Stephen Ruff was a top rep at Samsara and then Heap, where he leveraged data to work smarter and 4x his number. One of his top strategies then became productized as Champify. Todd Busler was an early sales rep at Square, built the sales team from scratch to 50 reps at Heap.io, and most recently advised early state B2B revenue teams in the Unusual Ventures portfolio.
Stephen Ruff was a top rep at Samsara and then Heap, where he leveraged data to work smarter and 4x his number. One of his top strategies then became productized as Champify.
Todd Busler was an early sales rep at Square, built the sales team from scratch to 50 reps at Heap.io, and most recently advised early state B2B revenue teams in the Unusual Ventures portfolio.
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Hatchet Ventures website: https://www.hatchetventures.com
Hatchet Ventures LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hatchet-ventures/
Chet Lovegren’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetlovegren/
Stephen Ruff’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-e-ruff/
Todd Busler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-busler-03934760/
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Narrator: 1, 2, 3, 4. Are you a founder, co-founder, aspiring entrepreneur, or just someone who loves to hear about how companies are built? Then join us as we talk with founders and CEOs who have been there and done that. Welcome to The Founder's Formula Podcast. Sponsored by Hatchet Ventures. And now your host, Chet Lovegren.
Chet: Welcome one, welcome all to The Founder's Formula Podcast. The show that is designed to bring you the latest and greatest stories and insights from founders worldwide, who have been there and done that. My guests today, plural are the co-founders of Champify, which is a tool that allows you to reengage with your customer alumni, leading to higher conversion rates, faster deals and more revenue.
Please welcome to the show, Todd Busler and Stephenn Ruff. Todd Busler was an early sales rep at Square and built the sales team from scratch to 50 reps at Heap.io, and most recently advised early stage B2B revenue teams in the Unusual Ventures portfolio. Stephen was a top rep at Samsara and then Heap, where he was actually able to leverage data to work smarter and four X his number, which was one of his top strategies that he then productized as Champify, which we'll hear a little bit more about in a second.
Stephen Todd, welcome to the show. Happy to have you.
Todd: Likewise Chet. Thanks for having us.
Chet: Yeah, I'm really excited. And I want everybody to be able to learn a little bit more about the story about Champify, what it is, what it does, how it was founded, but more importantly, part of the show is we wanna learn a little bit of more about you two.
So I'd love to kick it over to Stephen, Todd, whoever wants to get us started. Tell me a little bit about you and your story. Obviously we have the intro but digging a little bit more to your experience and what got you up to the point of co-founding Champify.
Stephen: I'll start Todd. So what got me up to the point of starting Champify?
My entire professional career has been in B2B software sales. So like most people starting in a more of an opening role and then progressing to, to full cycle. and I've gotten to see a few, got to see a few different flavors of that, a company like Samsara, you're selling to logistics companies, you're hitting the phones.
It feels a little bit more old school versus Heap, which was digital analytics. So you're selling to an entirely different audience. A lot of the old schools styles don't necessarily work, but there, what were quite a few parallels between those two. And that's hey sure. If you brute force things, if you just put in the effort, you can probably get your, get yourself to a decent state.
However, like in most professions, there's a way to work smarter to have higher output than if you were to just work hard without a strategy. So specifically at Heap, I was dropped into an eat what you kill role. Most people in sales have a few different lead channels that the company helps them out with.
Marketing might give them inbound leads. They may have a business development person that, that partners with them to help reach out to prospective customers. However, in the eat, what you kill role it's you and only you, that can generate your pipeline. And I think being in this position really made it clear a lot of the trends that have been happening in sales that is everyone has automation to reach out to people.
And therefore everyone's getting overwhelmed with salespeople, reaching out to them. Even consumers are right from cold calls to email automation, it's really hard to break through the noise. You only have so much attention to. give I fell on my face for the first few months and then started to think, okay, I need to do something differently here.
I needed to use data to be a little bit more creative who might be looking for our solution? Who may have already worked with us in the past? Who might I have a warm intro to? And these strategies immediately took off. The biggest one of course was you could fill a football stadium with people who had worked with us before and now were at new companies.
And I realized there needed to be a better way to do it. And that's what led to Champify.
Chet: That's awesome. I love that you scratched your own itch and we'll get into a little bit of that later in how the company was founded. Todd, how about you walk us through your experience up to this point and kind of what led you into Champify?
Todd: Yeah, so like Stephen, I got started in B2B tech world as well. I actually started as a sales engineer at a big company, went through, huge training program, year long training at SAP. After that, I was like, Hey, I wanna be the actual sales rep and doing that at 24 years old at SAP doesn't really work.
So I had the chance to go to Square. At the time Square was like 800 employees just building out a sales team. So I watched it go from a handful of us to 60 in a year. I think there, I got exposed to sales operations, territories, enablement, comp plans. A lot of things that support the whole sales effort.
And I started to really like that. After that I was like, okay, I really like even smaller companies. Right? So I went from like a 60,000 person company to 800 person company, and then I started at Heap as the fifth employee. About as small as you can get without joining the company. Had a really good run there learned a lot, made a ton of mistakes, made a ton of really good connections.
Ruff and I connected there. We see where he was one of the top reps and we were approaching this problem where it was just getting harder and harder to do traditional outbound. And we started to say, what are some creative ways we can go about that? Which was ultimately the reason to start Champify.
I think how we actually landed on getting going or me really having the the confidence to jump in is when I left Heap, I spent the last year working for Unusual Ventures. A venture firm led by John Vrionis and Jyoti Bansal, who's the founder of AppDynamics and Harness and Traceable and others. And ultimately what I found out was, this problem of generating pipeline outbound when you don't have brand recognition, when you don't have a big name yet was just really hard.
So what it, what I was able to do my first couple months at Heap in 2015 was not possible working with founders and Unusual portfolio in 2021, 2022. That's when Ruff and I started spending more time together. And for me, I'd always wanted to start a company and it was something when I felt like I knew the problem uniquely well, and I had a lot of conviction that I personally felt that problem. So when I started to see this across Square, Heap, Unusual seeing Stephen ready to jump in and felt like we had a good chemistry and bond to do it, it was the right time.
Chet: That's awesome. And I guess that kind of segues really well into what we wanna hear a little bit about. So tell us about Champify. What is it, how does it work? Who's your audience? And then I'd also love to hear like, How did that end up happening? Cause there are tons of people out there that have great ideas, tons of people, that experience problems in their business that they solve for that never take that idea to market or capitalize on it.
So I'd love to hear from you both a little bit of that, but also more importantly, give us the insight on what Champify is, what it does. Who's your target audience? How does it work?
Stephen: Sure. I'll start out. A little bit of how Champify came to be and then what it turned into. So I remember in an entrepreneurship class, which is maybe a hard thing to teach, unless it's hands on.
My professor said founding companies are based on two things, right? Scratching your own itch or domain expertise. And the second one had a really good analogy with it, which is if you ski a different mountain every day, you're not gonna know that one path through the trees that nobody else does. And I think for both Todd and I, it hits on both of those points.
We happen to fall into software sales career, and that's where we have most of our expertise. And we've also been in several positions that this product applies to. What Champify turned into kind of came from us, trying to do it manually. I was like, okay. We have 50,000 people that have used our product in the past.
How do I find those people? Maybe I go and look at our analytics tool or I go look at our data warehouse. How do I see if they change jobs, mainly LinkedIn, which is the most accurate employment data. And then how do I get that information to the right people need to go into Salesforce, find out who owns what account, who owns the past account, who owns the new account and then Slack them to let them know that it happened.
And don't me wrong, like this still was able to generate good pipeline, but there needed to be a better way. If you look at the other lead channels, they just show up magically in your engagement tool or in your inbox so you can get engaged. And we wanted to think, okay, how can we turn this into another lead channel that's worked similarly to the rest?
So what Champify is a Salesforce application. It resides within your own Salesforce, which means no new login that's trying to compete for your attention or no new workflow that the team needs to learn. And what we do is we automatically monitor your Salesforce data.
So people that have bought from you in the past, people that have gone through a deep evaluation, people that have used your product, or worked closely with customer success, individuals that have high value to the organization, they have a high degree of familiarity. We're constantly monitoring this customer graph.
And on an ongoing basis we're understanding whether they're still at the same job or whether they've moved to a new job. And based on that information, we can update the CRM, which is the system of record and ties into all these other tools. And we can alert the right individuals on the team so they can take action on this information.
Chet: That's awesome. And then, specifically speaking to what's going on in the market, what have either of you recognized that helps drive the need for sales tools like this? I think one of the benefits, just hearing you talk about it is that it's not another thing that's competing for salespeople's attention like that streamlined efficiency is really good, cuz I know as a sales leader myself, it's oh I want to implement another thing to drive efficiency, but I don't wanna give people like a whole nother thing to manage,
It's really complicated. It's really tricky. So I love that. You've come up with that concept, but what specifically about the market right now, have you recognized that helps drive the need for a tool like this? Whereas maybe there wasn't as much of a focus on customer alumni or this concept of reaching out to power users or decision makers or champions in the past who have maybe switched jobs. What are you seeing in the market?
Todd: Yeah, I'll start, I think in general, like people have relied on referrals and repeat buyers.
For as long as people have been selling things, right? It's like this play isn't novel, what's novel, and what's new is really the why now is this a bigger focus? So I think there's two or three key things that are happening Chet. The first is according to HubSpot, email volume has doubled in the last two years.
And response rate across the board have gone down 40%. If you think 2015, 2016, 2017, you're an early adopter on SalesLoft or Outreach your ability to be significantly more effective than everyone else that was very possible. Now, find a B2B sales team that doesn't have a sales engagement platform that isn't running through tons of cadences.
So like overall, when people start doing that, the effectiveness is going to go down. And I think there's some really interesting things happening on the power dialer space and people having a lot of success with cold calling as well. Ultimately I think they're fighting an uphill battle too, because you know the spam blockers, the way the iPhone is working like that's getting trickier and trickier.
And then the other trend is that there's this big push for product led growth for try before you buy, for freemium models, which means more people are getting accustomed to using different software, even if they're not paying for it yet. So the surface area of your customer base is getting wider and wider, and that means the movement is also spreading its kind of tentacles further and further. So when you combine all of these things with AEs needing to generate pipeline and companies needing to be more efficient today, not just grow at all costs.
When they're looking at how do I increase efficiency of you know sales, pipeline, or revenue per sales person. They need to look at tools like Champify and trying to find that low hanging fruit to be able to get there.
Chet: That's awesome. Stephen, how about you? What are you seeing specifically from the market that drives the increased need for something like this? Whereas maybe it wasn't as big of a focus before.
Oh, we got you on mute.
Stephen: Adding to what Todd said. Another big trend is the number of people that are involved in a decision. Again you rewind the clock 20 years and Hey, you could hit up somebody who's VP or C level get them on board with your concept or your solution. And they'd be like, all right, we're doing this makes the decision on behalf of everyone else that's going to be affected by it and using it on a day to day basis.
Now it's a lot more common for, I believe five to 10 people to be involved in the average decision. And oftentimes you're not really starting at that high level and you'll get kicked down. It'll be like, Hey, we're gonna let the people who are going to be using this dive deeper and make a decision and vet their options.
And now if you're looking at even a mid-market sale, it's starting to become more enterprising in that sense where we're doing like relationship mapping. We're like, Hey, is this person green, yellow, or red? Who do we need to flip? Who else can we leverage in this conversation? So while of course a former buyer and a new account, that's just one example of a warm connection, can be a great way to get that initial meeting. It's debatably just as impactful when we're in an active sales conversation, it might be against a competitor, or we just may only have one or two people on the side that are bought in and having a trustworthy proof point on the inside can really help us win in a do nothing scenario or against a competitor.
So I guess the trend is more people involved in decision. So it's not just one connection in an account. It's as many as possible.
Chet: Yeah. Plus you add on frequent job changes too. I think that helps, right? The average tenure of even a sales leader now, VP salesm CRO out in 18 month if it doesn't work out, even on top of that, then you got three years at best.
It's not our mom and pop's leadership and sales world anymore. We're not staying at companies for 20 years, 30 years. It's changed.
Stephen: Yeah I think a fun stat there is that in the past 10 years, people on average are changing jobs about twice as often. Of course, that varies from industry to industry.
The average tenure is about four years. We have seen a small downtick with the economic downturn. I think people are latching onto what they have but still a lot higher than the baseline several years ago.
Chet: Yeah. And now correct me if I'm wrong, don't take offense, but I didn't see that either of you really have that technical coding background.
I know Todd, you did some engineering at SAP. Probably not as specific as Hey, I need to go code an application or create a product. So what's really interesting to me is. In the past, it was the Zuckerbergs of the world who could code you around the world, but then didn't know how to do all the other stuff that I think us as sales people and sales leaders learn how to do really well.
They had to go figure it out with someone else and whatever their adoption rate was a lot slower. What really interests me now about the founders landscape is we're seeing a lot more non-technical founders who understand the go to market concepts, the sales strategy, the operational things they need to be successful.
They come from the tech world. So how did you solve for the lack of technical expertise? Since, especially since Champify sounds like it's a fairly integrated product, right? Not really complex, but you have to integrate to Salesforce. You have to pull, data of job data, all that kind of stuff.
How did you solve for that challenge of not having that technical expertise to get the platform built out?
Stephen: That's a good question. And the answer is twofold. One is learning by failing, software in general seems very simple on the surface and apologies to the product teams at my former companies for complaining that things were taking too long.
Because there's a lot of complexity that happens under the surface. And it's hard to just know that without actually living it. Yes, everything seems simple on the surface, but there's a lot of hidden complexity. I started this a little bit before Todd joined alongside my past job. So I had a few months of tinkering around and, falling down, getting back up before I started to get a good grasp.
I did take a year and a half of coding in college. So I have the ability to give decent instructions to an engineer and almost act as a product manager. Working at an analytics company definitely helped on the data engineering side, but learning by failing and then hiring a CTO as soon as possible.
Chet: How did you now that's an interesting concept because I hear a lot of the non-technical founders talking about how important getting that first technical hire was, how not having that experience again, though. One of the challenges is I don't know what to scope for sometimes. There are those unknown unknowns.
How did you two go through that vetting process? Was it someone from your network? Were there questions? Did you reach out to other founders? What are the insights you can give to aspiring founders that are like, Hey, I have a great idea. I have a great product concept, but I'm not very technical and I need to bring on a technical person, but there are the unknown unknowns.
I don't know what to look for. How, what would you recommend or how did you solve for that?
Todd: Yeah, I'll start. So I think, when we really started talking on this and saying, Hey, this is a real possibility for us to do it. I think what I came to the realization that, Hey, there's something a lot bigger here.
This initial idea is great, and Stephen, you made a ton of really good progress yourself, and through some contractors prove it out, but there's something bigger here. And if we're gonna go for this, like we need to go get a legit CTO. Third co-founder. That's what we did, but Chet you're exactly right.
I don't know how to vet for a CTO. I don't know how to hire a really good engineer. I've hired, 50 some sales people and interviewed probably a couple hundred, that skillset I do know. But I don't know how to do that. A technical screen. So what we did, the first handful of angel investors we had, which were the two co-founders of Heap, the CTO, and one of the first engineers who now is a CEO of a different company basically shared with them what we were looking for, what we're going after.
They had been up to speed on what we were doing, because they were gonna be some of the first angel checks. We started flirting some names by them, some throwing some ideas, and then what they actually did was help us with those interviews.
We did some from a culture fit. Do we wanna work together? Do they believe in the problem and vision? But when it came down to technical screen, we relied on people on our network that we knew were very good at what they do. And we had really good relationships with
Chet: Stephen. Do you have anything to add there?
Stephen: No. Having. Todd has a lot more credibility at being a leader and doing a really good job with it. Having a good core team is probably is one of your best recruiting tools. You could have big ideas, but if you already have a team that can go in and execute and a team that people look at and they're like, Hey, I think this would be really fun.
I think we could all compliment each other. That definitely helped. Again, if I was trying, if I was trying to go through that process myself it would be a lot harder than with both Todd and I on board.
Chet: Yeah. And that's great that you two were able to come together and leverage the people around you and the network around you.
That you've not only built your past experiences, but even just outside of your previous experiences and people that you met along the way. I was curious, I don't wanna spoil anything for any special announcements, but I heard, through the grapevine that you all recently raised around a funding.
And so what I'd be really interested to hear is I know that you've all been in stealth mode for a while. What did you find particularly challenging while going through this round of funding to raise the money and get the funding that you need and buy in from your investors as you're operating in this stealth mode and having this, basically like this pre-release for this product, that's gonna just totally disrupt the market and add a lot of value at the end of the day.
Todd: Yeah, I think the trickiest part about the fundraising was just some uncertainty, right? Like I think if we were trying to raise at this time last year, confidence would be at an all time high. You could go in and likely pretty easily with decent background and some compelling story get funding. And I think when we went into it now, there was a lot of people, Doomsday type of writing going on out there.
No deals are happening, this thing's over. So I think the first part was just approaching of there's some uncertainty. And I think that gives you a little bit of angst. I think what went well? What went poorly mainly like things went well and I think it was because we had a couple really notable angels on board, early on.
We had some really good early design partners with good logos and good usage. And we had a pretty compelling story. And I think what people really bought, what the investors really bought into was that this is becoming a problem in a category that's getting bigger and bigger. So that's like the why now.
And then secondly, that our team was uniquely positioned to figure this out. Like we deeply have what they call, founder market fit. Like we know this problem really well. We understand it. It's built for us. And I think. There's still a lot of money and people making seed bets are, they're betting for eight, what the macro economy's gonna be in eight to ten years. So it really doesn't as matter much for them while they might be a little bit more hesitant. The process went, pretty smoothly for the time period. We're in.
Chet: That's awesome. And I know it's, I know it's no easy task regardless. Some people are playing their money a little bit closer to the chest, but as you put it I've heard that a little bit more of the pressure is on the growth stage companies, but for the seed. And pre-seed like, I feel like this is the time. It's not as much money needs to go in and there's still just as much potential reward, know, on the outcome.
Todd: And I think it also forces companies to be more realistic. And what I mean by that is, when the purse strings are getting tighter, not only on the investor side, but mainly on the purchasing and the company's side, like if you're selling 20, 30, 50, 100K deals now, like that's real, if you were doing this last year, when someone's eh, everyone's doing well, everyone's blowing out their number. It's hard to tell what's real product market fit, right? So while folks that are getting funding now might be growing a little slower than companies of last year, the year before. Like you can talk about that and tie it a lot more to stronger product market fit, real problem, real urgency, et cetera.
And I think that's going to be a benefit for the companies coming, just getting started right now.
Chet: Yeah. I'd love to hear, I know we're almost at time here, but in closing, we'll start with Stephen. What would be I'm curious to hear what would be the aha moment for you that you could share with others in terms of when you started working on this? Since I know you came in earlier to it than Todd, what was the aha moment where you're like, okay, yeah this is a lot of trial and tribulation.
There's a lot of hard work. There's a lot of failure. This is going where it needs to go. Was it the round of funding? Was it bringing on Todd and others? What did that look like for you? What was the aha moment for you on your journey? Thus far of founding Champify.
Stephen: There were three aha moments and I'll go through each quick. One was when I was feeling very stressed out in my role and I wasn't doing well. And I decided to try reaching out to some people who had used this in the past. I sent five emails. I got five responses. I got five meetings and I got three deals within about six weeks. And I was like, wow, this actually works.
Second aha moment was getting somebody like Todd Todd bought in, making sure I wasn't crazy in thinking, Hey, this is a great wedge into the market. It delivers immediate value. And it applies to a lot of different businesses. But having somebody else agree with that is definitely huge.
The third aha moment was we've been in beta for about six months and recently went into GA and are publicly announcing shortly. Maybe we will have already done it by the time this podcast comes out. But one of our customers generated a mid six figure opportunity within the first two months of using our software and ripped out a competitor.
Very quick deal size, decently high ARR, especially for their segment, ripped out a competitor and did so in the middle of complete economic turmoil. If we can help customers be successful right now very excited to see what that looks like in the future.
Chet: Yeah, totally. Todd, for you a little bit of a different question on, on, on your side, what kind of advice would you give to somebody that's either already jumped in and is going through like probably where Champify was a couple months ago or is where Champify is and they just got around to funding and there's this, this uncertainty of, we don't know what's gonna happen, but let's be honest, we all know what's gonna happen in the market.
We just gotta get through it. What kind of advice would you give to a first time founder or someone that's going through something similar that you and Stephen might be going through right now?
Todd: Yeah. Good question. So first off, like I'm first time founder. So I don't have all the answers here. I think the one, th the two things I'd say is there's a lot of noise out there.
People telling you what you need to do, running your company, how fast you should be growing, how aggressive you should be. Like, I think the two pieces of I advice I have is put your head down and focus on what matters, which is go get customers and make them really happy. People forget at the end of the day, if you make customers really happy, they'll pay you more over time.
They'll tell your friends and you'll grow, right? It's that's the first thing. Just spend a lot of time with customers, make them happy, cut out the noise. And the second part is like, knowing what you signed up for, this job is really hard. It's rewarding and it's hard and has highs and lows. And there's a lot of stuff outside of your control.
And just understand that. And that's what you signed up for. I'm having more fun than I, I had, I'm having more fun since I've started this than the last five years, I had 10 years, probably my whole working career and definitely having lower lows already, but just realizing that's part of the journey. Stay focused on the prize and really just cut out some of the noise. I think there's a lot of advice out there. Some of which is good, but a lot of it isn't and just focus on what matters.
Chet: Yeah. It's the classic eat the fish and spit out the bones. Take a lot of what works for a lot of other people and condense it down to what works for you.
So I love it. Either Stephen or Todd, you can jump in here, but in closing, let us know how can people connect with you? How can people connect with Champify? Do people that listen to the podcast, get a discount if they sign up free trial, what does that look like? What are you offering here?
Todd: Yeah. So you can find us @Champify.io.
I would recommend checking on our site and following both of us on LinkedIn. In addition to using the product with Chet, anyone you send us, we're happy to give a couple hundred free Champify leads, Champify qualified leads we call them. We put out a lot of content just on like new age, new school prospecting, how to engage, nurture deals, how to run different creative plays, tapping into your university network or your exec connections.
A lot of things outside of here's what your new subject line should be, or here's what your ninth touch should be in an outbound cadence. There's enough of that advice. So Champify.io to read some new age prospecting tips and setting up a free trial.
Chet: Awesome. I love it. And then if if anybody's looking to connect with either Todd or Stephen on LinkedIn, we're gonna have a link to Champify in the show notes below as well as Todd and Stephen's LinkedIns.
So you can connect with them as well and reach out to them. And if the DM is relevant, I'm sure they'll reach back. Don't sell 'em anything though. We all get enough of those LinkedIn DMs over time. So leave your sales pitch, don't pitch connect. But I love it. I love the story. I'm a huge proponent of Champify. Stephen already knows this. I love the product, love what you're all working on. I think it's it's gonna do a lot of good for the sales people out there that are looking to do the different things. Do what others can't won't so they can do what others can't right. Old Jerry Rice quote. So gotta love me some Jerry Rice appreciate you both being on the podcast today.
If you're interested in connecting with The Founder's Formula Podcast for Hatchet Ventures further. Don't forget to check out our engagement page in the show notes. Don't forget to like us subscribe on YouTube and follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple, or Google, whatever your podcast, platform of choice is.
Stephen. Todd, thank you for your time today, gentlemen, have a great one.
Todd: Thanks Chet!