A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:45:26 · Jonathan Awad, Pablo Srugo
[00:45:26] S0: of the top of funnel method is there's so much power in your network. There's so much power there that you can have so many assets to play with and to use and to be valuable. And at the end of the day, buyers don't typically, and I'm going to throw up a random stat, like this is a fake stat, but it's directionally correct. 80% of the time, 90% of the time, they're not going to get paid to buy your thing. If they buy your thing, they don't make more money. You don't always get promoted. And very frequently, such as a fairly safe startup, they can get fired. So they're taking this huge risk on you, this huge bet on you. And maybe you move an OKR for them. And maybe that's tied to their comp. And maybe it's valuable. But likely, this is what happens. They try your thing. They have to convince a ton of people. They're nervous half the time. And if anything goes wrong, immediately they're like, who did this? If anything goes catastrophically wrong, they could get fired. Especially if it's more than like a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, whatever. Ten figure, you know, five figure thing, six figure thing. Like, yeah, [00:46:22] S1: think about it. Hey, we spent 50k on this. We spent like four months implementing it. It's completely useless. Like, wait, what? Get out of here.
00:46:22 · Pablo Srugo, Jonathan Awad
[00:46:22] S1: think about it. Hey, we spent 50k on this. We spent like four months implementing it. It's completely useless. Like, wait, what? Get out of here. [00:46:29] S0: Pablo, did you just make us this? Why did you just make us this? What's wrong with you? So that type of thing. How do you overcome that? You connect. You get them to actually trust you. People in the beginning are buying the founder. They're buying you. So if you're just only talking about your product, or you only spend time talking about their product, [00:46:44] S1: they're like,
00:46:45 · Jonathan Awad
[00:46:45] S0: well, I don't know you that well. I don't trust you. You're going to be there for me. You're going to respond in two minutes. And I'm going to duck and dive and cover. I don't know you. So all I ever did when I really kind of realized this reciprocity in humans was I was like, well, if I become as close as possible to as many buyers as possible, and I'm valuable to them, and I give them something outside of just our product, they'll give us a chance. And then you kind of look around here. What do I have? What can I give you? And I think humans are all the same. It's money powerful. That's kind of it. You can't just hand people money, but you can give things that are super valuable. Your network is super valuable. Your connections are super powerful. And so I saw this thing where I was like, well, a lot of people really love talking to me. And it was a little different when I was an AE, you know, a salesperson versus founder. They seem like they just like there's something fun about talking to a founder, something fun about, you know, going to these events and meeting VCs and, you know, feeling like, ooh, maybe I could be a founder too. Like maybe I could see myself in Jonathan C. And I kind of hit. That's why the great thing about doing the approach of just meeting as many people as possible is you could do events, bring a lot of people together, and then you could bring the VC. Bring the partner at Goldman who isn't a buyer for you necessarily, but it's just like a cool person to know. You could bring the person who's an exec at like LVMH. I know a lot of people in fashion and modeling randomly, right? Like you could bring all these cool people together. And that's really interesting. But a hack I did, and I haven't done it recently in like all like the last six months because I think you're going to scale past it. So I don't mind sharing this. Easy, like one of the easiest methods I found is just getting really deep with someone very quickly. And just saying like, hey, have you ever thought about being a founder? You have any ideas? And these are the buyers, like the person who could sign and the person who influences, et cetera. And so many of them were like, actually, yeah, I totally have. I have the dream. I have the vision. Like there's always been this little itch I always wanted to scratch.
00:48:38 · Jonathan Awad, Pablo Srugo
And really easily, I was like, well, we have a lot of VCs. I have a lot of friend VCs. Do you want to meet any? And I'm telling you, whenever they say yes, it's 100% of the time we work together. It's never failed. Not one time. I've done it, call it like 40 times or something. Wow. Like 40 times. And you give like one VC intro or like a bunch? [00:48:55] S1: Like what's the approach usually? [00:48:57] S0: It depends. It basically is like, I hit up, call it 20 VCs and 10 of them are investors in Baselayer. And I'm like, hey, here's this person. Here's their profile. Here's their, you know, vague interest of an idea. We'd love for you guys to meet them. Just hear it out. Like, see what's going on. You know, make the connection, see what happens. And, you know, I ended up scouting for a couple funds as a result of this method. Funny enough, there's actually kind of a poofer. And I've invested in a bunch of them. Funny enough, and there's a bunch of angel investments on my LinkedIn. So you can see that. But a bunch are always like, wait, yeah, cool. Because these buyers are like senior people. [00:49:31] S1: Yeah, they're legit.
00:49:31 · Pablo Srugo, Jonathan Awad
[00:49:31] S1: Yeah, they're legit. [00:49:33] S0: These are legit people. And it's so interesting. It's such a simple hack. Founders have Nisees and really cool other founder friends and, you know, things like that, that buyers totally would love to meet and be interested in exploring. And like, they'd be super valuable to them. I mean, I've done a lot of things. I've done like crazy events. Like, I'll bring a ton of people to my events. And I've definitely introduced some people to their spouses. Like, straight up. Like, hey, girlfriend, boyfriend,
00:49:59 · Pablo Srugo
[00:49:59] S1: here you go. Like, you know what's funny about the VC thing? I don't know if you watched Always Sunny. You ever watched that? Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Remember the, the implications, right? It's like, you make the intro and you're in the middle of that until that person gets funded, which they're not getting funded anytime soon because they're an exec somewhere. They're not like quitting tomorrow. And so it's not just that you did a favor for them, which on its own is already valued. There's no quit pro quo. Like, you're just doing it to do it. Then later on, so they're like, oh, John, I like Johnny. You know, he introduced me to like three VCs. Awesome. The other thing is like, man, and whether they think this explicitly or not, it's like, if John doesn't think highly of me, like, I need John to think highly of me, you know, because he's the reason I met these five VCs. So if ever I want to like get money from these five VCs, like, you know, they might ask John, like, hey, what do you think about this person? He's the one that made the intro. And if I'm like, oh, if John's like, yeah, this person, you know, they told me they could buy and like, actually they had no power and they couldn't do anything and like ultimately didn't buy, waste my time. Not great. Right. I'd rather impress John and keep him on my, you know what I mean? So like, that's, that's also playing into this psychologically, I think. A little bit too.