How Authenticity Grew Sales Hacker from a 4-Person Meet Up to a 30-City International Community
Today I’m talking to Max Altschuler, CEO of Sales Hacker and author of the new book Hacking Sales. Max’s sales career began at the early days of Udemy, where he had to figure out how to grow the company by 20% each month without spending much money or using a lot of resources. Since then, he’s become a master of using technology to hack sales, and he tells us how he’s used this knowledge to build a successful business based on helping sales professionals do their jobs.
A background in startup sales meant hacking wherever possible to boost growth
As the sole person responsible for growing the instructor side of Udemy’s online education marketplace and the classic startup problem of having no money to do it, Max had to find a way to generate revenue using fewer resources than the vast majority of sales teams did.
He figured the only way to do it was to hack his way through it, so with technology, he built up an amazing virtual outsourced SDR (sales development rep) team to help get Udemy through their A-round and B-round of funding.
After his success there, he left for a company called Attorney Fee (now LegalZoom Local) where he was responsible for growth in a similar way.
Then, he started Sales Hacker Inc.
At first, it was nothing more than a meet up, and when he left Attorney Fee, it developed into a conference.
After the huge success of the conference and the realization that despite sales being everywhere, there weren’t any college courses, education or real content on sales, Max realized what he wanted to do.
Within the last 2-3 years, says Max, companies have really started to develop technology for sales people. With Sales Hacker, Max plans to ride that wave and be one of the key players pulling the trend forward, and playing a big part of the conversation while showcasing new tools and educating companies and startups on how to embrace technology in the sales process.
Sales Hacker conference vs. SaaStr conference
When Jason Lemkin asked for Max’s help with The SaaStr Annual conference, Max recognized that working with sales technology as a part of Sales Hacker and SaaS companies were very closely tied, that it only made sense to get involved.
But since Jason’s conference was four to five times bigger that the Sales Hacker conference, the scale and the fact that they only had a five-person team to turn fantasy ideas into something practical and doable was interesting and a bit tougher.
But even though the conference was so huge and involved a lot of hard work, Max says it had the highest-quality attendee list he’d ever seen at an event. There were CEOs and executives from some of the fastest-growing companies, great VC-backed entrepreneurs, and everyone was incredibly open to quality conversation.
Exactly why conferences are worth the headache
Putting on a conference is a task with a very hard deadline, all kinds of potential problems, and lots of personalities, vendors, and live technical difficulties to deal with.
But even though it can be incredibly stressful, Max says it’s worth it – especially for the business model he’s trying to set up with Sales Hacker.
At it’s core, Sales Hacker is a full-service media company that does publications, hot conferences, and meet ups in 30 cities all over the world. The idea is to build a community from the events and get high-level people involved.
With the community behind it, Sales Hacker can be a company that is about conversation and helping its community members in different ways. Already, lots of doors have opened, and they’ve had to pick and choose which opportunities to pursue to grow their business.
Why Sales Hacker is so focused on building it’s own community-based brand
With their own brand, they’ll be able to do whatever they want with it.
As an example, Max cites Jason Lemkin who built the SaaStr brand. While other VCs are running around chasing deals, because of the SaaStr brand he built, Jason can sit back, relax, and get access to invest in some of the best companies who often give him better deals and terms just because of his brand.
At their conferences, they don’t sell out their attendee lists or let sponsors pay for speaking spots. Instead, they do things that speak to the core of building an authentic community people can trust.
A few of the things they’ve been able to do because of their branding so far include:
Backing things up a bit: authenticity from the beginning
In the beginning, Sales Hacker meetings were an invite-only ordeal – sort of like a private mastermind group. It started with four guys meeting together each moth to hack things out and figuring out how to make the sales process better.
They were figuring out things around building lists and managing virtual assistants, and over time, they invited more and more people in their networks who were doing interesting things in sales. By their last meet up, they had 20 people, and Max says the reason it was able to grow that much via an invite-only process was because it was authentic and genuine.
Keeping the events genuine and useful
Because panels tend to be a handful of people rambling and saying the same things, Max isn’t a fan of them because he feels they’re inauthentic and devoid of actionable information for an audience. So he doesn’t use panels in the events he hosts.
Instead, he prefers to give one speaker a set amount of stage time to really go deep into one topic.
For example, at the Sales Hacker series events, they usually have three 20-minute spots with one over-arching topic. And for their conferences, they’ll line up 10 different 30-minute sessions with some Q&A to follow.
He says having just one person zoom in on a topic helps people a lot more and provides for a great Q&A afterwards.
The biggest struggle in growing Sales Hacker as a business
According to Max, everything in a startup is a circle of, “We want to do that thing and do it really well, but we need to hire someone to do it. We can’t do it until we hire them, but we can’t hire them until we do it.”
Essentially: growing pains.
As an entrepreneur and a sales guy, he says he’s impatient and wants to move extremely fast. In reality, he’s happy with the speed they’re going, but is always striving for more.
Hacking Sales – the book
Max says that Hacking Sales is all about building up the sales process from the early-stage startup perspective, and is written for sales reps and entrepreneurs. It’s a how-to playbook on the entire sales process, and each step has tips and hacks behind it that you can use to optimize your sales. It also showcases 200 different sales tools you can use to automate your sales process.
The idea of the book is to help sales professionals and entrepreneurs do what Max did in his days at Udemy and Attorney Fee: get high-velocity sales as quickly as possible, because especially in a startup, time is money. It helps readers generate more revenue while using less resources and time.
Advice to his 21-year-old self
“Put your head down and work hard.”
Max says a lot of people get into SaaS and sales wanting to network and read TechCrunch all day. According to him, that’s all a waste of time if you’re not actually getting any work done.
He also suggests being transparent and writing about everything you do. He says it’s really not possible that anyone could copy you – no one will be able to out-execute you at your own process.
His idol
Max says that he really looks up to his father because, “He’s a happy guy, he’s done so much, and if I can be that successful when I’m his age, I’d be pretty happy with it.”
Max’s dad was the kid reading stock quotes at age 13 and who became a stock broker turned financial advisor. Max says he’s also always been really good at sales because he’s genuine, authentic, has a high level of empathy, and people trust him.
One productivity hack
To boost your productivity, Max suggests spending the time to find and hire a good virtual assistant, and train them to do all of your menial tasks.
Beyond doing things like scheduling, he says a lot of virtual assistants are so professional and smart that they can work directly in tools like SalesLoft, ToutApp and Yesware to take care of even some of your higher-level work.
One must-read book
Max recommends the 48 Laws of Power because it’s full of great stores and teaches you a lot about strategy.
He says he finds most business books boring, but this one is a fun read and is actionable.
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How TaskUs Co-Founders Went from Living With Their Parents to $15M in Revenue
Bryce Maddock, CEO and co-founder of TaskUs, has lots of interesting stories to share from his entrepreneurial journey with his best friend over the last ten years. From selling designer belts in high school to setting up night clubs for high school students, to struggling for three years to get TaskUs up and running successfully, Bryce has definitely gotten his hands dirty as an entrepreneur and has a lot of great advice.
Finding a Business Parter & Getting Into Entrepreneurship at an Early Age
Bryce Maddock, now 28 years old, grew up in LA and has been doing business in some form or another with his best friend since they were both just 17 years old.
They sold designer belts on the school yard in high school, set up real night club experiences for high school students when they were in college, backpacked around Europe, and then left their swanky post-college jobs to move back in with their parents and start TaskUs.
Though it had a long, rough start, today TaskUs supports some of the hottest rapidly-growing startups like Tinder, Whisper and Uber. They’ve got 1,500 employees between Santa Monica and The Philippines, and closed out 2014 by doing $15 million in top-line revenue, increasing from the $6 million they did in 2013.
By attaching themselves to some of today’s more successful companies, they’ve been able to grow based on the growth and success of their clients.
How TaskUs is Different From Other Outsourcing & Virtual Assistant Firms
Six years ago, when TaskUs first started, Bryce and Jasper were trying to be a Virtual Assistant (VA) business, and kept coming back to the idea that they should be able to hire their own VAs as well. But since they were 22 and didn’t have any money, the only way they could afford to do so was to hire overseas.
They started a business model that wasn’t based on hiring a VA based on a set skill set – instead, clients could enter a needed task into TaskUs and they would send it to a person whose skills were best-suited to do the job. The idea was that a client wouldn’t be limited to just one person’s availability and skill set, but the idea performed better in theory than in practice.
Through trial and error by outsourcing to 16 different countries in their first two years, Bryce and Jasper found that they needed to become highly familiar with client expectations so they could deliver work that wasn’t deemed sub-par or mediocre. So 2.5 years into founding TaskUs, they pivoted their business and took their delegation knowledge to build what is a more traditional outsourcing business.
Now, rather than focusing on helping an individual get whatever they need accomplished, they focus on helping businesses as a whole by taking a full-on function like a customer service team, a photo editing team, or a content moderation team. And in most cases, they build out an entirely new team in The Philippines to do that specific function.
The Most Popular & Strangest Services TaskUs Provides
Roughly half of all the staff TaskUs employs work as part of another company’s customer service team, whether it’s on email, phone or live chat.
The other half does a whole grab bag of back office work: whether it’s content moderation for Whipser and Tinder to make sure nothing offensive passes through, photo retouching for eCommerce businesses, or writing product descriptions.
“People are aware that customer service is outsourced, but I think the other half is most fascinating because there are so many things most people don’ think about human beings having to do.”
For example, TaskUs has one client that runs a wine app that allows people to take a photo of a wine label so they can order more bottles of it later. While most people assume the app works on optical character recognition, there’s actually an entire team of people who review pictures of wine bottles all day long to make sure the app users get the correct bottle when they order.
How Does TaskUs Get to Work with Such Cool Clients?
“We joke that we are at the humble service of today’s sexiest companies.”
Bryce says that outsourcing is never sexy, but they do get to work with some of the coolest startups.
The secret, he says, is that he and Jasper have religiously attended meet ups for the last six years. By doing this, they’re able to talk to founders and ask meaningful questions on a regular basis. The reason TaskUs succeeded was their ability to connect personally with a lot of very successful entrepreneurs.
How Should a New Company Get Started in Outsourcing?
For someone who needs just a little bit of work done, TaskUs probably wouldn’t be a great fit. They require a team of at least 10 full-time people at $10 to $12 per hour.
In the early days, they would have been happy to take a client that just needed one employee, but now they focus more on quality customer service, so each client has a US-based outsourcing manager so they don’t have to deal with hiring and training their own staff.
But for someone in seed stage, Bryce recommends looking somewhere like Odesk or Elance to get a single virtual assistant for $4 to $5 per hour. The only catch is you need to watch internet connectivity and background noise. Working from home is great for email, but you need to be careful with phone work.
The Early Days of TaskUs: Moving Home & Not Giving Up
Shortly after Bryce graduated from NYU, he took the secure route by working in investment banking for a year and a half before he called it quits. The job was too boring and tedious for him, so he decided to pack it all up, move home, and start TaskUs.
At the time, he fully believed he’d only have to live in his parents’ house for six months before he could move out and have a lifetime of riches. But, the universe had other plans.
Because they didn’t know exactly what they were doing, he and Jasper only took in about $100,000 total in their first year. And after paying their freelancers, they probably only had $1,000 in take-home pay each for the entire year.
Three years later, they were still living with their parents and Bryce was beginning to question what he was doing and whether or not he should throw in the towel.
“If I’m being totally honest,” he said, “there were moments when I wanted to give up.” In fact, for the majority of that three-year period, he thought TaskUs was going to end up a failure.
At one point, he even pulled Jasper aside and told him it was time for them to stop. Jasper told him that he didn’t want to do the business if it wasn’t with Bryce, and assured him that they would make TaskUs successful together.
He also had some feedback from a lot of his mentors, who could see his potential for success even in those darkest moments. The people surrounding him made such a difference, that if they weren’t there, Bryce says he probably would have given up.
Landing a Spot in EO: A Lucky Break
Bryce and Jasper both knew that in order to become members of EO, they had to do $1 million worth of revenue to get in, so that was their target.
But when they started filling out the application, they found out that since there were two of them, EO wanted to see $2 million of revenue. Their hopes were a little deflated, but they were able to convince the board to accept them.
One of the best benefits of being in EO was the international side of the organization. In The Philippines, they had 150 of the country’s best entrepreneurs they could call on at any time – and they did so in order to get out of some sticky situations.
After Three Years, Another Brink of Failure
An interesting side to entrepreneurship, says Bryce, is that once you become successful, you run into a bigger problem than making money, and that’s money management.
He says it always seems to happen when the business is taking the next big step up, and you don’t have enough cash in the bank to cover that first month’s operational expenses.
For example, at one point they hired 100 new employees for one client, and when the first payroll came around, they didn’t have enough cash in the bank to make payroll. Fortunately, Bryce was in The Philippines at the time and could stand in front of the employees to promise their pay checks, but one day late.
“As your business begins to grow,” he said, “it’s not about staying profitable, but it becomes about managing your cash flow and making sure you’ve got enough money in the bank.”
Any time a business takes an exponential step up, you have to be careful that it doesn’t break the business.
Having a Friend as a Business Partner
“I would not hire my friends,” said Bryce. “Almost never.”
He realizes that he and Jasper are a bit of exception to the rule of never working with your friends, but he accredits it to the fact that they’ve been doing business together since high school.
He also notes their six-week backpacking trip through Europe when they didn’t fight once…which he took as a good sign.
When they started TaskUs together, they did have to work through some serious challenges, but he states that they key to success in their partnership has been communication and dealing with each other in as constructive as a way as possible.
Advice to His 25-Year-Old Self
“Stick with it, it’s right around the corner. You’re going to make it.”
When he was 25, he kept doubting the TaskUs business model and wanted to throw in the towel to start something else. What turned out to be the case was that he just needed to apply the lessons he’d learned to pivot the business for success.”
One Productivity Hack
Bryce says he used to use a Chrome app called Blocksite to keep him from getting sucked into a black hole of worthless content via Facebook. It worked until he installed Safari.
Rather than ‘hacking’ productivity, Bryce does things the old-fashioned way: he says setting aside blocks of time where you commit to really focusing on something is the best productivity hack he’s found.
One Must-Read Book
Bryce suggests The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
“That is the best book for entrepreneurs,” he said. “Hands down. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is incredible.”
For a non-business book, Bryce suggests Shantaram, which is a 1,000-page novel loosely based on a guy’s life. He says it helped him get through the three years of TaskUs when he wasn’t making any money.
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Welcome to another edition of Growth Bites. Today we’re talking about how to hire a virtual assistant. I’ve used virtual assistants both locally and overseas with success. Here are some resources to help find one, and how to find a highly qualified candidate.
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