‍Warmly, the signal-based sales orchestration platform, went from zero to 100+ paying customers in 2023. More importantly, we went from founder-led sales to a repeatable sales process.

We recently raised an $11 million Series A led by Felicis, helping us continue the momentum into 2024.

Introduction to Warmly's Success Story

It wasn’t all up and to the right even if it might look that way from the outside (founders getting awarded Forbes 30 under 30, participating in both Y Combinator and Techstars).

Warmly was founded in 2019 (yes, you heard that right) and our initial product was a virtual name tag for Zoom. While the original product won accolades (like this PLG123 video) and was a Zoom Apps launch partner, ultimately we struggled to sell it. We had a second major product pivot as well before focusing on the current iteration during the second half of 2022.

Because we already had another product in-market, we built the sales orchestration platform in stealth for six months before sharing it publicly. This new product gets customers warm leads by de-anonymizing website traffic and then automatically following up with visitors via chat, video, email, or LinkedIn. This helps customers generate 10x more outbound leads than a traditional SDR while seeing 3x higher close rates because these are warm leads rather than cold ones. 

Keep reading for our color commentary on how we built a repeatable go-to-market motion in 12 months and what we learned along the way.

Q1 2023: Founder-led sales 

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 0 → 10
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Design partners and founder friends
• 📈 Key experiment: Messaging
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can we sell Warmly at any price point?
• (2) Can I stand up a basic funnel?
• (3) Can I find the 10 most common objections and solve them?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: HubSpot (CRM), Mixmax (sales execution), ConnectTheDots (warm intros), DocuSign, spreadsheets

Entering Q1, “everything but sales were already in place,” and so I could spend the majority of his time scaling go-to-market.

Our main initial experiment was on Warmly’s messaging. I needed the words for a sales person to be able to talk about what we were doing. Since we had previously built a solution that was different from the problems that customers were trying to solve, I was particularly keen to avoid making that mistake again.

I began by looking at SEO rankings and researching what others in the space called themselves. One tactic is to go to every competitors’ website, write down all of the words on their homepages, and then build a word cloud around it. “Competitors spend five to six years figuring out how messaging works so why reinvent the wheel?”

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One of my early email outreach messages

There were a bunch of category and message variations in Warmly’s market (ex: account-based marketing, contact databases, intent data). I tested some of these messages with potential design partners, allowing him to find out what competitors got wrong and what we got right. I then tested a message focused on a live video caller Slackbot that would capture people before we leave the website. That failed to land – people instead wanted outreach to be done for them in an automated way and done across multiple channels rather than just video chat.

We landed on signal-based revenue orchestration, which captured what customers were trying to do and was meaningfully different from what competitors talked about. The simplified message was that Warmly helped you “get warm leads and talk to them live.” We could tell that it was working because prospects were nodding their head along and would say “here’s how I see that being used here”. (As an aside, I thought about AI sales orchestration, but found that people were sick of AI as a marketing message.)

I knew that Warmly's messaging wouldn't be completely solved in only a quarter. We were able to specifically tackle (a) what kinds of other tools did people have?, (b) what’s the category that we operate in?, (c) what phrases will get people to join a demo?, and (d) what phrases were other people using?

Another priority for Q1 was to set up a basic sales funnel.

Can I see that if I talk to roughly 10 people, one will close? If I talk to 20 people, will two close?

I had heard general benchmarks about having 5x coverage; that is, for every five qualified conversations, you close one deal. As a founder, I didn’t worry about hitting these exact benchmarks early on because he knew he was talking to “the most random people who weren’t in our ICP” and therefore would never buy. My bigger concern was the close rate among qualified prospects and finding out who was in Warmly’s ICP.

As a product with a $10-15k average annual contract value (ACV), I was looking to see that these deals could be closed in only a few meetings and with a 30-45 day sales cycle. Seeing positive signals, he was ready to scale the magic.

A snapshot of Warmly’s funnel stages for their outbound pipeline (we have separate pipelines for freemium, midmarket, and inbound)

Q2 2023: Sales leader-led sales, founder involved

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 10 → 30
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Founder friends, startups, email sequencing
• 📈 Key experiment: LinkedIn sequencing
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can a strategic sales leader who is a non-founder roughly hit projected quota? 
• (2) Can I as the founder hit quota and also reasonable terms (no opt-outs, annuals only, discounts)? 
• (3) Can I build trust with this leader to sell my vision and build a team around them?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Warmly/6sense (website de-anonymization), Outreach (sales execution), Seamless.ai (contact database, Warmly (AI website chatbot), Sendspark (video personalization), Warmly/Salesflow.io (auto-LinkedIn sequences), LinkedElf (LinkedIn connections)

After starting to prove out founder-led selling, I chose to recruit a sales leader and then hire sellers after that. This would've extended our go-to-market progress by a quarter if not for the fact that our early sales hires used to work at the same company as this new sales leader. If we had to recruit, ramp up, and train new sellers – particularly sellers who might not have been effective – it would’ve taken much longer. 

I emphasized that I wasn’t looking for a sales leader from a really big, later stage company. It was important to me that the sales leader be scrappy, hungry, entrepreneurial, and experienced – but not someone who’s done it twenty times. If I couldn’t find someone like that, I believed that the safer path for Warmly would’ve been:

• Founder-led sales first
• Then hire a BDR/SDR to scale the founder
• Bring on the first AE to report to me
• Once that’s successful, hire a second AE
• Then, hire a sales leader

My big experiment for the quarter was LinkedIn sequencing as a source of qualified pipeline. I had heard from other go-to-market leaders that email wasn’t working as well as it used to and that LinkedIn sequencing was still effective.

My co-founder Alan, Warmly’s SDR leader, and I adopted LinkedElf and Salesflow to max out our LinkedIn connections, adding 100 sales and marketing leader connections every week on auto-pilot. Then we wanted to do messaging on auto-pilot, too. We were able to send out 300 connection requests a week, seeing about half of them accept, and then one-eighth of them reply (half of which would be positive replies, the other half not so much…). Collectively, we were able to book about 10-15 meetings per week just from conversations on LinkedIn – and found a channel that we could continue to grow Warmly’s pool of leads.

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A refined version of Warmly’s messaging now that we have more customer validation

Q3 2023: Seller-led sales, founder involved

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 30 → 60
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Omni-channel (Linkedin/email), inbound (warm calling on the website with Warmly), territories
• 📈 Key experiment: Conferences
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can an AE and ISR ramp and hit quota in the last month of the quarter? 
• (2) Can our sales leader enable the sellers to ramp and hit quota? 
• (3) Can we build a V1 sales process that can be understood and executed?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Warmly (AI auto-emails), Warmly (AI auto-LinkedIn), HubSpot Quotes ,Tourial (pre-made demos), Spekit (sales process documentation), AccountAim (territory building)

At this point, our new sales leader and I needed to quickly build out the go-to-market team. First, we made a financial model to check whether the math would work out. If you’re not reconciling your quota against your financial model, you’re screwed. The financial model allowed our team to see things like:

• When is the next milestone we need to fit for fundraising?
• How do we get there without being cash-out?
• If Warmly had these milestones, how many reps do we need and when do we need to hire them?
• What would quota have to be in order for all of this to work out?

While in the past mature SaaS companies might’ve aimed for a 5x quota to on-target earnings (OTE) ratio, I didn’t believe that was realistic given the current buying environment and given that our sellers would need to source some of their own leads. We instead aimed for a 3x quota:OTE ratio and a 50/50 split between base and OTE commission, which would fit Warmly’s financial model and allow us to attract the right caliber seller. (As an aside, I encourage others to pay a higher salary-to-commission ratio in the early days so you don’t lose talent while you’re figuring out what’s working and what’s not working.)

Here’s what the team structure ultimately looked like:

• Sales leader (KPI = overall revenue that was sales-sourced / sales-closed)
• Account executives, i.e. AEs (KPI = closed-won revenue)
• Inbound sales reps, i.e. ISRs (KPI = closed-won revenue for very small deals and qualified opportunities among inbound demo requests)
• At Warmly, the ISR role creates a path for SDRs to get promoted; ISRs can advance to AEs if they consistently hit quota
• SDRs (KPI = sales qualified opportunities)
• We do international SDR hiring, which helps keep costs down, and has a 1:1 ratio between AEs and SDRs
• Sales assistants, aka SAs 
• The SA helps with sales admin work, joins demo calls, drafts replies for AEs, pulls lead lists, and writes internal and external follow-up notes
• We got our sales assistants via Virtualis

In Q3, we bet on attending conferences to diversify pipeline generation beyond LinkedIn, greenlighting five conferences for the quarter. For each conference, our sales leader Keegan Otter would attend with one sales rep. We decided not to buy a booth for any of them; rather, we simply went, were friendly, and tried to meet as many attendees as we could.

Three of the five events turned out to be successes; two were not, including Dreamforce which was both extremely large and lacked buyers in our ICP. Overall, the conferences generated more money in closed won sales than it cost for us to attend. But there were drawbacks. For example, I found that there were tons of meetings booked from conferences, but also a spike in demo no-shows. And it was draining for the team to be on the road for five events over the course of only six weeks.

Reflecting on the quarter, I believe that most companies find three to four channels that work for them. It’s important to try all the channels early on, then get laser focused and double down on the ones that work. Conferences were a ‘tweener’ – we needed to keep iterating.

Q4 2023: Seller-led and sales leader run

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 60 → 100+
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: No change from Q3 (repeatability!), just optimization
• 📈 Key experiments: LinkedIn social to drive inbound, PLG
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can I as the founder step away from closing altogether? 
• (2) Can the sellers hit quota each month across the quarter?
•  (3) Can we find repeatability in our core metrics (meetings held, SQOs, closed/won) and rates?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Letterdrop (LinkedIn social), Alysio (gamified daily sales metrics), Warmly (cross-tool signal-based revenue orchestration)

By Q4, Warmly’s go-to-market started to look more and more repeatable. My focus turned to optimization. 

We bet on product-led growth (PLG), which Warmly had gotten good at during a previous pivot and hadn’t yet applied to the current product. Unlike the Zoom name tag product, the sales orchestration platform involves extra friction for self-service adoption – users have to install a script on their website.

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Warmly’s pricing page includes a free account for smaller customers

We got creative with the free offering, designing it to be an on-ramp to Warmly’s core product rather than a replacement. Free users would get access to up to 500 free warm leads each month along with intent signals and alerts about those leads. If users then want automation to act on those leads, that’s when they'd have to pay for it. There have now been over 1,000 installs of our PLG offering and we're still early in optimizing free-to-paid conversion. 

Two key learnings that made PLG different this time around:

1. PLG became an acquisition strategy for a more valuable product. Before the pivot, we built a great product but people weren’t willing to pay for it. This time we validated that we could sell it before investing in PLG.
2. PLG helps segment Warmly’s prospects. We thought if we had both ‘book a demo’ and ‘try for free’ on the website, everyone would click ‘try for free’. It turns out that companies with less than 50 people naturally sign up for free while companies with more than 50 request a demo. That’s what we wanted.

Reflecting on the last 12 months – and what comes next

First tip: your CRM setup is critical (we chose HubSpot). At first I was very anti having a bunch of form-fills and I understand why reps hate updating a CRM, but the better you can do this in the early stage, the better. I would recommend five fields to always fill out:

1. How did we hear about us?
2. How was the meeting booked? (Get really specific – Warmly has 20 sub-channels – because that will tell you what channel to double down on.)
3. If you closed-won or closed-lost to a competitor, which one?
4. Who was the associated AE?
5. Who was the associated SDR? (An associated SDR might be the same person as the AE if your AE’s are full-cycle.)

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The beauty of CRM reporting when you have good data (the actual numbers have been anonymized)

Second: clean deals are better. The sooner you can get away from month-to-month, opt-out, weird deal terms, do it. It becomes a big headache for CSMs and for managing how you pay out reps.

Third: pay out your sales leader on a percentage of overall revenue that was sales-sourced and sales-closed (i.e. everything except for deals that are founder-sourced and closed). I don’t give commission out on deals that I find and close on my own as a founder. But any deal where an AE is involved or an SDR is involved, the sales leader gets a commission on overall revenue to align incentives.

Fourth, and finally: you and your sales leader should stay accountable for closing deals on your own. I still try to self-source and close three deals a month and my sales leader does, too. You have to be so close to the process and find issues with it before taking a step back.

Google and Yahoo announced that they aim to reduce the amount of spam emails received by their users and improve email security.

Any bulk email sender will be subject to strict new requirements to avoid experiencing email deliverability issues.

Google will begin enforcing the new requirements on February 1st, 2024, while Yahoo will enforce theirs in Q1 of 2024.

These restrictions will change the way many organizations think about outbound prospecting.

How is "bulk sender" defined

A bulk sender is defined by Google and Yahoo as an organization sending 5,000 or more messages a day to any gmail or yahoo email address.

The daily threshold pertains to all emails originating from your entire organization, regardless of the platform or method used to send them.

This includes email marketing platforms like Hubspot or Mailchimp, sales sequencing tools like Outreach or SalesLoft, or emails from your application like password reset emails, newsletters, or product announcements.

What does this mean for bulk email senders?

You want to be careful to make sure your organization is not being flagged as spam. Once marked as spam it takes time for your email domain to normalize and your messages landing in the inbox again.

When do people mark your emails as spam?

• When you aren't emailing the right person
• You're sending irrelevant emails
• You aren't kind in your communication
• The email you sent was clearly AI-generated
• You added the prospect to a multi-step automated email cadence (which auto-followed up five times with no response)

What are the risks of not following these requirements?

Starting February 1st, 2024, if a bulk-sending organization has an abuse complaint rate of 0.3% or higher, Google and Yahoo will automatically block all messages coming from that organization.

That's only 15 emails getting flagged before the hammer is dropped.

Globally, Gmail is the number one free-email service, usually making up between 40-60% of subscribers on a B2C sender's list worldwide, and a top three B2B mailbox provider. Yahoo is also among the top three for global representation on a B2C sender's list.

By not adhering to their new email guidelines you can expect your engagement metrics to begin dropping as your emails land in spam folders more and more.

Because Gmail and Yahoo's reputation-ranking system for senders is also based on subscriber engagement and your engagement has plummeted, it will create a snowball effect.

You'll begin to see open rates plummet, conversions plummet, and eventually, be unable to reliably deliver email from your domain.

Mailbox providers hold all the cards. It's how it's always been.

Why is Google and Yahoo doing this?

Google noted that their AI-powered defenses stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching inboxes and block nearly 15 billion unwanted emails daily.

"But now, nearly 20 years after Gmail launched, the threats we face are more complex and pressing than ever." -Google

The short answer is they want inboxes safer and more spam-free.

One thing is certain, email prospecting has already become saturated and buyers are getting numbed to anything that doesn't stand out. Now with ChatGPT, it's become even more difficult to distinguish a personalized email from one that AI generated.

Because of contact database tools like ZoomInfo and Apollo and email prospecting platforms like Outreach and Salesloft, any sales team can add thousands of prospects to email sequences with a few clicks.

Buyers are getting 20-30 "do you want to buy?" emails daily that they unsubscribe from or mark as spam.

It's a massive drain for everyone involved.

Successful sales teams are going to be those that can stand out from the crowd and create an incredible customer relationship.

How should sales teams be thinking about this?

I don't see these updates as anything but a good thing for sellers and customers. Totally agree that those who might be affected could be worried, but it's also an opportunity to improve processes and build better relationships with prospects.

If you're doing outbound the right way, you've got nothing to worry about. "Right" meaning adding value, thoughtful, contextual, human, relevant, and so on.

Sales leaders may need to reduce the autonomy they give to reps and have greater control over the outbound rules.

Reps will need to be more intentional with their outreach rather than carpet-bombing their ICP market with bulk email sequences.

Hopefully, in the future, when emails land in buyers' inboxes they'll be relevant and targeted towards actual need, which creates a better overall buyer experience.

Imagine seeing 1-2 emails daily from a seller helping you solve a problem you have today.

That would completely change the lens through which buyers view salespeople.

The Future of Outbound Outreach

Building effective outbound sales will come down to two things:

• Is the company you're targeting in-market (ready to buy)?
• Does the company have a favorable outlook on your brand?

As we've talked about in How the B2B SaaS Funnel Has Changed, nowadays, buyers do the majority of their research before even talking to a salesperson.

Building a strong brand in your buyers' mind around the problem you solve will play an important role when it comes time for the buyer to evaluate solutions.

Especially in B2B SaaS there are so many solutions out there it becomes difficult to parse through the noise.

Things like G2 reviews, awards, household brand case studies, and thought leader product endorsements matter.

If you know when prospects are in-market for your product AND they have developed a strong liking to your brand, then you don't need AI-generated copy and mass emails. You just need to find these people and say "what's up."

Easy right?

How Warmly Helps Sales Teams Thrive

Warmly is "warm leads" platform that helps you discover companies in-market for your product AND companies and people who have engaged with your brand. The platform synthesizes metadata across your sales and marketing techstack to arrive at an "Account Intent Signal Score."

When the score reaches a threshold, we help you autonomously outreach to the buyers at these companies who would find your product most relevant. And we take an omnichannel approach across email, LinkedIn, and website chat to reach them.

You can still use your favorite sequencing tools like Outreach, Apollo, SalesLoft or HubSpot. But now you're sending emails more responsibly and, with "fewer bullets in the chamber," more strategically to prospects that have the highest likelihood of converting.

Introducing a "warm outreach" process reduces the risk of over-sending mass emails AND being marked as spam for your entire email domain.

This announcement from Google and Yahoo, coming in the year's final quarter, offers an opportunity to put an outreach plan in place that sets your sales team up for success in the years to come.

Sales reps need a platform to help them outreach effectively without burning through your domain.

You can try Warmly for free here.

Qualified is somewhat of an industry standard when it comes to account-based marketing and chatbot-led lead gen.

They offer solid conversational chat, decent B2B buyer intent data, and fantastic customer service.

But here’s the thing:

Qualified is built for enterprise, not SMBs.

At a minimum, it will cost you $42k a year, plus the costs of running a sales team large enough to take the heavily human-led approach that Qualified promotes.

Plus, you pretty much have to be using Salesforce.

For large enterprises running a Salesforce + Marketo + 6sense tech stack, Qualified makes a lot of sense.

But for anyone not working in Salesforce (yes, other CRMs exist) or with a more modest budget, there are many other suitable options.

In this article, we’ll explore 8 more realistic Qualified competitors & alternatives.

1. Drift - Best For Enterprise
2. Intercom - Best For Customer Support
3. HubSpot Chat - Best For Basic Chat
4. 6sense - Best For Conversational Email
5. ZoomInfo Chat - Best For An All-In-One Platform
6. Demandbase - Best For ABM Execution
7. Clearbit - Best For Developer-Focused GTM Teams
8. Warmly - Best For Account-Based Orchestration
9. Why Consider An Alternative To Qualified?

8 Qualified Competitors & Alternatives

1. Drift - Best For Enterprise

Drift is kind of the industry standard when it comes to automated chatbots.

It sits at the other end of the human-automation spectrum to Qualified, designed for high-volume lead funneling.

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Why Consider Drift As An Alternative To Qualified?

Drift is basically built for large enterprises with millions of visitors to their sites each month, something which would require a huge salesforce to cover with Qualified’s motion.

They’ve also started leaning into AI-powered chatbots, though there are other more advanced tools in this space.

One key feature that Drift has over Qualified is video. A sales rep can send an embedded video in an email (like a Vidyard). This kicks off a cool little playbook:

• Prospect clicks the video
• Directed to a landing page to watch the video
• Drift notifies the rep that the prospect is watching the video right now
• Sales rep can reach out to start a live conversation with the rep while they’re engaged

Where Drift Falls Short

Drift kind of missed the boat on a deep integration with a CRM.

They’ve caught on now (they have native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and a couple of others), but they decided earlier to be an independent platform that you do everything out of.

This means you didn’t have the tie-in to CRM deals and opportunities that Qualified offers.

So, it's not really a perfect alternative if you’re just looking for a non-Salesforce version of Qualified.

Drift Pricing

Drift is cheaper than Qualified, but still fairly expensive.

You’ll pay at least $30k annually for their standard plan and $90k upward for their more advanced packages.

So, Drift is still serving the same market as Qualified (and thus not ideal for SMBs).

2. Intercom - Best For Customer Support

Intercom is a household name in chat, though it comes at it from a support angle rather than a sales one.

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Why Consider Intercom As An Alternative To Qualified?

Intercom is an industry standard for customer support.

It’s a people-driven chat tool, but they have started integrating more automated, AI-driven flows to respond to market demands.

This is great news for small businesses that might not have the budget for a dedicated support team but still want to provide at least some level of customer service, as Intercom’s AI chat tool is more cost-effective (and claims to resolve 50% of support requests instantly).

Where Intercom Falls Short

Intercom isn’t focused on the sales use case.

It is a passive rather than proactive chat tool (Qualified, Drift, and Warmly all take a proactive approach), and so it doesn’t respond to buying intent signals, like these solutions do.

Intercom Pricing

Intercom’s Starter plan begins at $888 per year. This includes their AI chatbot, but with limited functionality. You’ll have to upgrade to the Pro plan (custom pricing) to create custom answers.

3. HubSpot Chat - Best For Basic Chat

HubSpot Chat is a good out-of-the-box chat tool that requires minimal setup.

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Why Consider HubSpot Chat As An Alternative To Qualified?

Okay, we gotta be real here.

HubSpot Chat isn’t super sophisticated. Out of all the Qualified alternatives, it's the weakest tool as an outbound chat for sales teams.

The big win, however, is that it's free. So, it can work as a starting point for small organizations with no budget.

Where HubSpot Chat Falls Short

The list is pretty long here, but to keep things as simple as possible, HubSpot Chat lacks intent data, company reveal capabilities, sales orchestration, and reporting. However, this might change with their recent acquisition of Clearbit.

Alternatives like Warmly and Drift provide these functions, but HubSpot Chat isn’t designed as an ABM tool so much as a human-led live chat solution.

HubSpot Chat Pricing

HubSpot Chat is one of many free tools from HubSpot.

Being a freemium tool, though, functionality is limited. You’ll need to subscribe to a paid plan to go deeper (in which case, you’re probably better off going with one of the other alternatives listed here.

4. 6sense - Best For Enterprise Account-Based Marketing

6sense is one of the most well-known platforms in the account-based marketing space and is also core Qualified partner.

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Why Consider 6sense As An Alternative To Qualified?

6sense is a hugely comprehensive platform.

In 2023, it was named a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Account-Based Marketing Platforms for the third year running, joined only by Demandbase.

Specifically, Gartner called out 6sense’s customer satisfaction, sales alerts and insights, and marketing strategy.

For those with an enterprise plan, 6sense also offers AI-driven recommended actions, helping sales reps focus on the highest-value activities.

Another cool feature is their conversational email.

It basically sends and responds to emails on your behalf using natural language. Obviously, this is a little scary, especially for enterprises, so it's generally reserved for low-stakes emails, but it's a cool way to clear a lot of tedious work off your plate.

Where 6sense Falls Short

For SMBs, the biggest challenge with 6sense, like many other competitors, is its pricing model.

Sure, it's great that you can pick and choose different modules and features to customize your plan (and pricing), but certain tiers need to be bought before others can activate.

For instance, to get the conversational email function we discussed above, you’ve got to buy the ABM platform, Predictive Analytics, and Orchestration tiers.

To get to a point where you have full end-to-end orchestration of a workflow, you’re spending ~120k.

Additionally, much of this is experimental and only works on Salesforce.

A few other drawbacks, as mentioned by Gartner, include:

• Lack of attribution modeling
• UX complaints
• Some reports regarding ICP traffic (like ICP traffic converted to a meeting) are missing

6sense Pricing

6sense customizes pricing to your company’s specific needs. However, it's not cheap. You’re looking at about the same price range as Qualified or Drift.

5. ZoomInfo - Best For An All-In-One Platform

ZoomInfo is a suite of GTM software platforms. They have tools for marketing, operations, sales, and hiring, as well as a decent chatbot with solid “if/then” workflows.

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Why Consider ZoomInfo As An Alternative To Qualified?

ZoomInfo is well-known as a best-in-class solution for contact and company data.

That’s really the core of their product offering. Everything else is built up around that.

For example, their SalesOS platform has prospect insights and buying intent signals, conversation intelligence (think Gong), data enrichment, and engagement tools like chat workflows and email automation.

They also have their own demand-side platform, so you can sync your audience so you can advertise to them.

The big benefit, then, is that when you want to add another GTM-related offering to your contract, you don’t need to stitch together another vendor. You just buy from the same supplier, reaping the benefit of native integrations.

Where ZoomInfo Falls Short

ZoomInfo does a lot of things well.

Where they fall short, though, is that in trying to do a lot of things well, they’ve started to lose ground on being the expert at any one thing.

ZoomInfo built its name on having the best contact data out there. But contact data has been commoditized and, in general, is an ongoing depreciating asset.

Realizing this, ZoomInfo has taken a “acquire and cross-sell” approach to expand revenue and keep growing ACV. They bought Insent.Ai for their chatbot tool, Comparably to expand their Talent asset, and Clickagy to improve intent signaling.

Diversifying into other offerings means less focus on their core competency, and so other vendors (like Apollo.io and Seamless.ai) have been gaining ground on contact data.

Their chat is also less powerful than alternatives like Qualified and lacks full CRM integrations. Again, this is a consequence of tackling too many surface areas at once, and acquiring tools rather than building them natively.

ZoomInfo Pricing

ZoomInfo is one of those “you gotta talk to us first” companies. We don’t have any pricing available, but we’ve heard that they’re also a pretty expensive solution, depending on the modules you opt to include.

6. Demandbase - Best For ABM Execution

Demandbase is another solid ABM tool and the only other platform named as a leader in Gartner’s 2023 Magic Quadrant.

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Why Consider Demandbase As An Alternative To Qualified?

Demandbase is, for all intents and purposes, a #2 version of 6sense.

It's been around for a bit longer (so it kind of has a legacy interface) and was a proponent of ABM for years before other brands jumped on the idea.

It does most of the same stuff as 6sense, with slightly better segmentation and reporting, though Gartner scores it slightly lower on both its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute scales. 

They also have a cool Buying Group AI feature in beta, which purports to “define, track, and engage members of a buying team within an account, outcome-driven ad campaigns to achieve marketing objectives, and prescriptive sales dashboards with recommendations for sellers.”

This is something many vendors have hand-waved at, but never quite nailed.

Where Demandbase Falls Short

Demandbase, like ZoomInfo and 6sense, has an “a la carte” model, and there’s plenty to choose from.

Unfortunately, “a la carte” generally translates to “expensive,” so this is another out-of-range tool for SMBs.

Demandbase Pricing

Demandbase creates pricing on a company-by-company basis, which is pretty much the standard for software solutions in this category.

7. Clearbit - Best For Developer-Focused GTM Teams

Clearbit is somewhat of a different beast from the rest, but still worthy of mentioning as a Qualified competitor thanks to its visitor identification and prospecting functionality.

More importantly, Clearbit was recently acquired by HubSpot, which has the potential to be a huge partnership in this space.

This acquisition combines CRM, data, and workflows, creating a solution that can break down data siloes and integrate seamlessly across systems. It will be one of the first to bring forth the new era of signal-based revenue orchestration.

As Whitney Sorson, CTO of Hubspot, puts it:

"Picture having complete data on over 20 million companies right inside HubSpot. All with over 100 rich data points about the companies and their decision-makers. Then, imagine being able to easily find high-fit prospects natively within your CRM. Finally, imagine that once those companies and contacts are in HubSpot, being alerted when those companies are showing buying intent."

(Image Source)

Why Consider Clearbit As An Alternative To Qualified?

Clearbit is great at deanonymizing site traffic, enriching it with best-in-class B2B data, and then syncing that back to your CRM.

They’ve got strong integrations with both Salesforce and HubSpot, with the latter likely to strengthen, given the recent acquisition.

They also have a powerful tool called Prospector.

This uses AI and their B2B database to find the buying committee for a given account and then sync that back to your CRM to line up orchestration in engagement tools like Outreach and SalesLoft.

Lastly, they offer a robust API for custom connections. So, if you’re a developer-focused GTM team and have people who can stitch together systems to create automation off of data, Clearbit is a winner.

Where Clearbit Falls Short

That last point works both in favor of Clearbit and against it.

If you’re running classic sales-led motions, Clearbit doesn’t come with any out-of-the-box playbooks to execute sales workflows. It’s designed more with the developer in mind.

That might change as the HubSpot acquisition plays out, though it's clear that any workflows will need to take place in their own sales tools.

For now, though, Clearbit is like the building blocks but doesn’t necessarily solve the problems end to end. You need to integrate it into your other tools to make sure the data is being used to fuel the rest of your GTM.

Clearbit Pricing

Clearbit’s plan structure looks pretty simple. You’ve got a free option (obviously limited), a paid option (no pricing information given), and an option to just buy API credits.

8. Warmly - Best For Account-Based Orchestration

Did we save the best for last? Obviously.

Let us introduce you to Warmly, our AI-powered platform for account-based orchestration, purpose-built for SMBs.

With Warmly, you can build an army of AI SDRs, finding that sweet spot between the human touch and AI-led engagement.

Also read: The Rise of Account-Based Orchestration in the Age of AI and Automation.

Why Consider Warmly As An Alternative To Qualified?

Compared to the other alternatives discussed here, Warmly takes a different approach.

We use generative AI to automate and personalize outreach on your rep's behalf.

That outreach is triggered by intent signals from tools in your tech stack (Slack, SalesLoft, Apollo, and so on), and enriched with best-in-class intent data from 6sense, Bombora, Clearbit, and PeopleDataLabs.

We call this account-based orchestration. It is a far more scalable, efficient, and cost-effective alternative to account-based marketing.

(Image Source)

The goal here is scalability and speed to lead.

35-50% of sales go to the company that responds first, but only 7% of companies respond within five minutes of a prospect filling in a form. Half don’t even respond for five days.

Achieving this speed is super difficult (and ridiculously expensive) to do with a human-centric approach. Warmly finds that perfect middle ground between human touch and AI automation.

Our AI platform runs your entire workflow—from intent being triggered to outreach being fired—until it's the right time for a rep to get involved.

(Image Source)

From the customer’s perspective, it looks like they were speaking with a human the whole time so that transition is seamless.

With this approach, you can build and scale up an AI SDR army on an SMB budget, creating full-cycle automated orchestration with human intervention at the right point based on real-time purchase intent data.

Learn more: Warmly: The Account Based Orchestration Platform.

Why Warmly Might Not Be A Good Fit For You

We, like all of the platforms discussed here, aren’t a perfect fit for everyone.

Warmly is designed specifically for the SMB and lower middle market.

So, we’re a great alternative for smaller organizations who find Qualified’s enterprise-facing feature set to be overkill or who simply don’t have the budget for that kind of sales motion.

However, it does mean that our integrations right now aren’t perfectly supporting the middle market or enterprise-level companies.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly offers 3 different plans:

(Image Source)

Our most basic paid plan comes in at $850 a month, or about ¼ of what you’d pay for Qualified.

We also offer a free plan, meaning you can start getting free warm leads without having to speak with a salesperson.

Get started for free here.

Why Consider An Alternative To Qualified?

Qualified is clearly a solid tool.

In fact, there are a few things it does exceptionally well:

• Reporting - You can see exactly who’s coming to the site, what percentage of traffic fits your ICP, which campaigns are driving conversions, which accounts are hot, and so on.
• Salesforce integration - Qualified is built by ex-Salesforce people, so they’ve got a pretty strong tie-in. The Qualified-Salesforce integration is about as deep as integrations get, so it's a great choice for larger teams who need everything fed into Salesforce as the source of truth.
• Amazing customer support - The team at Qualified is hungry to get you leads, and you’ll have a dedicated CSM to guide you through setup, including setting up Salesforce.

It's billed as “pipeline generation software,” which largely rests on their conversational marketing tools (i.e., website chat).

While there is an AI component to the software (you can build automated chatbots), where Qualified differentiates itself from competitors like Drift is in taking a distinctly human-led approach.

The idea is that customers are chatting with real people, which is where the drawbacks begin.

Only Works If You Can Scale Your Sales Team

Qualified’s ethos is human-first. That means that, as a customer, when someone reaches out through website chat, it's a human being on the other end.

This is great from a personalization standpoint, providing better buying experiences (assuming the skill is there on the other end). But it also means you need a dedicated person to “man the chat.”

This is made clear by Qualified’s reporting, which is built around things like chat leaderboards and analysis of traffic hours, so you can set up your team around peak times.

It's a great tool if you can organize humans appropriately, but it is largely out of reach for SMBs and even mid-market businesses that don’t have inbound reps on hand nor the budget to hire them.

Not Built For SMB Budgets

Speaking of budget, Qualified is expensive.

It's one of the most expensive chat-based ABM tools around. You’re looking at $42k a year for their Growth plan and $72k for the Premier plan, and those are just the “starting at” points.

Then, you’ve got things like implementation and integrations with your tech stack (you typically see Qualified paired with Salesforce and 6sense) to build.

All of this means lengthy setup times, and requires an established revenue organization to set up all the reports and workflows, plus organize all the reps.

Non-Salesforce Users Are Out Of Luck

Lastly, Qualified only works on Salesforce.

As mentioned, the Salesforce integration is strong. But they don’t integrate with any other CRMs.

So, it's basically a Salesforce-only platform.

An Army of AI SDRs at ¼ The Price of Qualified

It's tough to deny that Qualified is a solid platform.

If you’re deeply embedded in the Salesforce architecture and have the manpower to run a human-led motion, Qualified makes a lot of sense.

That’s a pretty niche situation, though.

For small and medium-sized businesses, lean sales teams, or any company working in any CRM that isn’t Salesforce, Qualified’s value prop becomes questionable, especially considering how expensive it is.

With Warmly, you can begin receiving hard ROI in 20 minutes with just two steps

1. Add a code snippet to the site
2. One-click authenticate your existing systems (Hubspot, Outreach, Apollo, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.)

You’ll immediately start improving conversion rates by revealing who is on your site, enriching that with best-in-class data, syncing that data back to your CRM, and routing hot accounts to the right rep.

Plus, with plans starting from just $850 a month (billed annually), you’ll reduce your Qualified bill by ~75%.

Discover how Kandji booked 2 qualified meetings just 8 minutes after going live with Warmly.

What is category design?

Category design is the process of creating a new category of products in the market.

The reward for being a category king is extraordinary.

According to Harvard Business Review, category kings capture 76% of the value within the category - as measured by market cap.

If you're not #1 in your customers' mind, try reframing and designing new category.

Benefits of being king:

1. Market Leadership: As the king of a category, you set the standards and define the norms within the market, often resulting in a loyal customer base that sees your brand as the go-to authority.
2. Pricing Power: Dominance in a category typically grants the flexibility to command premium pricing due to the perceived uniqueness and value of your offering, with less pressure from competitive pricing.
3. Enhanced Visibility and Growth Potential: Being at the forefront of a category often attracts more media attention, strategic partnerships, and investment opportunities, fueling further growth and solidifying market position.

Creating a category doesn’t mean having the best product. It’s about being seen in a different light — standing alone rather than in a crowd.

Here's how Warmly is designing the category of Signal-Based Sales Orchestration.

When to pursue category design

Pursue it when your market has many competitors.

I would argue that for any venture backed startups there's no reason not to pursue this strategy because you are inherently trying to disrupt the status quo. There are always incumbents.

Those incumbent solutions already occupy a space in your buyer's mind.

How do you enter and not only compete but capture market share quickly?

Warmly ran into this problem when we first brought our product to market.

There were already so many tools that help you capture more leads. People were also biased in what they liked.

Prospects had trouble figuring out where to put us in their techstack because our category didn't exist yet.

They knew they needed a CRM like Salesforce or a sales engagement tool like Outreach. Some sophisticated buyers would already have intent tools like Clearbit or 6sense in place.

But the concept of orchestration wasn't something people actively looked for.

Some of our early evangelists would describe us to others as "If 6sense, Drift, and Clearbit had a baby... that's Warmly."

Prospects began to view us as a cost-saving because we consolidated three tools into one for cheaper. Not a bad start.

But sales deals would stall because buyers would compare us directly with established kings and queens of existing categories they were familiar with.

It was difficult to compete in someone else's story.

Instead, we wanted them to see that "you can keep using tools like 6sense and Drift, AND Warmly, and here's why 1+1+1=5..."

Step 1: Select the right problem

Market >>> everything else. As Marc Andreessen, Founder and General partner of a16z, puts it, "In a great market - a market with lots of real potential customers - the market pulls product out of the startup."

A great market is more important than a great team or product for building a big business.

We felt a lack of market with our prior nametags product.

The market wasn't there.

Luckily, our team got better over time.

Given the recessionary market environment of Q3 2022, every company was looking for more warm leads, including us.

Teams that predominantly fed off inbound leads now had to go outbound.

We found that the key sub-problem of finding more warm leads was:

• Identifying who was in-market for your product
• Getting in front of them in that buying window

Tools like 6sense, ZoomInfo, and Apollo have raised hundreds of millions to try and solve this problem. It's not solved yet. But the market was already validated.

Step 2: Frame the new, different future for the customer

Bring your customers into the future by showing them something new.

As Category Pirates explains it...

Unique points of view have a simple architecture.

• Frame a different problem/opportunity.
• Evangelize a different future.
• Show customers how your “solution” bridges the gap from the problem/opportunity to a different future.

Most importantly, the company evangelizing the POV is immediately viewed as the leader.

For us, there were already many awesome tools out there to help with intent data and buyer signals, but all of these siloed solutions still have to be orchestrated - usually by humans, which is expensive and time-consuming.

Incumbents created their products during the golden age of the sales development representative, where companies solved their lead generation problem, which required a lot of manual effort, by throwing more humans at it.

With advancements in AI, instead of coordinating humans who need to operate multiple tools to catch a buyer's attention, we leaned into the point of view of using automation and orchestration to do the repetitive work.

Let humans do what they do best, building relationships, and let automation take care of the rest.

Step 3: Crystalize a radically different brand

What's the number one thing you want your audience to think when they see your name?

We wanted our audience to shortcut their mind to "AI Sales" when they thought of Warmly. Conversely, when they think of AI sales, they think Warmly.

Next, what do you want your audience to "feel" when they see your name?

We wanted them to feel powerful, that they could access something mystic and extraordinary by having Warmly.

We studied Carl Jung's brand archetypes and how they could be applied to companies.

Jung theorized that humans use symbolism to understand complex topics. And these symbols can be timeless and understood as categories. In the case of brands, these categories exhibit personality traits that customers easily understand. Archetypes, he called them.

‎Image Source

We selected the "magician" brand archetype, the ethos of which you can see reflected in our website.

Source: Warmly.ai

We chose our category name to be signal-based sales orchestration because

• It encapsulates our unique point of view and the future that we saw.
• Nobody else occupied it from an SEO perspective.

Once we crystallized our brand, we reflected it in every facet of our marketing and product - website, language, social posts, blogs, sales calls, feature naming, branding.

As Seth Godin, world-renowned marketing author, explains, "Having a brand means you've made a promise to people. They have expectations. It's a shorthand of what they should expect the next time."

Step 4: Lightning strike!

Once you define your problem, unique point of view, category, and brand, you're next step is to let the world know who you are and what you stand for in a lightning strike.

A lightning strike is a category-defining event.

It defines a new problem or, like in our case, an old problem that can be solved in a new way.

It must be carefully crafted to trigger a moment in the minds of your prospects where they say, “Wow, this is new... I want that.”

We wanted to frame the problem, claim the solution, and own the narrative.

We decided to use our Series A funding announcement as our lightning strike to spread word of mouth.

Super important here is to tell your story in three bullet points. Because that's all people will remember.

Any more and it dulls the punch of what you're trying to say.

Our template looked something like this:

• "The world is changing..." (Problem reframe)
• "Because of X, Y" (Unique point of view)
• "Warmly closes that gap" (Bridge the gap to a different future)

It's difficult to unwind the narrative once it's been released in a lightning strike to the world. You get one shot.

It's worth spending the time to get your story right.

Image caption

‎Source: ‎https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/19/warmly-pivots-from-zoom-tool-to-directing-warm-leads-to-sales/

Step 5: Make your position as category king permanent

Once the category king dominates the category, it can use that position to expand the category to higher levels.

Create a flywheel to continue reinforcing your position as category king.

We instituted a constant beat of mobilizations and lightning strikes we call "operation rolling thunder."

• Our investors wrote thought leadership pieces about our space, expanding awareness around the category, and putting us at the center. For example, Why NFX Invested in Warmly: Harnessing AI to End the Cold Call by NFX or Investing in Warmly by Felicis Ventures.
• We launched on Product Hunt, Bookface (a launch within YC's community), Hacker News, and others
• We actively engaged with revenue operations, account-based marketing, and demand gen community groups across Slack, LinkedIn, and Reddit, extending the reach outside of our inner circle of influence
• Our evangelists and affiliate influencers educate our category within trusted CMO/CRO groups
• We sought out additional press and newsletter coverage to keep our market attuned to how Warmly was developing
• We built an ecosystem of affiliate influencers, integration partners, and agencies
• We use each new customer as an opportunity to turn drive more testimonials and positive G2 reviews.
• We leveraged Lavender's playbook, consistently generating high-value content like webinars or blog posts and distributing across other channels like YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, newsletters, and emails

Each lightning strike gives the flywheel another shove. It amplifies the effects of each of the prior listed initiatives, furthering the gap between the category king and the rest.

When people who haven't heard of us before read the press about our fundraise they assume that success is a straight line. It wasn't.

Those who are close to us know that progress was not linear. We pivoted four times before landing on the current iteration of our business, so we've learned a couple of things that didn't work before we found one that did.

See Max's LinkedIn post about our various pivots.

We want to share an unconventional framework for early startups that worked for us as we were navigating the idea maze.

Step 1: Assemble An Anti-Fragile Founding Team

The cofounders, Carina, Max, and myself were lucky enough to have met each other when we did to start this company.

Max and Carina met at Google, launching a "Where's Waldo" April Fools prank inside of Google Maps.

Max and I met through a founders fellowship program called On Deck (which I highly recommend for any early stage founder to apply).

Although we all shared a common goal and vision, we had very different styles and ways of thinking to achieve that goal - just ask any of our employees.

Over time, our unique approaches complemented each other and extended our strengths.

The archetype of each of Warmly's founder might look something like...

Max is our legendary purple cow.

Dreams big. Stands out. Reaches for the unreachable. Hustler.

Max is someone who, when you meet, you won't forget. He's a compelling character who can turn noes into yeses.

Top tier investors. Enterprise companies. The best talent in the market.

Eventually, they all cave.

He goes where nobody goes and thinks unconventionally.

For example, when Max takes a stroll, he'll sometimes select random numbers to call just to say "hi" and catch up for two minutes. It keeps the network warm and Max updated on where people are at and what they need.

This is a mindset you can't teach.

Carina is our methodical empire builder.

Filters out noise. Weights every decision. Leaves nothing to chance. Turns ideas into reality.

Carina is someone who has diagrams and graphics for everything. She is a systems thinker who has no problems calling your bull$&!+. She's the perfect complement for Max's creative energy and ideas.

Carina, although smiley by nature, is unemotional when it comes to decision-making, has the least bias out of the founders, and actively solicits everyone's opinion.

When the "processing period" has concluded, you won't look at the final proposal and think "that doesn't make sense."

It always makes sense.

Alan is our scrappy explorer

Curious. Dives headfirst. Always seeking the next big opportunity.

I started off in engineering at Warmly but have moved around a bit to sales, customer success, and now marketing.

To be honest I'm not detail-oriented enough to execute to perfection like Carina, or have the same relentless creativity that can pull rabbits out of the hat for the company like Max.

What gets me fired up is identifying and solving big bottlenecks in the company. And it's allowed me to learn how to pick new things up quickly.

Once the founders understood each other better we gravitated into roles that extended our zones of genius.

The wholeness in how we operated meant that with each pivot we learned more about product, market, and ourselves. We became anti-fragile, and by extension so did our company.

Eventually, after 4-years, the score takes care of itself.

Step 2: Leave Your Ego At The Door

Initially, we were naive enough to think that our ideas would be the ones to shape the world.

"Just imagine if we could build a better LinkedIn where people listed their asks and offers like in On Deck's slack channel."

Our first product, pushpull, connects people authentically to help each other out.

Source: pushpull.community

“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should” - Jurassic Park

We didn't ask ourselves "If this idea was so good why hasn't it become a billion dollar company yet?"

There was no big favor marketplace.

We were trying to be the first.

And in doing so, we understood why many failed before us.

"How much money were people saving or making by doing this?"

Unclear.

We couldn't charge anything for the product.

We moved on to our next pivot, job change tracking for sales teams, where we started asking for money up-front.

That worked well until we realized we couldn't scale the product, another prerequisite for large VC backed company.

We went through a few more pivots, each one teaching us a new way to kill our ego.

To spare you the details, here are a couple more lessons:

• Acknowledging that we didn't have all the answers allowed us to seek external advice and shortcut our path to learnings. Nowadays we speak with founders of failed startups, former employees of competitors, investors in our space, anybody who could help diversify our perspectives
• Focusing on learnings rather than the satisfaction of being right ultimately led us to cut losing and embrace winning ideas. It's not enough to make revenue, we needed a path towards making one hundred million in revenue.
• Adaptibility became our superpower. A shortcut to building what other people wanted was learning the art of copying. Elon musk figured out that a lot of people in the world liked driving things with four wheels and a steering wheel. And there were already a bunch of roads out there. Why not re-create that (car) but just change one thing (battery)? Stand on top of the shoulder of giants.

Step 3: Stay as close as you can to the market

We did everything we could to stay close to the market.

At first we talked to prospects, customers, investors, competitors, former employees of competitors.

We even became a full-time SDR at another company to live and breathe the role.

We did in-depth interviews with our ICP buyers using tools like user interviews.

We studied competitor ads, websites, products, reviews and testimonials to see what people were saying.

We listened to sales and marketing podcasts daily to see the current issues and how people were resolving them.

We kept our eyes and ears peeled for any new entrants.

We contracted with former competitor employees to learn best practices.

We engaged in sales and marketing communities.

We posted on social frequently about our thoughts on the space to see how on the mark we were.

We ran language tests on landing pages with our ICP using tools like wynter.

We started co-hosting sales and marketing webinars.

Eventually, we became sharp about the market and how we could build something that was not only better, but new.

Step 4: Run toward your vision

Goals should be as clear as they are ambitious. When we knew the outcome we wanted and why we wanted it, we made the most progress as a company.

From there, it's a battle against time and distraction. Every second counts. Anything has the potential to take your mind away from the real north star.

Sales people will understand this: nothing matters but the revenue you bring.

You connected with 100 people on LinkedIn, sent 50 personalized emails, responded to all your internal slacks. But did you close any deals?

It's easy to get lost in "tasks." If we're not careful, the things we end up doing (or are asked to do) don't move the needle. Days start to melt. A month might go by and a lot was done on paper but it doens't feel like what James Currier, General Partner of NFX, would call "fast moving waters."

In the words of our General Manager of Nametags, Alessandro Cetera, "Sometimes it felt like we were swimming, but not moving."

We needed to maximize the impact of every second of the day.

It required a shift in thinking.

Say no to everything, except the things that matter.

Someone wanted to meet for 30 minutes for advice?

"Sorry, slammed right now."

Someone at Warmly wanted to introduce me to a potential partner?

"After Q4, thanks."

Manager is recommending a cool idea we could do?

"Interesting idea. Thanks for sharing."

Our head of Sales, Keegan Otter, does a fantastic job of protecting his time and mind. He says no to just about everything, and he does it all with a smile :). He works days, nights, and weekends - doesn't let a second go to waste.

And you know what happened? He doubled revenue for Warmly within months of joining and he's just getting started.

Words are cheap. Results speak louder than any pitch deck.

Doing something that sounds good is beside the point. Proving that you were right when it matters, consistently, especially when the decision was controversial was what maneuvered us into the "fast-moving waters."

It might seem chaotic from the outside to investors, friends, and even employees because you have trouble explaining how your mind is working. It's not useful towards your goal that everyone understood you perfectly. Your thinking is recalibrating every day anyways to new information.

On the inside, the picture gets clearer every day as you're trying new things, refining mental models, and building off of these "truth blocks" until your vision becomes not only clear, but obvious.

You realize that you actually have everything you need to make this a reality.

Suddenly the language you start to use with customers sounds like music. Their eyes light up when you show them your demo.

Everything downstream becomes easier once you've pivoted into something that was proved, iteratively, from first principles.

Sales come easier. Marketing comes more naturally. Product and engineering know what to build and can see the impact of their work with customers.

The whole company becomes 100% mission-aligned.

The funny thing about frameworks is that they tend to be backward looking mechanisms to explain to others how you think you got to where you did.

But every product, person, customer, and market environment is different.

We created Zoom Nametags during COVID, and now an AI sales platform during a tech downturn.

We may need to scrap it all and pivot again one day. Can't say how we'd do it. But now that we've done it once, after so many failed attempts, we're 100% confident of what it takes for us to do it again.

Hi World,

I’m Max, CEO of Warmly, a startup going through Y-Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch. For those unfamiliar, Y-Combinator (or YC for short) is a startup accelerator. Thanks to YC, our startup alongside over 200 others will learn, grow and accelerate over the course of the next 12 weeks. Curious about what goes on at YC and what a startup can learn from the process? My co-founders and I plan to blog about our experience to give you the inside look at the program and help us reflect on what will be a whirlwind experience!

So who the heck are we? Well, the Warmly cofounding team is made up of Val, Carina, Alan and me (Max). We’re a motley crew and sometimes in quarantine we make rap songs.

You might notice that above I hyper-linked something strange called a PushPull card instead of traditional LinkedIn profiles. That’s because in our first attempt at a startup we built authentic actionable business cards. But after going through another incredible accelerator this winter called Techstars (in Boulder, Colorado), we pivoted to Warmly.

What the heck does Warmly do? Warmly builds software that helps B2B companies get more customers easily. Our first product, TrackAdvocates, tracks the job changes of a business’ customer contacts and provides the tools to reconnect and generate new sales. This allows them to resell their software to users who already love them.

But back to the humans behind the business. Over the coming weeks, each of the cofounders will be writing up their honest thoughts and reflections on going through YC and what we’re learning. While it is mostly for us to process all the goodness we hope to come from the summer, we hope you’ll find it interesting too. So anyways, let’s start with Week 1:

YC Bootcamp. YC started off with a bang with a bunch of back to back Zoom sessions all week in what they call “Bootcamp”. Because of COVID, everything is remote. The sessions in Bootcamp are designed to give us a variety of topics to think about — from the best growth metrics to track, to product development cycles, to enterprise sales advice to how to write good emails, it was certainly a whirlwind.

One highlight was certainly hearing the Airbnb founders tell their origin story — I really respect them. They started exactly where I am now, in Y-Combinator. And their determination through the program led them to be “ramen-profitable” or making enough money to cover rent and basic food for the cofounders. As I watched them so at ease with one another telling their story by passing the speaking baton between each of the three, it was so clear how close they were to one another and how much they trusted one another. I felt grateful to share that amongst my cofounders.

Armed with 20+ pages of notes, my cofounders and I had a lot to digest and dozens of action items to implement with our startup. Personally I felt stressed and anxious. Starting a company is hard. Really hard. And we have a long way to go to be successful. I posted about my stress in the YC Slack group and was comforted to have a lot of support from other founders feeling similarly!

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about our posts? No problem — would love to hear them at [email protected]

P.S. if you want a way to to invest/support startups and small businesses like ours you can use Wefunder.

Hello! I’m Carina, Cofounder & Head of Product at Warmly. A few months ago, I left my beloved Google Maps family of 4 years to start a company with three amazing humans, Max, Alan, and Val. Since then, we’ve launched our first product PushPull, pivoted off that product (now available as a free platform 😊), launched our new product Warmly and got our first customers.

Two weeks ago we joined Y Combinator Summer 2020 batch (first remote batch because of COVID-19). For those who haven’t heard, Y Combinator (YC for short) is a 3-month startup accelerator program, which many companies in the Silicon Valley have gone through in their early days, e.g. Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, Instacart, Doordash, Segment, Docker. YC provides you with mentors and a network of alumni and other founders to accelerate your learning, growth, and traction — and hopefully prevent you from making similar mistakes as other first-time founders might.

What happened in Week 2 of Y Combinator?

YC is actually a lot less structured than you might expect. Generally, there’s 1.5 hour of sessions every Tuesday and Thursday. This week they covered finding product market fit and our YC partners/mentors Eric Migicovsky (ex-Founder of Pebble smartwatch) and Gustaf Alströmer (ex-Product Lead at Airbnb) shared their founder stories. They have pretty wild stories — we can’t share the actual talk, but here’s snippets public on YouTube we can share: Eric (YC 2011) talks about his Pebble Smartwatch Founder Story, and Gustaf (YC 2007) doesn’t have his founder story public, but he has an awesome How to Get Users & Grow talk, pulling from real examples from his Airbnb experience!

We also went through something they call Prototype Day, where each startup gets a few minutes to mock-pitch, in preparation for pitching to investors on Demo Day in August.

3 key points you want to get across in minutes:

1. What do you do? In 1 line! Just enough for the listener to be able to picture what it is your product does and be hooked into wanting to know more.
2. Why do users care? Show why the market size is huge. Show you have user traction.
3. Why is your team the one to do this? Why is your team amazing? Do you have founder-market fit and the right skillset?

You want people to remember you and what you do. Note that there’s 200+ startups in each YC batch. Investors will be listening to these back to back!

For example, our ‘What do you do’ 1-liner is:

“Warmly gives you weekly warm intros to warm leads for any B2B Company. When you sync your CRM with our software we monitor the job changes of all your users and let you know which companies they’ve gone to next so you can sell into new companies through people who already love your product.”

We also started with a funky team bio to help us be memorable. 😛

“Hi I’m Max and my co-founders are awesome. In their free time Carina is a chicken farmer 🐓, Val is a circus aerialist ️🤸‍ ️& Alan is a wushu master 🥋. I’m just the guy who convinced them to leave Google with me to start Warmly.”

Besides these sessions, there’s 2 office hours to discuss whatever you need help with. One with your group-mates (about 5 startups per group). One with just your team and a YC partner.

The rest of the week, it’s up to you to make the most out of it! Our team has been rapidly focusing on growth: getting more users, talking to users, improving new user experience, scaling the backend to support all the incoming new users, and hashing out clearer metrics to measure growth.

A realization: CEOs & founders are human too 💡

As I heard founder stories from Airbnb founders (YC 2009), from the Pebble founder, and other YC 2020 batchmates, I realized that all of them were in our shoes when they first started.

I remember when I was in college at UC Berkeley doing Computer Science. Getting a Software Engineering job at Google seemed like a far-off dream job. I remember I didn’t even apply to Google because I legitimately didn’t think I’d get in.

When I was at Google, every time I bumped into a VP or Exec, I definitely felt like they were levels above me — I wouldn’t even know what to say to them. And I remember reading news about the CEO of Facebook, the CEO of Uber, and seeing them as superhuman.

It wasn’t until we started fundraising that it really hit me. As part of reference checking our investors & VC firms, we chatted with some of the founders who those investors were funding. We met some famous CEOs. And they were just incredibly nice, humble, human beings. They also had struggles. They also had to go through rounds of failures and learnings. Same with the now-famous founders who came to YC to tell us their founder story and give us advice. The key things that made the difference was they made the leap to start a startup, and they constantly learned from others to get better, and they didn’t give up but instead pushed through all the challenges they faced.

You can do it too. :)

Bonus realization: I realized that all cofounders and first employees do a TON to get a startup to where it is today. Usually only the CEO is known (think Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs). But going through a startup now and talking to other founders, I have mad respect for all cofounders. And I’m super grateful to have an amazingly quirky, smart, caring, driven hustlers whom I call cofounders.

A few asks: Product Feedback, Intros, and Sales Advice 🙏

Feedback on Warmly: If you have experience working in B2B in the Sales, Customer Success, or Marketing realm, we’d love to show you our product and get feedback on whether it’s intuitive and get ideas on how we can improve it!

Intros to potential users: If you know anyone in a company who might want to use our product, let us know! Even if they can’t currently buy our product, just giving us feedback on our product idea or trialing our product is extremely helpful! Ideally if you know a Chief Revenue Officer (or someone in Sales or Customer Success), that would be great — these are our ideal users. But intros to a good friend in any role who works at a B2B/Enterprise company works! (We can reach out to them to see if they can intro us to someone in Sales or Customer Success. 😊)

Advice on sales: None of the 4 cofounders have sales backgrounds, although we’re pretty good at being sponges and learning from smart people and putting things to practice. We could use advice on how to source leads, prioritize and nurture them, close deals, etc. Thanks so much to Eric Davis, Scott Leese, and our talented Techstars and YC mentors who’ve helped us a ton so far!

What happened in Week 1 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Max Greenwald’s post Week 1 in Y Combinator.

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them at [email protected]

Here are three assumptions we had invalidated by YC.

Hello! My name is Val and I’m a co-founder & CPO at Warmly. My fellow founding musketeers (Alan, Carina, Max) and I are going through YCombinator this summer.

*****

Something YC does really well is accumulating thousands of data points about startup activity. When they give opinions on what you should be doing, it is usually based on the experiences of scores, if not hundreds, of companies before you.

Here are three assumptions we had invalidated by YC.

1. “Our pricing matters”

We came to our partner meeting with a question of “how should we be pricing” and the answer was a literal ‘LOL’.

Pricing is irrelevant at our stage. Choose something decent and go with it, it’s a colossal waste of time to try to optimize pricing while our user base is in the double-digits and our monthly revenue is the quadruple-digits. Our primary focus is now purely on getting paying customers at the price point we have.

2. “We need to anticipate backend errors and have robust code that is unlikely to break”

As a team of mostly former Googlers, we are the Queens and Kings of optimization. We know how to take something that’s decent and make it awesome. In a startup, however, you need to take something that’s nothing and make it decent. For a crew of Type-A overachievers, making something “decent” can be extraordinarily painful.

We learned to not try to optimize our product. We are not Google. Startups need to take giant swings and then see if they work. Don’t bother fixing code unless it’s breakage is impacting your ability to get more sales and keep churn low. If customers are tolerating a suboptimal experience, great. Don’t touch it. Work on what is preventing new sales or what is going to make people quit your product in the next two months. Don’t plan features further out than that. Why? Because being slow to launch = delays in getting user feedback = less understanding of users and the problem = you’re slow to iterate solution = startup death.

As a former designer, I had to learn to be content with a “not atrociously terrible” UX. It wasn’t easy. Our YC partners, Gustaf and Eric, really drove home the idea that “if people aren’t complaining, then you’re wasting your time fixing it”. Focusing on “delightful” UX is a luxury for businesses more developed than ours.

3. “A lost sale is a failure”

If a prospect didn’t want our product it’s a “gosh darn it, well better luck next time”.

NO. If a prospect didn’t want your product, document exactly what it was about them that made them a bad fit. Track this. Celebrate disqualifying certain demographics because that helps you narrow in on your actual ideal customer.

If you do this documentation and still feel like the prospect would have benefited from your product, then you’re a crap salesperson and you need to get better. Record your sales calls. There is nothing quite as cringy as watching a recording of yourself, do it. You’ll catch all of your “likes” and see how terrible it is when you don’t make “eye-contact” with the person on Zoom.

Gross salesguy/dad from Matilda, my favorite childhood movie. I literally used to try to make things move with my mind. It never worked. :(

What happened in Week 2 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Carina Boo’s post Week 2 in Y Combinator.

Hey all! I’m Alan, co-founder & VP of Engineering at Warmly.

My co-founder Val mentioned in our last post “Three Things YC has changed our minds on”, that moving too slowly can lead to startup death. Another way to think about it is that you aren’t moving fast enough if things aren’t breaking. See, if a startup had 100 days of runway to make something happen, shipping features every 10 days means it only has 10 bets to make on the market. But the truth is nobody knows the odds of success for each bet. The only thing we can control is the number of bets we take. For a small team like ours, up against well-funded startups and entrenched incumbents, speed is our only advantage.

During our most recent YC office hours, YC’s advice to us was very simple: aggressively pursue growth. As a team we’ve always tried to move fast. But this week we dialed it up a bit.

We launched Warmly across YC’s internal network and its “B2B Preview Day” and saw an 11x spike in inbound interest from customers in 2 days. It was kind of a shock to the system. On the business side we were underwater with customer calls, sales-demos, and follow-ups, in addition to managing existing users. Our engineering backend system limits were tested when multiple customers simultaneously integrated with our platform. The result?

Some of our customers weren’t able to integrate. Cue: sinking feeling.

The product roadmap we had agreed to for the week was thrown out the window, and all hands were on deck to fix critical system issues, while delivering value to our new customers. At the same time that this was happening, we received feedback from a few existing large trial customers that we needed to tighten up the product and improve our offerings, ASAP, for them to convert.

I remember thinking back to something one of our mentors once said.

“In startups, it doesn’t get easier, it only gets faster.”

But just like personal growth, startup growth also happens in moments of discomfort. This growth doesn’t materialize in the traditional sense i.e., more customers, more employees, or more money in the bank. Instead, the discomfort forced us to identify new areas of improvement across the company — from business, to engineering, to team communication. The thought crossed my mind that the environment we all operated in suddenly shifted and that our company would need to level up to survive because the startup clock doesn’t wind back.

Warmly’s growth also necessitated personal growth. It’s at the point of breakage, when I’m scrapping and struggling against a deadline, that I can see clearly where the biggest and most important pains (and gains) are. And that’s when we can go back to the YC community, who are all going through the same thing, to commiserate and ask for advice. In this way, the team grows, the product grows, and so our company grows. YC’s advice is simple, but wise. Pursue growth.

It’s a never-ending, virtuous, innovative cycle of things breaking and fixing, all the time.

And yet, through all the insanity, we still make sure to find time to laugh, gently tease, and connect with each other through fun little team bonding activities, like Wikipedia races or Draw My Life.

What happened in Week 3 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Val Yermakova’s post Week 3 in Y Combinator.

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them at [email protected]

What’s the origin of “Do Things That Don’t Scale”?

The quote actually originates from YC founder and legend Paul Graham. Paul Graham is famous for his startup essays and the one entitled “Do Things That Don’t Scale” is really worth the read.

In the article Paul describes how founders believe that they either will take off immediately, or not at all. But that’s not how it really works. In reality, you have to “take off” in different phases — from 0 to 1, from 1 to 10 and from 10 to 1,000. When you’re going from the 0 to 1 phase of figuring shit out, Paul says, you need to make things work for 1 customer. In doing so you should do things for that 1 customer that would never work for 10 customers or 1,000 customers.

This week in our Group Office Hours, our YC partners reminded us that the program was almost halfway over and Demo Day was just around the corner. They encouraged us to identify big unknowns that could be preventing us from reaching our goals, and solving them in the hackiest way possible. So we took the leap and tried three this week.

1. Spreadsheeting a feature

With our engineering team focused on scaling our backend this past week, I was shit out of luck on getting new features in the hands of users. One of the biggest ways we think we can add value to our users is by pushing the industry towards warm intros instead of cold outreach. Cold outreach in our minds is like throwing darts into the universe — you have to get real lucky to hit something and make a new sale. To that end, if we can help businesses move towards warm intros by thinking about their customers as a network, this will allow them to leverage those customers for new opportunities as opposed to cold outreach.

Many customers have told us they’d love to know which companies they could get warm intros to given the network they have. We realized we could create an easily searchable database (and recommendations) for just this using our algorithms — but it would have to wait until we could build it out in a few weeks. Channeling my inner Paul Graham, I thought about how I could do something that didn’t scale to get feedback on the effectiveness of the feature. So what did I do? “Spreadsheeted” the feature!

I decided to download my own LinkedIn Connections (to people who worked at companies that I could warm intro our customers to) and stick them in a spreadsheet. Then in the heart of our product (on the job changes tab) I added a single line of text

“Want more warm leads? Click here to view prospects”!

Adding a simple string to our product

And it went directly to a spreadsheet!

The spreadsheet we gave to customers.

Yes, in a live, functioning product. I immediately could start using it in a sales call and explain the desired effect.

The result? In less than 24 hours we had over 10 customers requesting intros.

2. Adding a direct line to the CEO

Customer feedback is the core of what makes Warmly better. The more interactions with our customers, the more likely we are to find product market fit and iterate towards a big meaningful business. If I don’t talk to 5 people a day about our product, I doubt I’ll be able to deeply understand the B2B sales & customer success worlds (due to my lack of experience in B2B). I decided to add my personal cell phone number in our product so that folks could literally reach out and text me any time. Yep — morning, noon or night. Feedback welcome. This might not be sustainable at 1,000 customers, but in the meantime I’m patiently waiting by the phone, doing something that doesn’t scale, hoping that a customer reaches out so I can learn more about what I can do to help them. Do you have questions / feedback about our business? Call me!

The result? Well actually no one has called me yet. But 2 customer have said they thought it was cool that they could.

3. Every customer deserves tender love & care

I set aside time this week to directly and personally connect with each of our customers. Since we set up shared Slack channels with each customer to massively reduce onboarding time and barriers for communication, it’s been easy to reach out in an authentic way (highly recommend!). The team and I realized that connecting via email with written text certainly wasn’t the best way to form a close relationship with our customers. We had already added images and jokes to our job change notification report emails but we still didn’t feel close to our customers. But what about the medium of video? With the rise of at home work, I’ve been delighted by the authenticity of seeing real people’s homes, interruptions by their kids, or even the occasional “hey I need to make lunch while we talk, hope that’s cool!”

Sending a video note to our customer Retool!

So that’s why I decided to record a selfie video for each of our customers letting them know how much they mean to us as a baby startup and how grateful we are for their continued business, support, and trust. And it really is true — we’d be nowhere without them.

The result? Happy customers who loved the gesture.…. And Carina (our CTO) reminded me after the fact that I need to smile next time before I start recording otherwise I’ll have just a grumpy starting face!

This week I realized how helpful it can be to do things that don’t scale. I won’t always be able to record personal customer videos. I won’t always be able to text with any customers. And I certainly won’t be able to stick random spreadsheets into our product (our CPO Val would kill me!). But nevertheless, while the product is nascent, the business just getting started, and the lack of learnings the biggest obstacle to our success, we’re willing to do whatever it takes to answer the hardest questions and explore opportunities that could lead to exponential growth.

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What happened in Week 4 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Alan Zhao’s post Week 4 in Y Combinator.

. . .

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them at [email protected].

The Old Normal: In-Person Working

January — May

Since day 1 of the whole cofounding team working together, we have had:

Daily (M-Sat)

Daily standup

Weekly

Weekly mental health checkin

During this time there are a variety of things we can do. The process for this has been iterated upon. The ‘basic’ check-in we do is fill out a sheet on 6 different parameters and rate our personal satisfaction with each parameter from 1–10. Then we go around and share our ratings.

I’m also incredibly passionate about Non-Violent Communication, Conscious Leadership, and Authentic Relating so often times I will create a workshop for the team to go through. Some examples are in my blog, valy.space. But most of them I’ve yet to make time to document properly.

Weekly team gratitudes

During this time each team member takes a turn sitting in the “hot seat” while other people share a gratitude they have for them for something they did that week. At the end of each person’s turn, we bring our hands together and make a noise of their choosing — my “movement” is a ninja-style HIYAH!, Carina’s is a chicken noise and Alan forces us to beatbox. I won’t tell you what Max does, that’s top secret. Each new Warmly member creates their own noise that we use to honor the end of their gratitude.

Weekly team learning retrospective

Here we reflect back on the week and write about all the things we learned. There’s never enough time for everyone to share everything they learned — it’s insane! We learn an astonishing amount over the course of a week.

Weekly team bonding

Fun time! Each person takes a turn planning a team bonding event. We’ve done everything from learning how to draw, to kicking butt Wushu, to playing Jackbox, to yelling at each other over codenames.

Weekly personal time

From January to May, we were working 7 days a week with only 8am-1pm on Sundays devoted to personal time.

Once we finished Techstars and hit May, this became too much and we were feeling the burnout.

May

For the month of May, we decided to take every Saturday and Sunday off.

The New Normal: Remote Working

June — Present

Then YC started in June and we added Saturday back into our schedules, but we still protect Sundays.

Because of COVID, we decided to shift the company to remote — at least until the world opens back up again. This means that our small but mighty team has dispersed across North America and our process has to account for 3 different timezones (ET, PST, HST). People in Hawaii are waking up at 4am while New Yorkers get to rise and shine at 10am.

To account for the lack of in-person interaction but also the zoom-fatigue, we’ve increased our opportunities for bonding but decreased the time of each event.

Today our process is:

Daily (M-F)

• Stand-up

Weekly

• Learning retrospective
• Team lunch (NEW)
• Team gratitudes
• External gratitudes (NEW)

We added this in order to acknowledge all the external people who have been helping us along our journey. It really takes a village to make a startup.

Biweekly

• Mental health check-in (NOW BIWEEKLY)
• Team bonding (NOW BIWEEKLY)
• Process retrospective (NEW)

During this time we discuss if there is anything about our process that needs improving. It’s time for people to discuss timezone issues, request to have fewer meetings, request more meetings, etc.

• Market learning (NEW)

Absolutely essential. We are building a product for Customer Success and Salespeople and it is imperative that we maintain a consistent pulse on what these communities are discussing and feel are their most pressing issues. We are all responsible for finding an article, white paper, podcast, or blog post about a specific topic, ingesting that content and then teaching the rest of the team about what we learned.

Our team event calendar (where all 15 people attend)

This processes, while ever-evolving to our current needs, help us stay a well-oiled machine and keep us accountable for maintaining an equitable and inspiring team culture.

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What happened in Week 5 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Max Greenwald’s post Week 5 in Y Combinator.

. . .

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them at [email protected]

We tier up all the job changes we automatically detect into layers of cross validation. For the top tier, detected job changes that are validated by our system’s internal checks as 100% correct, we automatically pass through to our customer. For the bottom tier, ones our system isn’t confident about, we run a final pass through our QA team.

While we’re constantly building and improving our automated data pipelines, we’ve found that having a set of human eyes is invaluable for catching edge cases. Each edge case lends itself to an insight. And each insight can inform incremental system level improvements that start to matter at scale. Our QA team is the final guard rail to catch the car before it swerves off the cliff into a sea of bad data.

QA Challenges We’ve Faced

As our customer base grows, so does our quality assurance team.

Unlike scaling software infrastructure, scaling a QA team comes with its own set of unique challenges. How do we onboard new QA members quickly? How do we ensure consistent output and accuracy? What happens when suddenly, overnight, the number of contacts we need to monitor increases 5 fold, and half our QA team isn’t available or is on religious holiday?

The most important of these scaling questions, the one that far eclipses the rest, is how do we establish trust?

Trust that a person is honest, that they will be available, that they will do what they say, that they act with our intentions in mind.

In the beginning trust was much easier to build because we were few (the QA team were people I knew I could trust: myself and my cofounder Carina). Then our needs outpaced our ability so we added a few more. But we could still meet with and get to know each person in the team and listen to their concerns and challenges. 

Scaling Trust

At some point though as Warmly grew, I realized I needed to start hiring QA managers, in addition to more QA folks. I went from knowing everyone, to knowing OF everyone, to not knowing what many of the members looked like. At a certain point it became impossible to keep track of everyone.

We started to see a slip in our data’s quality. New hires were making careless mistakes. They approved job changes that were clearly incorrect, even though everyone was trained on and used the same guidelines.

When we pointed out the mistakes to the managers to let their team know, it didn’t always stick. The members would correct their mistakes. Then a week would go by, and the same mistakes would crop up again.

For the earliest QA members (now managers), we interacted with them on a regular basis and got to know each other more personally. They understood Warmly’s mission and what we were trying to accomplish. In turn we got to know their own life goals. We built a relationship, and we established trust. We really enjoyed working with one another and they knew they were part of the family.

When we introduced layers of management, it allowed us to plan and coordinate in much larger groups. But it also prevented us from extending the human connection and empathy with the QA folks we were not interacting with regularly.

We realized we couldn’t replicate these interactions with everyone, but we could try something else; write them a letter. We could try to unite the QA team under our company’s shared vision, explaining to them why the work they’re doing is so important, and inspire them to take the shared ownership of quality.

And for those of you who are curious, below I’m sharing the exact letter we now send each new member of the QA team on their first day at Warmly. While it’s still early, we’ve already seen a lift in data quality, but more importantly, trust.

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A letter to Warmly’s finest

To the good people of Warmly QA,

All of you have been working hard, and we notice and appreciate the dedication. Thank you for your diligence and willingness to push through. Thank you for your positive attitude. And thank you for being a source of inspiration for the rest of the team.

I’d like to share with you all a bit about Warmly and how your work is contributing to changing the world.

Warmly’s Mission Statement

“Re-imagine the world of business through deeper connections”

What exactly does Warmly do?

In the simplest explanation, we help companies detect when their customers change jobs.

Why is this important for our customer?

Say, for example, one of our customers, Coca Cola, has a customer who moved from Google to Uber. Coca Cola wants to know about the job change ASAP so that they can find a new replacement advocate at Google or otherwise risk losing Google as a customer. At the same time, Coca Cola sales team wants to know about the job change so they can sell Coca Cola’s product to the new company, Uber, through the customer who just joined Uber.

Selling through a former customer has a 70% chance of conversion vs. cold outreach (throwing darts into the universe), which has only a 5% chance of conversion. It’s much easier to sell your product to someone who is already familiar and likes your product, just like it is much easier to work with someone who you are already familiar with and like working with!

How you are essential‍

The most crucial part of Warmly’s vision is realized through the work you all do. Every single contact you are able to find and every person you successfully detect as a job change is one more node that is added to the internal graph to build the customer network.

In the beginning the goal might look impossible. The QA team started with Carina, Carol, Emily and I searching google for people who might have changed jobs. It was slow but we never compromised on quality because we knew that high quality, accurate data was the only way we could win.

And we were right. Although we’re still a young budding startup, we’re growing fast. Because we are able to get the data back faster and more accurate than anyone else, we’ve received tons of positive emails from customers thanking Warmly for all the warm intros they were able to get.

Your efforts are being noticed from small startups like ours, to large, 500+ person companies. Customers across every industry are starting to look to Warmly, for warm intros to their future customers. And now that our QA team is growing, one job change detected will soon become 10,000, and one day, millions.

Our plan is to break into the world’s leading companies to revolutionize how sales is done across industries and geographies. People should not be sold products by salespeople, they should be referred products by their trusted friends, friends who want to advocate for a product they like and believe in. Warmly enables this to happen.

I’m not alone in being grateful for the amazing work you all are doing. It’s a hard road ahead, and at times stressful. But we’ll be with you each and every step of the way.

So on behalf of everyone here at Warmly,: Max, Val, Carina, Zack, Amanda, Emily, Brandon, Carol, Grant, Natalie, Sanil, Shahpar and myself, thank you again.

You are part of the family now and I hope you will see it as such. We rise and fall together.

Let’s go make a dent in the universe.

Warmly,

Sending you all our ❤️

What happened in Week 7 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Val Yermakova’s post Week 6 in Y Combinator.

. . .

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Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them ay [email protected]