Sales and technology run deep in Shane Wey’s family history, so it’s not surprising that the UC-Berkeley grad is the CEO and co-founder of MightySignal.
Wey and childhood friend Jason Lew are the young entrepreneurs behind MightySignal, a new company that helps B2B sales teams figure out who is most likely to buy their product.
MightySignal, currently apart of the Techstars Seattle 2014 class, has built software that scours the Internet and indexes the different services that companies use and pay for. The idea is to help salespeople have a better grasp on potential new customers.
“Sales teams struggle to figure out who to sell to,” Wey said. “There is so much data online that indicate what companies are willing to buy, but no way to collect it all and and make sense of it.”
Wey’s father and brother are both salesmen, and the 27-year-old says that he’s “witnessed firsthand their wins and losses.” He met Lew on a sixth-grade basketball team and the two went on to graduate from Homestead High School — which also happens to be the alma mater of Steve Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs.
“Our goal is to make something that people clamor for,” Wey said. “We want it to fly off the shelves. We obsess over understanding our customers and their pain points.”
This isn’t Wey and Lew’s first endeavor. The tag team also founded Melt, an app that lets people express thoughts in their own voice online.
We caught up with Wey for this installment of Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature.
Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: “We tell sales teams who’s most likely to buy their product.”
Inspiration hit us when: “Sales teams struggle to figure out who to sell to. There is so much data online that indicate what companies are willing to buy, but no way to collect it all and and make sense of it. Sales VPs literally hire people to surf the web, copy and paste into excel sheets, buy obscure email lists, and pay out-of-country services to put together prospects for them. It’s clearly a market in search of a solution.”
VC, Angel or Bootstrap: “We’re in the midst of raising a seed round, so angel and micro-VC. We are early stage (the only team admitted to Techstars without an idea), and started generating revenue halfway through the program. This is the sweet-spot for angels and seed funds.”
Our ‘secret sauce’ is: “One — with the data we’re collecting, we know more about companies than they know about themselves, and we know the ones that sales teams should be closing. For sales teams, using us is the difference between shooting in the dark and shooting with dart-like precision. Two — we move insanely fast and are a little crazy.”
The smartest move we’ve made so far: “We sold it before building it. Some say you should generate revenue from Day 1. We had it Day -14.”
The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: “There have been too many…”
Would you rather have Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner: “Easy. Steve Jobs. Playing to the home crowd here. We grew up in the same area, attended the same high school, and Jason used to be on the iPhone and iPad engineering teams at Apple.”
Our world domination strategy starts when: “It already started.”
Rivals should fear us because: “There is some kind of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ thing going on here. A pair of engineers up-ending the sales space. Instead of throwing labor at the problem, we write code that scales and learns. It’s going to be an unfair advantage between those who use us and those who don’t.”
We are truly unique because: “We integrate with existing CRMs as opposed to building new platforms. We find quality prospects and put them in your CRM. We also hydrate existing leads with data that lets sales teams know who to focus on.”
The biggest hurdle we’ve overcome is: “Hard to pick one. After each hurdle, the next feels like a bigger one.”
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: “Sell it before you build it.”
Editor’s note: GeekWire is featuring each of the 10 startup companies participating in the TechStars Seattle incubator in the lead up to the Demo Day pitch event and launch party on Nov. 6. See past spotlights here.
