The Ledger
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Standalone AI support bots struggle once incumbent platforms add native AI features
“The moment they introduced that, it's really hard to sell an AI bot on top unless you're, like, very enterprise upmarket, where, like, the scale of support tickets you have is so massive that, like, they're optimizing for, like, a percentage point, right?”
Pylon has zero 1-on-1s or all-hands, sharing monthly investor updates instead
“Otherwise we have zero one-on-ones with anyone. Like no one on the team has a one-on-one scheduled on their calendar. We don't have any, like all hands. A lot of the communication is done through, You know, I send out our monthly investor update to the entire …”
Pylon has zero managers, categorizing staff only as founders or non-founders
“Right now we have no managers, so it's just you're either a founder or you are a non-founder. So that's what the leveling looks like”
Kausas: Choose Co-Founders You Enjoy Working With Because Startups Pivot
“One of my learnings was I was just like, I just want to work with someone who's kind of similar to me who I'm going to be excited about working on any idea because we're likely going to pivot. And so I want to be able to pivot with the same people and just lik…”
Almost all billion-dollar public SaaS companies target cross-industry functions horizontally
“And when we looked at the companies that actually made it to that size, turns out they all were, almost all of them were, like, horizontal SaaS companies. And so they had basically picked markets up front and by accident or intentionally that you could sell to…”
Accepting introductions from investors who pass on your startup creates negative signal
“The other, like, common mistake I think people make is they will accept intros to investors from other investors, and I learned this from YC, that's, like, a big no-no. So, for example, let's say I talk to an angel investor, and they're like, oh, like, this is…”
Kausas claims Zendesk's customer experience deteriorated following its private equity acquisition
“Because they were acquired by private equity a year before, it was already starting to go downhill. Like already the experience was going downhill. Like people were not trusting it as much as they did.”
Pylon put a photo of a co-founder's mattress in its pitch deck
“First slide was our logo. Second slide was Robert looking up from his mattress with like the pylon, you know, living room essentially in the background and investors loved it.”
Kausas: Pylon hires only senior and staff-level talent for all roles
“So we're hiring only, like, senior and staff, you know, for every role, so everyone's actually very, very experienced”
Kausas: Legacy support software failed to support shared Slack and Teams channels
“These days, a lot of startups, instead of Doing like email support, they're opening up shared Slack channels, Microsoft Teams channels Discord communities, WhatsApp chats, et cetera. And the biggest problem, the initial problem that we actually discovered was …”
Y Combinator partners told Pylon founders their support idea would never work
“The next day we talked to YC they tell us the idea sucks, but that like, and they also say that they've seen this idea a million times and it never works for anyone.”
Kausas: Early B2B startups hire CSMs before support staff
“In B to B, especially early stage, you're typically hiring like customer success managers before you have anyone who does support the CSM kind of like owns all of post sales customer communication.”
Kausas: Pylon founders paid themselves $35K yearly salaries after YC
“After we got into YC, and we'll, we'll get there in a moment like, Advith Robert and I, we started paying ourselves 35 K per year, which is like the minimum salary that you can pay in California.”
Research showed only 76 public SaaS companies are valued over $1 billion
“Do you know how many public SaaS companies there are that are worth over a billion dollars? It's, like, when we had looked, it was, like, 76. So it, like, was not that many. And then we looked at how many companies are worth over ten billion dollars. It was, l…”
Kausas: Salesforce owns only 24% of the CRM market
“How much of the CRM market does Salesforce have? Do you know? Host: No, I would say, like, what, 20%? I'm just throwing it over there. Marty Kausas: No, no, so you're, that's very close. 24%, I think, last time I checked. So, they are a three hundred billion d…”
Pylon founders sent 120 personalized LinkedIn messages daily during idea discovery
“Robert Abbott and I, we'd wake up every day, we'd go on LinkedIn we bought sales navigators so you could message, I think at the max it was, like, 40 people per day, so we're messaging 120 personalized messages between the three of us every day, you know, book…”
Kausas: First customer Hightouch maintained 300 shared Slack channels for key accounts
“Hightouch, who ended up becoming our first customer they have 300, they had at the time, like, 300 shared Slack channels with, Customers of theirs. And these are all the important customers. Everyone who's not important is like a self-serve customer for them i…”
Kausas: Hightouch Originally Started as High Touch Support via Shared Slack Channels
“In fact, I don't know if you know High Touch but, like, their name stems from High Touch Support. So they were, like, originally trying, like, now they're, like, a, you know, started, they were, like, became, like, a reverse ETL company, and now, like, data ac…”
Kausas: At least 12 startups tried Pylon's Slack support idea before them
“As far as we know, and we tried counting, we are the 13th company to start from the same starting point. There are, like, 12 other companies who have started with the, hey, like, add a tick and emoji to a message in a Slack channel, like, send it to Intercom o…”
Kausas: At least 10 startups in Pylon's YC batch built AI support bots
“So there were at least, like, 10 companies in our batch who were doing just that.”
Kausas: Pylon raised a $3.2M seed round led by General Catalyst in 6 days
“We end up you know, we end up raising a seed round from general catalyst right before the end of the batch. So, you know, we had like a big LinkedIn post about that where, Hey, we raised our seed round in six days 3.2 million dollars GC led it.”
Kausas: Pylon grew ARR from $30k to $80k in days during seed fundraising
“The first like number investors were seeing was like, Okay, in a couple months, we got to, like, 30 K in in, like, AR. And then, like, literally a week later, it's at 60 K. And now, like, two days later, it's at 80 K.”
Pylon Reached $120K ARR by End of YC Batch
“In fact, by the end of our YC batch, we were at a 120 K in ARR, and so, like, turns out, like, people were buying Zendesk, they were buying Intercom, and it wasn't working because they did all their support in Slack, and so they literally were, in some cases, …”
Kausas: Pylon will end 2024 with roughly 5x revenue growth
“From, we'll end this year at, like, around, like, five X what we started the year at and it's been, like, very consistent revenue growth, like, in percentage, like, percentage growth has, like, basically remained flat.”
Pylon retained $3.1M of its $3.3M seed funding before raising Series A
“We were already cashflow positive. And so we did not need the money. We weren't thinking about raising money. We were, yeah, we like had spent at this point, we had raised like 3.3 total with like YC's initial check. And we had like 3.1 in the bank.”
Kausas: Pylon closed a $17M Series A in 14 days
“14 days after the start we end up getting the term sheet closing the round and then yeah, and that was seventeen million dollars so now, you know, with our basically three million that we have left from everything else, we have twenty million in the bank”