Adam Torres and Braydan Young discuss SlashExperts.
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Show Notes:
Has the sales process changed from just taking a demo? In this episode, Adam Torres and Braydan Young, Cofounder of SlashExperts, explore Braydan’s journey as an entrepreneur and SlashExperts.
About Braydan Young
Braydan Young is a seasoned sales and marketing strategist who helps businesses increase revenue through innovative, results-driven approaches. With over five years of experience as an investor and advisor to early-stage companies, he has consistently supported startups in the sales and marketing tech space. His expertise spans new business development, sales management, and marketing execution. Braydan is deeply passionate about empowering entrepreneurs to reach their goals and build thriving businesses.
About SlashExperts
SlashExperts is the leading peer-conversation platform that helps B2B companies accelerate revenue by connecting prospective buyers with real customers. By turning advocacy into a measurable, scalable growth channel, SlashExperts enables marketing and sales teams to build trust, shorten sales cycles, and influence pipeline. The platform seamlessly integrates into CRM systems, offering attribution-ready data and buyer insights at every stage of the funnel. Founded in 2024 and backed by world class investors, SlashExperts is on a mission to redefine the way B2B companies sell.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today my guest is Braydan Young, and he is the co-founder over at slashExperts Braydan , welcome to the show.
Good to be here. I need to get my radio voice going. You know, , that was a good intro right there. Well, let’s get it some good vocal fry game on. And correct me if I’m wrong, you co-founded another company and this is your latest venture. Am I accurate on that?
Could you maybe talk a little bit about that to get us kicked off? Yeah, so 10 years ago started sendo, which was a, or still is a, gifting platform, so anything you might wanna send to a customer, to a prospect. It was a fun one there for 10 years. We raised about 200 million through the company to about 600 people or so.
We helped most companies that are out there send gifts. It was fun. It was a, it was a fun ride. And then I was crazy enough to. Go and try it again and see, and see how the second one happens, man. First you gotta talk to me about that piece of it. , what drives you to do that? Man, I’ve interviewed over 6,000 people.
When I do interviews, I hear, you know, a serial entrepreneur story, other things like that, man, I can barely handle one. what drives you to go do another? Yeah, I enjoy the early stages of a company. I love the first like, six months to one year. Like the putting the foundational pieces in is like, where I just, I love the chaos of like, there’s not enough hours in the day and mm-hmm.
You gotta figure out how to build the CRM that’s gonna connect to the tool and the tools down, and you’re trying to do demos at the same time like that. Chaos component, I think is what I enjoy the most. And my spouse, , my wife was like, yeah, you should go do it again. Like, she’s like, I know you’re not gonna take time off, so well go see.
So , we found a problem at Sendo that we were trying to solve, and that’s where slash experts came from. Hmm. So talk to me about the idea what was the problem you were trying to solve and like, what was that next step when you decided that you were gonna go, do it? So we had tons and tons of web traffic to sendo and kinda , like most B2B companies, the only, the only path, the only way to convert the, that web traffic was take a demo.
It was like, Hey, like welcome to our site. Like you’re not a customer so you can’t log in. So take a demo and every B2B site that’s out there has the exact same path. Like some might have webinars, some might have case studies, but I mean like no one really. Reads those things, but, and everyone has all these logos on their site to give social proof.
Like, Hey, here’s all the great logos we work with. Like, , don’t you feel warm and comfortable? Like, take a demo. So we were like, we gotta figure out another path for a prospect to take than just book a demo. And so we started testing with having a page of experts. So take a website like abc company.com/experts, and on that page you would have all of your customers, advisors, people you trust who say good things about you that you would host on that page.
And prospects can book time directly with those people rather than sales. So almost you’re taking the referral or the back channel, if you will, and putting it top of funnel. And that was the concept and like that’s what we did. What we quickly saw was people would take a bunch of these phone calls or they were already doing these calls and now it’s just easier to book.
And then on the back end, because I’m from gifting, we actually gift people to take those calls so they get, you know, a e-gift or a charity send, which was easy to do. ’cause I know that world pretty well. Mm-hmm. And most referrals. Mm-hmm. Aren’t banked. And so being able to automate that was huge. And then we push all that data back to your CRM, which has been fun to build out.
It’s been six months or so, so I just went full time, couple months. So build. Wow. , as you started building it out, was there anything that surprised you? Like any learnings during the process? Like you’re like, eh, I thought this would happen, but then this happened.
Like, gimme some of those ’cause those are the fun things in the beginning of, of starting anything. I feel like, yeah, , when we built it, we didn’t like, so we thought it would only be top of funnel. Like prospects would go to a page and rather book a demo. They would just, they would go to this page and book with an expert.
What we quickly saw was sales and. CX started using this expert page for like post demo as a follow up. Oh, that makes a lot Like they were hey of sense. Yeah. They were like, you should talk to someone who already uses us. Here’s the booking link to book with them. And like the pain of asking for referrals was massive.
And so we didn’t realize that on the back end that usually it’s like, oh cool, you wanna buy And like the next step is like, you know, meet. This person and you go back and forth and you’ll be book a time , like it was just a simple thing to put in a link there to have some book a time directly on the calendar.
So mm-hmm. That was surprising. I mean, and it was a different way to drip content. That’s, we talk about that a lot , at mission matters about dripping content. And so for, yeah our version of that would be obviously you’re, on the show right now. So now people get to feel that one-to-one.
You’re being interviewed by a third party media platform with no vested interest. I’m not an affiliate for you. And nothing like that’s on the back end. Yeah. So what’ll happen many times is the the sales team will take this and even the hr, which surprised me. HR , will take this type of interview and share it with potential candidates and say like, look, this is what we want.
Don’t hear directly from our CEO this this. This. And I’ve had people like follow back up afterwards and be like, oh yeah, you’d be surprised our HR team’s been using , that interview and this and that. Especially for like, you know, higher level like hires, we’ll say, like different levels of management we’ll say.
But it’s not shocking to me, but it’s surprising to me how well that stuff works. Yeah, I mean, there’s so many review sites that are out there. Mm-hmm. And the only review site that’s done very well in B2B has been G two. I mean, there’s other interest Radius and those folks too, but G two is the dominant one.
And there’s a lot of reviews that are on there that people just can’t. Trust and like longer form conversations with somebody on the phone. Yeah. You can actually get the questions answered. I mean, that’s, why referrals, I think were invented in the first place and what the, thing we were trying to solve for, which was surprising to us.
And the way everyone’s buying these days is. If someone sees a software or a tool or they have a problem, they usually go to , their Slack group of peers and they ask that question like, Hey, like, how are you guys solving X question or X problem? And then people recommend softwares and then they go read about it, and then they go take a demo.
So that back channel the companies have no transparency in. That’s what we’re working on solving. Yeah. Why is it important to talk to someone before buying software? Like, I don’t wanna assume that everybody understands that. Yeah, , the anti AI approach. I think that there’s, like the old phrase, you know, that no one got fired for buying IBM, you know, I feel like maybe, , , that dates me, like as I, I feel like, I don’t know.
It’s one of those things where like when I was coming up as fcr, that might date me too. Like, what Ocean, who, what does, does that mean? Like no one got fired for, you know, buying A CRM or buying Salesforce. Like there’s, so, like the thing there is like, if. You’re spending a good amount of money on a piece of software, and I think that’s one thing, but I think the bigger piece these days is time and bandwidth.
So if you’re spending money on a piece of software and you didn’t ask like how onboarding goes mm-hmm. And you have a team now that has a bend of backwards to put it in place. Like if you didn’t do your research on those sorts of things and you buy this tool. That you try to implement. Mm-hmm. And it doesn’t work and it falls on its face.
Like that’s a big problem across companies. I mean, if you look a couple years ago when the market kind of fell out of intech, it’s because people had all the shelfware and systems they weren’t using. And so everyone had these cancellations and churn happened across SaaS. That’s because implementation was horrible.
And so I think that talking to a human and asking the right questions and like, Hey, like how’s this actually going? Someone just using a tool, this will. Basically take care of a lot of those issues you would run into The AI can’t answer for you. I think it is a conversation on the phone of being like, Hey, like, you know, how’d this go?
I just think like those conversations, especially in the enterprise, aren’t going anywhere. Mm-hmm. Anytime soon. I think that PLG is a great motion to test something. But I still think if you’re gonna implement software the right way, you’re gonna have to now do your research and talk to someone who’s already using it.
Who typically gets the, who typically gets the most value outta working with slash experts? Is this an enterprise only approach? Is it mid-market, small business? Like, talk to me a little bit more about that. Yeah, I mean, like the, right now it’s, we’re focusing a lot on SMB, mid-market enterprise too.
Mm-hmm. The challenges, if I go off three, the SMB world is a great one because you can have partners on there that’ll take phone calls for you to help try to sell your tool to somebody. I know. Typically at the SB space, you don’t have a ton of customers that could be experts just yet. So you use partners.
Mm-hmm. I think if you’re mid-market, you should, you should be spending a lot of time building a community around your, customers enterprise. Of course, , they have multiple products. Yeah. Value wise, what we’ve seen and just starting out is there’s a lot of value for the company because they can start to track back channels.
But for experts, they also ha can start to build their network ’cause they’re talking to people that are peers. And so I think eventually you start to build your own peer network. ’cause you’re doing phone calls that we all already do. Mm-hmm. Just, we never get thanked for it. Yeah. And the, and how are you sourcing the experts?
The companies put them up there. So if we sell ABC company, they decide who their experts are gonna be on their page because it’s like, it’s like abc.com/experts. So they decide who they want to have on there. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And then especially for the buying process and what they’re doing, like, it just makes a lot of sense.
So Braydan , lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this a lot, of executives what’s your vision going forward? Like, gimme the next, you know, five years or so. Let’s dream for a moment. Yeah, I mean, if I were to dream, I would like every B2B page that’s out there.
They have experts site where people can actually have conversations with the real people that are a third party that are using the tool, and that’s the way people start to buy. So that becomes the first step in the process rather than talk to sales, I think. And then, after you have that conversation with a peer who’s already using the tool.
Then you go to sales and you go, Hey, like, you know, we’re ready to move forward. Like, here’s what we want. I just think that changes the entire dynamic of taking a demo and doing, I think that like my, my big dream is like in the next five years and I think it’s already happening. I think disco calls the SDRs do are going away.
I mean, if they’re not already gone mm-hmm. Like, might disagree with me on that one. I think that most people don’t jump on the phone with a demo if they don’t already know about the tool. Yeah, and I think that, I think we don’t need to know that like car buying, right? Like you don’t, very few people are gonna go to the car live if they haven’t Googled the car that they’re looking at or cars, period.
Like they know something now. It’s not like back in the day we just go and what’s the latest model? Right? Yeah. Right. Like I. I just don’t think that people have the time to kick tires anymore. Like around like the whole, like these, like I think if you’re on a phone with somebody, there’s some sort of buying authority.
So walking someone through bant is great when I would say there is extra money to spend and extra time, but I just don’t think that that’s a way of life anymore. And, and B2B, I think it’s more like. Get to the point and you know, I’ve already done the research and I want to move forward. So that’s my like, I guess vision is like everyone has an experts page to buy.
And then the bigger piece is like all of that data from the calls that are taking place from experts gets pushed over to people’s CRMs. And then you can start to market correctly to your prospects and talk to your customers the right way because you have an insight as to how one’s, how someone’s talking about you.
Mm. Yeah. That that’d be cool. Like. That’s where you can use ai. Like, you know, take all those phone calls from experts and plug that into your chat gpt of the world, and then you’re like, oh, we’re not even talking content correctly, because our customers talk about things totally different than what we have on our page.
Oh, and then you can, and then you can adjust, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That’s the point. You take that learning and then you adjust, and then you optimize it, and then you hit your ideal target better, hopefully over time. Yeah. Man, I like smart people. Braydan , you’re smart. Well, , , it’s, I like when somebody’s coming up with something new and trying to change an entire market, I’m gonna be like, well, I’m gonna look back at this in five years.
I remember I was talking to Braydan , did I give him that idea? Who gave him that idea? No, it’s, , it’s been a fun one. Yeah. I mean, like, it’s only been a couple months. It’s been fun to build out. But yeah, I mean, like, who knows, you know, maybe we’ll build this out and then, you know, someone like Will will be like, Hey, I can do a ticket even further.
So it’s been fun to build. Yeah, I’m, I’m guessing that’s what it’ll be and your wife will be like, well, might as well go do another one. What’s your next one? Like, good luck. Like I have a, I have a, I have like a 3-year-old and she’s like, well, I guess the kid’s getting older, so you can go start another one.
See how it goes. Oh man. Oh, Braydan , I think that’s a great way to end it. How do people follow up? How do they connect and learn more about slash experts? Yeah, so there’s slash experts.com. Also Braydan Young. I’m the only Braydan Young on all of LinkedIn. My parents work creative with the spelling of my name.
So if you look at Braydan Young, you’ll find me on LinkedIn. So connect me too. Wonderful. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so you can just click on them and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Braydan , thanks again for coming on the show. Hey, thank you. Appreciate it.
