How SalesScreen CEO Sindre Haaland grew to $10.7M revenue and 350 customers in 2024.

[Music] and Norway I had actually a pretty famous name brother called Halen if you've ever watched soccer uh he's actually from the same place as well as the hunger so funny enough we're not related so unfortunately I don't have his talents uh but I'm gonna go over obviously you know the heading is about efficiency in the company and we're going to talk about three things that has really made it for us number one being you know dharmesh from CTO coined this but aligning vectors it's really really important when you're a 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 the sales development of space but in general when you have business outcomes if you're seeking to to get to and outcomes you want to ride let's say we want to surpass a 10 million dollar refreshold threshold okay that's great but how are we going to 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 we're going to go through just to set like sales screen in a bit of a context uh we should be around eight million dollars uh this year whereas sales studentification 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 diets every day to get to their outcomes even quicker so how do you do that kind of make it fun and exciting you engage them in competition you visualize their data and 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 sales stream platform came out in 2014. and it wasn't until 2018 and 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 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 of us so I'm just going to start out with the most important topic because we as operators as Founders and as CEOs we really need to have a strategy and we need to have a plan uh if you're going to grow as a company and you're going to grow efficiently you need to have some sort of a vision and how that's going to happen so you have that top level plan right now you know we need to set clear expectations we need to communicate it in a way that everyone follows and we would create transparency around them 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 going to see the Maximum Impact some people might not you know do it at the same speed or really nail this but as long as you go in the same direction that's when you're going to move the needle as a company an OTR 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 uh the problem for me with opr framework was you know there was something missing from it we set high level objectives we had the key results and we description everyone knew about it we talked about it we checked in on progress but it was still not really aligning everyone and when people are not online they're you know you're gonna do many things that's not valuable to the company overall so what practical for us was actually implementing a concept of initiatives and I've heard actually several speakers already talked to this so if you're a founder or an operator uh in a smaller sauce with a smaller team you might 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 uh 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 key result how are you going to get to that one you're not going to get to that goal you're not going to get to that result unless something changes like that is the definition of insanity uh so then you're gonna have to challenge the one that owns that key result because each should be owned by an executive yeah why are we not doing any initiatives what's going on you need to gather uh more feedback from teams you need to to promote your key result so that next month when we get together as an executive team you bring me at least three initiatives that's going to influence this key result because if not we're never going to raise it and then you have obviously you cannot use that meeting at 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 we're at on the year-long objective of the company this is how we progress on the on the key resource that we set and this is the initiatives that we complete the last one this is what we're going to do next 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 be much more easily say no I don't have capacity right now these are the key initiatives that we're working on and I have to complete them by the end of the month it's not it's on me 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 BP level so all right we have monthly initiatives with deliverables we have key results that were we were aiming for and often 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 going to give you an example uh we work with tons of sales development teams and um you know scrs flexibility pipeline especially in the sauce industry I thought I was relevant so I gathered some data from some of our clients to figure out you know okay obviously they want to create five sales qualified leads every month how do they do that you know that's the outcome that you want to go for uh well mostly you need to have some Discovery calls all right how do you do that well okay um you had different touch points with that you call them you send emails to them you can connect with them all right so you know how do you get that going you want to start well just start by adding prospects to a sequence so you need to figure out the context we need the accounts with the prospecting add them to a sequence that generates tasks and you need to complete them regular similarly and be able to get happy so now we actually have actions that can be influenced on the icy level to get to that pipeline goal that we've been talking about so actually actually in many contexts 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 so I've seen so keep in mind these have a pretty strong brand which makes it a bit simpler not gonna lie but the solution or the answer here is 58 so 58 prospects added to the sequence what's necessary to get an eating an average and also you need to do at least 33 cold call attempts to get a meeting I actually think this number should be much higher so I was a bit surprised that it was that low we have tons of customers that it's more startups and they have 70 80 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 that we're driving towards obviously it makes things a lot simpler because I talk to people who's doing 10 cold calls uh you know a week or 50 like you're never going to 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 to really recognize the fact that that's a small team like that's 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's sees it everyone's working on and you bite-sized the outcomes and the key actions that you're going to take and then you get into the final Point like once you have the quantity uh 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 of this if it's excellent quality right well um I would say you need a balance so you need higher quantity and you need to have quality it's not maintainable to give you 300 protocols a day like that's not going to be good for you so no it's not only about quantity but once you start to have that funnel of actions and then ice you 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 100 cold calls and getting those meetings um great if another person needs to take 200 there's something wrong in their way that they communicate with clients um so then you know what you need to coach them on and ultimately now that you kind of distill down the top level goals and the key results and initiatives that you're working on and then you figure it out in the manager of up 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 so 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 you have the results that you're working towards there is initiatives being done every month people are working in the same direction you're heading in the celebration the individuals say no actions they need to take on a recurring basis to influence them all right it's going to be tough some days she might not hit your call minimum so just using that as an example um because of XYZ 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 a team so some things that you can do I would always say that you need to think about the individuals that you have in the team um and it starts with visualization in the sector 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 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 stiffs you can try to to throw in something fun and get people to give that extra level of energy to get back on course and once you do you know make sure you reward them and celebrate them and talk about them because it's not only about the money that you're pocketing it's also about the packs 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 you're 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 links and there's multiple tools that help you do that I'm not going to talk about the tools per se but the fact is that individuals are motivated differently some people want to climb on top of a leaderboard other people want to adapt that pack on the back they want to be seen by their colleagues because they're socialites or you know they want to explore and build their careers you need to figure out what is people's motivation I need to set that in a structure that actually makes them deliver on those key actions that delivers the initiatives that flows up to that key results and ultimately makes you reach your objectives and overarching goal so you know in these 20 minutes I've talked about three concepts that really has helped us at this stage to enroll the VR right now to gain efficiency as a company uh and that is you know nobody is Surplus nobody's you really need to to deliver and you need to deliver at high Pace on 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 it's the CEOs it's to try to do this thing um secondly really break it down your outcomes and objectives it doesn't help to be constantly talking about we need to break 10 million AR or we need to deliver on this objective if people don't understand what I actually means and work for them and finally one thing you know what they're supposed to do all the time that is all about motivation just keep them on their toes and fired up and rallied execute and perform Thailand so that's it for me um if there's any questions I'm happy to answer thanks everyone cool so Andre we have a couple minutes any questions for Center great oh so does your application does sales screen integrate into a CRM to pull the data into all that stuff how do you integrate into the sales teams to pull the data into motivate it yeah so the example that I showed that was actually with data from Outreach so we typically integrated crms or engaging tools and we're trying to capture the actions that individuals can take by themselves and really gaming fight back because once you gain find outcomes like uh close to one 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 but yes we do that okay any other questions 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 so these are the top reps in this region region you know because some companies keep those blocked off they don't want to see that any thoughts on on exposing that data to all the sales teams so everyone can see how they're performing yeah I think uh Ray dalio talked about radical transparency if and anyone has heard about him it's spawn on you know I'm I'm very big Advocate I'm fan of transparency in an organization and I've had so many customers being afraid to Showcase like a full leaderboard because they don't want to you know set what's almost motivation there's ways you can work around that you can show top 50 of the team you know that is fine you're motivating The Killers but let's not just focus on those top one two percent 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 you know do a raffle suddenly as long as you do something you know you can win and that's going to engage much bigger portion of the team so you kind of need to think a bit about the psychological profiles in the company and what makes them things that is the perfect transition to our next speaker because we're going to be talking about inspiring versus embarrassing and creating psychological safety so thank you Sandra perfect thank you

Introduction salescreen.com launched back in 2011 they hit 2 million bucks in Revenue in 2017 raised some early secondary some early primary used a credit line just as a backup today they're doing about eight million dollars in terms of run rate serving 350 customers they're moving Upstream our post double the past 12 months each customer is paying on average 2 500 bucks per month as they look to continue to scale really selling into big real estate companies and insurance companies helping incentivize and gamify their sales reps to a certain pipeline targets hey folks my guest today is Sandra Holland he founded sales screen 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 sales gamification SAS called salescreen.com Sandra you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right is this like get your get your sales reps to play a game so they actually use the software and keep their pipeline updated yeah you could say that in a way in a way but uh more so I would say you kind of have a business outcome you want to reach let's say build pipeline as an example you break it into actions that the 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 that obviously mathematically it's going to lead to more pipeline so that's great so give us an example of a customer paying you today what are they paying you for exactly so it's uh usually that use case if it's in in the soft space on the software but uh we're the biggest in like insurance and real estate and more transactional b2c types of environments so it's uh to motivate their sales team to go that's our Mantra uh so they're paying us per seat uh for sdrs or sales teams um and it could be clients like you know sap or uh seismic or IED or yeah a lot of different types of customers all over to go and are they still paying about 29 per user per month uh no not really uh I guess uh we have a couple of packages so you could get it even cheaper uh which is the recognition package where you get more of the visualization at score and if you want the full gamification is typically around 500 per user per year I see okay well so what is the more discount or you know lower the entry prices 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 uh per month uh average right now it's two thousand five hundred dollars around there that's great so you've increased that almost 2x actually exactly 2x since the last time we spoke back in late 2021 um you also mentioned in late 2021 that you're in the middle of doing a capital raise um obviously now it's very hard to raise Capital but what happened to that Capital rise in 2021 did it close did Raised you stop it what happened uh we did a small Bridge uh and that is luckily for our sufficient uh to keep going uh so we're profitable within the next 12 months uh but the major Capital race that we were looking for also had some secondaries um uh that fell short uh when the market crashed we we didn't feel hot on racing in in a in a market like that so but I think we put the trigger on that 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 four million 2 million was secondary I think right it was in 2018 uh so we had a 2 million primary 500k in secondary uh and then we did a top off in 2020 when Kobe came uh on similar amount so yeah oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all 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 data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations 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 all right let's jump back into the interview there's a lot of Founders at your stage that they go Nathan like I don't want to raise VC and ride that boat I always tell them you got to 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 did you get it done I think we were 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 uh it was more question of how much did we we need or want and uh we didn't want to sell everything so you know it became a smaller seed round or color whatever you want Sandra is the pretty girl walking down the street that everyone is chasing saying please take my secondary please please please it's a good position to be it really helps it does help it does help now last time we spoke you were working with 400 customers how many are Currently serving 350 customers you at today and what drove that growth um yeah I guess it's a bit of the go-to-market strategy at that point we wanted to to take in any type of customer so we went fairly broadly and we didn't have like a uh dialed in ICP so it was a lot of smbs as well uh so the reality is that we were probably not uh I think we're even fewer customers than that today like around 350 but much larger uh as we also talked about with the average contract value so um I think we've uh we've done a major shift in going up market and that's been quite successful it sounds like you've still driven obviously Revenue growth despite the smaller number of just customers without looking at our poo Monthly recurring revenue right so if you have 350 customers at 2500 bucks a month I mean you guys are right right around 850 900 a month in Revenue right yeah we're uh a little bit uh well around eight million dollars we've had a bit of a unfortunate luck with the US dollar lately uh since we have a lot of customers uh invoiced in uh Great British pound and Norwegian kroner and such so uh yeah that's uh taking a bit of a hit uh last 12 months but still pretty good well that can come back who knows we'll see what happens but exactly you've still driven nice growth Year from about a six million run weight at those currency values in 2021 to 8 million dollars today you've also I think mentioned you you did Leverage I think a four million dollar loan in 2020 to preserve Equity is that right it was kind of like more of a credit line so we haven't really drawn a lot on that uh so we still have that as a buffer interesting how do you um how do you think about that in terms of getting access to Capital during a recession well I think it's a brilliant way to get the access to Capital during a recession so if you have recurring revenue and it's fairly predictable you can leverage you know um even your setup or vessel to get to either a credit line or some loan up front so you can continue to invest or have a better Runway to your next fundraising so I advise people to look into that if uh if they haven't done so um already if you did pull money off that four million dollar line what interest rate would you pay we're on seven percent seven percent interesting and is that fixed like obviously 2020 so far didn't increase four percent has that has that facility whoever is behind that facility increase that rate on you over time or no it's fixed at seven it has gone up a couple of times yeah 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 yeah exactly so in this case you can actually pay it back as soon as you have the money um which is great you know when you have fluctuations and seasonality and stuff like that so that's that's great okay any plans to raise Capital right now or you're sitting tight of I mean in this market uh if the price is right we'll do it uh I think that we would benefit greatly from it but it's not a an active push on our side right now with a bank or anything like that to raise I think yeah maybe after summer uh it's going to be brighter times and we'll see what happens what would be the right price today uh that's uh hard to say you know uh you know the multiples uh and how far down they've gone so it's not like uh we expect the double digit multiples at this stage but um you know um yeah so you consider something that you'd consider like an 8x9x if someone approached you with that in this market you would be insane not to honestly so yeah I do think we're gonna bounce back to that level um hopefully not in a too far distance how do you manage that because like an 8X multiple and 8 million Revenue today would be a 64 million evaluation but I seem to remember you telling me last time we chatted that you had 120 million rep value 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 I'm not sure where you got that number from actually uh we were never valued at that okay or actually we were but we didn't accept that offer so I guess technically you're off that's where I got it from them 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 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 I think many people struggle with that right now um was it smart to not trace it uh I don't know I wouldn't say that either so yeah all right let's with our last couple minutes together here let's talk more about product which is what I love right what's on the product roadmap for sale screen um for this year it's it's actually simplifying it a bit um 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 a tool uh we're gonna work a bit more on the front end so new competitions new competition layouts and it's always fun and exciting uh and we're also actually building a new plg motion so that's taken quite a bit of resources but uh I think we we have to um 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 there you go and how many folks are full-time on the team today uh on the product team just at the whole team everybody whole team yeah uh we're just north of 40 people around there okay 40s 40. okay I think lastly told me 50. so you did have to let some people go try and get yourself done better yep I think that's uh again uh the world has changed so uh we as as many others had to look at um you know efficiency and now we're at uh yeah well 175 200k per per person and that's much uh better yeah Revenue permanently 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 I mean this is a hard thing right but how do you know yeah it is it is now in our case uh we did one-on-ones with everyone uh that was uh affected and we did it back back to back in one day oh wow draining day oh yeah it wasn't fun I don't uh want to do that uh too often um uh but yeah I mean that's that's life and that's business unfortunately uh and um it really is a terrible feeling as a CEO and of pounder specifically uh 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 livelihoods so that's what you have to do as a leader well said Andre let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your the last book that you read I said I don't even remember it's been too long okay we'll say nice the only podcast is this yeah yeah is there a CEO or founder that you're following or studying um no not really number three what's your favorite online tool for Building Sales screen for Building Sales screen uh Visual Studio Number Four how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh I have two small kids so six maybe okay that's still pretty good so two two kids and I said are you married yeah I'm married okay married with two kids and how old are you um 33 years old 33 years old last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um I guess uh the value of a tight ICP guys there you have it salescreen.com launched back in 2011 they hit 2 million bucks in Revenue in 2017 raised some early secondary some early primary used a credit line just as a backup today they're doing about eight million dollars in terms of run rate serving 350 customers they're moving Upstream rpus double the past 12 months each customer is paying on average 2500 bucks per month as they look to continue to scale really selling into big real estate companies and insurance companies helping incentivize and gamify their sales reps to certain pipeline targets cindray thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to 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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 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