Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The reality is that you were in revenue when you went out to raise. That makes things a lot simpler. The fact that you spent a year fine-tuning your model to the point where you were a recurring revenue-generating business makes raising money a lot simpler.

Braydan Young: The one thing going against us was that we were both salespeople. A lot of the questions were about our technical co-founder.

Sramana Mitra: How did you address that?

Braydan Young: With revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Any time we have a non-technical co-founder, we always say that you have to counter the pushback around you not having a tech person in the team with revenue.

Braydan Young: Right. The company was growing at a good rate at that point. Our first hire was different. It was a CX person. We had too many customers at that time. We had no one to talk to them. Chris and I were really bad at CX. After that, we hired somebody who can help with creative ideas. Then sales.

It worked really well in the beginning. We were bringing on customers so quickly. We had product-market fit really fast. People were like, “I have a warehouse filled with stuff. I don’t know what’s there. I’d love to send it to you so you can track it.” We also had this track where they send out holiday gifts. We’d ask, “What did that do for you last year?” They can’t show the ROI for that. That was our value.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a great pitch.

Braydan Young: We have sales and CX. Every problem was scalability. As you scale sales, you have to scale CX. You’re trying to launch new product features as fast as possible because that was a good thing and a bad thing. There were so many marketing techs coming on the scene at that time. They were like, “Do you plugin to Marketo or Eloqua?” It got to a point where we had 30 people and we raised Series A from Craft Ventures.

Sramana Mitra: How much?

Braydan Young: $13 million.

Sramana Mitra: Where are we now?

Braydan Young: 2018. We knew that we needed to keep hiring sales, but we couldn’t afford it in San Francisco. We went to Scotsdale, Arizona. We started hiring salespeople out of Zenefits. That was interesting. San Francisco people have an edge to them. We’re all obsessed with tech if you’re in tech. Arizona worked, but we ended up having to go through a lot of people to find the people who were really great. The biggest problem we had was we had two cultures. We had the San Francisco culture, and we had the Arizona culture. I started going back and forth and trying to generate the same culture.

Sramana Mitra: Is it possible to do that?

Braydan Young: No. We didn’t go out to Arizona enough, so we didn’t know what the culture was. We had a bigger problem. The sales team would butt heads all the time. We had to separate that.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve experienced this. I had two operations reporting to me. One in the Bay Area and one in Europe. These are two completely different cultures. They compete. The point you’re raising is an important point. You have to make these decisions fairly consciously of where you go and how you manage these cultures. We are in an era of virtual offices and distributed operations. Cultures can be all over the place.

Braydan Young: It’s okay to have different cultures. We have an office in Ireland. It’s okay as long as you understand it.

Sramana Mitra: You need two things. You need values and objectives that are aligned. Two, you need processes that are aligned.

Braydan Young: Right. We didn’t have the process piece in the early days. The crazy part was it was the VC fuel days. You had these big rounds. A lot of them were SMB and midmarket to start. Then we brought on our first enterprise customers too early if I’m being honest. Once you bring on enterprise, they influence your roadmap aggressively. That one big customer might care about it, but the rest don’t.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young
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