190 How we built a billion dollar startup from scratch | Podcast with Alina Vandenberghe - Chili Piper

Chili Piper is the secret spice of top revenue teams like Intuit, Spotify, Airbnb, Gong, and thousands more. Chili Piper is the only lead routing and scheduling software that improves conversions all the way across the funnel. Lead routing, form scheduling, SDR-to-AE handoff, and so much more. Wouldn't you say it's time to spice up your revenue team? Connect with Alina 👇 Chili Piper: https://www.chilipiper.com LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alinav Tekpon is a SaaS marketplace born out of the genuine desire to help people change how they consume and purchase software products and services. Tekpon has behind a team of enthusiastic tech lovers whose main goal is to help users boost their lives and businesses with the right software. Connect with Tekpon ⚡ Website: https://tekpon.com SaaS Entrepreneurs & Startups: https://www.facebook.com/groups/tekpon Listen to the podcast 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0sf7X3sC8Pg8gzpphTYxgi Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tekpon-saas-podcast/id1637493062 The topics we've discussed 🕐 00:00 Intro 00:18 What is Chili Piper? 02:18 What's the biggest problem you solve? 03:05 Most loved Chili Piper features 04:04 Use cases 04:45 One of the biggest competitors uses Chili Piper 05:50 Chili Piper pricing - freemium is coming soon 06:24 Integrations 07:10 How Chili Piper created a new software category 08:10 Were you not afraid you're building something nobody wants? 09:15 The founding story of Chili Piper 11:53 How big is the Chili Piper team? 12:20 What is your culture? 15:15 Remote first & annual retreats 16:10 How Alina chooses the right hire 17:45 Unfortunately, most people are not self-motivated 18:00 Bootstrapped to $2M ARR, raised $3M seed stage 18:25 Raised $33M Series B, almost at a unicorn valuation 19:15 Bootstrapping & Fundraising are both working 20:40 Conflict between founders is the number 1 reason startups fail - how to avoid this problem 22:05 Getting the first customers and interviewing them about the problem 23:00 Word of mouth will always be the best 23:50 Education is still very important 24:30 How Alina started social selling and her advice 16:10 The future vision is to IPO in the next 5 years 26:40 How did AI impact Chili Piper? 27:30 Advice for starting founders 28:20 Favorite SaaS 28:55 Outro