How Does Supabase Pay Its Sales Team?

Paul Copplestone says Supabase pays sales only for the growth a help call adds on top of growth the account would have shown anyway. About 60 percent of every Y Combinator batch uses Supabase, and the loyalty they want is the kind Stripe has kept with developers for more than a decade.

The team watches product triggers: an important logo, a customer scaling up, limits, errors, or spend past a line. In the working example, a thousand triggers a week become a thousand emails to people with problems, and about 500 people reply. Accounts that do not reply are the control group, and they grow 25 percent month over month. People who reply get a call whose only job is to help, with a script drawn from their traffic. After the call, the account grows 125 percent. The gap is a 100 percent uplift, and that extra growth is what salespeople are paid for. A normal quota would pay the whole result of a call meant to sell.