A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:13:03 · Mark Hughes
[00:13:03] S0: We were doing this. I think I think honestly it was it was a really good moment for us though because I realized that we had to move our lives to San Francisco to build a very big business and you could see like my background now. I've got Koi Terra in the background, but that really became a forcing function. So we started with the Gong competitor, as we said, that was getting commoditized. We knew that they would just bring these AI features on. But then when we had conversations because if you look at startups, obviously, they're a connected graph. So, like, looking backwards, it all makes sense. At the time, maybe not. But then it was like, we really we built, like, these kind of coaching and feedback from the the the recorded calls. And people were like, I really value this, like, coaching feedback. That's actually very interesting. Like, the scorecards in Gong are really crap, and I have no way to actually improve. So then we built the role play tool, and we had the coaching and feedback and be like, oh, this is really strong, but the sales leaders or startup sales in particular didn't really care as much. Went into support, that's what we knew better. We'd, like, scaled support orgs using it. Again, really like the coaching feedback enough to say, like, like, if I actually was to say one thing, like, the flywheel we built from the get go was this the scoring the scorecard and the scoring system, the the evaluations that we built, because then it was like, oh, I love this for training, but I'd love this in our production environment as well because QA is still super manual right now, and we don't have visibility into our conversations. So we use the same scoring system, basically, somewhat evolved all the way throughout. And, like, to answer your question about the HyperMen piece, we had as as Patrick had built all this stuff himself, he wasn't using the likes of Vappy, for example, to build the the role play tool. We went out to San Francisco. There's actually, like, an interesting tweet I can try to service it, but of me demoing Solid Road to people at, like, this YC event because Patrick had done YC before, they're like, oh my god. That's so cool. Super early days, really long latency, etcetera.
00:14:44 · Mark Hughes
And then we came back a few weeks, and then, like, Hyperbound launches, and they had built on top of Dailyco and Vappy and all these tools that we didn't even know existed when we were out in San Francisco a few weeks before, or maybe they weren't even around yet. Because I think we were quite early customer to VAPI in the end. We were like, okay. Well, that's so much better than what we built. We need to move on to these third party softwares. But then also, like, everything's happened in San Francisco. Like, that could have been us having this viral moment had we been in San Francisco, but we're in Dublin in the middle of nowhere where so that really became like, okay, we need to get over San Francisco. So, like, we would even with very little money be, like, doing these, like, low budget trips to SF. Patrick moved over to San Francisco, like, first because, like, all the kind of tech stuff, the labs being there, etcetera. Moved over on, like, I don't know how he survived. Now living here for six months, I don't know how he survived on, like, the salary he was, It's expensive, man. Oh, like, on a, like, a low Irish salary in San Francisco, so I'll be forever indebted and grateful for him for the months that he put in there. So he would have moved over September 2024 and then we got accepted into YC in November 24 and then did the YC winter twenty five, so January. There was four of us. We all moved over then. Two more guys joined. So this is I think this is
00:15:51 · Pablo Srugo
[00:15:51] S1: a really interesting thread to to pull on a little bit. Obviously, you're you came from, like, a secondary city, and you go to Baria where, like, you know, almost all this stuff is happening. That story about Vappi specifically, Jordan was was on the show, so I know kind of how that happened. And, you know, it but it's very interesting how, you know, finding out about something a couple weeks before can have such a big impact. But you have the before and after. Like, you weren't there. You were building, doing stuff, and now you are there. Maybe speak a little bit you know, imagine you're a found you're talking to you're talking to yourself, you know, before you move. You're talking to a founder who's, like, thinking, should I, shouldn't I? How important is it now that you've done it? Right? How much benefit did you really get from it?
00:16:26 · Mark Hughes
[00:16:26] S0: Yeah. I I could not be a bigger advocate for San Francisco, and I think it's really down to the surface area for luck. Like, just being here, being in the room with people, like, how connected the ecosystem is over here. It's, like, it's all very serendipitous. So, like, that example, like, I I gave already about kinda giving the demo, but there's so many other examples being over here of, like, meeting our series a investor while we're doing y c at, like, an Irish meetup event in San Francisco. It's it's really hard to, like, quantify, but it's how I'd say it is, like, it increases your surface area for look, and I always think back when we graduate from Y Combinator on the last day, they just put up, like, all of the the data behind, like, companies who stay in SF and companies that leave SF. Even if you go to New York, like, it just, like, the chances of success are just so much higher if you stay here in person in SF. And, yeah, startups are really hard, so, like, be able to, like, increase the surface area for look and increase the chances of success when you're trying to build a multibillion dollar business. Like, we always talk about, like, even why we picked this office because we wanna build Salesforce terror that usurps solid sort of solid road terror that usurps Salesforce Tower in the skyline and SF. So you will also think bigger by being out here. Like, there's a bit of Catholic guilt working living in Ireland where it's like, oh, you know, tall poppy syndrome kicks in, but you come over here and, like, Emma's like, oh, yeah. Like, I'm a billion dollar business. Like, okay. What revenue are doing? Zero. We're only starting. We're we're building a billion dollar business. Like, great. Joe. I've been
00:17:53 · Pablo Srugo, Mark Hughes
[00:17:53] S1: way more accepted. It's true. A lot less skeptics. [00:17:56] S0: Yeah. 100%. [00:17:57] S1: Let's go a little deeper on the moment where you switched from sales role playing to customer success role playing. Tell me more about how that came about. It happened for you in the way that it happened for you, but I mean, the idea that you have a product kind of works, like could work maybe, and then somehow you see just enough things that you put it somewhere else and it really explodes. Like, that's common. Right? So I'm curious how it really happened for you. [00:18:18] S0: As I mentioned, kind of the kind of earlier customers gave us the reassurance that, like, this is the right ICP to go after. We really then narrowed in on that. So went after, like, heads of customer support, VP of operations rather than targeting. [00:18:31] S1: But did you sell sales and they just pulled you to customer success, or you just, like, luck into or just start trying customer success just because? Like, how do you even how do you even make that transition? How does that start?
00:18:41 · Mark Hughes
[00:18:41] S0: Yeah. It was kinda looked in through that, like, contact center that we initially kinda pitched them on the sales piece, they're like, oh, no. More of our volume is customer support. So we looked out in that regard, and then we were able to kinda narrow ICP. And then I think another kind of big moment was later that year because, like, how we actually scaled our first million dollars ARR came from cold outbound. So we would set up, like, hundreds of email inboxes using Lemlists, pull the list from Apollo. Once we knew the kind of ICP, once we knew the persona in the company, and, like, we're having success with, like, enterprise b to c companies and VP of operations in those companies, like, was, like, that we're having most success. So built out, like, messaging around that, pull lists in Apollo, set up, like, hundreds of email variations in Lemlist, warmed up those email domains. So it'd be like try solidroad.com, getsolidroad.com, we weren't burning our our primary domain. And, yeah, and I was looking at the stats before this, like, even like, we're sending, 500,000 emails. I was looking for, that first million ARR, we sent 500,000 emails. We got 5,000 replies and 250 meetings booked and then, a 20% conversion off those meetings booked, was 40 customers and an ACV of 25 k to get to a million dollars a or more. Like, that's how we work from. And so like and I think one somewhat outlier deal with a higher ACV that we got late in 2024, which was like great for because I'm a big believer. Come from a sales background, as I said. It's, like, it's all about case studies, testimonials, and social proof. So we closed crypto.com and are, like we were an enterprise customer. They're also financial services. So, like, even back then, like, selling an internal training tool using AI, people were very security conscious. And now you look at all the stuff that AI is doing, like automating tasks and, like, even being customer facing. It wasn't like that even in 2024. So getting through, like, security and procurement of crypto and then having them as, like, a reference customer made it a lot easier to close the next deals coming in because it's like, okay. They're a financial service company. If they've gone through their procurement process, you know, they have SOC two type two. They've always owed 27,001.