How Chili Piper Bootstrapped to Profitability in Year One

Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Nicholas Vandenberg, co founder and CEO of Chili Piper, a SaaS platform that helps you instantly turn inbound leads into qualified meetings.
Nicholas grew up in France and wanted to travel around the world.
He applied to Stanford so he could live in California for a couple of years before continuing his travels.
But all his plans changed when one day he Steve Jobs gave a talk to his class.
Nicholas was so inspired that he decided that he was also going to become a tech entrepreneur.
Ironically, Nicholas's first startup was co founded with John Scully, the guy who became CEO of Apple and eventually fired Steve Jobs.
Nicholas's latest startup, Chili Piper, was founded when he and his wife identified a niche problem with with companies losing leads because they couldn't respond quickly enough to inbound leads they received from their website.
He wanted to be sure he was solving a worthwhile problem, so he told his first potential customer that he could build them a solution for $20,000.
The customer paid him up front and that's how they got started.
But like most startups, when you look deeper, you also discover a bunch of problems and challenges.
And it was no different for Nicholas.
He said most people wake up and check their every morning, but he used to check his bank account and worry if he had enough money to pay the bills.
And at one point he ran out of money and couldn't pay his employees.
However, despite those challenges, they bootstrapped the company from zero to over $5 million in annual recurring revenue and recently raised $18 million in funding.
It's a great conversation with a serial entrepreneur who shares a lot of useful insights.
I think you'll find the story inspiring and entertaining.
Nicholas, welcome to the show.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (02:25.750)
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.

Omer (02:27.430)
Do you have a quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (02:33.030)
I'll tell you, I have two.
There's one that has inspired me all my life.
It's originally in Latin.
It's Fortune favors the bold.
The idea that you're going to be lucky if you take risk and be brave.
I think I wrote that when I was 17 somewhere and I've kept it all along.
And then more recently as doing a startup and Yuko's ups and downs, I came across a quote that actually printed and put it on my desk And I have it in front of me.
Somebody said, in the end, I always win, and if I'm not winning, it's not the end.
And I find that very appropriate for a SaaS company because you go through up and down and you really think, if I'm not winning, I just have to continue until I do win.
So that what is inspiring me these

Omer (03:20.970)
days, I really like that, actually.
I really like both of them, but that one in particular, I think most of us could probably look at that every day and find some inspiration and motivation to keep going, especially on the bad days.
All right, so for people who aren't familiar with Chili Piper, can you just give us an overview?
What does the product do, who is it for, and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (03:49.420)
Sure.
So we are sales tech company.
We help sales team and marketing teams.
Our core product is actually very simple to understand when companies spend a lot of dollars.
So mostly B2B companies to attract visitors on their website.
The call to action is a form.
So you have a form, you say, contact us.
And the prospect fills the form.
And upon submission, they get a thank you page.
Thank you.
Somebody is going to call you.
And the prospect is left wondering who is going to call me and when.
And the amazing industry secret is that companies lose more than half their prospect in this interaction.
People are proud to convert at 40%, which means that they actually lose 60% of their prospects because nobody called them back or it was a Sunday and it took too long or the prospect disappeared.
So we've built this intelligent agent that our customers put in their webpage upon form submission.
When the prospect comes here, I'd like to talk to somebody in real time.
We're going to find, we're going to qualify that prospect, make sure it's the right target, then we're going to find the right rep to take the meeting.
And we can dial the rep's phone and dial the prospects, put them in touch in real time, or we can retrieve a calendar and have the prospect book a meeting.
And as a result, conversion rates double, so go from 40% to 80%.
So that's our core business.
We call that inbound revenue acceleration, because that's exactly what it does.
It's for inbound, and it accelerates revenues.
It doubles your pipeline from the same marketing spend, and from there we've expanded into a suite of booking tools and workflows around meetings.
So all the pieces that you may need.
So, for example, to agree on the time to meet by email, we have these smart suggested times where I can send you three times and if you click on it, we'll book the meeting in one click.
We also have signatures that are smart, where you can book a meeting from a signature.
So we've expanded into a suite of tools around meetings.
That's what chili pepper does.

Omer (05:43.520)
So how did you come up with the idea for this business?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (05:46.960)
So a lot of companies have started around an idea.
I have an idea and I'm going to do it.
This is my fourth company and it was done a bit differently.
We started with a thesis, not an idea.
The thesis was that the world of sales is going to be changed by digital apps and it's going to be a huge market.
That's what we want to do.
So when I say we, I started actually with my wife Alina, who was running product at Pearson and before that at Bloomberg.
So she had a lot of expertise in B2C apps.
She had very successful launches.
For example, one of our apps was coded by Steve Jobs when he launched the iPad.

Omer (06:27.110)
What app was that?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (06:28.230)
She was at Thompson Richards at the time and it was a news app.
So we showed all the different categories on the iPad.
And for news, he showed the Thompson Reuters app that she had designed.

Omer (06:38.640)
Nice.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (06:39.520)
So we had this thesis and then we decided to go to market and we came up with the original idea.
We actually didn't come up with it.
We talked to potential customers and asked them what problem they had.
And one customer said, I have this problem of booking meetings, so my prospecting team needs to book meetings for my selling team.

Omer (07:00.320)
And.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (07:00.750)
And we need to round robin these meetings and it's very complicated, they get confused and which account executive they should book with.
Can you help with that?
So we said, we will help, we'll build a solution, but you have to prepay $20,000.
And they said yes.
And then we checked a bunch of other companies, say, hey, do you have this problem of a handoff between teams around this meeting and scheduling?
And we found that half the companies we talked to had the same problem.
So that's how we got started.
We got a real commitment.
There was money up front because the problem was serious.
And we knew that other companies had the same problem.
And once we got in business, then we look at other problems around meetings on booking, and we came across that inbound process that's broken and decided to find a solution for that.
So we went in steps and we started with something that was actually brought to us by a customer.
That's how we did it.

Omer (07:57.190)
Who was that first customer, it's a

Nicolas Vandenberghe (07:59.670)
company called Five Stars in San Francisco.
They do loyalty programs for small businesses.
So they have a high volume of customers they need to book very fast.
Especially in the B2 SMB, if you wait too long, you lose the customer.
So it used to be the process where somebody would be on the phone with a potential customer and it would take them seven minutes to book the meeting.
In seven minutes you have to hang up the phone, the prospect is not confirmed.
So you have a lot of leakage.
So it was mission critical for them to get that process streamlined.
And after that, the second customer was a company in New York called Greenhouse, a SaaS company well known.
It turned out that they had the same problem and they were very focused on efficiency and they were willing to take a bet on our startup and buy our product.

Omer (08:51.330)
So I'm kind of a little curious about this because when I was looking at Chili Piper and this whole idea of a scheduling app that's used by sales teams, I was kind of like, isn't this similar to a lot of other scheduling tools that you might get out there like calendly or X AI or these types of things?
And then the way that you've described it is obviously it's kind of more sophisticated and there's a particular kind of couple of use cases that you're kind of going out and solving.
But I'm curious, when you talk to these customers, had they tried those types of solutions and not been able to make them work for a particular reason?
It just seems like, you know, when I look at what you've done built with the business today, it's pretty impressive.
Yet when, if we sort of travel back in 2016 and sort of look at the opportunity, I would be thinking, well, is there really that much of an opportunity when there's already these type so many different types of solutions out there?
So what is it that I'm missing here?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (10:00.500)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a very good question.
The answer to your question is yes, they had tried with other solutions.
And the problem is that the scaling solutions are quite simple.
Exposing availability in a calendar is quite trivial.
Something actually we did in a week.
So what we went after is a much more complicated problem is scheduling in the context of a process.
I think that's what people get confused when they're negative with scheduling.
There's a lot of scheduling.
Well, there may be a lot of scheduling, but our solution for inbound, we are the only ones.
So we have a no discount policy and we never discount because we never under competitive pressure on pricing because we are the only ones.
So it's all in the details, right?
If you're looking at the inbound process, you say, well, a form, I can put canonly one of these.
But it doesn't work that way because you have to qualify the prospect.
You have to route, you have to check in Salesforce that whether there's an existing account or not or in another CRM, you've got to do all sorts of of steps in the workflow.
And the actual scheduling piece is a small piece in that ensemble.
And when five Star at the time asked us to solve the problem, we understood the scheduling piece was a small piece compared to the rest of the solution.
It's the same thing now, right?
It's all about the entire process and all the things that need to happen around it that are complex.
The interesting thing in our current product is that the return on investment is very obvious because we double the pipeline.
So what is at stake is very high and companies are willing to pay money to get their fully automated solution if it's going to double their pipeline.
So that's the thing.
It's all about the details of the workflow and what needs to happen.
It's actually quite complex.
In addition, we have to integrate with multiple systems.
So the form is typically owned by the marketing team.
So let's say they use Marketo, HubSpot or Eloqua.
So you have to make sure you integrate with form.
The CRM is another animal.
So typically Salesforce or HubSpot, then we have to integrate with Zoom, for example, or WebEx, like the scaling solution.
So we have to put all the pieces together internally.
It's more complicated than it looks from the outside.

Omer (12:22.210)
Yeah.
And I think the key what you just said is like, you know, doubling the conversion, which is ultimately what, you know, the customers care about.
I'm curious, when you said to Five Stars it's going to cost you $20,000 for a solution, where did that number come from?
Were you sort of thinking about this?
Is, you know, what it's going to take to build an initial product or was it just a way of just validating how serious they were about this?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (12:51.050)
Yeah, the latter.
I just wanted an amount that was significant enough that it was helpful to us and the commitment to them, but low enough that they would say yes?
I mean, I think it would have been worth a lot more to them.
They would have paid a lot more, but it would have taken longer.
It would have been a longer process.
I was quite eager to get started that was how we came up with this amount.

Omer (13:15.270)
So with this business, you bootstrapped this to about $5 million.
ARR.
And then you've taken some funding and we'll talk about what you've been doing there.
And I think you hit profitability in year one.
Is that right?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (13:38.710)
That's right.

Omer (13:40.320)
I want to talk about that.
But before we do that, I think it would be really helpful just to talk a little bit more about some of your other companies, what you've done, and sort of how you arrived here.
That.
That I think is an interesting part of the story that I want to make sure we.
We sort of talk a little bit about, set the context, and then we'll sort of dig into what that first year looked like.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (14:03.680)
Yeah.
So as I mentioned earlier, it's my fourth company.
The story is I grew up in the south of France and didn't know anything about entrepreneurship.
So I just wanted to travel around the world.
And I thought, you know, a good way to do that is to apply to Stanford Business School.
That would give me two years in California, and then I'll continue on my way.
And my plan was to go to Hong Kong.
It's ironic because Hong Kong is the only place in one of the few places in the world I haven't been to.
And when I got to Stanford, a few weeks into it, one of my classmates invited Steve Jobs to talk to us.
And at the time, Steve Jobs was running next, and the joke was that he was going next to nowhere.
And Steve Jobs sat on the floor and telling us about how he started Apple and why he started next and things.
And I looked at that and said, this is unbelievable.
That's what I want to be when I grew up.
I want to be a tech entrepreneur.
And so I stayed in the Bay Area and it was set that this was going to do.
So I guess upon graduation, I started my first company.
And fate has this twist where my partner in my first company was John Scully, the very CEO.
Wow.
Right, Exactly.
The very CEO fired Steve Jobs.
It was just chance that I met him.
We met a guy with the technology we agreed on launching.
What we did is that it was a Photoshop for dummies.
So a way to, or you could call it the grandfather of Instagram was a way to manipulate your photos on a PC easily.
So I started that business in 1995, and we did 6 million revenues second year, so the first year of shipment and 11 million the year after.
And so that was going really well.
Actually, we got an offer from a gaming company for 55 million.
In the end, Scaly was not keen on taking it.
So I sold my shares and I started another company because I wanted to.
BY now it's 1998 and everybody's doing Internet around me.
So I thought, as I said, well it should be the Internet is the future and I should be a player.
So I started a second company.
That one was a bit crazy.
The idea of doing a universal shopping cart.
So helping websites with shopping cart, multi merchant, multi website.
And we grew to 65 people in 11 months with tons of customers.
Then I got an offer to that company for $60 million and I invested all my money in it.
So I three quartered the company.
So I was going to clear 45 million for 12 months of work.
It looked too good to be true.
And it turned out that the deal didn't close in the end.
The acquiring company was CNET at the time of the dot bomb.
So their stock dropped.
Then the CEO called me and said, we can do the deal, have to talk to investors.
And in the end I had to lay off more than half the team and did a poor deal with Microsoft.
So that was my second company.

Omer (17:12.630)
So when you were in talks to sell the product was Redcott when you were in talks to sell that for 60 million.
When you look back at that, do you think it was like, did it just take too long?
And you sort of think, oh, if we'd only been able to kind of negotiate and close this sooner, I would have had more of a successful exit there.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (17:34.750)
I think fortunately for me, I didn't take too long.
I just thought about it and say, okay, let's do it.
And I agree.
So I actually have nothing to blame myself for.
I said, yes, let's do it.
And the deal didn't happen.
It's one of the things that the market turned on us and nobody had seen it coming even when it started happening because, oh, it's just a little correction.
Nobody.
This is the way human brain works.
It's hard to anticipate that things that are going so well could go so badly all of a sudden.
So at the time I was in San Francisco when the first correction happened.
Everybody thought it would continue.
So I didn't worry.
But there was not much I could have done.
The market turned on me and that's what happened.

Omer (18:21.500)
And so how much did you end up selling it for?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (18:24.460)
It was single digit acquisition by Microsoft.
They waited and waited until I was very, very desperate and then it's okay now, let's do it.
And they Wiped out everything.
I remember they asked me to move to Seattle.
I declined.
So my team moved to Seattle and we had this huge warehouse as an office.
It was the coolest office.
And I packed everything.
I locked the warehouse.
I dropped the box at a friend's house, and I took a n plane to fly to Nepal to go trekking in the Himalaya to recover, Because I ended up not making any money myself on that.
On that deal because we had investors and things.
So I said, you know what?
I figured, I'm going to go to the mountains and see people who live on $50 a month, and then they'll stop complaining about it.
So that's what happened.
It worked very well.
You always see people more challenged than you are and put things in perspective.

Omer (19:30.360)
Yeah, definitely.
It gives you a lot of perspective.
Okay, so that was Company two.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (19:36.840)
Company two.
Then I did a third one that I sold quickly in biometrics, that I sold well.
And then I thought, I should become a vc.
Assume that that's what entrepreneurs do when they grow up, they become investors.
So I was wrong.
I was not so interested in being a vc, so I did different things.
And then I help a friend.
That's how I came up with Chili Pepper.
I helped a friend at a telecom company run a sales team.
So the VP of sales, that was 2011, 12.
And when I actually started setting up the systems and I put everybody on Salesforce, I was amazed that Salesforce hadn't changed, essentially hadn't changed in 10 years.
And all the reps were reluctant to use it.
And I thought, this is crazy because I have a hard time stopping my daughters from using their technology.
And here's the salespeople.
You have to beg them to use it.
There should be these beautiful technologies available to salespeople.
So that's the thesis on Tilly Piper.
I thought, you know, this world is going to change.
Somebody's going to come up with super cool tools that salespeople love as opposed to hate and have to use, and that's going to be a huge market.
So that's how Chili Pepper got started.

Omer (20:54.540)
So I think all these different companies that you started and sold, there was obviously a lot of experience you built up from that.
So as we get to year one of Chili Piper, how did you think about that and what were you able to.
What specifically did you do to be able to get to profitability in year one?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (21:22.260)
I guess I'd been marked by this red card experience.
Right.
So this time I thought, you know, essence of company's revenues So I want to go to revenues as fast as possible.
So then we went literally to day zero because we actually had a prepayment from five stars when we started.
And so we, Alina and I put together a very small team.
Our developers were actually in Eastern Europe and we went fast to revenue and then we tried to get to cash positive as soon as possible.
So I did all the sales, she did all the onboarding and we kept the team very small and we just signed up customers.
And the problem with solving is was an acute problem.
So after Greenhouse, we sold a couple of other well known companies and one of them was Square, the payment company.
Which is quite amazing when you think of it because this big company growing super fast, relying on a core technology from a team of five.
It was five of us back in September.
It was interesting because when we got that deal with Square and a couple of the companies, that's when we turned cash positive.
And from there we kept growing and hiring, but based on our own cash.

Omer (22:37.610)
So it's interesting because you call this inbound revenue acceleration.
And if anybody goes to the homepage of Chili Piper, you'll see all kinds of logos, right?
Not just Square and five stars, but Facebook and Shopify and list goes on and on.
Now that you've kind of been in this space for a while, why do you think that this problem kind of wasn't really solved before?
And how is that this category evolved in the last few years?
Are you seeing more competitors?
What's happening in the landscape here?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (23:26.230)
Yeah, it's a really good question.
Honestly.
When I realized there was this problem and I worked with Alina and our CTO to come up with a solution and we started thinking, yes, I should work, it just seemed also too good to be true.
I think that's impossible.
I mean, why haven't anybody thought of it?
So the same questions you had as we were building that product, why hasn't.
Because the problem is real, right?
People lose.
Companies lose more than half their.
And it took me a while, but I think there is a reason for it.
And the reason is that we sit at the intersection of marketing and sales and they each focus on their own metrics and that piece that we have is right in the middle.
So marketing has the goal to bring leads, right?
So they do a lot of work and if a form is submitted, then the lead is captured, they've done their job and sales is about, they have processes to follow up on the lead.
The form is not theirs.
Once prospect has been submitted, it's pushed to The CRM and they're supposed to follow up and that's their process.
So the idea that there would be a bridge in between these two processes is something that nobody was focused on.
So there was sales tech helping salespeople do their job.
So for example, distributing these leads, assigning them, there's a lot of marketing tech helping these forms.
But there was.
Everybody was focused on their own path and nobody was focused on that bridge in the middle.
So that's my explanation of why people didn't.
Why this partner was still unresolved.
And once we launched, I assumed that a lot of people copy us, but it hasn't been the case.
I think there's no question that it's a very tricky development and by now we well known we've done it.
So we leadership, I presume that people just think this is already taken.
We leave it.
As for the logos, we actually did on purpose, we went after the very visible logos because we have this idea of, we call it the bullseye strategy, which is the idea that word of mouth plays such a huge role these days and you want to go after the most influential companies so that when the next company says, should I do that?
They're going to look up to that influential company and say they do it, I should do it.
So very early on with Alina, we focused our effort on signing companies.
Like I mentioned, Greenhouse Square, but we also signed a company called Segment, the marketing tech, very well known, we went after all these logos.
Now, as you've mentioned, we have the woozwoo of tech is on our website.
So it's a snowball effect.
Right?
So once you get these logos, the more logos come.

Omer (26:15.890)
Did you get any pushback from some of the larger companies?
What you're trying to solve here?
There was clearly a pain and a need for something.
But also if you're running a company like Square, I'm guessing there might be some concerns about do we want to really sort of have a dependence on this startup with a handful of people being sort of on the critical path of our sales pipeline?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (26:42.940)
No, it's amazing.
We got your pushback from that.
We got pushback from other things, but that one.
No.
It's amazing.
When we signed some of the larger customers, they had more people.
So we did everything virtual.
Right.
We are a distributed company.
We never have in person meetings, but we had zoom calls and they had more people on the zoom call than we had in the entire company very often, but nobody checked that.
The pushback we've had is interesting.
Often sales is reluctant to change their process, which amazes me, because they're going to do a lot better.
But typically, the sales team has invested in sales development reps whose job it is to follow up with these leads, and they're concerned that they could lose their job.
Right.
I mean, of course, what's really happening is that they get redeployed, but that's a concern.
So we get pushback on that.
So people find all sorts of reasons why what we do is not a good idea.
Less and less, because now you see everybody's doing it.
So you think, I'm not going to be the only one continuing losing my pipeline.
But at the beginning, you also reason why their situation is different, and they need an SDR team to do it the other way.
So that was the big pushback we kept getting at the beginning.

Omer (27:59.460)
Now people listening to this might be thinking, wait.
Nicholas has a great story.
He's a serial entrepreneur.
He came up with this idea and, hey, bootstrapping 5 million beyond.
And then now you've been raising money.
You're at about $21 million that you've raised.
Sounds great, right?
He's kind of had it really good.
But it wasn't always like that.
Like, you know, when we were chatting earlier, you told me that, hey, for a long time, you know, people wake up and they check their email, you were checking something else.
What was that?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (28:34.670)
That's right.
I was chasing my Chase bank app every morning to check our bank account when you bootstrap the twist at any time.
So actually, every morning I open and see if a particular customer paid.
Right?
Because we ask every customer to pay upfront, and that's how we finance ourselves.
So actually, the irony that we became cash positive, we started in January 2016, we became positive in October 2016, and in September, we ran out of money.
But we knew that there were customers in the pipeline.
So I asked the team members, said, look, we're not going to have money to pay you how much you take stock?
And they all said, yes.
They say, absolutely, we're going to succeed.
We pay September 16th stock.
And of course, it was a very good idea because the stock is not worth a lot of money.
Actually, one of them actually cashed out a stock from the time and made more than half a million on that deal.
So it worked out, but of course, it took pace.
So that was September, and then October.
We the square deal, we had a bunch of other deals and the money came in, but it was still never comfortable.
It was still stressed every morning to check your bank account and see if you, if you're going to make payroll at the end of the month.
And of course we need to grow so we'd hire more people and there's a higher payroll liability that we have to meet at the end of the month and we have to make sure bring in revenue.
So that bootstrapping for sure is not for the faint of heart.
It's a tough process.

Omer (30:15.990)
So it sounds like it was more of a cash flow issue with a lot of bootstrappers.
It's like, hey, I'm kind of still trying to find problem solution fit or product market fit for you.
It sounds like by that time you were pretty confident that you were onto solving a worthwhile problem and you had a pipeline that at least gave you some confidence that, you know, the money would be coming in.
So was this mainly just a cash flow issue?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (30:49.140)
Yeah, yeah, that's a fair statement.
Because by the time our product was working, you know, and our customers were happy so they would renew and extend, it was working.
And when we did this inbound solution segment, did an A B test and they found that they doubled their pipeline with us.
So it was, it was very clear that some metrics that on the measurement with a case study to show that it worked.
So you're right.
We had complete faith in our product.
We knew the product works and we knew it was a matter of time and market adoption and managing the cash flow in the meantime.
That's exactly right.

Omer (31:29.030)
So I mentioned a little earlier that you've raised about 21 million.
You closed 18 million round a few months ago, I think it was in June.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (31:37.760)
Yeah.

Omer (31:38.160)
And 3 million last year.
Why did you not raise money sooner?
Why did you decide that you were gonna keep bootstrapping this business despite the, you know, the, the out of money kind of dilemma in sort of the first nine, ten months.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (32:01.600)
Yeah, yeah.
So at first I wanted to bootstrap because we thought it was a good discipline, especially because we sales to salespeople.
So we wanted to very quickly have this experience of closing deals and revenue.
We thought it was going to be the right start for the DNA in the company.
But it wasn't the intention that we would stop for a very long time.
It was just we wanted to show that we can get there.
And then what happened is that people a bit like what you were saying earlier, potential investors didn't understand what we were doing.
It looked like it was just a little calendar thing.
And so we received offers that were never priced at what we expected.
Right.
Because we could see this was going to be a big market and either they were telling us, oh, it's a small market, we're not interested, or they would say, oh, that's great.
Here's a term sheet that was way below what we expected.
So that's what happened.
We thought, if we're not going to get the terms we're looking for, we don't need the money, we're going to continue.
And we did all the way until it became more obvious that we onto a very big market, that we're doing well.
And then the overview of the business and the external view of the business started to meet.

Omer (33:15.910)
And then this year it wasn't that hard to get funding and sort of more favorable terms.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (33:22.390)
Yeah, this year I'll tell you, it's been fascinating.
So back in November, we had VC discussions and I got again two term sheets, price below what we wanted to say.
Okay, we're not going to take them.
It was November 2019.
Then in March when the COVID happened, everybody freaked out.
So by then we had a first investor.
We said, we need to raise money to make sure we don't go bankrupt.
But nobody was interested in giving him money.
In March, all VCs were puzzled and didn't know what to do and had closed their checkbooks.
So instead we said, we're not going to waste our time banging them.
We're just going to focus on the business and make sure we can operate safely.
So that's exactly what we did.
We just focused on renewing customers, understanding which customers were not going to be able to make it, and so on.
And then something really weird happened that around May, June, the world of software exploded.
So the VCs started, first of all, three months inactive.
So they had all this money that they needed to invest.
Also, they saw that some software companies were doing really well in spite of the crisis.
So that flipped completely.
And all of a sudden there was an oversupply of money for tech companies.
And that's what we took advantage of when we did this error.
I'm thrilled with our Investor Base 10 and GR and original Flashpoint, they're great teams.
But we had many other offers.
We were completely oversubscribed with other firms begging us to take their money when just three months before nobody would give us money.
So it's been very interesting.
And now with the IPOs being super successful, like Asana yesterday and Snowflake one of our customers worth $60 billion, it's even more.
So there's this supply of money.
So obviously if we were starting now, the conditions would be very different, and I think we'd go and take money much earlier because the terms that you can get are much more favorable.

Omer (35:32.710)
2020 has just been the craziest year ever.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (35:37.510)
Yes.
But, you know, it's crazy, but for us, it works out really well.
We're continuing doubling year over year.
We raised $18 million.
We're developing products.
So it's odd.
Everybody says, I wish I could delete 2020.
And it was like, well, I don't want to delete 2020, because it got us some money in the bank.
If you delete 2020, don't delete the 18 million.

Omer (36:03.860)
All right, we need to wrap up in a few minutes, but before we do that, I want to talk about your other company, which you are running in parallel.
So tell us a little bit about that.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (36:18.530)
Yeah, so people think I'm crazy, but the other command is called cost more time.
And it's something that I figured I needed.
So it's a to do list with a twist.
So reinventing a to do list.
We doing a to do list that's focused on helping you actually do the tasks as opposed to list the tasks.
So I suppose we shouldn't even call it a to do list because it's a to do a doing list.
That's right, a doing list.
Exactly.
And you know, I tried also to do lists like todoist things, trello and nothing worked for me.
I figured that late in life that have this condition called adhd, you know, with a very hard time to focus.
And when I understood that, said, you know, I need something to help me and this thing don't help me.
So I decided to solve the problem by starting a company and building the software.
And that's exactly what CustomerTime is.
It's combined.
So the there are three core ideas.
One is that you combine the to do list with your calendar so you can schedule your task and block time in your calendar.
Then there's an additional way to do that is what we call a sprint.
So you can group tasks together that are related so that you don't have to switch context.
So say you're going to do everything's finance related, you bundle them in a sprint, and then you block Friday afternoon and you just execute all these tasks that are related so you minimize context switching.
The third one is distraction blocking.
So we close your tabs, we close your notifications, we close everything.
You can stay focused, do your task, and when you finish, we reopen.
So I, I completely love it.
It's my.
It's my secret weapon in being productive.
I do have to work extra hours, you know, and some people tell me, why do you do that?
Why don't you just focus on Chili Piper and the truth that, you know, some people watch football at night.
Me, I'd rather be working on a tech company than, you know, I used to play a lot of tennis.
I actually stopped.
I said, you know what, if I have a few hours, I'd rather spend on customer time and figure out how to do the product better.
So that's what I decided to do.
I said, I'm just going to build that solution is too cool.

Omer (38:36.750)
So how many people do you have working on Cosmotime?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (38:39.950)
Because what time?
It's five of us.

Omer (38:41.870)
And how do you balance your time?
Is this kind of more like, okay, you know, chili pepper is my day job and this is something that I sort of think about evenings or weekends or whatever.
Or is this sort of just mixed in and you're sort of jumping from one to the other depending on the day of the week.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (39:00.670)
It's mixed in, but long, long days.
It starts a start a day to finish a day, 10 or 11.
Work most weekends.
So it's all mixed in.
But as I said, I don't.
It's by choice.
I just enjoy it.
It's the kind of thing I like to do.
So after dinner, I come home with dinner.
We have a little boy at home.
Take care of the boy and when he goes to sleep, I just go back to doing the work and it's mixed in.
So I definitely spend more than a full time on chili pepper and find additional time for Cosmo time.

Omer (39:36.710)
It's a really interesting product and as I told you, I always kind of geek out on to do lists.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (39:43.110)
Yeah, you've got to try it.

Omer (39:45.190)
I will and I'll be sending you lots of feedback.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (39:49.350)
Great.

Omer (39:50.070)
Awesome.
Let's wrap up and get onto the lightning round.
So I'm going to just ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready to go?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (39:59.150)
Yeah.

Omer (39:59.830)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (40:03.230)
I got a piece of advice from a professor at Stanford Business School who used to say, good decisions come from good options.
And what he meant by that is that if you want to make a good decision, make sure you prepare several alternatives that you can then choose from.
And that has consistently been super helpful in my business career.
Good decisions come from good options.

Omer (40:27.230)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (40:30.510)
Actually, since the audience is around SaaS and entrepreneurs.
Instead of a book, I would recommend for everybody to go and read Paul Graham essays on the web.
I don't know.
By now he must have 45 different essays that he could compile into a book.
That should be the bible of every SaaS entrepreneur.

Omer (40:51.630)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (40:56.070)
I think for sure the number one thing that matters is market vision.
You've got to be able to understand how the market is reacting and where the market is going.
Everything else, the hiring, you can make mistakes.
But if you don't have the right market vision, you're not going to get product market fit and you won't have a company.
So that's the number one talent.

Omer (41:15.510)
I think I already know the answer to this one, but what's your favorite personal productivity tool or how exactly?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (41:21.990)
Yeah, it's customer time.
It's changed my life.

Omer (41:24.690)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (41:28.130)
Well, my hand is full, so it's got some time.
I haven't had a chance to think of anything else.

Omer (41:36.210)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (41:40.290)
So when I came to the us, Everybody assumed that I would be a connoisseur in wine because the French are supposed to know wine.
And I know very little about wine and have the right talent.
So I decided to build my expertise in cognac.
So I'm a cognac expert.

Omer (41:59.200)
Love it.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (42:03.760)
I'm super interested in understanding how people make decisions, their behavior.
So I read a lot of books around neuroscience.
New science is in an amazing phase right now where they keep discovering new things.
There's this professor called Paul Glimcher at New York University, nyu.
He has opened web seminars where he invites scientists.
And I love it.
So that's a passion of mine to try to understand what's happening in the brain and where we act certain way.

Omer (42:36.460)
Awesome.
I've loved this conversation.
I'm really glad I got a chance to sit down with you, Nicholas, and not just talk about Chili Piper and Cosmo Time, but just your background and your experiences and it's just such a fascinating story.
So thank you for making the time to talk with me today.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (42:55.480)
My pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me.

Omer (42:58.120)
Now, if people want to find out more about Chili Piper, they can go to chili piper.com.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (43:03.320)
that's right.

Omer (43:04.040)
And also check out Cosmo Time.
That's Cosmo with A K. Yeah.
Cosmotime.com.
and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Nicolas Vandenberghe (43:13.130)
They can connect on LinkedIn.

Omer (43:14.210)
Okay, great.
And we'll include a link in the show.
Notes to that.
Nicholas, thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Wish you all the best.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (43:21.290)
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Take care.

Omer (43:23.130)
Cheers.