00:06:47 · Daniel Chait
[00:06:47] S0: Well, just because you don't have to get caught up in it, doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. Because to your point, when everybody's saying it's a bad idea, like, things get harder. And when everybody's saying it's great idea, things get easier. So that's like the weather. Like, you can't control it. It doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. So it's kinda like that. I think when we first started, partly due to some of the dynamics I mentioned, like, I didn't have any venture capital introductions. I didn't know anyone. And so it was, like, definitely, like, a little bit fake it till you make it. I found my way into some investment circles and sat sort of on that side of the table for a little bit and sort of did a little bit of learning how those people think, and I was like, oh, light bulb went on. Angel investors are terrified of two things. They don't wanna bet on a company that nobody else is gonna bet on, and they don't wanna miss on a company that everybody else bet on. So it's like, oh, wait a second. Nobody wants to be the first angel investor into a company, and everybody wants to get in when someone's in. And so I started seeing that because I was listening to how they discussed investment opportunities. And so I just figured, okay, we gotta hack that mentality. And so we just retold our story in a different way that Greenhouse was inevitable. We basically went on to the cover page of our angel invest... Now keep on. This is... We we had nothing. It was me and my cofounder, John. We were trying to raise our first few $100 to hire two programmers and build the product. And we went from saying, you know, hey. Like, we're raising this amount of money to saying, we only need this amount of money out of the total raise, and the rest is committed. Now it was committed by me and John. Nobody... You Smart. It's like, yeah. We're committed. I'm pretty committed. Are you committed? Yeah. Alright. So we're committed. And we're always like, well, there's no law about what committed means. It's not like a defined term in the dictionary. It's just like Mhmm. It's all kinda like... So it's not exactly, like, clear when a startup is positioning, like, what's going on in their deal, like, what's actually happening under the hood. And so we were able to use some of that to our advantage and say, look.
00:08:35 · Daniel Chait
You know, I'm committed to doing this business whether I raise a nickel or not for a couple of years. And I've got rent and I've got, you know, food and I eat and so you add all that, but, like, that's an amount of money that I'm committed to spending on this business and so was he. And so between the two of us, that added up to, like, you know, some money. And the rest of it was what we were looking for. And so immediately, we positioned it from, yeah, we've got, you know, a few $100 committed out of a $500 that we're trying to raise. Everybody's like, I'm in. And so you do a little bit of that when you're getting started. There's ethical lines, obviously, you can't cross and that we didn't and wouldn't, but there's also a little bit of hustle and a little bit of grind. And I think the art and science, the art of getting it right at that stage is knowing what those lines are and being a little bit clever about coming up to them. I'll give you another example, if I could have another minute. Just to illustrate the kind of hustle and grind you do as a startup, it's like, it's not you're doing bad stuff, but you're doing stuff that you maybe wouldn't get away with, like, a little bit later. So, again, I said we're trying to do a lot of customer discovery. I wanted to understand the customer. So there was a job fair here in New York, and all the New York tech companies at the time were there with a booth hiring engineers. And so I signed up as a candidate. I went to this job fair with my resume and stood in line at these booths. I remember waiting in line behind, you know, a bunch of people with a lot of jobs. You get up to the front of the booth, and there's a recruiter from, you know, a tech company in New York. And I'm like, hey. What are you hiring for? And of course, they're a recruiter. They're very... They're happy to talk. So they told me all the jobs they're hiring for. I go, how's it going? And, oh, this one's hard, and that one's hard. Oh, what are the challenging parts about it? Where are you looking? What have you already tried? And I'm, like, having this whole conversation with the person. And after about five minutes, they're like, this doesn't sound like... Like, what's happening here?
00:10:19 · Guillaume Moubeche, Daniel Chait
[00:10:19] S1: Is he selling something me? [00:10:21] S0: And that would just be like, hey. Can I get your card? Of course. They... Like, any recruiter would love to hand out their card to, you know, someone at a job fair. So they give me their card. Say, thanks a lot. Would walk away. So I left that day with a bunch of business cards of tech recruiters in New York and a ton of information about their their mindset and their problems and what they needed. And so they made a rule at that job fair that you couldn't do that because of us. But but those are the kind of things that you just sort of hustle when you're getting started, you know, to, like, give yourself an edge because you can't do the things that big companies do, but they also can't do the stuff that you do. [00:10:53] S1: You know, you mentioned earlier, Jason Lemkin and SaaStr. [00:10:56] S0: Sure. [00:10:56] S1: So when you organized, like, the first SaaStr in Paris, it was just at the moment I was, like, launching my company. So I volunteered to get like free tickets. And when I had the free tickets, I just went in and and did like similar things and went hustling. So, yeah, 100% agree. [00:11:13] S0: I respect I respect the hustle. You know, I mean, again, I've been an entrepreneur my whole career. There's things that you can't do, but, you know, when I see a startup person, you know, trying to think creatively about how many they wanna try to go, like, I respect that. And so, you you gotta do a little bit of that.
00:11:13 · Daniel Chait, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:11:13] S0: I respect I respect the hustle. You know, I mean, again, I've been an entrepreneur my whole career. There's things that you can't do, but, you know, when I see a startup person, you know, trying to think creatively about how many they wanna try to go, like, I respect that. And so, you you gotta do a little bit of that. [00:11:26] S1: When exactly did you know that it was working, that you had like this kind of magic moment where you have product market fit and everything comes together?
00:11:36 · Daniel Chait
[00:11:36] S0: Well, it all comes back it all comes back to Lemkin again. So he was starting that blog as we were starting Greenhouse. Basically, Friday, a would new blog post, and it was weirdly the problem we were figuring out that week. And he would just write the blog post and the answer. And so basically, our business plan for the first nine months was every Friday, read disaster and do what he says. And he had written a blog post about it. He said, well, when you get 25 arm's length customers, true, this is not my brother's cousin. This is a true company that just decided to buy your product out of anyone else, then you've got product market fit. And so when he wrote that blog post, we took 25 pieces of paper and scotch taped them up on our whiteboard and numbered them one to 25. And every time we'd get a customer, we would print out the logo in office printer and cut it out with scissors and tape it up on the thing. They're like, okay. One. And that was our goal. We said, okay. By the time we get to 25, we'll know that we'll know that we've done it. And so the first one took us months, two months to get, and the next one took us weeks, and then the next one took us days, and then they just blah blah blah blah. And so to get to zero to one was impossible, and to get from, like they say, impossible to inevitable, that's how it felt. And so to get the first one felt impossible. And then by the time you had 15, it was like, yeah, the next one's just a matter of time. And so by the time we exited with 25, we were like, okay. We've got it. Like, we've 25 companies that genuinely chose and bought our product, you know, out of all the choices. There were still a million questions that we had, but but we'd answered the fundamental one, which is have we figured out something that people want and that they'll choose over the other options?
00:13:13 · Guillaume Moubeche, Daniel Chait
[00:13:13] S1: Yeah. And I mean, you scaled like past 100,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. At some point, I think you decided to sell like majority to a fund. How exactly did that happen and what was reasoning behind it and the vision after? [00:13:29] S0: Yeah. So fast forwarding, you know, quite a few years now, picture this is... I'll start in 2020. We did that deal at the beginning of twenty twenty one. [00:13:36] S1: Okay.