Grobotz

Greg Peiatrusinski wasn't new to entrepreneurship when he founded Grobotz. At 28 years old, he'd already built and sold multiple companies—a software outsourcing shop in Shanghai, a social media application company, and a gamification platform serving enterprises like PwC and MTV. But despite all this experience building products, he'd never figured out how to scale. "With the first company, I was just waiting for customers to come," he admits. His acquisition strategy was purely word-of-mouth referrals. "I was doing almost nothing to acquire more customers."

This haunted him. After spending over 18 months researching growth and sales strategies, Greg had an epiphany: there was no software that could automate customer acquisition—specifically, the top of the funnel. No tool existed to automatically find the right-fit companies and contact them so sales teams could focus only on prospects actually interested in learning more.

Grobotz launched in May 2013 with a simple but powerful premise: give sales teams access to a database of 150 million people, let them search and segment endlessly, and automate outbound email campaigns. The pricing was equally simple—$12,000 per year, flat fee, unlimited everything. No per-lead charges, no per-email caps. Just one price for the whole toolbox.

Greg assembled a 32-person team split between San Francisco and Warsaw, deliberately hiring in Poland to keep costs down—developer salaries were roughly a third of San Francisco rates. The product team had 14 developers. The sales team started lean: one account executive in August, then one added each month.

Greg's own sales team became the first users of Grobotz, eating their own dog food to acquire customers. In August 2013, just one month after launch, they hit $23,000 in revenue with roughly 23 customers paying about $1,000/month each. The signal was immediate and clear: they'd found something that worked.

What's remarkable is the retention. Of the August cohort's 23 customers, only one churned by November—a 95% retention rate in just three months. Greg attributes this partly to treating the first month as a "paid trial" where some companies realize outbound sales isn't for them. But among customers who'd already been doing outbound sales, churn was essentially zero.

Month-over-month growth was explosive: 54% in October. Revenue doubled from August's $23k to October's $50k+. The team's monthly burn rate was just $10k on a $50k revenue month, leaving Greg confident they could hit profitability if they scaled to $80k in revenue—though he chose not to, preferring to reinvest in hiring.

The strategy was straightforward: hire SDRs and account executives as fast as possible, arm them with Grobotz, and let them use the product to acquire customers. By November, Greg was planning to hire three account executives and nine SDRs in a single month.

One decision that worked: the flat-fee model meant customers never had to budget based on lead volume. This removed friction from the sales cycle.

By November 2013, just four months after launch, Grobotz was on a $600k annual run rate. Greg was planning to hit $1 million run rate by month five. He'd raised $600k in convertible notes and was preparing to raise a seed round in the next three months, targeting a $15–20 million valuation—justified entirely by hypergrowth and near-zero churn. For a company that had started with one account executive four months prior, the trajectory was remarkable.

Greg's advice to his 20-year-old self: "Dream bigger and work harder." At 28, he was proving both possible.