Pocus: From Founder Pain to First $1M ARR in One Year

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Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, an AI-powered sales prospecting platform that helps sales teams generate pipeline more efficiently.

In 2019, while building the sales strategy and ops function at Data Miner, Alexa was frustrated seeing sales data scattered across multiple tools and systems.

She decided to hack together her own solution.

During her time at Stanford Business School, she met her co-founder and they began working on a way to help sales teams spend more time selling instead of drowning in data.

Through Stanford's Lean Launchpad program, they interviewed 350 sales leaders and professionals to validate their idea before writing a single line of code.

It took them a year to build their first version of the product. But their patience paid off – within their first year of launching, they hit $1 million in ARR.

Yet as first-time founders with no enterprise sales experience, they struggled with everything from building business cases to managing complex negotiations.

They faced constant pressure to expand beyond sales into other teams, but stayed focused on serving sales teams exclusively – a decision that proved critical to their early success.

Today, Pocus is a Series A company with 30 people, generating seven figures in ARR, and helping customers like Asana, Canva, and Miro.

This episode is part of our Enterprise Sales series.

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