Founder-Led Sales: From 2% to 20% with 10-Hour Custom Demos
Two years on Quora and Reddit. Zero customers. Yega Kumarappan and his two co-founders had no sales experience. They bet that founder-led sales could beat the B2B sales playbook. Founders will hear how Paperflite grew from a 400K seed to 500 B2B customers and seven figures in ARR while selling SaaS without sales experience. Yega shares the founder-led sales process that took conversion from 2-3% to 17-20%, why he spent 8 to 10 hours setting up a custom demo for every startup sales prospect, and how the team built qualified inbound from Quora and Reddit in their first two years. He also breaks down why Paperflite never raised after the seed and how he competes against the Seismic-Highspot merger. Plus: the Fortune 500 deal that almost died in their Intercom inbox because the team thought it was a prank, and the founder-led sales tactics that produced 26 enterprise customers in year one. This episode is brought to you by: 💖 Gearheart → Book a free consult and get the first 20 hours free 🔑 Key Lessons 🎯 Founder-led sales starts on forums, not LinkedIn: Yega's team spent two years answering Quora and Reddit questions to build qualified inbound, then converted forum readers via LinkedIn DMs and Intercom. 💰 10-hour custom demos beat generic product tours: Pre-building each prospect's actual Paperflite hub (their content, regions, buyer segments) pushed conversion from 2-3% to 17-20%, validated through A/B testing. 🤝 High-touch onboarding is leverage in founder-led sales: Paperflite manually pulled content from SharePoint and shared drives for the first 50 to 70 customers to lock in retention and learn each industry. 🚀 Profitability buys product freedom: A single 400K seed plus year-two profitability let Paperflite rebuild coaching as AI-native and content creation as Canva-like without VC-led roadmap pressure. 🏢 Position between giants and AI point solutions: Seismic-Highspot consolidation creates one big target above and AI-only entrants leave gaps below - mid-tier with deep industry context wins the middle. 📉 Verbal commitments don't predict conversion: Marketing leaders told Paperflite "we love this, we'll buy it" in validation calls and then didn't - rely on the conversations to learn, not the commitments. 🛠️ Run A/B tests on your B2B sales process, not just your product: Paperflite split prospects into self-serve vs we set it up for you cohorts and used the conversion gap (2-3% vs 17-20%) to commit to high-touch demos permanently. Chapters What Paperflite does and the size of the business Origin story at Cognizant and the content distribution problem Leaving stable jobs to start Paperflite Raising the 400K seed in 2018 Validating the prototype with CMOs who didn't buy The Netflix experience for sales content Finding the first customer through Intercom The S&P Global Fortune 500 deal that looked like a prank Two years on Quora and Reddit to build inbound Founder-led sales without self-serve onboarding The 8 to 10 hour custom demo playbook A/B testing demos: 2-3% vs 17-20% conversion Why Paperflite never raised again after seed Competing with the Seismic-Highspot merger Positioning the mid-tier sweet spot Lightning round Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/483 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email