You Make $8m/yr, Would You Sell for $100m Cash?
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How did Qobra grow its sales compensation software business to $8M ARR?
Uh actually I didn't really have a proper job before. Launching Cobra, so created a company almost right out of after school. So we relaunched as uh SIARS compensation software, so automating end to end commissions from uh integrations to generating statements. We serve more than two hundred and fifty customers now.
Can I take two hundred and fifty customers times that thirty thousand ACV to sort it back into your ARR? That puts you at like seven million of ARR. Yeah, slightly above that. Congrats, man. That's exciting. Yeah, it's cool. I just saw this on your LinkedIn. Top sales rep earned one point five million in commissions in twenty twenty five. He's earning like seventy five X what people earn on average in in variable compensation. What on earth was that sales rep selling to make that kind of commission? Hey folks, my guest today is Antoine Fort. He's the co-founder and CEO of Cobra, an AI first sales compensation platform. He graduated from college and then co-founded the business in 2020 to fix one of B2B SaaS's most broken workflows, commissions.
All right, Antoine, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I am. Thanks very much, Nathan, for hosting me on this episode. I appreciate you joining. Do you have a horror story? Were you a former account executive that you know wasn't paid?
job before launching Cobra. So created a company almost right out of after school. So I did not leave the horrors of commissions myself, but I could see it very clearly. So that's why I wanted to solve this.
So here you go. These are the products you're selling today. Which of these products did you launch with and what year did you launch? So we
launched uh as a SIAS compensation software, so automating end-to-end commissions from uh integrations to generating statements.
And what year did you launch the business?
How did Qobra land its first customers and set its early pricing?
Oh yeah, twenty
twenty. Twenty twenty. Okay. So you launched the business in twenty twenty and walk us through your first paying customer. How did you get those first couple of customers?
There's uh like two first uh customers. One of them, um so I I I was just with the idea of launching Cobra, but Cobra was not live. We didn't have the name yet. It was called Salescrew and uh actually the the the legal name of the company still salescrew. And I saw like the co founder and CEO of uh Partou. French uh French company uh who wrote an article on sales compensation. So I reached out to him on LinkedIn and during the full weekend he and his CFO worked on building kind of a sales compensation app, wireframing. And so on Monday he sends me an email saying we need to talk. So we have this meeting on Monday. And he's saying, Okay, I like the idea. So You can see what we do what we did. Uh so if you want we could be your first investors and your first customers.
Uh so I said, yeah, let's go. And we we we raised a very uh tiny seed pre-seed round at that time and part two became our first customer. And then the other one Um it was almost at the same time. We just launched public on on on LinkedIn and someone reached out to me saying, Hey, it's interesting what you do. Um, can I get a demo? So there was almost nothing to demo at that time, uh just a promise. Uh but in the end uh we landed this customer uh very quickly.
The pre seed round that you did with Partibee, uh I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. How big was that round or how small was that round?
So it was a one hundred K very small rounds, uh with seven business angels. That really helped a lot then.
Was LinkedIn part of your strategy to get your first hundred customers that was a big influence?
I was mostly doing uh, you know, outbound calls. So it was just me and my phone and then a little bit of network as well. And what was the price point back then? How much were you charging? Uh so we just looked at uh what was the price on the market for similar solutions, especially uh US ones, and we said, Okay, for our first ten customers, let's just split that in two.
What was that price point? Ten thousand a year, a thousand a year?
Yeah, that was that was yeah, ten thousand a year.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Qobra grow its sales compensation software business to $8M ARR?
0:00–1:42
2
How did Qobra land its first customers and set its early pricing?
1:42–4:15
3
How do events, paid ads, and meme marketing help Qobra win customers?
4:15–7:37
4
How did Qobra raise funding and use debt to limit dilution?
7:37–10:47
5
Can AI replace sales reps, and what does a $1.5M commission reveal?
10:47–12:35
6
How will Qobra’s AI agents automate sales compensation work?
12:35–15:46
7
How do G2 reviews and programmatic SEO drive Qobra’s growth?
15:46–18:15
8
Would Antoine sell Qobra for $100M cash while expanding in the US?
18:15–18:58
Speakers
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