Shoreline Mountain Products

In 1997, I got a job at Shoreline Mountain Products, a company you have likely never heard of. Shoreline Mountain Products was a mail order company that sold rock climbing gear. This was before the internet was prevalent and before e-commerce was a thing. Instead, our main sales channel was through a 100-plus page paper catalogue that we mailed twice a year to a list we purchased of people who rock climb. When I joined, there were three of us working out of Tom Shores's living room and garage (the makeshift warehouse), answering phones and packing boxes. Four months into my work at Shoreline Mountain Products, I was on the phone with a friend of mine, Alexis Rodriguez. Alexis had recently founded the digital agency Raw Interactive. Alexis asked me if we had thought about creating an online presence and selling gear on the internet.

I suggested this to Tom and he was all in. I have to hand it to him: first, for really understanding who his customers were, and who they were going to be (which was younger and more affluent climbers); and second, for having the courage to experiment. Those two things are important and you will hear them over and over in different ways throughout this entire book.

With Alexis's help we launched a very crude e-commerce site in the summer of 1997. The rest was history. Ultimately Shoreline Mountain Products sold to Mountain Gear—at the time REI's biggest regional competitor—which resulted in Mountain Gear having an e-commerce experience before REI!

• Lessons learned: Starting a business wasn't like turning on a light switch. You can't just decide to do it and the customers will come. It required lots of hard work to be successful, both physical and mental. It required figuring out who our customers were and what they wanted. It also required constant innovation to stay relevant. We touch on these topics in Chapters 2, 3 and 7.

HotJobs.com

In 1999 I joined HotJobs.com after a chance meeting with one of the founders, Dave Carvajal. HotJobs was one of the original online job boards and a leader in the space. I was one of the first 20 salespeople in our San Francisco office. The company was headquartered in New York, had fewer than 50 employees, was doing less than $10 million in revenue, and was private. Three months after I joined, we had an initial public offering (IPO). This all happened in the middle of the internet boom, through the infamous internet dot-com bubble of 2000, and into the rebound through 2004.

I was at HotJobs for about four and a half years and in that time I touched on almost every aspect of the sales organization. I was a salesperson, ran an inside sales team, built out and scaled the account management team, and created both our first Winback program and our renewal process before being acquired by Yahoo! Then, inside Yahoo!, I helped rebuild a regional sales team, and then moved over to help build out both account management and part of sales for the newly formed strategic accounts division.

I reflect back on my time at HotJobs as my hands-on MBA. The list of things I learned are probably a book all by themselves, but there are two things that stand out when it comes to figuring out how to sell more faster:

Lessons learned

1. In order to have a long- lasting and successful business, you must provide a value to your customer that is obvious, measurable, and irreplaceable. And while this may seem obvious, I see hundreds of businesses a year that not only don't do this, but the founders don't even think about what that means for their customers. At HotJobs, we did this so well that we were recession-proof. When the bubble did burst in 2000, our revenue and customer base continued to grow. We touch on this in Chapters 3 and 5.
2. Culture matters, people matter, and it starts at the top. I remember thinking I'd never work in such an amazing culture again because it was so infectious. Especially in those pre-Yahoo! days, everyone was drinking the Kool-Aid. This is all because of the great culture and leadership set by our founding CEO, Richard Johnson, and because of the maniacal focus on hiring the right people by our founding sales recruiter Dave Carvajal. When you can build teams and a company of people who deeply believe in your vision, and when you are the kind of leader whom people want to follow into the fire, your chance of building a successful company increases exponentially. When I joined HotJobs there were dozens of competitors and we were not one of the leaders, but because of Richard's leadership, the culture he built, and the incredible people at HotJobs, by the time we were acquired by Yahoo!, HotJobs was one of the top two job boards as measured by both traffic and revenue. We dig into culture in Chapters 6 and 7.

Work.com and Business.com

In 2004, after leaving Yahoo!HotJobs, I founded Work.com with Jake Winebaum and Russell Foltz-Smith. Work.com was incubated inside Business.com and essentially was an early version of what Indeed is today. Jake and I eventually decided to merge the two companies together and double down on Business.com. I took over inside sales first and eventually all of sales and client services for Business.com. When I first took over sales in late 2005, we were under $10 million in annual revenue and by the time I left, after being acquired by R.H. Donnelly in 2007, we were at $70 million annually.

During my time at Business.com is when all the learning from Shoreline Mountain Products and HotJobs.com started to resonate with me. I developed a framework called W3, which is the foundation I now use to build any sales organization. It's also the entirety of Chapter 1.

While I've continued to learn (a lot) since the Business.com days, it was then that the concepts of Sell More Faster were first forming. At Business.com, we figured how to grow revenue, scale the organization, reduce churn to almost zero, create an infectious culture and achieve rocket ship type growth, all within 18 months. If HotJobs was my MBA, then Business.com was my PhD.

• Lessons learned: So many lessons! But, most important, having a clearly defined idea of your customers and the value you provide is not only important to acquire new customers, but crucial to building a great culture, attracting awesome investors, and building a world class company. We will be jumping right into the W3 framework in Chapter 1.

MySpoonful

In 2008, I founded MySpoonful with Stacy Horne. MySpoonful was a thrice weekly email newsletter that delivered curated, up- and-coming bands to your inbox. We bootstrapped MySpoonful for four years and built a large and engaged user base. Revenue was always modest and barely covered our costs, but even so we were approached and eventually sold the company to another company that brokers music rights.

• Lessons learned: Again, I learned a tremendous amount at MySpoonful, but the biggest lesson I learned was that finding the value that your customers see in your product (not the value that you think they should see) is crucial to identifying who your customers are. We talk about this in Chapters 2, 4, and 7.

BlackLocus

In 2012 I was living in Austin and was introduced to Rob Taylor, CEO of BlackLocus. I joined him as head of sales. BlackLocus provided intelligence and analytics to online retailers, specifically based on price and assortment. When I joined, BlackLocus believed their customers were small online retailers and Amazon sellers who were trying to compete with big retailers. In the first few months I questioned everything. We quickly learned that the initial hypothesis regarding our customer was wrong, and using the concepts in this book figured out how to flip it to a very different group: enterprise retailers. Seven months later we went from virtually zero revenue to over $120,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and shortly after sold the company to one of our customers, TheHomeDepot, for over $50 million.

• Lessons learned: While it was a quick journey, BlackLocus was where I really put all my past learnings to work. And again, while there was so much to learn, my biggest takeaway was that W3 works as a framework to identify what your business is and how to grow it. BlackLocus is where I most deliberately put all the concepts of this book into practice and the result was the fastest trajectory to high sales growth and acquisition I've experienced (as both an operator and investor).

Joust

In 2013 I founded Joust with Tim Gray and John Christiano. Joust was a consumer app, innovating on the daily fantasy trend and bringing it to “anything.” After the fast and large exit with BlackLocus, I was feeling invincible. We were able to get some really early and big interest, signing up customers like XGames, MTV, Discovery Channel, Fox Sports, and more before we had a fully developed product. Ultimately we were not able to build a successful company at Joust, despite the early excitement from these big brands, and I left 36 months later.

You've heard it from founders and VCs alike and it's true, you can learn as much, if not more, from failing as you can from succeeding. And for me, the beauty of this failure is that it was really the final nail in helping me to solidify my core beliefs in how to build a big and successful business. And while there are literally dozens of things I learned at Joust, here are the three most relevant for this book.

Lessons learned

1. If you try to go wide in who you are selling to or try to provide service to too many customer types, you end up providing minimal value to all and maximum value to none. Not only did we have two customer types (media companies and individual consumers) who had competing interests, we also tried to service every profile-user type and media company type. As a startup, it was way too much to try and figure out how to make everyone feel value when there were so many customer types we were trying to serve. We discuss this in Chapters 2, 3, and 7.
2. If you don't know why and can't measure the value your customer is getting from your product, neither can they – and without a clear identification of that ongoing value, your customers will go away. We didn't spend enough time trying to learn this, and there were just too many customer types. This is at the core of why we failed. We cover this in Chapters 2, 4, and 7.
3. Ego doesn't win and hard work alone isn't enough. You need a framework, a methodology, and data to work from in order to test, learn, and refine your process. The three founders of Joust all thought we could figure it out simply by working hard because we'd “done it before.” We ignored the basic fundamentals, outlined in Sell More Faster and ultimately were not successful. It took us three years and $1.5 million to figure that out. And while we may have still failed, even if we did follow the concepts in this book, we would have failed much faster and much cheaper.

Techstars

This brings me to the summer of 2015 when I became managing director of the Techstars Austin Accelerator. Since joining Techstars I've invested in and worked with 40 companies via the accelerator and have mentored another 100-plus through both Techstars and various angel investments. This means I have put this framework into play time and time again and have witnessed how it helps companies like Chowbotics, ScaleFactor, Storyfit, Prospectify, Helper Bees, Allstacks, Skipper, Mesur, DocStation, Transmute, WriterDuet (the platform where this book was written), and many more scale from virtually zero revenue to millions. This framework has also made it clear when a business was not scaleable and a pivot was needed.

The pieces have been there and go as far back as my days at Shoreline Mountain Products, but it wasn't until recently that I was inspired to write this book.