A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:13:42 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:13:42] S0: This is a stupid question, but just for the audience who maybe not all in on sales enablement tech, when you take something like InVision, which is really just mockups for product or whatever, and you compare it to what you built at Walnut, what are some of the key differences? Is that even an analogy that even makes sense or is this totally different worlds? [00:14:02] S1: It's totally different because people use mockup tools to create something that doesn't exist yet mostly and illustrate how that would play out. Whereas we work with companies, like Adobe, or Dell, or Equifax, or Medallia, or companies where everything is all set up, to say the least, but they have to turn that into something that will actually be able to tell a story and in a way that you don't need to borrow any resources from RND product or design. You've got to have your platform all set. You can just customize the data and make it amazing, but it's not – you cannot make up some feature that doesn't exist as you would with graphic design. [00:14:44] S0: Let's go back to this wait list. You do decide the strategy of going out there and just making as much noise as possible. What were some of the tactics that worked the best? Any stories you can share from there where even maybe you were surprised as to just how well they really ended up working and what were they and how did you structure them?
00:14:44 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:14:44] S0: Let's go back to this wait list. You do decide the strategy of going out there and just making as much noise as possible. What were some of the tactics that worked the best? Any stories you can share from there where even maybe you were surprised as to just how well they really ended up working and what were they and how did you structure them? [00:15:03] S1: Yeah, so I would talk about two anecdotes that I think some of the people listening might know. One of them is a video that we released that was a low budget film. We tried to say – we were still a pretty small team. We wrote the script and we acted in it as to the best of our abilities, but it was me thinking we are all someone else's prospects. Even people that have or run software companies, they are also buying software from other people. Eventually, the prospects are going through terrible processes. I came up with this hashtag called We are Prospect and we filmed a video of a nice lady trying to buy a shirt and the salesperson is giving her hell and it's the metaphor was buying software, of course. We just published it on LinkedIn. In retrospect, the message really resonates and the way we told the story really resonates with the audience and we woke up to seeing millions and millions of organic views on LinkedIn. [00:16:09] S0: Did you sponsor it or literally you just put it out on LinkedIn as a video on your profile and it just took off?
00:16:09 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:16:09] S0: Did you sponsor it or literally you just put it out on LinkedIn as a video on your profile and it just took off? [00:16:14] S1: Completely organic. The most significant companies in our space reached out wanting to be part of the movement. Some of them are public companies, people from Fortune 500, executives from Fortune companies were sharing it on LinkedIn saying this is insane. Some of our competition was starting to do low, even lower budget versions of that film. It just broke LinkedIn for a little while, but this was really early on and this was really low budget, and it was our way to say, what's the change we want to bring? It's not just a product we're building. Then we had an episode two of that and that also had the same outcome. We chose building a movement as some tactic that I know every founder says they want to build a category and every founder says they want to build a movement and all kinds of stuff. For us, it played out nice. The second tactic we used… [00:17:09] S0: Maybe just on that, by the way, and we'll share the link to that video in the footnotes, but just from your perspective, what do you think you got so right? For people to actually share a company's video, you’ve got to really resonate with something inside, and then you did it again, right? What do you think is the nugget that you really got right there?
00:17:09 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:17:09] S0: Maybe just on that, by the way, and we'll share the link to that video in the footnotes, but just from your perspective, what do you think you got so right? For people to actually share a company's video, you’ve got to really resonate with something inside, and then you did it again, right? What do you think is the nugget that you really got right there? [00:17:30] S1: I think the emotions that people had at the time were, and especially people on LinkedIn, which are professionals, right? Most of them are salespeople, marketing people, CS people. I think everybody was suffering from the same thing. They just didn't know to put their fingers on it and say, this part of the entire process is a shit show prospect or suffering processes. There's an infographic that Galata published. It looks like a meme. It's so complicated. They take you through what a sales process is in B2B, but it's a million lines going crazy in circles and people knew what's pissing them off. They didn't know to describe it. Then we just did a video where this lady trying to buy a shirt was the heart of the suffering of everyone that were exposed to our video and they just engaged with it like crazy. [00:18:18] S0: Was it mainly focused on the problem side or did it – or how much was the solution even part of that video? I find, generally speaking, the problem is actually what resonates more. As long as you're like, “Yeah, that pisses me off,” you hit that like, you hit that share, was that how you structured it?
00:18:18 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:18:18] S0: Was it mainly focused on the problem side or did it – or how much was the solution even part of that video? I find, generally speaking, the problem is actually what resonates more. As long as you're like, “Yeah, that pisses me off,” you hit that like, you hit that share, was that how you structured it? [00:18:34] S1: Yeah, we didn't even talk about Walnut in that video. We had very successful ads, but this one was completely a problem. We just put a Walnut logo on it. The call to action was not even trial product. The call to action was sign up for more content. [00:18:53] S0: You're moving on to the second tactic.
00:18:56 · Yoav Vilner
[00:18:56] S1: The second tactic that we did early on and really low budget was we went to LinkedIn with a set of ads that – and I know we're talking about startups still being scrappy and not having a lot of budgets. We published on LinkedIn a set of ads that show a cat and a lion and the excess that before Walnut your product demo is a cat and after it's a lion. Now you're wondering what difference does that make? Everybody makes funny ads, but essentially, we were the first ones to use that format. Then today you see the top companies, the top enterprise companies, hundreds and hundreds of them just borrowing the same format. It was an annual conference. The CMO of LinkedIn went on live stage about, I think it was last year or two years ago. The first thing he showed on the screen, I think it was some pastry, like Walnut saying, before it's uncooked and after it's a cooked pastry. It got to all kinds of festivals on the main screen and people, and I heard from people that are students in some college that a professor was analyzing why Walnut did what they did with that ad. Honestly, I have to say we didn't do a lot. We thought it's going to be cool. We didn't know it's going to get there. What I'm trying to say is you don't need a lot of budgets when you're just going to market. At first you can be pretty good at just sensing what your audience is looking to see and are they trying – are they wanting to buy tools that are down to earth that are boring and professional? How are they going to react to humor and jokes? To us, it played out pretty early on.