Fireside: Founder-led sales for discovery and scaling - the Dexory journey

So first of all, I'm very excited to be here on stage with you for a lot of reasons. One is because I think you'll have a lot of interesting information to share with founders in the room about sales and scaling and a lot of important elements of building a business. But also, just kind of some background information, Andre and I first met in March of 2021 when I was a mentor in an accelerated program that Dex3 was in. And we got to know each other and started working together and ended up kind of working with the company as an advisor. Later became an investor, an angel investor in the company as well. So I've had a front row seat in this scaling journey that you guys have done, which is just fantastic. Let's just jump in. For those of you who don't know what Dexary is, maybe you can say in a few sentences, just describing what Dexary is as a business. Sure. So Dexary is a data intelligence platform. We're a technology provider for logistics. We have a data intelligence platform that gives warehouses the ability to run their operations most efficiently. But what's really unique about it is that we use autonomous robots to collect this data. So we also have the world's tallest autonomous robots, which makes us a full stack business. And even before working with Zoltan, we've had this vision around using autonomous robots, collecting the data, and helping businesses make better decisions. We had a couple of pit stops around our journey in retail and other industries, but we decided that logistics is the best application for this technology, and that's how we ended up working together. Yeah. And so what I love about this story is that you have really gone through all three phases of kind of the founder-led sales journey. So you had that first painful part where you're trying to find product market fit. Then you went into the stage where you kind of found product market fit. And then you're in the current stage where you're really scaling your operations. And so I want to cover each of those three phases in a little bit of detail. If you think back to when you were in the retail space, right, what did you learn about the challenges of finding product market fit in your conversations and your experience at that time when you were still still finding your way? So I would say product market fit is something that you really feel when it when it happens to the business, right? We were we were getting traction with with people in retail. We were seeing excitement for the technology, but we are just not seeing much speed or drive to action. I think we were also struggling with maybe how we were engaging with this corporate because we were spending a lot of time with innovation teams and when you're early in your journey, you kind of cling on to any glimmer of hope. And I think innovation teams probably have a slightly different mandate. But the point around product market fit is that your product really needs to bring business value. If you start bringing that business value, people are going to adopt and people are going to start moving fast. They're going to be intrinsically incentivized to push that forward in the organization. And if you think back at those early conversations, I think you were talking to companies like MediaMarkt and Heathrow and the like. What did you learn about the discovery process, the discovery and the customer pain points? What worked? What didn't? What did you learn from that experience? I think we were from the beginning we were very much pitching this concept of data and data insights and that's great but unless that really brings value and it brings value to to the key shareholders and stakeholders in the organization it's not gonna go anywhere I think that was one of the big things for us you have to very quickly speak to the right people you have to make sure that the people that are actually gonna buy that product from you See the value and have the interest into the in deploying that technology You can get the pilots up and running but unless you have that early exposure to the key stakeholders It's gonna be really difficult to get out of I think they call it Pilot purgatory or something Exactly when you're putting a lot of effort into short-term assignments really not being able to build interaction So you're in a stage where you've tried the retail sector if I recall the pandemic hits Obviously, retail changes as a market significantly. That's when actually I came into the picture and you made a decision to pivot to logistics, which is, of course, where your focus is currently. Tell me about that process that you went through to commit yourself. First of all, let go of retail and commit to logistics. What drove you to that decision? So let's take a step back before that. So we bootstrapped this business for, I think, about six years before anything meaningful happened. So we started building the technology. We always wanted to stay very close to the market. We didn't just want to build the technology for the sake of it. So we had a lot of invested time into the retail side of things. Obviously, the pandemic reset that. And then we started seeing a lot of pull from logistics. We started seeing people excited about the technology, but obviously the application wasn't quite right because warehouses and stores are very different environments. I would say the big thing that kind of pushed us to do a hard pivot and only focus on logistics was really the point that we can bring a lot of value and seeing that almost sort of like the excitement in people's eyes, them realizing the impact this technology can have was, I would say, one of the major pivotal moments. It's like instead of trying, struggling to push something uphill, Suddenly, it all comes towards you. So that was the big driver. Was there one pivotal conversation that you felt like, yeah, we've got it. This is something that we can build a business on. So I would say probably the first time we took our technology for a customer demo in a warehouse. And the team that was running that facility said, look, if you can scan this environment in a day, we will sign 10 sites. And I was like, yeah, there's no way we're going to let this one go. I think that... It's just words and talk, but you can see that they were genuinely committed. They meant what they said. So it was very important to have that confidence from their side. And what happened with that customer? Did you sign them? Yes. They're one of our early customers that are continuously expanding. So, yeah. So one of the things that I also get a lot of questions from founders I work with is, okay, but how do I build credibility? Or how do I build traction in an area that I don't personally have a big network in? Maybe I don't have a big... professional background in how did you and your co-founders build credibility in the logistics sector when you actually didn't if I understand correctly any really experience in that area I mean we didn't even know all the words that were used in logistics when we started to be honest But what we wanted to do we really wanted to solve the customer problem We didn't we weren't we hadn't fallen in love with our technology or the way the technology was what we really wanted to do is stay close to the customer And I think that's how you build the best credibility if you're genuinely curious and internally incentivized to solve that problem rather than push the technology down on someone else because that's what you have at that point in time. I think people are going to really appreciate that and it's the fastest, most accelerated way of learning. And it gives you that, you know, once you have this approach with a few customers, you get that internal view of how the industry looks to solve the problem. And that very quickly builds your credibility in the space. Right. And I think you highlighted a very important lesson here is that, and I talk about this all the time, is that sales is not about trying to push something onto somebody, right? It's not about trying to convince them to buy something they don't need. It's about solving an important problem for them. And so it seems to me that you did that as well, right? So you really were curious about the problem, you understood it, you tried to understand it, and you positioned yourself as a solution to that. Were there any other kind of aha moments or insights that you gained from that early sales period that you didn't think were important but subsequently you realized were very important in closing deals with customers? I think there's there's a few of them for sure one one very important point is around the ease of technology adoption so it's not so much about the fact that you solve the problem but how you solve that problem is also very important because you're you're going into a functional working industry you know it might not be the most efficient one but If we look around us, everything we have in here has come through a supply chain, has come through warehouses, factories and all that stuff. So people can't afford to stop and rebuild everything they're doing because you have the unproven but magic formula. So it's really important to make the technology, make the product in a certain way that it's very easy for them to adopt. you remove as many of the barriers as you can. So a big part of us discussing with customers early on, they were telling us look we really want to adopt the technology but we're concerned it's gonna be a massive capital investment which then kind of that impacts and drives how we want to position the business model or it's gonna be a massive operational disruption which means that we have to work on our technology so it's really easy for them to actually deploy in their spaces. So that's those are probably two very practical elements but there's also an element of digging deeper below the surface and understanding what lies beneath the first problem they have, so you can start informing your roadmap, and within a year or two years, you can start catering for a much, much bigger set of challenges that they actually have. Yeah, and I think there's another element which, Mitch, you might not even realize, but is so critical. So anybody who's spent more than 30 seconds with you will know that you're an incredibly passionate guy. Like, you exude belief and self-confidence. I personally think that's one of the most important qualities of a successful founder is that when you're talking to customers, they feel the passion you have for whatever problem is you're solving. Is there a moment or can you think of an example where you felt like your passion for the Dextry solution really pushed the company over the line to close a deal? Yeah, 100%. And I remember very clearly we had also one of our big customers that came to visit us. This was a lot earlier in our days as dexory and the facility wasn't exactly fully fledged as we have it today. This was the MD and it's a great evangelist of ours and she had just taken the role so there's a lot of belief that she put in what we were not looking to sell but what we were presenting. I think that the passion point and and the way you build that relationship with customers is very important Especially when you're doing enterprise B2B sales because people will put they'll put a lot of faith in in you and your team to deliver what they're underwriting So I think from from our side being able to to show the vision and to show how we are looking to change the industry Really can that that passion is is very contagious people people it robs off on people and they really like that. But also being able to back that with this incredible commitment to work and making sure that you're not just selling dreams, you can actually make that happen and you can deliver something that will move the needle for them. I think that's very important. And it's a part of the sales process that evolves with the founders, but you never get away from it. regardless of the stage of the business you're in. Yeah, so we're gonna get back to that point in a moment. So I want to jump to the third portion, right? So we talked about the messy start, you talked about the pivot, finding product market fit, and you get to a position where, okay, we need to build a sales organization, right? So founder-led sales has led to a level where you just have to start, you know, scaling the sales engine. You went out and you found a sales leader who came on board the company and actually left three months later. Tell me that experience. Tell me what you learned from that experience and tell me what the alternative solution looked like. I think it's a classical or one of the classical first hires mistakes, right? The big thing for us is we obviously look to take advice and we have a bunch of great investors on board and so on, but... Lot of the time people focus too much on CVs and people focus too much on past experiences and just because you you worked at Google or somewhere else doesn't mean that you're suitable for the stage of the startup and I think that's really really important the mistake we made was we hired someone that expected a certain level of process and expected a certain setup and was not Internally driven and incentivized to build all that and we needed a builder. We didn't need someone that would manage team that obviously didn't exist back in that day and we have incredibly tight deadlines and very very high expectations so that combination didn't really work out because unless you're really going to put in the work it's just not going to happen I think that's a very important lesson for for us and it's it's about hiring at all stages it's really important to calibrate the stage of the business with the expectations with the person that you're hiring Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head. It's in those first hires, especially in the sales area, you want people who are prepared to build process, not inherit process. And I think that's a big distinction between certain types of professional experience, but also personalities. So this first hire didn't work out well. ended up hiring another person to become the VP of sales and she continues to be part of the organization so it seems like that's been a successful move. Talk about some of the additional elements you had to introduce in your sales and marketing process and specifically how your role as founder evolved as you started building that structure. I think we had to introduce different teams and different departments pretty much across the entire org at all the stages. Because we're a B2B enterprise sales company and that's the offering we have, a very important point for us was the customer success team. That reports directly into my co-founder, Wana, who's overseeing the commercial side of things. But that is incredibly important when you're doing enterprise. And you should never overlook that. I mean, the early customers are your most important, most valuable evangelists. If you're looking to raise external capital, if you're looking to engage with investors, they will want to do reference calls. So it's very, very important to make sure that the early customers are the happiest customers you'll ever get. So we started scaling the organization. We obviously scaled the sales team. We scaled sort of like the sourcing and deal sourcing team. We looked to add automation. I can definitely say that AI is not the silver bullet there, but I think you'll have a talk about that and go into more detail later. But if you go back to the second part of the question, how did my role evolve? I think my role evolved more from actually being deeply involved in the process of the sale. And it evolved more towards the stage of being able to inspire customers, being able to excite them with what we're doing, with the roadmap, with the vision we have for the industry. Not so much for the business, but for the industry. And also kind of reinforce that the commitment that we have to working with them and solving their problems. So this is more on a commercial side, but I would say also the your sales role as a founder evolves and applies to attracting talent, to attracting partners. Partners are incredibly important. You're not going to scale the business in complete isolation. So if you can do this well, people are going to be more committed to your business and they are going to do better for you. Yeah. So we have just over a minute left, and I just want to offer you the opportunity to share some important insight. So many of you will know Andre is Romanian born, born and raised in Bucharest, his two co-founders also, but you've built effectively a global company in the UK. You're about 180 people now, 10 million ARR, raised about 120 million in funding. So you can say from a local perspective, you've built a meaningful business. What would be your Single most important piece of advice for any founders here in Romania who want to achieve that same level of success What is it that they should keep in mind as they look to build that business? I think the relentless execution of your vision is the most important thing and It never it does not get easier along the way I don't want anyone to believe that it's different levels of hard. It's you just get more resilient. It's very very deeply believe in that And if you map it out and look at bigger businesses, you handle more difficult problems, the volume of what you need to cover is a lot bigger. It's just how it is, it doesn't get easier. But it gets more and more rewarding, especially when you see the business scaling, when you see the team growing, when you see how excited customers are to use your product, it really makes it worthwhile. So dream really big and push through. follow follow those dreams with really really hard execution relentless execution and ambition thank you and that's a great way to end if you guys are interested in reading a little bit more about Dexter and Andre's story I wrote a book called the launch code which is available out in the hallway I'll be dedicating copies today at 3 30 it talks a lot about the Dexter story as well as about another 25 or 30 founders with similar stories that you might find useful so Andre thank you very much it's been a great conversation and thank you very much everyone for joining us thank you thank you you

Founder-led sales journey at How to Web Conference 2025.

Dexory is one of Europe’s standout success stories, and this fireside chat explored how founder-led sales evolved from early discovery to building and scaling dedicated sales teams. 

The discussion highlighted the key lessons learned along the way and how those insights were turned into repeatable processes that grew together with the company.

How to Web Conference is the leading startup and technology conference in Eastern Europe, gathering annually 3,000+ attendees in Bucharest, Romania.


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