[Raised $10 million] Ep.115 - The First 100 with Yi Shi, the founder of Flash Intel

Yi Shi is the founder of Flash Intel, an all-in-one sales platform to consolidate the sales tech stack. Welcome to the show, Yi. Flash Intel raised a total of $10 million.

Yi is 4x Entrepreneur. Before Flash Intel, Shi was the chief executive of the Shanghai-based technology group Avazu Holding. Founded in 2009, the startup owns game developer and distributor Teebik, app developer Dotc United, and investment firm aFund. In 2015, Shi sold Avazu Holding's advertising unit Avazu to Shenzhen-listed gaming company Zeus Entertainment for more than $300 million.

Where to find Yi Shi:

• Website: https://www.flashintel.ai/
• LinkedIn (2) Yi Shi | LinkedIn

Where to find Hadi Radwan:

• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack
• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedIn

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Transcript

Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Today on the podcast, I have Ishii, the founder of Flash Intel, which is an all-in-one sales platform to consolidate the sales stack stack. Welcome to the show, Yi. How are you doing today? I'm good. Thanks, Hadi. Thank you for staying up so late. I know you're in Japan and you have built an amazing company, Flash Intel, and you've raised 10 million to do all of this. But before we dive into your history. Tell us, for someone who's not familiar with what a sales stack is, what is that? So basically, what Flash Intel does is helping all kinds of B2B companies, right, in software, in finance, in all kinds of businesses where you deal with other business as a customer, to help these guys to generate more pipelines. That's our mission, and that's also what we do, and where we are good at. So basically we are creating all kinds of tech stacks to helping other B2B businesses to generate more pipeline. So essentially are you verticalizing the sales tech stack or are you aggregating different sales softwares? Like for example, I work with Zoom Info, I work with HubSpot, I work with SalesLoft. There's so many different organizations out there that would plug the whole sales value chain. Are you aggregating all of this or are you actually verticalizing it, replacing all of those? So basically when I started Flash Intel, I found it's a common problem in the B2B software space that a lot of companies cannot scale because of lack of GTM skills, right? They don't have the competence in a proper repeatable GTM motion. I mean, I tried to find the reason behind that. And I think one of the reasons is the disjointed experience. So if you're looking to sales tech, if you're looking to go to market, you can find a lot of companies with so many different softwares in different categories. Like each of these sales tech, sales software, they do offer value, but there are so many of them. So for a single sales rep, like a single sales rep can get up to like 20 different platforms and systems. It's not gonna make them more efficient, right? It's gonna make them less efficient by learning all the 15 or 20 different platforms. And the initial goal of Flash Intel to create Flash Intel was to offer integrated platform to simplify helping these sales guys to ramp up faster and to simplify their daily workflow and processes through automation and through AI. I will say like we are an integrated platform, but at the same time, we are also modular. So we also connect with other platforms. That's very helpful. Thank you for sharing that. So essentially, if I'm a B2B company, who is your champion in the organization? Who are you going after with your software? Is it the software? Is it the sales development trap? Is it the account executive? Is it the sales director? So right now we are trying to make SDR's life easier. So we help them to schedule way more demos than they could with their existing tech stack. So I would say like all kinds of sales development leaders, including managers, uh, CRO, or like directors. So the decision making positions in sales development. If I'm today in SDR and I don't have flash Intel, what is a day in my life? How many tech stacks am I expected to use to let's say close a deal or even get someone on the phone and pass it to my account executive? Okay, so if you are an SDR, I would say normally if you leverage email and phone calls and also some other basic SDR text, you need at least five different platforms. That starts with sales intelligence, so you need data, right? And then after you get all these data, you need to clean up your data still. Even if you work with the best data provider, even if it's zooming for, you still get 20 to 30% bounce rate. you still need to get an email verifier to verify all your data. And then you start with the execution. So where you start creating your own sequence with certain cadence, right? And then with everyone running the same tech stack, a big problem is also the email durability. How can you send out emails which deliver at the end to your customers, to your prospects? So you need another tech stack to do email rotation to help you with durability. And then you need to do calling. So by doing calling, it's not simply like doing every dial manually. So by doing every dial manually, it's not gonna be efficient. You can make up to 20, 30 calls a day or 50 calls a day, but that's it. How can you, like in this environment, it's really hard to attain quota, right? By attaining quota, you need to make at least a few hundred dials every day. So without the automated tool like parallel dialer, You cannot make it. You can't spend 10 hours every day just clicking on different buttons to do dining. And this all together, right, it's just to help you to get the data to do the execution. It's already five different platforms. And then you still need to work with a CRM and work with other existing tech stacks of your company, right, emails, like Zoom, Google Meet, and so on. So I will say like at least five different tech stacks. That's very helpful. Thank you for walking us through the process. Take us back to the early days. How did you start selling your solution and convincing customers that they needed, especially as you said, there's hundreds of different tech stack. If you go to a website like G2, you will see like there's a hundred different solutions. So how do you stand out? So Flashinga is a very young company. We started, I started this company last year. And in this process, we did a lot of PMF. PMF, I would say, it's kind of an iterative process of improving your product according to your customer's feedback. So in this case, it's really important to get in touch with a lot of customers. And how I started to acquire my first customer was doing a really high volume of calls, a really high volume of emails, trying to find out which vertical works best for our solution. And then like at the beginning, I mean, my SDRs scheduled a demo. However, I also jumped into the demos to talk to the customers personally, like as a founder to a customer, to a prospect, to understand what they really need, to understand like how we can help them and also most importantly, to give them more confidence into your company as a young company. It's really important to give them more confidence. At the beginning, it was really about the volume. You need to go out, you need to focus on your execution. You need to talk to you a lot of customers being adaptive. And especially as a founder, right? Being involved in the sales process. How do you ensure like the number of people who respond to your cold emails or to your cold calls is high? Because as you know, at the beginning, you're improving product market fit. You need a sample so that you know how to position, but that sample can be hard to get early on if you're calling people, if you're emailing them. Is there any tactic or strategies that you've deployed that has helped you in getting that rate higher? Yeah, I would say regardless of what you sell, you always need to understand your customer's biggest priority or pinpoint. And you also need to understand your persona's biggest pinpoint. The customer, it's a whole organization. But the persona you are talking to, it's one guy. It can be a manager. It can be a director, it can be a CRO, right? And sometimes their interests align, but oftentimes their interests don't align. As a manager, as a director, the top priority of them is to get promoted by applying a proper solution. And the company itself wants to generate more revenue, seeing higher ROI, and at the same time save some money. In a lot of cases, their interests align, but in some cases, their interests don't align. So it's really important to understand who you are talking to, the company and the persona, and really understand their key priorities and pinpoint. And by understanding that, you can define your ICP, define your message. And one technique which I find to be very useful is, so identifying the pinpoint of your target persona and the target company. At the same time, trying to find some key intent signals. based on these pinpoints. So in our platform like FlashingInfo, what we do is we have four different intent signals. We can scan job descriptions. So what kind of positions these companies are trying to hire? If you are trying to sell a database solution, helping other companies to do better scaling, right? Then you should be looking for companies currently hiring for a database administrator with a sharding scale, stuff like that. So, really by understanding your target persona, their pinpoint, and trying to rephrase that into your message or rephrase your solution towards their pinpoint and build everything into your message and build everything like building a targeted list and match the message with the target list. I would say that's a key at the beginning to maximize the conversion rate. Can you double click on one of the concepts you just mentioned, which is a core strength of your platform called intent based selling? Can you explain to our listeners what that is and how does it work in your platform? Yeah, so before I started Flush Intel, I did a lot of research. I found GoToMarket is a big problem for B2B companies and existing solutions on the market in the sales intelligence space. You can find a lot of players, but everyone tells you the contact info of the people or the company you're trying to find out. So they are answering the question of who you want to talk to. But they are not answering the question of when. When should I talk to someone? When is the company currently in market looking for a solution, actively looking for a solution? That's what we are trying to solve with our intent signals. Right now we have four different intent signals. including topic intent, including job intent, including tech intent, and also social intent. So basically what we do is we are scanning all the job postings of companies within our database. We are also scanning the social media. What are the people behind of these companies, inside of these companies, are talking about currently? What are they interested in? And at the same time, we are also scanning like their tech stacks. When have they started applying a certain tech stack? When have they started to pay to start a subscription with a certain tech stack. And then the last intent signal, top intent, is where we aggregate all the information from different areas, trying to run some NLP algorithm based on this information to extract all the different similarities to different topics and categorize different companies into different topics to identify who's in the market. Makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing this. So you started this company last year and you're almost employing around 100 people. What's your hiring strategy and how do you know how much people you need to hire? Is there any metrics like in your dashboard that would tell you as long as this is green, keep hiring. You haven't raised a lot of money so 10 million do fly away quite quickly. Is there any way that you have these markers that tell you how to hire, when to hire and in what capacity? The number one metric for every startup founder, it's always runway. How long is your runway? So that's for everyone. Like you need to look into your cash burn. And the second thing you need to look into is a unit economics of revenue generating roles. So by saying like unit economics of revenue generating roles, well, what I mean is you need to look into how much you pay to your sales rep, how much you pay to the whole sales org and how much net new revenue are they generating. That's basically the ratio of the LTV versus the CAC. By keeping a healthy unit economic, especially for the revenue generating roles, like you can scale infinitely if you have a good unit economic model. So I would say like runway and UE, these are the two main metrics I'm looking to, yeah. How are you currently thinking about managing the hiring risk because in an enterprise sales function, you hire people, it's a long sales cycle. The velocity of business would be slow at the beginning and then they pick up. How would you manage like you're hiring the right people? Are there certain metrics you look at, questions you ask in an interview or even your own strategy in knowing when to keep people and when to let them go? It's a good question. So I would say The most important thing here, it's the playbook a company is trying to apply, especially for a young company. I will say we shouldn't start with enterprise sales with a very long sales cycle. We should start regardless of what motion you apply. It can be PLG, it can be also SLG, but you should always start with SMB at mid-market with shorter sales cycle. So if we can control the sales cycle, to under, let's say, 60 days, we can iterate way faster versus if you hire as enterprise sales team with a sales cycle of six months or one year, right? So that's the first thing, which is, I will say, the most important thing. Which playbook are you trying to apply as a startup when you start to build your sales org? I would always recommend to start with SMB and Maymarket. There isn't that much money in SMB and Maymarket because the ACV is way lower. the sales efficiency can be also lower versus enterprise. However, like it's SMB and mid-market sales, once they started to get rolling, it's also a talent pool for enterprise sales. First thing I will say always focus on SMB and mid-market, shorten the sales cycle. By shortening the sales cycle, we can see way faster in way shorter, like a cycle who doesn't fit into the company. And then... Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and then we look into other aspects like enablement, what's missing, PMF, optimizing commercial sales skills, closing skills, and so on. What's your favorite interview question? My favorite interview question? I'm kind of an immigrant founder in the US. That's my first company in the US. I started other companies in Asia before. I will say like, what's different? by founding a company in the US versus by founding a company in Asia or like the competitive advantage for being an Asian founder, founding a company in the US. Excellent. What's a principle that you live by that has served you well in your journey? So I think the most useful principle I learned in my journey as a founder, it's called Shuhadi. It's a Japanese martial art philosophy. So it's basically... says that you need to learn. So Shu Hadi, it's three steps. Shu, it's standing for Obe. Learning from traditional wisdom. You really need to learn existing techniques, existing playbooks, trying to copy, trying to do it. Just try to do it. Okay. So that's Shu. And then Ha, it's by mastering the basic techniques, by mastering all the basics. Like what kind of things can you do to micro-innovate, to make it better? by the quality, trying to make it better in some areas, right? In some features. So really like micro innovation. And then you come to the third step of Li, right? Xu Ha Li. Okay, the third step is it's about how you innovate, how you differentiate, how you make something completely new, right? To replace, to serve the same audience, to save the same customer, to serve the same buyer. However, from a different perspective with a very innovative, new innovative idea, new innovative product or new innovative service. Yeah. A lot of startup founders, they just start by doing the third part, starting from scratch, trying to innovate. However, like without having a deep understanding of your customer's needs, without a deep understanding of your customer's pain point, it's really hard to innovate something from scratch. and get your customers to buy it. So I would say Shuhadi, it's a very important principle which I've applied in the past. I really started multiple companies before. It's my first company and Shuhadi, it's really important, which I apply across all my companies before, yeah. Excellent principle. Thank you for sharing this. We'll put that in the show notes for our listeners. One last question, Yi. What is next for Flashing 10? I mean, AI is the next big thing in the industry. So Flash Intel is investing a lot into AI, LOM, large language models. We are going to bring out new products like AI agents, local workflows with automations based on AI. We are investing a lot into AI. We're investing a lot into large language models and also into bringing out well-functioning. AI agents which can really help our customers, really help SDRs, really help sales development leaders or revenue teams to help them to generate more meetings, generate more pipelines. Thank you for stopping by. That was an amazing episode. We wish you the best of luck. How can people reach you and are you hiring? Yeah, I'm always looking for new talents. So my email is yi.shi at myflashcloud.com. We'll put that in the notes. Thank you again, and we wish you the best of luck. Thank you, Hadi. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Spotify, and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey. Leave us a five-star review. Your support will help spread our podcast to more viewers.