How Turnstile positioned quote-to-cash for founders who don't know the category exists | Michael Babineau

Turnstile is reimagining quote-to-cash for the modern B2B world, where negotiated agreements create operational chaos that standard pricing never does. After selling Second Measure to Bloomberg, co-founders Michael Babineau and Lillian Chou experienced the irony firsthand: running a data analytics company while managing their own revenue operations through spreadsheets and manual processes. That incongruence became the catalyst for Turnstile, a self-serve revenue platform designed to support sales-led B2B companies from their first negotiated deal through tens of millions in ARR. In this conversation, Michael shares how they're solving the structured data problem that plagues B2B revenue operations, why eliminating custom development forced genuine platform flexibility, and how they're collapsing a traditionally 3-6 month implementation into a self-serve onboarding that takes minutes.

Topics Discussed:

• Why negotiated B2B agreements create the structured data problem that breaks revenue operations

• Turnstile's compound startup approach spanning quote-to-cash to revenue recognition

• The internal ban on custom development that forced true configurability into the platform

• How supporting non-standard contracts from day one enables earlier market entry than traditional CPQ

• Revenue leakage and "truth drift" between contract terms and actual customer relationships

• The rippling-style GTM strategy: start with startups, grow into enterprise with your customers

• Positioning challenges when your category exists but your ICP doesn't know it yet

• Building for human operators and AI agents simultaneously on the same platform primitives

• Agentic dunning and the roadmap toward AI-automated revenue operations

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Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

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