Our Journey On How We Founded A Sales Gamification SaaS And Scaled It To $10M ARR
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
I’m Sindre Haaland, a Norwegian Viking splitting my time between New York City and Norway. I founded SalesScreen back in 2011 with some of my close friends from university and have served as the CEO ever since.
I’m proud to state that we are the world's leading sales gamification SaaS, with thousands of sales teams relying on SalesScreen to motivate their employees to goals every day all across the globe.
The tighter the ICP and the bigger the pain, the easier everything gets from selling, to marketing, implementing, and retaining customers.
A typical SalesScreen customer is a business with a high sales velocity motion, like an insurance company, software BDR team, recruitment, telco, real estate, banking, mortgage, or pure call center type of business looking to raise their sales performance by making everyday tasks more fun and exciting for their teams.
Today, we are closing in on $10,000,000 in recurring revenue and are growing fast.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I grew up with a curious mind, always wanting to learn, especially anything within the computer science field. Already as a thirteen-year-old, I was a fluent coder in C, had mastered assembly-level coding, and had been sent to the principal to explain how I was able to access school systems without login… Needless to say, I was and still am a proud geek.
Once I hit sixteen years old, I started my first business on the side. I rented a location, stacked it with computers, and wrote some code to let individuals “rent” a computer in my warehouse and decide what services they wanted to run on it. No more renting a counter-strike server and hosting server separately, simply rent a box with me and host multiple services on the same machine - while load-balancing internet connection and computing power to the services you deemed most critical.
Today this is completely redundant, as the whole cloud movement is basically what I set out to do. This business never took off, as my family urged me to take an education first. And so I did.
It was when I was studying as a computer science major at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology that I met my two co-founders Marius Ekerholt and Øystein Heimark. We all took the same courses and ended up working together in a colloquium. I couldn’t shake the desire of getting started with my own business and decided to get going while I had access to so much raw talent all around me.
At the time, I knew I wanted to start a SaaS business, but had no brilliant idea in mind. I knew it would cost money and that it would take some time to get enough recurring revenue to pay decent salaries, so I instead opted to start as a consultancy company doing mobile app projects and website development for clients to get cash into the business and fund the ideation and development of software as a service.
This was back in 2011, and at the time, not many startups in Norway were doing Software as a Service. This meant that we needed to figure out everything by ourselves.
After multiple iterations, we did all the mistakes you could imagine as first-time founders. One of the biggest mistakes we made was spending more than a year developing a SaaS to replace text messages for corporates. This was based on a new cool technology called push notification.
The same week the SaaS was slotted to go live, the text message became free of charge and our business model went bust. Luckily, we found an advertisement sales company that sent tons of text messages internally for a very specific reason - to motivate their inside- and field sales teams by creating buzz and awareness that somebody just closed a deal! The collaboration with this customer, and our willingness to pivot in this direction, was the underlying idea of SalesScreen.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
Our first SaaS application was meant to replace the text message for corporates, but luckily we listened to our first customers' needs and gradually introduced features that pivoted our platform into becoming more of a sales reporting tool with motivational elements. The “aha” moment first came when we built our second SaaS, an infoscreen solution that made it easy to have live content rotate up on big TV screens in offices.
With all the sales data we now had, our clients requested to see them presented outside the automated message that everyone received when a new deal closed - they wanted to see it up on TV screens in the office space, represented by leaderboards and big charts showing progress to goal for the teams. We integrated the two platforms to enable this and introduced a key feature that we quickly identified as the “aha” moment not only for us but also for our customers.
I still vividly remember experiencing the “aha” moment for the first time. It was when my co-founder Marius and I were in a client’s office mounting TV screens for them and installing the new real-time visualization of their sales data. Little did they know what was about to happen.
One of our friends worked in the call center, and he knew what was coming, so he had saved up a big deal for this moment. He looked at us and asked if everything was up and running, and we nodded yes back. He took his phone out and went triumphantly into the middle of the bull pen, demanding everybody's attention.
Once people looked at him, he took up his mobile application and used our application to record a new sale. Instantly, all TVs lit up with Eye of the Tiger playing at full steam, broadcasting his big deal win.
Everyone went crazy! They jumped up and down and we had never experienced such energy before, but we knew what it meant for us as a business. We decided then and there that we would shut down the other applications, start all over, and build the world's first and best sales motivation platform.
I believe that every sales team should have technology made for their employees to keep them engaged, motivated, and eager to get their work in every day consistently.
In the process, one of the developers heard about this new concept called Gamification (applying game-like elements to a non-gaming environment to create excitement, and fun, and unlock business outcomes). This was the perfect match for what we were building, and we then realized that we were building the first sales gamification platform in the world, where motivating individuals to get to their goals was the outcome and value that the platform delivered.
This time around, we also experienced first-hand the importance of putting the client's wishes and needs in the center, so everything we developed from there on was based on their requests and needs.
Describe the process of launching the business.
I knew it would cost money to build a SaaS, and time to get to a point where we could pay decent salaries to ourselves from the revenue generated from the SaaS. As such, I decided to start out as a consultancy firm developing mobile applications and websites for clients. This consultancy arm allowed us to finance the development of SalesScreen, and we rotated developers between product work and consultant projects, as everyone preferred to work on the product.
The consultancy business also gave us access to interesting customers and problems in the market, so we gained a lot of inspiration and did several MVPs and products.
After iterating and failing on many ideas and products before getting it “right” with SalesScreen, we decided to make sure we made our roadmap and every feature based on what clients wanted and needed. We made them in charge, and the ultimate priority test was also allowing customers to pay for “prioritized” development.
This not only made it possible to bootstrap the creation of SalesScreen but also made sure that what we developed were features that our clients loved and needed.
We were then able to dismantle the entire consultancy arm of the business in late 2015 and live out of the recurring revenue generated from SalesScreen.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
The celebration that came with every sale up on TV screens in the office space effectively worked as a viral loop for us. Sales reps loved it so much that they went to their new managers when switching jobs demanding they look into it and buy it for the team.
People that visit offices with SalesScreen would see the vivid visuals, and real-time competitions, hear the music playing, and be curious enough to ask what it was - and then look it up directly. This made it possible to scale past the first million dollars without any marketing budget.
As we scaled and matured the business, introducing marketing, customer success, and sales development representatives was vital to keep on attracting new business, educating the market about our solution, and retaining customers. Both tools and processes have improved dramatically over the years, accelerated by bringing in leadership talent that had prior experience from SaaS and done it before.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
After raising money for the first time in 2018, SalesScreen has expanded to multiple new countries and leaned into the USA as a key market, in addition to Europe. We have hundreds of customers and tens of thousands of sales reps in more than 26 countries actively using SalesScreen every day.
As everything is built in-house, we have a fantastic gross margin above 90% including the cost of goods and services like support and customer success. Customers keep on renewing, making back our customer acquisition cost tenfold. We are also fortunate enough to be profitable as a business, meaning we are in no rush to raise more capital to keep on growing.
The future for SalesScreen is bright. I believe that every sales team should have technology made for their employees to keep them engaged, motivated, and eager to get their work in every day consistently. Not many tools out there leverage behavioral psychology like us to target human emotion and unlock the next level of productivity while combating attrition, but I’m certain that every business will once they realize the benefits.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
It’s impossible to summarize all that I have learned as a first-time founder over the past 11 years. What I can say is that everything is easier if you are solving a very painful problem in a hyper-focused niche. The tighter the ICP and the bigger the pain, the easier everything gets from selling, to marketing, implementing, and retaining customers.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
My favorite platform is candidly SalesScreen.com! It gives me the heartbeat of the sales floor in the palm of my hand, I can see if we are tracking toward a goal, and what wins are happening in real-time - allowing me to give praise and feedback while it’s still relevant for the individuals getting to the goal.
Besides SalesScreen, I’ve reluctantly found myself enjoying the flexibility of both Salesforceand PowerBIto dig deeper into the underlying trends of my business, and Notionto track progress in projects and find internal information.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I’m a big podcast guy, and I love the work Jason Lemkin has done with SaaStr.com. It’s a great community, and so many brilliant minds have shared their secrets on how to succeed. You can get a lot of inspiration and ideas when following podcasts like this one or that are close to your function. I also follow other podcasts that are either scoped down geographically or about leadership in B2B SaaS.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Make sure you build a business around a true demand in the market, not something you think the market will need. Test the idea as much as possible before devoting too many resources to making it a reality.
Do not make the classic mistake of thinking that revenue will come as soon as the product is “finished”, find a way to make money from day one to reduce the required investment and burn off the company.
Once you get started, focus! Too many founders I talk to have the same key learning when looking back; they had not dialed in their ideal customer profile and cast too wide of a net from the start.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are always on the lookout for great talent! Take a look at our careers page for more information about current openings and open positions.
Where can we go to learn more?
Follow us on LinkedIn for information about SalesScreen, gamification, and SaaS, and connect with me directly.
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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