Sam Caucci. He’s the CEO of Sales Huddle, a training and development team that is using game technology to help organizations better prepare their people for the workforce.
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? – Meditations
- What CEO do you follow? – Jason Lemkin
- Favorite online tool? — GrowBots
- How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4
- If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Sam is a big believer that you have to over-network
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 00:52 – Nathan introduces Sam to the show
- 01:30 – Sales Huddle is a mobile game platform for employee training
- 01:43 – Sales Huddle has everything a business needs to learn
- 02:04 – Sales Huddle is a subscription business
- 02:10 – Pricing is from $5K to $15K
- 02:13 – There’s a monthly recurring fee based on the number of employees on the platform
- 02:20 – 2016 revenue closed out at $1.2M
- 02:29 – MRR is around $800K 82 subscribed clients on the platform
- 02:58 – Sales Huddle has an initial integration fee for converting a client’s current content into the platform
- 03:18 – Most companies pay Sales Huddle an upfront payment
- 03:36 – Sales Huddle tries to get companies to pay upfront first
- 04:03 – Sales Huddle has 100% retention
- 04:37 – Sam credits their 0 churn on the product not infringing on the customer's current learning stack yet
- 05:10 – Sales Huddle started as a part-time consulting company 6 years ago
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- 05:26 – The development of the product was in middle of 2014
- 05:27 – Selling started in 2015
- 05:40 – Team size is now 20
- 06:05 – Sales Huddle is currently raising and has raised $400K
- 06:33 – The round was a kiss convertible note
- 06:41 – A kiss convertible note converts to an equity and is similar to safe note
- 07:44 – Many startups don’t think of their sales pipeline
- 08:08 – Sales Huddle is currently in a strong position
- 08:40 – As a founder, Sam believes it is his responsibility to drive the shift with his team
- 08:58 – Sam can definitely raise money through sales, but they have to think of the worst case scenario
- 09:12 – Sam sees his company running a 100m dash; once they get to 200m, they will think about how to get to 300m
- 09:30 – ARR goal is around 100m and they’re currently at 50m
- 10:16 – Sam just had a daughter
- 10:49 – Sam is building a team that is going to have your back in a bar fight
- 11:12 – Sales Huddle’s competitors
- 11:43 – Sales Huddle just started to spend money on paid acquisition
- 11:59 – Sales Huddle is almost always breaking even
- 12:16 – Sales Huddle is burning $40K-60K a month
- 12:41 – The hardest shift for Sam
- 13:50 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
- A great retention rate could mean you’re not charging enough or your product is just that good.
- Be the founder that your team trusts—even to the point of trusting you that raising funds is not necessary.
- Always invest in growing your network!
Resources Mentioned:
- The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
- Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
- Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
- Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
- Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
- Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
- Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives