How The Sales Huddle CEO Sam Caucci grew The Sales Huddle to $7.7M revenue and 111 customers in 2025.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is sam kaiuchi he's a founded sales huddle a training and development team that is using game technology to help organizations better prepare their people for the workforce all right sam are ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so just to be clear help us understand kind of where you fit in the kind of bigger space of hr tech in general yeah so today uh you know the way we look at the world is that corporate employees are less prepared than ever before uh companies continue to invest in yesterday's technologies to whether it's on board or continuously develop or prepare workers but largely the skill gap that's that's present today has shown that those technologies have largely failed uh our product uh we built a game platform that does two things one it allows companies to more quickly create content to push out to users anywhere they are which we feel uh lms products largely miss on second uh we have a uh we have a because we're a game platform we create an environment where usage is not just near 100 but there uh most of our gameplay happens voluntarily outside of working hours so and we see that learning management systems are um not only uh torture for workers to interact with but they're also uh they take way too long to create at a time when jobs are changing way too fast so help me understand what's the average company going to pay you per year to use this technology on their workforce uh our average contract value today hovers around 50k but we have pricing as low as uh 3 000 a month and pricing that you know surpasses enterprise north of 100. this is very different than last time it came on back in april 2017. your average acv there was around ten thousand dollars so you've really moved up stream almost 5xing that yeah i mean two i think two big things one i think we gained more as a startup we gained more confidence in our sales process so you know asking for more is something that just takes time and then uh i think in that process of getting more uh more confident we also got more confidence selling to larger enterprises so you know i think that one of our biggest uh opportunities and challenges over the last year has been uh we just signed fossil group 500 global stores signed vineyard vines uh we just launched a global deal with pimco um these large enterprise deals taken up a lot of our time however it's also boosted acv and uh put us into a sort of totally different stratosphere how many customers are you working right now today uh about 111 okay right now okay fair enough and now have you bootstrapped or did you decide to raise some capital so we raised our first round of financing in q1 of 18. uh raised about two and a quarter uh as our seed round okay and it's really the only other financing before that i mean we're predominantly bootstrap but the only other financing prior to that was you know accelerators and angels yeah you had about 400 000 and from accelerators and angels correct yep yes about 2.9 of the company today so far do you regret raising the 2.5 million no i mean i think that you know the reality of it is uh i think you always have to what the balance that we have to weigh has to do with how fast can we move and uh what does our market look like and you know it's fair to say that with record low unemployment and hr tech starting in the heat up because companies are understanding employee churn is a major problem for them uh i think that the timing where we sat you know we grew very responsibly being bootstrapped the way we were i think that looking at our financing in our last round it was all about how do we continue to keep our foot on the gas because we're outselling our product a little bit yeah i mean that sounds like to me it's code for burn to drive growth right so much are you burning per month right now about 120 is that cool i mean are you good with that [Music] yeah again i think at this stage of where we are uh it's it's fine you know i mean we're i think we're in a position that at any point in time if we wanted to be break even we could a lot all of our dollars go towards product development uh you know our our um our biz dev team is about 18. um how many total people 36 36 what is so what do you mean biz dev is 18 like marketing sales i would include so biz dev marketing uh and i'll we only have a few customer success people and our customer success folks are largely uh part of the sales process because we are very land and expand as a model so our customer success team is very intimately involved in our our upselling and expansion process how many engineers uh 18. oh okay okay guys so it's 18 15 50. yep yeah how many how many how many of the 18 are actually quota carrying sales reps seven okay interesting did you make your first hire with that 2.5 million dollar round on the sales side or had you already ramped up some sales people so we had one seller prior to the the close of the financing that financing was two-fold one well let's accelerate engineering and then uh number two was build out our sales force is it working i mean i think that we have a we have a process that we feel very confident in the process is working you know i think that there's always places in any business to optimize for us you know we're in a category of folks who see uh workforce training isn't nice to have not always a need to have so we spent a lot more dollars on uh you know kind of growth on the on the growth side marketing team top of funnel uh primarily focusing on how do we educate people about the problem that we know is there it's you know it's tough to be in a space where i see ourselves as creating a category there are no other game platforms when it comes to workforce development or employee performance so we battle the the status quo which means our sales team has to do things a little bit differently than other uh if we're creating a crm company tomorrow you know everybody knows the value of crm it's a little bit different yeah what's churn look like over the past 12 months i think we've had you know we've been healthy churn about ten percent okay uh revenue or low that's that is um that is uh revenue a little higher on the logo side early adopters that were low acv from back in those days like when we talked that probably weren't going to step up but we learned from makes up about half of that the other half has to do with you know as a as a as a sas tool um we learned that we learned really quickly that when you have one key stakeholder that's a champion with your software inside of an enterprise that's a good thing but it's not a good thing when they turn over so we learned that we got to get really deep really fast when we sell into an enterprise to have multiple stakeholders that know us have relationships with us you know so that you know god forbid somebody moves up moves on you know the baby doesn't go out with the bath water so to speak does your expansion revenue more than make up for the 10 churn yeah we're net negative churn how negative uh six seven points okay got it so you've got about 16 points of expansion then for net revenue retention of 100 you know 106 percent yeah yeah okay that's good what's the expansion like what's driving the expansion is it number of seats or some other utility metric yeah so because of the fact that we're doing a lot with frontline workers and a big passion point for us with our product is that the overwhelming majority of 130 million u.s workforce does not get access to uh ongoing skill development like other roles inside of the org we can't price by user only because you're gonna pay a hundred bucks a month for a seller but you're not gonna pay 100 bucks a month for maybe the usher or the security guard so uh our pricing model has three prongs to it uh price users so we still have users as one of the metrics second is admins we've built a product where frontline managers can create content so in a way challenging hr's dominance of being the gatekeeper for employee development so uh you you know frontline users admins and then the third part is amount number of games in their game library now sometimes we work with a midsize brand that doesn't have a large robust library maybe they only have one person in charge of training well in that in that regard we know that expansion's going to be driven by you know just seats but you know we just sold into it's another great example like uh tau group it's the biggest nightclub chain in the world uh tao group has um they want to launch on day one with every employee but they only want to launch with one topic area so for us now it's more about their library how many games do they want to be able to handle...