SalesScreen
Sinjay Holland founded SalesScreen in 2011 at just 22 years old in Norway, fresh out of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with a degree in industrial economy and technology. The founding insight was elegantly simple: sales teams perform better when you gamify their work. Instead of just asking them to hit targets, SalesScreen breaks business outcomes (like pipeline building) into actionable steps and applies game-like elements—leaderboards, competitions, visualizations—to get reps excited and engaged. The math is straightforward: more engaged activity equals more pipeline.
The early years were about casting a wide net. SalesScreen initially targeted SMBs broadly, accepting almost any customer without a dialed-in ICP. This worked well enough to reach $2 million in revenue by 2017, but it came with a cost: lots of customers paying relatively little. In 2018, Sinjay took his first serious capital: $2 million primary and $500K secondary. A second tranche came in 2020 during COVID—another similar amount, plus a $4 million credit line to preserve equity and maintain runway. These moves showed sophistication rare in young founders; he was thinking like a CFO, not just a builder.
The big pivot happened after 2021. Sinjay realized that chasing SMBs wasn't the path to scale. Instead, he moved aggressively upmarket into enterprise—real estate companies, insurance firms, SAP, Seismic. The results were dramatic: customer count actually *dropped* from 400 to 350, but ARPU *doubled* from ~$1,250 to $2,500 per month. Pricing also clarified: the full gamification package landed at roughly $500 per user per year, with cheaper entry points for pure visualization. By 2023, the company had grown from $6 million run rate (2021) to $8 million, despite headwinds from currency fluctuation (many customers invoiced in GBP and NOK).
At 33 with a wife and two young kids, Sinjay is running a lean, profitable machine. The team shrank from ~50 to just over 40 after a difficult but necessary layoff round in 2023—he'd been burning too much per employee ($175K-$200K per person in burn). He's not in fundraising mode, though he'd consider a deal at the right multiple (8-9x revenue in today's market). The roadmap is focused: simplify the product, improve UI/UX, and build a new product-led growth motion to reduce CAC. He learned a hard lesson worth sharing with other founders: a tight ICP beats a sprawling customer base every time.
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