A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:08:06 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:08:06] S0: Were these relationships you already had or did you run a cold email campaign to just get in front of people? [00:08:12] S1: We used – yeah, it was not the first run for me and my co-founders. There was a couple of sales leaders we had in our network that we could interview. I tried to focus on the US market and go up market as much as I could, but the first couple of calls we had were, of course, relying on our own network. The following calls we had were because there started to be a word out about this new animal called interactive demos, and some set leaders just agreed to take a call and what it's going to be about. [00:08:42] S0: Were those original calls, did you structure them as discovery, asking questions, or was it you were more sales mode by that point, pretty confident that this was a solid idea and it was just about trying to get people to sign? [00:08:54] S1: We were super confident about our idea, but we positioned it, of course, what I think every founder should do, first of all, you start by asking about the challenges and the problems and what's missing in your sales stack, and then you get some solid answers that could lead you to your own idea. Our instinct was that they're going to benefit from the specific idea we had, but we started the call with just hearing their general set of problems. [00:09:22] S0: You ended up building a wait list of 700 people. Was this all hand-to-hand combat 700 interviews or did you at some point find things, different tactics to maybe scale that wait list a bit faster?
00:09:22 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:09:22] S0: You ended up building a wait list of 700 people. Was this all hand-to-hand combat 700 interviews or did you at some point find things, different tactics to maybe scale that wait list a bit faster? [00:09:36] S1: Let's say we interviewed 60 or 70 sales leaders and that was one-on-one meetings that we got from our network and other people. Afterwards, we raised an initial seed round. It was the first batch of our seed round. It was $2.5 million. At that moment I felt that I should go to market as fast as I can. [00:09:59] S0: At that point, did you just – was it really based on the team? You had a track record. Was that mainly why you think you raised that seed round when you did or was there a thesis that I think it was NFX, right, that led it, that maybe they had at the time?
00:09:59 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:09:59] S0: At that point, did you just – was it really based on the team? You had a track record. Was that mainly why you think you raised that seed round when you did or was there a thesis that I think it was NFX, right, that led it, that maybe they had at the time? [00:10:12] S1: Yeah, NFX, which of course is an amazing fund for SaaS product, they were the first believers. They were accompanied by angel investors like the CEO of Wix and Liquid2 in San Francisco and some other investors. The way that we saw it, my initial investors, they were like, “The website isn't clear yet. The value prop isn't clear yet. If you launch it now and go above the radar, then you might burn some bridges.” I saw a lot of different startups in my life and I felt that this one could spark a whole landscape if we do it fast and we do it loud. That was the strategy. We put marketing in mind and brand in mind and all that and positioning it in mind since Day 1. I took it to places like Product Hunt and LinkedIn and all kinds of platforms where I felt salespeople are going to be curious to hear what it's about. It was, according to some publications, the most viral product launch of 2020. As you know, it was a troubling year to be doing anything. That helped the wait list grow to 700 people and that also helped us extend our seed round from 2.5 to, I think, it was 6 or 7.
00:11:33 · Pablo Srugo
[00:11:33] S0: How do you – so let me go on that tangent for a second. I think being the stealth startup is cool these days, right? I think the general advice you would get from VCs is stay quiet until you're ready, art of war stuff. Obviously, you did the opposite and it works for you. What's your advice to founders on what should they think about? I'm sure it's case by case. What should they think about whether they consider going out early, product hunt, blasting it out, PR, all this stuff, or staying quiet until they're doing $10 million ARR and then they get noticed?
00:12:06 · Yoav Vilner
[00:12:06] S1: Yeah, like you said, it's case by case. Cybersecurity companies, if they spark competition, they can be in trouble. You have to have a very specific marketing where you reach out, you do ABM for specific CISOs and your tone of voice has to be spooky, right? You're going to get hacked and every – that's a whole other set of going to market. I feel that in sales enablement, B2B sales kind of thing, there was room for a playbook to go wild. We've done things that just amazed us with the exposure they had and the response we got from the market. That was a hunch that I had. If we speak about pros and cons, obviously pros, it built out the landscape, which is now pretty popular and a lot of people are aware of it. Cons, it generates a lot of companies that are inspired by our idea and some of them can raise a lot of money. Overall, that also helps you educate the market. The only tip that I can give founders is they have to decide if they're building something where market education will help them and they don't mind having 15 or 20 follow-up teams that will be inspired by their idea. That's fine. You can go crazy. If you think you're building in a landscape where even two competitors will be problematic for you, then you should definitely be heads down and build for a while.
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?