Announcing Our $6.6m Seed Round

The playbooks for sales, marketing, & growth of the last generation's software giants aren't working anymore. It's time to adjust or die.

The last 18 months were a sobering period for CEOs, investors, and revenue leaders alike. The music stopped, pandemic-fueled software spend flatlined, and much like those sobering thoughts after a Saturday night bender, CEOs, VCs, and CROs realized they may have had one too many.

Enterprise software growth has been on a steady decline for the last 5 years. There are more software companies than ever, all battling for increasingly slim portions of enterprise software spend only to produce incremental gains in enterprise productivity. A decade ago, it was hard not to grow quickly as a software vendor. Markets were nascent, and growing 50% per year early on. As venture capital bankrolled category development, new software products flooded every part of the market making it easy to find room in a category, create a new one, or disrupt an incumbent altogether. Every slight operational headache was a new line item, another growth round, another ambitious hiring plan. This worked for a while. But eventually, buyers started to realize that many of the point solutions boomeranging cold emails into their inboxes were ubiquitous, making sales just a tad less efficient and as a result, more expensive. This wasn’t a problem during the Good Times™️. Previously, if you wanted to grow faster, you just hired more salespeople. That doesn’t work today - budgets have evaporated, and so has sales efficiency. The industry is sobering up, and the hangover is setting in.

The software bull run of the 2010s flooded the market with hundreds of venture-backed point-solutions, all eager to close gaps in the enterprise software stack. There was incredible pull for great companies like Slack, Figma, Dropbox, and many other n of 1 offerings. This unquenchable thirst only compounded throughout the pandemic; every company was now digitally-native, and buyers suddenly needed SaaS for everything - remote productivity, global payroll, expense management, etc. It was easier than ever to find reasons to buy more software, yet many of those same products have been the first to go as the industry quits cold turkey. To make matters worse, many companies built entire functions and departments around a poorly-strung-together chain of point-solutions that at best fragmented mission-critical information and created data silos across entire organizations. Most of this spend ended up being a tax on enterprise productivity.

Despite the sharp pullback of the last year, software spend hasn't disappeared - people are still buying SaaS. But categories are crowded, innovation is incremental, and budgets are shrinking. Soaring CAC, shrinking budgets, and layoffs all indicate that the once-intoxicating SG&A-driven growth playbooks are no longer reliable. But there are still quotas to hit, targets to make, and products to sell. For many, it’s unclear what to do next. Early-stage (Series A-B) Sales & Marketing leaders are feeling the heat as SDR teams and marketing budgets get cut. The pressure now falls on Revenue Operations teams to implement tools and processes that keep leads from falling through the cracks, and reps from wasting time on manual tasks like booking meetings, routing leads, and updating Salesforce instead of winning deals. But this pressure creates more questions than it answers. How do you grow at all reasonable costs? How do you do more with less?

Today, I’m excited to unveil Default.com - the all-in-one inbound lead platform that helps modern companies make the most of every lead by consolidating the usually fragmented inbound sales stack into one deeply integrated platform. We started building Default with a single vision: to build the go-to-market “intelligence layer” for the next generation of category-defining B2B companies, starting with the inbound sales funnel. Over the last 18 months, we’ve built a best-in-class platform with everything you need to build, automate, and scale your inbound pipeline: beautiful lead qualification forms, best-in-class scheduling, a powerful workflow engine, enrichment, and deep integrations with the go-to-market tools every scaling B2B company uses today: Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Segment, Outreach, and more. Our hope is that with Default, early-stage customers will spend less to build their revenue engine from the ground up in order to scale to $100m and beyond.

At Default, we believe companies should spend less—not more—to get to scale, and our bet is that companies who build and scale their go-to-market engines on Default will spend significantly less to get there. Gone are the days of paying hundreds of dollars per sales rep, per month to help them sell. Default does this and more, giving you one platform you can use to manage all of these workflows.

Today, we’re excited to announce $6.6m in funding from Craft Ventures, Jack Altman, 8VC, BoxGroup, base case capital, Caffeinated Capital, Kearny Jackson, GTMFund, and others as well as some of the best founders & operators in the world like Siqi Chen, Lauryn Isford, Kyle Parrish, Thibault Imbert, Pete Kazanjy, Sri Batchu, Varadh Jain, and many other incredible people.

Book a demo to learn more.