Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: To me, calling sounds like a mistake.

Braydan Young: Yes. It would have been way better to have a marketing campaign or have a landing page. The knowledge I had was only coming from sales back then. It was brute force.

Sramana Mitra: Unless there is a substantial deal size of at least $10,000 or so, calling doesn’t really work.

Braydan Young: By the end of the three months of doing this, we had about 15,000 users in the platform. I would average about 20 to 28 calls a day. It just destroyed you. You’d walk in the office and you’d just have the calls all day. It was the same pitch. We have a phone call with a company. They were like, “I like this for coffee e-gifts. Can you guys also do physical stuff? Can I send my branded swag out?”

That was the aha moment. Chris quit his job and came in. We had to figure out this new version. He built that with the team in Pakistan. I continued to do the coffee thing. At that time, coffee was making enough to sustain, but Chris and I weren’t getting salaries. My girlfriend, who’s now my wife, was supportive. She said, “You have three more months to pull some money out of this.”

As time went on, we launched Sendoso which had 30 to 40 e-gifts. We found a guy through our network of people who had a warehouse in Vegas. When we launched, we moved those 15,000 customers over to Sendoso for free. Then we added a SaaS fee. It’s $200 a month to start. We were able to sell quickly. We hadn’t raised any money yet. Now we have this platform and we’re selling it. We said, “We should raise some money.”

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking now?

Braydan Young: 2017.

Sramana Mitra: That’s two years in?

Braydan Young: A year in.

Sramana Mitra: What is the MRR at this point?

Braydan Young: About $20,000 a month.

Sramana Mitra: You also had transaction revenue?

Braydan Young: Just MRR. We go to our first VC meeting. We got a meeting with Norwest. We pitched them. I remember pitching them and the guy was like, “I love what you’re doing but I think you’re more of a feature than an actual platform.” It was painful to hear.

We took that feedback and we added more stuff to Sendoso to make it more of a platform. We added a marketplace. We added a way for you to route orders to a bagel shop or a flower shop. We plugged into Amazon where we could take items from Amazon. We started adding more iterations.

We met with 20 or 30 VC firms. We had our first angel round through a bunch of folks down at Palo Alto. They gave us $300,000. That was the first time we took a paycheck. After we raised that round, we knew we needed a round right away after that. We tried to raise it immediately. We found a fund called Storm Ventures which gave our first seed round.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young
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