????[Warmly Update 78] We shrunk -9% intentionally & I couldn’t be prouder

This is a formerly private list of Warmly’s closest friends, family, investors & supporters. They are now public - please feel free to share them liberally for the good of the SAAS realm

??Read on to learn: Why we shrunk intentionally, my personal reflections on 2024 & why we gender-seggregated our onsite Airbnbs.

What do we do again? Warmly is a signal-based orchestration platform that helps revenue teams find the best warm leads and automatically converts them while they’re still warm.

??Ask:

• Senior Engineering hiring (Brazil): We’re looking for warm intro referrals to excellent Brazilian engineers. Not necessarily to hire them but to ask them for intros to their friends they trust that might be looking. Our engineering team is based there and we pay top of the market. $2k referral fee if you’re on a chain of referrals that leads to our next hire!
• SDR Agency Intros: Seeking intros to anyone who places SDRs (ideally non-US SDRs). I’m curious to see how we can partner together to grow their business by offering our customers to them as prospects.

TL;DR:

We shrunk instead of growing because we brought on non-ICP customers so we decided to right-size our book of business before the new fiscal year (still grew 3x which is cool). We crushed the quarter in sales & hired our first exec - as head of engineering! I write my reflections on 2024 here too.

?? KPIs Last Month:

Total Warmly MRR → $234,543

• Warmly MRR: $184,726 (M/M growth in May = -9.88%)
• Nametags by Warmly MRR: $49,816

Additional KPIs

• Pipeline Created: $1,120,165
• SQOs: 71

??Tweets & Posts: See my, Melissa and Keegan’s LinkedIn profiles for:

> Teasing 6sense for mailing my mom and dad a legal notice ( maximus greenwald )

> Showing how team got a 15% meeting booking rate from started Warm Calls ( Keegan Otter (Software Cowboy ??) )

> Announcing we’re hiring SMB & MM AEs ( Melissa Gaglione?? )

?? Accomplishments/Wins:?

• Finishing Quarter 109% to goal: Holiday szn is always difficult for sellers and when I did our projections a year ago, I was not savvy enough as a revenue-thinker to understand this dynamic so I mandated $$ growth in Q4. Despite this headwind, combined with two others (revenue leadership was kinda absent 2x’ing the sales team and thus left closers to their own devices, and we had a company onsite 3rd week January where sellers had to focus on team stuff > closing). Excited to see that not 1 but both of our ISR team (recently rebranded - SMB AE team) hit their accelerators for the quarter for overachievement
• First in-person event for prospects & customers: we have never held an event before. We’re just a baby startup. But we took a risk and invited prospects/customers to show up in person in Austin, Texas. We offered to fly in 5 customers too. To our surprise the event sold out (80 sign ups for 60 spots) & it was literally at the same time as an Apollo.io community event pop up (we both were courting GTM folks to join us). It was really really amazing to come together and have our engineers meet our customers, our CSMs meet our prospects and to be human beings together talking about the warm part of warmly and warm leads. For transparency of Going CLEAR, we also had to deal with something I never thought about or expected, our first-ever case of harassment (by a non-Warmly participant) :(. I am proud of our team for dealing with it appropriately and swiftly. For founders/HR folks reading this - happy to take DMs on how we’re thinking about building protocol around this.
• Hired first Exec at Warmly: I often describe Warmly as a bunch of pirates on a pirate ship in search of adventure. We’re hacky, scrappy, and most of us have a bolt or two loose. But as we grow, so too does our scaling needs & complexities. So we hired a special leader: someone who is a pirate and a ship captain. Welcome to Binil Thomas as Head of Engineering! Binil most recently saw rocketship growth well past our stage at another GTM tech company Orum. Grateful to our customer/vendor/partner Orum and their leadership under Karthik & Jason who, from working with him for 4 years, knew that Binil would help us navigate and scale our engineering department. It is interesting to note for the sake of Going CLEAR that 3 years ago we pre-maturely hired an exec when we had 0 revenue and needed to pivot twice more. That mistake was a blessing in disguise (he turned into our founder leadership coach), but only in hindsight can I confidently say I think we’re ready this time around for this level of leader.

?? Failures/Learnings:

• My learnings & self-feedback on me as CEO in 2024: As a first time founder & CEO I thinking it’s critical to learn as much as possible and one of the best ways to do that is through self-analysis and reflection. I wrote my own job description & self-expectations that my leadership team co-edited with me at the beginning of the year (here) and now am reflecting on how I did relative that. This is raw, honest, revealing & I have room for improvement. Here it is
• Shrinking -9% from firing 11% of our customers: I wrote about this at length in my public post here. But the gist is that I allowed us to sell non ICP customers in an effort to get as many deals in the door as possible. Now that we’ve grown and see who is successful on Warmly and who is not, we are shedding customers who won’t get value from us as we go upmarket with our new product strategy. We love & appreciate these people who took a chance on us and are here to support them in the transition to better-fit tools. I need my CSMs focused on our happy, growing customers that we can materially change their business with more warm leads. An interesting but unsurprising result that we pulled from questions we got on Linkedin: 66% of fired customers came from inbound, whereas only 33% of fired customers came from outbound.
• Gender segregated Airbnb’s: We had an onsite in Austin, Texas for the whole company. This was an important onsite for us to bring the team together since we basically doubled in size since the last one. For 5 years of Warmly onsites we always got 1 airbnb and shared it. Same bathrooms but gender segregated rooms. I never really thought much of it… who wouldnt wanna hack around together and chill like roommates. And when we planned to be in Airbnb’s again for this 38 person onsite, a lot of folks were like wuuuuut. Folks expected hotel rooms. People had fair concerns like wanting to rest alone between company events, not wanting coworkers to see them in pajamas or brushing their teeth. Even sharing a room with someone of the same gender was concerning for some. While I empathized with these concerns, I was really sad because I wanted to promote some core values I care about maintaining: scrappiness (airbnb = way cheaper than hotel) and team unity (shared bonding over morning bagels and late night hacking). We all know Alan snores - it’s just part of the squd haha. I was pretty adamant on not making any changes, but was convinced begrudgingly to be more accommodating. Funny enough like all of the women in my life outside of work were horrified and all of the men didn’t get it. We made 2 key changes: 1) gender segregated Airbnbs and 2) we would offer folks the cost of their Airbnb housing as a stipend to put towards a hotel. This seemed fair. In reflection I think this balance was a good step - we maintained scrappiness and I (personally) felt like a lot of team unity still took place. As CEO of Warmly, I will always have an open door to listen as we grow, and make informed decisions that help Warmsters be their most effective selves to meet our business goals – I just personally wanna keep sharing Airbnbs for as long as folks are down.

??Gratitudes:?

• Andrea Spillmann-Gajek for CSM Advisor
• Guillaume Roux-Romestaing at 11x for great partnership
• Jim & Tom for exhibiting excellent leadership
• Robin Spencer xClearbit for advice on candidates/CS hiring
• Josh Norris ???? for keeping his pulse on the market
• Kellen Casebeer for energizing conversations on GTM engineering
• Adam Robinson for speaking to my team at our onsite
• Chris Walker for speaking to my team at our onsite
• Patrick Nelson & Sarah Reece ?? leads from customers Canopy Tax & Orum for speaking to my team at our onsite

?

Warmly,

Max

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