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 inside of our platform you know so we have a user pricing that get you know we have a pricing model for like low content high users and then we upsell as they add more content no that makes a lot of sense okay 2014 you launched 111 customers today you mentioned fifty thousand dollar acv i mean if i do the math i would put you like 400 450 grand a month right now in revenue is that high uh we're yeah we're a little shy of that because again we still have some early adopters that are you know different different price points you know we're hovering uh right now our kind of run rate is um between three and a half and four million i know you like execs samsung you're saying three and a half million per year correct okay got it so that would be about 290 000 per month something like that yeah yeah uh okay good so that's good now talking about cac right so to get a new customer are you comfortable with a 12-month payback or are you being more aggressive uh we're you know our customer acquisition costs are so minimal right now um it's not even i would say it's a metric i'm aware of but at this stage you know we're we're just head down on usage well if i'm a sales guy and i close a 30 000 deal for you how much commission are you going to pay me 20 okay got it so i mean there's cost there right so that immediately puts payback period at four months what about how do you get the lead in the first place all cold outreach okay from 90 percent of our yeah so our sdrs 90 of their 90 of our leads um in 2018 last full calendar year came from a cold outreach from our sdr team okay and what is growth been like so if you're at 3.5 million run right today where were you a year ago uh we were hovering a year ago we were you know program a million four million five seven that ballpark so i mean more than double that's healthy growth yeah um where's most growth come from upselling customers or adding new ones altogether 25 of our uh new booked arr this year came from uh expansions and upsells uh the rest is coming uh coming new okay that's a good metric to know very good sam all right ma'am let's uh and by the way i mean that last capital raised a while ago now you looking at raising more capital we're we're currently in discussions about what we're going to do i mean q4 is our biggest quarter so you know we're deciding if we're going to raise a round in q4 or let us let us finish out the year strong and then turn the corner coming out of the air and see what we're going to do but we're evaluating it right now your next round i mean i mean how much do you think you might end up raising if you do it whether it's q4 q1 you would probably be thinking that you know nothing less than 10. yep and do you i mean do you would you even look at something where you're you know on a 50 million valuation or do you want something richer uh no i think it will probably i think we're i'd love a 50 million dollar valuation but i probably think we'll probably be somewhere in like the the 30s uh i think that's a reasonable range to be in also very very sensitive to the fact that you know we're we're we're still selling and we're growing um consistently so i think it's also important you've talked to a lot of founders that the amount we raise if we do raise is what we need not and nothing more not ascent more than what we absolutely need to get to the next milestone yep all makes sense let's wrap up the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book um right now because that that book changes uh right now i'm i'm enjoying um let's say is my best one right now uh anti-fragile or anti-fragility i think is the title of the book um talking about uh the again core concept being around um what you know toughness is a big part of our team in our unit at one huddle uh one of our core values is being tough consistently in every part of our business challenging our customers uh so believe the title is anti-fragility i spend more time in the book than on the cover number two what's your ceo you're following are studying right now uh nick saban uh i used to coach high school football i spent a lot of time and you know i use a lot of sports analogies i'm surprised i have gone this long on this on this uh session without using one but uh coaching talent nick saban a guy who year over year constantly has to reload both with managers and players and keeps the brand and the team consistently at a high level i think there's a lot to learn number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company we um you know i think at the end of the day i'm old school crm is still is still at the core of what we do uh we use we use copper today uh you know copper's kind of helped us get from right you know right out of being early to where we are today uh and you know it's still what drives our business and we're sort of we don't mess around with numbers internally with our sales force and yep number four how many hours of sleep to get every night four to five sam come on that's not healthy five hours of sleep that's it that's ridiculous not a good thing well i would say that i get four to five for four to five days and then i sleep for ten is what happens um makes sense you catch up all right what's your situation married single kids married with married with the boss is two and a half so she's uh she runs the show uh she's she's uh i'm doing a sales training next week and bring her into the office because she's now at the stage where she says why to everything so you know that's a pretty powerful sales technique funny all right and how are you i'm 34. 34. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew ask i would say when i was when i was 20 i did a really good job at uh i started work at 18. so i was in i was in school full-time work full-time they did a really good job going where other people wouldn't go into the conferences going to the trade shows going to the events uh if i were to go back and do that again you know i would i would have more uh one-on-one time with the people i met i would ask more of uh graciously of the time of people around me to learn um to dig just another layer deeper i think sometimes when you're 20 you you know you uh um you don't you don't understand the value of every conversation you have guys sam with one huddle again breaking 3.5 million bucks an ar up from 1.4 million in ar just a year ago healthy growth rate 2.9 million dollars raised burning about 120 000 per month right now he looks to drive additional growth they're now serving 111 customers again gamifying employee development employee training average acv now in the 30 40 50 000 uh kind of range potentially raising in q4 q1 maybe 10 on a 30 million pre we'll see what happens there in the meantime sam thank you for taking us to the top thanks david these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now