active customers, so customer lifetime was back then around three to four months, which is signing our first twelve months agreement. So customer lifetime for some customers is increasing drastically. Still not at the two to seven years you want as a sales company, but we're getting there.
Nathan Latka
01:33And how much are those customers still paying about $500 a month?
Manuel Hartmann
01:36>> No. They're typically paying
Nathan Latka
01:38like, they're
Manuel Hartmann
01:38>> paying semiannually or annually, like, investing 10 to 20 k. So pretty much, like, 800 to $1,800 a month.
Nathan Latka
01:45So how much revenue do you think you do in 2021?
2021 Revenue and Cumulative Sales Milestone
Manuel Hartmann
01:49>> Probably around 700 k.
Nathan Latka
01:50700 k. Got it. So you have done now to date well, you've broken that million dollar mark in total sales, which is a big a big metric. Congrats.
Manuel Hartmann
01:58>> Thank you.
Nathan Latka
01:59Alright. How do you do do you this is gonna sound like a horrible question. I do not enjoy consulting. I just I have no patience for it. I'm like,
02:06I move to SaaS as fast as possible.
02:08So, like, are you gonna move to SaaS or do you enjoy this consulting thing?
Consulting vs SaaS and the Coaching Platform
Manuel Hartmann
02:12>> We tackle this question a lot internally, right? How much do we want to do with the core team? The core teams came from two to eight people, but we invested 150 ks plus into the coaching platform, so at a scalable knowledge, basically standalone knowledge, like information product, and building a coaching platform. So we're still gonna do customer success, we're still gonna do, like the check ins and the guidance, but we also implement the concept of a
02:36>> lead coach, which is not basically employed by us, but a customer comes in and say, I really want to work specifically on the sales hiring. And then there's like a recruiter, for example, which takes them on his journey and is not the coaching is not done by us apart from the group coaching.
Nathan Latka
02:53Okay. Got it. And so when you look at some of the companies that have been most successful going through your program, you mentioned Wowflow about a year ago, but who's killing it right now?
Customer Success Stories: Boost Bar and Others
Manuel Hartmann
03:01>> Killing it right now is, for example, Boost Bar. They went 0 to 2,000,000 in booked ARR, annual recurring revenue in fifteen months. So they started literally at zero CRM
Nathan Latka
03:10Who was that? Sorry.
Manuel Hartmann
03:11>> Boost Bar. Boost Bar? AR. Exactly. So they just they just went into, like, validating market segments and, like, finding their ICP really quickly for the first six months. Didn't really sell like a customer because just like longer sales cycles, but once they hit it, they really hit it off and went to 100 of sales really quickly. Another customer
Nathan Latka
03:35Yeah, go ahead. Keep going.
Manuel Hartmann
03:37>> Classed at a similar stage as Wowflow back then, and they always had like one k, five ks tickets, and now they just closed their second 6 figure deal with like a big, big institution which could grow to like higher 6 figures pretty quickly.
Manuel's Background and Credibility
Nathan Latka
03:53People, especially my listeners, will be very sceptic of like consultants I have on the show. It's like, why are you qualified to teach this? What's sort of your background here?
Manuel Hartmann
04:01>> My background is like first sales rep at an AI SaaS company myself, where I was really like good doing a lot of trial and errors. I was talking to a lot of other salespeople, CEOs like, hey, where do you learn this? They were like pretty much by trial and error. But some people go with successful sales startups, right? Like that scale with them, like from 100 ks to a million to 10. And we just get the
04:23>> best sales leaders to become coaches part time, like can be anywhere like two to four hours, like a week or even a month, and get them to make them accessible to people who they would otherwise not be.
Team Size and Bootstrapped Status
Nathan Latka
04:35How many folks are on your team now today?
Manuel Hartmann
04:37>> Eight. Eight people.
Nathan Latka
04:38Okay. Very cool. Now have you stayed bootstrapped or did you raise capital?
Manuel Hartmann
04:43>> No. Bootstrapped. 100%.
Nathan Latka
04:44We love bootstrapped. That's great. Any plans to raise or no?
Manuel Hartmann
04:47>> No. I've had some discussion like, hey. Do you want to? Like, do you want to build a 100,000,000 company? Was like, so far, 100% pushed up.
Nathan Latka
04:55And and how do you personally think about how how old are you? Think we're probably around the same age. Right?
Manuel Hartmann
05:00>> Yeah. 33 at Christmas for me.
Nathan Latka
05:02Oh, very cool. Yeah. Okay. I'm 32. So how do think about building your personal net worth here so you can take bigger risks, maybe do some angel investing or other stuff? I mean, you take distributions out of the company or how do you manage that?
Personal Finances and Long-Term Vision
Manuel Hartmann
05:11>> I don't take distributions out of the company, so my salary has remained the same for the last seven years, pretty much like 90 ks. I want to leave it in a company so we can build a 10,000,000 ARR company in the next four years. What we are really interested in these segments, like all the mastermind coaches, is we're all in similar phase of building a company from 6 to 7 figures, then 8 figures in the next
05:33>> three to five years. And then really have like the SalesPlaybook mafia and just work like a Navy Seal team on market traction. And it might be that we found like a little like an angel investor club, like sales sales tech ventures or however we do it, or we we become pretty operational as a SWAT team that you bring in if you need results really quickly, we'll figure that out.
Nathan Latka
05:54Mhmm. And so you've paid yourself $90,000 a month for the past nine years.
05:58Is that what you said?
Manuel Hartmann
05:59>> A year. Not a month.
Nathan Latka
06:00Oh, sorry. $90,000 a year for the past nine years.
06:02Interesting. Okay.
Manuel Hartmann
06:04>> It. Pretty much.
06:05>> I was employed before SalesPlaybook. Right? So I didn't determine my own salary before.
Nathan Latka
06:10Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay. Interesting. This makes a lot of sense. So you, again, got going in 2019, I believe. Right? That was the start?
06:15Right.
06:16And and what was the company that you were at? You mentioned you were at an AI startup?
Manuel Hartmann
06:20>> Yeah. One Dot. So o n e d o t.
Nathan Latka
06:23Interesting. Okay. And for people listening right now, maybe they they, you know, they don't wanna spend more time on this outside of this interview. Give me like the top three, like, do's and don'ts of scaling to the first five members of your sales team, your outbound sales team.
Top Dos and Don'ts for Scaling a Sales Team
Manuel Hartmann
06:36>> I think that the first do is make really clear you have a halfway repeatable process, right? Like, founder does it first, so you need to validate, you need to sell the first five, ten, 20 customers, depending on ticket size yourself. Number two, hire for attitude. So really, like, get people who are hungry, hands on, intelligent, curious, rather than work at Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, MongoDB, whatever, whatever. And the third one is invest enough into ramping them into
07:05>> mock up calls, into like case studies, taking them on sales calls early on, coaching them, right? Which which is like, especially remote, can slip pretty quickly. On the three don'ts, I think is hire too early, hire before you sign your first customer and you need to validate that product, that message market fit first, right, before you can validate the person sales fit, so to say. The second thing was just like hire people who want to have
07:31>> a really high base pay, that's pretty much like total confidence. Like, I need 10 ks base, why are you not confident? And the third one would be really people that do it for the wrong reasons that are not customer centric enough and that are not interested in helping you like build a company. They just want to make a commission check because these will be frustrated and leave pretty soon for a big tech.
Competition and Partnership with Uvaro
Nathan Latka
07:53Now are you competing with these firms like Uvaro or do they go through your platform? They just raised a 12,000,000 series a.
Manuel Hartmann
07:59>> Yeah. I actually had Joseph, Founder and CEO of Uvaro on our podcast just two weeks ago. Fantastic guy. So they're focusing more on a, like salespeople, people who want to build a career in sales, like cross from truck driver, barkeeper and so on, which is great. We need more in the workforce that's helping us. And secondly, like, we've established firms like with the art ramping up their SDRs. I think with the second one, we would compete
08:27>> to a certain degree, but we're actually just jumping on a partner call next Wednesday to see because they're really strong in North America, we're really strong in Europe. So the geography is like making noncompetitive.
Nathan Latka
08:40Yep. Very interesting. Hot space. Now, Manuel, if people want to learn more about you guys, where can they find you online?
Manuel Hartmann
08:45>> You can find me online on LinkedIn, Manuel Hartmann or thesalesplaybook.io.
Famous Five Rapid Fire
Nathan Latka
08:51Very cool. And famous five. Let's wrap up here. Number one favorite business book?
Manuel Hartmann
08:56>> Speed of Trust.
Nathan Latka
08:57Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Manuel Hartmann
09:03>> Various in the sales space, like you, like regarding the podcast, Dan Martell, Jerry Meyer, like, actually the BEXIO for plus minus 100,000,000 in Switzerland. You can imagine him like an accounting software, like, I don't know the name, like Xero is called in The US.
Nathan Latka
09:21Yep.
09:22Yeah. Yep. Okay. Great.
09:24Number four. How many hour number three number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?
Manuel Hartmann
09:28>> Roughly seven.
Nathan Latka
09:29Seven.
09:30And situation? Married, single kids?
Manuel Hartmann
09:32>> Married, becoming a dad on Christmas, pretty much.
Nathan Latka
09:34Oh, wow. Congrats.
09:35So you're turning you've got a birthday.
09:37How how old are you?
Manuel Hartmann
09:39>> 33. 33.
Nathan Latka
09:40On Christmas myself.
09:42You have a birthday, '33, and and a baby on around Christmas.
Manuel Hartmann
09:46>> Plan for December 27. Let's see how it goes.
Nathan Latka
09:48Wow. That's exciting. Congratulations. Last thing here. What's something you wish you when you were 20?
Manuel Hartmann
09:54>> Going into sales, like, full speed on much earlier. Like, don't don't divert to consulting and something else.
Nathan Latka
10:01Guys, his customers have gone from 0 to $2,000,000 in run rate in under fifteen months. He's running thesalesplaybook.io. He launched it back in 2019 after running sales at an early artificial intelligence B2B SaaS startup. He was doing $30,000 a month about a year ago, about $360,000 total in sales last year. He's gonna break 700,000 this year. Nice growth rate. Team of eight totally bootstrapped. Manuel, thank you for taking us to the top.
Manuel Hartmann
10:21>> Thanks so much.
Nathan Latka
10:23One 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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11:11fundraise, 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 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 can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign
11:32up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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.
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