Doc Sales

Mauricio Quiguela, a serial founder with two previous exits, launched Doc Sales two years ago with an ambitious goal: create an international contract and proposal automation platform. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the team to pivot. They refocused on the Brazilian market, adapting their product and go-to-market strategy to local needs. By the time Mauricio pitched at Founder 500 in Austin, Doc Sales had grown to serving 1,000 customers across Brazil with a small 12-person team.

Doc Sales operates as a layer on top of CRMs, allowing sales reps to drag opportunity cards between pipeline phases while the platform automatically handles document generation, e-signature processing, and payment collection. The founding team built from first principles, starting with the cheapest tech stack options available—a decision that later created technical debt. They used basic email platforms and manually exported/imported customer data, losing historical metrics in the process.

Doc Sales initially sold to anyone willing to buy. They quickly acquired 1,000 customers, primarily accountant offices in Brazil. However, this unfocused approach created a critical problem: they were measuring success on averages rather than cohorts. When Mauricio analyzed customer segments, he discovered massive variance in customer quality. Accountant offices with 3+ users had an LTV of $1,400, a 4-month payback period, and just 1.4% monthly churn. But accountant offices with 1-2 users had only 30-month LTV and 5.3% monthly churn—triple the churn rate. This realization hit hard: most of their customer base was low-value, high-churn customers.

The turning point came when Mauricio realized the real problem wasn't product-market fit—it was organizational alignment. For six months, growth had been flat despite strong sales activity. He diagnosed the root cause: severe misalignment between departments. Marketing didn't know which customers to acquire. Sales wasn't optimizing for retention. Customer support was drowning in tickets from low-value customers. The finance team wasn't tracking payment failures that led to churn. No one owned the customer lifecycle.

Mauricio implemented "revenue operations"—a cultural and operational shift toward customer-centric thinking. Key changes included:

1. **Persona Focus**: They stopped selling to everyone and focused on profitable accountant offices with 3+ users. 2. **Central KPI System**: They moved away from spreadsheets to Power BI, creating a unified data layer that fed insights from all departments. 3. **Behavioral Triggers**: Instead of just tracking churn, they tracked "revenue leakage" (payment failures, downgrades, support tickets) to predict problems before they happened. 4. **Matrix Goals**: Every department kept individual targets (e.g., sales needed 5K new MRR), but bonuses were tied to global KPIs: 15% monthly MRR growth and <2% monthly churn. 5. **Payment Infrastructure**: They expanded payment methods to accept bank transfers (PIX in Brazil, ACH in the US) to reduce payment-related churn.

This shift happened around June 2021. The results were immediate: "Look at this. In a year, we double our ARR. We tripled the number of paying customers."

By the time of the Founder 500 presentation, Doc Sales had: - Started with ~$26-30K MRR when growth was flat - Doubled ARR year-over-year - Tripled paying customer count - Achieved a healthy churn rate (1.4% average for quality customers) - Expanded from Brazil to the US market (as of May)

Mauricio's key insight: revenue operations isn't a post-Series A luxury—it's a mindset that should guide the company from day one, even if formal implementation comes after product-market fit. With just 12 team members managing 1,000 customers, automation and alignment became survival imperatives. By making every employee care about company-wide metrics, not just their department's KPIs, Doc Sales transformed from a plateauing business into a sustainably growing one.