

SwipeGood (YC W11) Is Now Elastic, A Sales-As-A-Service Platform For Startups - anemitz
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/swipegood-is-now-elastic-sales-as-a-service/

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holdenc
I'm working on something similar, but for customers. It's called customers-as-
a-service. Basically, it provides on-demand paying customers for products that
have none. It's quite simple and only charges a 10% premium on your base
price.

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anemitz
Love it! Lol ;)

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izak30
Interesting concept, I have a couple questions:

* If you couldn't hire a strong sales team, what makes the team you just hired any good? * How do you handle things like company culture? For sales-oriented businesses, the salesperson is the first contact, and the face of the business to the customer, do you try to integrate anything? are you white-label or upfront that you're outsourced sales? * What about sales engineering? Sales can be technical, how is that handled?

I think that qualified lead-generation is slightly more interesting to me than
getting sales. Warm leads would be fantastic.

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anemitz
All our sales reps are highly technical and just amazing startup hustlers. A
lot of our success is also due to technology. Ping Steli at ElasticSales dot
com and he'll give you the details.

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tezza
A few questions:

* Conflicts of interest: how do I know my Product X is given fair treatment if you have another client with a similar Product X'. Say they have a higher price and your cut would be larger if you sell theirs, not mine.

* if you collapse, I stop using your service or leave for another sales team, do I get to keep the contacts?

* what measures do you have in place to prevent staff selling my contacts to my competitors or leaving with the client list?

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SteliE
Right now we solve conflict of interests by not working with competitive
customers in the exact same space. There are long term solutions for this.
Regarding contacts - yes you keep all of them :) We use contracts and
processes that make it tough for our sales reps to steal any of your data. But
beyond security we pay a lot of attention on who we hire in the first place :)

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knemitz
Good job, hunny bunny! Lya Mom

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andrewdumont
#win

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jhuckestein
I'm curious about the pricing. Do you pick the companies you work with? Is
pricing purely performance based? Do you take the risk for products that just
don't sell?

What about dynamic commission? E.g. I tell you my product costs X/month and if
you manage to sell it for more you keep the difference. If you manage to sell
it with a set-up fee, you get to keep that as well.

~~~
SteliE
Good questions :)

1) Yes we pick the companies we work with :) 2) No. But it has a strong
performance component so we only really make money when we perform 3) Not
often 4) Potentially :)

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huhtenberg
Oh, hai :)

So what's the criteria for #1? In broad strokes.

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anemitz
A great product that is already generating revenue. A market that we can
address. A sales cycle that is reasonable. Ping Steli at ElasticSales dot con
for more info!

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brusch
I think it should be dot com - dot con sounds fishy !

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kurtvarner
> _The headcount growth has been purely from Elastic’s own reinvested
> revenues._

> _Elastic has started to field interest from venture capital firms looking to
> provide funding, Efti says, but for now the company is focusing on the
> business._

Good for them. It's refreshing to see a company grow organically with their
own reinvestment.

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ovi256
I'm sure there's even a name for it, and pretty soon a whole movement could
develop around this amazing approach, complete with evangelists, books,
e-books, courses, conferences.

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aaronbrethorst
Error on loading the elasticsales.com homepage:

    
    
        GET https://ad.retargeter.com/seg?add=346584&t=2 The certificate for this server is invalid. You might be connecting to a server that is pretending to be “ad.retargeter.com” which could put your confidential information at risk.

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philfreo
thanks, fixed

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michael_fine
I'm still getting it.

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anemitz
What does this output?

curl --silent <https://elasticsales.com> | grep retargeter

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bound008
anthony ... be nice to our visitors.... aaron, what you should really do is
complain to support@retargeter.com for not supporting HTTPS.

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aaronbrethorst
I'm not a Retargeter user. Why would I complain?

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MJR
Their website has a giant "Learn More" button that links to a contact form?
Really? The "What We Do" page has three bullet points about how it works, but
they really need to add more details on the actual service. There's more
content on the "Work Here" page then the rest of the site combined.

~~~
SteliE
That's a fair point. To be honest right now we have more demand than we can
handle so we haven't really optimized the website for that. It's more of a
recruiting tool for hires :) Definitely plan to improve on it though!

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ozataman
Chrome says the SSL cert has expired... Should probably pay attention to these
things if you're going for HN first page.

Edit: I meant for the SwipeGood website - not sure if you don't care about
that anymore.

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thomas-st
a link for the lazy: <https://elasticsales.com/>

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jmvoodoo
I'm in the enterprise software business and there are already a lot of
available options for enterprise resellers. The typical reason they fail is
essentially dilution (lack of product knowledge or lack of incentive to sell
your product vs another). It will be interesting to see how (or if) they
manage to solve that. Does anyone from the company want to chime in (to a
potential customer if you have a good answer?)

~~~
SteliE
Sure :) We're not resellers. You can use dedicated sales resources on Elastic
that exclusively sell your product and we have a track record at succeeding at
this. Ping me at steli at elasticsales.com and we can chat more!

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garzuaga
The concept is interesting, no doubt about it. More and more activities are
outsourced (your hosting, your WP site, your customer service, your landing
page optimization, etc, etc). When it comes to selling, mostly B2B as they
mention, I believe there are long funnels in order to get new customers to pay
the bills. Let's see how the concept evolves. Good luck!

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thetrumanshow
Hi Elastic, welcome to the sales business. We're working on a sales process
standardization system, which we assume will be a component of your business
going forward, so it will be interesting to track your progress. We probably
won't be getting anywhere near the sales-team-as-a-service area. Best of luck!
Edit: removed a baseless assumption.

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vaksel
to do sales, you need to really know the product...I don't imagine an off the
shelf sales guy will be all that effective.

And I'd imagine cost is also an issue. With your own sales team you can just
hire people to work on commission...and here you not only have to hire a sales
team...but also include a healthy profit margin for Elastic.

~~~
SteliE
Companies use our service for the same reason companies use Amazon's AWS (even
competitors like Netflix). If sales is not your core competency you probably
want to work with us :)

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leftih
Good Luck! Waiting to see more of this... Cheers from Germany.

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dm8
Good job guys! How did you guys get such a good domain name? Importantly, how
much did you pay?

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anemitz
We got lucky and it was available:) Thx!

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seafront83
Congratulations - sounds like a great move :)

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mnemitz
Awesome!

