Aleks Gollu: Shortening The Sales Process From Days To Hours #189

In this SaaS District episode, host Akeel Jabbar interviews Aleks Gollu, co‑founder and CEO of 11Sight (formerly Elevensight), an inbound one‑click video‑call platform designed for revenue teams. Gollu explains the market problem: modern prospects gather information across multiple sites and then encounter friction from AI chatbots, forms, and scheduling tools that delay contact. 11Sight lets a prospect initiate a video call instantly from any touchpoint (website, G2, LinkedIn, QR code) with a single click, routing the call to the most appropriate available rep and automatically pulling CRM context. The conversation covers how this eliminates days‑long delays, accelerates the sales cycle (often moving a 10‑day process into a 10‑minute call), and improves conversion (video‑initiated leads are three times more likely to close). Gollu discusses practical routing rules, handling rep availability, and how the platform integrates with existing sales workflows. He outlines ideal use cases—high‑velocity deals worth >$1,000 with 30‑60‑day cycles—while noting limited benefit for very long sales cycles. The discussion also touches on outbound applications of the video link, performance metrics, and the importance of rapid rapport and empathy in sales. Gollu shares personal insights on critical sales skills, advice for his younger self, and how his distributed team operates across the US, Turkey, and India. The episode ends with a promotional offer: a two‑week free trial and a 10% discount using code HORIZON10, plus contact details for listeners.
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Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District.
In today's episode, we'll be talking about how a company is helping SaaS companies shorten their sales process from days down to hours.
And with that, we have today our guest, Alex Golu, joining us.
Alex is the co-founder and CEO of Elevensight, which is an inbound video call platform for revenue teams. Alex is a—
he's a serial entrepreneur and CEO with a successful track record of building innovative solutions from idea to exit.
He started his career at Oracle and Sapient, and he also holds a BS degree from MIT and an MS and PhD degrees from UC Berkeley.
He's also been granted 8 patents, is fluent in 4 languages, and outside of work, Alex is a movie aficionado and enjoys mountain biking and cooking. So It's a pleasure, Alex. I love the background. Huge resume there. Super excited to have you on the show today.
Thanks, Akeel. Thanks for having me on board, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Yeah, so me as well. Me too. And I'd love to just kind of start off. Maybe if you can just share a quick intro about your company. Tell us what is the innovation here? You've got Lev Insight. You guys are innovative when it compares to many of the other video calling SaaS platforms. Love to hear about it.
Yeah, I mean, so as you pointed out, this, this is my third startup, second collaboration with my co-founder Farrokh, second collaboration with Rafael, who's our VP of Marketing. And we typically look at the trends in the industry, new technologies, and say, hey, how can we rethink existing problems and create value? And what we have seen is a big shift that is taking place at many different facets. One is The main information about a company is no longer at their own website. It's actually distributed across G2, Capterra, LinkedIn, what have you. The other thing we saw is that the current modus operandi is companies have an AI chatbot, they have forms, they have meeting scheduling tools. So they have added a lot of friction in the process of a prospect trying to reach out to you. Like imagine the sales guy in the '80s sitting in his office suit and tie. When the phone rang, he picked it up or she picked it up.
And that's true.
That's true. Instantly. Right. We invented the internet. We shortened the distances. And yet it takes days, if not like an entire week before a business— you can get in front of a business. And then we saw all this and we said, okay, we also understand that there are different sales cycles, right? So for a $17 t-shirt, I will never want to talk to the vendor, they don't want to talk to me. And maybe like for a 9-month sales cycle, the current process is good enough. But anywhere in between, for high velocity sales, where the customer is going to decide in a couple conversations what to buy, that 10-day delay actually kills the deal. Why? Because I have a problem. I have it now. I have done my homework. So that's the other element in the big shift is that today's customers are well-educated, well-informed. They do their own homework. They create a shortlist and it's like, okay, now I'm ready to buy. And that's when they want to talk to somebody.
Mm-hmm.
So either you're going to be able to talk to that prospect now from wherever they may be coming in. Or either they are going to go to their competitor or inside the company, they are going to deal with the next problem. Okay, this problem I can't solve right now. Let me go solve a different problem. So that's what we observed that, you know, only 70% of people show up to scheduled meetings. 78% of people buy from a vendor they talk to first. We said, okay, so how can we give the fastest lead-to-lead guaranteed and collapse that 10 days. And if there's a scheduled meeting, the sales guy has to prepare for it. Nobody shows up, you wasted those 2 hours. We said, okay, so what we need to solve this problem is allow that prospect to reach the business from anywhere. May this be LinkedIn, G2, or the company's website, or even like by scanning a QR code. With one click, no appointments, no downloads. And that's what we have developed. So I know that in the pandemic with Zoom, etc., we get into meeting rooms. We are doing this interview in a meeting room, but this is all scheduled stuff, right?
Exactly.
When somebody wants to buy, I mean, last year we wanted to buy a payroll processing solution. We reached out to TriNet Paychex and ADP. By the time ADP and Paychex got back to me, I had a handshake with TriNet. Guess who got the deal? So we said, okay, so as prospects, we actually all hate interacting with AI chatbots.
I agree.
Whereas as like RevOps guys, oh, I let them protect my salespeople, but that's the wrong instinct. So we solved the need of the prospect by allowing them to reach out to the business with one click. But then we also understand that within the business, you need to make sure that that call gets routed to the most suitable available salesperson.
Yeah.
That salesperson gets given call context. Who is calling? What is the meeting yet? Because the calls may be coming from many different directions and different pages of a website on different products. So you need to be told what you need to achieve on that. We do have CRM integration. We can have other information brought in about the caller, and then anything that transpires in that meeting can get saved back into the CRM. So what has happened is in that 10-minute conversation, the SDR, BDR, or the account executive has moved the deal forward that would have taken another 10 days and a lot of prep time. Exactly.
I mean, that's what bothers me these days. I go and buy a— I go look to buy a SaaS solution or whatever it is, right? And then I got to book a couple of emails. I got to fill out a form. Okay, now I got a book. I got an email a few days later saying, let's book an intro call. All right, do I do the intro call? All right, let me see when the account executive is ready. And then all of a sudden, like 2 weeks later, all right, I'm already like, I had like 2 questions and have to wait 10 days to get an answer. But that's interesting. So you've actually went from breaking through from the scheduling to try to be non-scheduling, which is the right way, right? You want to reduce friction in the sales process, and that's what you're doing. And I think my question around that is, how do salespeople perceive that when they're kind of invading their schedule, right? I mean, they probably have some booked appointments maybe for today, and then all of a sudden they're like, oh, I've got a call, because most of them are just coming off the schedule, right?
Yeah, the right platform addresses all of that, and we address all of that. So if you are, for example, already on a meeting, We will not ring you. Right. So we know because what we have is we have the ability to ring multiple sales reps at the same time. Whoever answers gets the lead. If none of them can answer, we can escalate maybe to a RevOps manager who just really wants to make sure that the call gets answered. And if all fails, you can still offer, hey, schedule a meeting with me. Sorry we couldn't get back to you.
Yeah.
But for an individual sales rep, We can see if you are on a call or not, and if you are, we are not going to ring you. I mean, some of our customers, what they do is like some of the SDR BDRs do outbound calls, right? So for five six hours a day, you do your outbound calls. But at the end, for a couple hours, you need to do cleanup, some bookkeeping, and that's where you make yourself available for inbound calls because that's when you are doing some interrupt driven work, some work that you don't mind being interrupted, right? So you need to update and send some. emails. So you can create a schedule which basically fits into existing workflows. It's just that you carve out a piece that, okay, so these hours, these 2 people will answer, those hours, those 2 people will answer, and the rest of the processes continue as they used to.
That makes perfect sense.
I mean, the other thing is that I talked to a lot of SDRs, BDRs, and AEs. Both over the over time and even last week at Saster, and I mean sales guys love talking to people. Their forte is they're extrovert. They can make an emotional connection with the person they're talking to. In fact, one of the advice is like when you are interviewing a salesperson is hey, is this somebody you would trust you would buy from? Right? So that's the forte of the SDR BDR is to create that legitimacy and trust. or the account executive. And I mean, of course they know their product. They better know their product if there are questions that are coming ad hoc. Now, the other thing is if you just answered the call, nobody expects you to be prepared about the business who is calling you, right? Because if there is a meeting scheduled, you better be prepared. Maybe you have PowerPoint with the customer's logo, et cetera. That's a lot of work.
Mm-hmm.
Whereas if the call comes in, It's only natural that as the SDR, I ask you a few questions to get to know you. I have the license to do that. And that makes ultimately the SDR or the salesperson life a lot easier. They can be in their element and in real time build a rapport, figure out, okay, is this a qualified customer? What is their need? Can I satisfy this or do I need to transfer this call to an account executive? Who will take it to the next level? Or maybe I schedule a meeting, right?
Right.
So depending on the context, the get may be, hey, just get them come to our website and put in their credit card, sign up. Maybe it's like, okay, I need to escalate this call in real time because they need a couple more questions answered before they give us the card. Or maybe it does require 2, 3 meetings before you actually close that account. Then schedule a meeting, make sure that all of the information is put into your CRM, and next time they call in, that's when you close.
And just to try to understand, and I completely agree. So I guess the fundamental of all that is the friction is also for building trust, which I guess is the foundation for building any relationship. You want to get that as quickly as possible. That helps the sales cycle from both perspectives. What do you see as how does it actually reduce the sales cycle, I guess, from a company perspective and then the client's perspective? If you can kind of share maybe any stats or data on what the difference was in sales cycles before and after without using this tool.
So, I mean, some of our customers have done extensive research into this, and then they have said that a video-initiated interaction is 3 times more likely to result in a sale than any other internet lead. Some of this is also a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Because the prospect that's calling you with video is already qualifying themselves. Nobody is gonna call you with video just to have a conversation. They have done their homework. They have the problem. Maybe the board just yelled at them or something went wrong internally. They have a fire. They are dealing with that. I need to solve this today. Right? And if you talk to that person, sure, you're gonna be able to move that deal forward a lot faster. And the risk you run in postponing that meeting, that conversation is in the next 10 days, especially if this is a small company or even a big company, there are always gonna be new fires. So the buyer is distracted by something else.
Right?
So that's why if you answer now, You are much more likely to actually close and much faster because, I mean, depending on your sales cycle, some businesses do require a couple of conversations, but you are doing the first 2 meetings that would have taken 10, 15 days in 15 minutes.
Right. And do you find that this works better in some, you know, so you mentioned one thing which is, you know, sales cycle as an important point to see if it's a good fit for you. Is there other You know, whether it's industries or type of businesses where you see this works better versus others and maybe some places where it wouldn't apply well?
So, I mean, ironically, it's the sales cycle and the value of the customer. It needs to be more than $1,000 or so that it warrants a conversation. And I mean, clearly lead conversion is important and moving things forward is as important in any sales cycle. But if this is a 9-month sales cycle, a year sales cycle, there are going to be RFIs and RFPs and eventually multiple conference calls later, a decision is going to be made. 5 days does not make as big of a difference.
Okay.
On the other hand, if this is a 30 to 60-day sales cycle, 1 or 2 people will make the decision. It makes a huge difference because for all you know, the person you are talking to is the decision maker. Beyond that, we have had successes in B2B SaaS companies, but we also have successes in B2C, like buying a car. It's more of a one person, they do their homework and it's now about to figure out the financing and buying it in home retail, buying washer, dryer, TV. So it is broader than that, but we think that especially for SaaS companies who have a global reach and the ability to just Instantly deliver their solutions online, it is definitely a perfect fit.
I mean, the one side, so I know you guys are mainly focused on inbound video and putting in place on the web. Have you tried it on— has anyone tried this on the outbound level? Let's say you're doing an SDR role or you're contacting 100 people at 9 AM in the morning and you got a link and waiting, somebody waiting around to take those calls, right?
So, I mean, what does happen is if you actually, as an SDR who's making a lot of outbound calls, you have the option of when you are talking to somebody who is interested saying, hey, let me send you a link, click on it and we'll start talking.
Right.
So that definitely is a possibility and that can be placing the prospect in a meeting room or can be also allowing them to call you in real time. The nice thing about the call link is depending on what you want, it can be reusable in future. So I can give you, I can, and I can tell your audience, you can call elevensight.com/sales, right? We will have people standing by at all times and any one of us can answer that call. All right, you can call me directly at 11sight.com/alex. That's my digital sort of communication identity. You get me or only me, whereas sales, anybody can answer and then they can still transfer to me.
Right.
I'm now sort of jumping ahead, but like anybody who's listening to this podcast and has a question, has wanted to talk to me, you can definitely call me directly or just call our sales line from our website. They'll transfer you to me. Wow.
I mean, another kind of, you know, maybe bootstrap way of looking at that. I mean, you can, you can also, you know, send those emails and then, you know, I know we're like, for example, we're using Zoom link right now and you can just be like, hey, join, join this call right now, click here and I'll be waiting. But you'd have to be like sitting on a Zoom meeting all day basically, right?
Yeah. So that, that doesn't work, right? Because then anybody can walk in and they can walk in onto each other. Right. So the meeting room concept doesn't work. It's like you have an open house and anybody can walk in.
Exactly.
Whereas if you share what we call an e-line, people are calling you, you answer either on your phone or on your desktop. And if you are in that call, nobody else can come into that call. In fact, it's a secure call. Even we can't listen into it. And then it's up to you. We can make sure that if you are on a call with somebody, nobody else can call you. It gives you a busy signal. Now, of course, as an individual, you also have the choice of having a backup person. So if somebody calls you directly, you can say, if I can't answer, you know, I have my buddy, he can answer or she can answer the call for me. So we have that built into it too, is that Even like, because today social selling is important as an SDR, BDR, or a rep, you do also need to do your own lead generation, your own campaigns. In those cases, you may want to share your direct communication link for people to call you directly. But if you partner with a buddy, if they can't answer, you can answer for them. And if you can't answer, they answer for you. And The nice thing also is all of this is in our system. So you can see the entire call history, who answered, how many calls came, which sources generated more calls, what time of day these calls are coming in. And you see it in our system. We save all of that in the CRM. So at the end of the month, you can see which SDRs created the most number of contacts. on those inbound calls for the first time, right? And then in the CRM, you can track what that contact created, the deal and close the revenues. So there is that visibility of how many dollars did we generate by answering how many calls.
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And do you see any impact on the front end of the kind of sales journey? Because in the initial stages when you're nurturing or talking to a prospect, you're also helping build confidence and trust by using some parts of the step, which are like the landing pages, the chatbots, testimonials, all these things on the website that kind of help prepare and guide towards that call. Do you feel that makes any difference in terms of how that's traditionally used? And then is this a this or is it kind of—
I mean, businesses make their own decision of when to offer the video call as an option to their prospects. Right? This could easily be a hierarchical chatbot that asks 3, 4 questions.
Mm-hmm.
And based on that, offers a video call. And where that video call is gonna go may very much depend on the answer of the questions. Oh, this is a small customer. Let's send this to the SDR. Oh, this is a, you know, possibly an enterprise Sales-sized customer, let's send this directly to an AE. If you have a chat sequence that does that, then that actually allows you to give different video call options. If you have other tools that actually are tracking the journey of a customer in your in your website, that information can be relevant. You can put different video call links in like deep in the website in certain product. corners. So somebody who has spent and come to this point in the website, that's when we want them to have this option. So of course, clearly you have all of that.
Okay.
But then again, you know, 5 minutes is not a long time. In 5 minutes, you can actually build a lot of that trust. And you can also, once you understand what the prospect is looking for, you can redirect them back to the website. And I mean, obviously you can screen share and all of that. So with that screen share, you can say, look, here is one case study you should look at. This is very much like your use case and you can carry the conversation forward.
Makes sense. Yeah. I'm trying to see if, you know, if for example, you have like a chatbot, right? So which I talked about, it's like we use Drift, but there's some kind of qualification to that, right? People use it. And then from there, they kind of direct them to— most of the time is, hey, sounds great, let's book a call. Here's my Calendly link, right? For example, in this case, you're probably saying, okay, here's— let's chat right now. And that's what the—
Exactly right. I mean, let's talk next week is almost like, you are not that important to me, right? Show me a sales rep or show me a sales team, marketing team that is not In, in under pressure to generate more leads and more revenues. Everybody wants more leads, more revenues, faster time for conversion. So why, once you have done that, why schedule a meeting? Why not just talk to them right there and then?
I agree. I mean, that'll save you a lot of time and it's just about 10-15 minutes of your time. Yeah, I agree. I guess my final question around the sales side, and then we can switch over and shift gears towards the kind of more personal, more rapid-fire questions of the show. In your opinion, what is kind of the most critical skill of anyone? This is a big question, by the way. It's pretty loaded. What is the most critical skill of anyone who maybe communicates to others in terms of to help persuade or influence them in order to make the sales experience more seamless?
I mean, it's all about understanding what your prospect's problem is and then be able to address that. But that sort of is a quantified way of talking about it. The other is some people you talk to, you talk to them and somehow you trust them.
Hmm.
Others you don't, right? So that's a little bit of intangible. So if you can build quick rapport with a person and you have that empathy, that is the qualified aspect of it. And you can combine that with actual competence about your product so that you can answer questions unlike an AI chatbot and say, you know, that keeps asking questions as opposed to answering them.
Yeah.
That's the difference between a human being is that we understand questions. If you know how to answer those questions, and hey, you can't answer all the questions. If need be, you can transfer it to the to the next person. All of that, in fact, transferring to the right person who answers the question further gives legitimacy and trust that okay, this is this is a business. They understand our needs, and we will depending on what kind of questions we have, there will be other people who will answer those. Because when you are doing your homework and you are down selecting 2 to 3 vendors, now like the products are more or less equivalent, but do I trust the team? Can I work with them? Will they have my back? Will they support me? Or, you know, when the time comes, once I have paid them, if I call their customer success, they will never answer my call, right? So this entire thing that I'm talking about in sales also applies to customer success. Because if it's a monthly SaaS, every month is a new booking. Correct. Right. Sometimes like that quick 5-minute answer solves the problem and then that creates a tighter bond with the customer.
Yeah. Yeah.
Totally. And you can even like, you know, your customer at that point, depending on the tier of the customer, you may or may not Provide video support. Correct. Right. If this is really valuable, then when they log into their dashboard, there is a button that says, any questions, call us.
Yeah.
This is only $10 a month customer, then maybe you don't offer that.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah. I guess until, until we can build in empathy into a chatbot, I think we're, we're still fine in terms of this business. We have nothing to worry about. But maybe that's your, that's your next business idea, Alex, and I'll support you if you build that one. Cool. Thanks, Alex. So we're going to shift gears here, move towards the rapid-fire questions. You ready to go?
Sure. Go for it.
All right. Starting off, Alex, number 1, what's one activity— I know you mentioned a couple of activities you like to do, but what's one activity you enjoy outside of work that you say gets you into flow state?
So I'll give you 2 activities. One is sleep 8.5 hours a night. So that sort of recharges you. That's an activity, actually. The other is exercise. I mean, I definitely make sure that I exercise at least an hour a day. So this could be mountain biking, this could be going for a long hike, this could be getting onto the exercise bike, but make sure you work out a sweat, sort of get rid of that nervous energy of the day at the end of the day.
Yeah, get it all out. What's one piece of advice you wish you had known? And if you can, you know, go back in time, you would talk to and tell your 25-year-old self today?
So I'm gonna give you an unexpected answer. I would tell that person everything I've done and say, go do— don't do any of this, do something else, have a different life.
Have a new life.
Give yourself a second, totally different life.
Cool.
Why not? I mean, you've already done it the one way.
So this life I already lived, so let's live another one.
That's true. That's cool. And what does that look like? If you can dream it up.
Ah, who knows? So that's the 25-year-old me who listens to me who has to decide.
Okay, okay, figure it out. Yeah, yeah, explore it. Yeah, love it.
Because— yeah, go ahead.
No, no, continue, continue.
No, I mean, so it's like you ask yourself, what's the meaning of life? And, you know, the way I would answer that question is like, It is the limitations in life, things that are challenging that you choose to overcome.
You're choosing to. Yeah.
And we as humans have the advantage, and especially given how we live, we are not that worried about dinner tonight. So we pick our own challenges we want to overcome. So there are a lot of directions you can go in life. So I picked one where I became a serial entrepreneur, so I'm quite happy with that. It fits me. But hey, I could have stayed in academia, I could have taken an industry job, or I can do something totally different of nonprofit humanitarian.
Yeah, artwork, whatever it is. That's like, life is the adventure itself, right? Doesn't matter. There's no right path. Yeah, it's just a different color. Yeah, cool. All right, then the other question I have is around specifically in terms of challenges you guys are facing. Is there any big challenges you're facing with continuing to grow and trying to grow 11Sight? Or is there anything that you would say keeps you up at night these days?
I mean, so we have a distributed team. We have engineering in Turkey, testing in India. We have a core team here in US building that team spirit and keeping everybody on the same page. While on one hand, we now have the ability to have this distributed team, which wasn't possible maybe even 10 years ago. Sure, you would outsource, but you wouldn't talk to your team on a daily basis. So that's one key thing because if the team is executing in one direction, then the rest of the problems can be overcome.
Yeah.
And at a startup, there is no shortage of challenges. You need more resources, you need this, you need that, right?
Exactly. Yeah, I understand that. And you're based in the Bay Area or?
Yeah, so I actually am a little bit north of Berkeley. Our CTO is in San Jose. We have people in San Francisco, Sacramento. Even the local team can't get into an office on a regular basis because of the distances.
Yeah, we've gotten all pretty lazy to try and make that effort to get together, but yeah, it's comfortable.
Yeah, so before the pandemic, it was a question of where would we build the office? The pandemic eliminated the question that we weren't gonna be able to answer.
There you go. You've got your office. You're looking at it right now.
This, this is, this is my office. I have 2 monitors, 2 cameras.
So beautiful, but no people. That's the part missing, right? Yeah.
Yeah. They are all 2-dimensional on my monitor.
Yeah. Yeah. It's not the same, but that's all right.
It's not the same to be in the same room on the whiteboard and talk over each other.
100%. Yeah.
Who are—
what are the best 3 resources? It can be books, you know, people that you come across, mentors, or people you follow in the space who you'd say have been most instrumental to your success over these last few years.
I mean, you know, when the iPhone came or whenever a new thing comes, it's like people ask, oh, what's the killer app? Right? So there is no killer app. There is no killer book. There is no killer advisor. In marketing, you need to read different things. In sales, you need to do different things. So I mean, we were part of Alchemist. It was great. I mean, we talked to 20, 30 people. So it's really the ability to talk to a lot of people and then distill the advice to something actionable. That's basically what I would say is The better way to go because sure, if you have just the right mentor, maybe life is easy. But what if the mentor told you the wrong thing? Not everybody. I mean, like we all make mistakes. It's all about not making deadly mistakes and just being able to recover from it and persevere and be resilient and move on.
Okay, so just take you know from from everybody. There's no need to from everybody. Oh, everybody. Yeah, make your own. I agree. So we already talked about, you know, the purpose of life. So great starting question. Let's kind of jump in and maybe switch that. What does success mean to you today? And, you know, it could be personally, business, financial life that, you know, there's no right answer.
So like in the context, I'm going to answer it in that context, right? So yeah, we picked challenges we wanted to overcome and success would be being able to overcome most of them. But be able to hit the target most of the time, not all of the time. Why? Because if you are actually succeeding every time you hit a target, you aim at a goal and you get there, that means you are not challenging yourself hard enough, right? You are taking it easy. If you are failing every time because you are going after moonshots, life is not gonna be as much fun, right?
Hmm.
So Be able to figure out those targets that you can reach most of the time. That, I think, gives you a happy, fulfilled life where you know you are challenging yourself.
And what do you say to that person who's, you know, either easily finding success or, you know, continuing to fail? Because there's also that thought of, you know, keep failing, keep failing, keep failing, eventually you'll succeed. But, you know, they're going down the same path versus, you know, what you're saying is, You know, if you're failing, maybe you actually need to— and that's the word of the pivot— is actually completely change directions, right?
And yeah, you are picking the targets, right? If you failed here, you can't keep failing 10 times in a row. You need to do something differently. You need to pick something more reasonable, change your process of how you are picking your targets so that you also have successes. Now, having said that, I mean, clearly there needs to be perseverance and resilience once you pick a target to get there. But like, you know, when I took my driver's license exam, failed the first time, failed the second time, got it the third time. And then that's, that's that. Then you have your driver's license.
Sure. And there's also the other approach of saying, because you said if things are easy, I mean, that might be as the cue that you do want to continue, right? Once I find success in building a tech company and then you do it again, you find another success, you're like, okay, why don't I just keep doing this? Because now you know.
But I mean, the third one should be more ambitious because the way I look at our startups is when we did our first startup, this was back in '98 and we were fresh PhDs out of school and we sort of defined success as being able to see it through without screwing it up. And indeed, we were able to sell it to a competitor and we made some money in the process, right? The second time around, we defined success as being able to make money for all shareholders, right? And my second company, Pink, was acquired for $50 million by Accel KKR in a roll-up. So every common shareholder, every preferred shareholder made money. So this time we are defining success as not only making some money for everybody, but making a lot of money for everybody, right? So yes, you do, you succeed, then you have to move the goalpost.
Just move the goalpost. And that's the next challenge. That's the next part. Yeah. But knowing where that goalpost is like, yeah, okay, I understand it. Wow, that's a great analogy. Thanks for sharing that. All right, Alex, this has been fantastic. I think our audience is going to love this. Just last question to kind of wrap things off. Where can founders, anybody listening in, get in touch with you, learn more about you? Or about your company, 11voice?
Yeah, so I mean, they should definitely, definitely come to our website and they can call us, they can call our sales line and they will be transferred to me if they have questions, they want to carry this conversation further. They should sign up for our solution, they get it 2 weeks free. After that, if they use the promo code HORIZON Horizon 10, that's basically your company name, 10.
Oh, perfect.
Then they are gonna get an additional 10% discount and they can get started. And we'll, we'll, if they have any questions, they can call our team. The team will answer their questions and I would love to get their feedback on this podcast, but also hear from them firsthand about their experiences.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We'll add those links to the show notes. Thank you so much for that coupon code. So that's Horizon 10, you guys will get 10% off. And the beautiful thing is if you go on their website and you click on their button, you'll be able to talk to them instantly. So that's the nice thing. So make sure you guys check them out.
Give it a shot. That's just for the experience. We'll be happy to talk and then you'll be so impressed that you will say, oh, I need to do this for my customers.
Exactly. No, I see it clearly. So definitely check it out. Thank you so much, Alex. Appreciate you joining today.
Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below. And help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.
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