A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
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?