How Mattermore.ai Is Building an AI Copilot for Remote B2B Sales Managers (Interview with Co-Founder and COO Matt Shenker)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, mattermore. Ai wants to help managers run their remote sales teams. He comes from a coaching background, just brought on as co founding CTO. He's got two weeks to get that thing live and then start asking some of these beta users to start paying. He started focusing on this about a year ago and has paid the bills with consulting and coaching on the side. We'll see where it goes from here. Hey folks, my guest today is

00:19Matt Schenker. He's the co founder and chief operating officer at Mattermore. He's been a licensed therapist, meditation teacher, and management trainer for ten years. Last two years, Matt has been working with his co founder to develop the first AI copilot for b to b sales managers. Matt, you ready to take us to the top?

Matt Shenker

00:35>> Let's do it.

Standing Out in a Crowded AI Market

Nathan Latka

00:36Alright. Very cool. So this is a very, very, very crowded space. Right? So how are you standing out? Are you focused on a specific niche or what's the what's the unique angle?

Matt Shenker

00:45>> Yeah. So I I think there's there's two ways to really look at companies that are trying to stand out right now. One is what's your vertical? Right? There's lot of people who are taking AI and software and trying to solve a problem and are shooting really, really wide. And so I think one thing that's really interesting right now is to look at what specific verticals are people stepping into. Are they solving a specific problem for a

01:10>> specific person, or are they building a solution that is trying to solve a problem and still hunting for who exactly they're segmenting into? So I think one thing that we're seeing with the face is there are a lot of people that fall in that second category that are still more of a solution looking for a problem to solve. And so one differentiator for us is we have a very specific problem for very specific people, remote sales

01:31>> managers who are selling SaaS. And the reason for that is because they have sales teams that are hurting, and there's a massive potential for impact with a product like ours. The other big differentiator is when you say AI,

Target Customer: Remote SaaS Sales Managers

Nathan Latka

01:44what do you mean? Let me Matt, let me push on that for a second. So remote remote sales managers selling SaaS. So, like, right now, we're all founder of how those remote, you know, we sell to software founders and we have a Google Doc where every Friday everyone goes in and reports their metrics. Right? Pipeline, things like that. Pretty straightforward. Why do we need AI?

Matt Shenker

02:03>> Awesome. Do you have a specific sales team? And if so, how many people are on that sales team?

Nathan Latka

02:07It's just three of us.

Matt Shenker

02:10>> Cool. And so is it is it specifically people who are like a sales role or is it basically people who wear multiple hats?

Nathan Latka

02:17Sales roles are part of the funnel, right? Lead to lead to MQL, MQL to demo, demo to close.

Matt Shenker

02:23>> Awesome. Do they all have the same manager?

Nathan Latka

02:26Yes, me.

Why Sales Managers Need AI Assistance

Matt Shenker

02:27>> Awesome. So the key thing that we've found when we talk to sales reps as well as their managers is there's a massive problem within sales. One is it's an inherently stressful job. So other than teachers and nurses, sales consistently report the highest stress levels out of all occupational groups, which makes sense for anybody that's done sales, right? You're making calls all day, you're getting rejected, you're hustling. It's a stressful, high pressure situation. What we find is

02:56>> most managers of salespeople aren't actually trained for getting the most out of their management interactions with their sales reps. However, that's the number one predictor of how stressed out somebody is, not how responsive their customers are that week, not how many deals they're closing that week. It's the health of their relationship with their manager. And what we find is most managers are so busy getting stuff done that they're not actually showing up to calls with their

03:22>> reps in ways that are actually rejuvenating and co regulating, for one. And two, they massively under leverage asynchronous communication in ways that they can be creating trust and motivation with the people that work for them based on the ways that they're interacting with them. For good reason. Because who has time all day to be pausing and thinking about, okay, how's Mike doing today? What could I possibly message Mike that's not just like a blanket, hey, you

03:46>> got him. Go and get him today.

Nathan Latka

03:48Proud of

Matt Shenker

03:49>> you. How do I actually give him a specific, personalized, positive reinforcing message that's relevant to tasks that he's doing today. So where AI comes in is on that front end, which is what's actually happening with my team. Maybe there's things happening in our CRM or our outreach data that I don't have time as a manager to go in and look at in in the two minutes I have between tasks. Or there's things actually happening on Slack

Manager Effectiveness and the Stress Problem

Matt Shenker

04:14>> or Microsoft Teams, whatever asynchronous communications that we have. Sorry. AI can actually grab all of that data and bring it right to me as the manager.

Nathan Latka

04:22Instead of like, I I've never had someone say, wanna buy AI. What they have is a problem, and then you as a founder use AI and your software to solve that problem. Right? There's a very big Can you just give me a story of how a customer is currently using you and ignore AI?

Matt Shenker

04:38>> Sure. So one way to look at it is we we have teams that

04:44>> let's tons of teams that are just selling software. Right? And so what's happening is

Nathan Latka

04:49Can you Nick, can we talk about a specific, like, customer that's using you today, whether it's beta or paid or whatever?

Matt Shenker

04:56>> Yeah. I'd prefer not to use a customer by name.

Nathan Latka

04:59Do you have customers using the product today?

Matt Shenker

05:03>> Yeah. The the product is very much in beta. So we we do have we do have customers, but none that I wanna, you know, use them by name on a podcast.

Nathan Latka

05:12Oh, 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 Founder Path. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you

05:35connect 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 Founder Path dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company,

05:59you're gonna 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

06:21this 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, 1,200,000 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.

06:46Maybe you're 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 Founder Path. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a

07:09second, but 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

How Beta Users Were Found

Nathan Latka

07:35back into the interview. Okay. So are you beta? So I guess are you still guys still pre revenue today trying to figure out what the angle is gonna be before you launch the paywall? Exactly. Okay. So I guess help me understand is if you don't talk about people actually using you today, talk about where you found them. So how are you getting beta users?

Matt Shenker

07:53>> Yeah. So it it started out with referral. For a long time, I was a trainer of sales teams as my when my cofounder was in enterprise sales, he had a a mobile app development agency and then was was hardcore in different sales roles throughout his career. So we have a deep network of people who are in sales positions. And so what we did was we we did six week sprints where we would interview a 100 sales

08:15>> teams, one right after another. We did that for four consecutive batches. And then we went back to that network and we said, okay. Now we wanna show you what we found through these conversations, and we we have some recommendations for you. And what we did was we just began talking to people and then giving their CROs or their sales managers basically just reports based on our interviews, and then we would offer them different products that we

08:40>> had built. Really low code, no code, beta tested proof of concepts, one of those being, a post call report. So most managers of every kind of role aren't actually trained on how to be a manager. And so one of the things that we did was if you use Gong or you use Otter, any sort of thing that just automatically creates a transcript, we can extract the transcript with an API. And with automated prompts that we've built

09:05>> along with, some of our academic advisers, we've given fractional basis points in the company too. They help us build some rubrics and specific prompts that then we just fed into Claude as an LLM. And so we can narrow in. We could say, this is what a good manager looks like. Here's a transcript from this call. Give this person feedback on what they did that was a driver of effectiveness and adaptability and what was a drainer of

09:26>> effectiveness and adaptability. All of which we informed with the rubric we fed into it. And within a matter of seconds, we're able to email somebody a post call report. Like, hey, as a manager, here's the feedback that no director ever gives you and no employee ever gives you. So that's one sort of feature and functionality of what our product offers people. And in the back end, obviously, AI there is an LLM. But there's all sorts of

09:48>> data that's out there that's hard to connect and access. In 2014, there were like 400 sales enablement tools. Now we're in the matter of thousands of sales enablement fast tools. And so being able to connect all these different datasets for managers and deliver them to them to actually guide them on very specific things, like here's what you need to do to be a better manager for your team.

Nathan Latka

10:10Mhmm. I guess, sorry. Just just to jump in. I mean, the the the points that are win pointing to their LLM are ones that have billions and billions and billions of rows of data and proprietary dataset. That's not an angle you're gonna be able to win on. Right? So Yep. What I'm trying to understand is what is the secret sauce that Matt is bringing to the equation that other people do not have? And you've mentioned your

10:29application a couple of times. So I guess help me understand like what's the status of the product today? I see on your careers page, you've got job openings for a founding CTO and founding engineer. Have you been able to get an engineer, sort of convince them to jump in and start writing code?

Matt Shenker

10:43>> Yeah. So our our founding CTO comes from a long experience of being a director of AI for other companies. Just came from a company, I won't advertise, but was building AI models for the medical industry, be able to connect all this data of medical research to be able to deliver back to people so that somebody doesn't have to go searching for specific types of medical research. We can do the exact same thing for two different steps.

11:08>> The front end, what's actually happening with your sales team, your CRM data, your outreach data, any tools that you're utilizing, asynchronous communication, and what's happening on your calls as a manager, one on one and team stinks, to be able to turn all of that into data and connect it all. The back end, it's what is the actual behavior science? We don't have a knowledge gap when it comes to what does it take to manage well. You

11:31>> don't have to go ask the right mentor to be able to be told of what effective management looks like. We have strong data in the behavior science that actually shows us. But we don't have as like,

Nathan Latka

11:40what your background that. I don't I don't mean to cut you off, but, like, I I think I get what your angle is, and it's a short pie.

Matt Shenker

11:45>> Those those those are things that are AI.

Nathan Latka

11:48What I see is behavioral therapists, consultants, like, things of that nature. Why isn't this just the name? Why can't why does this have to have AI in the title and be software? I mean, why it sounds like you're passionate about this. Why not just go be a coach and for for remote sales managers?

Matt Shenker

12:04>> Because this this isn't a coaching problem. So the the problem the problem that we have is that we have access to all of the knowledge that we need, and we don't have the right systems that have harnessed that all of the knowledge sets. So one, what's happening with the sales team? And two, what should I do as the manager? You don't need a coach to solve that problem. And in fact, what we found through years coaching

Product Status and Engineering Team

Matt Shenker

12:25>> sales managers was even when you have a coach, there's a massive visibility problem, which is if I ask, okay, how did you do this week, Nathan, compared to last week? You can look at your output from your sales team, but we can't actually look at the specific concepts that we talked about as a coach. Were you implementing those more often? And if you were, which ones were actually moving the needle? So what we're doing is not

12:49>> just creating a coach that can live with you as a sales manager, we're creating more metrics about what's actually happening with your team, what are the actual outputs of your relational interactions as a manager. So you don't just have to send somebody an engagement survey twice a week or twice a year. What you can actually do is get immediate continuous contextualized visibility on how engaged is your team? How effective are you as a manager? What is

13:14>> the exact action you need to do right in this moment to uplift your team more? Not something you wanna talk about where I can share Harvard Business Review articles with you two weeks from now, or we can unpack whatever happens to be present with you in your mind as a coach and the time that we're having the conversation.

Nathan Latka

13:30I'm very lost on what the product is trying to do. Sounds like it's it's like show us what your sales team should be doing on a daily, and there's like dash of consulting. So I'm trying to drill and figure it out. I can't. But my hope is obviously that you you guys do well, have the product launch. When do you think you'll launch the I mean, the website right now, I can't get past anything except the

13:48career page. When do you guys think of MVP Live?

Matt Shenker

13:52>> For MVP Live, probably six to nine months from now. We're gonna start off really small with, some of the customers that we already have, running pilots with them, really showing the impact of the product there.

Founding CTO and Technical Architecture

Nathan Latka

14:02Why does it take I mean, why does that take so six to nine months is a long time to spend on MVP.

Matt Shenker

14:07>> Yeah. Well, because we don't wanna start with a publicly facing product. What we wanna start with are the customers that we've we've built relationships with now and go in and have a have a deeper impact rather than shooting really broadly right from the hip to begin with. What we wanna do is take take our product and work really in-depth with a small number of customers as we then continue to iterate and improve the product. And once

14:28>> we feel really strong about not just the base of what it can offer, but the the full scope of what it can offer, then that's when we'll actually expand out to a more accessible MVP.

Nathan Latka

14:36But when do you I mean, my whole thing is is, like, you know, early stage founders eventually gotta ask for money. And if people don't pay, then you gotta go the wrong thing. Right? So when are you gonna ask for money and put the pedal to the metal and see if you're onto something?

Matt Shenker

14:49>> Yeah. Well, that that's something we can do right from the beginning. What's nice is that we we we have a CTO who is confident that two weeks from now, we'll have a we'll have our our internal MVP that we could actually go we can go to CRO, we can go to sales teams, we could say, here's what we can offer you specifically. But we're not gonna go out and start selling that to thousands of people right

15:08>> from the get go. What we wanna do is make it a much more personal experience, running a few pilots where we can use it as an asset and

Nathan Latka

15:14a tool. Of course.

Matt Shenker

15:15>> Of course.

Nathan Latka

15:16Mean, that's how you should launch. But I mean, I guess, when when did you say you recruited your engineering cofounder? Yeah. When you said two weeks to get an MVP live, you then put that in front of your beta users. How long have you personally been working on this? When did you when did you launch?

Matt Shenker

15:30>> Yeah. My co founder and I have been working on this for about a year now, where we've been running interviews, testing different proofs of proofs of concept, talking to technical folks, accumulating our advisors, that sort of thing.

Nathan Latka

15:39Okay. And how do you mean, lot of startup founders, they've got to figure out very creative ways to keep their personal living expenses low while they run the test and they get the MEP, etcetera. So like, what have you done to either keep your costs low or do something on the side to get money or go raise capital? How are you paying your personal bills?

MVP Timeline and Go-to-Market Approach

Matt Shenker

15:54>> Ain't that the truth? Well, the the nice thing is, you know, I'm I'm a licensed therapist, a coach, and a trainer. And so at at random points, basically, we've said, okay. You know what? We we actually need money right now. We've been able to turn to clients within the sales space and say, alright, we're taking in coaching clients, we're taking consulting jobs, we're taking training gigs. The problem with that, as you know, is it's the there's

16:14>> always this trade off of, okay, if we're doing that, then we're taking time and attention away from the business and what we're trying to push forward. But like you said, sometimes, you know, you gotta pay the bills so you actually have a place to live. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

16:25Alright. Well, let's see what happens, man. We're rooting for you. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book?

Matt Shenker

16:30>> Favorite book, The Alchemist, Paulo Calo.

Nathan Latka

16:32Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Matt Shenker

16:37>> A CEO I'm following or studying. Not not me one specifically. The the one that's lighting me up the most right now is a guy I just talked to this week, Dan Syroker. He's the he's the CEO of Rewind AI. Really love what they're building.

Nathan Latka

16:49Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building that or more?

Matt Shenker

16:55>> My favorite online tool. It probably depends on the week or what we're whatever we're working with. Honestly, now, it's Slack just because I'm in there so much talking to my cofounder.

Nathan Latka

17:05Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Matt Shenker

17:09>> Thick.

Nathan Latka

17:10Alright. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Matt Shenker

17:13>> Single.

Nathan Latka

17:14Alright. And how old are you?

Matt Shenker

17:16>> 30.

Nathan Latka

17:17Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Matt Shenker

17:21>> Everything is figureoutable. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

17:24Guys, matttermore.ai wants to help managers run their remote sales teams. He comes from a coaching background. Just brought on as co founding CTO. He's got two weeks to get that thing live and then start asking some these beta users to start paying. He started on this about a year ago and has paid the bills with consulting and coaching on this side. We'll see where it goes from here. Thanks so much, Matt, for taking us to the

17:43top.

Matt Shenker

17:44>> Thanks, Nathan. Take care.

Nathan Latka

17:46One 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 alive. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

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