A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:20:22 · Shmulik Fishman, Pablo Srugo
[00:20:22] S0: Yeah, gig income verification, those are great keywords. They still work today. If you type that in, Argyle comes up. [00:20:31] S1: How did you turn that one customer into a dozen customers? All inbound or did you start going outbound as well? [00:20:36] S0: Yeah. We built out a very small sales team. I also think that, the first 100 clients that we got, I was heavily involved in that. I really do encourage founders stay involved in sales and customer success for longer than it feels comfortable. I still do a lot of it today because I think that hearing from the customer about their pain points, why they're buying your service, what about your service doesn't work, you need that to keep building, and so a lot of the early sales were me. We kept on iterating on the SEO strategy. We found lookalike clients. It just also happens to be that, in this industry, lending, it's a massive space, massive space, and you can start to go out to the largest lenders that leverage Equifax service or a credit bureau service. You can start calling on them and say, hey, I have some results to show you with other clients. Would you like to use this service? It's having these outsized results. That’s how we started – that's how we kept on iterating.
00:21:37 · Pablo Srugo
[00:21:37] S1: You mentioned staying as close to your customers as possible, especially on the sales and customer service side. I couldn't agree more. I actually think that's one of the most common mistakes is hiring this VP sales a little too quickly because you want somebody who's a pro, who's going create a great sales organization, and all these sort of things. In fact, there's this company I saw not too long ago. They bootstrapped to two million in revenue, nine people, effectively break even, raised a few million dollars, and the first thing was VP sales, beef of the team, blah, blah, blah. A year later, they're still doing two million in revenue, right? It just completely flatlined because it was too early. This is maybe a bit too specific, but just to give some – maybe make this point more tangible, do you remember some of the things, anything that you would've learned back then because you were so close to these customers, because you stayed close on sales or on customer success? Some of the things that customers might have told you or you might have gleaned from sales calls that actually – because they're subtleties, right? They're small tweaks that sometimes are the difference between something that sells and something that has too much friction.
00:22:50 · Shmulik Fishman
[00:22:50] S0: I think a lot of why I start – I still stay so close to clients is they know more about income verification than I do, and so my clients have been educating me on this space and how Equifax does it, how we're different, what type of data they need, how they want it organized, how they want it calculated. It's great to get all of that education from your clients because you're hearing their challenges. You're, able to get from them what they wish was different, and then you can just go build against it. I find myself really being a product manager masquerading as a CEO. Just from a product manager's mindset, it's great to hear the client's problem so you can build the solution, and the closer you can get to the problem, the better. You don't want to be disintermediated from that conversation. I think that's the reason why we've kept our sales team really lean. Even today, Argyle does not have a VP of sales. We have this GM strategy where there's a general manager for each one of our key verticals but all in the purpose of keeping ourselves as close as possible to the client.
00:23:58 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:23:58] S1: One of the best ways I heard this explained to me was it's really a learning flywheel, right? If you think about, if you have an AE and then a VP sales and then you, you have to hope that message goes through that entire chain before it gets to you and then makes its way to product versus if you're the one that's touching all these things. At the beginning, speed and adaptability is what it's all about. That's really putting yourself there makes that flywheel so much tighter and everything move so much faster. [00:24:29] S0: I think this is a podcast for tech founders. You're a tech company, right? You're not a sales company. The thing that Argyle does better than anybody else is build technology for income verification. That's what most of our team is focused on all day. You can have a lean team that is go-to-market and still be really successful. That's not the key differentiator. The key differentiator is the product, the technology that you're building. [00:24:54] S1: Totally. Walk me through maybe just on the fundraising side because things started happening pretty quick. Bain led your seed. It was two and a half million or so. Then, a year later, $20 million Series A, which is a pretty big Series A, especially just a year after a pretty normal size seed. Walk me through that story. How did you connect with them, and why did they decide to make such a big investment?
00:25:16 · Shmulik Fishman
[00:25:16] S0: Yeah. I guess we're going to make some news public, or we're going to give some inside takes. Ajay at Bain reached out to me on LinkedIn. Ajay, if you're listening to this, I still – I believe it was you that reached out to me personally. Yeah. It was a cold email on LinkedIn where Ajay said that he had heard that we were building something really interesting, and he wanted to come and meet me in person. He came to our two-person WeWork that was kitty-corner to the bathroom, so you had to look at everybody going in and out of the bathroom every day as you sat in your cubicle. He came to the office and he sat down. He really dug into the business, and he liked it. I think there's a lot of similarities between what Argyle does for payroll and what some other people like Plaid or Finicity have done for banking. There were some corollaries and an investment thesis around it that really worked. The learning there for me is just be really open to every conversation. Any investor could be the investor for your first round, and some people get picky about who they want to respond to or what order to get investors in. Just talk to everybody. Don't be scared about sending your deck. I certainly wasn't. I think that's the reason Ajay found out about me because somebody forwarded a deck that I had sent to somebody, to somebody, to somebody, then to him, right? It was because I was super open with sharing and wasn't trying to guard the material, and so I think that's how it worked.
00:26:43 · Pablo Srugo
[00:26:43] S1: It’s one thing to do two and a half million dollars or so. I think that's they believe in you. They believe in the thesis. Got it. What happens in that year that leads them to do $20 million check? That's a big size check. They must have seen some serious traction or something that led them to really lean in.