Starting Something New

Since a lot of you were asking, here is the background story about this new venture we're starting and launching today.

From ProLeads to a New Path

Ever since starting ProLeads in 2014 and joining 500 Startups in Batch 12, I have, a bit unwillingly, become an expert in B2B sales technology.

It all started with a meeting with the godfather of Sales Development, Aaron Ross earlier that same year. I realized that the technology I had built originally for matching people and vendors at trade shows was doing the exact thing that SDRs were doing manually - doing research on contacts and accounts and figuring out what to say to them to get them in a meeting.

"Challenge accepted!"

Building and Automating B2B Sales

I built a prospecting engine that allowed you to add contacts to it and it would do all the research and spit out hyper personalized content for emails. It worked really well, but it was a quite technical user experience and there was no way to send the emails from our system. At the same time I met with Outreach VP of Sales Mark Kosoglow and we decided that it would be great if they could have an api that we could integrate with. Said and done, they built the API and I built the first external integration into Outreach. At the same time I started to get to know Salesloft's founder Kyle Porter who was very successfully chasing Outreach's lead. They also built an API and we partnered and built the first external integration into SalesLoft too.

From Struggles to a New Beginning

Over the years of "normal" startup struggles we decided to bring on a new co-founder in Brendan Short and we re-booted the company as Hexa, and joined the leading B2B accellerator, The Alchemist. We kept on building on our vision that no email to B2B professionals should be a boring generic email and instead it should be hyper personalized without the hassle of having to manually write every email. Things started going quite well, and close to demo-day I went to a Modern Sales Pros event during Dreamforce where I ran into Ben Sardella and we had a nice chat over a beer. It turned out that he and Bryan Franklin had started a company that had a very similar vision, but without the technology to make it efficient enough to scale.

The Breakthrough and a Shift in Focus

A few months later in 2018, OutboundWorks acquired us and we started building the combined vision together with an incredible team and great support from True Ventures. We scaled like crazy and booked closed won deals for our clients like never before. We had successfully automated every single step from prospecting, to sending personalized emails, handling replies, and booking the meeting with the sales person! We had truly built an automated SDR... However, at this time we started to notice a worrying trend.

Reply rates were dropping sharply, and to my big demise, personalization had ZERO impact on the conversion rates. We were quite puzzled but kept on pushing through. Then came another blow. Customers that we had closed millions in closed won deals for started to churn. We were even more puzzled. What turned out to have happened was that VP's at our customers started looking at the cost of their sales reps’ software tools, and they saw a big item that said OutboundWorks. They went on to ask their reps if they were using OutboundWorks to justify the cost, and the reps answered “Nope, I’m not using that…” BECAUSE WE HAD AUTOMATED EVERY STEP OF THE PROCESS! ??♂? We ended up selling the company without having fully realized our vision of what we knew would create a better world for B2B professionals.

Sales Emails Are Broken—What’s Next?

Fast forward a few years to the ChatGPT launch moment where the whole industry changed again over night. Now you could truly create great emails to anyone and it scales incredibly well. There’s only one problem. The reply rates decline from automated sales emails did not stop back in 2018 when we started seeing it. Instead, it has continued its race to the bottom. About at this time I came across Per Clingweld, Kevin ?stlin and Aage Reerslev and the incredible team at Zaplify. I started working with them and applied my “Speed of Iteration” methodology there and I was very impressed by the quick adoption and implementation of this new method of building companies. The work and iterations eventually led us to the path we’re on now. Launching something new.

Ok, so sales over email is broken, personalization doesn’t really make any difference, and automation makes sales people not feel the value that is provided. At the same time, outreach anxiety of every B2B professional is still very much real. At least that’s true for me and a lot of people I’ve talked to. I don’t know what to write to get started. I’m hit with communication overload across email and linkedin and other channels where I have a hard time to keep up. And I’m not even doing any sales these days. I purely want to maintain and grow my network. I struggle to prioritize which conversations I should focus on first and then what I should say. Sure, I use chatGPT to write some messages, but it is still a bit eerie in how it doesn’t quite sound like me and how I would say things.

"What if AI could handle the heavy lifting, and humans could focus on connecting, one conversation at a time?"

What if there was a product that would access all of my contacts in my different channels, monitor them and do research, keep track of important events, prioritize who I should talk to in what order, and then also write the message to them that truly sounds like me? What if that product also gave me new suggestions of who might be a good addition to my network? What if that product also allowed me to have multiple different intents of driving different types of conversations? And what if that product allowed AI to do things AI is good at, and let humans do what humans are good at, connecting human to human.

Introducing Andsend: Overcoming Communication Overload

This is what we have built at Andsend and launching today, and I’m very happy to be apart of this fantastic founding team!

Looking back, I never set out to become an expert in sales technology. It happened out of necessity—solving problems that kept coming up in B2B sales. But now, with Andsend, we’re taking those lessons and applying them far beyond sales. This isn’t just a tool for SDRs; it’s for any B2B professional overwhelmed by communication overload. Whether it’s managing your network, prioritizing conversations, or dealing with the constant flood of information, AndSend helps you take control. The AI handles the research, prioritization, and messaging, leaving you to do the simplest part: just review, and send.

Sign up here, managing up to 50 contacts is free: https://www.andsend.com