Swipe.by · B2B · AI marketing for restaurants
Promote top reps to open new cities
What they did
In their words
He Sells AI Door-to-Door. $3.5M ARR, 400% Growth, $0 Ads
… for us. And we have a distribution that scales and actually builds a natural barrier of entry. Are you comfortable sharing how you worked with FounderPath? Yeah, for sure. Help us understand why you did that deal. And if you're not using it on ads, where are you spending it to drive growth? We got $450,000. I think that is the right number, right? We have the absolute luxury that our growth is profitable and our unit economics are extremely
profitable. So I don't need to raise money to keep the lights on. That puts us in a somewhat nice spot. I mean, we actually, all the growth we're doing, we're doing plus minus EBITDA profitable. Some months we lose a little bit money, some months we make a little bit money. But yeah, we primarily use it to scale our outside sales operation, right? Like what our, since we promote so fast, we kind of have a step function. People are really good on the ground. They bring in money, but then we promote them to open up a new market. So we're actually growing market by market. The moment we do that, we lose that person on the ground making money. So we lose that delta on actually cash coming in.
They do get a base. And now we have to put ads in Indeed to find good candidates, right? We are spending to ramp up the market. Was FounderPath the first outside money you've ever taken? No. So, you know, I started everything raising angel money, angel family offers, some, you know, high net worth individuals. And then we have been actually doing some level of factoring non-diluted funding from Stripe before, right? But so built the company and …
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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
- Pay door-to-door reps mostly commission, with a guaranteed minimumReps keep 30-40% of year-one revenue; top reps promoted in ~6 months
- 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: promotion, geo-expansion, market-by-market