Chili Piper co-founder Alina Vandenberghe on the road to success

We talk a lot about scaling up when there is venture capital funding, but getting started is a whole different game. When there isn't outside capital flowing in to help you grow rapidly, you must be scrappy, ruthless in your priorities and, let's face it, have a high risk tolerance and unwavering persistence to get back up again and again and again.

Today's guest has kicked off most of her life. Alina Vandenberghe is co-founder and co-CEO of Chili Piper, an inbound conversion software that helps sales teams automatically schedule appointments and instantly turn leads into qualified appointments.

Growing up in Romania, Alina started her first business before even enrolling in high school to help pay for her education. She moved to the United States after graduating as an engineer and worked her way up, creating mobile products at companies such as Reuters and Bloomberg. At the time, she imagined herself as the future CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but as she became more involved in corporate politics, she realized that it was not. for her. Alina was a builder, not a politician.

In 2016, she created Chili Piper with her husband Nicolas and poured into it everything she had learned over the years. Although she was a product manager, she had experienced sales first hand growing up and had spent many hours studying revenue teams. She had a deep understanding of their processes and pain points and knew how to build software that would help them thrive. It was just about sticking the landing. And that's exactly what she did. Over the past two years, Chili Piper has received total funding of $54 million and today employs more than 200 people in 40 countries.

In today's episode, we caught up with Alina to discuss building a business from scratch, the importance of a marketing strategy that drives growth, and the benefits of being remote first.

If you're short on time, here are some quick tips:

When getting started, move quickly and grab a big market share, whether that's creating integrations with big players or automating as many tasks as possible. While it's true that large companies have the resources to jump in and copy almost any product or feature, it's also difficult to mobilize them internally because of all their other priorities. Alina may have a high tolerance for risk, but she always makes sure that any action starts small before scaling – it makes no sense to go big if you can't drive the pipeline later. To maintain a strong culture at a remote-only company, Chili Piper hosts an annual employee trip and provides a stipend to encourage people to visit.

If you like our discussion, check out other episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in the reader of your choice. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the episode.

Land in Times Square

Liam Geraghty: Alina, you are welcome on the show.

Alina Vandenberghe: I am very happy to be here.

Liam: You have had a remarkable journey throughout your life and career. You started your own business before high school. Was it in Romania?

Alina: Yeah, that's where I grew up, yeah.

Liam: Okay. And you did this to pay for your own education?

"I saw a computer and was completely intrigued by it. And my dad was kind enough to take all his savings and invest in a computer I built myself"

Alina: It was a necessity. I started working very early, and throughout my childhood, at many times, I had several jobs where I worked in parallel.

Liam: Where did your interest in technology come from?

Alina: I saw a computer and was completely intrigued by it. And my dad was kind enough to take all of his savings and invest in a computer that I built myself. And the rest is history.

Liam: That's great. So, how was it when you came to the United States?

Alina: I moved to the United States after graduating from college and landed at Times Square. It was like such a big difference from the communist Romania I grew up in, where everything was rare. And I was there in Times Square - there was so much light, so many people, and so...