SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Slintel Breaks $6m ARR, $20m Raise on $100m Valuation Ready to Take on B2B Intelligence Space
22 Jun 2021
Chapter 1: What key metrics did Slintel achieve in their growth journey?
So right now is when we started hitting 500. We've been doing like almost 2x every quarter, if I may put it that way. Last year we grew 5x. So last quarter was not as big as this 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 Anupreet Singh.
He's currently leading sales at Slintel, a SaaS sales intelligence platform. He set up sales teams and functions from scratch for various companies and firmly believes that the initial revenue target is achieved only when the entire organization works with grit to support those initial sales reps. Anupreet, you ready to take us to the top? Hey, hey, Nathan.
Thanks a lot for having me on the session. You bet. So before we jump into how you're building a sales team at Slintel, let's just get an overall of the company, right? So, you know, are you sort of in the ZoomInfo, Bombora, B2B intelligence space? Absolutely.
And, you know, very, very excited about that space at large. You know, the way all of us have grown in the last two, three years, it's amazing.
So how are you picking? You must have some trick you guys use, whether it's a sales script or a piece of product or tech code that you have that ZoomInfo doesn't have. But how are you picking customers off from the legacy players? Very good questions.
So, you know, Nathan, what we do is that we have algorithm that goes out in the web. We try to understand digital signatures that technologies leave when someone is using them. By which I mean, you know, there are different places in which a particular technology would leave additional footprint.
Like, for example, Salesforce gives you a dedicated login URL, which would have your company name dot my dot salesforce dot com, which means that each of the customer of Salesforce will have a dedicated login URL. We have means to understand which URLs have been dedicated to which companies out there.
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Chapter 2: How does Slintel differentiate itself in the B2B intelligence space?
You don't make them disappear, huh?
Absolutely. And we don't have a monthly limit. Most of our competitors do, like per user per month kind of a limit. We don't have that. So we give you a pool of credits. You can decide to use as many per user as you want.
You might want, say, 10 of your users to not export at all because they can just view everything on the platform and do their research while five sales of people would need exports to CRMs or to CSVs. So that's totally fine with us.
So you have a usage-based upsell and number of credits. You've got a seat-based upsell, which is obvious seats. The last pricing axes you'd like to see is obviously feature-based upselling. So do you do any feature-based upselling?
We actually don't. We don't piecemeal our product. We don't like to. So we like to give the full blown platform to everyone that comes on board. The reason being that we see organic upsells and organic renewals when someone is getting success out of the platform. And in our case, success is directly related to revenue. So if they are making revenue using our platform,
uh they will definitely upsell they will definitely renew so for us giving them everything that they need to you know get to those revenue goals is our motto and we don't limit them to the extent of features that they can use on the platform honor free teach us about churn right so when you look at your gross revenue churn over the past 12 months what was it We've seen 110% as our NRR.
So mostly we've seen that if there is around 10, 20% companies that are churning, against that we're able to upsell around 30%. So, so far we've been maintaining a pretty healthy NRR so far. We've been in the business only for the last two, three years. So it's very early to kind of predict the churn rates annually, but we're doing pretty fine so far.
So you launched in 2018?
We did. So first one, one and a half year was all about building the product. And then we went into the GTM side of things.
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Chapter 3: What strategies does Slintel use to acquire customers?
So you were there in the early days, I believe. What employee number were you? I was in the first 10. Okay. First 10. Great. So question for you. I mean, how did you guys get your first five customers?
Very interesting. So First Strike customers, like anyone else, was more from friends and families. We started reaching out to companies that we've worked at. And organically, we started doing very well in the HR tech side of business because Deepak, the founder, is from Eightfold. I am from Metal, which now got acquired by Mercer. So, you know, both of us have an HR tech background.
So initial few customers were from HR tech for those reasons. And then staffing companies started coming in organically when we started closing to HR tech. And then we expanded into other industries. So first 10, 20 customers were from the HR tech for those reasons. And they're still sticking around with us.
I always like to ask that first year of operations, it's usually an embarrassing number, but it's part of the process. Do you remember what that first year revenue was?
Yeah. So before I joined, the total revenue of the company was $100,000. And that was like kind of first year revenue where the founder was trying to sell most of the deals himself.
And then the second year was a very- You joined at like 10K of MRR then?
Yeah, we do only do annual deals. We only do annual deals. So it was 100K when I joined them. And from there was the actual, you know, massive journey that we've taken so far. We just announced our series A today, by the way, with GGV capital for $20 million. So we've closed two rounds in the last six months. So we've just expanded very, very fast in the last two years.
We'll talk about the $20 million raise today, the 4.2 million last year, and even the initial 300 grand back in 2018. But first I want to understand how we're getting customers now today, right? So what's the sales motion look like today?
So we have SDRs and account executives in place. We have further divided the SDRs into inbound and outbound. Most of our revenue today comes from inbound. We do massive ad campaigns against our competitors. We do massive investment in our SEO. By nature, our SEO is pretty strong because we have data of around 15 million companies, customers of around 40,000 technologies.
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Chapter 4: What is the pricing model for Slintel's services?
No, but is that the goal? Is that the goal for every CSM? That's what I'm trying to get into here. What is your metric? Okay. So you say, here's a million dollar book of business. Your goal is to keep 110% net dollar retention on this million. So you should grow this million to 1.1 million in ARR in a year. If you do that, Nathan, I'll be really happy with you.
Correct. Anything less than 90 is really bad for our company right now. So because anyone who's doing less than 90 is not anywhere close to our goals right now.
That seems really conservative. I mean, you guys, I feel like should be at like 130, 125% net dollar retention. Why so conservative?
So we see that the biggest growth comes from only the enterprise customers, the ones that are all from fast-growing startups. But we also have a chunk of less than 50 employees, customers that kind of churn after one year. A lot of those companies shut down.
So we have to take into consideration that a lot of companies that started working with us because sales intelligence is one of the first few tools that companies start using.
Those are small ARPU accounts. If they churn, it shouldn't impact your net dollar retention in a big way.
Yeah, but in the first year or two, right, we had a lot of such customers coming our way. So we are moving away from them and we are also focusing a lot more on the 51 and above. So we know that those companies, those customers are still in their pipe. The goal is to definitely go towards 120, 130 in the next six months or so.
But today, the book of accounts that we have, we know that that has a mix of both very small accounts as well as relatively larger accounts. And now our focus from here on after this recent race is going towards enterprises, you know, Fortune 1000, Fortune 500. Understood. So that's when you can focus on that kind of part.
As a CSM, if I hit 110% net dollar retention, what bonus do I get? How do you incent me to do that?
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Chapter 5: How does Slintel manage upselling and customer retention?
Okay. Very good. This is really viable. We're getting short on time here. So I want to keep digging here, but just to summarize that you basically give a million dollar book of business to every CSM and they're going to 110% net dollar retention. They make 4% of whatever they upsell. Okay. Okay. Talk to me about your first sales hire. What quota did you give them?
That's always really hard to figure out. Absolutely.
So when we started off, we figured out a way to do around $50,000 per month internally. So we had just one person. First couple of months, there was no quota for that person. Me and that person was trying to figure out means to deliver $50,000 per month consistently. And once we were able to do $50,000 between the two of us, we started hiring more with a target of $20,000 per month.
To be clear, you're adding $50,000 in new monthly recurring revenue per month or 50K in ACV value? 50,000 ACV in the beginning per month.
These are days when our total ACV was $100,000. We started from there. In three months, we started doing 50,000 per month. of ACV. So, so yeah.
When you were figuring out the model, you set a quota target of basically $600,000 of new ACV, right? So 50 grand per month, right? For you as the first rep. And then you said, how do I edit this to go hire my first external AE? Talk me through that. Absolutely.
So when we hired, we hired two AEs and two SDRs together, and we tried to make sure that this 50,000, even if I am not in the picture, I'm not going to the demos, we are able to maintain this 50,000 per month consistently. And then we plan ways to go from 50 to 100, which we did eventually in three months.
But 50,000 for the first three months was split between three AEs with a target of somewhere around 20,000 per AE per month. So we went from two AEs, $20,000 per AE per month to three AEs, $20,000 per AE per month. Eventually, we started doing 30, 35 each and we went to 100,000 with just three AEs and then eventually to 150,000 with just three AEs while their target was 30,000 per month.
So the thing that we did differently from others was that our targets
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Chapter 6: What challenges does Slintel face with customer churn?
Absolutely. That's great. But you've raised a bunch of capital to do it. So why did you guys raise $20 million? Why did you need it?
It was inbound. We did not need it. To be honest, we did not even spend our 4.2 million when we got an offer for 20 million. There was no way that we were accepting it. There was no way that it was on the card, but GGV was a great partner to have. Let me put it that way. They come in with a lot of US experience. Our founder is Indian. Most of our leaders are from India.
We have all the intentions to now start hiring in US pretty aggressively. And that in that next phase of growth, right, we wanted, Deepak is one of the only people in the leadership team that is in US right now. Most of our other team members are in India. So while we expand, you know, our US team, we wanted someone from US to participate as an investor.
And the partner should be in US, the board of directors should be in US and GGV was a great partner that way. So when we got them on board, the other things that opened up for us was exposure to the U.S. market in terms of hiring, in terms of campus recruitment. They referred us to Stanford. Recently, we hired a bunch of interns from Stanford in that virtual campus drive.
So, I mean, a lot of things opened up for us. And that's the reason why we accepted that inbound offer from ZGB.
Yeah. Now, were you early enough to get equity in the business personally? Yes. Okay. So anytime, obviously you do a round, right? You're getting, you're getting hit, right? There's a bit of dilution. Most series A companies were giving up between call it 10 and 20% of the business, like on that series A round. Were you guys sort of in that range?
Yeah, we were absolutely. But I think the valuations are also crazy. The valuation has increased approximately 20 times since I've been hired.
What was the, we won't talk about today, but the 4.2 million you raised last year, what valuation did you raise that at? Somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 million was that valuation. That is so crazy. 15 to 20 million. So 15 to 20 X that your million dollars in ARR at that time. Yeah. That's crazy. And, and, um, and you said valuations growing basically five X year over year.
Uh, the venue is, and yeah, valuation is also in the same pitch.
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Chapter 7: Why did Slintel raise $20 million and how will it be used?
And how old are you? I'm 29, turning 29 this month. Very cool. Last question, Anupriya. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? Sorry, what was that? Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
I think I wish I knew that money is not as important when I didn't have money at 20. I thought money is everything and I kept chasing that. And that is one of the reasons I was so aspirational in my life that I became a sales leader at 26. I'm the youngest sales leader in the industry today, leading such a big function and was leading sales function since I was 26.
But the reason I could do that is because I was so aspirational. But after I achieved that, I realized that money is not as important as I thought it was.
Guys, Slintel competing in the B2B SaaS intelligence space. They had $100,000 in MRR a year ago, now over $500,000 in MRR or $6 million run rate. Over 200 customers, again, growing rapidly. They spent $200,000 on paid ads last month and also doing a strong SEO motion. 30 folks on their sales team, 10 AEs carry a quota, 10 CSMs carry a net dollar attention quota. We dive into all of it today.
Anupreet, thanks for taking us to the top. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Nathan. I had a lot of fun. Thank you so much for making it so insightful. I hope the listeners get some value out of it.
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