A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:48:16 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:48:16] S2: Got you. [00:48:17] S0: I think you do need to be a little bit careful if you're going for incumbent. Because you want to know that the person is not like, has a meaningful understanding of the work that they're doing. That they're not over specialized. But context on your space matters a lot. So I'd say expertise is good, but you need to be able to vet the quality of the person really, really clearly. Like do they align with the type of work that you do? Is the culture fit good? I would probably recommend way harder back channel on that. Because they'll appear more credible in your space. So that on paper they will look much better. But you go to make sure that the work product that they want to produce and the way that they work is aligned. We were really comfortable being like, there's no framework for anything here. No performance management. You will not get mentored. You'll come here and do stuff, and we want to ship code every day. If you like that then you've now self-selected into a good setup. [00:49:09] S2: Did you run an outbound process for hiring as well or was it mainly inbound people that just said, hey you're building, can I come work? [00:49:15] S0: It was mostly inbound, loose social network stuff, and mostly just because we had to be careful about solicitation, and stuff like that.
00:49:15 · Colin Zima, Pablo Srugo
[00:49:15] S0: It was mostly inbound, loose social network stuff, and mostly just because we had to be careful about solicitation, and stuff like that. [00:49:21] S2: And what about on the go to market side? Obviously on the product side, I can see that being helpful. Was it also helpful on the selling side? Where it's like, yeah, I've sold Looker into all these vendors. I'm going to call, you know, the people I used to sell to. [00:49:32] S0: A hundred percent. Our first handful of sellers were all Lookers. Our third hire, who now runs our Europe, was in Dublin and he was just a great seller at Looker. And so we were like, hey, we got no one over here. I don't know how this is gonna go, but we're gonna put a team in Dublin and I trust you. And I know if you can do it, then it works. And if you can't do it, then we need to go work harder as a product. But like, good luck. [00:49:53] S2: This is where to me, this playbook, like you mentioned the risk. Which I think is a genuine risk, but I'm like, if you're selling large mid market or enterprise. Why wouldn't you go and try to hire? I mean, there were times where it was just not doable because they're making so much money. You can't take them. But you've got the SaaS apocalypse playing for you still now, like you've got these stocks are flatlining or going down. They're certainly not going up fast. You can go to these people and be like, hey, you've sold your old product to, you know, X number of people. Come sell my new hot product to those same people. It's a no brainer.