00:16:47 · Ben Pfisterer, Adam Miller
[00:16:47] S0: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I I call reverse pitch kinda scaring them off legit. So, yeah, I do. I often find myself in interviews thinking I literally sound like I'm scaring this person off, but I think the best people just love it. They embrace it. And they... And if if it's aligned with what we're doing... Because I don't wanna hire someone who doesn't like what we're doing or doesn't wanna be in the company that we've built. So I think you... You're you're better off to be up upfront about that. And Mhmm. If it does scare people off, that's fine. That's good. That works for both parties. But the people that know it and they walk in the door is no surprise that, hey. We're here, but we're moving fast. You got a lot of talented people around you. You're gonna feel a little bit overawed, but you're gonna be inspired by this talent as well. So we're taking on a huge challenge. We're a massive responsibility in the market. We've got a lot of customers now who have needs and are loving our products. Let's service them. [00:17:33] S2: Just pulling that thread a little bit. Like, I think it's clear from what you said is that you can you know write these manifestos on culture but it really comes down to your first kind of twenty thirty people you hire and they dictate the velocity of the organisation but also like the way people show up and interact with each other Do you have any lessons on hiring those first maybe 10 people and the things you've got right and maybe the things you do differently next time?
00:17:58 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:17:58] S0: I mean starting at bringing together the founding team so there's four of us, and then I guess the initial people of 10 to 25. I don't know where the line stops. But from the founding team, that's probably one of my most proud things. I actually got these amazing and talented people together. I think there's no doubt with any of those three other people missing, this wouldn't be what it is, and I'm very proud of that. You know, we've never had an argument or fight. We've had, like, you know, strong conversations about topics, but we've never had a falling out. We're absolutely completely different people, so we complement our strengths and weaknesses, and I think that works well for us. We're very much aligned with, you know, what life is and what we're trying to get out of it and how big this challenge is and what it'll take, and you probably won't find four hardworking people in the world. And then the first the the the next sort of 10 to 25 people gets a very, similar thing. Because, like, I I do see all those people as founders as well, although the title kinda sits... I'm actually four of us, but, they've been with us for so long and have been so much to the journey. It's just all the cliche basic stuff. It's like, you know, am I gonna be able to work alongside these people? Do they add an additional positive layer? Do... Are they as hungry for whatever they're trying to achieve as we are? Are they willing to own the product? Are they willing to own the design? Are they willing to, you know, inspire the people they hire? And are they very, very good at what they do or willing to grow into that? All that cliched stuff, and it's not rocket science. It's basic stuff. But, ultimately, I think the best thing, we just click as a team, and and we aligned with what we're trying to do at a very difficult time with COVID happening, what have you. And I think getting those early runs on the board helped us sort of bond a lot more. So, yeah, thrilled with the team. Most of those people were still with us, which is cool.
00:19:40 · Sachin
[00:19:40] S1: In preparing for this episode, I asked a bunch of people, especially people from Square pick, like, would I most wanna ask you? And everyone wanted to know how you grew so quickly because a lot of companies, they can develop product pretty quickly or they can raise a bunch of capital, but it's very rare that you see a company can do both of those things and then make all of these sales really quickly and start to generate revenue to the point of where you were within two years. I'd love you to get specific here. What did your go to market look like that resulted in getting tens of thousands of customers within just two years?
00:20:11 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:20:11] S0: I think it was probably came from the velocity of building the business and the product from start, and that bled across all the different departments and different areas to say we just won't tolerate moving slowly. Like, we have to move fast. So it was like that wartime mentality, if you will, where, listen, yeah, we've got this amazing injection of capital, but comes massive responsibility to that. So let's just build everything out with absolute urgency. And that's, again, in in every single team. So in terms of go to market, it was a little bit of a shotgun approach. Like, we sort of said, let's go broad rather than getting too narrow. Because if you're narrow and you get it wrong, you stagnate. So we went broad. We had some great go to market strategies. Obviously, we went direct or wanted to be a direct business, only on direct channel, but we partnered up with Officeworks as well, which gave us a great halo effect to to launch. But we also came with an enormous amount of experience. Like, the initial team, have done a lot of this stuff before. So we're in different organizations and different sectors, but it wasn't our first proverbial rodeo. Like, it wasn't a rock out going, what's paid marketing? Should we do it? How do we get earned media, etcetera? We know exactly what we wanna do. And, also, we just focused on that. We've stripped out of the bureaucracy, the overthinking. We didn't ask any customers. We didn't have any, but didn't ask any merchants what they wanted. We said, we got a vision of what we wanna build. Let's build that. If we got this wrong, we can pivot quickly. Let's just go at it really, really hard. So once you strip out all that bureaucracy and the stuff that you don't need in businesses, you're left with let's execute. And I think that mentality across everything, go to market, was very important. Also, the other thing we knew we had to get right is you're going into dealing people's money. So you have to look solid. You have to be stable. There was no flimsy MVPs. This was an absolute amazingly stable product and service and onboarding, etcetera, from day one. We didn't cut corners. We went straight through the middle, built what we had to build. Plus, we had to make our brand look bigger than it was. Like, it had to look professional. It had to look amazing.
00:22:05 · Ben Pfisterer, Sachin, S3, Adam Miller
So the product team and the marketing team did a phenomenal job in making us from day one look like a big company. Yeah. There's some of the things I think ultimately, but it's just all about that pace execution and a slight sense of paranoia. Like, this could turn any day, so let's keep pushing. [00:22:19] S1: So just a quick break from the pod. We're sitting here with one of our newest founders, Rix from KC Ventures. Tell me about what does KC Ventures actually do. [00:22:27] S3: So KC Ventures is all about helping startups scale from everything from finance, operations, and strategy. So we can be a fully outsourced finance function, so everything from accounting and all the compliance work, but it's really the strategic work that sits on top of that. My background as a founder, built and scaled my own tech startup. I really try to bring that in and adding that and helping startups as they scale too. [00:22:46] S2: Luke, we're early stage founders, and we know the mess of trying to organize this stuff yourself. When is the optimal time for a founder to come to KC Ventures? [00:22:53] S0: I'd say it when [00:22:54] S3: the founders are at a point where they've got something that they need to manage and really wanna get more data and insights about their business and how they can take it to the next level. So early stage founders, I would say they can focus on keeping things as lean as possible. But when you get to that point where more data and insights is gonna be really valuable, that's the point where you should get in touch.
00:22:54 · S3, Adam Miller
[00:22:54] S3: the founders are at a point where they've got something that they need to manage and really wanna get more data and insights about their business and how they can take it to the next level. So early stage founders, I would say they can focus on keeping things as lean as possible. But when you get to that point where more data and insights is gonna be really valuable, that's the point where you should get in touch. [00:23:11] S2: And the reason that the velocity of shipping product then led to that viral growth, is it just because the product was so good and then there was word-of-mouth on the back of that? Like I was trying to think through are there any network effects in in the product? I don't think there are. Are there? They're absolutely. Okay. Is that is that negotiating better rates off the back of