SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
New Sales Enablement Tool, $1m to $3.5m in 2 Years, Now Raising $7m on $50m Valuation
23 Aug 2021
Chapter 1: What is the current ARR of the sales enablement tool?
So right now we are at about 3 million ARR. We don't calculate MRR that much. So it's not that relevant for us because customers pay us, you know, 12 months ahead and there are always annual contracts.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Sammy Shuny. He's the CEO and founder of a company called Shwell. He's been an entrepreneur for 15 years, started a web development agency while studying at the university and now is building the firm focused on sales enablement. All right, Sammy, you ready to take us to the top?
Hey, Nathan. Thanks for having me here. You bet.
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Chapter 2: How does the company differentiate itself in a competitive market?
$15,000 annually to $50,000 annually? Yeah. Okay. So about $1,000 to $2,000 per month? Yeah, exactly. And tell me a little bit about the product. What are they paying for? Where do they get it?
So surely say sales enablement tool. So what it means is that it provides the relevant, the right content for sales teams at every step along the buying journey so that they are able to present and share the content with their prospects and clients.
And where are you today in terms of customers? How many total?
We have about 300 customers right now. 300. When was the first one? When did you launch? So we launched back in 2012. So we have been around for a while. Although we kind of did a reset a couple of years ago when we raised our seed round.
How much was the seed?
One million.
And what year was that? 2019. Why was one million the right amount to raise in 2019?
Well, it felt like the right amount. We didn't want to raise more. We didn't want to raise less. Okay, then the COVID hit and Things changed a little bit. So we were planning to open offices, a couple of offices. We still do have those offices, but now things have, of course, changed a lot.
What valuation did you raise the million on? About $6 million. OK. Was it high or low at the time? Did you like that?
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Chapter 3: What is the average customer payment structure for the service?
Well, just, just by looking at our, you know, customer base, we have, you know, really good logos, uh, you know, well, well-known brands from all over the world. Uh, we have a really good, you know, growth rate at the moment. Um, we also launched the world's first kind of a product-led growth model, premium model, sales development tool, just recently.
And Samuel, what's the team size look like today?
How many folks? It's not a huge team. It's about 40 people. Four zero? Yep. How many engineers? Are you an engineer?
No, I'm not. I do kind of talk tech and I know some coding. We have about one fourth of the people are engineers.
Okay, got it. So call it 10 of them are engineers. How many sales reps?
At the moment, we do have, well, we have SDRs and account executives. So it's the total team size is about 10 to 12 at the moment.
How many of them are like actual AEs that carry a quota? Uh, six. Six. So you have one SDR for one AE. That's the ratio. Yep. And you're the guy to ask this because your sales enablement software, what quota do you set these six people at?
I'm sorry. Could you repeat?
What quota do you give these six sales people with?
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Chapter 4: When did the company launch and what was its initial funding?
I bet you pay people more than that.
Yeah, yeah. It's a kind of a, You have to remember that Shovel is a Finnish company, so we are based in Finland. And because of the COVID, we did a big change in our strategy. So we kind of concentrated all our people in Finland. So the salary is not that high as it would be, for example, in the West Coast USA.
Got it. But now we're in a remote world. It also doesn't matter where you live. If you're a good AE, someone in San Francisco can hire you and pay you 200K per year. Exactly. Exactly. How do you retain your best people when you're competing in a global marketplace now? How do they not get picked off?
We do have most of the people placed in Finland right now. It's about more, but also the location of the offices. We have the world's best healthcare, world's best education system. The tax rate is quite high, but then again, you get good services, nature, clean air, everything. So for us, it's more about the location.
Many of you guys listening have built incredible SaaS tools to help other founders, specific industries really get value or make some system easier. The problem is you can't help your clients until they import some portion of their data. And you've considered on your Trello board and your Sprint timelines spending weeks building a CSV importer for certain data sets.
You're spying right now because you know I'm right. And either you do it and you waste engineering time or you don't do it and your customers have a horrible time getting onboarded. And listen, let's face the facts. Your ability to give value to your customers sometimes is very dependent on their ability to get you their data. Once you have the data, everything is really smooth.
Well, this exact problem probably explains why Flatfile is growing so quick. They've raised over $44 million and they do exactly this. The data onboarding platform for your marketing teams, your engineering teams, they enable you to get usable data faster so you can focus on what matters most to your business.
And the fastest growing companies like my friend ClickUp, Zeb, multi-billion dollar valuation, they all use Flatfile. Now flat file reached out. They wanted to sponsor. I said, you got a good deal for us. And they do for anyone listening, any, anyone that's part of the top entrepreneurs community or get Latka.
You can get a deal now to get started today at Nathan Latka.com forward slash flat file. And they make it so easy by the way, their onboarding is beautiful. You don't have to commit to a bunch of stuff. You can actually see a demo live instantly right now. Check it out. Nathan Latka.com forward slash flat file. Now, are you burning capital today or are you profitable?
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Chapter 5: What valuation did the company achieve during its seed round?
Okay, so that's not horrible. Are you planning to raise right now or are you going to stay with just a million?
We are actually planning to raise the next round.
How much do you want to raise?
Seven to 10 million. And why is seven to 10 million the right number? It's the right number because we want to go full ahead with two arrows or heads. First of all, we want to do the sales-led growth, and we also want to do the product-led growth. We do need to hire new salespeople, but we also have to hire new engineers and really get the product itself into shape where it can sell itself.
What's Charm?
Churn is really slow, low at the moment. So it's about 3.5.
Monthly or annual?
Annual low.
And do you have more expansion revenue than that? No. Do you upsell customers more than the 3.5% to your net retention?
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