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Hey y’all! Happy first month of the fiscal year (to all those who celebrate).
On my continued mission to discover the future go-to-market playbook, I find a lot of alpha by spending time with the smartest founders, who are building the infrastructure that runs the best company’s gtm playbooks. And, there is a wave of founders who are building a new gtm stack from the ground-up. Nico is one of these founders. And he’s building his company, Default, in a very thoughtful way.
That’s why, I was stoked to spend some time with Nico and dive deep(er) into the world they’re building, in this Sponsored Deep Dive Post, on Default.
Here’s what we cover in today’s post:
Inbound data ingestion as a strategic wedge
Building systems to meet buyers’ new behaviors
“Rippling for sales” (a compound startup)
Why the data warehouse has not delivered
The non-obvious roadmap ahead
Let’s get into it.
Building an Inbound Growth Machine
The first time I talked with Nico was at the Blue Bottle coffee shop in South Park (SF) - and his excitement about the gtm space was infectious. He was able to nerd out on gtm at a level that’s very rare. About teams, tooling, and philosophies. Another coffee jam session was here in Austin and two people sitting next to us overheard us and were VCs and asked to meet with Nico to hear more about how he was thinking about thinking about building in the space.
Fast-forward a few years, and Nico has moved to NYC and has an office with a bunch of cracked engineers, a hungry team of gtm folks who are at the bleeding edge, and—to use Nico’s words—“enough Lucy and Celsius to topple a sub-Saharan warlord.” This team is building their company in a way that I wouldn’t want to compete with.
But his vision started in a classic San Francisco hacker house three years ago, where Nico and his co-founder, Victor, sketched out an ambitious vision on a whiteboard: What would the next generation sales and marketing cloud look like if you were building it from scratch today? That whiteboard session turned into Default, a company that's taking a different approach to modernizing the sales tech stack.
While many startups chase point solutions in sales engagement, call recording, or forecasting, Default is playing a longer, more strategic game. Their thesis? The next major sales platform won't emerge from building yet another sales tool, but rather from controlling a critical point of data ingestion and gradually expanding from there.
Inbound data ingestion as a strategic wedge
Default chose to focus initially on inbound lead management – the crucial handoff point between marketing spend and sales execution. This wasn't a random choice.
I caught up with Nico recently and he told me:
"We knew we needed to build around a point of ingestion... this is a really good place to start building what could become the next sales & marketing hybrid, prospecting cloud."
BaCk WhEn I wAs An SdR… “time-to-lead” was one of the most important metrics. And what this meant was - prospect puts their email address on the “Request Demo” page on the website. Emails notification gets sent to the SDR. SDR drafts+sends an email to the prospect as soon as they see the inbound demo request - asking them to schedule time for a demo. Then some back and forth on scheduling. The chase culminates with a “Demo calendar invite” sent from the SDR to the prospect.
This would take days or even weeks. But now, it’s entirely solved with technology, like Default.
New way: prospect goes to a website and instead of hitting “Request Demo” they are shown a calendar (of the rep who is responsible for their account*) and can schedule right there on the spot. Time-to-lead no longer needs to be measured (it’s zero—every time). More efficiency is a better experience for the prospect and the rep.
*There is a lot that happens behind the scenes to pull this off: enrichment, queries into the CRM, branching logic, routing, etc.
This is a basic example of a workflow that can be automated when you have robust lead-routing infrastructure. From here, you can start layering in other more complex workflows that optimize your inbound machine, plus ensure there are no leaks throughout it.
Building systems to meet buyers’ new behaviors
The buying process is much more complex today. It is no longer a simple funnel with, say, three ways a prospect can get into that funnel. Instead, there are dozens or even hundreds of ways a prospect can get into the sales funnel. And, every prospect comes into the funnel at different stages of awareness around the problem and product offering - and it’s critical to meet each prospect in a nuanced, personalized way. The systems of yesterday don’t match the new needs of these buying behaviors.
What makes Default's approach particularly interesting is its fundamental reimagining of how sales data should be structured. Rather than viewing prospects as static objects, they see them as entities that move through different states. "We thought about the prospect object as a state. Less as a static object or static thing," as Nico put it to me.
This seemingly subtle shift in data modeling has profound implications for how sales workflows can be automated and optimized. This architecture enables marketers to ship things—like a form—without requiring an engineer. It allows for more dynamic, state-based automations that better reflect the reality of modern sales processes.
“Rippling for sales” (a compound startup)
While Default enters through inbound lead management, their ambitions extend far beyond. They're building what Nico calls "point solution alternatives native to Default" – everything from scheduling and routing to forms and enrichment. But unlike many companies that struggle with multi-product expansion, Default is architecting their platform from day one to support this breadth. In other words, they’re aiming to build a classic “Compound Startup.”
They're focused on winning the cross-sell battle in the SMB market rather than chasing enterprise deals. "Being multi-product in mid-market enterprise is actually much worse than foregoing that opportunity cost on lower ACVs in SMB," Nico told me.
Personally, I’ve thought a lot about this all-in-one strategy. It requires time and discipline. And lots of capital. Basically, you have to go the hardcore VC route to build a true compound startup and win.
Default’s strategy mirrors Rippling's evolution in the HR space. Just as Rippling started with employee onboarding forms before expanding into a comprehensive HR platform, Default is using inbound lead automation as its wedge into the broader sales technology ecosystem.
Why the data warehouse has not delivered
While some predict that data warehouses like Snowflake might eventually replace traditional CRMs, Nico is skeptical of an immediate disruption. "Snowflake has just done such a bad job of helping people build on top of their data warehouse," Nico told me. The challenge isn't just technical – it's about the millions of users who are deeply familiar with building business logic in tools like Salesforce and HubSpot.
I strongly believe that building “data warehouse native” is going to continue to be a strategic advantage for companies building gtm tech. Default is leaning in here, which allows customers to use anything from their data warehouse (such as customer events) to kick off a Default workflow.
The non-obvious roadmap ahead
Everyone is trying to figure out what “Salesforce 2.0” will look like. Default is building from a unique place that may finally create a novel system of record that unlocks workflows that aren’t currently possible with Salesforce’s current table of companies and contacts. Everything is changing so fast—buyer’s behavior, way more data available, more appetite for automation… I’m excited to see tooling that is building for this new world.
I’m stoked to see how Default’s strategy unfolds, as they build at the critical point of data ingestion. And I’m lucky to learn from Nico and see the team at Default grow and evolve (adding legends like Stan to the team).
If your company has high inbound volume, I recommend chatting with Nico and the team at Default.
Thank you for your trust, I do not take it for granted.
Until next time,
Brendan 🫡
PS - Want me to write a Deep Dive Post about your company? Shoot me a note on LinkedIn (must have $1M+ ARR) and I will share more info with you.