This promising startup, allwhere, used SellX to validate product-market fit, generating $750,000 in customer pipeline and raising $1.5M in seed funding from D.E. Shaw & Co.

allwhere is the all-in-one platform that allows HR departments to organize the work-life of their remote teams. Team members can receive anything from a laptop or curated WFH setup to a perk or birthday cake right to their door. Launch allows HRs to automate, schedule, curate, or allow employees to handpick anything they need to be productive.

https://www.allwhere.co

Location: United States

Industry: Software

Key highlights:

• 3 sales reps allocated in 24 hours
• 830 leads generated in 2 weeks
• 15 successful meetings held in 1 month
• $750,000 worth of customer pipeline produced
• $1.5m of venture capital raised

Pain-points solved:

• Saving $300,000 total in hiring and training costs per three sales reps
• Getting full-fledged sales team up and running in 24hrs vs 90 days
• Earning meetings with high-profile managers of the relevant target audience
• Understanding the challenges and goals of HR execs in this new remote world

“I was desperately looking for a way to test an idea that, I was sure, would revolutionize the concept of remote work, onboarding, and HR processes. The difficulty was that I needed to quickly find a sales team without spending tens of thousands of dollars and months for recruiting and onboarding,” says Oscar Mattsson, CEO at Launch, when describing the challenge.

The challenge

Oscar Mattsson had a great idea for a startup. First, it had to solve remote work problems for many teams out there. Launch should help HRs with everything from buying and delivering onboarding packages to setting up remote offices and authorizing employee self-serve purchases for pre-approved equipment.

But there was one minor issue. Mattsson had to validate the idea first. In product marketing terms, his task was to find a product-market fit. He wanted to connect with prospective users of Launch.

Launch needed sales specialists with access to the right audience. The standard option meant choosing between hiring an in-house team or outsourcing.

In the case of an in-house team, Oscar had to allocate tens of thousands of dollars for recruiting before spending months hiring and onboarding new hires:

$15,000 and $20,000 are the average US costs in hiring and training for a single sales rep;

57.5 days is the US average time to hire a new employee.

With outsourcing, Oscar would be forced to work with teams without the relevant expertise in the HR market.

Both options weren’t going to cut it. Launch needed quick access to experts without having to invest a fortune in hypothesis testing.

The process

• Oscar was referred to SellX by his friends who already delegated their sales ops to the platform.
• Launch’s CEO curated a list of 3 SDRs chosen from thousands of industry sales professionals with a proven track record of selling to HR.
• SellX allows for selecting goals, indicating the campaign’s budget and price Mattsson wanted to pay per lead. Once set up, SDRs started generating leads for Launch.
• Mattsson was able to track all sales activities of the SellX SDRs. This includes the SDRs’ targets, leads’ bio, time spent, and even interview records.
• Every time Mattsson confirmed that he had received a lead, SellX charged his account to pay SDR and retain a small fee for the service.
• The only thing left was to schedule an interview with the high-intent leads identified by SellX. Those eventually helped Mattsson navigate the market and become a part of Launch’s customer waiting list.

The results

After only 30 days on SellX, Oscar had more than a dozen meetings lined up with HR execs at enterprise companies with thousands of employees. This delivered enough data for Mattsson to validate his concept and raise $1.5m in a seed round from D.E. Shaw & Co., a reputable NYC fund with $55B AUM.

Oscar not only gained valuable insights and data to back his project, but he also earned $750,000 in leads that turned into prospective customers, which opened the door for Launch’s rapid growth.

“It took about 30 days, from the moment my friends recommended SellX to the moment I closed my 15th interview. If a month before someone had told me that I would get access to the top representatives of the HR industry without having to knock on closed doors and send endless emails over Linkedin, I would not have believed them. But the fact remains — with the help of SellX, I opened the door to an untapped market rather quickly” says Mattsson.

The classic approach would require Oscar Mattsson to use non-specialized sales reps that are outsourced or face the reality of having to build his sales team from scratch. This would be much less effective and take far longer to organize.

With SellX, Oscar allocated enough professional salespeople to reach his target audience while saving months and thousands of dollars, avoiding the usual barriers to entry. With buyer commitments from prominent market players on its desk, Launch had no difficulty attracting its first investment.

Today, the company continues to work with SellX as its primary direct sales channel.