tl;dr
Progress in the first 3 months:
- Idea (Aug)
- 25 discovery interviews (Aug)
- Working MVP (Sep-Oct)
- Landing page (Oct)
- 450 people on waitlist in 2 weeks (Oct)
- YC application (Oct)
- 80 demos in next 2 weeks (Oct)
- Closed >20 pre-sales, $200 each
- Started using the MVP internally
- Prepared for fundraising (pending YC decision)
August 2023
Before starting Sellestial, we built a sales-guru chatbot, which we "successfully invalidated" with ~15 interviews in June. So we started from scratch and asked ourselves: "What would be the single best sales tool we would like to use?".
Klemen (co-founder, CCO) and I realized that a sales people, we want a tool that:
- analyzes our emails, messages and conference calls with prospects,
- automatically updates deals in our sales pipeline,
- suggests and automates the next best sales task for each deal.
We hypothesized that a tool that performed the above really well, would be at least a 10x improvement over what currently exists in the sales CRM market today.
We advertised our idea a bit on LinkedIn and booked ~30 discovery calls with various people working in sales. When presented the idea, most people were skeptical—Sellestial sounds too good to be true. "Is AI really there yet?"
At Sellestial, we're pushing AI there. We're not building foundational models (at least not at this point 😉). But the pace of innovation in generative AI today indicates that in 12 months we'll see stuff that is hard to imagine today. We're focused on building everything else—all the pipelining and the infrastructure, as well as fine-tuned models, which can adapt immediately to upcoming advances in foundational models.
After asking our interviewees: "Imagine for a second, that Sellestial will actually work—how valuable would it be to you?" Everybody, without exception, confirmed such a tool would be revolutional. So, we decided to start building it.
September 2023
We defined the goals for the MVP:
- automatic identification of sales-related email communication with prospects & clients,
- automatic prospect company and contact enrichment with basic publicly available data,
- automatic identification and characterization of sales opportunities,
- automatic next-best-sales-task generation and execution.
Matevž (co-founder CTO) started working on the infrastructure, and I got my hands dirty with the AI pipeline.
We also started writing our YC application—we believe Sellestial would be a great fit for YC because of it's massive potential to... well, to replace Salesforce and all other CRMs out there. That's a really huge market. But to dominate it, speed matters more than ever. We need all the resources we can get to make this a success, and YC would provide a huge part of that.
We decided to validate the idea (and MVP) further and launched a landing page inviting people to Sellestial waitlist (thanks Tea and Tim from 350life!).
October 2023
In ~2 weeks after launching the landing page, we got ~430 people sign up on the waitlist. We used the following channels to attract visitors:
- outbound email
- outbound LinkedIn
- Linkedin posts
- LinkedIn ads
- X ads
- a growth influencer
- Facebook groups
Thanks, Maja Voje for helping us with this!
On October 13th, we applied to YC. A week later, we invited people on our waitlist to Sellestial demos. To date, we performed 85 demos, and pre-sold 21 subscriptions for $200. The deal is good: you pay us $200 now (before you can test the software), and you have the whole first year after launch free. If you decide this is not for you, you can get a refund within the first month after the launch.
November 2023
This week, we're finally starting to use Sellestial internally. Also, laid ground work for fundraising in case YC application falls through.
What's Next
We're anticipating feedback from YC later this week. If we're not accepted, we'll start raising a $1.5m pre-seed round immediately. This means we'll start expanding our team very soon. We plan to start onboarding first test users in the following weeks and launch sometime in early 2024.
