#247 - Alex Levin, CEO Regal - on growing high revenue and low dilution

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to talk more and sell more. My guest is Alex Levin, Co-Founder and CEO of Regal. Leave a comment or a question for Alex or Ton. Alex is a Tech Entrepreneur on a mission. He was a product manager at Personal and Thomson Reuters and then joined Handy (later acquired by ANGI) to lead growth and marketing. Alex grew up in New York and received his BA from Harvard. While at Angi, he successfully drove top-of-funnel growth. But even after rolling out website optimization and email/SMS remarketing, only ~4 of 100 customers would convert. Surprisingly, he found that if they'd called the 96% “abandoned” customers and got them on the phone, they loved the attention and converted at double the rate. In search of technology to scale this, he found only solutions around a basic, one-size-fits-all “call more” or “call faster” strategy, resulting in declining answer rates and a terrible customer experience. Solving this problem sparked the idea to co-found Regal in October 2020 with Rebecca Green (CTO). They believe in the power of a personal touch in an increasingly digital world. In the meantime, they've built an outbound phone and SMS sales solution that helps many fast-growing B2C brands achieve their growth goals way faster.  Their mission: We believe in the power of a personal touch in an increasingly digital world. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Alex to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we sell online to B2C customers. Alex explains how there is a new playbook that requires a B2C sales team and how Regal.io helps B2C sales teams 3.5x their answer rate and drive more revenue than their website does. He shares some big lessons learned on how they grew rapidly to a double-digit million ARR in 2 years and had no sales or marketing team for the first year. Last but not least, he talks about why we should prioritize creating wealth for everyone in your company rather than glorifying fundraising. Here's one of his quotes: At bigger companies, you're taught the wrong thing. You're taught that the more people work for you, the more important you are. I think that results in bad outcomes for companies. We try to teach people that the most valuable people in the company are those that can make themselves completely redundant. During this interview, you will learn four things: What you should be looking for in conversations about new products with customers That you don't have to have a huge engineering team to build products that drive revenue from the start How to successfully grow your SaaS business faster with fewer people How to create a SaaS business that becomes critical infrastructure for your customers For more information about the guest from this week: Alex Levin Website Regal Leave a comment or a question for Alex or Ton. Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Get my free, 2 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices