A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:22:49 · Damien Lewke, Pablo Srugo
You do have a responsibility to at least have an opinion about what it is that you need to do and the best way to drive that is constant customer discovery. So ninety and ninety, I've now spoken to hundreds. I try to speak to customers certainly every week, honestly, many times a week. Because the market is changing so fast and you constantly have to bring that feedback back into the company. [00:23:10] S2: I think out of all the things that founders need to do, customer discovery is probably the one that they do the worst job at consistently and gets skipped, and just done like. I remember I had a coach, I think it was a basketball coach and he'd be like, don't just run through the motions. Do the work, actually do it, right? Yeah, I got to pass, I got to shoot, whatever. That is how customer discovery gets done often and gets really bad results. Let's go through that in detail because this is one of the tactical areas that I really want to get a lot of detail about. So that founders listening could actually steal it. Talk to me about the process first of all. How do you get the first, you mentioned asking later on for more interviews, but the first ten, twenty, thirty meetings? What are you asking for? When you ask somebody for time, you got to be like, this is what I want out of it. What's the ask? Tell me as much as you can about just that piece of it.
00:23:10 · Pablo Srugo, Damien Lewke
[00:23:10] S2: I think out of all the things that founders need to do, customer discovery is probably the one that they do the worst job at consistently and gets skipped, and just done like. I remember I had a coach, I think it was a basketball coach and he'd be like, don't just run through the motions. Do the work, actually do it, right? Yeah, I got to pass, I got to shoot, whatever. That is how customer discovery gets done often and gets really bad results. Let's go through that in detail because this is one of the tactical areas that I really want to get a lot of detail about. So that founders listening could actually steal it. Talk to me about the process first of all. How do you get the first, you mentioned asking later on for more interviews, but the first ten, twenty, thirty meetings? What are you asking for? When you ask somebody for time, you got to be like, this is what I want out of it. What's the ask? Tell me as much as you can about just that piece of it. [00:23:59] S0: Yeah, so really I had the added benefit of having worked in security. I had a decent network. Shamelessly, I was still helping out with research at MIT. I'd done some grad school. I was helping out part time. So I still have an MIT email. So people responded more positively from an MIT email. [00:24:16] S2: Always, yeah. If you're a student then it's, yeah, a hundred percent. Especially an MIT or Harvard one.
00:24:16 · Pablo Srugo, Damien Lewke
[00:24:16] S2: Always, yeah. If you're a student then it's, yeah, a hundred percent. Especially an MIT or Harvard one. [00:24:20] S0: But the key is take a moment to think about your network. I promise you there are people in your target area that you or a friend of yours knows. But what was really important for me before I kicked this off was, honestly, I cased my LinkedIn and then I hit up some friends. And other people I worked with, and I cased their LinkedIns. I basically built out a spreadsheet of who I was going to target and then the ask was really simple. Hey, I'm Damien. I'm building a company in this space and just looking for some early feedback. The give get was, you get a chance to get your fingerprints all over the idea. We aren't even at a product yet. Would you be willing to give me fifteen to thirty minutes of your time? It seems scary to send an email off into the void, but people are so much more receptive than you might think to give you thirty minutes of their time as you have an idea. [00:25:15] S2: What kind of conversion rate? I'm curious, you probably don't have the stats. But more or less, if you email a hundred people this, do you get fifty? Do you get eighty? What do you think, more or less? [00:25:22] S0: You know, it's funny. You're like, you don't know the stats but I can give you. I think it was north of seventy percent. [00:25:27] S2: Wow, okay. Yeah, that's big.
00:25:27 · Pablo Srugo, Damien Lewke
[00:25:27] S2: Wow, okay. Yeah, that's big. [00:25:29] S0: Yeah, well, because people want to help. That's the key and I also asked friends of friends, right? So it was like, hey, I saw this person, you mind intro-ing us over email, here's the blurb, right? Make it super easy for your connections to do it and that really helped, right? The warm intros, from the warm intros to the discussion, to the follow on, it just gets that much easier. But if you've written more than fifty words in that email, it's too long, right? Keep it tight, keep it punchy, what's the give get? [00:25:56] S2: And then in the call itself, what was the structure? And did the structure change for your first twenty calls versus your last twenty? Or you just do the same thing ninety times over?
00:26:06 · Damien Lewke
[00:26:06] S0: Yeah, so I'm glad you asked that, Pablo and it's funny you mentioned basketball. Conversation for another time, but I played soccer pretty competitively. I actually played overseas for a few years and one of the core pieces I resonate with is doing the motions, not going through the motions. Because what happens is, in the beginning, those motions feel odd or uncomfortable and by the end. They're second nature and it's that second nature that allows you to hit that buzzer beater or nail that cross, right? Those are the ways that this works, is it's building the muscle memory. So, of course, the structure of the calls changed and honestly, for all you founders out there. It's an important muscle movement to learn because it will help you as you start to do founder led sales. You'll learn how to better actively listen. You'll learn to key in on keywords and pain points, and time your questions and responses. So, structure of the call started out with this. Before I met them, I sent a background on who I was. So they knew who I was and they knew the question I was asking. Came in and it was like, hey, tell me about what you do. Tell me about your top three priorities this year and how, and where have you thought about this particular problem, right? We were talking about the false negatives and threat hunting, and security operations problem statement, right? And then you just actively listened. And then the next layer down was, okay, and what investments have you made there? How much money have you spent? And how does that work across, tools and people? And then finally, it would be like, okay, based on everything that you've said. How would you stack rank this in terms of existing problems? And if something were to tackle this, what should that look like? So it was really nebulous. But really, it drilled down into understand what's top of mind, understand their priorities, understand their investments, and then understand their opinion about what you should do. That evolved because the idea started to take much more shape, right? I already had an architecture, the architecture was evolving, and it ended up drilling more into, I'd say, a bit more focus around like, okay, again, top priorities, blah, blah, blah. But then it really dug into, how do you validate that? What metrics do you prove? How do you demonstrate business value?
00:28:10 · Damien Lewke
And then, okay, I have some data on business value. Okay, how do you think about pricing and budgeting, right? Is this replacing? Is this augmenting? How valuable is that to you? The idea was end state for the ninety and niniety to get a market scape in terms of who your ICP was, which verticals you might plan. But also understand what does their environment look like? What does their team look like? What are their priorities in general? How much money do they have? How do they value your solution? And ninety data points, as that discussion evolves, really builds that comprehensive data set. Which allowed me to raise money and be like, this is what we're doing. This is how they value it. This is how it's going to work and at the same time, bring in a team to help build that out.