A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:32:29 · Pablo Srugo
[00:32:29] S2: I think it's interesting to compare the before and after, like the SaaS app world and this world. As much as synchronization always mattered, if you think about the apps we would all know, right? You might've had Slack to message people on your team, Superhuman or Gmail to email people externally, Miro to whiteboard stuff and collaborate internally, Notion to write up docs and yeah, in a sense it'd be cool if they all talked to each other. That's kind of your Microsoft suite option. But it doesn't really matter that the data doesn't go across. It doesn't dramatically change the value prop and in many cases, why these apps are all big in their own right. You'd rather each of these tools be great at what they do than be mediocre at what they do but somehow synchronized. In the world of AI, and as I'm thinking about the value you're delivering. Which is you're taking something that touches many departments and moving and solving the entire problem across, the data sync is critical. If they have ten AI vendors, like they would have had ten SaaS apps, you absolutely are going to need to talk at each step of the way, right? As you do all these handoffs, which every single one, and they're going to have to all fully integrate together. Which then raises the obvious question, well, shouldn't it just be one product? Which is what you've built, but that's a big change. Data has been talked about for a long time. It's not until very recently, at least in my eyes, it's clear. Not just the value of data, but the value of having data that follows a workflow all the way through.
00:33:55 · Sean McCarthy
[00:33:55] S0: Yeah, one hundred percent and I think that that's been another big thing that we've tried to really mitigate against is that we also don't want to be reliant on other companies for this critical data. Where they're owning maybe these ontology layers, or they're owning critical information on the customer success side that we have to ask to make sure that we're getting routed at proper API or whatever it might be and so the more of that that we can pull in, it's a win-win, right? Obviously, we're not relying on somebody else and then the customer doesn't have to pay an additional vendor to perform that same task. And then additionally, what's happening right now is a lot of these enterprises are still testing the ROI from AI. And with that, they're not going to test with ten or fifteen companies, they're going to pick a handful of companies, you know, and test those out. And if you're successful, you can really dig your heels in, and that's what we've done and what we can hope to continue to do.
00:34:49 · Pablo Srugo, Sean McCarthy
[00:34:49] S2: So let's kind of go deep, maybe really tactical on. Because now you're mainly, you started with SMB, as you said, you moved up mid market, you got pulled to enterprise. Now you're at the place where you're winning in enterprise, you're beating well-known large enterprises at that game. Let's go deep on just kind of that enterprise playbook, right? From your vantage point, in terms of now you've done it for a while, you're starting to perfect that. What does it look like? Maybe start with, as an example, you've got an enterprise that you want to win. What happens? How do you make that happen over time? [00:35:20] S0: So we've done a number of things to kind of be scrappy and get in. I wish that I had twenty-five years in and could just pick up the phone, and call one of the C-suites and say, you're going to buy this for me for a million dollars. We've had to dogfight our way into the enterprise. [00:35:36] S2: Just to add more clarity here, these enterprises that you're selling to, is it just like 3PLs, but just bigger ones? Or what types of customers are we talking about?
00:35:44 · Sean McCarthy
[00:35:44] S0: No, we're talking like the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 now and so there was one thing maybe that's helpful is there was a really large switch from in the end of 2025. As well when we kind of made this enterprise grade solution, which was that we were selling primarily to supply chain companies and now we are selling to companies that operate a complex supply chain. So you can think some of the biggest grocers in the U.S., some of the biggest automobile manufacturers, Arma, and what those customers, they might sign kind of all over, but they all operate a hyper complex supply chain, right? So if you take Sprouts or Whole Foods, they're a grocery chain, but they have a very complex supply chain and so that is really who we are selling to now and have found a lot of market pull. And I think we're also not vying to go sell to the same brokerages and some of the other folks that our competitors are, and that's been beneficial for us. So what we'll first do is obviously see if we know anybody. Hands down for us, our ICP has been the senior vice president of operations. I would say ninety percent of the time, so we'll go find that person on LinkedIn. We have sent champagne, we have sent donuts and bagels to warehouses. We will look and see, do we have anybody in common? I'll have as many employees as I can to see, and here's who we're looking to target. Do you know anybody? You know, if we have the cousin's friend's brother's uncle, we'll reach out and say, hey, would you mind saying some words and maybe getting a meeting set up? And so we try to back channel first as much as we possibly can. And when we are approaching these enterprises, we also learned the efficiency playbook and what that means is, going to these customers as an AI company and saying, hey, we're going to make you more efficient. What are your problems? Works almost never because they have so many problems and they usually don't know where to begin. What we've changed to and where we've had a lot of pull is in the grocery example that I gave you, Going with that exact use case to say, we know that you have trucks showing up that have temperature breaches on them, this is exactly what we built, this is what you can expect in the first ninety days, and here's the average that our current customers are saving by doing this.
00:37:47 · Sean McCarthy
So it's a very pointed, tailored use case to something that actually matters to them and we're seeing that work eight out of ten times. I would probably say, where they will say, okay, this sounds interesting enough, where I want you to have a conversation with the director of operations. And they'll kind of kick us down after that. They'll kick us down to the director of ops, or maybe even the manager of ops, and we'll work really closely with those teams. Doing a lot of cross-threading during that time, showing that we can understand their use cases, building and conceptualizing what it would actually look like for them, giving them custom demos of exactly what they would be getting to get the buy-in and making sure that they have a really clear line of sight. And that we're getting as use cases and all that critical information. And then that's where that presentation comes in. Because most of the time, they're going to give a presentation to that same VP, and that VP is probably going to then give it to the board or the ELT or AI committee if they have one. And so that's where that comes in. We're putting all of that data in there, everything that we've grabbed from the use case information to the ROI analysis and building this deck for them. Sending it to them, so that hopefully it's just one less barrier that we have from an entry point.
00:39:00 · Pablo Srugo
[00:39:00] S2: So that's great as the high level framework. So let's kind of maybe dive into each step there. So the first one is, you know, you identify the SVP ops. Okay, that's easy. Then you go and you figure out if you have, you know, mutual connections. You start pinging. Do you kind of just set up? Okay, we've got these fifteen potential wins. These are the best, this is the best one, the best three, the best five. Let's do those first and see what happens. And within that, how meticulous are you about the messaging? Is it just, hey, you know, we're trying to speak to this person. I started connected, can you reach out or do you have like a much more crafted, very tailor made message you wanted to send? How do you think about all that?