What are the core problems Roster is solving and who are their customers?

Roster, at its core, is building the first operating system for modern Ops teams. 

Our mission is to unlock operational excellence across all companies, and our belief is that for any business to be successful going forward, Ops is a mission critical component of that. 

We're very early today—we raised our first round of financing in December led by Founders Fund and are prototyping with several pilot customers in a closed beta. As for how the idea came about, last year I interviewed 100+ operators and recalled my own Uber ops experience. There was this very consistent pain point around the emergence of a Cambrian explosion of different third-party SaaS tools. Companies are managing on average a hundred and fifty SaaS licenses, but they don’t really know how their teams are using them, and if they’re using them effectively to drive business outcomes. As teams have become increasingly remote, day-to-day workflows have become even more fragmented—in other words, this problem is not going away anytime soon. 

The problem boils down to lack of visibility — feeling like you’re flying blind. People can’t see what their teams are doing, what playbooks they’re following, if they’re working efficiently,, and as we get more granular into that, what’s tactically effective in their day-to-day workflow? 

Today, we're focusing on the Sales Ops use case. Every Sales Ops leader we spoke to said it's extremely difficult to add up what makes an effective salesperson. For our most consistently top-performing sales representative, what is her execution playbook? She's number one on the leaderboard week over week—what’s her secret sauce? Is she on the phone a bunch? Is she taking great notes? Is there certain prep work she's doing before a pipeline review or prospect call? Sales Ops bring clarity in the right numbers, repeatable strategies to execute on, and how to course correct when the company is off-track from goal. But you can’t answer the basic question of what inputs repeatedly drive outputs (like attainment, pipeline, ramp time) when you don't have visibility into team behaviors in the first place. Today, Sales Ops attempt to build this unified view from anecdotes and ad hoc analysis stitched together from different CSV exports. Oftentimes, this requires the help of data / analytics engineering resources. Or they have to become a SQL guru overnight. It’s super painful.