Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You built something good enough for an MVP.

Braydan Young: Yes. We ended up creating a whole entity out in Pakistan. Business model was a buck a send. It started to take off. We were pretty good at SEO and if you search “send a coffee”, we’d pop up first. We got a letter saying, “Why is our logo all over your website?” They didn’t want resellers. We made a couple of quick bucks, so we packed it in.

We sat down and said, “What if we plugged the coffee center idea into Salesforce and into Outreach and make it where you don’t have to go to a separate platform to get an e-gift. At that time, account-based marketing was the new resurgence of marketing. We sat down and emailed every single person in Starbucks to pitch them this idea. They agreed for us to come up and pitch them.

We got up to Seattle and had this meeting. On the other side, there were 10 people in suits. It was super corporate. Before we started the meeting, they said, “We do coffee tastings before we start meetings here.” Chris and I were the only people drinking it. They came back every 15 minutes and brought us a different cup of coffee. Chris and I were the only ones drinking it. We’re wired. We’re pitching these guys shaking because we had that much coffee. They agreed. We went back with Starbucks in our backpocket.

Sramana Mitra: What were the terms?

Braydan Young: We got a discount. They gave a break of 5% to 10%. We got that break on gift cards. We could use their logo, which was big. They would also join us on calls. We would pitch Airbnb and they’d be with us. We were the super small startup with Starbucks backing us. We can get meetings with anybody because we had this massive company with us. We started selling. At that time, Chris and I had other jobs. We knew that this might get big.

The founder of my current startup, which is no longer around, met with me and said, “Do you want to work on that or here?” I had to choose, so I left. I was fired from my own startup. I called Chris and said, “We have to make this work.” Chris stayed at his current job for another couple of months. I worked solo by myself pitching all day long to companies.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of companies were you selling to?

Braydan Young: Marketers and sales people at any tech startup. We would crawl LinkedIn and get this massive list of emails from people who were in sales and marketing. After we crawled LinkedIn, they would get dropped to another mail merge. We did this big email campaign trying to get meetings. I would have 30 to 40 calls a day. I realized now that we could have done videos.

Sramana Mitra: These are very small deals right?

Braydan Young: Right. They weren’t deals.

Sramana Mitra: These should have been done by marketing.

Braydan Young: We didn’t have marketing. It was only me and Chris. It was just me.

Sramana Mitra: What I’m saying is it needs to be done by digital marketing. You cannot call people to get these tiny deals.

Braydan Young: I agree. I was making no money. Our success route was, we’d look at our strike chart. If we made more money than the previous days, then we’re like, “This is great.”

Sramana Mitra: You weren’t even trying to figure out a marketing-driven channel.

Braydan Young: Not yet.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young
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