How a Customer Helped Design a $7M Software Business

Antoine Fort, co-founder and CEO of Qobra · Top Founders

Antoine Fort is co-founder and CEO of Qobra, a sales compensation platform based in France. Qobra automates commissions end to end, from data integrations to rep statements. Fort co-founded the company in 2020, almost straight out of school, without having held a full-time job. He is relocating to New York to lead Qobra's US expansion.

Summary

Fort built Qobra from a first customer who designed a commission framework over a weekend into a company with more than 250 customers and a little over $7 million in ARR. He launched at half of US competitors' prices, sold through his own outbound calls, and now spends on events, consumer-style ads and G2 reviews that show up in AI answers. Qobra raised modestly, avoided the high valuations of 2021 and added bank debt. Its new AI agents build comp plans from a PDF, which Fort expects to grow revenue by taking money now spent on services. These signals are from a Top Founders interview with Antoine Fort.

1. A Weekend Spec. Fort read an article on sales compensation by the CEO of a French company and reached out on LinkedIn. Over a weekend, that CEO and his CFO worked out a sales compensation framework, and on Monday they offered to be Qobra's first investors and first customer. A second customer asked for a demo after Fort announced the company on LinkedIn, when there was almost nothing to show. Qobra raised $100K from seven angels, and early sales came mostly from Fort's own outbound calls. ▶ 2:03
   
   Quote: “There was almost nothing to demo at that time, just a promise, but in the end we landed this customer very quickly.” (Antoine Fort, ▶ 2:59)