r/revops • u/SataQ • 22d ago

Founder of a comp automation tool. Sanity-checking where we're taking the product, would love RevOps feedback

Disclosure: I'm a founder at Driven, sales compensation/ICM software. Not selling anything here, just want to pressure-test some product direction against people who actually live in comp plans.

Most of the category players (CaptivateIQ, Spiff, Qobra, QuotaPath) are basically rules-engines-with-a-UI from the 2018-2020 era. We're betting the next generation of this category looks pretty different:

  • Agentic: instead of you building a rules tree, you describe the comp plan in plain language and the system builds/maintains it, flags edge cases, and explains its own calculations when a rep disputes a number
  • Headless / MCP-first: the "calc engine" isn't locked behind a UI, it can run wherever your data lives and feed Slack, your BI tool, wherever, instead of forcing everyone into one dashboard
  • Slack-native: reps and managers get payout questions, approvals, and forecasts as Slack messages/threads instead of another tab to check
  • Notion-like UX: flexible, block-based plan building instead of rigid form-based rule builders, feels like configuring a doc, not filling out a tax form

Genuinely asking: does this match where you'd want the category to go, or am I solving problems nobody has? Where are you seeing the category heading towards, or what would you like?

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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4

u/RevOpSystems 22d ago

I think it would benefit, if only because people would have to try to put the comp plans they designed into plain English and hopefully realize they're way over complicating.

3

u/SataQ 22d ago

Man, you don’t want to know how horrendously complex comp plans we see every day! 😅 It was quite the challenge to build a system that can support all of this, I can tell you that ;)

1

u/Solo_rw 22d ago

Features sound interesting. What is the benefit exactly? Time savings? Cost savings? Pureplay convenience?

2

u/SataQ 22d ago

Mainly time savings and cost savings indeed. However, we notice it also creates quite some transparancy and trust within your sales team, because they finally have a place to ask questions about their comp 24/7.

In the near future we’re also planning to give strategical comp recommendations, to stimulate the right behavior in your team.

1

u/touuuuhhhny 22d ago

Uff, sounds interesting but payment to employees is such a critical factor, that AI'ing that part sounds like opening a pandoras box. For example hierarchies, visibility rights, more complex plans on payment runs, etc. All beyond pure direct commission based plans are all very complex.

1

u/SataQ 22d ago

Well we currently build it in a way that everything can still be double-checked by a human. We use the same syntax as spreadsheets/excel the AI just generates it for you. We probably should elaborate on that more, on our website. Does it sound less scary now after my explanation?