Swipe.by · B2B · AI marketing for restaurants
Pay door-to-door reps mostly commission, with a guaranteed minimum
Reps keep 30-40% of year-one revenue; top reps promoted in ~6 months
What they did
What happened
In their words
He Sells AI Door-to-Door. $3.5M ARR, 400% Growth, $0 Ads
… a dollar on marketing, not a single inbound funnel. Who's giving the demo? The market leads that are in the markets actually will do the demo virtually, right? So we have an outside salesperson with the customer here. Then we have the customer here and we have someone over the screen doing the actual demo. The rep you have on the ground in any major city, just to be clear, they're making no base salary, right? It's 100% commission in first year?
No. So they have an activity guarantee, what we call it. So if you don't close anything, but you knocked on doors and you set appointments, you will make money. How much would I make? Like 36K, 40K a year. Nothing crazy. Generally, we want to have you to have around 70 touch points a week. A touch point is not unique. So this can be right. Maybe you go to the same account three times in a day. That would be three touch points. Okay. And then we have a key that goes against that as you do closing activity. If you do 10 demos in a week, you can't do any more walk-ins, right? I signed up because I saw your ad on Indeed.com, and I'm the rep on the ground in Miami.
… Locations. Okay. Yep. And you want me to knock each week on at least 70 doors or take at least 70 demos. So that is equivalent to about 10 doors or demos per day. And if I do all those things, I at least know I have a good base salary. And then I can earn more on commissions. If I really crush it in Miami, you'll notice. And in my year two with the company, you'll say, Nathan, we want to promote you to manager of Florida or something like that.
Is that right? Six months in. And then the cool thing is, because I took FounderPath, I have little dilution. Nathan, you also get actually a little bit of equity. Everyone who joins us gets equity because we're still so early stage that everyone who survives here for two years, right, and has a lot of fun here, hopefully for two years, has done their due to help us to get where we have to get. So you're vested after two years on obviously a small sliver, but everyone gets equity. Can you sort your database by like revenue to see which customers you serve that are running the best local businesses?
Yes, we can. Would you ever consider making them all acquisition offers and rolling it up considering you have the data to know which ones to roll up? Like buying restaurants? Yeah, you have the data. I mean, that's what everyone else, the reason they don't do it, it's like they don't know which restaurants they should buy because they don't have the data. You have the data. You're running them already. Look, we're way too tiny. Like right now, …
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More from this episode
- Sell only door-to-door, with reps walking into restaurants~$3.5M ARR, ~400% yearly growth, $0 ad spend
- Promote top reps to open new cities
- Recruit sales reps with Indeed job ads
- Have the rep sit with the owner while a remote lead runs the demo300-400 demos a month
- Skip free trials and push small businesses to pay a year up frontMost customers pay the year up front
- Give websites and online ordering away free; charge for the AI services on top
- Swap revenue-share loans for fixed monthly debt payments to fund the sales pushKept 100% equity; fixed payments made cash planning easier
- Sell to hair and nail salons with the same restaurant sales teamStopped; product was ~5% short of what salons need
Tags: rep-comp, commission, quota, activity-guarantee, equity