A Year Later…

We’ve been doing our thing at RevBoss for almost 3 years now, but we’ve really just gotten started in the last 15 months or so.  We raised a seed round of $1.1M late last year and have been running hard ever since…though that’s not to say that we weren’t running awfully hard before.

When you’re neck-deep in the weeds, it’s hard to appreciate how far you’ve actually come, so we thought it’d be fun to reflect on the past year.

In Q1 we…

• Ramped up our dev team and got serious about building a product.  We had plenty of “software,” though it was mostly a jumble of tools we used to run our sales prospecting service.  Turns out that building a SaaS product is just as hard and time-consuming as they say it is.

• Closed some of our first customers by eating our own dog food — we RevBoss’d RevBoss and closed prospects that were sourced through our software.  These are by far the most satisfying wins.

• Started a new tradition of awarding a 36 in gold chain (inspired by Run the Jewels) to someone on our team who really rocked it out that week.  We’ve been doing it all year long and it’s been a fun way to recognize individuals on the team.

In Q2 we…

• Built v1 of the Segments feature in our app — users can specify a unique search criteria (or upload their own data) and RevBoss finds the prospects and their contact info.

• Started having convos with our customers about switching from service agreements to SaaS subscriptions.  At some point, I’ll write a separate treatise about turning a services company into a SaaS company — it isn’t for the feint of heart…namely in that you’ve got to be excited to turn $2,000 / month services customers into $250 / month SaaS customers.

• Started building Flows in late summer, which along with Segments is part of the one-two punch that makes RevBoss great.  Segments to find prospects, Flows to get them into your sales process.

• Had our first big team gathering in Durham where all of our remote team joined us for a week of fun!  We met with customers and investors, ate lots of great food, laughed like crazy trying to complete escape rooms, and lazed by the Eno River.

In Q3 we…

• Shipped our Beta Product! It was a bit of a rocky very, very painful release…as in nothing worked at first — so, you know, just like every other Beta release.  After a bit of a scramble, we stabilized the product and have been making swift progress ever since.

• Revamped our pricing and website to focus on our SaaS offering and began winding down our services offering, starting with our appointment setting service.  It was pretty scary to walk away from one of our service offerings.  We basically told customers representing ~25% of our revenue that we weren’t going to offer that service anymore.  It was the right call — we needed the focus and we needed to begin shaping our identity as a product company…but it was awfully nerve-wracking to walk away from the cash.

• Partnered with ExitEvent to host the first SalesJam event — a half-day conference focused solely on sales.  David Morken, Co-Founder and CEO of Bandwidth.com provided the keynote.  We created the event to highlight the growing sales ecosystem in Raleigh-Durham and to teach, inspire, and connect sales pros.  SalesJam v1 went so well that we’re already working on the next one.

In Q4 we…

• Built and shipped RepSteps to help make sales reps more productive by incorporating phone calls and LinkedIn touches in RevBoss Flows.  We also added multi-user functionality so that multiple reps can share company data, while still being able to do their own prospecting and outreach.

• Released a new offering called SaaS+SDR to help automate even more of the sales process, including prospect qualification and LinkedIn outreach.  

We’re thankful for the customers who have made 2016 such an awesome year.  And we’re looking forward to continuing to help our people solve more problems with great software and exceptional service.

Thanks for joining us on the ride. So much more to come in 2017!