You Make $8m/yr, Would You Sell for $100m Cash?

Before the product existed (then called Sales Crew), the founder found an article on sales compensation written by the co-founder/CEO of French company Partoo and reached out on LinkedIn. Over the weekend the CEO and his CFO wireframed their own sales-comp app; on Monday they met and offered to be first investors and first customers. Qobra raised a tiny $100K pre-seed (7 angels) and Partoo became customer #1.

Around the same time as the first customer, the company announced its launch publicly on LinkedIn. A prospect reached out asking for a demo; there was almost nothing to show beyond the promise, but the deal closed quickly.

For the early customer base the founder mostly did outbound phone calls alone, plus a little personal network. No scripts, volumes or lists described in the body.

Looked at market prices of similar solutions, especially US ones, and set the price for the first 10 customers at half that: $10,000/year. Average contract has since tripled to ~$30K/year.

Pricing is per sales-rep seat, i.e. per rep whose commissions are calculated. Admin licenses for finance and RevOps users are free, so 100 reps = 100 licenses regardless of admin headcount.

This year the company put more budget into events, meetings, dinners and trade shows. Took the lowest (silver) booth package at SaaStr (cost more than $10-20K). Goal: get as many passers-by as possible to talk; the booth TV loops the same meme-style ads run on LinkedIn/YouTube so people get intrigued and come over.

Applies B2C-style marketing to B2B: meme creatives (e.g. a SpongeBob meme) run as LinkedIn ads and YouTube ads, $200-300K/year in direct paid advertising. Creatives handled by one in-house person (Dylan) plus a freelance agency. Measured through website traffic by source and post engagement, accepting that LinkedIn is top-of-funnel and hard to tie to revenue.

Invests in getting a large number of G2 reviews (host cites ~1,000) and ranking highly in G2. The value is less direct G2 traffic than G2's authority in SEO and GEO: when someone asks an AI assistant like Claude for the best sales comp software, it draws on sources such as G2.

Intentional glossary SEO playbook (programmatic SEO on terms in the sales-comp space), idea from a team member; worked on strongly for 2-3 years. Results were slow at first before compounding.

On the back of the $10M Series A (end of 2023), raised $2M in debt from HSBC and two other banks to limit dilution. Advice: talk to bankers right after a fundraise, but remember it must be repaid and don't treat it like investor money.

Turning the SaaS into an AI product that does the job: three agents (Architect, Analyst, Coach). The Architect builds and deploys comp plans from a PDF/PowerPoint in minutes instead of a weeks-long implementation; Analyst and Coach cover report building and sales-rep engagement. Aim is to capture the ~$6 of services spend per $1 of software (consultants, admins) rather than cannibalize revenue.

With under 1% of the French market captured, the company is prioritizing the US; the founder is relocating to New York.