Founder learnings from building an early-stage GTM
Lessons from Swiftlane and Uniti AI
Greetings from Australia, where I’m currently on holiday! I’m using the next couple of newsletters to highlight some of the incredible founders who subscribe to The Revenue Architect, the startups they are building and the lessons they’ve learned about building an early-stage go-to-market, along with links to further reading from my archive. This week we hear from the founders of Swiftlane and Uniti AI, two very exciting early-stage startups in the proptech industry.
Saurabh Bajaj, Founder & CEO at Swiftlane
Swiftlane is a seed-stage startup that provides video intercom and keyless access upgrades to apartment and office buildings. They recently launched their "face ID for buildings" product which lets a building the same way you access your smartphone. It’s really cool.
Founder & CEO Saurabh Bajaj shares his experiences as a first-time founder coming from a technical background and dealing with sales and marketing for the first time:
“We had too many issues to list out - Our sales and marketing teams did not talk to each other. We didn't really have visibility into what was working about our sales and what wasn't. Every salesperson was acting as a lone wolf, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. We had no structure on why we were winning or not, and how we could actually scale our sales process. We had no clue what's working and what's not.”
“I see the same issue across most founders and startups I know. Everyone just hopes to hire a CRO or head of sales to magically fix everything but I’ve noticed that most heads of sales do not have a structured approach to scaling sales either. There’s also a lot of bad advice out there. Its a very small pool of people who actually understand going from zero to one and building repeatable processes.”
“I met Arnie through our investor and began implementing his advice into our sales and marketing playbooks. Immediately, we started seeing massive gains in customer conversion across the entire funnel, from MQL to SQL to wins. We were also able to better understand what's working and what's not, instead of just flying blind and seeing what sticks. Today, Swiftlane's sales and marketing run completely on Arnie's playbook. Every salesperson in the company is required to take his courses.”
Further reading
How to do a retrospective of your go-to-market - includes a framework, a template for collecting your data and additional posts on how to interpret the results.
Closing for early-stage founders and salespeople - a live course for early-stage sales teams on improving your win rates, which can be tailored to your company in a private class.
Francesco De Camilli, Founder and CEO at Uniti AI
Uniti AI is an early-stage startup that creates and deploys AI agents for companies dealing with a high volume of inbound leads for complex purchases. The AI agents handle the initial discovery and qualification process for complex products and that require exploration of customer needs before purchase.
They only just came out of stealth mode but already have customers like Regus, Cushman & Wakefield, Expansive, and many other real estate operators signed up. It’s a very practical use of AI that enables operators to respond quickly and thoughtfully to inbound leads and quickly stand out from their competitors.
Founder & CEO Francesco De Camilli's biggest learning about building early-stage GTM has been ICP obsession:
"Arnie’s advice has been transformative. He taught us to focus on niche markets and sell before building. If you have two logos, focus on adding two more. If you have four, focus on adding four more. Forget top-down TAM; identifying 100 accounts that care is better than targeting 10,000 that don’t. This focus has enabled us to bootstrap the business and get to $500k ARR without outside funding."
Further reading
How to build the ideal customer profile for your business - a step by step guide on how to make your ICP as specific as possible so that it focuses on people who are likely to buy from you.
How to find early-adopter customers - a video lesson on how to identify early adopters, including a case study of a startup that sells to B2B marketers.
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