Roger

What do they actually do

Roger is a live outbound sales service that automates prospecting, personalized outreach, follow-ups, and meeting booking across email and LinkedIn. Customers define their ideal targets, connect accounts, review/approve outreach drafts, and Roger runs multi‑channel sequences, qualifies replies, and books meetings on the customer’s calendar. The system pulls prospects from sources like LinkedIn, company sites, social profiles, and live job listings, verifies emails, and mirrors the customer’s tone using past emails to keep messages on-brand (site, YC launch).

The product operates as a hybrid of AI automation plus human oversight: campaigns are run by the AI while a dedicated human SDR monitors and optimizes performance. It’s available self‑serve with a demo and registration, and is active in YC’s S24 batch. Pricing is described as volume‑based rather than per‑seat. Their privacy policy says they won’t sell customer data and that any data accessed via Google Workspace APIs is used only to provide the service and not to train generalized models (site, YC company page, privacy).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Early-stage founders doing their own sales: They need qualified meetings quickly but lack the time and budget to hire and train an SDR; manual outreach is inconsistent and slow.
• Small SaaS startups seeking predictable pipeline: They struggle to run high‑volume yet personalized outreach and to follow up reliably across email and LinkedIn.
• Lead‑gen/outbound agencies managing multiple clients: Personalization and campaign ops are labor‑intensive, limiting client capacity and throughput.
• Small inside‑sales teams at SMBs: Manual follow‑ups lead to missed leads; they need verified contacts, steady multi‑channel follow‑ups, and reliable meeting booking.
• Growth/RevOps operators: They spend hours on data entry and sequence tuning; need automation that syncs with CRM/workflows and provides clear reporting.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Leverage founder networks for hand‑rolled pilots with YC founders, early SaaS makers, and agencies; onboard 1:1 and convert pilots via referrals and direct outreach through LinkedIn/email (site, YC launch).
• First 50: Turn early pilots into 3–5 short case studies, run targeted LinkedIn ads and direct outreach to similar companies, and host demos/webinars; open a light self‑serve path and add a simple referral reward (site).
• First 100: Scale paid channels (LinkedIn + Google), use Roger to run its own demo/outbound trials, hire a small SDR/AE team, and add partnerships with outbound agencies and CRM/calendar integrations for partner referrals and marketplace distribution (YC page).

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Adjacent categories suggest a large market: sales engagement software is estimated around $9.6B in 2024 and growing (Fact.MR); lead‑generation services are pegged at ~$6.3B in 2024 (Global Market Statistics), and outsourced sales services were ~$4.0B in 2022 with growth expected (Activated Scale).

Bottom-up calculation:

If Roger initially targets 50,000 small B2B companies globally (SaaS, agencies, SMB inside‑sales) at an average $6k–$12k per year, the beachhead TAM is roughly $300M–$600M; expanding to 150,000 similar accounts would imply ~$0.9B–$1.8B.

Assumptions:

• There are ≥50k small B2B firms globally actively doing outbound across SaaS, agencies, and SMB inside‑sales (conservative share of firms using sales engagement/lead‑gen today).
• Average customer spend is $6k–$12k/year given volume‑based pricing and comparable outbound tools/services.
• Roger focuses on SMB/mid‑market segments where self‑serve + light services can scale.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Outreach: A leading sales engagement platform for multichannel sequences, tasking, analytics, and pipeline management; widely adopted by mid‑market and enterprise teams.
• Salesloft: Sales engagement software with cadences, conversation intelligence, and deal analytics used to run and measure outbound motions.
• Apollo: Prospect database plus outreach sequences and tracking; blends data enrichment with email/LinkedIn workflows for end‑to‑end outbound.
• lemlist: Cold email and LinkedIn automation with personalization, deliverability tooling, and campaign management for SMBs.
• SellScale: AI‑assisted outbound platform focused on personalized messaging and multichannel sequences to augment SDR productivity.