A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:33:02 · Isaiah Granet
[00:33:02] S0: Yeah, first of all, always negotiate upfront with influencers. So we have a whole guide on how we do this. Which is you're building a relationship in the long run, and you want to make sure that you're working with people that are high integrity, that you negotiate clearly upfront, you set boundaries. But then you also need to be writing the copy and the content for them. Making sure that they're hitting on the pieces that you want. For us, that was, holy smokes, this AI startup is asking, why are you still hiring humans, and creating a conversation in their comment section. And then also making sure that you time it correctly. You want to be perfectly timed between East Coast and West Coast in the United States. And then as the day goes on, you need to understand how the algorithms work for where they're going to try and catch viral content. So X is really interesting. Right now, what we see is the posts that pick up, it's usually about seven to eight hours after the post. So it's actually quite long and what you need to make sure is that you talk the influencers well to that. And then what we do is we actually have European influencers who overnight are posting to keep the view count climbing. And so for mega virality, I could spend an hour alone just talking about how we do it. The short answer is intentionality actually matters. If you find yourself just paying people and not saying, who is watching this? What are they talking about? When are they going to see it? You're not going to have a successful campaign. You're just going to burn cash.
00:34:20 · Pablo Srugo, Isaiah Granet
[00:34:20] S2: These days, where are you finding these influencers? [00:34:22] S0: Oh, that's a good question. I actually source them manually for the most part, and we pretty much work with micro-influencers to start with. So we try and find people with under fifty thousand followers. [00:34:32] S2: And you're doing it across channels but you're saying LinkedIn and Twitter are actually the best place to have people with ten thousand, let's say, followers on Twitter, as an example. That's a good one? [00:34:40] S0: Exactly, yeah. [00:34:41] S2: So this fuels you to a few million ARR, and then the other move that you made at one point. Which was quite wild, is you, as I understand it, fired half your customers.
00:34:41 · Pablo Srugo, Isaiah Granet
[00:34:41] S2: So this fuels you to a few million ARR, and then the other move that you made at one point. Which was quite wild, is you, as I understand it, fired half your customers. [00:34:49] S0: Yes, this is an unpopular decision to do immediately after you raise $20 million. But what we realized was it is easy in the AI era to rack up old sounding numbers of ARR. But if you want to build an enduring business, you have to sell to the right people and what we realized was we had, you know, this $1 million of revenue that we caught that was just going to ask for things that we didn't want to build. They were white labelers. They were resellers. They were building agencies, perfectly fine businesses, by the way, just not what we wanted to build and they wanted, all of this tooling and technology that we didn't want to create. And I would say that even the three months that we were serving them from January to, you know, April caused probably about a year's worth of damage on our product roadmap of things that we had to support, that we had to undo, tech debt. I mean, we were late to fire these customers and my best advice, again, to founders is focus, focus, focus. If you find yourself constantly dealing with people that aren't your core customer to maintain an ARR metric, understand the debt comes due someday and it might be the right decision to hold on to them early stage. Sometimes you do have to show momentum and ability to sell for fundraising, but sooner or later it will come that you have to deal with that.
00:36:04 · Pablo Srugo
[00:36:04] S2: You know, the only kind of pushback I have, or not really pushback. It's just more I want to go deeper on, is at the earliest stages. When you only have, you're trying to build a multi-hundred million dollar a year business, and you have this idea of the thing that's going to get you there, and you have a certain amount of customers. And let's say you have a few million in ARR, and then something else happens on the side. I would argue, just like you did, if that thing is taking you away, and the only reason you're doing it is to inflate metrics or fundraise, don't do it. But how do you know that that's actually not maybe the thing? And it actually turns out you should have done it. Because actually you were more limited here and you're in a better position there, and you just ignored the market at the wrong time.
00:36:41 · Isaiah Granet
[00:36:41] S0: Great question. I wish I had a catch all answer for you. Because maybe it turns out that the Bland actually would have been the biggest agency white label or platform in the world and we would be five times the size we are if we stuck with it. You can't know that, but the reason we made this decision was ultimately we didn't believe that value would accrue for those people. Because when we talked to them about what they were doing, it was all unrealized value. Meaning they were hoping to use Bland to build their business and that meant that the value that they could achieve was very, very high theoretically, but in reality, there was no tangible way to understand that. And so what we did is we said, we're going to follow the pain. These business owners don't have pain, they have hope and I know that sounds weird, right? You want to be with hopeful people, yes, but where you build a great business is by figuring out where when you press, does it hurt.
00:37:29 · Pablo Srugo
[00:37:29] S2: I actually think it's on the mark, you got to go to first principles and first principles always is like solve this hair on fire problem, right? And that actually, I've seen this happen where you're solving, let's say, hair on fire problem. You know what often happens when it's tough is you're doing these $10k to $20k ACVs, probably not your case. But you're doing these $10k to $20k ACVs and it's solid, and it makes sense, and you're solving a real problem. And then you've got this enterprise that comes here and it's like, I'll give you $200k if you do this other thing. And you're like, $200k, that's twenty of my normal customers. But when you dig into it, the key question is it's not like never do that. It's just like, compare the pain, right? I like that phrase, but compare the pain of that $200k for them to the pain is $220k. If you feel like, yeah, this is a real pain for them, and if I solve it for them. I'll not only make $200k, but I'll open up this enterprise piece of a lot of other customers with big pain, do it. If you're like, I don't even really get why they want it, but it's $200k, you know, probably don't do it. Keep doing the thing you're doing.