A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:32:05 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
[00:32:05] S0: It was definitely person driven, but I think what it ended up becoming was like actually very helpful. And like I still did all the sales calls. I still closed all of our deals. Right. But he was just more firepower to be able to do that at more scale. [00:32:18] S1: Did you guys do the deals together then? How did you how did you split things? Like where did he come in? Where did you come in? [00:32:21] S0: Most of our deals we did together. He did a lot of top of funnel and discovery and getting the initial calls. He he has a big following in the market. He would host these like wine dinners and coffee events with general councils. And so he was very good at like drumming up interest and building community. And then he would then bring myself and Jared in as we started to go further into the deals. [00:32:41] S1: And was that like his ability to bring top of funnel was because he was already in the space selling like I assume he brought in a lot of previous customers at top of funnel. [00:32:48] S0: I think that's one piece of it. The other is just he's an unbelievably personable person. Like he is so good at building relationships. One of our first clients that he signed was it was ridiculous. The first week he joined, he signed a five year deal with a client like paid five year deal off the bat over lunch. And we were like the whole office was like, what what just happened? [00:33:10] S1: I need to interview him. And how do you how do you do that? That's crazy.
00:33:10 · Pablo Srugo, Nick Fleisher
[00:33:10] S1: I need to interview him. And how do you how do you do that? That's crazy. [00:33:13] S0: You should. But this GC at this company said to him like, hey, I, you know, I just want to make sure like I'm getting the best service here. Like, how should I trust you guys? And Oliver said to him, like, you can call me whenever you want. Like, I will pick up the phone at any moment. Like, that's how you know that you're getting the best tool and the best team here. And the guy did end up calling him in the middle of the night, like literally at like two, three. And Oliver like doesn't sleep. Like he it's not because he he works so much like he actually just like can't sleep a lot. [00:33:40] S1: What could be happening at 2 a.m. that he needs like this like a test or something?
00:33:44 · Nick Fleisher
[00:33:44] S0: No, it was a test. It was a test. And Oliver picks up the phone. He's like, hey, what can I help you with? It's stuff like that where it's like building those relationships. And some of the like our fortune 500 deals take months and months to close. Like we have deals closing now. And like we've had deals closing over the last four or five months that like Oliver and I started incubating at the end of last year. And that's like people are saying tell us like how do you get how are you able to get such big deals? And part of it is just because we've been working on it for a while. Like we've been building relationships there. Like some of the fortune 500 clients we have. We've like multi-threaded with 50 stakeholders over the last nine months, the two of us. And he's flown to these places like over and over. And so like founders need to be selling, right? Most of my day is demoing and selling. But I think it's just allowed us to move a lot faster. Like when we launched and came out of stealth, we had a ridiculous, we had like 10 to $15 million of pipeline like already ready to go. Like that we had been warming and demoing. We had done hundreds of demos already. That's because Oliver was just an extension of us and he also knew the market and had all the right traits. It then sets you up for a very good sales culture going forward, right? Like we know the things that work and the things that don't. We've tested all the tactics. So like when you start to get into like the real growth curve, like you're not testing the waters and trying things out all over again. The other thing I'll say is like his role early on was very tied to product and engineering. Like he would do these demos. Liam, Jared, and I, the co-founders, we were all coding. And so us plus the early engineers we hired would just like listen to Oliver do these calls. We'd hear someone say something that was wrong or didn't look right. And we would just go start working on it. We had one little room in the office that was like had a door that was not really closeable so it wasn't silent. And so we would just hear him do these demos and we would just start working on it right away.
00:35:28 · Pablo Srugo
[00:35:28] S1: One of the maybe classic pieces of advice tied to this is one of the reasons you don't hire an AE so early is because an excellent AE wants a product that's already got that traction that they can come in and be like, yeah, I'm going to hit quota. I'm going to destroy quota. Like if you're already selling this much, I can sell that much more. How do you get somebody like Oliver to join this early on?
00:35:47 · Nick Fleisher
[00:35:47] S0: It has to be the right person that's willing to take the risk, right? Like you're as if you are a really good AE, right, who can sell five, ten plus million dollars of a enterprise product a year. You're making millions of dollars, right? So it doesn't actually make any financial sense to go to a startup pre-product. So you have to incentivize with equity and ownership, right? Like obviously a huge chunk is equity, but I think another chunk is the ability to like do more than just selling, right? Like you're going to get to work with existing accounts. You're going to help us strategize about where we go. Like it's just so different from a traditional AE role. And if you're into tech in the startup world, it's very interesting. And as a result, like, you know, not to over harp on one person, but like that first hire, like Oliver has done a lot of venture investing and helped a lot of other startups with their early sales process. He, after, you know, despite having a great comp set up here, like he personally invested in the business as well. And so that to me is also an interesting profile that we're starting to see more of. Like you see it at 11 Labs and some of these other companies where like either the early sales lead or like VP of sales is an investor as well and like very plugged into tech. It's another interesting persona and it's attractive to a subset of like really high performing AEs to that.
00:37:02 · Pablo Srugo
[00:37:02] S1: Well, it's a very different setup, right? The classic setup is you as a founder go out, generate your leads, close your first million of ARR. And then once you've got something that's kind of working, find a way to make that somewhat scalable. And the way that I see that playing out usually is you hire these maybe top of final BDRs, SDRs that are like truly junior. And even on the AE side, you hire someone with a little bit more kind of experience, but you're not going out and hiring like the top AE in your industry. It's just not the normal thinking. And so you're kind of putting these pieces in the puzzle and saying like, if I can make it work with this team, I can make it work with anyone. And that's the way you kind of scale it. You went the exact opposite, which is part of it was serendipity in the sense that you knew Oliver and Oliver was there, right place, right time. Where you're like, let's hire the absolute best AE to just lead this for us. Let's make a package that's interesting and compelling enough to him and have him kind of drive all of that. It's kind of like intrinsically not scalable because there's only like one Oliver, but you then bet on Oliver to be able to create that, I assume the scalable piece of it, you know, later on.