SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1617 How He Closed 50,000 Seat Deals on Day 1
28 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: What is the story behind the founding of Ask HR?
launched ask HR with his buddies back in 2017 about a year and a half ago under a big umbrella corporation now charging about five bucks per month per seat about 150,000 seats so-called 62 grand in revenue up from nothing just a year ago professional services stuff on top of that again serving kind of the HR space signing deals in the you know smallest couple thousand seats all the way up to big corporate accounts 50,000 seats and
to friends or folks they've networked with at conferences like the SHRM Conference in Chicago or the HR Tech Conference in Vegas. They raised a little bit of capital on a safe note, six team members between Austin, Boston, and New York City. Again, knowledge management and support automation inside these teams. Hello, everyone. My guest today is James Sturges.
He has a strong software engineering and product design background, having led several teams in building enterprise software. Today, he is co-founder and VP of product at Odseb, focusing on building better knowledge management and support tools for employees. James is an avid golfer, adventurous traveler, and passionate problem solver. James, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 2: How does Ask HR leverage AI for knowledge management?
I am. All right. Now, just to be clear, today you're working on Ask HR, though, correct?
Yes.
So Ask HR is one of our products. So we have sort of an underlying AI platform and Ask HR is our first product that's using that underlying platform.
Okay. Yeah. So that's what we should talk about, right? Not the parent company with the weird name.
Chapter 3: What stage is Ask HR currently in regarding revenue?
Correct.
All right. Ask HR. So are you, I mean, and let's understand the stage. So I mean, have you launched or pre-revenue still, or where are you at?
So officially we're pre-revenue, but we have, we've launched with probably about a dozen major customers and then a couple of other smaller customers. And we're lucky that some of those customers are in the Fortune 500 space. So we're seeing a lot of really exciting sort of user movement with, we do a per seat sort of revenue model.
So we do have a lot of seats using our software that are encompassing that dozen or so.
Chapter 4: How does Ask HR plan to scale its customer base?
Okay, but all just kind of pilot, nothing paid yet? No, they are paid. Oh, they are paid. Oh, great. Okay, cool. So before we get too far down kind of launch tactics, tell us about what the company does. What's AskHR?
Yeah, so I think, how much would you like me to go into the background of the other co-founders in the company? I'll cut you off if you go too long. Okay, so really high level sort of elevator pitch.
Chapter 5: What pricing model does Ask HR utilize for its services?
So I have sort of a background in big text data analytics. I've been an engineer for a long time. I was in consulting before that. Most recently, I was actually doing sort of money ball for movies, if you will. So in Hollywood, we were analyzing huge amounts of text corpus data and trying to analyze what people liked or didn't like around movie sentiment.
for the production studio I was working for. My other co-founders are from LinkedIn, Intel, and another company called Blue Metal. And so we sort of have this background when I was in consulting with a lot of enterprise-level knowledge management. So how do you find knowledge better? How do you curate knowledge?
Chapter 6: How does Ask HR ensure customer retention?
How do you find stale knowledge? You know, things like that, answer employee questions. And so a lot of our product has sort of evolved around how do we do that with machine learning and do this much smarter? So how do you give access to knowledge
to the enterprise in a much better way and give someone a better experience than browsing through thousands of levels of folders in folder structure or in things like SharePoint or other things like that and instead take a natural language query and ask a question and basically get an answer.
And not only get an answer, but get here's the authoritative answer, here's some related things, and here's some other similar things you might want like documents.
What builds the knowledge base? The employees have to contribute to it?
So the knowledge base is, we do two things. One is a lot of companies already have this information.
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Chapter 7: What strategies does Ask HR use for closing large deals?
And so we don't want them to do a lot of work to bring it over to our side necessarily. So we'll go read a whole bunch of documents from file shares or other systems they may have, intranets, things like that. And then basically learn what type of information it is, what kinds of knowledge can this particular piece of content answer.
James, you read this manually?
Yeah.
What's that?
You read this manually?
No, no, no. This is all using machine learning, yeah.
Got it.
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Chapter 8: What insights did the guest gain from their early customers?
So what do they do? They're connecting you to their Google Drive where they have a bunch of process docs stored? Or what are you connecting to? Where are they storing this stuff?
Yeah, so we're really focused on the enterprise. So it's not so much... Google Drive is something we could support. Most of our companies have things like FileShare, SharePoint, Igloo, Intranets. These are things that have hundreds to thousands or more of documents. And sometimes that also is other disparate systems like...
and things like that where they want to ask, you know, some sort of natural language query of, you know, how many sales did we get last month and be able to translate that into, okay, do this select query or, you know, what's our policy on X?
And so I know these three documents have policy information around topic X. And so how do I then find it's this paragraph you're looking for based on what you asked me?
Yep. That makes good sense. And then I cut you off before you told me the per seat pricing. So what are you kind of testing the market at? What's the starting per seat price?
Yeah, so it really depends. The Ask HR business that we're doing, it's around $5 per employee per year. So it's not crazy. And the idea is that we're extending, in the Ask HR space, we're extending your HR team. So HR is a great starting point where there's not a lot of great technology. It's very outdated.
There's great systems around people management and recruiting, but there's not a lot of great systems around supporting people and their HR needs. So find... Which is my deductible friend. this, or how do I do this? What's our policy on this?
The product makes perfect sense to me. I think I, I think I totally get that. Um, walk me through though, walk me through though, kind of on a timeline where you're at today. So when did you guys launch the company?
So officially we incorporated in 2017. Okay. So this last year, and there's three of you guys, you said, right? There's actually four, four, four of us had started. Um, we have, uh, right now we're under 20 employees. So we've grown quite a bit. Um, some of that is part-time employees. Some of that is full-time.
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