SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
631: Saleswise Raises $3m, Launches Product, Helping 12 Customers Deveop Better Relationships with Their Data with CEO Gregg Freishtat
16 Apr 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: What is SalesWise and how does it help businesses?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 3: How does SalesWise price its services?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. I just finished traveling Southeast Asia for 41 days, and I usually always get sick when I travel, and quite frankly, eating is difficult for me. It's hard to find a restaurant, and I'm spoiled in Austin with my personal chef.
Well, I took these little packets with me this time, 30 of them, in my carry-on suitcase. They kept me totally healthy with 11 different secret ingredients.
Chapter 4: What is the history and founding story of SalesWise?
You can see them at nathanlaca.com forward slash juice. I'll tell you more later on in the show. That's nathanlaca.com forward slash juice. This is episode 631. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll want to tune in to learn from Christopher Gibson with Recursion. They run a Santa Fage enzyme. It's a 40-person upstart launched in 2013.
They raised $23 million in equity and have received $5 million in grants.
Chapter 5: How much capital has SalesWise raised and how was it funded?
good morning everybody nathan latke here our guest this morning is greg freistadt and he is the technology executive with over 20 years of experience leading innovative and transformative companies he founded four venture-backed startups all of which had successful exits and is now building a company called sales wise he's deeply rooted in a venture capital and the management of internet technology companies having led several through acquisition as and has had a hand in developing disruptive technologies and convergence of telecom plus internet
personal finance and online banking web-based analytics and digital media online marketing and currently relationship intelligence gregory ready to take us to the top i am ready all right tell us what saleswise does and what's your business model how do you make money The SalesWise is a business relationship intelligence platform.
So what we do is we help sales leaders, client success leaders get a real, truly granular visibility into the most important relationships they have, whether that be prospects, customers, vendors, or partners.
Chapter 6: What is the current team size and structure at SalesWise?
We are a SaaS company, but we do not charge by the seat. Rather, we believe in what we call democratizing data, meaning that our customers should provide our relationship intelligence to every single employee that can use it productively. So we price based upon the total size of the company. And then we pass through the Google Cloud storage. Go ahead.
I was going to say, Greg, so what's the, on average, because I know you have a bunch of different customer cohorts, but on average, what's the customer paying you per month? Somewhere just short of $1,000 a month.
Chapter 7: What customer churn rate does SalesWise anticipate?
The entry level is $500 for under 100 employees. We go up to 500 employees for $2,500 a month. Okay. And take us back to kind of more of the story here. So what year did you launch this business in? The business was founded about two and a half years ago. The product that we are currently in market with was launched about four months ago. Okay, so 2015 is really kind of founding of the business.
And then the current product you said was about two months ago? Four months. Four months ago. Great.
Chapter 8: Who are SalesWise's main competitors in the market?
And what is the... So 2015 is when you founded the business. Now, what got you into this? What were you doing before 2015? So I sold my last company to a company called Outbrain. And I was running, I started and ran their strategic initiatives and channel. So my customer was really our 65 US salespeople.
And the frustration of trying to use Salesforce and email and weekly meetings to understand what those sales guys needed to sell better so I could do my job striking partnerships was intensely frustrating and led me to the conclusion that the alleged revolution of sales and marketing on the internet is really a revolution in marketing.
And that sales, sales management and sales teams really haven't seen the type of innovation and access to data to transform how they do their jobs. So that's what we set out to build with SalesWise. Now, did you use capital from your exit to Outbrain to fund SalesWise and you kind of bootstrapped it or did you raise kind of outside capital? I funded the first six to eight months.
I think I've raised about 20 rounds of venture capital over the last 20 years. I participated in every round and will continue to participate in any time I ask outsiders for money. I tend to think I should be putting my own money alongside. How much did you bet up front before you raised outside capital? How much of your own money did you put in? About a half a million bucks. Okay.
And how much have you raised total to date? Total to date, we've raised a little over $3 million with a good chunk of that still in the bank. Okay. And was that mostly convertible notes or did you do priced rounds? All priced rounds. All priced. Oh, great. That's great. I mean, my initial capital was a convert, but everything since then has been priced rounds. Got it.
And then where are you at now in terms of team size? We are about 10, 11 guys. We are just hiring our first sales and marketing people. So the infrastructure required to do what we're doing is enormous. So my co-founder was five years Mountain View Google. And to give you some sense, you know, we're seeking over 800 million Salesforce records a day and have over five terabits of data.
So it was a full two years, year and a half to actually build the infrastructure required to service the type of enterprises and the magnitude of data that's required for the platform to perform. I mean, that's a lot of data. How many customers are you serving now, January 2017? We don't disclose exact numbers, but we're over a dozen customers and adding one or two a week right now.
So we're really just ramping up sales and marketing. Got it. So it's fair to say, again, you're in the fairly early stages because you just launched the product, but it's fair to say you're doing, call it at least 12 grand per month in monthly recurring revenue? Yeah, that's about right. Okay, and then you mentioned 11 people. Are you guys all based down there in the Atlanta Tech Village? We are.
Oh, good. Good. And then what is the talk to me about some of the other stuff you look at and maybe speak from experience, too, because I know this one's kind of just getting off the ground in terms of revenue and cohorts and analyzation.
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