Podcast Feature| The Saas Podcast | Enterprise Sales: How Blings Landed McDonald’s as Their First Customer

This article was originally published on Saas Club

Yosef Peterseil is the co-founder and COO of Blings, a personalized video platform for enterprise brands.

In 2019, Yosef and his friend Yonatan saw a problem that wouldn’t go away. Yonatan had worked at a company trying to create personalized videos for customers, but there was no technical way to do it at scale. So they decided to build a solution—a new video format called MP5 that renders personalized videos in real-time on the user’s device.

But finding customers proved brutal. They interviewed dozens of customer success managers before realizing their target ICP had no budget. After pivoting to marketing where the money actually was, Yosef got lucky—someone sent him the McDonald’s CMO’s phone number.

A few persistent texts and follow-up calls later, he had a meeting. Before the call, they scrambled to put together a custom video for the brand. The CMO loved it.

But closing even the proof-of-concept took nearly nine months—all while they were bootstrapping with zero revenue and couldn’t afford a real lawyer.

Then came more setbacks. They tried events but had no system to follow up. 70 hard-earned leads went cold. They also hired salespeople twice, but even talented reps couldn’t close deals since there was no playbook.

But they kept at it. Blings now serves companies like McDonald’s, Mercedes, Meta, and Rocket Mortgage. They hit $1M ARR in 2023 and have been growing since then with a team of just 19 people.