Many people on Linkedin are predicting the “Death of SaaS” but after our year, I couldn't be more bullish. Last year Champify grew ARR by 320% and 4X'd our customer base, and we saw our lead investor, Jack Altman, double down in our business and increase his investment.
Here’s my 2023 recap - the good, the bad and the opportunity:
THE GOOD:
We grew our customer base and revenue more than 3X while keeping burn flat. We hired Taylor Udell who is revolutionizing our ops process, adding rigor, and executing on strategic marketing bets- keeping our CAC low. We also just kicked off January with a new SDR (Will Falkenborg) who booked 6 meetings booked in week 1. Not a bad start.
We’ve brought on engineers with deep data expertise. We made HUGE product improvements based on customer feedback and our understanding of the problem/market. And with these releases like Get Intro from and Slack Alerts, Calendar Sync, and new enterprise workflows, we've improved our ability to impact outcomes for our customers.
Just this year, we influenced $129M+ in pipeline and $41M+ in closed won revenue for our customers, which includes some of the fastest growing, most innovative companies – like Navan, Clari, Launchdarkly.
THE BAD:
Our first SDR was a total miss-hire. We had a few months of extremely low output, and we lacked the enablement and the fit wasn’t there. I take full ownership of this. They were not set up for success. We learned from this experience and set up a strong outbound strategy - 100% aligned with marketing and our AE before we brought our newest SDR Will on board.
We had plans to deliver two more major product releases but they didn’t get done. Turns out even with productive engineers, early products take a lot of time to get right and there are thousands of edge cases. We’ve revamped our process which should allow us to go 5x faster. While we didn't release everything, we're proud of the investment we made in our existing customers and our current offering. Our customers are our top priority and we spent our time investing in their success.
We lost a few smaller non-ICP accounts. While frustrating, we’ve learned who is the ideal fit for us and are now DQ-ing more aggressively and only spending time with accounts we KNOW we can make successful. This feedback has helped our sales team stay focused on good fit accounts and improved who we target with marketing and outbound.
We we had 2 bigger customers churn that we didn’t see coming. Yes, they had a lot of turmoil within their orgs and lots of leadership changes, but it was really the result of an immature onboarding process. Major lesson learned. We've expanded our customer success team, and we're revamping our onboardingi to get. So far - it's working. Our most recent customer set 12 meetings in week 1!
THE OPPORTUNITY:
Our awareness strategy: I’m all in on Linkedin. We get 60% of inbound leads from organic content and I’m doubling down on the platform in 2024. Follow me to see how we continue to build our business.
We have so much room to expand our product offering. There is so much value in a company’s “owned” data we we make it extremely useful and usable to grow efficiently. We have built the team to integrate AI much deeper into our product.
Tailwinds making Champify even more important: There is so much friction for AEs/SDRs between what they should prioritize and getting the results from their actions. This friction is compounded when you look at the friction between sales and marketing teams. Yes, SaaS is getting more difficult.Traditional outbound tactics are failing. Poorly run SDR teams are still (sadly) the norm. And AI is going to make the problem 50x worse as people use it to ramp up the volume. This gives us a great opportunity to help.
We believe that companies that solve real pains in the market and stay close to their customers will thrive.
We’re excited to keep helping our customers grow in 2024. I’ll be providing more updates along the way. Hope you’ll follow along. It’s going to be a fun ride!
