SalesScreen Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] So good to be here. I'm sitting around Norwegian bike games with a time between Upper West Side here in New York and Norway. I have actually a pretty famous name, brother, called Haaland, if you ever watch soccer. He's actually from the same place as well as Stalingrad. So funny enough, we're not related. So unfortunately, I don't have his talents. But I'm gonna go over, obviously, you know, the heading is about efficiency in the company. And we're [00:29] gonna talk about three things that has really made it for us. Number one, being you know, Darmesh from CTO coined this, but aligning vectors. It's really really important when you're few people, and you're trying to do a lot, to make sure that there's a top level strategy that everyone is working towards, and that we're working in the same direction. Secondly, and now we're getting more into sales development space, but in general, when you have business outcomes [00:55] that you're seeking to to get to and outcomes you wanna drive. Let's say, we wanna surpass a $10,000,000 threshold. Okay. That's great. But how are you gonna get there? Like, really bite sizing it, breaking it down is important. And finally, once you know what actions each individual is has to take, it's all about motivation. How do you get the team rallied out and and make those vectors even stronger? So those are some of the things that [01:21] we're gonna go through. Just to set like, salesscreen in a bit of a context, we should be around $8,000,000 this year. We're a sales gamification platform. So we service tons of different inside sales teams and make their sales work really fun and engaging. So you know, think about having your sales team really dialing those extra 10 dice every day to get to their outcomes even quicker. So how do you do that? You kinda make it fun [01:51] and exciting, you engage them in competition, you visualize their data, and yada yada. Not important. The point is, we actually started out as a bootstrap company. So this is ingrained in my DNA, and it happened all the way back in 2011, while the salesscreen platform came out in 2014. And it wasn't until 2018 I raised money for the first time, and that's when I heard I was really terrible at spending money. So it took me a [02:18] year before I actually started to to have the appetite to burn cash, But once we started to do, obviously, yeah, you know, growth becomes easier when you're burning money for sure. But now the market's turned again, and suddenly it's sexy to be efficient. We did as many others, a right sizing of the team, and we're back to our roots. And we've learned quite a lot on the way. So that's a little bit about us. So I'm [02:43] just gonna start out with the most important topic, because we, as operators, as founders, and as CEOs, we really need to have a strategy. We need to have a plan. If you're gonna grow as a company and you're gonna grow efficiently, you need to have some sort of a vision on how that's gonna happen. So you have that top level plan. Great. Now, you know, we need to set their expectations. We need to communicate it in [03:08] a way that everyone follows and really create transparency around it, and then make sure that progress is being checked in on regularly, not only for the CEO and exec team, but for everyone. So obviously, I would say that if you get people aligned and going down that path, that's really when you're gonna see the maximum impact. Some people might not, you know, do it at the same speed or or really nail this, but as long as [03:36] they go in the same direction, that's when you're gonna move the needle as a company. An OKR framework is obviously one that's really utilized to make this happen, and we've done that as well for many years. This is a screenshot of our Notion implementation. The problem for me with OKR framework was the missing you know, there was something missing from it. We set high level objectives. We had the key results. There was stretching them. Everyone knew [04:01] about it. We talked about it. We checked in on progress. But it was still not really aligning everyone. And when people are not aligned, they're you know, you're gonna do many things that's not valuable to the company overall. So what practicode for us was actually implementing a concept of initiatives. And I've heard actually several speakers already talk to this. So if you're a founder or an operator in a smaller SaaS with a smaller team, you might [04:31] not have felt the pain yet, but as you grow, it becomes more and more important to take those key results and break it into monthly initiatives with key deliverables. So for me this has been huge. When we actually implemented this concept of initiatives, then we made sure from a top level, I knew that every key result that we were working on actually had something concrete happening. And if there was no initiatives in the company on a [05:01] key result, how are you gonna get to that one? You're not gonna get to that goal. You're not gonna get to that result unless something changes. Like that is the definition of insanity. So then you're gonna have to challenge the one that owns that key result because each should be owned by an executive. Why are we not doing any initiatives? What's going on? You need to gather more feedback from teams. You need to to promote your [05:27] key result So that next month when we get together as an executive team, you bring me at least three initiatives that's gonna influence this key result. Because if not, we're never gonna reach it. And then you obviously, you cannot use that meeting amongst executives to align on your top priorities, and then you will see that you have coverage. And suddenly, then you can go back to the company and tell exactly, okay, you know, this is where [05:56] we're at on the year long objective of the company. This is how we progress on the key results that we set, and this is the initiatives that we completed last month. This is what we're gonna do next month. So when you're talking to someone else, you know exactly what their key initiatives are, what they're working on, and what's important for that. So you can help them, but you can also much more easily say, no, I don't [06:17] have to pass you right now. These are the key initiatives that we're working on, and I have to complete them by the end of the month. If not, it's on you. And this is huge. So when you have that from the top, then you can start to be a bit more tactical on the manager level, on the VP level. So alright, we have monthly initiatives with deliverables, we have key results that we're aiming for, and often [06:40] they are outcomes. So how do you break them down and distill it into something that the individual contributors can actually action on? This, I call it bite sizing goals, and it's really about like trading a funnel of activity that leads up to that outcome in the end. So I'm gonna give you an example. We work with tons of sales development teams and, you know, SDRs, what's building pipeline, especially in the SaaS industry. I thought that was [07:08] relevant. So I gathered some data from some of our clients to figure out, you know, okay, obviously they wanna create five sales qualified leads every month. How do they do that? You know? That's the outcome that you wanna go for. Well, mostly you need to have some discovery calls. Alright. How do you do that? Well, okay. You have different touch points with them. You call them. You send emails to them. You link and connect with them. [07:34] Alright. So, you know, how do you get that going? Where do you start? Well, you start by adding prospects to a sequence. So you need to figure out the context when you need accounts into prospecting, add them to a sequence that generates tasks, and you need to complete them regularly and build a good habit. So now we actually have actions that can be influenced on the IC level to get to that pipeline goal that we've been [07:58] talking about. Actually, how many contacts do you need to add every day? How many calls do you need to make every day to get those meetings? We checked with, like, five different enterprise level SaaS teams. So keep in mind, these have a pretty strong brand, which makes it a bit simpler. I'm not gonna lie. But the solution or the answer here is 58. So 58 prospects added to the sequence was necessary to get a meeting and [08:25] outreach. And also, we needed to do at least 33 cold call attempts to get a meeting. Actually, I think this number should be much higher, so I was a bit surprised that it was that low. We have tons of customers that are small start ups, and they have seventy, eighty, 90 calls to get a meeting. That's not normal. But now that you know the actions that you need to take to get to that goal, the outcome [08:47] that we're driving towards, obviously it makes things a lot simpler. Because I've talked to people who's doing 10 cold calls [08:56] a week or 50, like you're never gonna get to your target. You need to know what is the actions that we need to take in order to get there. And once you do that, we're starting to really recognize the fact that as a small team, like as an efficient team, we need to put in the work. This is not easy. And you're creating that benchmark and those goals, and it's becoming very transparent to our organization. Everyone [09:22] sees what everyone's working on, and you bite sized the outcomes into key actions that you're gonna take, and then you're getting to the final point. Like, once you have the quantity unlocked, what about the quality? Like I hear this all the time. Like, well 70 calls, 33 calls, 20 calls, doesn't matter. Like one call is enough if excellent quality, right? Well, I would say you need a balance. So you need to have quantity and you need [09:51] to have quality. It's not maintainable to give you 300 phone calls a day, like that's not gonna be good for you, so no, it's not only about quantity. But once you start to have that funnel of actions that then IC can influence, so you can see differences in the team and you can coach them if they're struggling. So if some someone is making a 100 cold calls and getting those meetings, great. If another person needs to [10:17] take 200, there's something wrong in their way that you communicate with clients. So then you know what you need to coach them on. And ultimately, now that you kind of distill down the top level goals into key results and initiatives that you're working on, then you figured out in the manager or VP level what is the key actions that our team needs to take to to actually deliver on these initiatives, then it becomes all about motivation. [10:44] That's the final piece. Because then it's more execution. Right? You've done all the heavy planning. You've set your goals. You have key results that you're working towards. There is initiatives being done every month, and people are working in the same direction. You're heading in the same direction. The individuals, know what actions they need to take on a recurring basis to influence them. Alright, it's gonna be tough. Some days you might not hit your fall minimums of [11:14] just using that as an example because of x y z reason. Well, you know, that's probably not good enough. And when you're falling behind, you're gonna also have a problem. How do I like get my team to to catch up? And this is happening constantly. Right? Speed is a weapon. We've heard that several times today. So motivation actually is really important that you keep that center of your people strategy to be efficient in the team. So [11:42] some things that you can do. I would always say that you need to think about the individuals that you have in the team. And it starts with visualization in the center. So I talked about the OKR framework and all of that, but really it's about visualizing the work that people are putting in. And once you do that, you create accountability. People know what everyone is working on, and they know if they deliver or they fail to [12:09] deliver. So by just visualizing what people are doing, you create accountability and create a high performing type of environment. But if you're falling behind, you can stir up some competitions. You can have some spiffs. You can try to throw in something fun and get people to give that extra level of energy to get back on course. And once you do, make sure you reward them and celebrate them and talk about them Because it's not only about [12:37] the money that you're pocketing, it's also about the pats on the back and being seen and being recognized and being feeling like you're a part of the team. And then finally I talked about coaching, but you also need to celebrate the small things. And I've heard several people talk about that too. And if not able to do that as a CEO today, it's probably because you don't have the tools that enables you to see the smaller [12:58] wins. And there's multiple tools that can help you do that. I'm not gonna talk about the tools per se, but the fact is that individuals are motivated differently. Some people wanna climb on top of a leaderboard, other people wanna get that pat on the back. They wanna be seen by their colleagues because they're socialites. Or, you know, they wanna explore and build their careers. You need to figure out what is people's motivation, and you need to [13:24] set that in a structure that actually makes them deliver on those key actions, delivers the initiatives that falls onto that key results, and ultimately makes you reach your objectives and overarching goal. So, know, in this claim is, I've talked about three concepts that really has helped us at this stage in growth of PR right now, to gain efficiency as a company. And that is, you know, nobody is surplus. Nobody's, you really need to deliver, and you [13:55] need to deliver at high pace and multiple areas if you're gonna gain efficiency. So it starts with a top level strategy of the company, and you really need to make sure everyone is working in that direction. And if you're failing to deliver as a company then, well then the CEO's strategy has failed. Secondly, really break down your outcomes and objectives. It doesn't help to be constantly talking about we need to break $10,000,000 AR, or we need [14:26] to deliver on this objective if people don't understand what that actually means in work for them. And finally, once they knew know what they're supposed to do all the time, then it's all about motivation. Motivation. Just keep them on their toes and fired up and rallied to execute and perform high level. So that's it for me. If there's any questions, I'm happy to answer. Thanks, Arun. [14:51] >> Cool, Sindre. We have a couple minutes. Any questions for Sindre? [14:58] Great. Yeah. So does your application does SalesSpring integrate into a CRM to pull the data and do all that stuff? How do you integrate it to the sales teams to to pull the data and to motivate? [15:12] Yes. An example that I showed, that was actually the data from Outreach. So we typically integrate the CRMs for engagement tools. And we're trying to capture the actions that individuals can take by themselves and really gamify that. Because once you're gamifying outcomes, like close to one deal, like that's recognition, that's not gamification. You need to gamify the actions that people need to take consistently to get to the outcome. That's where you can actually change people's behaviors. [15:44] But yes, we do that. [15:46] >> Any other questions? [15:49] Yeah. Well, I think we'll start off. What's your thoughts on how much you expose as far as sales data, you know, with other you know, if you have big sales teams and, like, leaderboards of these are the top reps in this region, region, you know, because some companies keep those blocked off. They don't wanna see that. Any thoughts on on exposing that data to all the sales teams so everyone can see how they're performing? [16:14] Yeah. I think Ray Dalio talked about radical transparency, and I wanna say heard about him and his work. It's spot on. You know, I'm I'm very big advocate and fan of transparency in an organization. And I've had so many customers being afraid to showcase like a full leader board because they don't wanna, you know, step up someone's motivation. There's ways you can work around that. You can show top 50% of the team. You know, then it's [16:41] fine. You're motivating the killers, but let's not just focus on those top 2% performer. You also need to to, you know, have components that engage with the middle and core performers. So when you're running a competition, not only, you know, reward the top one, two, three performers, try to make it into a lottery for instance, so that every contribution counts. It gives you a ticket, and then you spin the wheel or you do a raffle. Suddenly, [17:07] as long as you do something, can win, and that's gonna engage a much bigger portion of the team. So we kinda need to think a bit about the the psychological profiles in the company and what makes them tick as well. [17:18] >> That is the perfect transition to our next speaker because we're gonna be talking about inspiring versus embarrassing and creating psychological safety. So thank you, Sindre. [17:29] Perfect. Thank you, all.

[00:00] Salesscreen.com launched back in 2011. They hit $2,000,000 in revenue in 2017, raised some early secondary, some early primary, used a credit line just as a backup. Today, they're doing about $8,000,000 in terms of run rate, serving 350 customers. They're moving upstream. ARPU has doubled the past twelve months. Each customer is paying on average $2,500 per month as as they look to continue to scale, really selling into big real estate companies and insurance companies, helping incentivize and [00:25] gamify their sales reps to hit certain pipeline targets. Hey, folks. My guest today is Sindre Haaland. He founded SalesScreen in 2011 when he was 22 years old in Norway. He has a master of science degree in industrial economy and technology with a specialization in computer science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In 2019, he moved to New York City, and today, he travels back and forth between The US and Europe as he builds his [00:48] sales gamification SaaS called salesscreen.com. Sindre, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Alright. Is this like, get your get your sales reps to play a game so they actually use the software and keep their pipeline updated? [01:03] >> Yeah. You could say that in a way in a way, but more so I would say you kind of have a business outcome you wanna reach. Let's say build pipeline as an example, you break it into actions that individuals themselves can influence, and you apply game like elements on those to kind of get them more excited, engaged, do more of those activities. And obviously, mathematically, it's going to lead to more pipeline. So [01:27] That's great. So give us an example of a customer paying you today. What are they paying you for exactly? [01:32] >> So it's usually that use case if it's in in the soft space or in the software, but we're the biggest in like insurance, in real estate and more transactional B2C types of environments. So it's to motivate their sales team to go, that's our mantra. So they're paying us per seat for SDRs or sales teams. And it could be clients like, you know, SAP or Seismic or IAD or yeah. A lot of different types of customers all [02:03] >> over the globe. [02:04] Mhmm. And are they still paying about $29 per user per month? [02:09] >> No, not really. I guess we have a couple of packages, so you could get it even cheaper, which is the recognition package where you get more of the visualization score. And if you want the full gamification, it's typically around $500 per user per year. [02:24] I see. Okay. [02:25] >> Well, more so what are discount or, you know, lower entry prices. [02:29] I guess just to avoid talking about every single potential use case and price point, what's the average customer pay you per month, would you say? [02:37] >> Per month, average. Right now, it's $2,500, around there. [02:42] Okay. That's great. So you've increased that almost two x, actually, exactly two x since the last time we spoke back in late twenty twenty one. You also mentioned in late twenty twenty one that you're in the middle of doing a capital raise. Obviously, now it's very hard to raise capital. But what happened to that capital raise in 2021? Did it close? Did you stop it? What happened? [03:00] >> We did a small bridge, and that is luckily for us sufficient to keep going. So we're profitable within the next twelve months. But the major capital raise that we were looking for also had some secondary some that fell short when the market crashed. We didn't feel hot on raising in a market like that. So we pulled the plug on that. [03:24] You did you did though, I think you did this very smartly. Your first ever external capital, I think was in 2017 for and you it was 4,000,000. 2,000,000 was secondary, I think. Right? [03:34] >> It was in 2018. So we had a 2,000,000 primary 500 k in secondary. And then we did a top off in 2020 when COVID came on similar amount. So yeah. [03:47] Oh, 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 [04:10] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [04:34] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [04:56] not 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 [05:22] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But [05:44] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.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. Alright. Let's jump back into [06:10] the interview. There's a lot of founders at your stage that they go, Nathan, like, don't wanna raise VC and ride that boat. I always tell them you gotta get secondary even on your first round. And so many of them founders struggle. They don't know how to ask with confidence for that secondary. How did you do it? How did you structure it? How'd you get it done? I think we were [06:29] >> one of the fortunate ones that got approached by quite a lot of VCs since we didn't raise anything prior to that date. And for them to kind of like sweeten the deal, they suggested that themselves. So it was more question of how much do we we need or want, and we didn't wanna sell everything. So, you know, it became a smaller seed round or call it whatever you want. [06:51] Sindre is the pretty girl walking down the street that everyone is chasing, saying, please take my secondary. Please, please, please. A good position to be in. [06:58] >> Actually helps. [06:59] It does help. It does help. Now, last time we spoke, you were working with 400 customers. How many are you at today? And what drove that growth? [07:06] >> Yeah, I guess it's a bit of the go to market strategy. At that point, we wanted to take in any type of customer. So we went fairly broadly, and we didn't have like a dialed in ICP. So it was a lot of SMEs as well. So reality is that we were probably not, I think we're even fewer customers than that today, like around three fifty, but much larger, as we also talked about with average contract value. [07:32] >> So I think we've done a major shift in going upmarket, and that's been quite successful. [07:38] It sounds like you've still driven obviously revenue growth despite the smaller number of just customers without looking at ARPU, right? So if you have three fifty customers at $2,500 a month, I mean, you guys are right, right around $8.50, $8,900 a month in revenue, right? [07:51] >> Yeah, we're a little bit well, around $8,000,000. We've had a bit of unfortunate luck with the US dollar lately, since we have quite a lot of customers invoiced in in Great British pound and Norwegian kroner and such. So yeah, that's taken a bit of a hit the last twelve months, but still pretty good. [08:11] Well, that can come back. Who knows? We'll see what happens. But Exactly. You you still drove a nice growth here from about a 6,000,000 run rate at those currency values in 2021 to $8,000,000 today. You've also, I think, mentioned you you did leverage, I think, a $4,000,000 loan in 2020 to preserve equity. Is that right? [08:28] >> It was kinda like more of a credit line, so we haven't really drawn a lot on that. So we still have that as buffer. [08:34] Interesting. How do you how do you think about that in terms of getting access to capital during a recession? [08:41] >> Well, I think it's a brilliant way to get access to capital during a recession. So if you have recurring revenue, and it's fairly predictable, you can leverage, you know, even your setup or vessel to get to either a credit line or some loan upfront, so you can continue to invest or have a better runway to your next fundraising. So I advise people to look into that if if they haven't done so already. [09:08] If you did pull money off that $4,000,000 line, what interest rate would you pay? [09:13] >> Around 7%. [09:14] 7%. Interesting. And is that fixed? Like, obviously, 2020, so far, didn't increase 4%. Has that has that facility, whoever is behind that facility, increased that rate on you over time or no? It's fixed at seven? [09:25] >> It has gone up a couple of times. Yeah. [09:27] Interesting. So in order to lock in the interest rate, you've got to pull the money and then but then you have to pay the interest rate even if it's sitting in your bank. [09:34] >> Yeah, exactly. So in this case, you can actually pay it back as soon as you have the money, which is great, you know, when you have fluctuations in seasonality and stuff like that. [09:43] So that's that's great. Okay. Any plans to raise capital right now or you're you're sitting tight? [09:49] >> I mean, in this market, if the price is right, we'll do it. I think that we would benefit greatly from it. But it's not an active push on our side right now with a bank or anything like that to raise. I think maybe after summer, it's going to be brighter times, and we'll see what happens. [10:07] What would be the right price today? [10:10] >> That's hard to say, you know. You know the multiples and how far down they've gone. So it's not like we expect double digit multiples at this stage. But, you know, yeah. [10:24] So you'd consider something that you'd consider like an 8x, 9x if someone approached you with that, you'd Absolutely. Look at [10:30] >> In this market, you would be insane not to honestly. I do think we're gonna bounce back to that level. Hopefully not in a too far distant future. [10:39] How do you manage that? Because like an 8x multiple on 8,000,000 revenue today would be a 64,000,000 valuation. But I seem to remember you telling me last time we chatted that you had a 120,000,000 rep val valuation on your last priced round, which means you have to have a weird conversation with employees that have option grants because they could effectively be underwater. How do you have that conversation? [10:56] >> I'm not sure where you got that number from actually. We were never valued at that level. Or actually, we were, but we didn't accept that offer. So I guess technically you're Ah, [11:06] that's where I got it from them. [11:08] >> So We've never taken a round at that level. Let's say like that. We've had term sheets, but that's a different thing. [11:14] I see. So would you say it's a good thing you didn't take raise that money at the higher valuation because then all the options would be underwater? [11:20] >> I think many people struggle with that right now. Was it smart to not raise it? I don't know. I wouldn't say that either. So [11:28] Yeah. Alright. Let's with our last couple minutes together here, let's talk more about product, which is what I love, right? What's what's on the product roadmap for SalesScreen? [11:38] >> For this year, it's actually simplifying it a bit, and making it just easier to maintain and use for our clients and make sure that they get value and they see the value directly inside the tool. We're going to work a bit more on the front end. So new competitions, new competition layouts. That's always fun and exciting. And we're also actually building a new PLG motion. So that's taken quite a bit of resources, but I think we [12:06] >> we have to. And I think it's a really brilliant way to get your customer acquisition cost down. So we're exploring that now, and hopefully, we'll have something live in a couple of months. [12:16] There you go. And how many folks are full time on the team today? [12:20] >> On the product team? [12:21] Just at the whole team? [12:22] >> Everybody. [12:23] Whole team. [12:23] >> Yeah. [12:24] >> We're just north of 40 people, around there. [12:27] Okay. 40. 40. Okay, I think last time you told me 50. So you did have to let some people go try and get [12:31] >> Yep. Your I think that, again, the world has changed. So we as as many others had to look at, you know, efficiency. And then now we're at, yeah, well, 175 to 200k per person, and that's much better. [12:48] Yep, revenue per employee. How'd you do it? Was it a group meeting in person? Was it an email to the team early in the morning? And then you come off from Slack? Like how I mean, this is a hard thing, right? But how do [12:58] >> Yeah. It is. It is. Now, in our case, we did one on ones with everyone that was affected, and we did it back back to back in one day. [13:08] Oh, wow. That was a draining day. [13:10] >> Oh, yeah, it wasn't fun. Yeah. I don't want to do that too often. But yeah, I mean, that's that's life. That's business, unfortunately. And it really is a terrible feeling as a CEO and a founder specifically, to let people that you love go. But at the same time, you have to think about the ones that are left and securing your livelihood. So that's what you have to do as a leader. [13:38] Well said, Sindre. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your the last book that you read? [13:45] >> Actually, I I don't even remember. It's been too long. [13:48] Okay. We'll say none. [13:48] >> It's only podcast these days. [13:50] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a CEO or founder that you're following or studying? [13:56] >> No. Not really. [13:58] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building SalesScreen? [14:03] >> For building SalesScreen? Visual Studio. [14:07] Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night? [14:11] >> Oh, I have two small kids. So six, maybe. [14:14] Okay. That's still pretty good with two kids. [14:16] >> So two so two two kids and I so so are you married? [14:19] >> Yeah. I'm married. [14:20] Okay. Married with two kids. And how old are you? [14:23] >> 33 years old. [14:25] >> 33 years old. [14:26] Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [14:32] >> I guess the value of a tight ICP. [14:37] Guys, there you have it. Salesscreen.com launched back in 2011. They hit $2,000,000 in revenue in 2017, raised some early secondary, some early primary, used a credit line just as a backup. Today, they're doing about $8,000,000 in terms of run rate, serving 350 customers. They're moving upstream. ARPU has doubled the past twelve months. Each customer is paying on average $2,500 per month as as they look to continue to scale, really selling into big real estate companies and [15:02] insurance companies, helping incentivize and gamify their sales reps to hit certain pipeline targets. Sindre, thanks for taking us to the top. [15:09] >> Thank you. [15:10] One 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 [15:36] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 an acquisition, a big [15:59] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna 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 up [16:20] 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. We [16:40] 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.

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is syndra holland he was born and raised in norway but lives with his beautiful wife son daughter and dog in brooklyn new york he's the founder and ceo of sales screen the world's most comprehensive gamification platform that creates a fun motivating and competitive atmosphere for revenue teams all right syndra you're ready to take it to the top sure all right this revenue space is sort of hot right now would you put yourself in like the revenue intelligence space or like the call tracking space or more like an hr tool gamification tool to help people meet their quota we're definitely a sales tool uh meaning you know that that's people that we talked to but i would say we're kind of like a counter balance to a lot of the craze uh recently you know with the outreach and uh i think it was gone um announcing get another you know gun buster round as they call it uh but they're all about like you know automation artificial intelligence machine learning we're more more about the humans it's like you know it's still people closing business and your biggest asset and cost i would say is people so how can you kind of unlock that next level by pushing the human reference so that's kind of where we sit so tell me more about sales screen what's the title of the person at a company that's usually paying for your technologies the head of sales how to revenue something else yeah it's usually uh you know all the way up to the top uh with the cro or chief commercial officer chief sales officer depending on the industry but um it's it's usually you know within the sales uh trajectory and and there's always sales enablement and um you know sales operations involved in evaluating the purchasing decision but eventually it's going to come up to the cro or like a vp sales type of personality and what are these cross paying for your technology on average per month you know an average deal for us uh it's it's around 24k um today so um it's it's a number that keeps on growing um quarter of a quarter center is that per year yeah yeah and and what are they paying for that typically there is a sort of number of seats feature based up selling or some usage based metric so our list price is uh it's fairly simple model it's it's 29 bucks per user per month for the base package it's paid annually of course and then you have five modules that you can add on top each of them costing seven dollars per user is that one of those modules that is more effective at upselling than others there's always you know two models uh that that i feel like uh that people pay out of the gate with um so what are the things like yeah you should almost like yeah just bundle them into the base package at this point i guess uh but yeah it's it's the boost module so it's like the actual gamification components with the competitions in particular and it's a reward reward module which is like um this coin that you can introduce to you inside a platform and then you can have your own internal web shop where people can exchange these coins that you make through unlocking badges or hitting your quota or you know um winning prices and competitions and exchange them for actual gift cards or or days off or giving push-ups your manager or whatever you want to have in that webshop so take me back to the early days when did you launch the company um so the company was launched in 2011 actually i was a student at the time uh but the sales green product which we are known for now that came on the market in march 2014 um and you know the idea came after iterating with multiple sauce products that eventually died out or failed but this idea came from a client which was using well for other tools for a different purpose that i didn't think of like we had this messaging sauce application set out to kind of replace text message corporates and uh and this one advertisement sales company like the yellow pages just in the nordics um they sent out like a text message every time somebody closed the deal to create like a virtual tap on the back um even though you're gonna we're not working or work in the field or in the call center uh and they they used our tool to for this purpose of like motivating their sales team was that my first customer in 2014 you know it became the first customer because i would say they were instrumental in like forming the idea behind sales screen and we we built pretty much every feature since then based on customer requests and what customers were willing to you know pay for us to prioritize to develop so big thanks to them now did you bootstrap up until the pivot in 2014. we did we actually bootstrapped all the way up to 2018 and surpassed three million dollars in there as a bootstrap company a 100 employee owned before we took out outside money for the first time okay well we'll focus pre-2018 because that's what i love i love i love hearing these bootstraps they want to talk about what why you shifted why you went the other direction but get me in your head in 2018 where were you in terms of revenue and how much you decide to raise so you know i i think we can uh go back to 2017 because that's that's the point where you know we passed two million dollars in ar we were growing nicely we had this amazing company culture and everyone was making you know good dollars we're paying out dividends um you know things were great but at the same time um oracle dell sap like these companies were knocking on our door uh requesting like a quote and and starting to talk with us um interested in our gamification technology and we realized uh we weren't big enough we weren't able or capable of handling their organizations they were simply told you know too big we had the technology and the technology was scalable enough but not organization so at that point we kind of realized okay you know what we have here is it's nice and all but we're not going to win our industry and become a new category or you know a dominant player unless we actually embrace this opportunity that is presenting itself more and more and and raise money to expand on on you know the market opportunity that was there so um that kind of made us transition over to bringing in money from the outside for the first time because we saw that the timing was right in the market how much did you end up raising in 2017-2018 uh so at that time we didn't have like that machine built out that is more well now known today i would say and then which we also have today but at the point i wasn't sure like how much money i needed because at that point in time we made money so um i raised like two million dollars just to have something to start with um and then since then i haven't really done any missions either i just taken i guess total 4 million more in loan um most recently this year a couple of million more so now we're kind of hitting the stride of where we can convert money that we take into actual growth and uh the growth is accelerating quite rapidly so to talk to me 2 million 2017 2018 is equity um you mentioned you were paying dividends the team at that point how big was the team at that point uh at that point were a bit over 20 people i think and there's a lot of bootstrap founders that are trying to set up dividend plans for their teams how did you structure your dividends before you raised so we only paid dividends once uh we we usually took all the money that we made and just uh we invested it in future growth uh so we're even at the time very growth oriented um and once one time we did it you know it was based on uh how much equity each employee owned at the time um naturally me being the the founder of the company i had the most but uh later on i you know my co-founders um was instrumental in building sales screen uh naturally had second most and then onwards and onwards how much of the company again pre-raising did you and your co-founder own 100 well what about your team like all the all the shares was held by employees yeah so that's what i'm trying to split up how much was owned by you and your co-founder versus the team oh okay um uh so yeah me and my co-founders we at that point in time i think we own roughly 60 perhaps and the rest 40 percent okay got it six that's pretty that's a pretty aggressive employee option pool so they're very incentivized they've got a lot of upside there yeah um so and it's still a pivotal part of our core strategies to have everyone involved in the uh on the upside um now that we're kind of raising money again we'll talk about that in a second when you broke 2 million ar in 2017 how many customers were you serving uh at that time were mainly like smb focused so i think we were north of 300 Currently serving 400 customers okay and how many customers today uh now it's only a bit north of uh customers and you know 20 000-ish uh sales people on the platform got it can i take that 400 times the 24 Monthly recurring revenue 000 average acv so you're doing like 800 grand a month right now on revenue something like that yeah right now we're uh we're probably gonna end this year around 10 um so i think if i'm gonna look at my book revenues right now we're a bit north of six million dollars zero oh great big congratulations what drove most the growth from 2017 from 2 million to 6 million today um you know it's mostly sales uh like uh sales driven and us going up market uh having larger enterprise clients joining in and getting you know 10xing our um annual contract value and what is growth like if you're at six million right today where were you exactly a year ago uh exactly a year ago uh you know a bit less than four okay so healthy growth i mean not like doubling year over year but still healthy growth yeah if we look at like since 2015 is 56 year old year um growth and if we look at the annualized growth of like last quarter we're at 71 percent um the quarter before that we're like 160 so it still goes a bit up and up and down because we have more of these enterprise deals coming in yeah but it's uh it's it's around 100 growth right now when you uh in 2020 i think you said you decided to take a 4 million dollar loan is that accurate and so why did you decide to do that [Music] um it's it's mainly because we've built out the machine um so you know at this point in time um we started uh one of the goals kind of expanded north america we had the brand recognition we had most of the revenue in europe and we wanted to make like the shift towards north america and that's when i moved to new york personally like into 2019 um and we started to to invest more in north america and build up that core team in 2020 uh naturally um you know building out a team in new york is a bit more expensive than in scandinavia let's just leave it at that um so you know it requires some money at the same time as i said you know we 10x are at annual contract value um and we saw lots of growth opportunities especially here in north america so we shifted our revenue from being like mainly um coming out of europe uh and the nordics um to having like uh you know one third of the revenue coming out of uh north america and you know growing very fast so there's a lot of different loan products out there right now for sas founders what did you see when you did this last year what was your sort of how many years do you have to pay it back and can you give me a general sense of what what the cost of capital was so uh what we did you know with 2020 and the code pandemic as well we were presented with some options and choices like um when it hit should you you know furlough people like short-term because of the uncertainty like we being such a employee-owned company that was like a no-go for us so in that first round of uh taking equity for the first time we also sold some shares in in the secondary um so we actually ended up putting most of that money back in assalone um so that was one part of it of the two million dollars in 2017 how how much of that was a secondary versus primary uh so it was secondary was equal amount oh got it so 2 million was primary 2 million was secondary you raised 4 million yeah yeah i guess uh you can save so over two two rounds so that the second part came in 2020 so that was kind of like put back into the company mainly and then uh we did a convertible note uh this year just uh leading up to a bigger round yeah what the two million raised this year on the convertible note what cap were you able to negotiate no i was only on a discount on the next round oh smart so uncapped at what like a 20 discount yep that's not okay that's not that's not bad so i mean what do you think you can go out now to the market you're raising now how much do you want to raise um right now uh you know it's it's definitely going to be north of 120 120 million dollars yeah you mean your valuation will be north yeah our enterprise valuation i guess yeah but actually but how much do you how much capital do you want to go raise uh so uh that's undetermined uh yet yeah we're in the process of kind of like preparing for this stage now so i i can't go out with too many details on this where is your gut telling you you can invest more capital to get more growth i'd sa first and foremost is north america um like uh it's just incredible uh how much low hanging fruit there is here right now uh but it's also in our asia pacific uh region so we have an office in in singapore uh and uh we're starting to break through there as well so we want to replicate the success that we had in uk and ireland and in north america in the apec region and what's your team size today how many folks we're roughly 50 full-time employees okay how many um engineers production we're 15. okay okay guys are they based here or in norway so the product team is mainly based in norway so we have one person in north america the rest is in orlando and how many sales reps do you have that actually do carry a quota uh at this point in time that's uh i should have known these uh numbers i guess um oh an estimate it's fine i think it's around you know 10. okay i mean that's always the hardest thing right about bringing in capital scale is like do you hire engineers higher sales people do you increase paid spend so like how did you think about your first sales higher in the quarter to put them on you know it is uh it is hard that's it was definitely hard in the first place now it's not hard anymore um now that we have the unit economics kind of dialed in and we see that okay you know we need um our pipeline it's coming from marketing uh increasingly more for marketing we need more resources on that part um we we are still you know sourcing quite large portion of our sales from our field sales team and our bdr str team so that's there's a ratio starting to kind of form there two to one um so now then you can kind of see like okay and also from the csm side we're actually starting to break through on the expansion and upsells of these modules and um there's you know this hub mentality and since our market is so big uh we we can build out different types of countries in europe or regions or even uh you know west coast uh as a natural next step here in north america as well and have these foundational hubs that you kind of grow up then um yeah so it's it's it's easier to spend money now that you kind of know that and what to expect from increased marketing spend in terms of traffic on the website conversion rates race and uh skulls and and pipeline group you know and syndra you definitely want to raise in other words if outreach or gong or sales off or henry chuck dominco came and just said listen instead of going and raising a hundred million dollar evaluation here's a hundred million dollars all cash up front right now to sell to us would you exit um hopefully no but that's not only up for me i think that we are very much on on the track to building out the new category-like outreach like course like going in the sales tech stack uh which is it's just yeah it makes perfect sense to be honest like especially given the tailwind from covet and the fact that people are being trusted into a hybrid or even like fully remote setting and getting them you know engaged and motivated in their day-to-day work is becoming like a board type of discussion and we see that um from our organic inbounds as well so uh it's not the right time to exit for us uh to be perfectly honest but you know if there's a ridiculous amount of uh of money on the table then um i'm never gonna say never um so i'm pragmatic like that when you look at your churn right your net dollar retention are you above 100 at this point yeah how much so 120 this um yes it's pretty and it's growing actually it's grown over the last eight seconds and what's just peeling back that math equation what was gross revenue churn over the past 12 months much worse so uh you know i don't have the exact numbers uh and firmly right now uh if we look at the last um you know three quarters i think it's a hundred and twenty hundred and seventeen hundred and seven um 105. so it's uh it's like uh it's a trajectory that i hope continues probably you know not because it's still it's already pretty strong yeah i'm trying to get a sense of is you have expansion revenue that is more than your contraction revenue i'm trying to understand what expansion and contraction are to get us to the net number yeah so uh it's mostly expansion bigger than contraction right now and upsell is not really a big portion of that number yet but it's growing but so you for example you could have 10 churn and 20 expansion or 100 turn 120 like what is the what is the hole that your expansion is making up for right now oh uh if you look only on on the contraction side sure um well you know hard to say it i i i don't know if i fully follow you on this one because uh net dollar retention is calculated by taking contraction and adding back expansion your your number is 110 or 120 right now so there's two numbers you add together to get to 120 percent i'm just trying to break down those two numbers do you know what gross revenue churn was over the past 12 months no i don't have that in front of me right now like we use to follow on our side is actual net retention you know so um how do you calculate how do you calculate net so the way we do it is is at least we look at the dollar amount so um to your point like there is a contraction and there's an expansion so in the seats um since we from from the past days had some contracts that went month-to-month we could actually get like variation on a month-to-month basis um so that that makes it a bit more complicated but that means that companies could scale down and scale up and we actually had like a fluctuation there uh so so the number of speeds is like the biggest uh portion of our net retention number right now and then the the last part is up selling so uh when you look at the what a an account pays going into the quarter and what they pay when going out of quarter um that's you know also has a a portion in that net retention yep no i understood you just don't know what the contraction is and you don't know what the expansion is you just know that i don't have the percentage numbers in front of me right now because um because of that uh legacy we we kind of have it on sub annual contracts and annual contracts so that the dashboard to to combine them uh hasn't been built yet so i only have like the the numbers uh the actual numbers which was the data analysts and the team kind of dug out so we're building out that dashboard to have to your point i understand that yeah no no problem no problem we're out of time here let's let's wrap up with the vegas five number one what's your favorite business book um i don't have a favorite right now maybe yours we'll see number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um no number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business right now i would say abm platform like man base like what demand base demand base number four how many hours you'll sleep to get every night i have two toddlers so like five so since you were married single married with two kids yeah married with two kids and they're both under three years so it's oh wow how old are you i'm 32. 32. last question what's something you wishing you when you were 20. i i don't know what i wished for came true so i guess building a company uh and making a living out of the company that i built was the dream guys salesscreen.com gamifying the sales process to get better performance out of your reps playing sort of in the same space as a gong call rail these revenue acceleration tools they grew from four million in revenue last year in terms of right to six million today they raised about four million in total capital including a bit of a combination there that's secondary looking potentially raising another 10 million today at 120 million plus valuation and they've might scale nicely from 300 to 400 customers over the past three years uh with their team of 50 people 15 engineers we'll see what happens next century thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 1 pm 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 fundraise 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 lanka dot com forward slash slack 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 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 ya