SaleSqueze’s CEO Leon Panjtar on Building The Next Generation of CPQ Solutions

We’re back with another interview with a founder I’ve invested in. Today, we’re talking to Leon Panjtar, CEO and Co-Founder of SaleSqueze. His startup, which recently secured $1.5M in funding, is focused on revolutionizing the CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) market with its focus on product visualization and customer self-service. Originally a spin-off of Kalmia, SaleSqueze has now become a big player in its own right. Read on to find out how self-confessed project guy, Leon has navigated a career as a handball player and coach, a robotics engineer, an employee at Kalmia, and now CEO.

Top 3 achievements:

Successfully built a great product and assembled a strong team that he believes is capable of realizing their vision.

Achieved business independence and established a successful enterprise.

He looks forward to coming to work with enthusiasm and passion every day.

SaleSqueze’s CEO Leon Panjtar is a former handball player turned founder committed to revolutionizing product visualization.

Robin: Hi Leon, so can we start with you telling us about yourself?

Leon Panjtar: So, professionally, I'm a robotics engineer but I never got to work in this field. I made a career as a software developer working on more than 130 development projects. I built a pretty successful career working for other people and eight years ago I decided to start something of my own. I co-founded a custom development company and grew that to 60 people and the idea was to build a team of great people, start solving real-life challenges, and eventually come up with an idea that would be worth turning into a product. And by then we would have enough cash flow and enough smart people inside the company to pursue that product idea.

I'm more of a product guy, not so much a project guy, and products were always what I wanted to do in life.

That plan worked well and four and a half years ago we stumbled upon three projects that looked kind of similar. All of them were for manufacturing companies that were struggling with sales. These companies were globally present but they were having problems with their sales processes, mainly due to the complexity of the products they were selling. So, we started building out custom-made software for them. After the third project, my then-employee, Tilen, and I sat down and said, okay, there are many similarities in this approach and this could potentially be turned into a very nice product. And yeah, the rest is history.

Tilen then became my co-founder, and we created a spin-off from Kalmia and started building SaleSqueze. And here we are today.

Outside of work, who are you?

Outside of work, I'm all over the place. I'm the father of two young ladies now, they’re 13 and 12. I'm also an ex-handball player. I was a pretty successful handball coach for youth teams for 10 years. Both my daughters are now playing handball, so I’ve restarted my coaching career, I joined the women's club and I'm coaching a youth team as an extracurricular activity. I’m also very passionate about barbecue and coffee but I have so many interests and so little time.

Can you talk a bit about that intersection between being a sports player and coach but also working in business and how those things work together?

I started playing handball when I was six years old. My life revolves around a group of people that was moving together through this experience. Most of my friends, my work ethic, discipline, etc. I can attribute everything to this sport. I was also a pretty successful coach for 10 years, which taught me a lot about building a team from scratch. I took kids who had never played the sport before, organized them into a group, and showed them how to complete a lot of tasks. They have to compete throughout the entire season and be consistent to get the result that they want. This impacted how I think about leadership and how I build my existing teams.

How has it influenced your current team at SaleSqueze?

Our default mode at SaleSqueze is to hire young talent. The majority of our employees – 95% – are in their first job and have come straight out of university. We have a good mentorship program and we’re able to create very creative and loyal people. And they know the process inside and out. They are team players and they help us push this boat forward.

Can you tell us about your career up until you started SaleSqueze?

I had two jobs before I started SaleSqueze. I spent five years in both of them. For one of my first jobs, I was given a scholarship throughout university. It was a very good company, very well organized all the processes and around 65 people. There were good salaries, a high standard of work, a lot of benefits, and a clear structure of what you needed to do to move up the ranks of the company.

That was a great opportunity because, after four years of working there, I was gradually promoted from a developer at first, to a lead in the development team to then head of development. Eventually, I was managing the development department throughout the entire company and I was also a partial board member so I got to see firsthand how a well-established company functions. And we were very profitable. Plus the culture was very nice. We still have alumni meetings every year. I left the company like 12 years ago but we still get together every year to go bowling or to drink a beer.

My other job was the total opposite. It was chaotic and had zero organization. Everybody was pulling in their direction. But they allowed me to build one of my first products, which is still on the market and is pretty successful. So that's why I stayed there.

From that job, were you inspired to create the product that you have now with SaleSqueze?

So, I was working for that company but I was also freelancing in the evenings and afternoons. At that time, my wife and I decided to build a house so I was working every minute I could to earn money so we could pull that off.

And then, in the last month before we were about to move in, I said “I have had enough of working for other people.” I just took a huge loan for the house and said, “Honey, I’m sorry, but I have to do this.”

I quit my job. I co-founded my first company and the two of us started working. After a year, we were almost at a million in revenue and with ten employees so it took off quickly, and yeah from that moment on SaleSqueze started to evolve in my head.

Tell us about SaleSqueze and your visual CPQ – how does it work?

The best analogy for CPQ that I can give you is in automotive manufacturing – every automotive manufacturer has a visual self-service experience on their website. People can come, they can click around, they can build the car of their dreams, then they can see the price, they can go back and change something to fit their budget, and it’s a self-explanatory tool that everybody instantly knows how to use and it’s a huge sales system.

First of all, it eliminates all the explaining that’s needed because the car is a very complex product, and it also streamlines all the processes for the company. The biggest issue when you sell something as complex as a car is to get the requirements from the customer.

And the automotive industry has nailed this and streamlined the process. On top of this came Tesla and they said “Okay we are ditching all the traditional methods and we are just gonna add a payment to this configuration experience and we have a sales funnel.” Immediately after that happened, and there were no limitations in terms of online payments, people started buying $100,000 products digitally.

At that exact moment, I realized that what we were doing had huge potential because nobody seemed to be doing anything. Everything that existed already was mostly custom-made or very expensive or hard to implement because of the complexity of the product. So we said, “Okay, we want to bring this technology to as many companies as possible, so our vision is to democratize this topic.” This means that anyone selling complex products and has complexity in their sales process, should be able to implement this technology fairly easily.

That’s the visual configuration part. But when it comes to the entire CPQ, CPQ stands for Configure Price Quote. You need to be able to configure correctly, then do a price calculation automatically, and then present a quotation to the customer. This is the standard process for selling products of great complexity and we have automated this process. And it is entirely automated out of the box – all the company has to do is build out this configuration logic.

So you said, you’re working with your former employee turned co-founder – what do you both bring to this product and this company?

As I said, I’ve worked on more than 130 development projects of all shapes and sizes. But this one is by far the most complex I’ve ever worked on. The production line and the limitations of engineering are quite strict. It’s not like you can push things around, this is how it was engineered, and that’s how it has to be.

Understanding this is one of the first challenges. So, you need to understand how production lines operate and how manufacturing companies operate. The second thing is that you need to be able to create a solution that can easily adapt to many different manufacturing environments.

Every company is different, so creating this universal approach to describing a product, was one of the main challenges. I have the gift of visualization, so I can very easily imagine things in my head. Also, since I’m a robotics engineer and studied industrial automation, I have a pretty good insight into how manufacturing operates. But Tilen is a genius when it comes to writing computer code and building systems that can be operated universally. There’s a synergy between us. He understands what I’m thinking and he understands where I’m going and he knows how to build that. It’s a good match.

How many employees do you have now?

We have 16. The company was founded in November 2021, and it started as a spin-off for which we presented to get our first angel round of investment. But the product, or the concept was alive for a year and a half before that.

We came up with the idea when I was still working with Kalmia. At first, it was just the two of us, myself and my co-founder – and eventually, we started adding more and more people because companies liked our solution.

We closed the first ten customers really fast – that’s how it all started. We built a team of six people. And then when we created the spin-off, we took everybody with us, transferred the IP, and created the standalone company, a standalone brand, which is now starting to grow.

How has your company evolved?

Due to the complexity of the topic, we started as a service company. We built systems to see what worked, how it worked, and how to build it in a universal way, and we had very little outside funding, so we charged for a lot of services.

But with every release on the platform, we understood which way we needed to go. We started decreasing the services and increasing the subscription revenues because a lot of the activities inside the platform were built in such a way that our customers could take over. We became more of a product-based company.

Up until last year, we were mostly only active in our local market in Slovenia. Some of our customers were also doing business throughout Europe, but the majority of customers were from Slovenia.

And then, last year, in the second quarter, we had a huge stop or a huge blockage in our sales process. We were struggling, so we said, “OK, now it’s the time to start going international.” We realized that if we wanted to do that, we had to build a product that had a self-service component because we could not serve a lot of customers throughout the world by offering services. So we standardized it built the onboarding process and wrote a curriculum to train the customers to use our product by themselves. And it took off. So, since September last year, we closed, two customers in Slovenia, but the rest are throughout Europe. We are currently growing like six, seven percent month after month, which is great.

You mentioned that you’re working with a lot of manufacturing companies but what kind of customers do you have?

We have customers in eight different segments now. In agricultural technology, construction technology, medical device manufacturing, industrial components, and industrial equipment. One very fast-growing vertical for us is home and garden, so Pergolas, carports, tiny houses, and pools. We also have automotive customers, especially in the RV and camper sectors and we have our first customers in casino equipment we have customers that are producing commercial equipment like refrigerators and specialist equipment that is highly configurable but standardized – that’s our specialty.

What are your goals in terms of using AI and automation for the future?

We’ve already created an automated product. But when it comes to using AI in an Industrial environment it’s more tricky. Generative AI brings a lot to the table but also presents a huge possibility for errors. In the production environment, you really can’t afford to have any errors.

For our customers, there are two problematic topics. The first one is that product visualizations are hard to create. One of their biggest struggles is that when customers buy a complex product they need to see what they’re buying. Otherwise, they’re not sure and it’s hard to convince them. This means that our customers spend a lot of time trying to provide visualizations of their products. We are currently experimenting with AI tools that allow us to create a product visualization without requiring much input from our customers. This is the first area where we plan to utilize AI in the near future.

The second one is whenever you have a product like a car port, a shed, or a tiny house, which looks nice, the demand is huge, but the price tag is also high. Whenever you have that scenario, you see a lot of people window-shopping on websites. Our customers see a huge increase in demand when they put the configurator out, but a lot of that demand is people wanting to have this product but not being able to afford it.

So, the second area where we are utilizing AI to help us is to qualify customers. Of the €2-3 million that the company makes in revenue they need to create around €40-50 million in quotations. That’s how much drop-off you see on the leads. Being able to qualify and prioritize customers that are ready to buy, is a huge topic for our clients. And, based on our research, there is currently no solution that allows them to do that. We have all the data, we have the know-how and we can use the historical data of what the end customer has bought before to make this happen.

It’s quite innovative. A lot of the companies we work with are smaller startups and they spend hours qualifying customers. So if you can find a way to make that process more efficient then that's a win a big win.

Where do you see SaleSqueze five years from now? What are your goals with this funding?

Well first of all, with this funding we plan to dominate Europe. We want to be the go-to solution in Europe for the SMB sector. We also want to prepare ourselves for the next growth round when we want to help companies bring their manufacturing back to their home countries. This is a huge trend worldwide. The second thing is the fact that Tesla, SpaceX, and others have created a whole new generation of engineers that think high-tech.

The high-tech revolution is going to happen again only this time with hardware companies and we will be prepared for that. We want to lead this revolution.

That’s one of our visions and we can do that by making the software easy to use, available to anyone, and helping our customers to generate very good sales results with it. Our goal for the next five years is to have 10,000 customers on board.

Thank you for your time, Leon.

Thank you, Robin.