Helping sellers get their 9-5 done by 4pm.

Working as a seller before I became a founder, I was always terrible at updating my notes and call details into Salesforce. It seemed simple enough for AI to solve this but also a real pain. I knew I hated it, and it took an hour per day.

We did things the right way here by pre-selling Ascend on the solution (see testimonial below). They paid before we built, which forced us to anchor the product in a real workflow instead of a pitch.

This helped us raise a pre-seed round of funding from investors including Daniel Gross of Pioneer Fund and Spark Capital.

We got many startups to start working with us including a venture capital firm who wanted a more simplistic call recorder, sales reps at high growth startups paying out of pocket for increased efficiency, and even sold an annual contract within three months of launching.

Notes

We launched many products before 4pm and struggled to achieve adoption. Sales reps would nod their heads and enthusiastically support our ideas and then ghost us after we spent weeks building a solution.

The learnings: people are excited by innovation and terrible at saying no. Build as little as possible before launching and exercise the discipline and creativity to sell the simplest versions of a concept internally or externally.