SalesFlair

Yaron Courthoud and his co-founder Levyon were running a software company with plenty of leads, but they hated manually tracking every detail through the sales process. Yaron had already spent time helping companies implement CRM sales and marketing systems, and he knew no tool existed that would keep that information for them automatically. So in mid-2014 they started building what became SalesFlair.

The product pulls CRM data from emails, calendars, phone, social media, company databases, and web tracking, so users always have customer information without entering it themselves. On top of that data, SalesFlair adds automation such as an automatic to-do list and alerts when a customer is "hot." The company kept pricing deliberately simple with a single plan at $30 a month on annual billing or $35 monthly. The first paying customer arrived at the end of 2015, after a beta period.

Funding came mostly from the founders themselves. Yaron kept consulting part-time while building, and the company combined accelerator money, subsidies, and loans. Yaron said the total raised was "around, let me think, I think 700K," and the company was raising a capped convertible round to reach roughly $350K.

SalesFlair's marketing mix included a blog distributed across many channels, outbound email, presence on various sites, and social media. Paid advertising, mostly on Facebook, was used only to distribute content. The breakout moment came from a Product Hunt launch two to three weeks before the interview. In two days it drove about 200 new trials, 4,000 unique visitors, and 763 uploads, and traffic stayed above pre-launch levels afterward.

Churn was very low. Yaron said only about three customers had stopped paying, which the host called shockingly low for SMB software at a $30 price point, where churn often runs 4 to 8 percent monthly. Trial-to-paid conversion ran between 5 and 10 percent week to week. Yaron also tried to make value visible quickly by pre-populating contacts so new users had data immediately.

The company was less transparent about its numbers. Yaron declined to share total customer count or total trials, saying he didn't want to look small next to competitors. The host pushed on this, and Yaron acknowledged he had been more guarded than necessary. Revenue was never stated directly; the customer count range the host used to estimate revenue was too wide to be useful.

As of the interview, SalesFlair had over 100 paying customers and a six-person team, three building product and three handling sales and support. The company was positioning itself against HubSpot's free CRM by focusing on sales automation and data capture rather than competing on distribution.