Cabal’s Founding Story

There’s a secret behind Sendoso’s success.?

On the surface, yes, Sendoso is a good idea, there is a clear market need and excellent execution. But it’s Kris Rudeegraap’s unique approach to community building that has propelled Sendoso so quickly to be the category leader. It’s also the founding inspiration for Cabal.

Kris is known for his positivity, relentlessness and creativity. If there’s not a clear solution to a problem, he’ll invent one. In fact, Sendoso was founded by Kris inventing a solution to a problem he faced as a seller. As Sendoso started taking off, he realized how powerful his community of customers, vendors, partners, and investors was to the business’ success.

Recognizing the power of community isn’t terribly insightful, but the way Kris engaged and rewarded this network of supporters was. Where other founders were hindered by administrative overhead and morass of SaaS tools, Kris blazed his own trail.

Instead of sending a thankful email or swag, Kris recognized Sendoso’s committed advocates by making them advisors and granting them stock options.

Most lawyers would admonish founders at the mere idea of giving small equity grants to a community of advocates, reserving such rewards for big-time advisors that expect 25-100 basis points. Kris realized the status quo was meritless. In fact, by sharing equity with his community, he could transform Sendoso from a company into a movement.?

He was right. In Kris’s words: “Our advisor strategy has led to millions of dollars of ARR, hundreds of thousands saved on recruiting fees, and accelerated our category leadership.”

“Our advisor strategy has led to millions of dollars of ARR, hundreds of thousands saved on recruiting fees, and accelerated our category leadership.”

When I first learned of this strategy, I knew it would be the future of company-building. But I also wondered how Kris kept it all organized.?

With no easy option, he had? hacked his way through it: Docusign for handling advisor agreements, Carta for budgeting, GSheets for directory, Salesforce, LinkedIn and Lever exports for identifying contribution opportunities, and a few dozen bespoke internal apps and scripts to stitch it all together.

As far as founding inspiration goes, this was a goldmine. Of course founders want to align the interests of their community with the interests of their business. And of course they want to keep their community of supporters updated and make it easy for them to contribute. They just didn’t have the right tool.

This is why we created Cabal. We help founders build their community of supporters, keep them updated and get their help. This community has so much potential energy trapped because today’s tools aren’t built for this dynamic. Cap table software is finance and legal-focused and collaboration tools are designed for high-frequency internal use. We designed Cabal to help founders keep their community organized, updated, and actively contributing to the company’s mission.

We help founders build their community of supporters, keep them updated and get their help.

For example, Cabal allows companies to sync Salesforce and identify where investors and advisors can help with warm intros or referrals with sales prospects. Cabal provides templates, mail merge capabilities, and drafting workflows to make it easy for founders to ask for help and even easier for investors and advisors to make an impact.

When founders build their community as a network of aligned contributors, they become more resilient, more attractive, and likely to succeed.???

We want to take a moment to congratulate Kris and the entire Sendoso team on their $100M Series C this week. Thank you for inspiring a new way of building and rewarding your community. Cabal will make this equitable approach to company-building the new standard.

Listen to Kris and I share the full Cabal and Sendoso founding stories on Callin.