SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Gong Competitor: "We'll Raise at a $120m Valuation" after breaking $6m in ARR
14 Jun 2021
Chapter 1: What is SalesScreen and how does it fit into the sales tool landscape?
Average deal for us sits around 24k today. So it's a number that keeps on growing quarter over quarter.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Sindre Haaland.
He was born and raised in Norway, but lives with his beautiful wife, son, daughter, and dog in Brooklyn, New York. He's the founder and CEO of SalesScreen, the world's most comprehensive gamification platform that creates a fun, motivating, and competitive atmosphere for revenue teams. All right, Sindre, you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 2: How does SalesScreen differentiate itself from competitors like Gong?
Sure. All right, this revenue space is sort of hot right now. Would you put yourself in like the revenue intelligence space or like the call tracking space or more like an HR tool, gamification tool to help people meet their quota?
We're definitely a sales tool, meaning that's the people that we talk to. But I would say we're kind of like a counterbalance to a lot of the craze recently with the outreach. And I think it was Gong announcing yet another Gongbuster round, as they call it. But they're all about automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning. We're more about the humans.
You know, it's still people closing business and your biggest asset and cost, I would say, is people. So how can you kind of unlock that next level by pushing the human reference? So that's kind of where we sit.
So tell me more about sales screen.
Chapter 3: What is the pricing model for SalesScreen's technology?
What's the title of the person at a company that's usually paying for your technologies, the head of sales, head of revenue, something else?
Yeah, it's usually all the way up to the top with the CRO or chief commercial officer, chief sales officer, depending on the industry. But it's usually within the sales department. trajectory and there's always sales enablement and sales operations involved in evaluating the purchasing decision, but eventually it's going to come up to the CRO or VP sales type of personality.
And what are these CROs paying for your technology on average per month?
An average deal for us sits around 24K today. It's a number that keeps on growing quarter over quarter. Is that for a year?
Yeah. What are they paying for that? Is it a number of seats, feature-based upselling, or some usage-based metric?
Our list price is a fairly simple model. It's $29 per user per month for the base package. It's paid annually, of course, and then you have five modules that you can add on top, each of them costing $7 per user.
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Chapter 4: When did SalesScreen launch and what were its early challenges?
Is there one of those modules that is more effective at upselling than others?
There's always two models that I feel like people pay out of the gate with. What are the two? You should almost just bundle them into the base package at this point, I guess. But yeah, it's the boost module, so it's like the actual gamification components with the competitions in particular, and it's the reward module, which is like this coin that you can introduce inside a platform.
And then you can have your own internal web shop where people can exchange these coins that you make through unlocking badges or hitting your quota or winning prizes in competitions and exchange them for actual gift cards or days off or giving push-ups to your manager or whatever you want to have in that web shop.
Take me back to the early days. When did you launch the company?
and so the company was launched in 2011 actually i was a student at the time uh but the sales screen product which we are known for now that came on the market in march 2014 and you know the idea came after iterating with multiple sauce products that eventually died out or failed but this idea came from a client which was using
Well, for other tools for a different purpose that I didn't think of, like we had this messaging SaaS application set out to kind of replace text message for corporates.
And this one advertisement sales company, like the Yellow Pages just in the Nordics, they sent out like a text message every time somebody closed a deal to create like a virtual tap on the back, even though we're not working or working in the field or in the call center. And they used our tool for this purpose of like motivating their sales team. Was that your first customer in 2014?
It became the first customer because I would say they were instrumental in forming the idea behind Sales Screen. We built pretty much every feature since then based on customer requests and what customers were willing to
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Chapter 5: How did SalesScreen achieve $3 million in ARR without outside funding?
pay for us to prioritize to develop. So big thanks to them.
Now, did you bootstrap up until the pivot in 2014?
We did. We actually bootstrapped all the way up to 2018 and surpassed $3 million in ARR as a bootstrap company, 100% employee-owned before we took out outside money for the first time.
Okay. Well, we'll focus pre-2018 because that's what I love. I love hearing these bootstraps. And then we'll talk about why you shifted, why you went the other direction. But get me in your head in 2018, where were you in terms of revenue and how much did you decide to raise?
I think we can go back to 2017 because that's the point where we passed $2 million in ARR. We were growing nicely. We had this amazing company culture. Everyone was making good dollars. We were paying out dividends.
Things were great, but at the same time, Oracle, Dell, SAP, these companies were knocking on our door requesting a quote and starting to talk with us interested in our gamification technology and
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Chapter 6: What factors contributed to SalesScreen's growth from $2 million to $6 million in ARR?
We realized we weren't big enough. We weren't able or capable of handling their organizations. They were simply told, you know, too big. We had the technology and the technology was scalable enough, but not the organization. So at that point, we kind of realized, okay,
What we have here is nice and all, but we're not going to win our industry and become a new category or a dominant player unless we actually embrace this opportunity that is presenting itself more and more and raise money to expand on the market opportunity that was there.
So that kind of made us transition over to bringing in money from the outside for the first time because we saw that the timing was right in the market.
How much did you end up raising in 2017, 2018?
So at that time, we didn't have that machine built out that is more well-known today, I would say, and then which we also have today. But at the point, I wasn't sure how much money I needed because... point in time, we made money. So I raised like $2 million just to have something to start with. And then since then, I haven't really done any missions either.
Just taken, I guess, total $4 million more in loan.
um most recently this year a couple of million more so now we're kind of hitting the stride of where we can convert money that we take into actual growth and the growth is accelerating quite rapidly so to talk to me 2 million 2017 2018 is equity um you mentioned you were paying dividends to the team at that point how big was the team at that point uh at that point we're a bit over 20 people i think
And there's a lot of bootstrap founders that are trying to set up dividend plans for their teams. How did you structure your dividends before you raised?
So we only paid dividends once. We usually took all the money that we made and just reinvested it in future growth. So we were, even at the time, very growth-oriented.
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Chapter 7: What are SalesScreen's future plans for expansion and funding?
And the one time we did it, it was based on how much equity each employee owned at the time. Naturally, me being the founder of the company, I had the most.
uh later on i you know my co-founders um was instrumental in building sales screen uh naturally had second most and then onwards and onwards how much of the company again pre-raising did you and your co-founder own 100 well what about your team like all the all the shares was held by employees yeah so that's what i'm trying to split up how much was owned by you and your co-founder versus the team
Oh, okay. So yeah, me and my co-founders, at that point in time, I think we own roughly 60%, perhaps, and the rest 40%.
Okay, got it. That's a pretty aggressive employee option pool. So they're very incentivized. They've got a lot of upside there.
Yeah, and it's still a pivotal part of our core strategy is to have everyone involved on the upside now that we're kind of raising money again. We'll talk about that in a second.
When you broke $2 million in ARR in 2017, how many customers were you serving?
At that time, we were mainly SMB-focused, so I think we were north of 300. Okay, and how many customers today? Now it's only a bit north of 400 customers and 20,000-ish salespeople on the platform.
Got it. Can I take that 400 times the $24,000 average ACV? So you're doing like 800 grand a month right now in revenue, something like that?
Yeah, right now we're probably going to end this year around 10. So I think if I'm going to look at my book revenues right now, we're a bit north of $6 million.
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Chapter 8: How does SalesScreen ensure employee engagement and retention?
Oh, great.
Congratulations. What drove most of the growth from 2017 from $2 million to $6 million today?
Um, you know, it's mostly sales, uh, like, uh, sales driven and us going up market, uh, having larger, uh, enterprise clients, uh, joining in, um, and getting, you know, 10 X in our, um, annual contract value.
And what is growth like if you're at 6 million on right today, where were you exactly a year ago?
Exactly a year ago, a bit less than four. Okay, so healthy growth. I mean, not like doubling year over year, but still healthy growth. Yeah, if we look at since 2015, it's 56% year-over-year growth. And if we look at the annualized growth of last quarter, we're at 71%. The quarter before that, we're at 160%.
So it still goes a bit up and down because we have more of these enterprise deals coming in. But it's around 100% growth right now.
In 2020, I think you said you decided to take a $4 million loan. Is that accurate? And if so, why did you decide to do that?
It's mainly because we've built out the machine. At this point in time, one of the goals was to expand in North America. We had the brand recognition. We had most of the revenue in Europe.
we wanted to make like the shift towards north america and um that's when i moved to new york personally like into 2019 um and we started to to invest more in north america and build up that core team in 2020 uh naturally um you know building out a team in new york is a bit more expensive than in scandinavia let's just leave it at that um so you know it requires some money
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