Ben Douablin on Product-Led Growth vs. Enterprise Sales: Full Enrich's Path from Bootstrap to 10M ARR

**Alex Theuma** (0:03)
Every decade or so, the rules of software change completely. This is one of those moments. The AI Revolution Show is the intelligence podcast for B2B software founders navigating the platform Shift. The founders building through it, and the founders already on the other side.
Ben, we're here at SAS Dock USA recording the AI Revolution Show. Great to have you on. Good to see you as always. How are you doing?

**Ben Douablin** (0:32)
Good, Alex. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure to come to SAS Dock and the Shift AI.

**Alex Theuma** (0:39)
Yeah, well, now Shift AI, we obviously made the announcement today, which was exciting, and I think it's been very positively received as well. So good stuff. It's amazing actually to see what you can do in today's world, like with all the tools that we have, to actually get a rebrand together in, well, I pretty much did it in a weekend, right? Last year, we were thinking about this beginning of last year, actually didn't have the name Shift AI back then.
But I was thinking, a small business, to do a rebrand, it's going to be a six-month project, using agencies and other designers and so on. And it's going to be a big distraction, and how could we do this? So that was a limiting factor. Then two weeks ago, I've been thinking about this for a very long time. It was just like one weekend, Claude putting everything together, Monday, here's a new website, this is what we're doing. We're living in such an exciting time with software and what it enables us to do in next to no time. We can be so productive and get these things done. So very exciting. But I'm glad to get it out there. And I guess maybe it's a nice segue into what you can achieve in a short period of time.
Because we had a quick chat when you were coming in, and I think it was 2023 when we were in Mykonos. I think your hair was a bit longer. I don't know if it's long anymore. You're wearing a cap. Yeah, it was definitely longer.

**Ben Douablin** (2:13)
It was longer.

**Alex Theuma** (2:15)
We were at the SaaS.Founder Members Retreat in Mykonos. It was a great time, probably too good.
But you were there working on a different startup. Maybe if you can share 2023, what you were working on, what happened there, and then how then in 2024, you went into FullEnrich.

**Ben Douablin** (2:36)
Yeah, indeed. We started the first company five years ago, it was 21 or 22
The company name was SalesRamp. We used to automate the sales commissions. My background was in sales, always frustrated with how bad the commission was calculated, lack of transparency. So we were like, okay, this is a huge gross lever to tackle this thing as a rep. But started the company, raised money, increased 1.2 million. So everything was great at the beginning, because people are like, yeah, this is a huge pain point. The sales commission is always a mess. So it seems to have a good validation of the issue. But on the way, we realized that, okay, the salespeople are not the people that will buy this kind of product. So you can't have a bottom up strategy.

**Alex Theuma** (3:24)
Yeah.

**Ben Douablin** (3:24)
You sell to CFOs, sometimes HR, compensation and benefits. So it's kind of boring also to sell because you're not focusing on, oh, how can we increase the growth of the company with a better compensation platform, with more transparency, with SPIFs and everything. It's a tool for controller. And as a founder, I think also it's great to have a sort of founder market fit and something that makes you happy to work every day. And over time, I realized that the persona I was fixing was not the initial problem. And also realized that it's only for people, a company that have like 50 plus sales rep. So pretty small market, high velocity sales cycle. So it's big and narrow and the competition was huge. So super capital intensive to build as a product, long sales cycle and at the end you don't make huge money. So we realized after two years that, okay, if we continue in this direction, we'd have to raise a lot of money in bad condition because we're a bit late on this market. Already had like good competitors. And back then, our main go-to-market motion was to do cold calls and cold emails in France. And we realized that to do that, you need to have like proper list of prospects, the basic, but just bought like seven different data providers just to get a proper list of prospects. And we're not like having the conclusion that you can't rely only on one or two data providers, and you need to aggregate them, orchestrate them. So we built this internal machine that was aggregating, verifying the data, and we got like amazing list of prospects. So we built this engine internally to identify prospects and reach and prospects with the BDRs and SDR, but the product was not so easy to sell. The product was clunky back then. So every time we're talking to a VP of sales, they're like, guys, I don't want to buy your sales compensation platform. But you mentioned this internal tool that was aggregating all the vendors, and I'm done to buy this.