A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:29:13 · Pablo Srugo, Keith Peiris
[00:29:13] S1: So it's, it's a bit of a different view of like Clay and all these tools, these modern things, like they're very set up for a cold outbound. Like there's like run the absolute best cold outbound campaign. Your idea was run a different outbound campaign, not necessarily run a hot outbound if you can or a warm and we'll help you do that. And that's kind of where, that's maybe a little bit of the difference. [00:29:31] S0: Yeah, exactly. Like I think, I think building a startup, you know, it's a momentum game, right? We always tell folks, hey, if your company just raised a seed, you know, build momentum using every tool you have imaginable before you're relying on cold emails. You know, cold emails are something that works when you've got like a brand or if you're, you know, attacking a niche where other people aren't attacking. But we just sort of came up with this different approach while building out the system. [00:29:58] S1: So maybe it's a good point because we've got two kind of tactical areas we want to dive into. One of them is specifically how to sell into YC or Bay Area founders and it probably works for any kind of founder geography that you find yourself in. How to sell to founders. They're obviously a great set of early adopters for many different AI products. This is a strategy that could work for a lot of founders that are just starting off. But how did, how did you do it? What did you do special when it came to selling to these YC founders?
00:30:25 · Keith Peiris
[00:30:25] S0: We did a couple of things and the first thing I would say is as a founder, you should have good taste on how you want to be bothered, right? Because you're super busy. You're trying to make your company work and you're probably not going to respond to cold email. So the first thing I did is I reached out to folks over LinkedIn instead of email. This is something Lightfield does natively too so we sort of learned. And second, I never led with buy my product. I led with, hey, this is my background. I'm hosting a dinner. Do you want to come to this dinner? Or I led with, you're probably struggling getting go-to-market up and running. Most founders are not go-to-market founders. They're technical. Like we invited the CRO of HubSpot to come speak at our office. You can come hang out. We're not going to try to sell you anything. Or, you know, we brought the guy that wrote Predictable Revenue. You know, how did we get those people to our office? We found a list of great authors who are speakers and we're like, look, we'll buy your book for everyone that comes to this talk. We just need you to show up and hang out. And a lot of them are like, great, sure. If you buy 100 copies of my book, I'll show up. So we started doing that.
00:31:26 · Pablo Srugo
[00:31:26] S1: So this is like a selling through events strategy. And the LinkedIn thing is interesting. On the one hand, I'm like, is that just a new channel that's going to get crowded like every other channel? Which it might. But the second piece of it is, because I'm thinking of myself, the nice thing about LinkedIn, which will always be true, is you're one click away from the profile. And so if you have some credibility, that's always going to be at least marginally better than something like email where it's just harder to know. Like, you're not going to take that long. Somebody messages you, you kind of like, ignore it. That's it, right? So on LinkedIn, somebody messages you, you might click on the profile, maybe, and then you're like, oh, this person is actually legit. Let's see what they said. You know what I mean? The fact is, it's probably less crowded, so that's part of it. But maybe that's the other side of that equation, which is, if you have credibility, you can exploit it a little bit better on LinkedIn.
00:32:13 · Keith Peiris, Pablo Srugo
[00:32:13] S0: Yeah, yeah. That's totally right. The other thing that I did, I think if you sell complex software, it's very hard to get anyone to understand why your complex software is better than someone else's. So I think the short form that people use, they look for references. They look for customers they know to understand whether this is legit. And it turns out the easiest way to get good reference customers is to give your software away for free to a couple of people in that network and work hard until they're happy. So I would say our first 10 YC customers were not even customers. We're like, please use our software. Here's a Slack with us. We're going to make it better with you. And we're not going to stop until you're happy. [00:32:53] S1: And who did you go? Did you go after some really hot YC companies or just any? What kind of logos did you get through that strategy? [00:32:59] S0: We did a mix. We got a couple of hot ones. We got a couple of ones that were emerging. And we're like, we're just going to earnestly work towards making you happy. When they were happy, it turns out it's a highly networked group of people. They started posting. You know, in Telegram chats and Bookface and others. And then we started to get referrals. You know, and it was around that time that then we started to charge a little. You know, and we were able to sort of build out organically from there.
00:32:59 · Keith Peiris, Pablo Srugo
[00:32:59] S0: We did a mix. We got a couple of hot ones. We got a couple of ones that were emerging. And we're like, we're just going to earnestly work towards making you happy. When they were happy, it turns out it's a highly networked group of people. They started posting. You know, in Telegram chats and Bookface and others. And then we started to get referrals. You know, and it was around that time that then we started to charge a little. You know, and we were able to sort of build out organically from there. [00:33:26] S1: Now going back to the event strategy, you use LinkedIn to reach out, you use these kind of credible names to say, hey, like we work with, you know, XYZ, whatever. And then you get them into an event. So now, okay, fine, they're at an event. How does that translate into you getting more customers for your product? How did you do that final link? [00:33:43] S0: Yeah, we were pretty honest about it. We're like, look, we brought the speaker here to talk about go-to-market. Just so you know, you know, we're building an agentic CRM. Let me show it to you for two minutes. And if you're interested in learning more, I've got like a computer in the back and I can give you a demo after. And it turned out the product demoed well. You know, we build good software. At the end of the night, you know, we always had 10, 20, 30 people that were like, show me what you're building. I'm interested. And that's sort of how it turned into something.
00:33:43 · Keith Peiris, Pablo Srugo
[00:33:43] S0: Yeah, we were pretty honest about it. We're like, look, we brought the speaker here to talk about go-to-market. Just so you know, you know, we're building an agentic CRM. Let me show it to you for two minutes. And if you're interested in learning more, I've got like a computer in the back and I can give you a demo after. And it turned out the product demoed well. You know, we build good software. At the end of the night, you know, we always had 10, 20, 30 people that were like, show me what you're building. I'm interested. And that's sort of how it turned into something. [00:34:13] S1: And that's where you found the wedge of like, it's not just, oh, a new system of record that looks and works better. It's like, I'll help you land more customers through this new, like exploiting your, your, your existing network. [00:34:24] S0: Yeah, exactly.