How TestBox CEO Sam Senior grew TestBox to $5.7M revenue and 1 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is sam senior he's the co-founder and ceo of test box originally from regional australia he studied software engineering and economics university where he met his co-founder peter he left bain after six years as a senior manager in san francisco to build the future of software buying he now lives in boulder colorado sam you ready to take us to the top yeah thanks so much for having me nathan you batman so what does this mean the future of software buying well i think previously everyone's talked about having an enterprise sales letter approach now people are talking about a product-led approach to growth and selling software i think the future is actually customer-led so meeting the customer and how they want to buy software the process they want to take and giving them a true hands-on experience and so we've basically built an app that allows people to test and compare enterprise software before they buy without needing to talk to a sales person with a hands-on experience with real data in there and all the use case configures they can do a side-by-side comparison within within minutes instead of doing a month-long sales process sam how does that work it sounds too good to be true someone listening right now that wants to try salesforce salesforce is not going to let you try it unless you're on a sales call and all this stuff have you like pirated their software something and give everyone access like how do you do this so we we've been very intentionally starting with just one software category to prove our value so we started in the customer support help desk space we've actually gone out and built uh partnerships with each of the major vendors so we've got about six on the platform at the moment three more in discussion but we've got more than 50 percent of the market share of the top platforms already partnered in and integrated with us and how do you define market share so otherwise you wouldn't know how in terms of revenue or users really either is fine um i think if you take revenue for example like zendesk and help desk space has 20 plus percent of the market share they're actually one of our partners that's integrated into test box okay and what about like freshworks yep integrated okay and so hubspot service hub and a few others as well so what do you give zendesk and freshworks let them do this they want people going through their funnel obviously so yes and no i think they understand that people don't always want to go direct and go through an aebdr process and said they want to go self-serve and hands-on we're basically taking that self-serve approach and supercharging it in a way that no one else has been able to do by getting it more real life like it's already been implemented for that end user um so we're actually a new lead generation source for them interesting yeah well it's actually funny dixa's interview is next week uh girish came on before their ipo with freshdesk and brian hogan came on free ipo from hubspot so i've got you also have help scout trango uh and that crew as well so this is cool so you're gonna i love how you're you're gonna sort of focus on a niche here and dominate the niche why customer support software though why start there so my co-founder and i actually about 10 or 11 years ago worked as it help desk agents so we just understood this space really well having used these types of software before and and understand the use cases that really matter but it all got kind of coalesced around this experience actually where someone close to me had previously bought help their software and i watched how painful that experience was and i basically interviewed her the entire time to understand what the major pain points were and how we could make it better so those two experiences together said let's start there plus it's a hugely growing market that's like 10 and a half billion today growing at 10 plus percent and it's getting more and more important so it's also a good niche for that reason tell me more about growth so you got going you just raised some capital we'll come back to that in a second but you're on boarding this is three-step process first is introduce yourself what are people mainly picking in the industry drop down are you seeing concentration around like b2c tech or b2b technology or something yeah so that that's primarily where we focused is be tech and then e-commerce then fintech um sign ups sign ups what market are they in those three yes oh okay okay okay got it cool and then um and then so i'm going through it now i love asking these questions like right so you're basically saying what what products do you want to test i'm going to click hubspot and zendesk looking for another solution so you're basically doing user generated content here people start typing in something and it's like a new customer support tool that's taking off you should be aware of it because people start typing it right exactly right and so we're basically trying to collate all that information so that we can say great we've had this many more people asking for this platform let me go build that partnership and get them integrated all right talk money to me when you give hubspot a new customer right it's a hot probably the hottestly they impossibly get you must have some economic upside here yeah exactly so with hubspot uh it's about it's 20 of total contract value so not just first year but actually the entire contract value that we get paid what if you help the customer sign up on hubspot for 100 bucks a month hubspot customer success managers work with them for 12 months and expand them to a thousand dollars a month do you get the expansion revenue to 20 on that okay so you have to trust on hubspot and zendesk and freshworks reporting back to you accurate expansion revenue on accounts that you helped them land yeah exactly but that's and that's part of the partnership terms in terms of terms and conditions legal or that sort of goodness super interesting okay so you're effectively a sales rep for them but running a different motion but yes but it's fully productized yeah yeah yeah interesting okay so when do you guys launch the business when you write the first line of code uh the first line of code was written just over a year ago but we launched in sort of a public beta in middle of june so only a few months ago now and what numbers do you care about right now like waitlist size like tell me what you care about i think there's two major things for us because we're essentially building a marketplace we need to be building both sides of that so the big one of just like continuing to build partnerships really matters so i'm trying to pick up a new partnership every month at the moment so we have that supply side of the market and then on demand side it really is just like how many sign-ups can we be generating on a weekly monthly basis and then once they're in how quickly can we get them to a decision is it gonna take three months like it does today or is it gonna be like uh like a recent uh converted customer it took them two weeks and that's a significantly better process than they go through at the moment so we're not with october yet so i can't ask you for october numbers but in september how many total news signups so it's it's less than 10 um i think we're like sort of eight that sort of number so it's still small but it's continuing to grow every single month got it and how many customers have you actually there are now paying on one of your six you know or nine partners yep so we've closed we've been closed one deal so far but that's how does that that feel been amazing how'd that feel yeah it felt pretty incredible there's a lot of jumping up and down um but i think importantly at the moment it's not just a we've had 100 company use that platform but we've also had a hundred thousand person company use our platform so at the moment this company that's a hundred thousand sort of ftes using test box to make a decision on a new platform so we're in this interesting phase where we've just been trying to build awareness and like we're just starting to see real elevation on size of company how could and a number of people coming into sas box what prevents you from arbitraging or basically you know taking up like hubspot like top keyword tools like you start basically paying for ad space or running seo to get those leads before hubspot does i imagine there's something in the pressure agreement that prevents that no there isn't actually it's just incredibly expensive yeah i think if you look at the cost for these sorts of ads you're talking at least 120 150 for some of these ads on those keywords and then that just conversion on that when you think about the percentage that we're taking um it doesn't really work out economics wise what about like a project seo play though right hubspot versus zendesk hubspot's number one g2's number second stack shares number three i mean you could write a book there and and yeah that's exactly what we're doing so does hubspot like that if you start out ranking them are they cool with that yeah that isn't a competitive term in our agreements with them interesting do you give them like a row for the partnership agreement where if you ever want to sell or exit they have for like writer first refusal on exit price uh not at the moment well we'll see how that goes in the future but i think like right now that's our focus really is just like let's keep being that amazingly generation platform for them okay tell me more about economics you're just getting going here how much have you guys spent to date on getting the mvp live yeah so we've probably spent something like seven hundred thousand dollars to get the mvp live...