You’re not losing deals because your product sucks. You’re losing because you’re too slow, too manual and your buyer moved on.
In today’s episode, I sat down with Erdem Gelal, the CEO and co-founder of Flowla, a company quietly transforming how sales teams operate after the discovery call. From building sexy music startups to selling an unsexy B2B marketplace, Erdem's journey is anything but ordinary. Now, he's tackling one of the most frustrating bottlenecks in B2B sales: the post-call black hole.
We go deep into:
The silent killers of sales performance (and how Flowla automates them)
Why founder-led sales is still undefeated but dangerous to scale
What scalable distribution really looks like in the age of AI
The VC vs bootstrap debate: hard truths from someone raising right now
This one’s for the founders, operators, and revenue leaders ready to unlock speed and clarity in their sales motion.
Subscribe for more founder stories, startup truths, and strategies that cut through the noise
Chapters
00:00:00 – Meet Erdem Gedel: 3x founder, now tackling sales chaos
00:01:45 – From digital sales rooms to AI orchestration
00:03:20 – His first startup hit 500k users… then collapsed
00:05:00 – The unsexy marketplace that changed everything
00:07:10 – Why London? And how he moved fast
00:09:40 – Building Flowla: the true origin story
00:11:30 – Automating the post-discovery black hole
00:13:30 – The viral LinkedIn post that changed everything
00:16:00 – Winning in a noisy world: product vs attention
00:18:10 – Building distribution: content, virality, and trust
00:20:15 – Self-serve vs handholding: which scales faster?
00:23:00 – Why he's still doing manual outreach
00:25:15 – Their sweet spot: 50–500 employee companies
00:27:50 – Pain points: awareness, connection, culture
00:30:45 – Remote vs office: the hybrid evolution
00:32:00 – Raising vs bootstrapping: his honest take
00:36:15 – Fundraising as a skill and growth lever
00:38:25 – Why your first investors matter more than you think
00:41:20 – Going big in the US: how Flowla unlocked it
00:45:00 – SOC2, Salesforce, and scaling US trust
00:47:30 – The advisory board that changed the game
00:49:50 – Don’t have traction? Do this instead
00:52:00 – The 3 trust boxes you must tick
00:54:00 – Founders: Stop falling in love with the solution
00:57:00 – How to actually validate your idea
01:00:00 – What he’d tell his 13-year-old self
01:03:45 – A chilled, grounded end to a tactical masterclass
