A Pill Down a Dog’s Throat

Rethinking Sales Processes through Saleswhale

This week our investment in Saleswhale was announced. I tell any one who would care to listen that I’m really excited to work with this team. Young and “dynamic” founders who have been through the grind before, churn out a product quickly, take customer feedback, and iterate quickly. They run weekly sprints and I am amazed at how quickly they build stuff. There are a handful of companies on this side of the world that can boast this kind of execution speed.

The founders of Saleswhale come from humble backgrounds. No Harvard MBAs or Stanford Computer Science grads here. Nor any McKinsey or Goldman Sachs experience. Part of me just wants to see this team succeed so that they can remove stereotypes by proving that you can be any one and come from anywhere to succeed in the startup world. 5 geeks holed up in a shophouse are cooking up something that can define how we do sales, and this is why I love the startup world. It is probably the only space left in the world where inequlity is still low.

Gabriel’s story in fact is particularly interesting. Whatever I know of him is through his own recount and his social networking account, so I might be hazy on the details. Right after school, Gabriel had to skip college and get a job. After spending a couple of years doing a few sales jobs, he ended up starting a company. It was one of those in-vogue online coupon businesses that people built on the GroupOn model. He taught himself programming and developed the website as he likely didn’t have money to hire dev talent. Upon realising that the model won’t work as expected, Gabriel decided to shut down the company and given the demand in the market, started a dev shop. Venus joined him here and started learning UX and design, as well as front end programming. Gabriel and Venus (who are married btw, and yes GREE Ventures is not biased against founder couples) worked on churning out apps for multiple companies including Epson and Zalora. After a few years, they realised that they love building products AND seeing them to fruition, and the latter was not really possible in a dev shop. This is when Saleswhale was formed, possibly out of frustration of managing their own sales process. A few pivots later, they managed to enter Y-Combinator and hence caught the eye of most investors. Along the way, they also convinced Ethan to quit his job at Viki and he is now leading the tech and engineering. We are lucky that they decided to partner with us, as I would assume most investors would be happy to invest in a team as enthusiastic as this one. The team now is 5 people, all techies, and with 2 founders who have built a business the hard way before. Sounds like a good recipe to me.

There is obviously that thing about the market. Countless unproductive hours are spent by sales team around the world sending out target-less and non personalised emails that go straight from inbox to junk. While email marketing hacks and custom solutions are trying to help resolve this, the problem deserves to be solved via automation. Why not let the bots do the automatic A/B testing of messages for you on customers and then loop you in once the bot detects that a message is likely to convert? Why not let the machine learn from patterns of sales on which customers are converting and which are not, and then help shape your next sales campaign? Why not trust a low-brain bot to answer your inbound emails and figure out who is worth talking to? So simple, and yet so powerful. Sales teams can focus less on manual follow ups and more on closing sales, delivering the best customer experience and offering quality customer support, rather than trying to shove a pill down a doggy’s throat.

Which brings me to my biggest reason of why I loved this company and the team: customer empathy. I talked to a number of Saleswhale customers personally and frankly I have never received customer feedback as good as this before. Not only do they find the product ultra useful, all of them concurred that the sort of support the company is providing is ridiculous. It’s so good in fact that even the customers are worried that the company might not be able to keep this up going forward. If Gabriel and Venus can manage to continue this at scale, they are on their way to success regardless of what they achieve here.

Do note, this is not something easy to achieve. While every good founder starts off with a mission to serve its customers and solve a pain point for them, its only the great founders who tend to remember this mission and the need for customer empathy after all hell breaks loose. When your metrics are declining, or you have to go in hyper-growth mode for your investors, or you have to manage internal team politics in a team of 50 people, it’s difficult to wake up everyday and remember what you started this company for. Medium itself went through this cycle, and it’s surprising to see that after 5 years of operations and $300M of funding, the CEO believes they lost focus on the mission.

However, in building out this model, we realized we didn’t yet have the right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content. We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming for. — Ev Williams

While I wish the Saleswhale team good luck in executing on the business, I hope that they do not loose what they have going for them here. I hope that 5 years down the line, I run into a random Saleswhale customer and they have the same feedback for me: “I simply LOVE their product and support”. That’s all that matters.