What's up everybody? This is Cortland Allen from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders behind profitable internet businesses. I try to get a sense of how they got to where they are today, what makes their businesses tick, and how they make decisions both end their personal lives and at their companies.

Today I'm talking to Stelly FD.

Steli is the founder of close.io.

It's software that lets startups and small businesses keep all of their sales communication

in one place so that they can close more deals and make more sales.

It's also a really great example of this classic idea of pure software fitted by a small team that can scale to a ton of customers and generate insane amounts of profit. But it also wasn't easy for Stelly to get here. He had a long and winding path as an entrepreneur. And so in this episode, we spent a lot of time talking about how Steli got to the point where you could create a business like Closed at IO.

Hopefully this would be helpful to those of you who are just starting out and maybe want to skip a few steps by seeing what mistakes other people have made and avoiding them yourself.

That's obviously incredibly valuable if you can do it. So let's get into the episode.

Stelly, welcome to the show and thank you so much for coming on.

Hey, thank you so much for inviting me.

So you are the CEO of Close I.O, an inside sales CRM for startups and small to medium-sized

businesses.

You're also an expert salesperson.

You're a teacher and a mentor to many people.

And you're very effective and I think entertaining public

speaker. So I've got to ask you my favorite lead-off question here. Out of all these areas,

which one is your favorite? Huh. That's an interesting question. I definitely think teacher,

right? I don't know if a teacher creates a certain image that may or may not match what I mean by it, but I've always loved to share what I learn. And that's always been part of my life, even in the earliest years. So it's something that I enjoy tremendously. When I can share something, I've figured out and see somebody else benefit from that. That gives me an incredible amount of fulfillment. So that's definitely my favorite thing. You know what? That was my first guess. Just from watching your talks and the videos that you've made, it's very clear that you are passionate about other people knowing the things that you know, just by looking at the amount of energy that you bring to it. So I think that's a great role for you.

But let's come out here for a minute and talk about not just close I.O. in the business that you're working on now, but sort of the market that you're in. What is inside sales exactly? And also, what's a CRM? All right. So what's inside sales? So you could divide the sales world into two buckets if you wanted to.

Field sales and inside sales field sales is kind of a traditional sales person that

physically has to go and visit a customer, you know, door-to-door salesman of the past.

Inside sales just means that your salespeople or you are selling by sitting in your office

...