The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:10:09 · Carles Reina
[00:10:09] S0: So the way we did it is like the PLG motion gave us a ton of like volume of leads, which 90 plus percent of those were extremely bad. But the interesting portion is you started seeing some patterns where people were finding interest and where you essentially were having meaningful conversation. So that for me was instrumental to understand later on in building name account lists and going after specific accounts from an outbound basis because I was seeing some level of traction. And investors were telling us, God, you have product market fit because you're doing all of these millions. And I was telling them, No, no, no. We don't have it. I don't believe in product market fit until in one single ICP you've made more than $10,000,000 right? So you keep experimenting and you build list. And then one week you tackle a specific persona. And another week you tackle a completely different vertical to actually understand what moves quicker, is what the pitch that actually resonates better, and so on. That's how we essentially started doing it. And I remember the first two deals that we did within thirty days of launching the first product. It was a company that was doing a chatbot based in Germany. They paid us $12,000 and we thought, is super good. We could start doing things. Second company was a media company that was doing automated radio stations that we signed a two year deal, dollars 36,000 per year. Those two companies, we still have them as customers. They've skyrocketed in value, both of them. But, like, that was only the beginning. It's like, okay, we can start doing it. We know how to actually generate this motion. Now we need to go
00:11:38 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:11:38] S1: much deeper. How do you advise founders then in the early days when they're in this kind of... Again, we have so many founders that listen to of pens and paper. When they're looking at it and going, do I go horizontal? And let everyone try it and really kind of let the market decide. Or do we go very vertically focused and go, okay, chatbots, we've got one customer. Let's just put all the sales team on all the chatbot partners. How do you advise founders on which one's the right one? [00:12:01] S0: Depends on the product that you're building, right? If you're building something in the healthcare space, it's an absolute no brainer, need to actually go to healthcare. But you can still take a very broad approach within the healthcare space, right? So you can actually target hospitals, can target like clinics, you can target bigger ones and smaller ones, you can target like practitioners. You can target across the entire spectrum of your vertical. Target as many people as possible because truly, you might have a guess or you might have an intuition of what's going to be performing, but the best companies in reality started in one end, ended up winning really good traction in a completely different end that they were not expecting, right? So if you can target as many people as possible, you will understand what resonates, what doesn't resonate, how quickly they're moving, and essentially then you can fine tune your pitch and your name account list in that area.
00:12:01 · Carles Reina, Harry Stebbings
[00:12:01] S0: Depends on the product that you're building, right? If you're building something in the healthcare space, it's an absolute no brainer, need to actually go to healthcare. But you can still take a very broad approach within the healthcare space, right? So you can actually target hospitals, can target like clinics, you can target bigger ones and smaller ones, you can target like practitioners. You can target across the entire spectrum of your vertical. Target as many people as possible because truly, you might have a guess or you might have an intuition of what's going to be performing, but the best companies in reality started in one end, ended up winning really good traction in a completely different end that they were not expecting, right? So if you can target as many people as possible, you will understand what resonates, what doesn't resonate, how quickly they're moving, and essentially then you can fine tune your pitch and your name account list in that area. [00:12:45] S1: If we go back to the outbound element on the leads that we have, what did we look for that suggested a great lead that was a qualified lead that we would go after? Was it the fact that they had an email extension that was exantia dot com or whatever that was, and it was a company name? Was it usage patterns? What was it?
00:13:03 · Carles Reina
[00:13:03] S0: Nothing at all. It was like so random, like I had absolutely no idea. Like in the early days, we were signing like enterprise contract with Gmail accounts. So we remember like, this is like early days of ChatGPT. People were building applications left and right and thinking like, I might need to add some voice here or there, even if it's for dabbing or for voicing some of the narrations and all that stuff. The reality is there will be all of these developers, like single developer shops using a Gmail account saying, Well, I want to add boys, but your self-service plans are not enough because they have some limitations on caps, and essentially I would need all of these additional things. I was like, Okay, fantastic. Then enterprise is the right path. We'll customize it for you. Blah, blah. And what I used to do is it got to a point where I was doing thirty minutes calls, I would do maybe 50, 60 calls in a single week back to back. And I would tell them, within thirty minutes, I knew if they were qualified or not. I knew they were interested, if they could move quickly. So what I would do is I would set up a trial by the end of the day. I would commit on the call on the spot being, By the end of the day, you will have heard from me. I will set up your trial. You will have access to the contract so that you can start reviewing it. And if you need anything, just ping me at any time, and this is my WhatsApp. What you end up creating is this dynamic that you would end up building a very close relationship with those companies. They will message you on WhatsApp, and even up to date, if one of those very early ones have an issue, they message me on WhatsApp, and essentially we try to fix it. Right? But that is the type of relationship you're going to be building with your first customers because essentially they will be there for you forever. They're not going to switch away because we have such a good personal relation it's an absolute no brainer. Just if we go through that, questions to ask, which really clearly showed that they were a great high quality lead. In those thirty minutes, if you were to advise me, I'm
00:14:52 · Harry Stebbings
[00:14:52] S1: a technical fan, imagine I'm Matty. Dude, how do I know if they're a good lead? What questions do I ask?
00:14:57 · Carles Reina
[00:14:57] S0: For me, it's like slightly different from what the traditional sales methods are, right? But I wanna know, like, what are you building and what is your vision for your company? How are you thinking about, like, the entire market that you operate? Essentially, who are you? Are you technical? Are you not technical? What are you gonna be doing with the product in general? Do you need to involve a lot of other people or not, right? For me, those are the core questions in the early days, specifically on developer economy, or if you're targeting developers, that tell me if you are ready to actually buy this, you're only playing a little bit to understand whether it makes sense or not, or how hot things are gonna be playing. Because if you think about it, different markets have different type of profiles, right? It's like in The U. You need to be very direct, and it's a lot more aggressive sales in nature. In Europe, we're always in the middle, right? But if you go to LatAm or if you go to India, people don't have an incentive to actually tell you no. So you end up getting stuck. You don't qualify well, you end up getting stuck in endless loops of trials, chaser emails, and so on of people that, for a cultural perspective, they're not going to tell you no, but they're not going to buy. Every single market has a lot of variations, and because I've actually built all of them across the world for ElevenLabs, I know all of the details for all of those pieces, right? So if you tell me, like, Okay, I'm building a company in Mexico City, then I can tell you, like, These are the core items that I would like to understand from a qualification perspective in the first few minutes.