E54: $40M ARR with 50‑Person Team (in less than a year) - Bryan Adams, VP Sales at bolt.new

Brian Adams is VP Sales at Bolt.new, which gained notoriety for going from $0 to $4 million ARR in their first 30 days. Roughly a year later, they're now over $40 million ARR.

My number one goal every day that I wake up out of bed is clearing the runway is what I call it.

Brian talks about what it's like to compete with other red-hot startups like Lovable and Replit.

It feels like a knife fight every day in the sense because people can just wake up and leave tomorrow.

And Bolt's sales tech stack is different than what you might expect.

When I joined, we were running off of a Google Sheet.

For those of you wondering what it's What's it like to work in one of these hypergrowth AI startups? Brian gives you a peek behind the curtain.

I think the build versus buy actually comes down to—

Welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. Here's a familiar scene. A deal's in commit and the buyer says, can I talk to somebody like me? Next thing you know, sales reps are asking CSMs after hours. 5 people are in Slack trying to remember who helped last time. And that one customer who always says yes is getting burned out after 3 requests in a week. That's why this episode's brought to you by User Evidence, the platform that turns customer proof from chaos into a repeatable GTM system. With advocates, references, and real customer evidence all in one place, your team can share credible proof instantly and keep deals moving forward instead of stalling. Companies like Gong, Ramp, and Workato already use User Evidence to capture customer proof, build buyer confidence, and shorten sales cycles. See how at userevidence.com. That's userevidence.com. Today's guest is Brian Adams, who is the VP of sales at Bolt.new, which is one of the leading vibe coding platforms. Uh, and previous to Bolt, he held senior sales leadership positions at TaxFile, JFrog, and Sedai. He's been in and around AI for a while. So we are going to unpack all things GTM AI today because, uh, I've actually tried to build some stuff on Bolt. I think it's a really interesting piece of the future of go-to-market, like what is going to be build versus buy. And I got a bunch of questions about that. So, uh, looking forward to this and thanks for joining.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me and looking forward to unpack it all together.

Yeah. So for the uninitiated who don't know what Vibe Coding is or what Alt does, like just sort of give them the picture of like what the product does. And, uh, take it from there.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, and if you just go to bolt.new, it's essentially going to give you a text box where you're able to input any thoughts or ideas that you have. We will take that and we'll start to create a web application or mobile application, kind of whatever, whatever your heart desires. Um, and so I think, you know, I'm probably like Bolt's ideal buyer where I'm technical enough to know some things, but the reality is I don't know how to code. Um, but I can just type in plain English what I would love to build or create and Bolt will start to do it for me. Cool.

I have tried to build a couple things and what, like one of my ideas was I wanted to be able to pull all of the, uh, sales data or hiring data out of the Lever API and then run it through like categorization and, and like bring more structure to the data and then combine that with in-role performance. I just have a spreadsheet of like month over month quota attainment. And I got a long way through it. It was like, I was on the cusp. I couldn't get it to totally work, which I think is, is folks, a lot of folks have that experience with, with vibe coding. So when you're building stuff, like, how do you do it successfully? Like what, this is very personal question because I, I like, I just want to figure it out for myself. But like, what is the approach that you've taken to actually build things successfully?

Yeah, this is, I mean, I think this is the question, right? Like I, just like you, I mean, I've tried to build a lot of things and frankly I've done it on multiple platforms just to see like what else is out there? What are they doing different? What I have found to be the most successful and kind of what works for me, if you will. But actually what I've more importantly found what works for our customers is a lot of times you just try to go build and what building, what that actually means is you're going to go give a big prompt and say, hey, I want you to build, you know, actually you just gave a really good example. But in that example that you just gave is like a lot of technicality, putting that in, in the prompt box and just hitting go. There's for sure going to be things left out. And what also happens is like, you're going to get to a point where you probably start to bang your head a little bit. Like, dude, I'm so close, but it's just not there. Right? So what I—

so the lowest experience I've had on 3 different things I've tried to find code. Ooh, sorry.

This, and this is common. This is totally common. So what I've actually started to do and what I've actually gotten feedback from like customers as well, but I use the plan button. So I will, in the prompt box, I'll put in what I want to build and then I'll hit plan and then I'll hit go. And essentially what Bolt will do there is it'll say, okay, based on what you're asking for, here's all the requirements. Here's all of the things that we would need to do. Do you want to go do this? Do you want to go build it? But for me, essentially it's a conversation now that I'm having where I'm saying, hey, you know, you've checked the box of 60 or 70% of it. But I also want you to add this or remove that. And it's literally just a conversation until I get it to, I guess, like a fine-tooth piece where I'm like, all right, this is actually what I want to go build. And the system now fully understands it based on my conversation with it. And then I'll go build it. So that'll get me from that 0 to 1 in a lot cleaner and fresher place, like right off the bat versus me just, I mean, when I first joined Bolt and before, like I would just start typing and hopefully like I'm expecting, cause I don't know what I'm doing. I'm expecting it just to create what I'm telling it. Right. The plan button has been like a major, major, uh, game changer for me and for our customers to actually like accomplish what you're trying to do, especially with a non-technical audience. Yeah.

Do you find that you have to like break things out into different, like applications, like I should have a Lever API application and then a separate application for the data transformation and a separate one for the like analysis.

When you say break it out, are you saying like have it go create this and then once that's done, then go add on another layer and so on and so forth?

Or like start with a new repo, like start with a new project.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't start with separate projects if I'm trying to build it all under one umbrella. Okay. I understand what you're saying. What I have typically done now, I think what I, what I do today is I just layer it on. So I've even, I've even used, and I, I don't know why I never thought about this, but I've had like a ton of customers like, hey, go leverage ChatGPT and just see what they have to say. Right. And so ChatGPT sometimes is even like layering out what you should do. And then I go work. Like our plan mode, if you will. And then I'll say, hey, go build this. And then once it builds that, then I'll add the other layer and then the other layer. So instead of me giving everything all up front, I mean, I guess the irony of this is if I were to go to like one of my product managers or engineers and say, hey, I need this feature and functionality in our product, we would have to scope it and then it would go layer by layer. It wouldn't just go all in at once, right? This, this is no different than that.

Yeah, makes sense. So how much stuff have you built yourself and like shipped into production?

The building myself and shipping are two different scenarios. Uh, but I, I build a lot of stuff. I mean, I, I, I throw a lot of stuff on the wall now that this is available to me, right? Like historically I would have to go try to find an engineer or developer or somebody to help me kind of do this. So now I, if I get an idea, I'll just throw it in the Bolt and see how far I can get. You know, I would say what I put into production. So, you know, if you went to bolt.new and click the pricing page, I actually built that exact pricing page earlier this year. So I don't even remember what our old pricing page looked like. I remember I wasn't a huge fan of it. And we were actually at a company offsite and just essentially like over lunch, I just started ripping on this pricing page and put, told it what I wanted, what I needed it. I brought in certain screenshots of other pricing pages that I liked and said, hey, you know, give it an aesthetic like this, but make sure that it has the design look and feel of Bolt.new. And it, you know, essentially just made iteration after iteration. And so the pricing page actually on Bolt's website is what I built. Um, so obviously that, that's in production. Um, I actually had a newer rep that came in and we obviously, as you could imagine, like every company, you get a lot of feature requests, product updates, and customers asking you like, hey, do you have this or can you have that? And I think within the first 2 weeks of one of the newer reps that we brought on, he actually went and created essentially a link that allows you to upvote product features. And so now it circulates through our entire organization where if somebody gets off a sales call and somebody asks for a specific feature, you either add it or you just upvote it and it actually helps us prioritize what we should build and what kind of our roadmap looks like based on our customer feedback.

It's so funny 'cause like there's a bunch of companies who built that as like their business. And you can, like some of these things that are simple experiences, you can just, you know, build yourself.

Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of people when they first came to the market, they're like, hey, what can I build and what can I, you know, go make money on, right? I think that's, that's a lot of the thought process. And I think now there's a lot of zooming out to say, what can I build internally? And how will that impact whether it's your one-person company or your thousand-person company? And how do you impact like making things more visible and easier just to use it, spin it up in a day, right? Um, and that's what I mean, I, I see a lot of my colleagues doing internally as well. Okay.

So I want to zoom out. And so you're at a company where everybody internally knows how to use the product and you can like build your own stuff. So how are you thinking about what are you building versus buying? Like where, where in your stack, like how does, how do you now think about that? And how do you, how do you think your most sophisticated customers evaluating this build versus buy question?

Yeah, I mean, it's a daily conversation that we have. It's a daily thing that I think about. You know, I would say for me, I think a lot of people, everyone feels like what they're doing is highly customizable, right? It's probably different than everybody else, although that's not the case. But for me, I actually just try to build something first. Like I'll give you an example, right? Everyone uses a CRM. So I actually went in and tried to build an executive dashboard on specific metrics that I'm looking for. So how do I pull from a CRM and pull from other databases that we have internally? And how can I grab all that and essentially just infuse an entire dashboard of what I want and care about from marketing leads to deals closed to renewals and everything in between? I'm still cracking at it right now, but it is one of the things like I know it's out there. It's also just not a huge need to have, right? I have my CRM. It gives me a lot of the way. We have a data team where if I don't have access to it, I can kind of go out and answer or just ask them to get these answers. But I do really look to try to build something that I know that I specifically want that's going to meet my needs, which then allows me to kind of relay that to the rest of the organization, depending upon what, what it is at the same time. The, the conversation isn't just a build versus buy. It actually comes down to speed for us. Like, how do we think about it at Bolt? Hey, if I buy this, how quickly can I get this implemented? And then what will the impact be on the business? If that's something that's going to be drastically faster than us trying to build it, then we're going to, we're going to buy it. And also whatever we're buying empowers other people to run faster. We're going to buy it. If there's something like my use case, it's a very nice to have because I still have a ton of data in front of me, but there's like little granular things that I like to see and want access to. That will be something I try to build until I just need to go buy it. But I think the build versus buy actually comes down to speed and scale versus what do I want more? Yeah. And so what does the tech stack look like for Bolt?

Like when your go-to-market tech stack, like what's in there? Uh, and then I'd love to unpack like some of the best AI use cases.

Yeah, totally. So CRM is HubSpot.

Um, oh really? Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, we, I've historically been a Salesforce guy. I came in, company was using HubSpot. We, we talked about making the swap. We had some people internally that would prefer to stay on HubSpot and I was like, all right, well, as long as I could get what I need, then I'm good with it. And the way that they were leveraging like the datasets and from a marketing perspective, I think was the big needle mover to stay on it, at least for the time being. And then, you know, your traditional kind of Apollo Clay scenario from an enrichment standpoint. And then we're heavy on LinkedIn. And we're, as I was talking to you before, we just adopted a cool, a very cool tool called Freckle. And why this tool is so impactful for us is because we get tens of thousands of signups a month. And of those signups, 98, 99% of those are just your personal emails, right? Like we do get business emails, but a lot of them are personal. And this tool hasn't just said like, hey, we can help you. I think the word you used earlier was unmask or uncover you know, these, these personal emails, but like the data has been great. And so now we're able to uncover like another 15% of personal emails and understand companies and where they're working and what they're doing, which at the scale of inbound lead flow that we have has been huge for us. So that's been a really, really big needle mover. Trying to think what else from an AI perspective that we that we leverage and kind of pull hard on. I can't really think of anything right now. Okay.

And so what does the prospecting motion look like? Do you have a lot of AI automation or outreach through Clay? Are you still doing like hand-to-hand combat? You're trying to like unmask people and call them and prospect through Apollo, or what does that function look like?

Yeah, so we run a lot of that through, through Fretbolt actually. We have a big workflow kind of built specifically that we have criteria set just like every other company, right? So if somebody fills out, you know, a hand raise or they create a Bolt account and we're able to then enrich it and say, hey, this company or this person is at a company that's over a certain employee threshold, or at a certain, you know, specific title at a company, then we have automation that will address that. If it's like a very tier 1 account, let's just for example's sake say Fortune 500, then we're going to get on the phone and call them immediately. So, you know, I think as much as AI helps actually keep our team on the smaller end and very lean, there's, I mean, 25% of our meetings set are still on full phone calls. And so yes, there's a lot of the automation behind the scenes that kind of bubbles up where we should be focusing. And I think that's been the biggest impact for us. I think I said this previously, but our support, I'm blanking on the name of the company, I'll find it though, is a lot of it's done via AI because our growth trajectory kind of happened overnight. And I think at the time the company was like 15 people and we're getting thousands of people email in. Like there's, it's impossible for us to get to it, right? And so now we have this support tool that essentially has reduced like 80% of our inbound support and handled it, not just like pushed it to the side, like handled these support tickets where then we get to focus on that 20%. And that's changed the way that we run our support.

And so how you're, you're trying to roll people up into an enterprise relationship. Like what, what does Bolt want to do at an enterprise level? Like how do you get, you want multiple stakeholders all like vibe coding or are you trying to sell into like engineering buyers?

Like what is that, what is that enrichment targeting like outreach flow? Look like? Yeah, it's, it's a super interesting question. So you're probably aware, but a year ago we launched Bolt. But before that, the company is known as StackBlitz, which is a very technical IDE, um, and selling to developers and engineers. Then we launched Bolt and we say, hey, now we're going to make this very technical thing for non-technical people, right? So our main ICP today is, is is product managers, PMs. And now fast forward a year later, we're learning that that's still our ICP and our main audience, but we do have to start— yes. Yeah. Yeah. But we do have to start helping engineers and developers because there's still a, a conversation topic that's happening between that PM, between that developer to make kind of, to make their dreams come true, if you will, with what they're building. With Bolt. And then, okay, do they want to put that into production? Is this an internal tool? Is it for an external tool? So now our, our, our go-to motion outside of just your traditional inbound is outbound to what we know and see is a good ICP for us, not just from a, from an individual perspective, but from a company perspective. And also we are starting to target a little bit more of a technical audience because we're seeing different buying patterns around Who is buying this tool? Because it's almost kind of turning a little bit away from vibe coding and it's how are we helping people just become more technical and interact with each other?

Hmm. So what does that look like? So you want to sell to an engineer and compete with a cursor or there's like, this is a prototyping, it's a prototyping product. Like what's—

Yeah. So the, the, the land today, and I think will be primarily for, for quite some time, will be more of a non-technical audience for sure.

Okay.

But on the, on the underlying infrastructure outside of just the prompt box that you see, we have a very technical tool that we built with StackBlitz, which is that developer engineer and allows them to essentially kind of coexist with the same, with the same platform. And so today and even tomorrow, it's going to look very non-technical audience, but I do think there is a long tail where we can still empower engineers and developers with the platform.

And so this is a way for engineers and PMs to sort of like work and prototype on the same thing, and then the engineer would take it and do the production work?

Correct.

Okay. So then how, talk to me, talk to me about how you're outbounding into these target accounts. So you've got your like Fortune 500s, people that you think with like big PM teams, I would imagine. So what does it look like to try to get that buyer's attention? And like, talk to me about the systems that you use for that outreach.

Yeah. So I mean, I think to kind of call a spade a spade, we're really fortunate that we have a lot of inbound just due to the sheer interest of the space that we're in. Like this is, this is your, kind of holy grail of a PLG company, if you will, because we get so much interest in inbound.

But, and that hasn't, that hasn't waned because there was that big, huge vibe coding pop and then, okay.

Ours actually, it's just steadily increased. I don't think Bolt ever really experienced like this insane hockey stick. We did from a revenue perspective, but like from a, just your traditional signups after we launched, we've, we've, it's gone up and you, even if you see like, hey, maybe you're, I mean, I see these, uh, these public metrics of like, you know, how many website, what's your website traffic, et cetera. But we've seen signups stay pretty steady for us and, and incrementally just increase over time. Yeah. And so for that, obviously we're funneling all of that inbound, but also from an, From an outbound perspective, we've identified, and I'll give you actually a funny example. We were chatting with a CRM company and it was just a simple question. Like, hey, if you were able to implement the 5 things that you just said to me right now, if you could implement those like 6 months faster, what does that do for your business? It doesn't do anything. And I'm like, I love this. I hate this answer, but I love this answer. Can you like, why? And they were like, because we have our, our annual, you know, conference. And so even if we, even if we release something that we were like, this is amazing, we're going to wait. And I think during that conversation, I had this like aha moment where I was like, man, we're going to win with companies that are large enterprises, but cater to B2C because they have to. Keep up to the consumer's pace, right? Like if you go online right now to book a plane ticket, that company that you're probably interacting with needs to constantly do iterations and empower their PMs specifically to add features and functionality and then collaborate and say what needs to ship, what doesn't need to ship. And that's on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. But somebody that may be catered to just like only B2Bs. There's obviously other tool sets that you can build and there's value there, but what we like, the early pull is very much those B2C large enterprises that are keeping up with people like you and I that need certain things from them.

Yeah, that makes sense. So you're mostly, so this is a, it's a pure PLG motion. You have tons of inbound, you're unmasking and then figuring out like highest value, uh, highest value accounts. And, and then do they go through like automate any automated flows? Is that sales reps out of Apollo using cadences or sequences? Like, where does it go from there?

Yeah, we have, we have your automated drip. If you create an account, obviously, if it's a, if it's a contact us hand raiser, we'll, we'll reach out to you directly. We have a team of SDRs that will, you know, like I said, we'll pick up the phone. Or we'll send you a personal email. It's not going to just be some random, random drip. Yes, we have, to your earlier point, we have things that will bubble up and unmask where we want to focus our time. I would say maybe 2 or 3 months ago, we just started doing outbound cadence of companies that we know would be a really, really good fit for us. And so we just kind of kicked that off a couple of months ago, and that started to unfold in a good manner. For us because this is something people are talking about. This is something that people are just trying, even if they don't want to talk to you, like they probably have an account that they're trying it, you know, whether it's with us or a competitor, right? And so we just started doing that and we actually, not even a month ago, just started going really, really heavy on LinkedIn. Not just from like a content posting, but interacting, people that are interacting with us or interacting with other posts, you know, from a DM perspective. And surprisingly, that's actually been wildly successful. I don't know why I wasn't expecting it to be, but I just, I don't know. I mean, LinkedIn's noisy now too, right? So it's tough to think that's going to be very different than an email inbox. Um, but it's been really, really good for us and with some surprisingly large companies that I would never guess would have kind of landed through, through LinkedIn, but it's been working.

Hmm. Very cool. So who owns the, the GTM tech stack at Bolt? Are you like building and shipping tools that the team can use? Is the RevOps team like doing that type of work? I'm curious like how much you guys have built internally. And how RevOps would look different in a company like yours with the tooling you have?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a, it's probably a partnership around who's doing what, if you will. Again, I am, I don't want to say that I'm still learning HubSpot, but this is, it's different. And so, you know, our RevOps team and data team do a really good job of kind of creating our dashboards and reporting and making kind of everything relevant for what we want to see and what we want to look at. I'll be honest, I actually have some guys that I've worked with in the past that, that sit in, in a, like an SDR type growth role that I have advising for us that have just been amazing. Um, I knew they were amazing when I worked with them and I knew that they could kind of plug some, some gaps that we had here when I joined. And so they've kind of been off to the races and doing that as well. So, it's very much a team effort. We talk about it multiple times a week around like what we need, what we want to see, what tools we do or do not need. And I think we have a bulk of probably what we need from a toolset. And now we're just doing a lot of building and customization. Hmm.

So what's that like SDR growth group doing?

So outside of like your traditional, you you know, cadences. It's a lot of time. It's a lot of time in workflows. It's a lot of time. And every single month we'll look back and say, okay, you know, who did we close? What does that look like? And do we need to then go adjust any type of messaging or any type of, hey, maybe these people we notice aren't actually as ready to buy as we thought they were 3 months ago. So then we need to feed them different information. So we'll update our workflows based on what we're sending them.

And just, those are just like standard Apollo workflows?

Standard, I mean, HubSpot workflows, Apollo workflows. When I, like I mentioned, obviously now we're incorporating Freckle a lot into that to essentially unmask stuff, essentially go through and infuse it and enrich the data. And then that'll tell us what we're trying to do. I mean, I think actually a really good, we use a lot of Freckle for this stuff outside of Apollo, but one, one of the things that we're doing now is outside of the unmasking of people signing up and what can Freckle essentially open for us. We're now looking at it internally because as any kind of PLG tool, we'll ask our users like, hey, you know, who are you? What do you do? What's your, what's your title type scenario? And so we, we caught that 50% of the folks that essentially said like, hey, we're just PMs. We ran that through, through Freckle and then like personally verified it all and realized that it's actually only 20% that are truly PMs and the other 30% is not. So now we're infusing this to our actual user data to understand who's using it versus just like your generic, you know, hey, I'm a sales guy, I use a CRM type scenario.

Yeah, makes, makes sense. So there's, you guys haven't necessarily built a bunch of stuff in-house on top of the stack. It sounds like you're using mostly off-the-shelf tools. Freckle is, is like a big part of it. Um, in, in running this like PLG upsell motion, which is interesting. And, and so what's like, are there any really interesting things you've built or your team has built? That you're using in go-to-market, like with Bolt?

Yeah, I think also to zoom out, Bolt is now like a little over a year old. Yeah, that's crazy.

So are you guys in, have you guys shared what your ARR is?

I can't remember. Yeah, it's north of 40. And so I think when people think of like, Especially if you see that, hey, company is north of 40, they've had explosive growth. I mean, we're a team of 50 people.

The whole company or just revenue?

The whole company. All company. Wow. And we are, we still have a lot to figure out, right? As far as like how we do it. So for context, think about thousands and thousands of signups, you know, every day, week, month. When I, when I joined, we were running off of a Google Sheet. So, I mean, it was insane to be like, hey, I would pick up the phone and call one of my guys and be like, hey, did you reach out to this person? Because I got to go reach out to that person. I want to make sure we're not like, we, you know, our CRM from a sales perspective didn't really exist when I joined. And I've been here now. I mean, again, I advised before, but I, I've been here full-time 9 months, 10 months. So it's been a very short period of time to then say, okay, let's fully implement a CRM. Let's fully build out all the workflows and the automation so we can kind of just catch up to where we should be. Implement some tools that'll offset, you know, like I mentioned earlier from the support standpoint. And I honestly believe now is probably the first time where we can, we can as a company, not even just a GTM perspective, take a step back and say, okay, we've gotten here. We know where we're trying to go. Now what can we go like essentially implement? And for, from us, from a GTM perspective, like that first, that first tool has really been Freckle. Um, but now it's going to be, well, what's the next layer of that? And how does that now actually impact one of the things I, I'm really focused on is customer success because there's a new tool like this popping up every day, every week. And what I even hear on calls is there's no real winner yet. There's a lot of people doing really, really good in the live coding. Yeah.

Yeah.

There's, there's a lot of people that have had a huge revenue spike and then you're seeing a ton of churn. There's a lot of rotation. People are starting to kind of pick their swim lane now of where they, they can go win. And so what's, what's happening and what I started seeing a few months ago is people are buying multiple tools or not wanting to commit to annual, which then puts a lot of stress on customer success, right? So now how are we making sure that we can, and this is where I, I find a lot of leverage of things that we need to start testing from an AI perspective of how are people using the tool? What are they liking about the tool? What are they not liking about the tool? What are signals that tell us Hey, this person's great. And hey, this person's not because nobody is making long-term bets and commitments like they are with CRMs or databases and, and more cloud vendors.

And so although we've come to, as you can take your code wherever you want in your GitHub repo or local, that, that's the whole thing.

And so there is a, it feels like a knife fight every day in the sense because you're, Like people could just wake up and leave tomorrow.

So how do you deal with that? Like what are you doing as a sales and GTM org to try to like compete in a space that has like differing levels of differentiation?

Yeah. I mean, I think to not go too far in the weeds with other folks, I think for us, we do a really, really diligent Let me, let me rephrase this. We started to do a very diligent, like, POC process. Let's just think about it for now as your traditional SaaS POC. Let's uncover what you're looking to accomplish and then let's go help you accomplish that. And then realistically, if we're kind of doing that for you, you'll buy. So that started to happen and it worked. And then once you kind of kicked the conversation off on, started to happen. Hey, I'm so close, but I can't get to that last mile.

Yeah.

Is this actually working? And the, the, the holy grail is understanding how to prompt. And in the prompting, there's also things like in under, under the hood of Bolt where users can actually now integrate design systems so they can start prompting off of the components in their design systems.

Right.

House, the look, feel, and even sometimes code levels in their prompt, which is making their life a whole lot easier. There's also something that we call a knowledge base where a user can go and fill out this knowledge base of what they're looking and wanting and needing. So Bolt has another starting line to start creating to get them to kind of get to their resolution. I think the last piece of it is, and I'm kind of a firm believer, especially in this space, As Bolt, we just take a lot of the initiative ourselves. This is such a new thing in a new market where even me, like I learn new things every week on the best ways to leverage Bolt. And so I'm still learning and I've been doing this now for a while. What is the customer that just signed the contract today and wants to start building tomorrow need? So now we're essentially giving them assets that say, hey, what are you looking to build? Let's go build this together. So there's a very now white glove approach to helping them create what they're looking to create and achieve their resolutions. And you can't just leave it to them. I can't just invent you a document and say, all right, hey, go, go read this and do it. Like, you know, I think I said at the beginning of the call, I'm kind of Bolt's perfect ICP, because I just make assumptions when I'm in their building. And guess what? If you sent me a document, I'm not going to read it because I'm just going to talk to Bolt, right? So how I buy or use the product is in all of us internally is starting to help us, I would say, humanize like what the experience is and how do we then go better that and help them go achieve their goal. And we've seen kind of a big uptake since we've taken that approach, not just from like a net new. Logo perspective, but very much like a customer support, uh, experience. Let, let us come on site, get your team of 100 PMs in the same room, and let's go do this together.

That makes sense. Yeah, even me, like, I used Replit, Bolt, Lovable, then I had Codex and Windsurf going, and like all pointed at the same— all— like, I was like, okay, it's not working here, so maybe if I go into Windsurf and I pull in that project, that repo, and Windsurf might be able to figure it out. And that actually helped make a bunch of progress, like having different coding platforms, like take a crack at it. But I think that's emblematic of the space. Like you can, you can just swap and move around.

And at one point, which is great for us, right? Like great for you and me. But from a business, that's terrifying. Like, you're not going to go from Salesforce to HubSpot back to Salesforce. Like, that's not a thing. It doesn't exist.

So does that change the way that you have to comp reps? Like, when you're in such a dynamic industry, like, can you pay on a 12-month comp? Are you signing people up to 12-month contracts?

We are now. So it's, you you, you bring up a really good question around like, you know, how are we structuring comp and how are we making sure that it's, it's super competitive to where like they're comfortable with embarking on this journey with us. So as dynamic as feature sets and quality of tools changes on a week-to-week basis, actually, so does the buyer persona. So if you would ask me, you know, 6, 7 months ago, how are people buying? I mean, we're testing this thing out 2 or 3 weeks and then they would be coming and buying in tranches. Like, I mean, and I'm saying like, hey, we'll take 250 licenses. I'm like, in my mind, obviously I'm like, why don't we start with 50? You know, like, why don't we, why don't we like make this successful? But everybody has budget and everybody's, you know, has this shopping list of AI where people started coming and buying in tranches 7, 8 months ago. Now it started to go through more of like your traditional, hey, I need to get security and legal, then we could kick off a POC, then we want to start with 25 users or 50 users. And in that process, now we're doing essentially all, you know, 12-month agreements. But there's still these people that are like, hey, I, you go month to month. We've seen a handful of, you know, hey, let's just do 6 months. Um, and then we'll, from a compensation standpoint, we will on a 6-month, we'll compensate fully. And the thought process behind that is like, it's, they're committing to us for 6 months. Like if we, if we can't help them achieve their goal, then that's unless somebody who said like, hey, I'm going to, you're going to build the next Meta, right? Outside of us saying things like that, like, hey, if you're trying to build these point solutions, you know, pricing pages and and things of that nature. If we can't succeed on that, then that's probably a bigger problem. Right. Hmm.

So you're paying out a rep on a full 12-month deal, even on a 6-month contract.

Yeah, we are right now.

Wow.

All right.

Um, I guess you guys have to be like pretty profitable. You don't have to answer this question, but like at 50 million, at 50 employees over $40 million ARR growing at that rate, you know, you got a lot of license to maneuver.

The numbers are really good for us from a business perspective, for sure. And I think one of the things that we actually have that nobody else has is, you know, at StackBlitz, we built this web container technology. And so one of the things, if you've tried all these tools, I'm sure you already saw it. Like there's a reason that Bolt is way faster than every other tool. Because we don't have to go call VMs. It's all browser-based. So spinning it up on your local, which the speed there, assuming that you have internet, is gonna be lightning fast versus, I mean, there's not enough VMs for all these AI tools. It's just not. And so now you're not even competing with that. It's all browser-based. And so from a security standpoint, it's insanely secure. And 'cause once you refresh that browser, you know, now you're onto different components. And then from a speed perspective on the browser, it just, you get your results a lot faster.

Makes sense.

So that means our profitability, because it's not, you're not paying for the VMs.

Okay. So when you're growing at this type of pace, what have been some of the biggest learnings? Like not many people will ever go through this experience.

Yeah.

What are the things that you've taken away from it?

Yeah, it's, it's actually funny as my, I started with this process, like my fears started showing up more than learnings. And because it's very easy to sit back and say, hey, we have so many leads, so many deals, our growth is great. Everybody's high-fiving each other happy, right? It's very easy to get set in that. My biggest fear is how many deals am I not in? How many deals did I not even get a, get a, get a swing of the bat on? Or how many times am I coming late where they said, hey, you know, I've already tried Lovable or Replit, you know, and now I'm getting to you. Like, that is, that is actually what I'm more focused on versus like, what are my learnings? But I think a few of my biggest learnings have been what technology can we implement to keep the team smaller. I mean, if you think of a traditional SaaS model, a rep carries a million, million and a half, maybe a $2 million number, depending on what the business is doing at that rate, right? Their compensation, depending on where they live is, you know, is what it is. And, and that's what it is. But now it's like, well, what if I can be aggressive in compensating the right people? And that $2 million number What if they could do $5 million? What if I could automate everything to where our call recording software then automatically updates our CRM and then gives a preview of what the follow-up email should be? So you just have to go in and spend 10% of the time that you would prior to using your Apple Notes tab on your computer and then going through it and drafting, you know what I mean? And so we've been able to grow at a really good clip. While keeping the team small and not feeling like we're missing out on things and not feeling like reps are drowning. And that's been a wild experience for me because, I mean, I mean, you hear the whole cliché, like you go to a board meeting. All right. If you got to go add another $30 million in revenue, how many bodies is that? You get a 75% close rate.

You know what I mean?

Like, yeah. And that's not that they get today.

How have you built this like call recording to CRM update email drafting thing?

Yeah, so we use a tool called Sibyl.

Oh, Sibyl does that.

I don't know if you're familiar with it or not, but, uh, I actually love it. What— when I first started using it was actually at a previous company, and what I really loved about it is they did a really good job of getting all of the notes for what your follow-up should be And the first piece was, hey, here's the notes and here's your follow-up email. And it got to a point where I was like, man, this is actually really good. Like you could technically just send this. I would never tell somebody just let it rip, but like it got really good at doing that and itemizing everything out. And I think what I liked about that from like a sales perspective too is sometimes salespeople are uncomfortable sending stuff out. They're uncomfortable. Putting in just sales in general, like, hey, is this too forward? Am I asking too much? Should I not say this over email? Right? And I think they just did a really good job of calling a spade a spade and feeling comfortable with doing that. And then they just continued to enhance its system to take the calls and do data mapping to update your CRM. And the more and more we can update a CRM without having a rep go in there and do anything, that like just the better off it's going to be and gives them more time to go back and just get in front of customers and get in front of prospects.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. We're, we are hardcore about this, the same thing. I want to switch topics slightly. So before we started recording, you mentioned how like your approach is to, to empower, be hands-off and like let the team run. I'm curious if you can just share a little bit about that and how this, that fits into this, uh, it's like high, super high growth environment.

Yeah. I'll, uh, I'll give you a story of where I really felt like me adopting this was, was the right play. And then I've just kind of carried it with me. So probably like maybe 10 years ago, I joined a company and I essentially inherited a team and and I also inherited who was leading the team, who then got pushed to an IC and kind of like now under my leadership, which is a little awkward, obviously, because it's like, hey, you just came in, you took this person's job, and then they get demoted, for lack of better words. And I realized that these people are going to know the product way better than I am. I realized that these are senior people at this company that are going to know way more than than, than I am. And the last thing that I should be doing is trying to make sure that they're keeping up to date on all products and features and making sure they know what we need to be doing as a company. What they really want to do is they want to just go make money. That's why most people in sales get into sales in the first place. So I, I took a, an approach that I just felt, and this is how I was as a rep, and I was like, hey, I know there's probably I probably didn't give it enough credit, but I never, I would tell my managers like, hey, I don't need you to bother me or reach out to me. Like I'll always hit my number and if I need you, I'll reach out to you. Obviously that didn't go well all the time, but it's kind of the approach that I've taken with my teams to give them enough leash to run and go be free and go flourish. Now the caveat to that and the dangerous part of that is you could give them enough rope where they could trip up on that rope and it'd be pretty bad. But I'm a firm believer of if you're hiring people that understand that they just need to do their job and you take everything else off of their plate, right? So, hey, you have 7 calls today, which means you're also going to have 7 follow-ups and then you're going to probably have your 5 POCs that you need to check in and so on and so forth, right? Your traditional salesperson day. What else do you need? The reality is, is every salesperson, myself included, is going to complain, hey man, if we just had these features and functionality, we close every single deal, right? You hear it every day. But then it's like, all right, well, what if I can go push those features and functionality? What if I can speed up that process? What if I can go have internal conversations or internal blockers with the finance department on how we're going to get creative with this deal ahead of having this person then have to come to me and do all this. So my job has turned from, you guys go be great, we've hired you to be great, you're still here because you are great, go execute. Everything that you don't want to deal with, everything that I can take off your plate, give it to me and I'll do that. And I think that builds a barrier, a community of trust when I follow through with doing that for them, because now we're playing for something much bigger than let me just go chase that deal. And go ahead.

And how do you keep people accountable in that environment?

Yeah, I mean, so I'll have, I have two concrete meetings that we're always going to have every week. We're going to have a team meeting every single week where we're going to talk about what's going on. And I very much look at, I come from a, from a sports background, I understand that not every rep is going to hit quota every single month. So some months, you know, this rep is going to be our 30-point scorer, and the next month they may sit on the bench, but this other rep is going to kind of come up. And so I very much cultivate a talk about that type of environment where, you know, I call it a locker room, but like we have adults policing themselves. Because it impacts the whole team. It doesn't just impact me when I have to go report to the board or to the CEO. It impacts the whole team doing well. And in addition to that, in that team meeting, they know what they need to do and I'll tell them, I'll sign off and say, all right, these are the things I need you guys to do. Like I'm only as good as the data you give me. And guess what? If I start catching heat from the top, then the heat just trickles down. Right? Like, as long as you guys are keeping this whole thing up to date. I'll take care of everything else. But I can tell you like a real world example, this again, you could imagine like this doesn't always go well. And so I had been taking something up with the CRO at a previous company and went to bat to get things done and it got done. And I had a rep, a great rep, a rep I still talk to today. Um, didn't follow through with their accountability on a couple of things. And I just call it out. Like, hey, this, this is a two-way street, right? Like, I just did this. I'm asking for you to do this. This isn't a partnership anymore. Now this is just something kind of— you're leaving me high and dry. And instead of it being met with like an argument, it's like, that's my bad. That's, that's my bad. I got you on the next one, you know? And so I, I do try to build like that kind of locker room community in the team and understanding like we, yes, this is a, this is a lone wolf sport that we play. But at the end of the day, like we, if you want to go get that next round of funding or if you want to increase our share price, it's going to come with everybody in the confines of this room. And yes, obviously it's only as good as marketing and product and all that kind of stuff can take you, right? But We have to control the controllable. And if in, in, I'll even say in interviews though, like I only hire adults. An adult has nothing to do with an age. It has to be your accountability and responsibility to show up every single day and do your job. And if you need to be handheld, if you need to be white gloved and all these types of things, I'm probably not the best manager for you. And that's okay. Right? Like, I'm not saying that there's, there's leaders that should lead the way that I do, but I found it to be very, very successful. And I have numerous reps that have been like, hey, I don't know what, what you've done, but you've kind of unlocked me to allow me just to do this, right?

It's—

I think that's the goal. How do you unlock all of your reps to just go be great? And that's how I—

do you have to fire fast in that scenario? It's like, look, I hire adults, and if you come in, you're not an adult, then Yeah, I'll fire fast.

I will fire fast. And the firing has actually less to do on, are you closing revenue? And more so on, are you doing what you're supposed to be doing? Are you a good fit for this team? Because it's not just me. You're going to talk to all these other reps. Like, I need everybody on the same page here. And if you're a bad apple here, You know, maybe you can, maybe you're the greatest closer of all time, but if you're an asshole, like we don't have a spot here for you. Yeah. Yeah.

That makes sense. Um, all right. I want to move us into the quickfire before we wrap up. What do you think separates a good sales leader from a truly great one?

Good sales leader from a truly great one. I think understanding where the space is going and getting ahead of that. And, and then how do you incorporate that with your team? So what I mean by that is 8 months ago, it was all about vibe coding, all about vibe coding. And these are the specific topics that we started talking about on sales calls. And then all, and then you can shift it to say, hey, I see this coming. Like it's not about vibe coding anymore. People are going to want certain integrations and people are going to want certain things. So now you start infusing questions into the sales cycle and, and, and helping your team like ask these specific questions that most people, most people probably aren't thinking about, that's going to kind of change the dynamic of your sales cycle. Right. So that's kind of how you can impact your team. I've obviously already talked about like my number one goal every day that I wake up out of bed is clearing the runway is what I call it. Like my job is to clear your entire runway to, to do your job. But I think the greatest, the greatest sales leaders that I've had the privilege of working for genuinely learn a lot. And learning a lot doesn't mean something about a product or doesn't necessarily mean a sales cycle. Like I just learn a lot on how they work, why they work, who they incorporate to get their agenda done. And then how that impacts everybody else from like a trickle-down effect. But I mean, one of, to this day, like one of my favorite things we did as a sales organization, and this was from like SDRs to our strategic reps. Every March we did a March Madness and we would vote as peers, like who pitches the product the best, who does these things the best. And like, it's just amongst your peers, which is arguably the most terrifying thing in front of your peers versus a stranger. But I think if you build a community of learning and just betterment, the impact that that has well beyond when everybody leaves that company and moves on is is, is something to, to probably be proud of. And I think that's the goal is every time you, you leave something, yeah, you want revenue to rise and you want to have people get promoted and all that type of stuff. But I, but I think you want them to leave with something, some type of imprint that you've had on them, whether it's leadership, whether it's personal life, et cetera.

What's the most common advice you give to new managers?

Get very comfortable with being uncomfortable. I've been saying this for, I mean, probably since I was in high school. Like, the two things are you need to be very comfortable being uncomfortable, and you gotta control the controllables. There's very few things that we can control, like very, very few. So you always have to control those. And then the second piece of that is like, you're going to be put in uncomfortable situations all the time. Whether it's internally from a policy perspective, sales call, whatever, like you have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Yeah. What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn in your career?

Man, I may have been like 2 years into my sales career, had a 7-figure deal with a massive insurance company and like the person literally told me we were winning. So I'm like, all right, great. I'm in, you know, my early 20s. I'm like, this is amazing. I'm literally counting my commission check. This is gonna be the largest deal. Long story short, I half-assed like the RFP. I kind of just sent it to some people. And when we lost, I had built a relationship with this buyer that they were like, hey, let me give you some advice. Obviously I wanted it. And they were like, the RFP that you sent, it had different like colors that you were filled in, that you filled it out. Like you didn't take the time to go address, hey, this is filled out in red, this was filled out in black, these fonts are different. Hey, did we miss a question? And ultimately, that lack of, of, of attendance to something this simple made us nervous that when we run into a really big problem, are you going to pay attention to it?

Hmm.

And that just like, was the ultimate gut punch, but something I've taken with me every single day moving That's a tough one. Yeah, it's, it's, it's well known.

Last question. What's the best book you've read in the last 12 months?

The Art of War.

Oh yeah. The Art of War.

I just finished it a couple months ago and I just picked up the, uh, what's the other one I just picked up? The Autonomy of Habit.

Atomic Habits.

Atomic Habits. Thank you. Um, I just picked that one up like a month ago and just finished The Art of War a couple months ago. The Art of War, it ironically was a read that was a lot more challenging than I was expecting. Like I had to keep rereading it because there's very few words on the page. You're like, oh, I'm going to fly through this thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

But then you got to like reread it and you're like, oh, okay.

I just quoted The Art of War on a panel I was on like 2 hours ago. So big. Oh, really?

I love it.

Well, Brian, this was awesome. I appreciate you, uh, you jumping on and, uh, congrats on the epic growth. That's, that's, uh, wild stuff. All of us.

Yeah.

Everybody listening, like, you know, you want to find yourself there at some point in your career. So, uh, it's a fun ride.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I appreciate you having me on, Kyle.

Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes and be sure Be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.