Flockjay cut half its staff and pivoted its sales bootcamp into B2B SaaS tool Elevate

B2B SaaS platform for sales teams; previously a 10-week tech-sales training bootcamp with job placement

$11M Series A raised in January 2021, per Crunchbase data cited by TechCrunch

Flockjay graduated from Y Combinator in 2019 as an on-ramp into tech careers: a 10-week sales training bootcamp that placed graduates into sales jobs. At one point roughly 40% of students lacked a four-year degree, half identified as female or nonbinary, and half identified as Black or Hispanic.

The company was running an admissions business, a training business, a coaching and placement business, and an alumni community at once, and was not growing at the speed Hathiramani wanted. He cut 30 to 45 jobs — about half the staff — then won board approval for what he called one of his more unconventional conversations with them: a pivot to Flockjay Elevate, a B2B tool with a live feed of wins and losses, a best-practices library and an analytics layer.

The bootcamp model gave way to Elevate, announced in April 2022 with no revenue or adoption figures disclosed for the new product.

The bootcamp set graduates up for initial success, but they were not thriving once placed inside distributed sales organizations

Running admissions, training, coaching, placement and community at once caused burnout on a sub-100-person team

Sales roles deal with high attrition, so tools that help people stay in the job serve a recurring need

A crowded but funded market — Atrium, Databook, Apollo.io — showed buyers pay for sales enablement

'Don't fall in love with the solution, fall in love with the problem': the mission of keeping people in tech sales survived the bootcamp product dying.

As of April 2022 Flockjay was building Elevate as a spot where sales development leaders, managers and reps congregate internal communications. Hathiramani said the differentiator was a pivot born from a tough reality check, and claimed customers told him even Salesforce and Microsoft lacked truly collaborative sales tools.