394: SightCall: The Long Road to Building a Scalable Enterprise SaaS

Omar Khan
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talked to Thomas Cotro, the co founder and CEO of Sitecore, a cloud based platform that helps enterprises provide remote visual support for complex customer issues. In 2008, Thomas was working as a telecom engineer when he and his friend had an idea. They wanted to create a solution that could bridge the gap between the world of telecommunications and the Internet.

So they started working on what would eventually become site core, spending their evenings in his friend's basement to bring their vision to life. They bootstrapped the company for three years, creating a prototype in just four months. However, building a scalable, enterprise ready platform they could sell took five challenging years. In 2012, Thomas started showing up at the Salesforce office in San Francisco every week, determined to get a meeting. Despite facing repeated rejections, he persisted until he finally secured the meeting he was after.

Their prototype and unique approach impressed the Salesforce team, which led to a pivotal partnership that helped them land HP as their first major customer. Using sitecall, HP could remotely guide customers through printer issues, fixing problems without dispatching technicians or handling returns, which saved them millions in product returns. But getting to this point was no easy feat. It took years of hard work, constantly improving the product and never giving up. And even after landing HP, it was just the beginning of the challenges they would face.

As sitecore grew, they encountered numerous obstacles. Legal issues forced them to rebrand, sales and marketing teams were clashing, and the pressure to scale rapidly intensified after they raised significant funding. Today, Sitecoll is an eight figure ARR business serving hundreds of global enterprise customers with a team of about 100 people, and they've raised $54 million to date. In this episode, you'll learn how Thomas and his co founder identified a gap in the market and built a product to bridge the gap between telecom and software. How partnerships with major companies like Salesforce helped sitecore land key customers and drive significant growth in the early stages.

The challenges sitecore faced when forced to rebrand due to legal issues, and how they turned it into an opportunity for improvement. We talk about why raising substantial funding can create intense pressure to grow quickly, and how to manage the challenges that come with it, and how Thomas takes care of his mental health and physical wellbeing as a founder, and the importance of having ways to manage stress. So I hope you enjoy there's a world where your CRM is powerful, easily configured and deeply intuitive. Attio makes that a reality. Attio is built specifically for the next generation of companies.

It syncs with your data sources, easily configures to their unique structures, and works for any go to market motion. From self serve to sales led. Attio automatically enriches your contacts, syncs your emails and calendar, gives you powerful reports, and lets you quickly build zapier style automations. The next generation of companies deserve more than an inflexible, one size fits all CRM. Join eleven labs, replicate modal and more, and scale your startup to the next level.

Get your free account@attio.com dot that's attio.com dot. Are you looking to sell your online business or buy one to start your entrepreneurial journey? Discover exciting opportunities with boopos.com dot. Boopos is the number one platform for buying and selling profitable online businesses and the first to offer built in acquisition financing for qualified buyers@boopos.com. You can explore their exclusive listings, browse listings from other marketplaces, or submit your own deal for approval.

Booplass can offer pre approved financing for recurring revenue businesses, allowing you to access fast funding with no personal guarantees. And their experienced m and a advisory team supports you every step of the way. To learn more, visit Saasclub IO boopos. That's Saasclub IO b o o p o s. Sign up today and get qualified to sell your business or find your next deal.

Thomas, welcome to the show. Hi omeyer. So do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us? Yes, absolutely. The one that I really like is one image is worth a thousand words.

Why? Why is that important to you? Because that's kind of the fundamental sentence that I use to build cycle. Right. So we are in a world where today there's too many, what I call blind communications, where you try to explain what's going on, what is in front of you, what's your problem?

Thomas Cottereau
Where it should be so much easier if you could show this one picture and collaborate with vision rather than again, just text or words. So really like this sentence. And I think it's absolutely true. Try to describe any type of image. It will really require over a thousand words.

Omar Khan
So tell us about site call. What does the product do, who's it for? And what's the main problem you're helping to solve? Yeah, we are a cloud software, so what we deliver is an enterprise solution to help see, analyze and guide remotely so what does it mean? It means that in a lot of different service circumstances, which can be customer service or field service, you have some tasks to be done remotely, rather than having just, again, this text or voice communication, we bring vision into the process.

Thomas Cottereau
So typically, for example, you have a problem with your coffee machine or your washing machine, you contact the vendor and they will send you a link to your smartphone. You click on the link, it starts the back camera of your phone and you can show what the problem is on the remote. Customer service agent has some augmentation, augmented reality to explain you what to do and which part to remove, what to zoom in and really guide you to the reparation process, or even if you cannot repair it, for example, identify which part needs to be replaced and kind of lead you to the right troubleshooting through this visual component that is provided by cycle. So if I understood this correctly, if I was using a company that was providing support through sitecall, let's say maybe the ice maker in my freezer has broken and this person, I'm showing them with my camera, my phone, the ice maker, and with the AR, that would actually let me see as well. If they're talking about a specific part of that mechanism, the AR kind of highlights that.

Omar Khan
And I can see that too as a customer in terms of, oh, that's the thing he's talking about. Exactly. So think about it as a two way collaboration. On one side, there's this customer service agent who usually would sit in a contact center and cycle is integrated with all of these cloud contact center solutions on the CRM solution that it would use. So just by one click, they would see the streaming of your camera directly into their contact center solution.

Thomas Cottereau
And they have some advanced command that they can use through cycle. Yes. To guide you on your phone. So directly over your phone, that's where you're going to see this augmentation. So for example, if they ask you to remove this part of the ice maker, then they can put a screwdriver and show you that the screwdriver should go there.

And that's the one thing that you need to remove there to get it out. So it's really all of this visual guidance that they can provide to you as the end customer there directly on your phone. Yeah, love it. Who are your customers? Who are some of the companies that are using site call today?

So we have around 200 enterprise customers. Usually it's global organization, very big brands like from manufacturing, in field service, we have companies like G Healthcare that would use cycle every day. When they have a problem for the maintenance or installation on this MRI machine in the hospital, it can be also more consumer service brands. Like you mentioned, your fridge with this ice maker, if you have a whirlpool, they use cycle every day to help customers fix problem remotely. There.

Omar Khan
Can you give us a sense of the size of the business? Where are you in terms of revenue, size of team, and so on? So think about it this way. 200 global enterprise customers, 100 people in the team. We don't disclose our revenue, but we are in the eight digit numbers, and it's really a global organization.

Thomas Cottereau
That's wonderful characteristic as well. So I'm based here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters is. But I started the company in France. We have teams and offices from Boston to London to Germany, up to Singapore. So we really deliver this service at scale for large organizations.

And also, what's very important in the way we build this platform is the fact that it can deliver a high quality service for people all over the globe. So, typically, the contact center that you are reaching out to, even if you're here in the US, can be in the Philippines. So it's very important that the connectivity and the optimization that we've built here across this global platform can provide this high quality of service between the Philippines and where you are right now. Cool. Okay, so let's go back to 2008.

Omar Khan
You're in Paris when you. You founded this. This business, and for the first three years, you didn't raise any money, you bootstrapped the business. So, firstly, where did the idea for this come from? So where the idea came from?

Thomas Cottereau
I'm a telecommunication engineer, studied telecommunication, and started my career at UnET. So, Unet was, at this time, at the end of the nineties, the biggest Internet service provider in the world. We were literally building the infrastructure of the Internet and carrying over 40% of the world Internet traffic globally. So we were really the Internet pioneers, had the chance to even work with some of the founders of the Internet, very technical team, building all of the infrastructure. I was leading Southern Europe engineering group there, and we were working with all of the european team, as well as the US team on continuing all of this expansion at a time where the bandwidth requirements was so high that we had to literally double the size of the network every three months.

So it was really a race of building, changing of the technology, finding the new solutions to be able to continue to deliver the service that everybody was discovering. So that was really kind of very intense time up to the.com, and I was at unit during the.com and very exciting time as well, we saw the Internet traffic literally exploding. And then a couple of years in a row, we were acquired by MCI Watcom. So if you remember, MCI Watcom was a very large telco on the acquired unet to make unit their new Internet arm. And it was a cultural shock when we were quiet because we were the Internet guys and, you know, our life was Internet were going at lightning speed and were, you know, walking night and days on building out of this cool technology were MCA Watcom was a very typical telco where everything was siloed, segmented.

That was kind of a new world where they say, all right, now you're going to have to work this way. You're going to have to get big project. I remember even one of the first big projects that my new boss asked me to work on was to merge the data network of MCI Worldcom with unit.

Walk down here and say, okay, it's going to be a two year project. So take your team, walk on that, get it done and show me the progress. Came back less than six months later, it was done. When I showed the result, he said, no, that's not possible. Well, it's done, it's here.

I still remember this feedback that was, oh, you guys have to slow down. Which was, yeah, at this time for me say, oh, I think there's a problem there, right? There's a serious cultural shock. I think that's the other way that you guys have to understand that the Internet is going to go way faster and we will not slow down, but you guys have to speed up. And then, you know, I took out a project that was interesting, was at the beginning of voice over IP, out of the communication going through the Internet.

I worked a lot on the, you know, launching to project a new project there until the time where we went, chapter eleven.

So MCI Worldcom was one of the, I think still today, one of the three biggest fraud in history. The OCO went to jail and everything froze. Right when you're in chapter eleven. I didn't even know what chapter eleven was. I was in Paris.

I saw that in the news. Okay, what is. Then you google it. What is chapter eleven?

And then getting through all of this, we thought with some of my teammates that it was time to change the dynamic there, to build a new type of infrastructure that could deliver real time communication services to the world without being kind of trapped in a telco type of behavior. At this time, I was still missing some experience, right? Because I was really in tech, on the deep engineering. I never grew up, you know, a business. So I joined the CEO of an interesting company that was based in France who was providing software development and consulting for telcos and enterprise, a small company at this time, you know, around 40 people.

I knew the CEO, and he told me, you know, I told him my story and said, well, I want to learn. I want to learn business, right? Because my goal is to start my own company. And I miss this part. And it was great.

He said, all right, take your first sales guy and go for it. So we had a good five years there that I spent with them. Literally, we grew from 40 people to 450 people. The company was cash positive, great success, learned a lot. And then came the time where I thought, okay, I've learned enough now, and I can go back to this initial idea that we've had to transform the communication world with technology.

And I started to work with one of my friends from school who worked with me at UnEt on MCI Worldcom, and we started to design the platform on what it should be and how it should work. Literally in his basement every night until, you know, we had the true pillars that were designed. One of them was the fact that we absolutely wanted to be fully virtualized where. Think about it, in 2007, right, where you could not do any enterprise communication without deploying a lot of hardware. So we didn't want any hardware dependency, so we thought it would be a software play.

We're going to virtualize all of the real time communication work. The second one was more about the fact that now that we were virtualized on the Internet, we did not have any more silos or barriers between the media where, you know, with a telco, you have a voice channel that is connected on its own device. You have then a text. It's only text. There was a revolution when they introduced MMS on top of SMS, where you can maybe send the picture in your text message.

Wonderful. Thank you. Took them five years. I remember when that was a big deal, the MMS communication. But that was done the telco way again.

Five years, massive, hundreds of millions of dollars, investment, et cetera, to do it on the Internet. We could do it immediately. So I'm curious, as you were thinking about designing this business, did you know, were you already clear about the product in terms of what site call was going to become? Or was this more about, we want to build a business. We know it's in this space.

Omar Khan
This is the kind of problem we want to solve. How much clarity do you have about exactly what that idea was going to be at that point. It was not 100% clear on the exact problem that we would solve in the future. What was clear is that we were bridging a big technology gap between telecommunication and software, how to use it, on how to what our go to market would be. That was actually the third pillar that we've designed where we thought that our go to market should start by APIs.

Thomas Cottereau
So it's very, you know, engineering style where we thought, hey, let's provide a platform that can connect with all of the other enterprise software solution to deliver these capabilities to the enterprise through them, with them. So that's why our go to market was, we've got all of these features, of these capabilities. Now that we broke all of the barriers between all of this media, all of these things we can aggregate. That was the beginning where we say, hey, why not adding video on top of voice with screen sharing, but any type of data? And that's where we started to play with augmented reality, with a lot of things that we can also used through the same channel, because we did not have any constraint anymore.

So that was more of a discovery of everything we could do now that we unleash all of these capabilities. But to be honest with you, I was not 100% clear on the exact problem that we would solve for the enterprise market at the end. Yeah, I mean, as I hear you talking about it, it definitely sounds like a very techie approach that we have this great technology, we can make this technology better, and let's find a problem that this technology will solve, as opposed to what we hear about these days and the lean startup staff about talk to customers, find a problem, and then build a solution. You guys were very solution driven looking for the problem, right? Are you an entrepreneur looking to buy a profitable online business or a founder ready to sell?

Omar Khan
Boopos is the number one platform for buying and selling profitable online businesses. With their exclusive listings, as well as listings from other marketplaces and the option to submit your own deal for approval, Boopos has you covered. Plus, theyre the first to offer built in acquisition financing for qualified buyers of recurring revenue businesses, allowing you to access fast funding without personal guarantees. And their experienced M and a advisory team supports you every step of the way. To learn more, visit Sasclub IO bupos.

That's Saasclub IO Boop OS. Sign up today and get qualified to start your entrepreneurial journey or sell your business at the right valuation with boopos.com dot. Yes, we were very solution driven in terms of the problem, we knew a lot of problems because all of these enterprise, and again, we're focused on enterprise since day one. And that's kind of my word. I never done any solution for consumers.

Thomas Cottereau
So we knew that everybody was struggling with getting enterprise products that can make all of these collaboration features with all of the visual component as part of it, available through their software ecosystem in their infrastructure, without having to, you know, deploy massive equipments in there, etcetera. So that was a true problem that everybody was facing. But the value of it, the exact, you know, model on use case, you know, on the day to day that when I gave you the example with your ice maker. No, it was not clear back in the day. Yeah.

Omar Khan
Okay, so you, what I want to try to figure out is like, you're bootstrapping the business so you don't have, you know, unlimited funds or millions of dollars to go and invest in this business. You're targeting enterprise, which means it's not, you know, a weekend minimum viable product that you're going to go and sell to somebody on Monday. How did you get started? What was that first version of the product? How long did it take you to build?

But more importantly, like, how long did it take for you to find that exact problem that you were going to go and solve? It took us literally four months to get a prototype that worked where we could demo our vision through software.

Thomas Cottereau
The hard part of it was to build a true platform that would scale globally under this enterprise way. And that took us five years. So I did not anticipate five years, which is a big gap between four months and five years. As you can imagine of your life, it's not the same story.

So why did it take so much time? Is because there were so many challenges that we had to overcome to make the right solution for the enterprise market.

We were really combining these two words, the telecommunication on the software that did not communicate together, that did not work together in the past. And so we hired some telecommunication engineers, some software developers, get them on the same deck, on walking in the same office every day, and even after several years, they were still not speaking the same language. So just to highlight the big gap between these two industries that we were bridging, that was painful, was long. So after three years of building the platform, we had first pocs here and there on trying to test the market to see how to deliver our product. And that's where we raised our seed fund of roundup funding.

Omar Khan
And when you got to that seed stage, had, you did clearly define the problem now, like, in terms of this is the site core product that you told us about earlier. We had some good ideas, as you do in seed. You have a good poor point, and you explain all of the problem that you could solve on the few pocs that are ongoing.

Thomas Cottereau
We started, we used a bunker to find some investors back in Paris. After a couple of months, the bank had told us that there was no response and it was not ready and didn't find any investors. So I was a bit upset with that. So I asked the bunker to let us do it by ourselves. And we've got it reached to first investor there directly.

There's a fun story there. I hope this investor would not be mad if I share it with you. But I reached out to this guy, identified at one of the biggest fund in France, the one guy that I saw had the perfect profile, investing in software, in tech, and also having some understanding of the telecommunication background. So it was the, you know, hey, that's the one guy I want to speak to this one. And even went through the same engineering school as we've been through before, working in New York in the stock exchange of this staff.

So I dropped him an email. No answer. Two email, no answer. Three email, no answer. So maybe after the number four or five, I sent the last one and said, all right, I was not.

And it was not a nice email. Literally was very pissed. I say, you kind of a prick, right? You could even answer my email. That sucks.

We've shared the same background. You could even, if you're not interested in investing, we could go grab a beer. That would just be the right thing to do as a human. Right? So literally five minutes after he responded, oh, no, I'm sorry.

So it really worked. It really worked. He told me, we made a lot of fun about the story after, because he invested in the company.

He told me, hey, I was really not used to receive this kind of email.

Omar Khan
Yeah, don't try that at home. It doesn't always work. No, no, no. I cannot give that as, you know, as a recommendation for everyone. But this time it worked.

So three years you've been building this product. You get to the seed round, but even at that point, you don't really have. It's a prototype. You don't have a fully functioning product. You don't have any customers yet.

What happens? How much money did you raise in the seed round? And then how did things change? So we raised €1 million, and the expectation was to launch the product on find our market. So that's it took us maybe another year to get everything lined up on the platform ready really and then started to test the product with different prospect, large companies, large software vendors to see their reaction.

Thomas Cottereau
And that's where something interesting happened is I pitched a product to Oracle in Paris and they found it very interesting.

I did not know why at this time, but I knew after that. The person I pitched it to literally received two weeks before kind of a study from his team that explained that in the state of the art of the technology at this time, what we've done was not possible.

So they asked me to, you know, to go to meet with the team in the US and that's why I studied, you know, the back and forward between in the Sioux Valley on Paris. On seeing their reaction, I thought hey, I should try with the other vendors in the Bay Area. So I started to go and meet with the other ones and I had also some very, very positive feedback on that. Where the decision was made in 2013. Well that was at the end of the 2012 that I would move day to the US to launch a product from here.

It was kind of a big bet, say, hey, our go to market is going to be with the large enterprise software founders to provide the video assistance capability on top of the platform to their customers. And so that's where, you know, I moved with my family, my wife and two kids, and we moved to the Bay Area in 2013 and launched a product from there. Tell me about your first customer. Who was that and how did you land that first customer? So we started with one or two small ones, but the first big one was actually at this time the biggest Salesforce customer and we've signed it with Salesforce, which was HP and HP with the printer division of HP.

So HP was the number one Salesforce customer. They had these executive meetings where they share their strategy, their problem, where they would like to get some improvement to be done. And they shared this problem with Salesforce that was literally every year between 20 and 30% of the printers that our customer would ship back to them because from the customer's perspective, they did not work. When they test them, they would work or have a very simple problem like a paper jam. So this, imagine we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of waste in terms of product return refurbishment, test, providing a new printer to the customer.

Total mess.

When they shared that with Salesforce, that's why they say, well, maybe let's bring our partner at site call in the loop. We joined the meeting and we shared what we could do. They decided to move forward. And we deployed cycle in Salesforce service cloud into their contact center in different countries, from India to Philippines to Latam. To provide this, I would say to empower the customer service agent to not only try to understand what the problem is, but also to see and guide the customer to its resolution, avoid a product return.

It was a blast. It worked very well. It really opened up those to others and that was the beginning of the success there. Yeah, that's great HP, great logo to get early on. What I'm curious about is how did you become a salesforce partner in the first place?

That's a good question. I think by getting into their office every week. Seriously? Yeah, seriously. I moved to the Bay Area for one reason, because I wanted to work with these guys.

I was committed to it. They didn't have the big Salesforce tower yet. It was not here in San Francisco, but they had big office in one market. Every week I found a couple of guys that I met asked to introduce to others and blah, blah, blah. Every week I was there until I had this presentation here in front of the team at service cloud, who really saw the interest, who even shared with me after that.

The demo that I showed them was something that they would even present at Dreamforce the same year. But as they didn't find a product that could do it in the cloud, they would hide some video equipment under the desk to make it a big show, as if everything was in the, in the cloud, which it was not, because again, they didn't have a solution. And when I showed them that, you know, the solution was there, then they said, oh shit, actually there's one. That's how the kind of the partnership started, but they didn't, you know, very different from, you know, this seed run story where it's all about slides here. It's all about something that really works.

You know, remember after this meeting with service cloud at Salesforce, they asked me for an API key on the same day. I even received an email by midnight the same day from this guy, lead product engineer there. Sent me an email saying, okay, I tested everything. It works as you said. I don't believe it.

Come to my office tomorrow. So it was that persistence of just not giving up, continuing to basically get in to as, you know, whoever you could talk to at Salesforce. And I think it was a combination of that persistence and obviously the technology that you guys had built, something that everybody else thought the technology wasn't there yet to be able to do that. Exactly. Yeah.

This five years of hard work and trust me, we are not playing golf. We're paying because behind the nice pitch, it was a true robust enterprise platform that was delivering this promise. Great. After all of these years of persistence, you've built the product, you have got this deal with HP, this partnership with Salesforce.

Omar Khan
The business at the time was called Wemo, not site call. And then you got a nice, not so friendly letter. Yeah.

Thomas Cottereau
This letter is part of what I call my welcome to the US, where in Europe, I did not have any problem with WEMU. And even before moving to the US, we did little bit of research on the name, and we asked, you know, if it was okay to even trademark this brand in the US, and there was no problem. So that's what we've done. And we started to operate with the name Wemo. Yes.

I received this very aggressive letter from a lawyer that literally explained me that if I did not change my name within the upcoming two weeks, they would, you know, drag me to court and gotta be in very tough situation. And it was from a very large company that Wemo is the name of one of their product. It's not the name of the company, but one of the product is named Wemo. It was written differently. We had Wemo and their wemo, but they didn't like it, though.

So we went through a couple of discussions, kind of to cool down the situation and to give me more time to change the name. I asked them if they would be okay if I was way more in Europe, which they said, no, absolutely not, we will shoot you there. Well, to which I told them that I'm from there. I know everybody there. And by the way, my brand was treadmill before their brand up there.

And so I would wait for them and welcome them to kick their ass in Europe.

So we ended up into a trade off saying, oh, so they did some research. Oh, yeah, maybe it's going to be tough in Europe. So you had the french trademark for Wemo. Yes. Oh, yeah.

The european one was covered. Yeah. So we went to kind of this trade off where they said, anyway, we will not let you operate wemo in the US. It's going to be a pain in the ass for you. Maybe you're stronger in Europe, but it's going to be a pain as well.

So, you know, we agreed that they would give me one year to transition, take another name and get there. And I think that was the best thing to do. You know, when, when you are focused in growing a very small company at this time, you don't want to spend your energy into getting into this type of process there. Right. So that's why with the board, we.

Even if it was a bit painful. All right, let's rebrand everything. Let's find a new name that really, now that we know exactly what our go to market is, that can also be a bit more clear about this ability to see on guide remotely, which is sitecore. Right, okay. And then, so for the next couple of years, you were using partnerships, as we talked about, with Salesforce and HP as a way to grow land new customers.

Omar Khan
And I think it was in 2015 you were able to raise your Series A, which is about eight and a half million, I think. Yeah. When you and I were talking about this, you said, you know, fundraising is one of those really hard moments. I said, yeah. And I was like, expecting to hear the same thing about what you said earlier.

Can't get investors attention or time with them, or. It was really difficult to get the money and all of this stuff. And you said, actually, it was the day after I raised my series A round that was really hard. Can you explain that? Yes.

Thomas Cottereau
So just to put things in context, we were growing fast, right? Since 2013, when I moved here, 2014, we signed HP and we were really growing the business, finding new customers here and there, signing new partnership. We haven't had an ad on tv in France with a company named Darty, that's the French Best Buy, who thought that it was a wonderful idea to have their customers to typically troubleshoot any type of problem with their home appliances and provide this type of remote support. And they made a very funny ad because obviously the one question everybody has is, but what if, you know, through the camera, you would see someone in a situation that you would not like to see, right. They made this ad where actually the wife was in video call with Darty asking questions about where to install the new washing machine.

And she would go in the bathroom, obviously, the husband would get out of the shower naked. I'm going through the camera at this time. So it created some buzz. I think it was great. Also a good way to get around some of the fear that some brands could have with using video.

So we are doing well, growing nicely. So that's why it was kind of time to raise our series a on series a is all about scale, right? Scaling sales on marketing to grow the organization.

So we've raised this round 8.4 million, and it led to a lot of expectations from our investors. Right. And us say, all right, now let's compress time instead of growing the way you do you have this kind of pressure that comes on. You say, all right, I cannot, you know, I raised this, you know, over 8 million. It's not to continue as, as I was doing, right.

The reason why this guy believe in all ability to scale is because we're going to have to change everything and go way faster. That's what I started to do.

I think the speed would hit me there. On trying to change everything in an organization that was going well was sort of a hard time then that's where, you know, you went from a place where everybody was really, really focused, working together, building together as one team into a company where you see new management coming, creating some silos. And it even led me to a war. I call it a war because it was really first time I hired, you know, a CMO who came into company, great guy, did a lot of things, grew nice companies. And then, you know, he had all of his ideas on.

One of them was the fact that we should sell online. Obviously our sales guys, enterprise sales guys, did not like that. Even maco pricing, you know, public and things were. They rather work with our customers to build the right business case that mapped to their organization on their needs.

The war started to happen and I even had to take a hard decision to say, all right, so how do I fix that? I had to decide to cut the marketing side because my sales were the guys the one selling. And then obviously during this time, it creates some hiccups in the organization. The speed, instead of really accelerating at this time, actually, you slow down a bit because you lose your focus. When you say sales and marketing went to war, what did that look like?

Omar Khan
It's not uncommon for there to be some conflict between a sales and marketing orgy. When you use the word war, it's like, how bad did it get? I trusted my sales and I trusted my marketing. Right. And I was kind of in between.

Thomas Cottereau
And even the, you know, I wanted to let the marketing try their idea.

So they made our pricing available online. Italy. A couple of weeks later, someone reached out through our website, incoming request from a fortune hundred company. Right? So then I had one of my sales guys who started to discuss, you know, the opportunity with this person, you know, the way we would start and build a model with them.

And the person replied, no, no, no, I just want one license to test.

Well, imagine now that the salesperson will say, okay, I've got a big lead. I can work with this company, we can help them. And now it turns into this one person from a fortune hundred company who says that he wants to buy one license. So that really created this big tension there where I say, okay, all right, it's gonna be bad. You said to me that every round that you've raised has created some kind of challenge or pressure.

Omar Khan
You raised a series b in, I think it was a few years ago. Yeah. What was the challenge there? It was kind of the same story. So not with marketing this time, but with kind of scaling the organization again to go faster.

Thomas Cottereau
Same pressure. Right. We raised this time 42 million. So you increase the level of pressure. Right.

The more money, the more, the more pressure. And then think, okay, how then do I scale the organization to go to a much bigger company? That's where you, again start to bring new, highly experienced people who did it multiple times over their lifetime that can bring this expertise because you want to, again, get very strong people with you. We've done it already in the past, so that they help you find the path to this growth to scale.

Yeah. Again, one more time. I did not go into a war this time, but I also had this kind of tension or creation of silos, beginning of political discussion. Everything you don't want in a startup, a startup, it's all about speed. It's all about the flexibility that we have that the large organization cannot have.

We have to be able to be spot enough to navigate in complex situation, to find the right path to get there, and to evolve permanently. Because in the cloud, as you know, in SaaS software, it's not a one time purchase. You buy a service, and this service is evolving every day. If you want to keep your customer with having good customer stickiness, you have to continue to provide new features, new capability, continue to lead the market, continue to differentiate. So again, there's a momentum to keep in there that where you really don't want to go into the path of being a big company.

Omar Khan
It's kind of funny, like when you told the story earlier about your manager saying, go and take two years to go and do this project, and you come back in six months and they weren't moving fast enough, and then now suddenly you're in a position where every time you raise money, they're telling you now that you're not moving fast enough, but every time you go and spend the money, it actually slows things down, at least for a while. When you bring new people in, or the dynamics change, or of the organization, it's a side of fundraising that I think often, personally, I don't hear about. We hear about the struggles of raising the money and so on, but less so much about, hey, here. All the problems that got created once I'd raised the money to be able to go and do what I needed to do. Yeah, I find it harder after the fundraising than to get the fundraising by itself.

Thomas Cottereau
That's an uncommon interesting fact. But I'm sure that if you question other CEO's who can share honestly the complexity of this post fundraising, I think that's a two topic. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Omar Khan
We'd love to keep chatting, but we should wrap up. So I'm going to get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you, so just try to answer them as quickly as you can. Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

Thomas Cottereau
When I started the company, one of my advisors told me, hey, keep in mind that it's going to be a marathon, not a sprint. And I keep this one here, and I'm glad that I didn't run it as a sprint, because I would have died before. What book would you recommend to our audience and why? Well, there's one book I think every CEO should or should not read, which is hard things about hard things from Ben Horowitz. And the reason why is because, literally, if you want to know more about my story with this book, it's everything.

All of the pain that is describing there, I had to go through. I think all of them. I know we're in the lightning round, but you have to just tell us very quickly what you told me about getting halfway through the book and saying, okay, I just read about my past. Do I want to now just tell us that? Yes.

That was really, really scary when I was maybe had the book on where I say, okay, now, that's exactly where I'm at now. Thinking about it, that it was so, so true that all of these stories that are highlighted in this book, I had to go through all of these hurdles on point. I said, do I really want to know the future? Because if I read that and if it, you know, will it help me or would it destroy me? So, to be honest with you, I continued to read a couple of chapters and I stopped.

So I never, to be fairly honest, I never went to the. Up to the end of the book yet, but I will. Yeah, when you retire, you can go back. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder? I will give you one french expression, and in French it's droit danse bote.

So literally, it means being straight in your boots. So what it means behind is someone that would stand by their principle, their value, or their ideas, and would not change their mind. Right. I think that's very important because you're going to get so much influence. People want you to think differently, to do things differently, etcetera.

That if you are not creased straight into your ideas on where you want to go, you will never get there. What is your favorite personal productivity tool or habit? It's riding my bike. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time? A crazy business idea would be to use a solution like cycle within the gig economy.

I would love to empower anyone to have to be tasked and guided remotely by someone who knows, either someone who knows or even AI to help them perform tasks that they thought they could never do or that were not trained on. Thats a super interesting idea actually, especially because the gig economy is just kind of, you know, continuing to kind of explode in many ways. Whats an interesting or fun fact about you that most people dont know? Well, now they will know it. But when I grew up, when I was a kid, my parents moved literally in a, in a barn in the mountains where you could not keep what they tell me.

I was young, that you could not even keep a candle burning because the walls were just wood planks where the wind would go through and it was kind of wild.

Omar Khan
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work? It's, I would say mountain biking. Any type of outdoor activity, again, saved my life because it's this combination of getting out, refreshing your mind. And also what I love in mountain biking is that it's a very, very complete, you know, experience on sport where it goes from, you know, a lot of effort to go up the hill, right. And I like to say no pain, no reward.

Thomas Cottereau
And then it can be very, very technical in the downhill. Use your brain. You have to calculate everything. You have to be very crisp on the, you know, on every movement and everything you do. There's a lot of fun, adrenaline.

Is there good amount of risk as well, right. When you go into big works or this kind of stuff. So everything I like. That's awesome. Awesome.

Omar Khan
Thomas, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure to chat and go through your story of building this business since 2008. It's been quite a journey so far. If people want to check out sitecall, they can go to sitecall.com dot. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that.

Thomas Cottereau
Yeah, you can reach out to me by email thomasitecol.com and I will respond. Awesome. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success. Thank you.

Omar cheers. There's a world where your CRM is powerful, easily configured and deeply intuitive. Attio makes that a reality. Attio is built specifically for the next generation of companies. It syncs with your data sources, easily configures to their unique structures, and works for any go to market motion.

Omar Khan
From self serve to sales led. Attio automatically enriches your contacts, syncs your emails and calendar, gives you powerful reports, and lets you quickly build zapier style automations. The next generation of companies deserve more than an inflexible, one size fits all CRM. Join eleven labs, replicate modal and more, and scale your startup to the next level. Get your free account@attio.com that's attio.com dot do you dream of owning a profitable online business or are you looking to sell yours?

Boopos.com is the number one platform for entrepreneurs and founders alike. With Boopos you can discover exclusive listings, browse listings from other marketplaces, or submit your own deal for approval. As the first platform to offer built in acquisition financing for qualified buyers, Boopos makes it easier than ever to acquire a recurring revenue business without personal guarantees. Their experienced M and a advisory team is dedicated to supporting you throughout the process, ensuring a smooth transaction. Dont miss out on this exciting opportunity.

To learn more, visit Saasclub IO Boopos thats Saasclub IO Boopos sign up today and get qualified to sell your business or find your next venture.

394: SightCall: The Long Road to Building a Scalable Enterprise SaaS - with Thomas Cottereau

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction

2: The Genesis of SightCall

3: Overcoming Early Challenges

4: Breakthrough with Salesforce

5: Scaling and Internal Challenges

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Companies

Books

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript