A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:42:32 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:42:32] S2: And that's the other question, the message is what? Like, hey, I built this. Do you want it? What's the craft in that message? [00:42:38] S0: We tested every message you could possibly imagine. Some of them were about the product. Some of them were like, I'm a founder and I'm building something new. Would you like to look? That's what I'd say. You aren't going to know what messaging works. You need to play around. [00:42:55] S2: What worked for you? Did something work better for you or would you find it was all kind of similar? [00:42:58] S0: Shorter is better, more direct is better, less flowery language is better. So we just found honesty and simplicity to be the easiest approach. So that's where you need to be a little bit careful. If you ask for feedback, you will get closer to a tire kicker than anything else. Which can be good depending on the stage that you're at. But, the ask could be clear. If I think I built you something good, then like, hey, I think this would work for you guys. I would love your thoughts if that's true. People are afraid to say what they actually mean and you can just go on, and if you can describe your product crisply. And it solves the problem for that person, you can say like, hey, I bet you have this problem. We solved that problem. Would you like to see? The worst is that someone's not going to respond. Again, if you're doing this inside a social network, very often people will respond and you get an opportunity to say like, hey, did what I say come true? How was that?
00:42:58 · Colin Zima, Pablo Srugo
[00:42:58] S0: Shorter is better, more direct is better, less flowery language is better. So we just found honesty and simplicity to be the easiest approach. So that's where you need to be a little bit careful. If you ask for feedback, you will get closer to a tire kicker than anything else. Which can be good depending on the stage that you're at. But, the ask could be clear. If I think I built you something good, then like, hey, I think this would work for you guys. I would love your thoughts if that's true. People are afraid to say what they actually mean and you can just go on, and if you can describe your product crisply. And it solves the problem for that person, you can say like, hey, I bet you have this problem. We solved that problem. Would you like to see? The worst is that someone's not going to respond. Again, if you're doing this inside a social network, very often people will respond and you get an opportunity to say like, hey, did what I say come true? How was that? [00:43:50] S2: Walk me through the expectations, because I think this is another big one. If you were, and I don't. I know they have the numbers in front of you, but just high level. You sent a hundred of these. How many should you expect to respond? How many meetings should you expect booked and whatever?
00:44:03 · Colin Zima
[00:44:03] S0: Yeah, yeah. So when our BDR team was doing this, they were getting like a three percent response rate. So they'd get three responses out of a hundred LinkedIn connects. I might get a fifty percent connect rate and on a message, depending on the group. Like to the Looker group, I probably got a ninety percent response rate. Wow. Because these are people that I knew. To real LinkedIn connections, I probably had a ninety percent response rate and I had five thousand, six thousand LinkedIn connections. So, again, not all of them are data people. But if we find one thousand good people in there, there's nine hundred responses and look, there's probably two hundred people that are a reasonable demo there. That's enough funnel to get started. Because, all we're trying to do is start the flywheel at that point. But you need to be able to describe your customer really well and you need to give LinkedIn a little bit of money. Those are the two things that you have to do. Which money on LinkedIn is that just for the SalesNav account or were you running ads on it? No, just for SalesNav. We didn't start running ads for a couple of years, but it's like a SalesNav account and then you just need to ping people with a message that actually targets a problem that they have. And like you need to create your own credibility. So like, hey, I'm Colin. We tried a lot of the, I worked at Looker for eight years thing. That works really well to a Looker account. It doesn't work great to a non-Looker account. So you want to tune up your message a little bit based on what you're saying. But if you've been using Looker for the last five years and it's like, hey, I'm Colin. I led product at Looker for eight years. I built something new. It's awesome. Do you want to see it? You get a lot of yeses. It's really not as complex as it sounds. If you're not getting response rates, I think it's probably a good indication that there's a Product Market Fit issue at some level. But you got to be able to describe what you're doing also and we've found different success over different times with different features and things like that also. Plenty of people ignore you too.
00:45:50 · Pablo Srugo
[00:45:50] S2: The other thing that you did that I'm a big fan of, it's a weird one where it's like, I think anybody could do this. You were better suited to do it, but anybody could do it and it's done so little, which is hiring from your own industry. Tell me about what you did there and how you did it, why the thinking behind it all.
00:46:07 · Colin Zima
[00:46:07] S0: Yeah, I mean part of this is because Looker sold to Google and people were there post acquisition. And either love the big company atmosphere or didn't. But when we set out to go build a competitor to our last company we worked with a lot of great people and people would ping us and say like, hey you're doing interesting stuff. Can I come work there, and we like, yeah I know you do great work. Come over and do it here. And everyone has jobs, and you know who the good people are that you worked with. If you're starting a company those are the people that you should go hire. You don't have to think about it that hard. If you're doing something interesting it's like the Product Market Fit problem, like can you pitch them something interesting about your business. And again, we were very fortunate to have fundraised really nicely. So to give people a safe place to go work as well, but we could sort of give a convincing argument that it's a good place to work and then the talent like accrues over itself. Every good person that you hire that you used to work with makes the place more attractive to the people that you used to work with. So if you worked at a big company with a thousand people and you hire the ten best people you're going to hire the next ten best people also.
00:47:14 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:47:14] S2: This is obviously in your case, you came from there, you had some outbound, inbound. I'm assuming maybe you did outbound, we'll talk about that. But would you also recommend this to someone who's building, let's say these days. an AI native product in whatever category, where there are some SaaS incumbents, ten, fifteen year old companies. Two thousand employees, five thousand employees, would you go poach? You probably don't want to poach the Series A or B startup in your space, because then that's going to come back at you. If there are two thousand, five thousand employee company like they probably don't even notice, they don't really care, would you do that outbound on purpose sort of thing? [00:47:46] S0: I think the thing that you have to be careful about is different scale companies work differently. An effective engineer at Google is not going to be an effective engineer at a startup necessarily. An effective engineer at Looker when we were private is going to be an effective engineer here. [00:48:03] S2: How big was Looker, when, just before the acquisition? [00:48:06] S0: We were a thousand when we got acquired, a thousand employees. But I think the average tenure of our first ten employees was eight years. So it was a lot of people that were there on the first, you know, thirty people. [00:48:16] S2: Got you.