Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire customers? What was the pricing model that you were using?

Al Lalani: It was, plain and simple, cold-calling for the most part. It was really focusing on the niche of e-commerce. Within that niche, we focused on the mid-market. These are customers between $2 million to $50 million in online revenue. It was just us presenting it.

The good part was, what we were doing was fairly unique. It was related to something that everyone wanted to hear about. It was related to something that everyone wanted to hear about. It has always been a good and bad thing for us because everything we have and say is exciting. Everyone wants to hear it. The challenging part is that everyone is interested. Converting that interest into actual buying is a challenge.

Sramana Mitra: What was the unit price?

Al Lalani: We were selling it at about $10,000 to $12,000 annually. It was a very small part of the product that we had at that time. We didn’t have the full platform that we do now around customer loyalty and advocacy, so it was fairly small at that time.

Sramana Mitra: So you managed to get about 10 customers?

Al Lalani: Ten customers of pure play and hustle. That’s what it was. To give you some specifics of the hustle, I hired college students to call for me. I also called. It was interesting because I didn’t have any US employees. Usually, when you buy a SaaS product from a good company, you have the sales person and you have a customer success person. I did both of those initially.

Sramana Mitra: Were you based in the US?

Al Lalani: I was always in the US at that time.

Sramana Mitra: So first hundred thousand with pure hustle, then what happened?

Al Lalani: Then we raised a small seed round. We hired a few people to grow that from there.

Sramana Mitra: Whom did you raise the seed round from?

Al Lalani: We raised the seed round from a few angels here in Los Angeles. These were all e-commerce successes out of LA at that time. They were excited about the vertical we were in. This was probably late 2012. There wasn’t an accelerator. I got introduced and raised it from some angels as well as seed VCs. That’s our growth. Since then, we’ve only raised the seed round. We haven’t raised any capital. We’ve grown from revenue. I’ve seen people raise a lot of money.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in total?

Al Lalani: We raised a late seed a couple of years ago. We’ve raised less than $3 million so far.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex
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