Ten years of auditions. Three missed quotas. One spreadsheet that changed everything.
I'm David Wunderlich. I spent ten years as an actor in Los Angeles — auditioning, getting rejected, hustling, living with the constant uncertainty of “will this be the one?” It's a strange apprenticeship, but it teaches you things: reading people, telling a story, handling rejection without letting it wreck you, performing under pressure when it counts.
Then I transitioned to commercial pest control sales — B2B outside sales, driving a territory, knocking doors. I was 32, and I had no idea what I was doing. But I was hungry, and I had nothing to lose. It turned out the actor's toolkit made me good in the room. What it didn't make me was consistent.
The wall
My first three months were a disaster: missed by 22%, then 18%, then 31%. I was working 55–60 hours a week and failing — and the worst part was I couldn't figure out why. I was doing everything my manager told me to do. I had no data, no visibility, no idea where it was going wrong. Some months I crushed it and some months I missed, and nobody could tell me the difference between the two.
I tried CRMs. All of them. None of them were built for the way an outside rep actually works — a truck, a route, thirty doors a day, and about ninety seconds between stops to log anything.
The night it changed
One night I sat down and did something I'd never done: I logged everything. Every door. Every call. Every deal. In a spreadsheet. Over two years I logged more than 2,000 door knocks — and after just the first two weeks, the data showed me three problems I could suddenly see:
- My connection rate was 13% — I was knocking plenty of doors and reaching almost nobody who could say yes.
- I was sending proposals three days late, and about 40% of them died in that gap.
- I had no follow-up system at all. Deals just… evaporated.
So I fixed what the numbers pointed at — a better opening line, same-day proposals, a follow-up cadence — and nothing else. The next four months: 102%, 118%, 108%, 124%. President's Club. The breakthrough wasn't working harder. It was seeing where I was leaking, and fixing that.
Why Pipeway exists
Reps started asking for my spreadsheet. I kept giving it away (you can still get it — it's free). But manual tracking, honestly, is a chore — the discipline is the hard part, and a spreadsheet gives you nothing back on the days you need a push.
So I built Pipeway: the same system as an app. Log a door knock with a tap or a closed deal with your voice in seconds. Keep a streak alive the way a fitness app keeps you running. And every morning, an analytics engine reads your funnel and tells you the one thing that needs your attention today — grounded in your own numbers, never invented.
I'm not a Silicon Valley founder. I'm a working sales rep who still knocks doors, built by necessity into a toolmaker. Pipeway is the tool I wish someone had handed me on day one — and I'm building it in the field, with the reps who use it.
— David