Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young (Part 1)

Braydan and his cofounder are sales guys who have bootstrapped Sendoso to revenue and then raised over $150 million in VC money to scale an excellent SaaS company. Braydan discusses some of the mistakes and challenges, as well as their many successes.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Braydan Young: I was born in Sacramento which is an hour and a half outside of Chico. My parents were both entrepreneurs. My dad has a landscape company. My mom was a florist. They did lots of work outside. I went to college in Chico. After I graduated, they moved to San Francisco. It’s only three hours south. I live in Marin now. It’s right across Golden Gate Bridge. Once you have a kid, you move to Marin. The city is great, but once you have a family, it’s time to go to the suburbs.

Sramana Mitra: I live in Menlo Park.

Braydan Young: Right. I’ve been here for four years or so.

Sramana Mitra: What have you done after graduating from Chico?

Braydan Young: I went into insurance. Insurance was the first step after school. It was 2009. Finding a job was really hard. Insurance was hiring and they were hiring sales. I went into sales and sold insurance for a couple of years. I, very vividly, remember the conversation. I walked into my boss’s office. I was like, “I want to try webinar to get people to buy insurance.” He looked at me and said, “Braydan, this company is 200 years old. We’re not going to try new ways of doing things.”

I left and jumped into tech. My first tech job was a company called Demand Force, where I learned how to do transactional sales. I sold to dentists. It was very different than insurance. Then I jumped to another startup in the recruiting space. Finally, I finally did Sendoso.

Sramana Mitra: All this job that you’ve done is without a tech background, so you worked on the sales side.

Braydan Young: Always sales side. Never on the technical side.

Sramana Mitra: What are the circumstances under which you started Sendoso?

Braydan Young: My co-founder and I met at Chico. We both went to college together. We both stayed friends in San Francisco. He started a company in college. His company was Student Rentals and I ran a VC club. I invested $10,000 into his startup. He built the company to a point where he sold it to a place in San Francisco for a job in 2009. When I was selling insurance, I slept on his couch for a couple of months. We jumped around startups for a long time.

One night, he had the idea. He said, “I want to send coffee e-gift cards to my prospects. I’m trying to get meetings.” At that time, all these software were coming out with big email cadences. No one could do mass emails just yet. We had to figure out how to drop e-gift codes for $5 Starbucks gift cards into emails and make it easy for people. In the very first week of launching it, it made $60,000.

Sramana Mitra: Made $60,000. Tell me about the business model.

Braydan Young: We would buy gift cards for $5 and we would sell them for $6. We made a dollar. That was how it started. It was this coffee gift card thing. It was a cool way to attach to emails. We didn’t have the engineering background. We found these guys in Pakistan. We learned how to wireframe. We watched a bunch of YouTube videos. They built it in like a weekend. We had it that next week to sell to our friends in sales.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young
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