What Braydan Young Learned After 10 Years Building Sendoso

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Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Mark Espar. In this episode, I'm exploring the intersection of personalization, revenue acceleration, and standing out in a noisy digital world. My guest is Brayden Young, the cofounder of Sendoso, a platform that transformed how companies connect with prospects and customers through direct mail and gifting. Over the past ten years, Braden helped reshape how revenue teams operate, enabling more second calls and faster deal closes by making b to b outreach more personal, meaningful, and memorable. Having recently stepped away from Sendoso, Braden is now diving into a new venture slash experts. And today, we'll unpack how personalization at scale works, why it matters more than ever, and what Braden has learned from building Sendoso and now starting afresh with a brand new startup. Welcome to Markings Park.

Guest: Thank you. It's good to be here. Ten years sounds like a really long time. When I was writing that post on LinkedIn, I got a decade of direct mail. I think I've seen it all, maybe. At least from the b to b angle. Direct mail.

Mark Evans: You ever imagine that you spend ten years at Sendoso in the tech world? Ten years is a lifetime, especially for a cofounder. A decade must have flown by. A lot happened during that ten years, and the company grew

Guest: a lot. We originally started Sendoso as a platform called Coffee Sender, so a way to send Starbucks gift cards. It was purely just a way to make side money, and it hit the account based marketing world at the right time. And folks coffee, gift cards, egift cards work. Can I also send physical things? We were at different jobs when we began it. It was one of those things that I know. Ten years was through a pandemic. It was it was a big deal to step back and to try to build something new, but now I have a lot of stories to share, a lot of learnings that I went through for ten years.

Mark Evans: Let's take a step back and talk about when you and your cofounder decided to start Sendoso. What was the inspiration? What were you doing before and what was it to take the leap into being an entrepreneur?

Guest: So when we began, we did Starbucks gift cards. We'd attach them to emails, and we found a team to help us build it on the engineering side. We launched it. Coffeecenter.com was a really cool side hustle. Then quickly, it took off. People were like, this is a different way to reach out. The platform's Outreach and SalesLoft and were just coming on the scene. Yesware was the big one at the time. And it was all about sending emails as fast as you possibly could scale. We were trying to stand out by having a gift card attached saying, hey, take my demo. Here's $5 at Starbucks. We quickly got asked to save more than just Starbucks gift cards. Folks were like, I want to send DoorDash. I want to send physical things. It was the East Coasters. I wanna do Dunkin' Donuts. We're like, okay. We gotta figure out how to get more into the platform, and we can't call it just coffee sender. We rebranded and we figured out how to add more e gifts. We also figured out how to do a warehouse, which does a million stories there. We met a guy at a bar who was like, I run a warehouse, and we're like, perfect. We'll send you stuff. That was in Vegas and learned how to do some warehousing. It was a quick turn in terms of trying to stand out. We hit it at the right time because account based marketing was the big wave. Everyone's, I need to stand out. I need to have a different way to reach out. Emails at scale aren't working. And we're like, yeah. We do gifting. Everyone does it. No one tracks it. That was the big push. It was the right time. The question we would ask on calls was always, hey, do you do holiday gifting? We're like, yeah, I'd send all kinds of things during the holidays. Like, great. What was your ROI on it? And they're like, I have no clue. So that was how we did our demos. I start for the first three years. I mean, it was the right time, and then we grew from there. We raised a little money and then a lot of money to build out a big network of warehouses and to build a way to do gifts for b to b companies.

Mark Evans: I do wanna talk about raising money in total

Guest: Yeah.

Mark Evans: Through series One ish. One sixty ish. $10,000,000 here

Guest: and Yeah.

Mark Evans: Set me back a little bit. Direct mail and gifting weren't new when Sandozo appeared on the scene. Why did you think there was an opportunity and what made Sendoso's approach feel fresh and effective in the b to b space?

Guest: There was one company that was around that was doing it. They'd been around for a while, and that was the only one that we saw that where you could log in to a Salesforce and do a gift directly from a contact page. Our biggest mode at the time was everyone wanted to be a platform of record. We don't wanna be a platform of record. We just wanna plug into the tools where you already are. So we took the Sendoso tool and plugged it into Salesforce, Outreach, SalesLoft, SurveyMonkey. You could do gifting directly from those platforms, this Chrome widget that helped us plug in. And that was the difference, was people didn't have to go log in to another location. It was that you gift directly from your Salesforce page, which was huge because it's at the time, everyone wanted to have a platform you logged into, because everyone wanted that data. And we went the different approach, which helped us.

Mark Evans: But you originally started doing Amazon gift cards. You meet a guy in Vegas who says he has a warehouse Right. And every entrepreneur who's optimistic about the future, you jump on that. When did you know the idea was gonna turn into real traction? As a signal that some entrepreneurs get, some entrepreneurs miss it, some entrepreneurs never see the signal. At what point did you realize, we've got a tire by the tail here, and we need execute properly?

Guest: I think there was four real signals. One, when we originally started, we only wanted to own the digital side. The one company that did a lot of the physical sending didn't wanna partner with us because they're concerned what you're building. They don't want anyone else in their space. That was an interesting one. I think we're chasing the right thing. The next one was when we launched Coffee Sender, just a way to do e gifts, we did $60,000 in revenue the first month. This was a side project and we were granted margins of 1%. We were like, wow. This is a lot of people having hunger for sending gifts to people to try to stand out from all the emails they get. The third one was when we started building, probably the biggest one. When we started building, we started selling. I was the only one selling. Chris was my CSM slash CEO. So I was to sell a deal, give it to Chris, we'd onboard them, we'd go back and forth. And very early, we had an inbound lead from Capital One and they were like, we're in. We need to do this. So my desk has all this stuff underneath it. I need to be able to use you. That was a really big surprise that an enterprise company wanted to leverage us and use us that soon in the sales cycle. We didn't close them till years later, but it meant that we could land meetings with really big companies. So that was one those things where I was like, okay. I think we've hit a really big pain point in the market is that people wanna send gifts out, but they don't know how to do it and they don't know how to track it. That was one of the biggest ones I would say. The last one, as I knew it would work, is once a deal closed that I wasn't involved in. A deal comes in Salesforce and it closes, and you're like, wow. Okay. I think that was a big deal, then they renewed. That was probably the biggest two year cycle once you see that happens. This is actually something that can scale.

Mark Evans: For most startups, product development, job one. Sales is job two. Then they get around to marketing. What was the Sandozo recipe to sales and marketing? A lot of companies, great product, right time, right place, but they can't get the word out to attract the people that matter to them.

Guest: Ours was probably different than most startups out there. My background is sales. Chris's background is sales. We sold a ton of the product before it really worked properly. Most entrepreneurs, I would say, build a beautiful product and then they're great. The market's gonna love this and then they go out and sell it. We were lack of a better phrase, we were flying the airplane and building at the same time. It was one those things that we brought on a lot of companies who were, yeah, I need this. This is great. Do you guys have this component? We were, absolutely. We didn't. So one of things where we need to go figure out engineering how to build this thing. We wouldn't build integrations until someone was, hey, do you plug into X tool? Absolutely. Where it's actually on the road map. And then you'd have two weeks to build it, and then you'd launch it. We were building as quickly as we could to keep up with sales, which is the opposite of, I would say, most companies. That made it weird with raising. Cause when you're typically two salespeople, they want to know who your technical co founder is. We didn't have one. We got really good at wireframing. We got really good at learning what engineering was doing, which was all abroad. But we had a couple million sales in the first year, which helped us get past the hurdle of, where's your technical co founder?

Mark Evans: As the business is growing and as your financial needs increase, at what point in time did you realize that you had to raise external funding? Friends and family is a route that many entrepreneurs embrace because it's easy and you don't have to put yourself out there in a big way because you have relationships with people. But at some point, you have to raise that seed round and have to raise the a round. How did that process work at Sandoz? Who led it? What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs who are looking to go down that path?

Guest: It's one that you have to it's really a muscle you have to practice. We started pitching VCs day one. Here's what we're building. We were looking for more feedback. And we weren't raising money. Just say, here's our building. What do you guys think? We got a lot of really harsh feedback. The founder calling your baby ugly thing. They don't know what they're talking about. You learn that early on that the feedback is good and take you get a lot of it. You take the ones that you really feel are important to you. We started pitching really early, and as we started growing, we ended up being like, we need more money to grow faster because we had enough demos to keep us really busy. We had enough and we knew companies were sending using the platform. We just need more companies to help use us. We wanted to go to conferences. Conferences are really expensive. We had to raise. So we did our series c through a fund called Storm Ventures. And Storm Ventures did Marketo and Engageo. They knew the marketing space really well. They helped us get into a ton of early companies that were in the marketing space to help us scale. That's important too is know whoever you raise from. If they're in the space you wanna grow in, where your ACP is, that's who you wanna raise from. They helped a ton. And then we started growing even faster. We thought probably the whole time that we were always gonna raise, we wanted to shoot as high as we could because it was our first startup. Our a was through Kraft Ventures that helped us more on the side around the growing into small SMB clients, trying to figure out what the tech space was a bit more. David Sachs and Brian Murray helps a ton in their days to figure out the fundamentals of the company. Their backgrounds, all the benefits of those types of companies. Then we did Oak Ventures for our next round. That was growing international. Then we took a big check from SoftBank. Everyone reads about that in the TechCrunch world. SoftBank goes, here's money. Burn it, grow as fast as you can. After that check, you quickly learn, okay, let's see if far we can take this. That was in the middle of the pandemic. I'm sure everyone read about it a million times in TechCrunch. Everyone all of a sudden was, now you got to be profitable. You can't burn anymore. That was the big change. We learned a ton as to how to grow as fast as possible overnight to then turn on its head and say, hey, grow responsibly. That was a big shift, but we learned how to scale after that.

Mark Evans: Right. The question that I always have to ask entrepreneurs who raise a lot of money is when someone writes you a $100,000,000 check and says grow as fast as possible, what does that feel like after you Raising. Raising the money and then once you've closed the deal, you've got investors who are expecting not only big things, but massive things and you want it to happen really fast. What does that feel like? How do you figure out where to spend your money, how to spend your money, and make sure you're doing it in the right ways at the right time. It must be overwhelming.

Guest: It's exciting. The day you get a wire into the bank. This is serious. Let's make this thing happen. And we had an amazing executive team. We were simultaneously growing internationally as fast as we could in APAC and in EMEA. In The US, we had to grow as well. We were hiring probably 60 people a month, and it was very fast growth. The problem is that you're almost growing so fast that you can't keep up with the growth or who's even being hired. And it was by the market. It was like, do you have competition? Undercut them for three months. If their price is usually 10 k, say 0, and just buy other customers. It was almost like the model of Uber and Lyft, and it was like, just buy as many users as you possibly can, and then monetize later. That was the mantra. And it worked for a lot of companies. The problem was they could all turn on its head when the market changed. But you'd you'd onboard ten, twenty customers in the morning, another ten, twenty in the afternoon. It was very fast. And warehousing was, of course, we have a physical side of a product, so we tripled that over a period of a couple months. That was pretty hard to hang on to, and it was cool to see grow. You have to have meticulous project management skills, get an entire team here that's helped with the project management of keeping, like, the projects in line. So it was a lot of fun. I think that if the market wouldn't have changed, would we have kept growing? Probably. I think the question would be would we be profitable at this point? Probably not.

Mark Evans: I'm not sure whether you're a culture mission vision kind of entrepreneur. Curious about what it was like when you're going that fast to maintain the corporate culture, to make sure everyone's on the same page, and feel like you as the leader have a connection with your employees as you grow globally.

Guest: We also had COVID in the middle of it too. Also, everyone was at home. It was values, mission, having all hands once a week became incredibly important. I think what you run into from a very small scale. So we did San Francisco is where we started. It's where I am. And then we did a sales office in Scottsdale, Arizona. Even that small distance, we had a very different culture in both offices. And we learned that very early 2018, 2019. So I spent my weeks in Arizona. I go back and forth, which was also before kids.

Mark Evans: They were

Guest: very easy to get around. It was one of those things where I could spend time there and try to blend the two offices a lot. Helps. Going back and forth a ton having an open door policy. As we started growing even faster, we had an office in Europe. We had an office in Pakistan. You had these very different cultures across all the offices, which doesn't work. Because when you hop on when you have values and mission, it's great. But I think that they're just words at that point. You have to have your leaders actually living those values and showing you in person those values. It became how can we be in all the offices at one time. Then COVID changed a lot of that. I think you can have fun culture things. But it comes down to the transparency as value. You need to be transparent on the all hands. Those are things that can be lost in the shuffle of raising that much money. It's easy to get those things lost. I would say we went through times where we weren't great about values. And we realized that because we did a ton of EMPS scores. And employees would be like, I need to know what's going on. What are we working towards? Those are important things that we had to put in place. We got there. It was rocky though, as we were hiring 60 people a month. And boarding was different in Pakistan versus Ireland versus Scottsdale. And then everyone was remote at one point, so it took a lot of figuring things out for sure.

Mark Evans: Wanna move on to some other topics Yep. But do want to talk about your stepping back from Sandozo. This has been ten years of your life. You're invested personally and financially. When did you realize that your role had shifted at Sandozo? And ultimately, did you decide to step back? You were an adviser for a while and now you're on board. Was there a moment when you realized that it was time for someone else to be there, and you had to step back and do other things?

Guest: I think every entrepreneur that listens to your show will take the I'm talking about. I was in the meeting and we're going over a topic, and I texted Chris, my cofounder. And I was like, I've been in this meeting five times. We've had this conversation five times. It became where I started saying things like, we tried this in the past years ago. Here's what happened. Here's why we shouldn't do that. Once you start going through that, you learn I'm not giving everything I can to this company because I'm shutting down ideas that we tried eight years ago, I shouldn't be doing that. I went and worked on a Macintosh project for a while at Sendoso, which is great. Built a really cool t a really cool PLG product, launched that, which is awesome. Then I started looking for my next project probably a year ago. We had a challenge internally at Sendoso with converting web traffic. And we're like, how do we convert this web traffic? We have a ton of it. And not everyone's taking a demo. So how can I give them another path to take? That's where the idea of the experts came from, where you can actually connect to customers as a prospect and do a conversation that way rather than talk to sales. Because people trust that third party more. They wanna have the back chain and more transparent. That was top of funnel solve. Really, what if we also apply this to sales? Sales can make referrals easier and use that throughout the sales cycle. That was the light bulb moment again, like early on Sendoso. I started pitching it and growing it. A little bit ago it jumped and started to build out this new motion to change the way sales pipeline is built. Rather hard to sales.

Mark Evans: Was that the first issue you had while you were at Sandozo along the line? There any other things you were looking at, or is this the big one?

Guest: I think this was the big one. You'll see on LinkedIn, a lot of founders put advisor on their LinkedIn profile because they're talking to founders who are just starting. Many of us do that because we missed the early days of the chaos of the early days. It helped scratch that itch for a while. And at some point, you're like, I'm ready to go do it again. There was a lot of successes to those. A lot of it comes with, like, personal life too. My kid's now three, and I have some more time to go work on something because she's at school. It all matches out to when it was the right time to jump, was which is experts. I'm excited to build this out. There's a lot of conversations with my spouse saying, think I'm gonna try this again. Let's see where it goes.

Mark Evans: Let's talk about SlashExport. You had a thesis and hypothesis. You've raised some money, which is awesome. I guess that's the benefit of being a successful entrepreneur. People take a leap of faith with you because you've been What is SlashExport? What is the problem that you're trying to solve, and who's your target

Guest: ISP is the same. I've sold the marketing for a long time, marketing and sales. So when you go to most websites like sendoso.com, and your only path is a demo. What if we had a path where you actually have a directory of customers you can connect to? Like sendoso.com/experts, hence the name. On that experts page, have a bunch of people that are on there that are customers, they love Sendoso, and you can book a time with them directly rather than talk to sales. The goal there is what we saw was most people when they're looking at a new software, a new tool, they go to their communities, peers, and they ask, hey, is anyone using this tool? The answers they get, they decide to take a demo or not. We wanna be able to capture that on the front end to be like, hey, you can actually book a time directly with a customer on that page. That's top of funnel on the back end. If you're a customer and you do a phone call, we gift you, saying, hey, thanks so much for doing the phone call. So it's the gifting component. Also, here's the AI piece. All those phone calls essentially can get transcribed and fed back into your CRM, so you can start looking for patterns as to which ways and how you should change content, how you should market to your customers and prospects because you're actually gonna get an in-depth version of that phone call, which is really cool. So that data is really important. If you take GLG or TGIS or AlphaSites and apply it to b to b is our hypothesis.

Mark Evans: So I wanna get deeper into that, but I do wanna take a step back and talk about the problem with book a demo, see a demo, talk to an expert. Every b to b SaaS company, at least the vast majority of them, embrace this technique. This is the default call to action. There's all they wanna do is get someone to talk to them, have a conversation, get them into the funnel. From your perspective, from all the traffic you saw at Sendoso, what's wrong with book a demo? Is there book a demo fatigue happening? Is buyer behavior changing? You're trying to put forward an alternative to book a demo. What is the problem with book a demo?

Guest: I think the typical problem is incentives are off. The people that are trying to get you to go to a website and book a demo is marketing. They want those MQLs. They want to be able to say, here's what the pipeline we pass on to sales. So you become almost, hey, we pass on ABC company. They're now talking to sales. Marketing is great. See, we did our job. We built pipeline. Then they go to sales, and you hop on the phone with somebody who maybe hasn't done the best job of understanding who you are as a company, but almost becomes a motion of shoving product down your throat or, hey, here's why you should use us. And the best sales reps are the ones that are like, hey, maybe we're not a fit for you, which is good. I think that it's a good thing as a sales rep, but I think sometimes managers don't understand that. And then all of sudden, you're in this sales cycle. They've basically Frankenstein this product to fit for your need. Then you buy it, and then you go to CX who basically has to figure out what you bought. And then it might work and might not work, and then maybe you churn in a year or it becomes shelfware. That process doesn't work. But most folks who've been to solve it is they go to their networks and peers and they ask, hey, has anyone used this tool? Has it worked? That works a ton because but the problem is the marketers that are adding that book a demo button don't know what they're saying in there, They're trying to figure out how they can make the product better. I think that you're helping solve some of that by actually having conversations and having knowing what your peers are talking about. A way that companies have solved this is there's the PLG mode, okay, just sign up and use it, and come and see it. And which is great because you can actually see the product now, but the problem is there's still that upsell motion. You're still getting pinged all the time, hey, you should talk to us so we can show you what you're in. Both sides are a fail. The only real outcome is to talk to folks who have used that tool or to maybe go read reviews on all the review sites, but do you actually trust those? It's a real mess, I would say, as I get educated about new software. So our solve is to make it where there's people you can go and talk to. They're incentivized to join the phone call and they could tell you you're not. It's more, here's why we use it, here's our problem. I'm the same title as you. We can help match people. I think that's gonna be a big motion in b to b.

Mark Evans: It's a really interesting concept, but I would push back and this is me being the glass half empty person. Listen, as a marketer, I have a really hard time trying to get customers to even give me a testimonial, let alone a case study. You're asking customers to open their calendars so that random prospects can call them and ask them about their opinion about software. You're taking some of their time. They're doing you a big favor by acting as an expert or a reference. So how do you make it look like a win win? The prospect gets what they need, the company gets what they need, and the customer is rewarded for their efforts. How big of an incentive do you have to give them to make it worth their while?

Guest: It's a great point. Yeah. I think that and does a monetary payment there, a charity monetary thing help? You're still asking for time. I think that becomes the hardest part of the motion. Here was something that I found interesting. And this is from a sales perspective. Most sales reps, and if you're listening to this, most sales reps internally at your company have one or two people they always use for referrals. It's the same two people. They love their products and they send every referral to those two people. And it's a pain for them to be able to book times. It's usually, hey, meet John. You go back and forth on John and find time. This thing solves that to make it easier to book. But the bigger piece is those one or two people hardly ever get thanked for doing it. You end up at some point burning them out And they're like, I've done 50 phone calls for you in the past three years to try to help more deals happen there. And I don't want to do it anymore, or possibly you move on. By being able to start to track this now and know who those individuals are who are already doing those phone calls for sales and bring that top of funnel, the goal there is to actually have this more transparent for the marketer who might not be aware of it, or the customer marketer who might not be aware of it. And to be like, hey, let's actually use these people the right way and thank them and build filters in there. Maybe John can only do one phone call every month, not one phone call a day. I think that's the piece. It is a hypothesis of will someone give fifteen minutes to talk to your prospect? I think there's a networking effect there. So if you're meeting people that are looking for the same software, same problems as you, you can connect with people that are in your space. Mhmm. To love that, especially being remote. But, yeah, it's a leap for sure to see where that goes.

Mark Evans: What's the magic number for a customer to talk to a prospect? Or what is the incentive? How big does it have to be? At some point in time, early in the process, I'll go, you know, Brayden, this is great. I'll happily talk to your customer. The next time is, hey. You should probably buy me coffee. The next time is, why don't you take me out for lunch sometime? At what point in time do you have to raise the stakes so that I feel it's a win win?

Guest: Right now, for fifteen minutes, it's about $200. For SMB clients, or I would say people that are on the smaller side, it's usually $200 that they'll take cash or an e gift for Amazon. For enterprise, it's all donation based. So it's like, hey, here's $250 to the SPCA of yeah. That tends to work well there too. The big pieces, you can pull testimonials from those phone calls. So you're saving them time by not being asked for a case study because they've just had a conversation already how they're using it. So that might save time there. But, yeah, the big piece is will people be able to do more than one phone call a month, or is it one phone call a quarter? We don't know yet. I think I do a ton of referral phone calls because I a lot of tools that we use, but I also get burnt out on them. I think some of those things were used. I don't even know how many I've done. So there's there's a way to track it. I think it'll be interesting.

Mark Evans: By the time this podcast is published slash expert will be live, have you what have what have the early testing been? Have you getting Yeah. Great reception from both parties? Tell me what that journey looks like so far.

Guest: Yeah. So we are live right now. We have about 20 or so customers using us mostly for it's free right now for us to use it or for anyone to use it. The and it will be probably the first the next six months. Early feedback is booking calls directly with the customer. It's fifteen minutes. We've seen people take more than one phone call a week. There's usually a handful of folks internally at these companies that love these tools enough that they're willing to do more. We default to one phone call a week, so we're like, hey. I'll take more than that, which is interesting. Sales and AMs are our biggest users, even more than top of funnel. It becomes almost a motion of, hey, I've done a phone call with somebody. They loved our tool. I'm gonna send them a expert's link so they can book a call with the customer, which is interesting. Because we thought it'd be top of funnel only, but it's almost a motion where it's after first demo. Someone's like, this is cool. I like this. I read reviews, but I need to talk to somebody, which is a motion that we didn't see coming. And I think that's gonna grow more for sure.

Mark Evans: Yeah. That that makes sense to me because I think top of funnel, you're reading blog posts or you're watching videos or you're visiting the websites, you can pretty much get all the information that you need top of funnel. So then you hit the next step. You're in the middle of a funnel, you need some validation, you need other people to talk to so you can ask questions. So yeah, that makes complete sense to me.

Guest: Yeah. There's you're very good. So there's the validation point is one of these every single b two b set you go to, there's always the logos of who they work with. And you're like, oh, wow. It's like social proof of your whole these great companies. The thought there is, could we eventually get this tool to a place where you could chat with somebody? It's not a phone call. It's a chat to ask questions to a customer, maybe. I think there's a cool direction you could take this where where sales becomes almost emotional. By the time you get to a sales rep, you already have all your questions answered, you or already know if you actually want the tool or not because you're talking to people that know the space. I think that this is a problem that a lot of communities are trying to solve too, is to help them be like the perfect stack that you might post, and people have questions. And I think it'd be interesting to see the thing grow.

Mark Evans: It is interesting. Ironically, I'm thinking a lot these days about about person to person marketing, especially in b to b enterprise. Everything is digital these days. We we're sending people emails and tons of content and chat GBT and but I often think that connections and relationships are the things that put you over the top. And in a way, you guys are leaning into P2P marketing, person to person marketing, is that you're trying to get conversations. And I think do you think about that in terms of your sales guy? So, you know, what works and what doesn't? Do do you think about that? And where does the people part of it play in, especially these days when everyone is so busy and there's just so much coming at them?

Guest: It's very much almost, the lack of a better term, anti AI type stuff, where people need to talk to you before they purchase software. It's almost like the phrase of no one got fired for buying IBM. They used back way back in the day. I think that that's a very old phrase now. But it's one of those things where you can sign up for as many PLG systems as you want out there, self explorer systems. But for when you buy a very expensive software or even something that's complicated, at some point you have to talk to somebody who can help you do it. I think that an AI can only replace so much of that. And I think that you're gonna have to have a conversation at some point for sure with the person.

Mark Evans: Do wanna ask you about the lessons that you're bringing to slash experts that you learned that send those. What are the three biggest lessons that

Guest: Three biggest lessons? Good question. First one is I would say you don't need to hire for every role. So ten years ago, we didn't there weren't as many, I would say, agencies or AIs or agents that you could use that we're using now at Experts. A good example is from the CFO standpoint. We usually get to hire an outsourced agency or you'd hire a CFO to come in to come help you basically make sure all your books are in line. Now there's so many tools that are out there that can do it for you, and they have people that can come in and help. So that's a big one is then we do this internally. There's three of us doing experts. First one is can an AI solve this or help with this role that we And we outsource it? If we can't, then we'll hire. I think that's where we're doing that across every role, which means we're starting to actually measure revenue per employee, which we never did at Zendesk. So revenue per employee is a new metric for us that we're excited about because it shows growing at the right rate. The second one is organization. I'm not a process. I'm not good at process. My brain thinks in different waves. Process wise, I'm not good at. But my co founders love it this time around. That's really important for process is to make sure everything's in your CRM. Every task is in ClickUp. We're trying to measure and do right now, and I think it's because everyone's remote where you can see exactly everyone's working on in ClickUp, which we never did originally. Originally, it was like to do lists and writing. And I think that's really helped, especially these rounds of funding. Even though we're new, we were able to send everything. You just pull it from Clerky and you send it over. I think organization is a big one. I think it's only gonna help as we grow too because if we do another round of funding, you can just pull the contract from HubSpot, send it over. We didn't have that the first time around. It was a mess. That's probably the second one. And probably the third one, I've always had this one, but I think as you grow and as you scale, you wanna make sure you're growing with the right companies. We brought on enterprise companies too early at Sendoso. Mhmm. We were excited about it. You bring in these companies that really change your product roadmap because you're trying to solve for that big company. Right now, we're, alright, let's bring on SMB, mid market companies who want to use and scale this product, then we bring on enterprises. That's very hard to do. Maybe by the time this podcast comes out, if some an investor company has called and said, hey, we want to use you. If you want to say no to that Yeah. But you try to stay to it so you don't change your entire road map. But at the same time, it is nice when one of those big companies calls you.

Mark Evans: Thanks for the insight. Super excited about slash experts. Where can people learn more about you and, of course, slash expert?

Guest: Yeah. I am the only Brayden Young on all of LinkedIn. My parents got creative with my spelling and my name. Find me on LinkedIn and, of /experts.com is on there too. Thank you for listening. Thanks for the time.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Brayden, and thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review. Marketing Spark is about capturing the stories, insights, and strategies of b to b SaaS founders and market leaders. I'd love to hear from you if you're a CEO, entrepreneur, or market leader with a unique perspective or interesting story or journey to share. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.co to get in touch.