Episode 766 | Close.com's Amazing Run to $40M ARR (with Steli Efti)
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It's Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. Today, I'm joined by four-time guest, Steli Efti, co-founder of Close.com. We have what I consider to be an amazing conversation about their pretty amazing growth, being a mostly bootstrapped company, to $40 million in ARR. I

I love talking with Steli because he is so thoughtful, but also very passionate. And he and I have known each other for more than 10 years. And so there's just this kind of common frame of reference and this understanding of each other's history that allows us to go pretty deep pretty quick on topics that I think matter to entrepreneurs. It's a great conversation and I hope you enjoy it.

Before we dive into that, Exit Strategy, my new book, is available on Amazon and Audible. You can, of course, go to exitstrategybook.com to get the links or go to Amazon or Audible and search for Exit Strategy by Rob and Sherry Walling. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Steli. Steli Efti, welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. So good to be back.

It's your fourth appearance. Your last appearance was May of 2020. Wow. May of 2020, if that date rings a bell. And it was something about how to sell during a pandemic. And you were doing a lot of talking about it. I don't think fondly of those days, pandemic days. I believe you're a four-time MicroConf speaker. I was trying to recall. It's always hard to remember. I think so. And you're the founder of Close.com. Close.com.

Your H1 is "Stop using slow cluttered CRMs." You guys have been in business for, what is it, like 13 years? Am I remembering correctly? Yeah, I think the product has been launched in January 2013, so 12 years.

And I tend to refer to you as mostly bootstrapped, meaning you raised a little bit of funding early on and then never raised again. Is that still accurate? Yeah, that's correct. Cool. And do you want to give folks an idea of where the business stands today in terms of, you know, if you want to, if you're willing to share ARR and employee headcount? Yeah, so we're at 110 people, fully remote and over 40 million in revenue. Good for you, man. Brilliant.

Hell of a business. So when people hear this, there's a good chunk of this audience who will know you. They will know you from this podcast. They'll know you from MicroConf. And then there's a chunk who don't yet. And when I hear someone saying they built a SaaS company over 12 years, I mean, it's like kind of SaaS OG, right? SaaS was a thing, but I mean, that's a long time. And to also build a business of that magnitude without a bunch of funding, just a high level, like looking back, has the journey felt easy?

as long as that sounds, as 12 years of working on the same project? Or has it kind of flown by? It may not be the right word, but have you kind of just, day to day you execute and suddenly you're here? It's both. Life is a paradox in many ways and it feels both much longer and much shorter depending on the mood, the day, you know. But it's

But sometimes I feel so young and then I feel so old. And the time spent between those two sensations doesn't always have to be that long. So similarly with running a company like this, sometimes things are just flowing and you reflect back and you go, holy shit.

This has been a hell of a journey and it's been pretty smooth. And then there are moments where there's trouble and you're like, how much longer am I going to be doing this? This is too difficult. So it's like depending on the mood and the day, but it's been a, it's definitely been a very gratifying journey for sure. A really amazing journey. I can imagine. Yeah. And you have, you have one co-founder? Two. We have three co-founders.

And are they all, is everyone still working? Yeah. That is probably one of our biggest accomplishments and that probably trickled into a lot of the other things that made Close special is that the three of us have been working as co-founders. We did a couple of other things before we ended up pivoting to Close. So we've been working together as co-founders for 14 years and

And I would say that our relationship today is closer than ever before. And we are such different people. 14 years, there's a lot of life that happens. So a lot of moments of crisis where everything pushes you to show up at your worst or to expect the worst or to, you know, be a little bit more selfish than you ought to be or see somebody else like awful, be selfish and like all these potential for conflicts. And usually these things are the things that sort of break co-founders apart.

just like any other very intense relationship. And we've been able to work really hard on the relationship and navigate these tricky waters. And all three still work at the company and still work very intensely together. It's really impressive on a couple fronts. Number one, it's very unusual to have co-founders who are able to stay together that long. But it's also really interesting to

that all three of you have still felt so engaged with the business. Because usually what happens, even if you have two, and especially with three, at some point one of them is like, well, I have a life change. I have a wife and kids and I want to just move on. Or I have an idea and I'm bored with it. You know, whatever. There's reasons. We all move on from stuff. And with three people, there's a lot more variables. So it's...

really striking that not only are the three of you still, as you said, very close, I mean, you're probably really good friends, I'd imagine, working together that long, but that all three of you still feel like the business is invigorating to you, you know? And like, quote unquote, the best use of your time is really impressive. Yeah.

I think in reality, just like anything else that you really invest long term in and in the other relationship that goes on for a very long time, you're going to have ups and downs. It's not like all ups, no matter how great the end result is or how great the current

status of affairs is there have been times where some of us were less engaged than others. There have been many times that one of us or even all of the three of us were like, what are we even doing with our lives? Is this really what we want to be doing for the rest of our life? You know, like we've had all kinds of crisis of meaning, you know, and all kinds of other things. I think what has kept us together has been a combination of being very honest with each other and

trusting that you can be honest and that you can't be frustrated or can't tell people how you really feel and you don't have to hide, don't have to pretend. You're not going to be judged. Nobody's going to, if you say I'm really stressed out or I'm not, I'm

I am burned out. I'm not feeling that inspired. I don't want, I don't know if I'll keep want to do this. You don't have to worry that your other two co-founders are not going to conspire with a board to push you out and get your equity or some other thing, right? Like there's a tremendous amount of trust to be honest. I think we were all three quite wise in many times recognizing that this is an emotional state that I'm in or a phase that

And maybe this is the truth and I should act on it, but I can't act on it right now. It's too hot. I need to let it cool down and simmer down. I need to look at it from a number of perspectives and then I can make a good decision. But I shouldn't just knee jerk act because it's been a tough couple of weeks or something. And I think that more often than not, after we've had sort of times of crisis, it went and there was something exciting on the horizon or something engaging on the horizon that

And then the other thing is, I think that the three of us have built so much of a commitment to each other as well, that that also sort of over the years, we've showed up so much for each other that there's a sort of a bond that's very strong. And a recognition that, you know, yes, maybe there's a shiny, cool co-founder over there that's flirting with you at a bar about a new AI startup, you know, and everything's going to be simpler and more fun. But usually that's bulls**t.

And usually all problems that I have here, I'll take with me in other situations. So why not fix the problem here with people I really trust and really respect instead of just hopping to the next most exciting thing to run away from my problems or this company's problems? I think that all three of us have sort of

have that, which people don't usually always bring to the table, that sort of like perspective or a little bit of wisdom. And that has saved us, I think, from making decisions that ultimately I don't believe that at any point, anything that we thought about of doing that would have been more fun or more exciting would have been as fulfilling and successful as what we're currently doing.

It's a mature perspective for sure. And as you said, a lot of entrepreneurs have this, what do you call it, shiny object syndrome or ADD or grass is greener on the other side type thing that, as you said, maybe it's a co-founder, maybe it's an idea, maybe it's an opportunity, or maybe it's just frustration or burnout. Because you do anything for...

for 13 years, 12, 13 years, you hit points of being very unmotivated, uninterested in it. I mean, I've been married almost 25 years. I've been doing this podcast for almost 15. And I talk about the same thing, right? It's like there are ups when it's great and there are downs when it's like, ooh, this is not going well at all. And I really resonate with the fact that you said, but when it's not going well,

you say, I'm not going to make a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Is really what you were saying. Like a permanent solution is to like, I'm bailing, right? I'm shutting it down, I'm walking away, I'm selling my shares or I'm just not going to work on it anymore. And that I think is something that a lot of people don't have. It's crazy the maturity and loyalty, it sounds like, that the three of you have for each other. So it's really quite striking. Yeah.

Yeah, I think honestly, Rob, when I think back at like our success, you know, we've been, we've done some great things at a time, but I think most consistently, it's not been that we've been so brilliant that's gotten us to where we are. It's been that we have,

consistently avoided being stupid, right? It's that sort of like that Charlie Munger quote of like how far you can come in life if you consistently can avoid being stupid. And that's definitely something that I, looking back, there are very tempting times to be stupid, right? There's times where it's almost impossible not to act stupid as a founder. And in those times, I think that we've had the ability to sort of

disconnect how we feel and realize that that may be the truth and should be acted on, but it very likely isn't. So what is the right action is to, you know, just hold that emotion or hold that frustration or hold that anger or fear or greed and go...

You know, in Germany, they say, like, go pregnant with it. Like, just walk with it a little bit. Just carry it for a couple of days. Talk to a number of people. Marinate on it. Instead of instantly making a decision, especially decisions that can't be easily reversed, right? Where you walk through a door you can't go back from.

And most people will act when they're overwhelmed with fear, with greed, with whatever it is. That's why I think a lot of companies don't reach their potential because they kill themselves. They commit suicide rather than being killed by external forces because they overreact in situations where they should think it through a couple more times before they make a final decision.

Yeah, I think longevity is underrated. Just staying alive and sticking around, both in SaaS, because as we know, it's a long, slow SaaS ramp of death. And I bet if we went back and traced Close, your amazing $40 million company now, but like after 12 months, do you remember what the revenue was? Probably wasn't very much. No, actually, our first three years were pretty amazing. The

I think we're not a good example there, but we came with a lot of unnatural momentum of running this elastic sales agency. We had a bit of a name in the market and all that. So the first three years were great, but we had years where growth stalled and we had years where, especially where it seemed that there were a couple of peers that

that surpassed us, right? Or I even remember at MicroConf in Vegas, meeting a founder and giving him advice. And he was like, you know, whatever it was, 5K in MR after many years of hustling. And then, you know, I was already at like, whatever it was at the time, you know,

9 million, 11 million, whatever it was. And then two years later, his company surpasses mine and it's rocket ships. And if you're long enough in the market, you'll meet people that get richer quicker than you. And you're like, huh, what are we doing wrong? What is going on here? There's always something, huh? There's always something. Oh, man, I...

It's funny because I, so I feel the same way, right? I, let's talk about this podcast, which is one of the, aside from my marriage is probably like the longest thing I've done in my life. I guess raising kids is the other thing. I have an 18 year old, but a lot of this podcast is just showing up 52 weeks a year. Like I've shipped an episode every week since 2010. And some people are like, wow, startups, the rest of us really popular. How, how can I build something like that? And I'm like, I,

I don't know how to do it and not do it over 15 years. But then Sam Parr, who you know from My First Million, is an unknown kid.

I mean, he was very young. He was in his 20s. He sends me an email when I'm in Fresno back in, I was doing drip, so it must have been 2012 or 13. I still have the email on my Gmail account, you know? And it's like, hey, I'm in San Francisco, you know? And he's very bro-y, but it was super fun. And he's like, you should, you know, I'd like you to come to this meetup or something. And I was like, I can't make it. And then Sam Parr starts a podcast. What, how old is my first million? Three years, four years? Like, and it's 10 times the listenership of this. So to me, like you, I'm like, oh,

What happened? What have I been doing with my life? But then I think I have the success that I want. I have the success that I deserve. I have the success that I should be happy. It's like, it's only through comparison that I have ever found myself not being happy with what I have. Because I have plenty of my life in terms of my family, my professional success, financial success, this podcast, the audience, you know, whatever you look at, comparison is a thief of joy, right? That's the quote. But I feel you that...

the 5k to surpassing you is it's, it happens. And there's a part of me with those examples, these kind of same parts, people that you mentored, and then they have a more successful company than you and all that. I have both joy and pride for them. I'm like happy. I want people to be successful, but being somebody that is ambitious, being somebody that poured a lot of hard work into something and is very self-critical, you do go, what the

what the hell am I? I'm really like, this is proof that I suck at this. Like, I'm not good at this. I'm not, you know, living up. Like there's this idea of full potential, which for most of my life I was chasing and I was like, I just want to grow. I want to live up to my full potential. And I think I'm coming to a stage where, you know, maybe out of convenience, maybe out of wisdom at old age, I come to this, like, what is this even? If you ask people of their full potential, we have this imaginary idea where,

if I did everything that I can think of myself doing, possibly, I'm like a superhuman robot, right? Like just, I just do all these things. And that's not realistic. It's easier to think of all these things and to actually live them. And when you live them, when you meet people, I've met a couple of people that are, you know, super successful and very, very well known. And

are working harder than I've ever worked on to live to that sort of wake up in the morning, cold plunge, this, that, every minute is strict and you just fly over to this airport, do this event, fly over there, do that. And when I meet them, there's a part of me now that just, it breaks my heart where I go, wow, they work so hard and they will, they're still on this treadmill and they're not any little bit happier or more fulfilled.

or richer in any substantial way than they were when they weren't. So there's a part where you have to sort of like realize, well, I'm doing the best I can and let's see what's next. Like, let's just see what's next. But there's also something to be said for just consistently showing up, right? Like in the business world, it's just like, if you can not die, if you can just not die while maintaining optimism, fun and curiosity, right?

Which is very difficult. People that just survive usually become more and more cynical. And then just surviving or committing suicide, I don't know what's better. Maybe you should just exit if you're just so miserable, burned out, and depressed. Just keep going. Maybe it's not the right advice. But if you can survive while staying positive,

curious and having some fun, you're going to, I mean, you're already winning, but you're going to, the chances of you eventually like breaking out of whatever plateau you are and experiencing massive success are dramatic, dramatic, right? So if you can do something with longevity, if you could just show up day in, day out with a good attitude and

with the curiosity and open-mindedness to learn, to adjust. We're not just doing the same thing that doesn't work forever, right? And pretend it's working. If you can have that sort of balance of the two, it's really magical superpower. And, you know, I didn't do my podcast for as long as you. I did a ton of content for many, many years. I've been in the space for a long time. But now that I just started doing a bit more content again, it's surprising and humbling to

to get these emails and messages of people that are like, for 10 years, I was reading all your stuff and blah, blah. Steli did this for me. Or like with employees, this is a fun little experience that I have now that we are hiring people. And for the past couple of years,

consistently people would either be like oh I remember watching you or seeing you at microconf and I thought maybe one day I'll work for a guy like that and now I'm at this company or people saying oh when I said when I announced on LinkedIn I joined Close I didn't know about Close before I'd never heard of you before but when I announced it I got like 15 messages on LinkedIn hey say hi to Steli I love this content they're like people you're

big deal people know about you. And I'm like, I don't know, I guess, you know, putting that much out there and like helping that many people and showing up so much is,

the dividends are just like, even many, many years later, I can still benefit from that. My business still benefits from that. And same with you. You have such an incredible reputation. You had such a incredible impact to so many people. And it's hard. Sometimes you just look at the numbers, right? You just look at the download numbers of the YouTube views. And I remember this, Heaton and I had a podcast, the startup chat, right? For five years, we did two episodes every week, but we

But we had plateaued for a number of years. It was just like X amount of downloads, whatever it was. And then we saw all these other people that did like two founders doing a podcast about startup stuff. And some of them were like millions of downloads. And there was some frustration in the room, right? I remember I was frustrated about it. But when I think about it, there were thousands of founders that were listening to our episodes that bedrocked.

There are hundreds, I've met hundreds of people. Like if you put it in a room, it would be a whole conference of people that I met just from the podcast that told me one way or another, you changed my life. That's a lot. And you know, even meeting one person that tells you that is so moving. It's like, wow, I really had an impact. I really did something good here. But when it's thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, it's a huge number. But we look at a count on a YouTube, it's like 8,000 views or something. You're like, I'm a failure.

I don't matter. Totally. But it compounds if you do it for a long time. I don't want to rant too much about this. And it will benefit your business and your career in many, many ways. And showing up consistently, it's very, very hard to do emotionally, not to get discouraged, not to get distracted. But if you can, it's an incredibly powerful unlock of impact and success. And it's much more fulfilling than just...

just doing some viral thing that gets a bunch of views, but nobody cares. Nobody uses anything that you told them. Nobody, it doesn't really make a difference in their lives. Yeah, no, I fully agree. Obviously, as someone who's been doing this for a while, the numbers, as you said, you know, I know I have a couple of friends who've been doing a podcast for years and they have 2,500 downloads per episode or something, which when I say that, a lot of people think, wow, that's

that's that's obviously a failure but how many of us have 2500 people listening to every word we say on it you know on a show it's like yeah you can have a lot of impact and if you have a big impact even on a small number of people i still think you're moving you know you're you're moving the world right moving it forward i want to ask you a question about if you ever with clothes

had a moment, probably with your co-founders, where I use this expression, I think Peldy said this, Peldy Gozzoni, founder of Balsamiq, said this one time at a microconf, but he said he woke up one day and what was it? He had like deleted the credit card table or they'd been hacked or there was something that happened and he said, well...

I guess it's been a good run. You know, I love that. I like, I guess it's like, he literally thought the business was done and this was years into it. And I had a few of those, you know, I've had a few of those over the years. Is there any one of those, you know, any moment where you guys are like, after the initial, you know, the first year or whatever you're trying to survive, but after that, did you ever think, oh man, this is, this is going to tank us.

No. So I don't have a good story like that. There were many moments of crisis, right? There were many moments where, you know, I mean, last time we talked, it was just around the pandemic when it just started.

it did raise the question, what will this mean? Is this going to be like, will we survive this? How will we survive this? But there've been also many sort of just internal things that happened where we did have like fraudulent attacks on a massive scale, but we were lucky to catch it early enough. And it was more of a, once the crisis was averted, it was like a, oh, if we had caught this a couple of days later, it would have been game over. Like we had some moments like that, but

Never a moment where I thought, this is it, this is it, we're done. No. It is also a mentality thing. And many founders have this. I am much better in a crisis than I am when things are particularly going well. Actually, when things are going really, really well,

It's very hard sometimes to motivate myself. Or sometimes there's a guilt, a weird guilt of like, I know I'm not working as hard as the success right now. Like there's all weird, kind of weird things going on. But when things are going really well, it's not my happiest time. I'm doing okay. I'm learning to get better at this, but it's not my happiest time. When there's a big crisis, not that I don't enjoy it. I really worry. I have anxiety. I have stress. I fear. But there's a deep rooted trust there.

that I know I'm showing up and I'm going to weather this crisis. There's something that just, there's a voice in my head that says, you're going to survive this. You're going to find a solution to this. I don't know where that's coming from, but it's always been there. And we've gone through enough of these that now it's over many, you know, I've been an entrepreneur for like over 20 years, over so many crises, there's like a very deep rooted self-belief

And we had a security issue, I don't know, like two years ago, three years ago, where something happened, something was exposed. Somebody emailed us about that exposure of something. And there was a, it sort of very quickly skyrocketed into like almost like panic mode where a couple of engineers looked at it and they're like, oh my God, we didn't realize this thing. And they extrapolated. And even one of the co-founders got into this sort of sucked into this panic mode and

And the problem, when I started catching up on the threat, like as I was reading it, the problem was growing bigger and bigger and bigger. It was really like, this could be like, this is a huge issue. And the proposed sort of like, we have to email every customer right now. We have to do all these like very drastic moves immediately.

And, again, I thought, all right, wait a second. This is like, this is not the vibe here. It just doesn't feel right. Let's step, let's analyze one thing at a time. This person that emailed us, there's all these insertions and interpretations of who this person is and what the context is. Do we really know? Let's isolate that. Let's research who is this person.

Right? And what is that person's intent in sending us this information? Then secondly, let's actually, how much, how many customers were really affected by that? Right now, nobody knows. Let's put a team together where we research what is the problem, the security problem, how quickly can we fix it? Let's put,

the most resources and just fixing it right now. And then what we communicate and to whom and who we pay money to and what and the legal implications, we'll tackle that one team at a time. But right now we can't tackle any of this unless we know these other factors. And then we put like three or four teams on these different little projects.

And a day later, we came back with some information that was like, okay, everybody calm down. It's not as bad as everybody thought. Let's take another two days to get more answers. And by the end of the week, it was like three customers were maybe affected, but probably not.

you know, and we, we send it to a legal team, we send it to a security company, like, what do we really have to do? Is this really the right evaluation? Everybody came back, almost nothing has to happen, right? We fixed the issue, almost nothing has to happen, everybody's protected, everything's fine. I was like, wow, we were so close to sending an email that would have put thousands

thousands and thousands of all our customers in panic mode, right? And then once that cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back in. Like there's no way to reverse that. Oops, yeah. By the way, remember the email we got the other day? Well, that was said and mistake. So now it's like, we don't know what the f*** we're doing. We don't know what the f***.

fuck we're doing trust us we told you you can't trust us but we figured out you cannot just trust us about not trusting us but you should trust us about yeah and it was so that was so easy there was such a momentum towards that action that there was such a built momentum and and all it took was like one cool head at that time it was mine in other times it had been other people's i remember when i mentioned to you sort of like the when we first started in the very first year we had telephony uh

Always in close. By the way, inbound and outbound. You can make calls, receive calls in close. You can phone tree with close. Everything, right? And inbound,

And in the beginning, we had free trials and we gave people complete free unlimited telephony on the trial, right? Being like a bunch of noobs and like a startup. You know, we're like, oh, free, just do as much as you want. Listeners, don't do that. Don't do that. Yeah. So what happened? I'm waiting for this story. This is only, this is building up for me. So then we were lucky. We were lucky that one of our, one of my co-founders, I...

out of interest would randomly look at the call logs to just see, oh, what kind of interesting calls, which countries, just out of an interest. And he, one random weekend...

Was like, this is weird. There's these calls and they're very long. They're going on for like eight hours. That can't be right. And then he started digging and figured out, well, they're paid, like they're calling sort of pay per minute numbers, whatever it is. And it's like, wait a second, that account is calling like 20 of these numbers and is never hanging up.

And then started looking into it. And I think he discovered that we had like one kind of fraud account that had generated 20, 30,000 in calling costs for us in like 48 hours.

And we had at that point no fraud detection. We didn't have the systems in place to sort of like flag that. And if it hadn't been for his just generally curious looking around once in a while, we had sort of calculated out that within a week, it would have bankrupt us. It's just like we didn't have enough money. It would have bankrupt. And it would have been such a sudden death. We would have seen it coming.

And since then, I mean, we've gotten really good at fraud protection and we don't allow people to just make calls. But even since then, I've been amazed how consistently and creatively fraudulent scammers would use some scheme to make money with texting or calling or whatever in close or use the email capabilities or any other tool that we have. I've been always amazed at the creativity. I've always been amazed at like, how do these people even know we exist? We're such a small company, especially in the first couple of years.

But that was an example of that we would have just gotten $300,000 in calling costs from free accounts and we didn't have that much money on a bank account to pay. And that would have been it, right? And if it was me and just the third co-founder, the technical engineer guy and the sales marketing guy, we wouldn't have needed the ops guy that looked under the hood and wandered around to catch that early enough to save the company. Yeah, so that's...

getting a little lucky in that case, right? I talk a lot about, I'll tell founders like, hey, to be successful, you need some combination of hard work, luck, and skill. That's what I believe. Everyone may or may not agree with it, but I think you have to put a f***ing hard work in to do most things that are worthwhile. And I think you have to develop and build some type of skill set to do it. And then sometimes you get really lucky and you need a lot less hard work and skill than other people. But usually, usually,

I don't want to count on luck, right? I want repeatable things that I can do. I want to start a company with a repeatable approach. That sounds like you guys stayed alive. I know you've worked hard over the years. I know each of you have developed skills to be able to grow the company. And sometimes you need to get a little lucky in order to stay alive, it sounds like. So I want to...

about a recent pricing change that you made in January, which was last month as we're recording this. And you mentioned offline that for years, your entry-level plan into clothes was in like the $39, $49 range. And there were folks, there's always folks saying, oh, I would use you. This is every SaaS ever. If you were cheaper, I would use you, right? But you said you've gotten a lot of feedback over the years of,

hey, if you had a, whatever, a $15 or $19 plan that I, for one seat, that I would be, you know, willing to do it. And so in January, you launched this plan. And I believe it's $19 if you pay monthly and $15 if you pay annually, give or take. So I'm curious to ask a couple questions. Like, why did you decide to launch that plan? I'm sure you've been hearing the same feedback regularly

about having a cheaper plan for 10 or 10 plus years since the day you launched, right? But why do it now? And then to find out, is that working for you? Do you have enough data to be like, oh, this was a good choice? Or is it, you know, more cannibalizing your, I guess your $49 plan?

Yeah, I'll say a couple of things about that. One is that I think pricing is a much bigger deal in software than I realized for the first couple of years, especially once you get to some level of scale, pricing is really a big driver of growth. And I think that for many, many years, we were just too small. Like for up until, you know, whatever it was, two, three years, we're just like less than 50 people. For most of the company's history, we're a very small team and we just didn't have people that

really work on pricing in a dedicated manner to really do a lot of testing. And I think we always thought about, we were always a little scared to compete on low prices and get more volume of customers because we're such a small team. And because our more high

higher rank pricing always worked really well for the business and for sort of the kind of customers we wanted to attract. But there was always this sort of, it was always bumming us out that we'd get people, I would get on a podcast like this one and I would talk about clothes. And then, you know, sometimes we did promos about like eBooks, other things. And sometimes we told people that we'll give you a good deal. And then they would come and sign up for clothes and they would say, Hey, I'm a micro entrepreneur. I'm trying out a couple of ideas and I really love clothes, but my,

my ideas are not taking off yet. This thing I'm doing is not taking off yet. It's going to take probably a little longer than I thought. And there's this competitor product and it's not as nice as Close, but it does kind of like, does do the job and it's three times cheaper. So I'm going to just switch over there and then once I'm really successful, I'll come back.

And it's just always a bummer when people would leave because of that versus the product isn't working or it's not working for me. Now, you're right. There's always going to be people that want cheaper. When it's free, they're going to complain that you don't have enough features or you don't give them enough support. It's never going to end.

But only recently have we really felt like, wow, this is the company's big enough now where we can make some more investments in the growth of the business into our customer base, sort of grow earlier with them and grow with them versus, you know, being sort of very.

disciplined about what kind of customer we can really serve. And when we had the internal resources to run experiment and to know that people can consistently work on something like pricing versus we were always afraid to touch it because we knew once we touch it and change it, nobody here will want to look into it again and have to redo the work of pricing because we're such a small team and everybody has too much on their plate already.

And it's too early to conclusively say. I can tell you that I think two years ago, we packaged our prices and we did a big pricing change. Somebody championed at close where the prices were higher and it were like packaged sort of number of seeds. And that was a terrible decision for us. And instead of helping with retention and fixing a bunch of problems, it just messed with all our metrics. And it took a long time to really understand

admit that and a long time to reverse that. This pricing change is newer, but it's also less sort of all compounding. It's just an entry-level plan. It doesn't touch or change everything else that we're doing. And the instant result is that our customer acquisition is skyrocketing in terms of just how many customers we're converting. So we have a lot more customers. Those customers seem to retain a little bit better. Now, what we're going to have to look at over the next couple of months is do they grow and upgrade? And how does that affect all

other numbers, but we're pretty excited about it so far, especially as I believe we're going to see more and more entrepreneurship, more and more people will start things, try things. We're going to see more smaller teams accomplish big things in the future. I want the earliest, youngest entrepreneur in their journey to come and use Close and use the power of Close and not feel like, oh, that's a solution once we're sort of enterprise level ready. So I'm psyched about just getting more

entrepreneurs and business owners and more small businesses on the platform. And it feels now that we have a scale and a size where we can make these investments, even if it takes a long time for us to pay off. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Pricing changes always take a long time to figure out. Because there's retention, there's all these things. It's not, oh, hey, I got more people or I'm making more revenue in the next 60 days. It really is kind of a long tail. So if folks want to check out Close, obviously close.com is

And I often recommend close.com slash guides, which is, I mean, gosh, an extensive collection of sales guides ranging from the ultimate sales pitch deck, 12 sales pipeline templates, sales management software tools, the ultimate sales pitch guide. It's just a lot of eBooks. I know you originally wrote, I think most of them, but I think maybe other people on your team have contributed to those in the recent years.

Yeah, maybe the last sort of, I don't know even how many there are there. But if you go back to sort of the first 40, they're all for me. And I'm going through them now, like that I'm back in the content game to sort of revisit my old videos and my old stuff. And most of them still hold up pretty, pretty well, I would have to say any advice there on how to sell as a startup, how to negotiate as a startup, how to hire salespeople as a startup.

all that stuff is pretty solid. It was timeless. So I'm happy to say so. That stuff should help anyone that is doing a startup and is trying to get customers. So that's close.com slash guides. And then you have a...

like a YouTube show or a podcast, a video podcast. I don't know how you think about it, but it's called the Zero to $30 Million Blueprint. Yeah, we, last year, sort of people eventually pressured me into a corner of the company and said, you have to get back in the game. People want you, need you. Let's revisit the

how we went from zero to 30 million in revenue. And let's do a couple of seasons where we sort of break down the different stages. So you can go on YouTube and find the zero to 30 million blueprint, but also just go to at Steli on X or Steli FD on LinkedIn. I'm getting back into the game of like publishing a lot of content that's like timely and relevant right now. And as always with people that listen to this podcast, especially send me an email, steli at close.com. If you need advice, if you want feedback, um,

I've been a part of the MicroConf community for many years, as you mentioned, and really some incredible stories have come out of it and some great friendships. So I'm always happy to hear from people that listen to the podcast and want to connect or want to get feedback or help. Amazing. Steli Efti, thanks so much for joining me again. My man, Rob. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Thanks again to Steli Efti for joining me on the show. And thanks to you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 766.