SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Yesware Aims for $30m in 2016 with Matthew Bellows of Yesware
05 Feb 2016
Chapter 1: What inspired Matthew Bellows to start Yesware?
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. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
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Chapter 2: How much capital did Yesware raise and why was it necessary?
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.
Chapter 3: What is the target market for Yesware's services?
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Chapter 4: When should a startup hire its first salesperson?
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Chapter 5: What strategies does Yesware use to engage new customers?
Tomorrow is with Jason Coleman. He plans to be the number one WordPress membership plugin by 2017. Okay, Top Tribe, good morning.
Chapter 6: How does Yesware measure sales effectiveness?
I'm here with my tea this morning.
Chapter 7: What is Matthew's vision for Yesware's future revenue goals?
I'm excited about the guest we have, mainly because I've used their free tools before. It's a great one. His name is Matthew Bellows, and he's the founder and CEO of Yesware. Yesware serves more than 750,000 salespeople at companies like Acquia, AdRoll, Groupon, Salesforce, Twilio, Yelp, and Zendesk. Now, prior to Yesware, Matthew was the vice president of sales at Vivox.
Before that, he served as general manager at Floodgate, which was acquired by Zynga. He was also founder and CEO of WGR Media, which was acquired by CNET Networks. And he was VP of sales and marketing of Interstep, which was acquired by Flycast or CMGI. He earned his bachelor's from Naropa University and his MBA magna cum laude from the Olin School for Business at Babson College.
Matthew, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. Thanks for having me, Nathan. Yeah, I'm excited that you're here. You know, I always have wanted to meet someone who started off in the gaming world and then is all of a sudden in sales. You are that person.
Yeah, that's right. Very cool. I'm still in the gaming world as a hobby, but...
Are you writing games or just playing ones you enjoy?
Well, my very first job actually was in the games industry. As a high school kid, I was a beta tester for a company called Infocom back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I've worked in the video game industry on and off for about half my career.
And so I want to fast forward because there's so much we could talk about. The exit to Zynga, all your experience there. Yes, where's your baby though now? I want to focus on that. What year did you found the business in?
We founded it in late 2010 and raised our first round of financing in early 2011.
Okay, great. And guys, his experience, Matthew did a great job summing it all up in a great New York Times piece, and he really pulled out the struggles, which I appreciated. So I'll link to that in the show notes at NathanLatka.com forward slash the top 172. And I'm going to pull the story forward, and I want to talk about kind of now.
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