A founder who worked at Stripe and Stytch started a DealOps company to solve a specific problem: sales teams struggle to optimize pricing and discounts on individual deals. He left his job without a co-founder or concrete plan, spending months identifying this as the most compelling pain point he'd encountered.
take us to DealOps? What's the story? How, why did you decide to start this company?
So after, uh, leaving Stripe, I, you know, and working at Stytch for a while, I decided to, that I wanted to start my own company. And I didn't have an idea or a co-founder at the time. I just quit and I gave myself a few months to, to figure this out. And, um, the first thing I did was that I kind of sat down and reflected on my career. And problems I've experienced personally, kind of working at all of these different companies. And it's really funny that pricing non-standard deals and working with a sales team to optimize like discounting on the deal level, this was actually the first idea I had for a company.
Help us understand the nuance of this problem space.
Yeah, for sure. I think that the way to think about this is that In the B2B world, it almost doesn't matter what price you have on your website. Like most deals that actually get signed have some sort of custom price or they're considered non-standard. And what a non-standard deal is, a deal that's non-vanilla. So it doesn't have like the basic price that's on your website. It doesn't have like the very typical payment terms or invoicing schedule. And then deals like that, usually there are a lot of different decisions that need to get made while you're working on a deal like that. So things like obviously what kind of products to include, what kind of prices and discounts to use by product, what kind of payment terms to go for. And a lot of these deals end up having like very long-term impact on the company's financial situation, both obviously top line, gross margin, and even cash flow. So I personally find that like problem so, so interesting. If you think about this, it's, there's this relationship between sales incentives, deal economics, and the company's bottom line. And we know what are the things that the biggest levers to pull there. So I think it's time to look at this from more of a growth marketing perspective and optimize it.
