Bootstrap an AI Startup First, Raise Money Later: Sean Minter, Founder CEO of AmplifAI (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the next round of financing now. You went from $1 million to $4 million, and then you raised another $12 million round of financing, where were you expanding? Where were you investing at this point?

Sean Minter: In the second round of financing, the go-to-market strategy became a much larger portion of the investment. Going from four to ten to fifteen kind of range using that funding requires a much different go-to-market motion than going from zero to one or one to four. There was way more investment in the go-to-market motion with the second round of investment because product was already there. We invested a little more in product, but that wasn’t like a large increase. Customer success account management plans were there. Obviously, as customers come, you continue to invest in that. But the bigger change in people requirements came in the go-to-market motion.

Sramana Mitra: Talk more about that. So in the first round of financing, you do have a bunch of large accounts. There’s a lot of expansion within those accounts and a lot of revenue and probably some amount of new customers coming in from those accounts. But in the land and expand motion, the expand motion is the bigger emphasis. In the next round, it’s land that becomes bigger, right?

Sean Minter: Yes, we got to land so that you can expand.

Sramana Mitra: Yes. Tell me more about what did you learn about the land phase and what was repeatable? Repeatability is also very important.

Sean Minter: I think in the beginning of any business, at least for us till the $4 million stage, everything is founder-led sales. If you think you could hire a BPO of sales and try to teach them your product and get them comfortable enough in clients, it’ll never happen. I think you have to be the client facing person and get them comfortable because from the client’s perspective, they have no idea who you are and what your business is. They’re betting on you as a person. Do you sound like you’re credible? Do you sound like you know what you’re doing? Do you sound like you know my problem? Do you sound like you know a solution?

You’re not going to teach somebody from the outside that in the beginning. It’s never going to happen. If you think you’re going to hire some outside salesperson, you’re probably never going to be successful. You’ve got to be out there in the front. Then, as you grow, you have to be able to get a repeatable motion, but now you have more credibility.

Sramana Mitra: You have case studies and customer references.

Sean Minter: Then you can start transitioning, but you’ll never be out. For the largest clients, you always have to be in the sales process as the founder. You’ll never be out, but you can create a repeatable motion where at least a sales team can get you 70% to 80% close. And then you can come in towards the end and help close things in this realm. Obviously, I’m still involved in most of the large sales. We have a sales team that can kind of bring people in the door and drive it. Now, the next round probably is where you’ll have a team that can close it without you, even the bigger deals.

But I think really large clients will always need to talk to the founder or CEO type person because they’re making a bet on some small company they’ve never heard of.

Sramana Mitra: So, in terms of that repeatability that you have established, how do you extract the pain point in a new account? How do you figure out that they’re ready to talk to.

Sean Minter: That’s always more art than science, to be honest. If you can figure that out, that would be great.

Sramana Mitra: You have to figure it out.

Sean Minter: That’s always an ongoing process. We’re still figuring some of those types of things out. From a sales team perspective, we’re figuring out, are they ready or are they not ready? It all comes down to, in some ways, how many leads can you generate.

If you’re generating a decent amount of leads, you can be more picky about which ones you go after. If your lead gen process is limited, every lead is important. So it comes down to how you generate lead gen. If a lot of your lead gen is more inbound of content you’re generating, maybe they’re not the largest client. It also comes down to the customer size. So if you’re going after a small business, you have to be a lot faster at putting out. That’s high volume.

Sramana Mitra: But you’re not going after small business, right?

Sean Minter: We’re not. So that’s why I’m saying the motion is based on the company you’re talking to. Our sales cycle could be two to three years for the largest clients. We have some clients with ten thousand plus users now. Those sales cycles took a couple of years to get in the door.

We have small clients who have six-month sales cycles.

So the client segment is important. The sales cycle is different. But every lead, especially the large ones, are fairly important.

Sramana Mitra: So, how do you do lead generation?

Sean Minter: You can’t really get into large clients outside of face to face. We get access to most large enterprises at trade shows and by going to events that they’re going to be at.

Lead generation for midsize enterprises can be done over social media. We do LinkedIn campaigns and things like account-based marketing.

But you’re not going to get into the large, huge opportunities which we currently have in that process. That’s always going to be through some sort of face to face activity.

We have a channel partner program. It’s finally getting going. Channel partners won’t work with small startups, right? Because it’s too much activity.

Sramana Mitra: Without referenceability, they’re not going to work.

Sean Minter: But we’ve gotten big enough to where we now have channel partners that can take us into deals and that generates a decent amount of lead flow.

So we have leads coming three ways. Trade shows used to be the only way we got leads.

Now we have outbound activity – we have ABM activity primarily focused on LinkedIn. We have channel partners and we have our trade shows.

Sramana Mitra: How successful is your LinkedIn channel?

Sean Minter: Still not very successful yet.

Sramana Mitra: Not very successful.

Sean Minter: We think it will be. But to be honest with you, the world is flooded with so much outbound and LinkedIn and things like that. Our view is that the more people see you and hear of you through multiple channels, the more likely it is you will eventually get into some sort of connectivity.

Sramana Mitra: In your next phase of going to a larger body of land, you are going to have to make the LinkedIn channel successful.

Sean Minter: Yeah, 100%. We focus on getting more inbound activity, which means you have to direct outbound campaigns, account based marketing, and focusing case studies into verticals and users. That gets more complex. So we brought in a new leader of marketing about nine months ago to help us drive that.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrap an AI Startup First, Raise Money Later: Sean Minter, Founder CEO of AmplifAI
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