Steli Efti
Co-founder & CEO, Close. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorhost@Steli ↗LinkedIn ↗steliefti.com ↗
Steli Efti is the co-founder and CEO of Close, a CRM and sales automation platform built for inside sales teams and SMBs. A Y Combinator alumnus who previously founded ElasticSales, he is also an author and advisor focused on startup sales.
2shows
3appearances
26statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
37said about them ↓ Everything Steli Efti said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Long-term B2B contracts are useless during an economic crisis
“A contract is not going to be worth much because a contract is only worth something in a stable world, right? If our customers are going out of business, that contract is useless. If they would go out of business unless they break the contract, and so they dec…”
Sales teams should prioritize deal velocity over contract value during crises
“Today I would always prioritize closing deals a little faster and giving up a little bit of money for that speed versus trying to optimize for maximum money and taking more time to negotiate and close the deal.”
Churning a bad-fit customer is entirely a marketing and sales failure
“Well, that is a tragedy still, because why the fuck did we close them in the first place? What did we do wrong in our marketing? What do we do wrong on our sales to never indicate that this should, this is a customer that shouldn't buy our product. We did some…”
Selling incomplete software reveals actual customer demand and prioritizes product roadmaps
“What we did is we said we have one very unique, strong thing that the product does. If people really care, they'll buy even if it's really insufficient in many other areas. Like we sold sales software that didn't have any reporting in it. And people still boug…”
Founders should delay major decisions during emotional crises, says Steli Efti
“I think we were all three quite wise in many times recognizing that this is an emotional state that I'm in or a face, 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.…”
Startups often fail because founders self-destruct in emotional distress, says Efti
“That's why I think a lot of companies don't reach their potential because they kill themselves. They sort of commit, they commit suicide rather than being killed by external forces because they overreact in situations where they should think it through a coupl…”
Solving client problems manually gives SaaS spinouts an unfair market advantage
“Yeah, this is a very common, I think it's a common, a trend for like a pattern to get to a great valuable business idea, which is you're stumbling or identifying a problem that real customers, real people have, and then you build a solution for that because yo…”
Efti: Channel testing requires pre-planning for ambiguous results
“And I think one of the most important things that, that I teach people and the thing that we've learned to do is to plan for all three scenarios and say, okay, what does success look like and failure, but what is the in between? And what do we do if the first …”
Close hits $40M ARR with 110 fully remote employees
“We are at a 110 people fully remote and over forty million in revenue.”
Close narrowly avoided triggering mass customer panic over a security scare
“We were so close to sending an email that would have put thousands and thousands of our, all our customers in panic mode. Right. And then once that cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back. Like there's no way to reverse that.”
Undetected telephony fraud nearly bankrupted Close within its first year
“And if it hadn't been for us just generally curious looking around once in a while, we had sort of calculated out that within a week it would have bankrupt us. I think it's just like we didn't have enough money. It would have bankrupt, and it would have been s…”
Close reversed a disastrous decision to implement higher packaged seat pricing
“I can tell you, I think two years ago, we packaged our prices, and we did a big pricing change, somebody championed a close, where the prices were higher, and it will, were like packaged sort of number of seeds, and that was a terrible decision for us, and ins…”
Close's new entry-level starter plan caused customer conversion rates to skyrocket
“This pricing change is, 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, instant result is that we are, you know, our customer acquisition is skyr…”
Close achieved record customer prepayments monthly from January to May 2020
“We had one record month after the other this year from January up until May of prepays, right? Every month we've had more prepays than ever before in the company's history because we made that a focus.”
Close's cash position almost doubled between March and May 2020
“Over the last couple of months, I, our cash position has drastically improved, almost doubled, which made our business a lot more stable.”
Efti: Close.io generates millions in revenue with under 20 employees
“It's a very small team. We're less than 20 people and we're driving many, many millions in revenue and are competing with massive organizations.”
Close.io's average customer pays between $400 and $500 per month
“The average per month is probably, you know, in the four or 500 dollars.”
Efti: Close.io is profitable, self-funded, and took zero venture funding
“We're running a profitable self-funded business at this point, and Close.io never got a dollar in venture funding in one way or another.”
Close's three co-founders still work closely together after 14 years
“We've been working together as co-founders for 14 years. And I would say that our relationship today is closer than ever before, and we are such different people... We still, all three still work at the company and still work very sort of intensely together.”
Close.io generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in its first year
“I do remember what the first year revenue was. It was a few 100,000 in revenue.”
The other half of the tape: Steli Efti's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 36 times in 18 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rob Walling 21Nathan Latka 8Peter Coppinger 6Jordan Gal 1
Statements about Steli Efti, by other people (1)
Walling: Dharmesh Shah, Rand Fishkin, and Patrick McKenzie are TinySeed LPs
“If you decide to invest, you'll be joining folks like Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, Rand Fishkin, Founder of SparkToro, Steli Efti, co-founder of Close.com, and Patrick McKenzie, who many of you know as PatioEleven on the internet.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Startups For the Rest of Us 22
Top Founders 14
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2023 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2022 2 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 14 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- TinySeed Tales Season 2 | Episode 8: Upmarket Starts to Pay Of
- Episode 515 | Finding a Co-Founder, Getting Better at Sales, and More Listener Questions
- Episode 491 | Episode 491: Hard Lessons Learned, Reaching High-Touch Prospects, Finding
- Episode 516 | When to Re-write Your SaaS Codebase
- Episode 500
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2018 6 mentions in 1 episode
2017 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2016 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Steli's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Close | 1 | 14 | — | full record on Top Founders → |
| STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Close | 2 | 12 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |