Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I, not only do I, but I’ve done it for a long time, interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. And I say that because joining me is somebody who has listened to my interviews and built a company. And I’m so proud to see what he’s done, and I’m so excited that he’s here to do this interview with me. His name is Kris Rudeegraap. He is the founder of a company called Sendoso. Am I pronouncing it right?
Kris: You are. Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew: I love the idea behind this. By the way, you might want to move your mic up just a little bit so it doesn’t get your breath a little bit more. I know it’s kind of awkward. Tell me if that actually . . .
Kris: That works.
Andrew: Awkward too. Good. It sounds better.
Kris: We’re good.
Andrew: I want to make sure that you sound good. Here’s the idea behind what Kris has created with Sendoso. Oh, I’m still hearing a lot of breathing. You might want to move it up a little bit higher still. Yeah.
Kris: Is that better?
Andrew: Yeah, much better.
Kris: Okay, cool.
Andrew: The idea is this. We get a lot of email. We get a lot of online communication. Whenever you get something that is physical that you can actually hold on to that comes in the mail, it stands out and the person who sends it feels a little bit more real and they stand out more than everyone who was just sending you messages. And so this is something that Kris realized a while back and he said, “You know what? I’m going to start a company around this.” And it started with just coffee and it moved on to . . . What’s the most exotic thing that if I want to go from coffee to something else to show how exotic it will be?
Kris: I will send like custom piñatas. We’ve sent bobbleheads. We’ve sent, you know, thousands of cupcakes and you name it.
Andrew: And this is all from the software that a salesperson is using or a marketer is using, just send it from there.
Kris: Yep.
Andrew: All right. That is what he’s done and we’re going to find out how he did it thanks to two phenomenal companies. The first is dressing me right now, Outerknown. I’ll talk about why Outerknown is so exciting as a clothing brand. And then I’ll also tell you guys about ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels have gone a long way with me Kris, by the way, because I lost my AirPods. Freaking guys. They send me AirPods in the mail like the next day with a note that says, “Andrew, we promise no strings attached. We just want to send it over to you.” This is long before they were sponsors.
Kris: Nice.
Andrew: Yeah. And I think about them all the time. And in my head, I don’t know about you, Kris, but I feel super guilty. All I think about is how do I show Dave that what he . . . How do I reciprocate to Dave? That’s my issue.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: Is that kind of the common thing?
Kris: Yeah. I think that . . . I mean, I 100% agree.
Andrew: How big is the company? What’s the revenue, Kris?
Kris: Yeah. So, we are about 180 employees and our revenues are in the 10s of millions of dollars.
Andrew: Tens of millions of dollars?
Kris: Yes.
Andrew: Why don’t you see I’m more excited about that? I’m freaking lit.
Kris: I know. I’m super excited about it. It’s been amazing coming from just a few years to where we are today.
Andrew: Profitable?
Kris: We were in the beginning, but now we’re kind of in that growth stage where we are foregoing profits for future growth and hiring and doing all that fun stuff.
Andrew: I see your revenue from 2017. Where was that?
Kris: So that was about a half million.
Andrew: These are insane growth numbers that you’ve achieved here.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: Holy moly. And the whole thing came to you when you were, I guess, a sales rep and account exec. What’s the difference between the salesperson and account exec?
Kris: I’d call them the same.
Andrew: Same thing. So for eight years, you were doing that?
Kris: Yeah. So I was a . . . Yeah. I was an account executive for eight years in San Francisco and a couple of different software companies.
Andrew: The YapStone, Piqora. Is that it?
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. How is it, by the way? We talked before the interview started . . . and Talkdesk. We talked before the interview started about how you were listening to Mixergy back when you were working there and you said, “But I was always an entrepreneur. It’s not like this is new to me.” As a guy who started a company back in 2007, All Student Rentals, as a guy who’s an entrepreneur like in your bones. We’ll go back in a bit to the Christmas tree thing you did as a kid. How was it to go into sales, to go work for someone else and not be an entrepreneur and not own the company?
Kris: Yeah. I mean, it was . . . I think it was a means to an end for me. I was really kind of at that stage where I wanted to learn more about how do companies go from 10 people to hundreds if not thousands. And there’s no better way to do that then join in, you know, a fast-growing startup. And sales was a great mechanism to come in and you can make a lot of money in sales, you can have a lot of fun doing it. So it was a great way for me to come in and just contribute to the team, but also learn a lot.
Andrew: And what’s the problem that you found that led you to this?
Kris: So the problem that I found that led me to this was really, as a salesperson, I wanted to kind of breakthrough this digital noise of like, emails, emails, emails, and so I wanted to figure out how do I get more creative and send other things that can resonate and build more rapport and a more personal relationship with these prospects and customers.
Andrew: This was at Talkdesk?
Kris: Correct. Yeah.
Andrew: It’s a call center platform. What did that mean? What were you selling?
Kris: Yes. We were selling software that helps call centers modernize into using, you know, software that connects into their ticketing systems, that you can use your laptop to make phone calls through, that helps with more data in, data out, much more modern than like maybe picking up a phone call that you might have on desktop.
Andrew: Oh. So if I wanted to have a bunch of salespeople promote Mixergy Premium, our monthly membership, I wouldn’t necessarily want them all my office using those old type of phones. I could use your software or Talkdesk software and everyone could do it from their laptop, I can keep track of what they’re doing, organize the whole thing, get reports. That’s the thing.
Kris: Correct. And a little bit more on the support side, though. So if someone had an issue with your show or something then they called you saying, “Hey, Andrew, what the heck is going on?” That is more for the support people and to provide a better customer experience on the support side.
Andrew: Got it. And I see that they’re big on artificial intelligence . . .
Kris: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: . . . being added into those calls. Okay. And so . . .
Kris: Everyone these days.
Andrew: Did it work? Did you start . . . What’s the first thing that you sent to potential customers?
Kris: Yeah. So I was sending Starbucks gift cards in the mail.
Andrew: Literally a $5 gift card, you would go to Starbucks, buy a bunch of them. I guess they sell them in stacks, you’d buy them. You put them in an envelope and you’d mail it out to them.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: Did it work?
Kris: Yeah, it was working great. I would be getting people following up saying, “Oh, that’s nice,” or I would send that and then follow up with like an email or a phone call saying, “Hey, did you get the Starbucks card?” And it was just a great kind of warm intro from doing cold calls.
Andrew: Okay. And so how did you take the leap from there to “I’ve got to start a company around this”?
Kris: So, I was thinking about one weekend, then I was like, “Hey, why isn’t there an app in Salesforce that allows me to click a button and send?” And that was kind of the precipice of me saying, “Well, I can build that. That seems basic enough that I could do that.” So it started with me just one Saturday afternoon just like drawing up little mocks for it and putting it all together and finding in through an online freelance site finding an engineer that could build it for me. So, the original . . .
Andrew: What’s the freelance site that you used?
Kris: At the time it was oDesk, but now it’s Upwork. I think it was . . . I think the initial product was like five grand, I think.
Andrew: Five grand.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: And what did it do?
Kris: It was a Salesforce app that installed a little button that said, “Send Coffee” on any leader contact page and you clicked it. And then it actually sent a Starbucks gift card out.
Andrew: Wow, that’s pretty cool. And the company was called what?
Kris: CoffeeSender.
Andrew: Wow. What’s the pricing? I’m on the original version of the web page. I can see it myself. But what was it you were charging and how much were you making?
Kris: Yeah. We were just charging a buck a coffee. And I say we it was really me at the time. So, it was like, when I say a buck, charge a $5 Starbucks card, charge you 6.
Andrew: I’m looking at one of the early versions of the site where it says, “Pay as you go $5 per $5 e-gift card.”
Kris: Yeah. We change pricing models a couple of times. So there’s one time where you pay $5 for $5 and then behind the scenes we actually were able to partner up with Starbucks and they gave us a kickback behind the scenes.
Andrew: Got it.
Kris: So that was like a few months into it.
Andrew: Okay. And you were physically mailing this stuff yourself?
Kris: So it was partially e-gifts where you’d send an email with a link to a Starbucks card. And then there was a physical component too.
Andrew: And the physical component was that in the beginning and . . .
Kris: That was later on that we found that we could do that as well. So that was a little bit more of a sophisticated play as well.
Andrew: How automated was it backend when you were just doing the e-gift, which was just a digital . . . which was just an email with the code, right?
Kris: Yeah. It was automated enough. I mean, I’d basically go to starbucks.com, buy like 1,000 gift codes at once in a spreadsheet, load them into my software, and then it went.
Andrew: Wow. And so how did you get your first customers?
Kris: Well, I mean, it was really . . . I was the first customer. And then . . .
Andrew: Because you were using it for yourself for your potential customers or prospects.
Kris: I was using it myself for my . . . And then, you know, my sales friends at my company. And then through the app exchange for Salesforce, it just started to get . . . I just started to get randoms. And I didn’t even put on my LinkedIn or anything. This was just like a project that I would spend a few hours a week on.
Andrew: And every time they were sending out a card, you’d get a buck.
Kris: Yeah. I was just trying to get beer money, basically.
Andrew: Weren’t you fantasizing this could be the next big thing at the time or was it just a side hobby?
Kris: It was more of a side hustle. I have my co-founder today who helped me start Sendoso and was a part of CoffeeSender towards the end. He saw bigger vision and inspired some . . . gave me some inspiration to try to actually quit my job and make it bigger. But I kind of saw it as just like a feature at the time.
Andrew: And you know what? This is the type of thing that you could never come up with as an idea unless you actually were there as a salesperson needing it, understanding that salespeople are not going to go to a web page every time they need to sign up for something, but they will be in Salesforce, and so you might as well make it into Salesforce app. You understood that there was a marketplace of plugins for Salesforce, right? So the work that you did as an employee, as a sales rep paid off.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: Let’s go back in time and understand. I said that you were an entrepreneur from the beginning. What happened with this Christmas tree farm that was a couple of minutes from your house?
Kris: Yeah. So, that was probably one of my earliest memories of trying to hustle and make money. So a few blocks from my house was a Christmas tree ranch. So every November and December, I would go around to all my neighbors and basically say, “Hey, I’ll cut down your mistletoe.” And they’re like, “Sure.” I mean, no one wants mistletoe. And then I would bundle it up and sell it like kind of on the street on the way and so I would just selling a little bushels of like . . . It three bucks a bushel. And so that was one of . . . Now, I probably was doing that for years.
Andrew: Just standing out there?
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: How old were you?
Kris: I was probably like, mid-teens like 12, 13, 14. I was doing it like every year just because it was easy way to make extra money for like around Christmas time.
Andrew: And did you feel like a sense of nervousness before you started selling? Did you feel a sense of confidence after you’ve made your first sale? Did you feel invincible? Did you feel any of those things?
Kris: I definitely felt confidence and I definitely was like, “I could see myself . . . ” I was figuring out, “How do I make it bigger? How do I get more mistletoe? How do I like go out find more from neighbors that I don’t know?” So like, thinking of my supply chain, I guess.
Andrew: I used to sell sandwiches door to door to store owners and I remember I would always feel intimidated like . . . not always, almost every time that I would go there I would feel intimidated to go in and sell it. But I also knew the product is perishable. If I don’t sell right now I’m going to be such a loser going home with this whole thing. I better go and try it. And then after you do one or two, you feel like, “All right, it’s not so bad.” And then by the end of the day you feel like, “I could sell. I actually could sell.”
Kris: Totally. Yeah.
Andrew: You felt that too, huh?
Kris: Totally. And I remember like getting my money to buy some video games and I was so proud that I had like my own money to buy video games. I think it was like a Super Nintendo and then I was like, “I got a Nintendo 64.” So I was like stoked that I did it myself.
Andrew: There is no better satisfaction when it comes to spending money as a kid than spending your own money.
Kris: Exactly.
Andrew: It’s just so satisfying. Was it hard to get mistletoe? I never thought about mistletoe trees. Is it . . . Are they tall?
Kris: So some of them were tall, but like I had this like extended like tool that had like a knife thing on the end. So there’s actually . . . It’s more for like cutting down branches. My dad had one around the house and so I made it so I could basically reach like 10 feet up in trees. And that really did the most of it. There’s a few that I needed to bring a ladder to, but for the most part, you know, an extra 10 feet in the tree I was able to snag among a bunch of it.
Andrew: I’ve been running marathons on every continent this year. I wonder if people are tired of hearing me talk about it. Well, we’re getting close to the end of the year, so I’ll stop talking about it, I imagine. But one of the things that I noticed was I took my kids in Australia to trampolines, I said, “Let’s just go and jump on trampolines for a little bit, right?” Fun.
I contacted them before I said, “Can a two-year-old jump on a trampoline? Is it legal?” The person said, “If they could jump, then sure. What do we care?” And I took him in. There are no forms to sign, no nothing. Just the other day I happen to be doing a 20-mile run to prepare for the next marathon and I go into a trampoline place to get some Gatorade or something and I see all the rules and all the instructions about how you can’t jump on the edges because your foot can break. And they actually show you a picture of broken bones. “Oh, this is so different.” So when you walked over to a neighbor and said, “Can I climb a ladder or use my stick to get mistletoe from your trees?” You ever say, “Who needs this mess?” or sign this form?
Kris: I mean, I didn’t experience that and I think that this was probably, you know, 20 years ago or so where I think people were a little lawsuits . . .
Andrew: Worried.
Kris: . . . worried. Yeah.
Andrew: Lawsuit happy, you were going to say. Yeah.
Kris: Lawsuit happy. But I think nowadays it might be something where like you said kind of fill out this form or no, you’re not allowed, don’t get on that ladder, kind of thing, or even selling on the street. People might be more sketched out now. I mean, I wouldn’t know if . . . I haven’t seen too many kids selling it these days. Maybe things have changed.
Andrew: All right. Let me talk about my first sponsor and then come back in. Kris, check this out. I’m finally wearing something that’s not my usual V-neck shirt. I don’t know if it comes across well on camera.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: It feels comfortable. I feel like I’m going to actually wear this thing. And it’s all because someone on my team said, “Hey, Andrew, I think I know where you should be buying your clothes.” I said, “Oh, yeah? Where?” My thing is, I do want to look good, but not so good that it’s weird for a while there. I hired someone to professionally dress me. And she got me collared shirts, she got me jacket. It looked good but it felt a little bit . . . I felt a lot uncomfortable. It didn’t feel like really me. You know what I’m talking about?
Kris: Totally.
Andrew: You do any of this?
Kris: My wife tries to dress me sometimes.
Andrew: Who . . . Your friends?
Kris: I go back to . . . My wife.
Andrew: Your wife. I wish my wife would dress me.
Kris: But I end up going back to the V-necks.
Andrew: Because they are super comfortable. I then end up with those jackets, they’re on a hook over here, and when I happen to need them, I wear them but I never wore them casually. I’ve done this a lot. There are times when I used to have bags of clothes from Nordstrom and other places just sitting in my closet because I never wear them. They look good in the store but they’re not comfortable.
The thing about this company Outerknown which is now a sponsor of mine is they make clothes that looks good. That’s not the same old V-neck shirt. It feels as comfortable as that, but it’s a step beyond. And if you want to go a few step beyond that they have button-down, collared shirts that look really good, feel casual, toss them in a bag, bring them out, wear them comfortably and also they make you look a little bit nicer, a lot nicer without making you feel uncomfortable. And since my wife is a big hippie chick, it actually is created for sustainable this and environmentally friendly that and I never really read all of that BS even though they’re a sponsor and I should . . . It’s not BS. It’s true, but I don’t care about that. I just care, “Do I look good?”
Kris: Yeah. Is it comfortable?
Andrew: Right. Is it comfortable enough that I’m going to wear it?
Kris: Exactly.
Andrew: Will I feel like myself? And this does make me feel great. If you’re out there and you’re listening to me and you want comfortable clothes that do feel casual but also put you a step beyond the usual casual stuff that you shouldn’t be wearing, that you’ve gotten a little lazy with, go check out Outerknown. I should be spelling it out. They’ve got beautiful photos on the site, so even if you decide not to buy, you’re going to be lit up by the photos. They do have nicer clothes that I could get from my wife than, you know, the standard stuff. They have jeans. They have everything. So they go a step beyond just what I’m wearing right now, which was . . . What would you call this? It’s . . . I don’t even know what it’s called.
Kris: Yeah. But it’s nice. It’s like I kind of like it. I want something like that. It’s like a nice long sleeve, has a little buttons and it looks super comfortable.
Andrew: A little bit of that. Thermal shirt look to it.
Kris: There’s an in-between where it’s not too hot, but it makes you not too cold kind of thing.
Andrew: Yeah. Perfect. Outerknown.com. Let me spell it and then if you use the discount code MIXERGY, you’re going to get a big discount off their already low prices. Okay. So here it is. Outer is spelled O-U-T-E-R, known is K-N-O-W-N. If you go to outerknown.com, browse around, look and see what you want to buy, and then if you use the discount code MIXERGY, you’re going to get . . . Oh, wait. Actually, let me see exactly how much. I’ve actually made mistakes in the past for sponsors. I go, “All right, Andrew. We’re just going to increase the discount percentage for you since you already said it.” I don’t want them to have to do that. We’re looking at . . . Where is it? Where’s the percentage? How much? How much?
Kris: Any discount . . .
Andrew: Twenty-five percent. That’s pretty significant, right?
Kris: Yeah. I love that. I might . . . Is there any special discounts for guests?
Andrew: At 25% can we do better? I should just say the discount code will give you 50%, 60%. Right? Now they’re going to have to go and deal with this.
Kris: Twenty-five percent is actually a killer. That’s great.
Andrew: Actually, it really is. When you’re dealing with physical products, you understand these margins are significant. If they’re a software vendor, they go, “50% off. Go for it.”
Kris: Yeah, 90%.
Andrew: Right. Who cares? One extra user if you sign up for the first . . . No. They’re sending physical products, nice packaging and everything. All right. Outerknown, thank you so much for sponsoring. Everyone, use the discount code MIXERGY for that big discount. Where did you get your customers? Was it all through the app store and your friends?
Kris: Initially, yeah. I was . . . For CoffeeSender it was doing really no sales at all. It was just word of mouth, people using it. I mean, you also when you would receive it when it was in the e-gift, you would get it and they would say “Sent from CoffeeSender.” So it’s kind of that viral loop where you’d be like, “Oh, I got this for CoffeeSender. I want to check that out and send something.”
Andrew: What is that?
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: And you told our producer, “I intentionally wanted the email to come from a third party,” because?
Kris: It built credibility. It also helped to break through the noise because if a third party is sending this gift and says like, “CoffeeSender is sending this,” it provides a little bit more intrigue on like, “What is that?” versus maybe just coming from like a Gmail account.
Andrew: Right. It’s just another sales message. It kind of looks like it’s this, but maybe it’s not. Got it. All right. It kind of looks like it’s a free thing, but maybe it’s not a free thing. What are they trying to hook me into? Got it.
Kris: Yep. And also allowed us to provide analytics and track who’s opening it? Who’s clicking it? Who’s seeing? All of . . .
Andrew: How did you know to do that?
Kris: Just thought about it. Yeah. It was just a feature that I was like, “Wouldn’t it be cool?” I mean, I built it for myself.
Andrew: Because you were the customer.
Kris: Yes. Exactly. I wanted that.
Andrew: You want to know, “Did they actually open it?”
Kris: Exactly.
Andrew: Got it. And so you realize other people needed to . . . One thing that you didn’t anticipate until you started talking to customers was they wanted this integrated beyond Salesforce, right?
Kris: Yeah. So, like, Marketo and Eloqua and Survey Monkey and some of these other integrations where people were like, “How can I send things through other tools that I’m using as well?”
Andrew: And it’s because other marketers were saying, “I need somebody to fill out the survey. Can you reward them automatically with this?”
Kris: Exactly.
Andrew: Got it. Okay. I’m looking at Eloqua. This is like super beyond where I am. You’re talking about real enterprise software.
Kris: Yeah. Enterprise Eloqua is used by kind of the top of the top enterprises. So it might be the high end of the market comparatively to like the Marketo and HubSpot model.
Andrew: And it’s marketing automation software. So how do you know which one do we build and which one is just not going to work except for the one or two people who ask for it?
Kris: Ask questions from people that asked who it was and I’d look at the company and my eyes would light up seeing like this huge company is asking for this feature. I was like, “Yeah, I could figure it out.” So, I didn’t do as much kind of product development as probably most companies would considering this was like a nights and weekends kind of thing.
Andrew: Was it still oDesk developer building it out for you?
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: It was.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: And I guess, you know what, the nice thing that you have is once the framework is built, integrations are relatively straightforward. I’m not saying they’re easy, but it’s not like creating brand new software that plugs in. You’re just . . .
Kris: Correct. Yeah. We had the core kind of engine on how an integration would work. And so it was just like, how does this API for this other platform look and how do we just connect those two?
Andrew: And you kept going with that. At what point did you say, “You know what? I think we need to go beyond Starbucks gift cards”?
Kris: Yeah. So, probably half-year, year or so into the CoffeeSender, I met up with my college friend, Braydan, again and we caught up and he became a customer of CoffeeSender and just fell in love with it and he was like, “This is great. I want to use this. I want to use this.”
Andrew: Who is this person?
Kris: Braydan Young. He’s my co-founder.
Andrew: Yeah. Got it. So he started using your software and you got an email saying . . . You got a message and you saw his email and said, “I recognize this guy.”
Kris: Yes, exactly. And so we were grabbing coffee and catching up or maybe it was grabbing beers, I forget. And so he was like, “Hey, can I help you sell this?” And I’m like, “Well, I’m not really selling this. It kind of sells itself, blah, blah, blah.” And after a couple of months he actually was like, “Hey, I want to jump in and let’s build a company around this.” And so that was a turning point because I was still working at Talkdesk for maybe, I don’t know, six more months or so while he was behind the scenes hustling. So, that was when we he was reaching out trying to close more deals and he was doing a couple of hundred grand in revenue. So it wasn’t . . . .
Andrew: He was.
Kris: Yeah. So, it wasn’t like . . .
Andrew: How?
Kris: I mean, he was doing your typical like emailing people, sending coffee out, trying to get people to do meetings, showing them a quick like five-minute demo.
Andrew: To who? Who did he target?
Kris: Other salespeople.
Andrew: Okay.
Kris: So just going after VP of sales.
Andrew: Which kinds? Did he decide that . . .
Kris: It was really just like going through LinkedIn and finding people with like account executive or VP of sales in their title and just like . . .
Andrew: That’s it.
Kris: Yeah. Just going after that in the early days.
Andrew: Sending them a gift card and . . .
Kris: Exactly.
Andrew: And that was the first step in his sales process.
Kris: Yeah, exactly. Or it was, you know, sending an email, if you didn’t get a reply, sending a coffee gift. So it was a kind of trial and error thing on what was the best time to send it.
Andrew: What you end up discovering was the best time?
Kris: It was kind of a mix, actually. So we found that some people responded better in the beginning, some kind of mid-site and mid-funnel. But it was . . . We weren’t necessarily testing a lot, right? This was like, I wasn’t really putting that many hours in. He was putting in hours but not, like, refining his . . . or making it more efficient. He was just like, you know, going after it. So, really, started to evolve and I was . . . At Talkdesk we were doing more . . . And I was writing handwritten notes. I was sending out other gifts at Talkdesk. And it kind of dawned on me of like, “Why am I doing this manually? Why can I click a button?”
Andrew: You were handwriting notes to potential customers. You were sending out other gifts . . .
Kris: Yeah. Swag, I would send a bunch of like t-shirts out, this and that to try to, again, do something even more creative. We were sending out like these headphones kind of like these ones I’m wearing is like, “Hey, take a trial of our software . . . ”
Andrew: And this is just you buying it on the company budget, sending it out, seeing if it works, you personal . . .
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: Got it. I see it. We do stuff like that too, but I always use Amazon for it and it’s a pain in the butt because Amazon forces us to enter in credit card information all over again . . .
Kris: Every time, yeah.
Andrew: Add our address information again. Yes, we do get two-day delivery, which is nice, but it’s a lot of pain. And then my friend, Noah Kagan, who does this on Amazon a lot had his account shut down by Amazon because they thought that what he was doing was using it as a reseller product when what he really was doing was just sending gifts out to people.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: I get the frustration. Were you using Amazon too at the time? Were you buying stuff and shipping it?
Kris: Yeah. I was doing a little bit of Amazon although I would actually ship it to my office and then I would rebox it with a handwritten note to make it more personable and not have it come with like Amazon tape and stuff because a lot of it was more of like surprise and delight, not like thank you gifts or anything.
Andrew: Can you say what you were making when you were working at Talkdesk at the time that you were building this company? You told our producer, but I don’t know if you said it by accident or not.
Kris: Yeah. I mean, as a salesperson, I was like making like-kind of mid-200,000 a year.
Andrew: That’s the thing that I underlined in their notes from your conversation. You said, “Look, there I was making $200,000 plus a year. And then every time somebody would send out coffee, I just get $1.” So I could understand why the dollar sale didn’t seem big enough and it wasn’t until you had a co-founder in Braydan who was going out and getting sales and growing it that you realize, “All right. I think I need to leave.” But before you left, you were recognizing you personally were sending out different types of products, not just coffee, and that helped shaped the product how?
Kris: That was kind of the turning point where I was like, “Hey, if we could build an infrastructure that allows the same easy click and send button functionality, but allow you to send anything physical, that would be a game-changer. And so that was really got me excited and quit Talkdesk and then really spent about nine months back in kind of stealth mode, I guess you would call it or behind the scenes trying to build out infrastructure, warehousing, more integrations, more detailed rules, and enterprise provisioning, things, all that good stuff.
Andrew: And you were going to ship the products out yourself?
Kris: Yes. So, one of the . . .
Andrew: This is such a scary prospect.
Kris: It was pretty . . . It was kind of scary, but at the same time I was like, “Okay. I can understand what I got to do.” There’s companies have swag closets full of swag, companies want to send gifts all the time, so it’s like if an e-commerce company can do it, why can’t I?
Andrew: But you weren’t thinking, I guess a lot of people would be thinking, “Where Is there an API for someone who will send this stuff out? How can I not have to send it myself?”
Kris: Yeah. I looked at that in the beginning, but there really wasn’t a solution that was perfectly capable of, like, what I needed, which was like something that would provide handwritten notes. And I really wanted something that looked like it was handboxed together and didn’t have barcodes. And so traditional like maybe an API into like an e-commerce type warehouse management software, they’re not going to be able to provide the same type of custom-handwritten note or the same type of like kidding instructions and things like that. They’re more of like, “Let’s just pack as much as . . . Let’s pack as many boxes as we can and ship as much as we can out because they’re paid like variable.”
Andrew: I do have a huge problem with that. I like to give out these beads and every company that I’ve used to ship out the beads will include an invoice or a receipt . . .
Kris: Like a packing slip.
Andrew: . . . a packing slip . . .
Kris: Yeah. I know. No one wants that.
Andrew: It’s an ugly freaking packing slip. Even if you’re going to do a packing slip, make it look nice, but number one and number two, it just looks so cheap. I want it to feel like gift coming from me.
Kris: Totally.
Andrew: Even it’s a packing slip, at least show $20 or $50 what it costs would cross out and then Andrew pay . . . Be a little nicer about it. But it’s all about getting the stuff out too fast when it comes to a lot of the shippers.
Kris: Yep.
Andrew: All right. I’m looking at an early version of your site. I see you had Sendoso box, but you also had boxes that looked like it was coming from them. Like there’s one from Dream Coat. Was Dream Coat one of your customers?
Kris: That was just an example of, like, one of the box, just like anonymous version of what [inaudible 00:28:35].
Andrew: Okay. Go it.
Kris: So in the early days we weren’t as much marketing who our customers were, but it gives you some examples of like some of the creative boxes that we are printing. And so that was more like a stock . . .
Andrew: That’s the other thing, dude? You were going to print out boxes for people?
Kris: Yes. We create custom boxes that could be any shape and size that kind of insert trays. We have boxes that open up and a video plays.
Andrew: From the beginning, I’m looking at 2018.
Kris: We didn’t have as sophisticated boxes, but we did have . . . Like, the video boxes came in a little later, but we did have, you know, highly customized custom-printed boxes.
Andrew: From the beginning, you said, “I want them to be able to pick the product that they have. I want them to be able to pick the box and I want them to decide what kind of note goes with it.”
Kris: Yep, exactly.
Andrew: All those things. You didn’t say, “I’m an MVP it. We’re going to start out with one box, one thing.”
Kris: No, because I figured . . .
Andrew: No.
Kris: I was, again, “What do I want?” I was the buyer. I was the sender. What would I want? So I had to think like, “Okay. I would want a custom box with custom items in it, a handwritten note.”
Andrew: Yeah. I’m looking at handwritten note here. I think you wrote this freaking handwritten note. It’s . . .
Kris: The example on the website is someone that I wrote. Yeah. I was not writing all the notes. I hired people to write the note.
Andrew: Okay. And then the products came from who?
Kris: So really, we would source products on behalf of our customers.
Andrew: They would tell you what they needed and you would go and figure out how to get it for them?
Kris: Yes. So that was another crazy thing is now we’re sourcing things from the U.S., from China, we’re buying all these different things. Someone’s like, “I want to send this customer welcome kit that has a Yeti mug in it, a custom box, Shrinkle paper, a little postcard, you know, this or that.” So, I’m going out there and finding all the suppliers and buying it all and getting it into the warehouse and then holding it in stock so someone could click and send 10 or click and send 100 or click one.
Andrew: What’s the warehouse?
Kris: So we had a warehouse in Las Vegas.
Andrew: You got a warehouse too for this.
Kris: Yeah, yeah. Now we have five warehouses around the world but we originally just had a warehouse in Las Vegas.
Andrew: Kris, this is the point in the story where many entrepreneurs would say, “And then I clearly made a mistake. We went overboard. I was doing too much. Things failed. And then I simplified it and then rebuilt it.” But that’s not where you’re coming from.
Kris: Yeah. No.
Andrew: It worked?
Kris: It worked. It worked really well.
Andrew: How did it work? Why were you able to do all these different things when it feels so overwhelming? What did you do that allowed you to do all this?
Kris: Really, just kind of broke things down to make things seem simpler than they were for me. I pictured the warehouse as an e-commerce warehouse and it’s like, “What do I need to do?” Okay. You pick a box on row two, shelf 8, bin . . . So I wasn’t overwhelmed at all. Also, I was able to hire some people that made my job easier in the early days, but yeah, we never looked back. We just continued to grow.
Andrew: And it was all your money, though.
Kris: In the beginning it was my money until we raised some money.
Andrew: How much of your money did you put into it?
Kris: Maybe 100 grand or something.
Andrew: A hundred grand?
Kris: Yeah. Not terribly much.
Andrew: But to get the warehouse to get the original products, you put the whole thing together that cost you about $100,000.
Kris: Yeah. So the nice thing is like the products that we would wait for our customers to pay, they would prepay for the product. So we weren’t in working . . . We didn’t have like, inventory. It was all of our pre-paid customers’ inventory. So that was nice.
Andrew: Okay. Did you get customers for this before you started getting a warehouse and everything else?
Kris: So, while I was building the software out with the engineering team, Braydan was kind of like selling the slide deck.
Andrew: Okay. Great.
Kris: So we actually had a bunch of customers ready to get going before we actually like opened up the gates. So that was helpful because we were building up demand a couple of months before we actually started . . .
Andrew: Got it. So you this was going to work? That is kind of a lean startup mentality.
Kris: Yeah. So that helped us. And then once the doors opened we were taking orders and we got to 50 or 100 customers pretty quickly.
Andrew: Wow-wee. Do you remember the day that you went into your boss at Talkdesk and said, “I’ve got to go do this on my own”?
Kris: Well, the warehouse stuff came nine months after Talkdesk. But I do remember when I was leaving Talkdesk and I was saying, “Hey, I’m going to go try to do something on my own.” I wasn’t . . . I was kind of at the time not fully sure of how it was going to work out. So I would just like a little on edge, but I never looked back.
Andrew: Yeah. But there was also not this take this job and shove it type of attitude. They were good to you even afterwards. They stayed on as customers. They let you use them as a reference customer, it looks like.
All right. Let me talk about my second sponsor. I got to show you this and then we’re going to continue on with this story because your problem was not that you were taking on too much surprisingly, but you did have other issues and I want to talk about the customer success manager and a couple of other issues. Let me show you this thing. Hang on a second.
Kris: Cool.
Andrew: Look at this. [inaudible 00:33:23]. All right. This, I’ve got other stuff from them. Freaking ClickFunnels guys. I lost my earphones, my AirPods, which I love.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: Dave sends me this, AirPods with a note and he knows that I get so guilty when people send me stuff I don’t know what to do. He even said, “Look, Andrew, look, no strings attached.” And there’s actually a string here.
Kris: Oh my gosh. And there are strings.
Andrew: This is the way that . . .
Kris: That’s genius.
Andrew: . . . these people at ClickFunnels have dealt with me for years. Anything that you need, they’re just there and they help out. It’s amazing to the point where they said, “Andrew, we want you to come out and interview Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels in Utah. What’s your fee?” And I said, “You know what? For you guys, there’s no fee. I’d love it if my family could come along, but I just love . . . I feel so . . .
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: “I need to reciprocate. You guys have been amazing.” So he go, “All right. All right. Just bring the family out here. Are you sure there’s nothing else?” I go, “No, please. Nothing else.” And so I went out there and I did it. It was one of my best freaking interviews ever with Russell. I went back in time, I studied everything that he’d done. I watched him try a billion different companies and fail with a bunch of them and do okay with a bunch and evolve his way over to software until this thing just made it. And he let me contact people who didn’t like him, let me co . . . Not let me. He’s paying for me to come out there. He understands the kind of asshole I am. I want to really understand what’s coming and how he did it.
And stood there, we went through the questions, I fully understood how his business was. By the way, the interview is up for anyone who wants to go check it out. They put it up on their website on this URL. I actually screwed up with the URL with them and they redid it, they said, “We’re the ClickFunnels people. We’ll create a URL fast.” It’s clickfunnels.com/mixergy to see the interview where I did with Russell Brunson live in person. They did it beautifully here. Of course, they did because ClickFunnels. They’ve got all the software they need to make this page look beautiful.
But here’s the reason that I’m talking about ClickFunnels, my second sponsor. I spend a long time creating my own landing pages, creating my own sales pages after people land and give me their email address. I did the whole thing. I love it. I had a team of people who could help me. They were great at it and they loved it. They take pride in creating these landing pages. Somebody who I hired, Caleb Hodges, created a ClickFunnels account for me and said, “Just try it.” It increased conversions. People were landing on my page, giving me . . .
Kris: Pretty nice.
Andrew: Right?
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: And it looked good and made me feel proud. The only thing we didn’t like was he used a picture of a girl who was like lying in bed with her legs up. It was a little bit too sexualized with the woman. Someone else on the team said, “Get rid of the picture.” He got rid of the picture, he used something a little bit more conservative. Great. And we knew, like, the conversion numbers, we were able to add upsells. This whole thing did so well. I did over $1 million in sales just with the sequence of pages that I . . .
Kris: Genius. Nice.
Andrew: . . . created with them. Yeah. Today if you look at a lot of our sales pages, we ripped out our own work and we replaced it with ClickFunnels. I had a great designer on the team. We stopped working with him. It was very painful for me to say sorry because ClickFunnels does such a good job. I highly recommend ClickFunnels even if they weren’t, even when they weren’t a sponsor, I highly recommended them. And now that they are, I can say you can use this URL to get 14 days free of ClickFunnels plus a bunch of amazing bonuses including the funnel that we use to do over $1 million in sales, including the interview that I did with the founder of ClickFunnels, which really is one of my best interviews. If you love it, you should go and check out. If you like my work, you’re going to love that one interview.
Go check them out at Clickfunnels.com/mixergy. I’m so excited about them and I’m also . . . I feel guilty. Kris, what happens? I feel . . . I thought that I was the only one who felt this way. When somebody gives me a gift I feel like, “I don’t know.” But I guess that’s a common thing, right?
Kris: Yeah. It’s the power of gifting.
Andrew: It is the power of gifting. It’s good people. I think it comes from a good place in me. We need to reciprocate. We feel like . . .
Kris: Exactly.
Andrew: Right? And it’s not always reciprocate by, I’ve got to give you this exact thing, but at least I’ve got to give you my attention and gratitude, and for me, it just goes in my head all the time, “Did you reciprocate? Does Dave know? No, he doesn’t.” I’m a little bit like frozen with appreciation for Dave. It’s true.
Kris: Yeah. I love it.
Andrew: Let’s talk about the challenge, which is . . . I wonder if he used you guys to send this over. No, probably didn’t. He probably did it himself. Dave should not be sending it himself. He’s too high up at ClickFunnels. Talk to me about what happened with the customer success manager.
Kris: Yeah. So, Braydan and I, we kind of . . . Our plan was to kind of bootstrap in the beginning. And so probably for our first maybe five or customers, we were using like profits. We were like, “Hey, we got enough in the bank. We can hire another person.” But the first person we tried to hire, customer success manager, it was a referral, but he just didn’t have a lot of industry experience, and so we actually let him go after about a week. But that was our very first hire.
Andrew: The very first person. What’s the challenge there?
Kris: I mean, the challenge for us was that we took a chance on someone that was kind of switching industries and didn’t have a lot of experience and really was not the right person we needed to come in there and be like, almost like a founder level that could come in there and take initiative, do everything they needed to do without our handholding.
Andrew: So, it’s not just about the industry-changing. It’s about they needed more direction from you.
Kris: Yes, exactly. So, that was the challenge.
Andrew: So what did you learn from that? I would have thought that somebody who had experience would be the right way to go and there is no company like Sendoso.
Kris: Yeah. I mean, for them, it was just, I guess, maybe just a curveball. I mean, from that day on, the next hire we actually replaced him with another customer success manager and that guy is a rock star. He’s still with us today. And we’ve got . . . We’ve scaled up to, like, 180 people . . .
Andrew: What’s different in that second hire?
Kris: Had experience, a ton of experience that was relative and related . . .
Andrew: Experience to what? To managing, to give them direction or . . .
Kris: To being a customer success manager, to experience with tech companies, experience with startups.
Andrew: Oh, he had more experience.
Kris: Yes.
Andrew: And because . . . I see. So, it’s not just that he was a customer success manager. He was also in a lot of startups where things are being made up as . . .
Kris: Exactly.
Andrew: Got it. As they go along and that’s different where you don’t get a lot of direction, you don’t get a lot of people patting you on the back.
Kris: Yeah. You just sit in a seat and you got to figure out what to do.
Andrew: Yeah. It is really different. And I would never thought of it as being a thing. And then I watched my wife go from one company to another and I could see that she works in a certain way where she does like to have more direction. She likes to have somebody say, “I’m going to . . . ”
Kris: Yeah. Some people are better structured.
Andrew: Yeah. “I’m going to mentor you.”
Kris: Yep.
Andrew: And so she figured it out, but she does prefer that way to have somebody mentor her and then for her to mentor someone else. And I get it. I get that it’s an issue to be out there by yourself trying to figure it out and not have somebody say, “I’ve done this. I’ll guide you. You’re going to be better than me because I’m here for you.”
Kris: Exactly.
Andrew: And you weren’t able to offer that. You then found somebody who was. What about this? I’ve interviewed people here who have warehouses who have operations that ship. Dude, Kris, that is an insane tough job on its own. You had that plus a brand new version of that plus the online version.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: What are some of the issues in on that?
Kris: I think that it was . . . Some of the only challenge was just like scaling up the space. So we didn’t really know . . . In the early days, we didn’t know how much space we needed. So our first warehouse was like about 1,000 square feet. And we out-grew that so quick. We had to move to a place that was 6,000 square feet, but like in between there we had one customer that was like, “Hey, we’ve got a bunch of stuff at our office. We’re going to send you like seven pallets of stuff.” And I was, like, doing the math in my head, I was like, “Oh, shit. I don’t . . . that not even going to fit in our warehouse. What are we going to do?”
So there was some early like scaling challenges and we had to, like, one Friday we had just like, get everything, move it, get moving company, move all the stuff, get another warehouse. So we’ve moved . . . We’ve moved a couple of different times to three different warehouses. Now we’re in a facility, our main facility, it’s close to about 100,000 square feet and we’re opening up another facility that will be a couple of 100,000 square feet.
Andrew: What do you use for warehouse software? There’s software to manage people who do drop shipping or other shipping. There’s no software for your type of business. Is there?
Kris: Yeah. So we had to build our own software for the warehouses because the kind of current like e-commerce related warehouse software did not have the same things that we needed in terms of functionality, the lack of barcodes, the lack of the handwritten notes, all these other things that we wanted to make that gift to that . . .
Andrew: So you get to create that yourself too?
Kris: Yeah. So we’ve built warehouse software along with the software that is the sendoso.com and the integration and all that stuff too.
Andrew: Yeah. Look at this. I actually . . . I interviewed the founder of ShipHero. He has software for warehouses because it is such a beast that they need external software and there are no people out there doing it that he could figure out what they all need. You didn’t have that. The first version I’m imagining was in Excel?
Kris: No. The first version was actually like e-commerce-like warehouse software that kind of broke on us.
Andrew: Something that you used that other e-commerce sites used that didn’t really work.
Kris: Yeah. It didn’t really work.
Andrew: Why did it not work?
Kris: The whole thing about inserting handwritten notes really broke the typical process of just like packing boxes quick, not having barcodes on everything. Our inventory is more sporadic, so we don’t have like 50,000 chopsticks in one area. We [inaudible 00:43:08] 20 of a gift or 100 or . . . So we have smaller quantities but more sporadic around the warehouse. So there’s a lot of other . . . There’s kidding projects. So when you like send out maybe a bead bracelet, you’re just sending that thing. For some of the things we send, it’s wrapped in tissue paper, there’s a sticker attached to it, it’s folded into the box perfectly.
Andrew: So before something gets sent out, you need to . . . Do you write a handwritten note personally to the . . .
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: You do. So somebody handwrites a note just to that one recipient . . .
Kris: Yeah. We have dozens of dozens of handwriters at our facilities around the world.
Andrew: Who sit at their warehouse, after somebody brings a package, they write it, I guess they write . . . What is the process then for that?
Kris: So there’s a couple of different processes. And sometimes we will pre-write the handwritten notes and then they’ll go pack the box after. And sometimes we’ll be doing in real-time. And so there’s someone that goes grabs the item off the shelf, puts in the box while someone’s writing it, and then they’re combined and shipped out.
Andrew: Wow. Do you guys have video of this somewhere? It’s fascinating.
Kris: We’ve got some video on our website, actually. Yeah.
Andrew: About what it’s like to work behind the scenes.
Kris: There’s some behind the scenes. Yeah. I think under our feature section there’s a warehouse little section with a video and you can see the expansive warehouse.
Andrew: In the what section do I see it?
Kris: I think it’s the features and it says . . .
Andrew: Features. Got it. Okay.
Kris: And there’s a warehouse video. We also have like a Sendoso TV section too that has some cool videos of like the boxes and things getting in box.
Andrew: Oh. I see that. That’s on the bottom of the page under company heading. Yeah, I see. This is such a neat idea. I was using Ahrefs to get a sense of, like, are you guys doing any content marketing? You kind of are. It’s not huge for you, but . . .
Kris: Yeah. We’re starting to . . . We’re focusing on it more. It’s definitely a part of our strategy going forward. We’ve been a bit more kind of in direct sales model, but we still probably have gotten 40% of our revenue today from inbound marketing.
Andrew: From people seeing an article like the one that I’ve got on my screen here which is “12 of the Best Marketing Swag Ideas from Dreamforce ’18.”
Kris: Yeah. So, we’ll have things like that or we do like trade shows. We do other like co-marketing with other companies, things like that.
Andrew: You mean you go to trade shows.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: And that helps you co-marketing is what? How does that work?
Kris: Co-marketing is like we find one of our partners maybe like, Outreach or SalesLoft or Marketo and we’re doing like a webinar together or a joint blog posts, things like that.
Andrew: Okay. But number one, is it still outbound?
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: It is.
Kris: Yeah. So we have . . .
Andrew: So what have you changed in outbound now? Yeah.
Kris: So we’ve got about 40 people in the sales team, about half of them are sales development reps just setting meetings for the other half of the account executive team.
Andrew: Where are the sales development reps finding leads?
Kris: So our marketing team actually builds out our Salesforce database and pre-qualifies based on employee count, title, industry, technographic . . .
Andrew: Because a software can do all that now automatically. You just suck in the potential customers, the software tells you who’s right and who’s not. The SDR is a Sales Development Lead start to send over personal messages, right? Did I lose you?
Kris: No, I’m here.
Andrew: Okay. I just got a message from Zoom saying, “Your software is . . . Your internet connection is under . . . ”
Kris: I saw it freeze for a second.
Andrew: Yeah. So the way it works is they fill . . . Sorry. The marketing team fills your software with a bunch of leads, your software figures out who is the right prospect and then your SDR, Sales Development Reps, start to fire off personal messages to each person.
Kris: Correct. And I wouldn’t say our software. They’re using like . . .
Andrew: We just lost him because the internet connection is . . .
Kris: Sendoso to certain things out . . .
Andrew: Sorry. You said it’s not your software. What’s the software that you guys use to figure out what the right customers are?
Kris: We use Salesforce for kind of our CRM that we then pipe in all of our data into.
Andrew: And where do you get the data? How does this stuff work?
Kris: We use a variety of different data sources. Probably, we’ve got a team in India that provides data for us. We use ZoomInfo, we’re using EverString, we’re using a couple of other providers, Clearbit.
Andrew: And Clearbit is what you use to figure out who these people are and then make sure that they’re the right prospects.
Kris: Yeah. It’s like a data enrichment tool. So we can go and find, like, the contacts and the accounts to go after and the email addresses and all that stuff.
Andrew: I saw you raised a bunch of money on . . .
Kris: Yeah. We’ve raised about . . .
Andrew: How much?
Kris: Close to 15 million about, I think 14. So last series A it was led by Craft Ventures. And then the Storm Ventures led our seed round which was 2 million.
Andrew: And the funding was for what? For seed round.
Kris: Just growth. Yeah. So we were just using it to kind of hire more sales, more product, more engineers, more everybody.
Andrew: I see Hack VC is also investing with you guys.
Kris: Yeah, it is.
Andrew: I was just talking to Hack VC I guess it was yesterday, I think. Yeah, Ed Roman.
Kris: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah. He’s coming to San Francisco today or tomorrow and Olivia and I have plans, so I won’t be able to see him, but pretty cool. How do you know Roman? How do you know him?
Kris: I was introduced to him through another investor and kicked it off and yeah, he participated in last round.
Andrew: What do you think of him? What do you know about him?
Kris: I don’t know too deeply, but seems like a really cool guy. He’s been helpful in terms of making more introductions for our next round of funding.
Andrew: I interviewed him about this old business he had, we’ve stayed in touch. I guess he used to live in San Francisco, so I bumped into him which is one of the nice things about being in San Francisco. And he ended up investing in a bunch of really interesting companies.
Kris: Yeah. He built some pretty cool . . . He built some cool networks of . . . Yeah.
Andrew: He invested in ScriptDash, I guess. I love ScriptDash. They changed their name to Alto. You get prescriptions delivered directly to your door. No waiting on anything.
Kris: Oh, that’s cool.
Andrew: It’s amazing. It’s so good. All right. What’s the best part of having done all this, Kris? You’re a guy who wanted to start a company, you started one. What was it? The . . . What was that company . . .
Kris: All Student Rentals?
Andrew: Yeah. All Student Rentals didn’t go so well. Right? Is it okay?
Kris: Actually, it was decent. Yeah, I sold it, but it wasn’t a millionaire from it, but it was a good learning experience.
Andrew: Yeah, I went back in time and I saw it. It’s a good . . . It didn’t change your life.
Kris: No.
Andrew: You were aspiring to build something. You finally built something. This is freaking phenomenal. Isn’t it, Kris?
Kris: It is probably the best thing ever. I mean, I just pinch myself sometimes. I think it’s so amazing coming into work and seeing hundreds of employees that are just so happy to work here. We built an amazing culture, and then all of our customers. I mean, we have hundreds and hundreds of reviews. We get feedback daily of people that are like, “I can’t believe like my customer’s customer liked this.” And so we’re just creating this, like, huge community of people and it’s fascinating to see it grow and grow and grow.
Andrew: Yeah. And two years ago, this wasn’t even there.
Kris: I know. I know. I can’t believe it.
Andrew: Wow-wee. All right. The website is Sendoso, S-E-N-D-O-S-O. Sendoso. Am I pronouncing it right?
Kris: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Cool. And the company name is Sender, Inc.?
Kris: Yeah, that was just a . . . I mean, the story goes is that we were going to actually name the company Sender, but then like buying the domain like sender.com was like, way too expensive. So then we had to, like, brainstorm on a better name and we brainstormed Sendoso.
Andrew: I tend to think that for what you’re doing, it’s better to have a unique name so that when . . . Because I know as a researcher . . .
Kris: It actually worked really well.
Andrew: . . . I need to look you up to see, does this really work? What experiences have other people had? And if I’m just looking up “Sender,” it’s hard to find those reviews.
Kris: It’s blessing in disguise because it’s such a common word that we would have gotten lost or it’s less memorable.
Andrew: Yeah. And I feel like it’s different enough that I want to see, is this real? Does this exactly do what they say it does? This is too new. All right. Kris, I’m so freaking lit up by what you built it. It’s so exciting to see it.
Kris: I love it.
Andrew: I love it. I mean, there are videos on your site about people, now that I’m on there, of people who’ve gotten this and people who’ve sent it. It’s . . .
Kris: Yeah. We have a whole like customer love section too. We’ve showcased a bunch of things. It’s great. It just makes my day looking at everyone who’s gotten stuff and the excitement and happiness and the surprise and delight aspects of it all.
Andrew: And such a clever idea that just makes sense. All right. Congratulations on doing this. I want to thank my two sponsors who made this interview happen. The first is dressing me, Outerknown. Check them out at outerknown.com. Even if you’re a t-shirt person and don’t want the same brand t-shirt as everyone else, even if you just want that. I got some t-shirts from them. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. But the t-shirts are step above, they look a little bit nicer. And if you want to go a step beyond that they’ve got that too. And everything that they have is going to make you feel really comfortable and look really good. And if you use the discount code MIXERGY, you’re going to get . . . What did we say? A hundred percent off? What’s the . . .
Kris: Twenty-five percent.
Andrew: Twenty-five percent off. All right. It’s outer, O-U-T-E-R, known, K-N-O-W-N, .com. And the second sponsor is Russell Brunson, Dave, so many other people over at . . . These are the good gift-givers over at ClickFunnels.
Kris: I love the strings attached thing. That’s so clever.
Andrew: Because it shows that he’s got emotional IQ.
Kris: Yeah. I know.
Andrew: He understand the way that my freaking mind works . . .
Kris: Totally.
Andrew: . . . that I feel guilty. Do you want to know? I have a gift from a guest. I won’t even say what it is because I’m too embarrassed. It’s in my house and I go, “I feel too guilty to even open it up.” It’s an amazing, amazing gift. I’m going to love it. I just . . . And my family is going to love it. I just feel guilty and incredibly appreciative. It’s the power of gift-giving. But wait, I forgot to mention the sponsor. The sponsor is ClickFunnels. Go check out my interview with Russell and see how he built up his business and get that funnel that I created that’s done over $1 million in sales. If you go to clickfunnels.com/mixergy, you’re going to get all that. I’m appreciative to them for sponsoring and being here. And Kris, congratulations.
Kris: Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate it.
Andrew: Yeah. All right. You bet.
