Sales & Our Time at Y-Combinator
During YC I remember one conversation we had with Michael Seibel, Y-Combinator partner, where he looked at 2 of our developers and asked, “What are you both doing everyday?” Our chief data scientist timidly answered, “we’re building the product.” Michael then asked a super-simple follow-up “how many clients do you have that you’re building this product for?” I felt like he was teeing us up.
…..I think you can guess our answer was nothing short of a ZERO, an egg-of-goose. At that moment everyone became a member of the sales team.
As soon as we returned to our 1 bedroom apartment/office in Mountain View, CA our technical team began writing scripts to search for contacts in our space and build our lead list. We started getting thousands of contacts per week. Our CEO and myself, Director of Growth, set goals of personally reaching out to 200 companies per week… this also meant reaching out to ~600 people per week (2–3 people per company.) From there we successfully had +20 meetings per week and were finally starting to build a promising pipeline. Fast forward to demo day.. we had just under 10 paid contracts and closed a solid round of funding!
What we measured: Since we didn’t know which client type would close the fastest we started experimenting. We had 4 basic client groups; municipalities, property owners, parking managers, and airports. We learned 2 of the groups were more than eager to take a product tour but we’re sloooooow when it came to closing. Naturally the private sector moved quickly but was very difficult tie down and getting a meeting took tremendous efforts. Just to give you an idea; we had to email the private sector 12X more than the public sector in order to get the same # of meetings… the payoff was they closed quicker!
What we learned: We learned to automate nearly everything imaginable. We created scripts to keep the lead generation pumping 500 new leads per day. We broke our pipeline down into manageable tracks so we knew how each client moves through the pipeline from time-to-demo, to time-to-close. We also learned how important it is to find the product-market-fit as fast as humanely possible.
More sales learning to follow!
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