Loading summary
Transcript196 lines
- [00:03]
A
Sam, welcome to the show.
- [00:04]
B
Turner, thank you for having me.
- [00:06]
A
I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. So you, I think you're most well known for scaling Brex to I think 12 billion was kind of what the headline numbers will say. I thought it'd be fun to do kind of like a deep dive, kind of like modern GTM playbook. The world's changed a little bit since you've done that. I know you were just telling me before we started recording you've thought a lot about it, but you haven't really talked about it much publicly. So it'd be interesting what has changed the most in the sales process over the past couple of years.
- [00:35]
B
Yeah, well, as I said, thanks for having me. And yeah, Brex, just for context maybe as we segue into how have things changed. I left Brex in like beginning sort of early 2022. So if you think about like the evolution of AI, my entire experience at Brex, which sort of ranged 2018 to 2020 to 2022, it was all. And so then, you know, I spent some time with Founders Fund and then this started as a bit of an incubation there and then Monaco became its own independent business. But things are quite different both from 2018 when I joined Brexit, and then 2022 when I eventually left. I think that there are specific sales workflows that AI and agents are just better than humans at. And these are the things that are fully online and I'll give a few examples of what those things are. And then I can sort of pattern match to the time at Brex and where people are spending their time. An example would be building your TAM based off of your icp. So you're a company, you want to sell to a bunch of companies. You have an idea of like, what does this list of companies look like? Let's go create a database of all of the companies that we want to sell to. Historically speaking, that is where it's called prospecting. That is where a lot of salespeople and maybe even founders, if it was pre hiring sales folks, spent their time going on LinkedIn, finding different company types, logging into databases, running lists, filtering the data, exporting the data, you know, manipulating those lists, adding like, you know, different employee counts in different locations and different verticals and sub verticals.
- [02:13]
A
So this is trying to like qualify. If you need your specific customer needs to meet, it's probably like a certain size company, certain thing that they do, et cetera. So you're saying that they're manually going through in a spreadsheet possibly. Maybe there's some tools, like there's some that exist, they'll like kind of give you like a dump out. But you're like filtering this down manually.
- [02:33]
B
That's right. So you just want to create a database of companies that you can sell to. And doing that, historically speaking, it's an iterative process, but it takes a lot of time.
- [02:44]
A
What percentage of time of like the general sales process was this stuff?
- [02:48]
B
Well if, if you are dedicated to outbound and generating demand. So like an sdr, some meaningful percentage of your time. When I was at Brex in pre AI was dedicated to like finding new companies that you can reach out to. And then the outreach was actually like maybe the easier part of the process. You just drop someone in a pre written sequence. But finding the right people at the right time, that took a lot of time and it took a lot of labor resources in this category of sales. So there's this concept of like building your tam, so finding all of the companies that you can sell to, scoring your accounts because not every company is created equal. So if you think about, let's say and we'll just leverage Monaco or even Brex because it's similar as an example, you're selling to startups. Well, not all startups are created equal. There are going to be some that have dynamics about that business that make it a better fit for you to sell to. Are they in San Francisco? You know, for us we may want a more highly score or highly prioritize an account that is headquartered in San Francisco. There are going to be some that are like the sweet spot for employee count range. There are going to be some that are like business model, is it sales led growth, is it product led growth? Some dynamics of the company that influence the way that you may want to prioritize that company. So historically speaking this was like a very manual process. So you build your tam, you score your accounts, you then overlay signals. So these are things like visiting the website, are they hiring for a certain role? Again you can kind of like do this with a human, but agents are just better at this stuff today.
- [04:22]
A
Yeah, because you might literally spend 10 minutes scrolling through the career page just to see if they're hiring for a certain role. And that's. You could, I mean that happens in a second.
- [04:32]
B
With AI you can have an agent that crawls every website in your entire database in basically real time. And so you then get to finding the buyers. So you know, there's this startup we sell to the sales Leader? Who is the sales leader? What is their email address Again? That used to be sort of like a manual process that humans would have to go through. All of this can be done in near zero time and it's super high leverage in just, just in terms of how then can salespeople or founders spend their time when they're thinking about go to market. And so then maybe like the right way of thinking about and I just gave a bunch of the workflow examples, but maybe the right way of thinking about how is AI today impacting go to market? It is not a silver bullet. It is providing founders and salespeople leverage to spend their time on the things that AI is less good at in the two like big categories for this. The first is customer facing and developing relationships. So you should be able to get a bunch of leverage from the agents that are creating meetings from this database of companies, writing the sequences for you, targeting people at the right time or ultimately generating meaning you spend more of your time customer facing. Agents are not good at that. People still want to buy from people. And then the second thing is I would describe like more creative either like brand or demand gen campaigns. So these are the types of things that just require some like creativity, ingenuity, but also operational complexity. You want to put up billboards, it's like difficult for AI to come up with that idea as a concept. What is the creative work with the company that sells the billboards? It's one example, but we could go through like a whole bunch of you're doing a launch, you raised a round of funding or you have a new product launch. Well, AI might be able to give you some ideas on that, but the orchestration of that, creating the video, coming up with the concept, you know, distributing that video on social, those are the things that are very high roi, use of labor today, human labor. And we can spend more time on that stuff because AI is giving us leverage in the areas that historically speaking, we had to spend a bunch of time.
- [07:03]
A
This episode is brought to you by numerl. Numerl is the fastest, easiest way to stay compliant with US sales tax and global vat. It's easy to set up and they automatically handle all registrations, ongoing filings and their API provides sales tax rates wherever you need them with all the integrations you need. Their solution combines AI driven automation with human expertise to manage global sales tax compliance. End to end Numeral supports over 3,000 customers, including companies like Brex and Character AI and they pride themselves on white glove high touch customer service. Plus they Guarantee their work and they'll cover the difference if they mess anything up. If you want to get compliant, check out numerl at their new domain numerl.com that's n u M E R A L for the end to end platform for sales tax and VAT compliance. This episode is brought to you by Flex. It's the AI native private bank for business owners. I use Flex personally and I love it because they use AI to underwrite the cash flow of your business, giving you a real credit line. The best part is 60 days afloat, double the industry standard. Flex has all the features you'd expect from a modern financial platform like unlimited cards, expense management, bill pay that syncs with your credit line and their new consumer card, Flex Elite. Flex Elite is a brand new ramp like experience for your personal life. A credit card with points, premium perks, concierge services, personal banking, cars and expense management for your family. Net worth tracking across public and private assets and a whole lot more fully integrated with your business spend. One card for your businesses, one card for your personal life. One card for everything. To skip the waitlist, head to Flex 1 and use My Code Turner to get an additional 100,000 points worth $1,000 after spending your first $10,000 with Flex Leap, that's Flex 1 and Code Turner for $1,000 on your first $10,000 of spend. Thank you Flex. And now let's jump in. And so you had spent a bunch of time doing sales, leading successful sales teams and you decided, I'm going to start this AI native sales company. Like what was the thing in the market that made you decide like this was like a, an okay thing to do, like the best, highest opportunity for you to work on.
- [09:23]
B
I sort of fell into it. I don't know that it was part of the plan. I was at Founders Fund and I was doing investing and one of the things that Founders Fund has a track record of doing is incubating companies. And so many of like, you know, the greatest technology companies from Palantir and Anduril and Scott has one called General Matter and Delian has Varda and more are Founders Fund incubations. And so at the time, you know, maybe it's like 2023 and not a lot of capital is being deployed. It's still like a bit of a hangover from 2022 kind of thing. There's only one type of technology company that I'm qualified to be the founder of, given that I'm a non technical founder and that is a go to market or sales technology company. And then thinking about the space broadly I do think that like we are in maybe not quite the early innings so much anymore, but relatively early trending towards middle innings of the flat of a platform shift through which a new market leader will emerge. And if we think about the category broadly this is like go to market technology or sales technology. The market leader is Salesforce. Salesforce benefited from the platform shift of on prem to the cloud. I think AI in a lot of ways sort of rhymes with this and it is sort of like an architecture level decision whether you are AI native or pre AI. And so then you know, there's only one type of technology company that I'm qualified to be the founder of a sales technology company. Now is the time to be the founder of a sales technology company. Or you could probably apply that across like all enterprise software and the function is ripe for disruption. So I can go deeper in like what is different about our approach. But that's the sort of high level, like why, why this company? Why now?
- [11:13]
A
I feel like you actually see it less today, but it's probably a year ish ago, maybe a year and a half ish ago. There's a lot of talk of like whatever the big incumbent is, they have all this distribution, they're just going to, you know, do some AI features and they're going to win. I don't know if that's necessarily happened yet. Like did you, did you kind of like go through that and go through the maze of how's the market going to evolve? What should we do?
- [11:39]
B
Well, I think I have an opinion on it and I think hard to predict. Well, a couple of things are true. The first is the market leader in this category which today is CRM. Um, we are going to invent a new category. We think CRM is like the legacy thing. That's a reactive database that people used to work in when I was at Brex and companies prior. I think now there's something more oriented around revenue automation. We are not just disrupting or displacing the like IT budget or the software layer. We're also going after the labor. And so then we are far more outcome oriented and labor disruptive than I think historically speaking like the reactive database that was the enterprise software layer. So we believe that the future market leader is just going to be significantly larger than today's market leader because it's not just the IT budget that the winner of this market is going after, it's also the labor budget and the labor budget is arguably larger than the IT budget. And then thinking about like how does this space evolve over time? Hard to predict like which company or vendor will be the market leader or the winner here. It's certainly possible that it is Salesforce, but I do think that the incumbents, whether it's Salesforce or HubSpot or others, they're faced with a bit of an innovator's dilemma where they have an existing set of customers in revenue that are on a platform that was architected pre AI and pre agents. And so they can either continue to serve those customers and invest in the relationships on the existing platform and improving that existing platform, or they can start from scratch and start to disrupt themselves with an entirely new truly AI native platform. And I think up until this point the decision that has been made is sort of like try and overlay AI on top of this pre AI system architecture that is better than no AI, but less good than sort of like first principles. Thinking of if we were going to build this from scratch, would we do it differently? Of course you would. You wouldn't architect a platform with a UI to be reactive to user input, that you actually have an agent do the input, pretending to be like a human.
- [13:54]
A
Yeah, well, it's kind of too when you think about like how the products are sold, whether it's sold top down or bottoms up. I feel like that depends on how you would implement the AI features where you know, if it's sold from steak dinners to like an innovation committee, you'll it'll be built a certain way versus if it's like the dude just needs to start using it and needs to work really well and say a bunch of time, make the money, cut costs, like whatever. Like that product decision is a lot and that what that looks like is so much different from the other end of the spectrum.
- [14:24]
B
Well, and maybe, maybe, maybe eventually it's sort of all the above. I do think my version of that is something like I think the disruption and evolution of the market. It's a bit Darwinian in that we are like Salesforce in sort of like the prior era. We're starting with like a sort of narrow, almost niche segment of the market, which for us is technology startups. And we believe and we're already executing on building a better product for a like very narrow segment of the market that today if you think about like where is Salesforce's revenue concentrated, it is not in like early stage startups. And so right now it's like not that disruptive to this really large business, but we will Then start to move up market, we will start to move outside of technology startups. But it starts with this narrow segment of the market that we can start to get to as close to a monopoly as possible and then organically expand from there. But again tying it back to the original thought, which is the disruption we think is Darwinian. The really large enterprises, it's very difficult to get off of the like platform or system of record or in this case like Salesforce specifically. And so this is a many years long journey that starts with like very transactional sales to founders and over time gets to steak dinners with you know, maybe committees that are considering the next like five year technology implementation.
- [15:56]
A
Yeah, and it's interesting when you, when you describe it as like a revenue engine, like every company, every dollar of GDP is revenue really. So it's like you think about building a business that has the biggest tam. Like the biggest TAM possible is generating revenue. Like everything needs to make money. So it's kind of like the, the, the Runway of how big it get is kind of just like the global economy. Not saying that The TAM is $100 trillion, but like that's what you're playing in. Every business needs to make money.
- [16:27]
B
You should, you should be my hype man for like talking to VCs. I think, I think maybe a couple of things come to mind as you articulate that. One is the outcomes are very objective with, with revenue generation, revenue. That's right. So, so it's like we, we are building the platform to drive towards outcomes, those outcomes. There are some inputs, inputs being things like meetings generated, conversion rates. Ultimately though, the outcome of that equation is revenue, customer growth. And so then like measuring the success of a platform like Monaco. When we are oriented around customer acquisition, revenue growth, it's like relatively certainly objective but relatively easy. And then if you think about where, where is and I'm sure there's a market date on this and maybe I should have a more thoughtful answer. But if you think about like where, where is so much of the global workforce today? What is like the function that they are in Sales is one of the most common. And so then if you can go after just like sales and in a way disrupt that global workforce, it's far larger than things like I don't know, support is an example in that you can apply that to all different functions. Legal is another example or finance is example. They're just more salespeople than there are each of those different functional positions in the world.
- [18:00]
A
I think just in terms of like there's Definitely all these different software categories. There's all these like new AI native products that are kind of getting created. When you talked about customer support CRM, I feel like there's a bunch of them. What do you think you're uniquely doing in terms of like actually specifically makes Monaco kind of stand out compared to what everyone else is trying to.
- [18:21]
B
Yeah, I think there's one intuitive application of AI in a platform like Monaco, product like Monaco, and that is like within the product you are having agents and effectively paying for compute to do the work that historically speaking, humans used to do.
- [18:42]
A
So it's really like putting labor into the software.
- [18:46]
B
Yeah. And I think, I think that is like, that is, especially in enterprise software, seeming like the premise of AI. Again, that is the intuitive application for AI in Monaco. And we're certainly doing that leveraging agents and lots of compute and a lot of the workflows that I just described that are all agent and AI led. I think the less intuitive thing that we were very deliberate about from early on is the impact that AI has on our ability to build a product quickly. And I think that that manifests in the like, breadth of the product that we have decided to build. And historically speaking, you know, especially in this category, but I imagine broadly as well, there were lots of point solution companies. There's the conventional wisdom that you sort of like find a problem, you build a solution for it, use that as a wedge, and then like, you know, sort of get really good at that, expand from there. We took like the exact opposite approach. And part of this was with the belief that the almost like cost to building software is trending to zero. So Monaco is a very broad platform. We are not just replacing traditional CRM like the vendors that I alluded to before. We are also replacing many, in fact, as many as we can of the point solutions that historically speaking have integrated over APIs. And we will continue to like, try and bite off as much as we possibly can just in terms of the breadth of the product because of how much faster we are able to, not just Monaco specifically, but we technology companies are able to build software. And so then the like more all in one, the more deeply integrated, the more that you can accomplish out of the same platform. I think that that is better over time. And so we started with that mindset from day one by trying to take on a lot of. I think that there are others in both the category and more broadly that have started with the narrow approach of we are the AI. This, we are just AI CRM or we are AI for doing outbound, something like that.
- [20:58]
A
I've seen outbound, I've seen just follow ups, all the calls and it just automates your follow ups for you. And there's all these different smaller categories you can build around.
- [21:08]
B
And my, and our belief is those should be features of a much broader platform and not independent products and companies. And like part of why this, this is true today and hasn't been true historically speaking is how quickly you can build something like that. So like part of our moat is the breadth of the platform that we've started with from day one.
- [21:33]
A
So the argument is just it's so easy to build things, you should be building more. Like this whole argument of you need to build all this stuff to make a full fully fledged feature suite, everything they need. Like that's not that big of a deal. Cause you can just build it really quick.
- [21:47]
B
It's just don't you want to partner with one vendor and have everything that you can get from the same place? And then there are so many by being sort of end to end with a customer life cycle, you don't have the issue of like data in different silos that you do. Historically speaking, if you have the like hub and then a bunch of SPOK surrounding that or a bunch of point solutions surrounding that and then you can also you can leverage complex workflows that if you we talked about like if you're an outbound only product, you don't have Insight into like ACVs, what's converting how customers are performing over time. Who did we just close? How should we leverage that data point back at the top of the funnel and by having one data plane and one sort of suite of feature functionality all coming from the same product, they're just real tailwinds that you can do things that you can't with the point solution and sort of hub model.
- [22:46]
A
Yeah, I feel like because what you could do is you could certain thing, certain messaging is converting best, certain. I mean I'm assuming you can like plug this stuff back into. I mean I don't, I think this is a different product at this point, but you can plug it back into like the customer service piece of it. Like what kind of feedback are you getting from customers in the analytics? Like what product is being used the most on the first 30 minutes in the product? What's the heaviest use case? Maybe you need to emphasize that more in outbound or in onboarding or something. I'm not sure but I feel like the more you can touch that stuff and incorporate that it'll just improve. I feel like you've mentioned this before. The two pieces of sales is increasing demand gen and then conversion. It's like anything you do to increase those. That's the whole point of all this.
- [23:40]
B
You nailed it. It's a math equation, right?
- [23:42]
A
Yeah.
- [23:43]
B
Revenue, revenue. There are three variables. It is opportunities or number of leads times conversion rates times acv. What is the price? If you want just customer count, you can remove the price. It's just how many opportunities are we getting? What is our conversion rate? So that's the math equation. And then I think like, you know, tying it back to this, like why go broad from the start Concept. There are a couple things. These two things, this concept of like generating opportunities and increasing conversion rates, they can play off of one another.
- [24:18]
A
When you can build anything, amplitude lets you know how to build the right thing. Use human language to get complex answers about your products. No more manually selecting events or building charts or dashboards. Just ask. Use agents to sense changes in customer behavior, decide what's causing them, and ask you if it's okay to fix it. Continuously in the background while you work. Get the answers you need while building directly in the tools you are already in. Like Claude Cursor, Lovable and more and for the first time, understand if your agents actually work. Measure quality, debug failures, experiment and measure their ROI with agent analytics. Amplitude with AI analytics. All you have to do is ask. This episode is brought to you by Merge. They just launched their new Agent Handler product. Here's Merge co founders Shenzi and Gil to tell you more about it.
- [25:06]
C
Your employees want to give AI access to every tool your company runs on. Starting today, they can safely introducing Agent
- [25:14]
A
Handler One place for your employees to safely connect AI to every tool they need.
- [25:19]
C
Need. This is Janelle. Janelle's a new marketing hire here at Merge. She already built her first AI agent to generate blog posts. We'll prompt Janelle's agent to create a blog post about our latest product releases. Right now her agent is scanning every tool it's connected to. In Slack, it's finding a private leadership thread with unreleased revenue numbers. In Google Drive, it's finding a board deck with company strategy growth targets and all our employees salaries. And in Salesforce it's finding something even more sensitive. Our customer records which show names, payment details and sometimes even government IDs. Now let's rebuild Janelle's agent with Merge Agent handle. Merge automatically sets Janelle's access permissions. We can also manually adjust them like letting her agent read slash Messages but blocking access to Salesforce contracts. Merge gives Janelle one secure access link that she can put into Claude. Now Janelle type the same prompt. Right now, her agent is pulling the event recap and approved quotes. It drafts the blog post perfectly. Behind the scenes, agent handler blocks seven unauthorized attempts in 30 seconds. It also logs every tool, call and access request in real time, creating a complete audit trail of the agent's work. It gives Janelle's agent access to everything it needs without anything that could put
- [26:42]
A
our company at risk.
- [26:43]
C
Right now, every company has two block employees from using AI tools entirely and fall behind or open the floodgates and risk giving employees access to everything.
- [26:57]
A
Merge Agent Handler creates the third option. Give every employee the full power of
- [27:02]
B
AI while keeping sensitive data protected. That's why Merge is already trusted by
- [27:08]
A
over 750 teams, including OpenAI, Ramp and Dropbox.
- [27:14]
C
Keep your company safe with Merge.
- [27:18]
B
I'll give two examples that were like, historically speaking, these Revops insights that required really. And I always benefited immensely from having incredible Revops counterparts. But like, you didn't get this level of insight until you had this sort of like BCG or McKinsey analyst that came in that was like, you know, spending a lot of time running reports on data and different cuts of data and then trying to extrapolate. Like, is this, does the data match the anecdotes? And if yes, like, how do we apply that back? This is pretty sophisticated workflows or pretty sophisticated outcomes that companies that certainly weren't the customer bases that we were going after would not realize until they called a couple hundred employees, historically speaking.
- [28:09]
A
Okay, why was it so hard? Was it just because the data was in all these different places and it just wasn't intuitive of thinking how they all linked together.
- [28:17]
B
The way that this starts is you have a founder and they start going after some companies and closing some deals. Then they hire a few salespeople and then they do that same thing and there are some learnings. And then you hire a sales leader and that sales leader comes in and they start hiring more salespeople. And it's not in the DNA of any of the people that I just mentioned to be as thoughtful about things like cutting data in a bunch of different ways and trying to identify trends. And so I'll give like two very specific examples. One from the days of Zenefits and then one from the days of Rex that we can now learn in near real time. And then it's like one of my favorite parts of our product. And as I said, to you earlier. Certainly don't want to make this, like, a Monaco commercial, but I do think that this is, like, how can we leverage AI whether it's Monaco or not in this, like, brave new world? There were things that, historically speaking, required these really incredible and expensive McKinsey analysts to come in and figure this stuff out. Well, it zenefits we were doing health insurance, and it was, like, regulated by the state. And you just. You asked a question like, why doesn't this exist? Earlier, nobody really. You had a bunch of demos that would come on your calendar, and nobody was paying attention to, like, this demo is in the state of Florida. And, like, what does that mean for the outcome of this demo? Because, like, my next demo is in the state of. I think you grew up in Michigan, and I grew up in Missouri or California.
- [29:51]
A
So you just, like, might not be able to legally sell in Missouri. So, like, you cannot even do the demo.
- [29:56]
B
Well, it was. It was less about that. It was more. It was. It was more about, like, you just never stop to think, like, is the location of where this company is influencing whether or not they sign up. And what we found was the thing that actually influenced conversion rates more than anything is where. Where's the company headquartered because of, like, the dynamics of the insurance space and, like, a bunch of other variables that went into this. And so then I'll give another example, and then I'll talk about sort of like, how can I do this? And what's. What's the major takeaway? Because this really is massive acceleration. We are. We are able to bring down things that, historically speaking, much larger companies were able to get the insights into and then take action on to, like, much, much smaller companies today. Because I can look at this stuff far sooner. At Brex, the equivalent of this was we could sell both to finance and accounting, like, controllers, and kind of the same idea. You would show up for a call, A finance person would be on the other end of the phone. Sales rep, like, wouldn't take note that I'm talking to a CFO or a VP of finance or an FPA person. Or it could be like, a controller or chief accounting officer, whatever the accounting profiles might be. But what we found is, like, finance people converted, like, a 4x rate to controllers. And, like, when you. When we figured that out and understood it, it made perfect sense because, like, the controllers wanted to go really deep on, like, how do you map to the expenses and have these, like, almost technical conversations at an accounting level that sales reps weren't equipped to have the finance people were like, what's our rebate? Or like, what's our credit limit? What's our rebate? What's our float? And like, those are the types of things that salespeople are like quite good at and actually really lean into. And so then the point of all of this is that we can find these things out because agents today are actually like, we have an INSIGHTS agent and it is trained on just like cut data in every possible way. Based off of buyer, based off of location, based off of vertical and sub vertical, based off of segment and sub segment. See, when you start to get to statistically significant information that we may want to surface to a customer about the way that their business is performing and if like that learning maps to something that like either, no, this seems like sort of arbitrary or like, yeah, this actually does seem right, you can then apply that back to the very top of the funnel. And of course, like the next step is very logical here. We oriented all of our sales resources around the states that had the highest conversion rates. We oriented all of our first touches into companies, into finance Personas. And so then everything else stays consistent. And you've just influenced conversion rates pretty materially by changing the sort of like top of the funnel action based off of the insight. And again, really difficult to, to accomplish this like full workflow if you are just doing the outbound or if you are just the system of record. But you need to go to a third party to orchestrate the outbound. And that's an advantage that being very broad has from day one.
- [33:13]
A
Yeah, because you might just be a great outbounder. That's your role in the team. You're doing outbound. You might be really good at it. And there's just so many things that are outside of your influence that you'll just never be as successful as you could because of one tweak earlier or later or whatever in the system that you just like don't get to touch and you don't even know is there.
- [33:33]
B
There's this age old debate that I think most people are on the other side of than me, which is you have a lot of sales resources that are dedicated towards demand. Jen, historically speaking, SDRs, they generate demand, they schedule meetings. And there is this sort of like age old debate. Do you compensate an SDR based off of the meetings that they are booking, which is something that they have full over, or do you compensate them based off of the revenue that those meetings generate? And I land on the side of the revenue that those meetings generate. And maybe it's not one size fits all and maybe there's like nuance that like, you know, you can have some mix of the two. And those sorts of things we certainly spend. Shouldn't spend too much time on that specific topic here. That said, I do think that like the era of AI, it allows us to only orient around the outcome that we are driving towards, which is revenue. Like, like what are the characteristics of the companies that are closing that we should then apply back to the companies that we are targeting and not what are the characteristics of the companies that we can get a meeting with regardless of what happens from there.
- [34:41]
A
Yeah, because then you can at least use that downstream data to tailor what goes into the meeting. Right. Like who's actually closing book meetings that are more likely to close.
- [34:50]
B
There are really fun things that we can do with this that are like. And I can think of specific examples where there we had reps that just sold far better to founders than they did. Like finance people, as an example.
- [35:06]
A
Like you're saying that they were just like, maybe they hit it off more, they related better, they knew the problems and could hit on them better.
- [35:12]
B
You know, maybe in certain instances, like they, they were sort of like networky and like hosted events and knew a bunch of founders and like name drop founders and like they were sort of like in the founder community type thing. And so then these insights, they aren't necessarily in addition to insights at the sort of like customer business type level or the Persona level, you can get insights at the rep level, which are things like you have reps that are converting certain types of opportunities. A very common one here is the size of the company and like when you should start segmenting, who should be in which segment. And you can start to get like pretty interesting feedback and insights about like, did you know that this rep is performing incredibly well here? Performing less well here. And then I can sort of orient who do we assign this meeting to based off of who has the highest probability of closing it.
- [36:14]
A
Interesting, huh? Yes. You can just start to like dynamically shift your sales team. It's almost like, you know, it's like dynamic pricing and like Ubers or airline tickets, like dynamic allocation of the staff, like of the team.
- [36:28]
B
You can gamify everything. It's all oriented around outcomes. How can we close the most customers and how can we close the most revenue? And we do it in a way that is like totally objective. It's not the sales leader like favoring someone and giving them more opportunities. This is all AI interesting.
- [36:49]
A
Are there Any other things that have changed over the past couple years and or are there any major things that have like stayed the same?
- [36:57]
B
The things that have stayed the same. And there's interesting, there's something that there's a little bit, there's something that's a little bit dangerous about the introduction of AI into go to market. I think probably more so with founders than there is with sales organizations. We speak with a lot of folks and have to sort of like reiterate and remind folks like AI is not the silver bullet for go to market broadly. Like whether it's Monaco, any, any tool out there. It is, it is not like you are automating away go to market so that you can then spend your time. You know, most founders are not like me. They're either like product visionary, highly technical, that sort of thing. So, so like AI is not this silver bullet. And so then there's like, you know, maybe a risk that you start to leverage AI too much and you then remove yourself from the like incredibly high ROI things that you have to do as a founder. And so then tying this back to your original question was like what has stayed the same? There is no higher ROI use of my time. And I would maybe argue founders that are post product market fit but pre sort of like scaling a sales organization like that phase of company building. I would argue there is no higher ROI use of my time or founder time more broadly than spending time with customers being customer facing. And so then like AI doesn't, you know, automate away having to spend time meeting with either prospective customers or current customers. In fact the inverse is true. Maybe this is like slightly contrarian AI enables you to spend more time customer facing. Zoom is great when you have the opportunity meet a customer face to face, especially if your deal size is warranted. You know, we sell to startups in San Francisco and so oftentimes I or we will default when it's convenient to a meeting. We're not getting on a plane to go to meet with a New York founder for a $25,000 ACV deal. It just like doesn't support it. But if you are a founder selling into mid market or mid market plus into the enterprise, you should error especially when you're meeting with a marquee account. Just get on the plane, go meet the customer. That has not changed. And I think the ROI in that is incredibly high. And then here's the other thing that I touched on earlier. We do a lot of investment in I think what would be categorized as marketing. This is a Brand, Yeah, brand marketing, even demand gen marketing. And I think that there's something, there's something that like is less intuitive about that spend. And people try and get too not cute, they try and get too scientific with measuring the impact of these sorts of things at an early stage. And so I'll give some specific examples, but then I'll talk about like the actual impact that a company like Monaco realizes. And this is all through the lens of like what is true today. That was true historically also, and I think that was the original question. So these marketing campaigns, we have billboards going up, we have the launch videos. When we do the fundraise announcements or the product launches, we do gifting campaigns where we send people poker sets that are like these kind of cool poker sets that I think for us we maybe pay 100 bucks or something like that for them. We throw these poker tournaments that we call it the Monaco Invitational. Really fun event. Founders love poker tournaments. We give away cash to the winners and we throw a party in like the sort of like the obvious outcome of this is something like, how many customers did you sign up that attended your poker event? And like, what did you spend on the poker event? And like, what is the ROI there? And is that a channel that you should continue investing in? How much did you pay for the poker sets that you sent to a bunch of founders? How many of those founders signed up? And should you continue doing that stuff, billboards, It's a little harder to do the attribution on the billboard stuff. The thing that I think is less sort of understood and why we lean into this stuff so much. And I'll revisit maybe one important nuance or qualification here when we now do outbound to the founders that we're reaching out to. Our reply rates today, same company, same product, same message.
- [42:03]
A
This is at Monaco.
- [42:04]
B
This is at Monaco today. They are exponentially higher than they were before we launched into our public beta. And so like we were a unknown company the way that definitionally all startups are unknown when they first get started. The reason or a big part of why our reply rates are so high is because of these brand campaigns that we are doing where there is now like name and brand recognition. And so then there's like two things that are far more difficult to quantify when doing something like a gifting campaign, a billboard campaign, an event. What is the impact of that? Both on the efficacy of outbound reply rates and meeting rates from people who receive your message. Oh, I see your billboards everywhere. Oh, I heard about Your event, I'd love to come to the next one. Be happy to, like, take a look. But then also conversion rates, because you have almost like, inherent credibility where if you have brand recognition, people are talking about you, those sorts of things. There is a higher likelihood that somebody feels comfortable and confident moving forward with someone that has a brand that exists out there.
- [43:19]
A
And it's even just like a, hey, it's in, like, the group chat. It's like, hey, we just signed up for Monaco, or we're thinking about it, I got a demo. Anyone else use it? And if like, six other people, like, oh, I've seen their billboards, or, like, I use it, or I went to the poker tournament, that's like multiple touch points that you didn't. You can't measure that. Really, like, you don't even know those are happening.
- [43:37]
B
You nailed it. And so then there's maybe like one takeaway and then one thing that I said I would qualify and revisit at the beginning because I think it's important for me to touch on the final aspect. I get asked the question all the time, how do you measure. How do you measure the impact of the Monaco Invitational Poker Tournament? How do you measure the impact of the billboards? How do you measure each of the different things that we're doing? The launch videos that cost money? The real answer is, we don't.
- [44:06]
A
You don't. You don't even matter.
- [44:07]
B
We do not. And I think my perspective on this is something like, you will spend more time and effort trying to measure, and the outcome of that measurement won't be accurate because there's, like, so much information that you don't have when you're trying to do the measurement of it, that your takeaways will actually guide you in the incorrect direction. And the anecdotes here are actually more valuable than the data points themselves. And when I say anecdotes, what I mean by that is like, the things that people are regularly bringing up to you that they are seeing. And, like, we have failed at some things that we have tried. And I won't go, let's see, here's an example, and I'm getting a bit rambly, but I'll go back to the. I think there's an important qualification. We did a lot of really incredible, similar, sort of like, creative marketing campaigns at Brex. And a lot of my learnings that I've taken to Monaco with me were things that we tried and were successful at Brex, me and others that were trying these different things. One of the things that we did that wasn't successful was we opened up a restaurant.
- [45:22]
A
Still comes up, people still talk about that.
- [45:24]
B
Yeah, we called it South Park Cafe and it was like a co working space and it was like a real restaurant that served lunch and dinner. And I don't know exactly how many employees we were at the time, but let's call it like 50. And the restaurant had like 20 or 30 employees. And so running a restaurant is hard. The lesson isn't necessarily like don't open up the restaurant, but the lesson is like you should be trying a bunch of stuff. Some of this stuff is not going to work. And that was an example where we just like could tell it wasn't driving the impact from a lot of the anecdotes. And again, Brexit billboards and Brex did a bunch of other things that we're also leveraging. And you just like, you kind of know now over time, if you get into what today is a Brex size company or probably even smaller, of course you want to start like measuring this stuff. But early on, like the phase of company growth that we are at, and we're about 50 employees today, I do think that you just gotta try a bunch of stuff and then you'll sort of like anecdotally understand what is working well. Double and triple down on that stuff. The things that like don't work super well, chalk it up as like a win that you were willing to try it and there's like a learning that you can now like cross that one out and move on to another thing that you can try.
- [46:43]
A
I feel like personally, one of my best marketing stunts that I ever did, which I always forget about this because like I didn't really think about it that much, but I did this kind of fake VC pitch competition on TikTok. So there's a feature on TikTok where you could stitch a video or like duet a video, like you go side by side. And I made a video of me with a like filter messing up my face, a filter messing up my voice and making it really annoying. And I pretended to be a VC listening to your pitch. And my questions were like, what do you do again? Like, who introduced us? Wait, what's your tam? I was arguing with my gardener on the phone, I think, and it was like the classic terrible experience that a founder gets when they're pitching an investor who just doesn't care. And there was like 100 people that responded making a pitch, pitching me while I was doing that in the video, a bunch of people posted on Twitter. And I don't know how many views, I've never even checked, but it probably got a million views just over all the videos and channels. And I always forget that I did that. But that is probably the video that the most people mention. Like. Like, oh, yeah, I know you do that one. Like VC pitch video. And I was like, oh, yeah, I did do that. And like, I don't know, I just kind of did it for fun randomly. Once it took me like half an hour to do. And like, I don't know what the ROI was, but, like, it. I think it helped.
- [48:01]
B
It's hard to measure, right?
- [48:02]
A
Yeah.
- [48:03]
B
But there's like, the objective, because that one's online. There's the objective, like, how many likes did it get? How many views did it get? But then there's the anecdotes that are what you just described, which is the, like, people mention to me all the time, like, I remember the like, you know, VC pitch video that you did. And so then, like, it also sounds like it's lasting. So maybe, maybe there's a. What's the, like 2.0 version of that that you could bring back?
- [48:31]
A
I should probably do another one. I mean, it was so effective. The one thing I've been doing is I've been hosting comedy shows where we, like, hire really good comedians. It's pretty hard to do, but people seem to like those.
- [48:46]
B
That's really smart. One of the things that I do when I hear something like that, I immediately think, like, oh, we could totally.
- [48:54]
A
If you like that idea, we should do one. Cause it's kind of expensive. I can't pay for it myself. I haven't been able to sponsor it.
- [49:02]
B
I'm down.
- [49:02]
A
But yeah, but it's interesting because most people, you invite them to an event and it's like a dinner. Maybe it's like a panel with some speakers and they're just talking about AI, whatever. You just kind of get. And you're like, ah, do I really have to go to this? So I think, like, the poker's interesting because you're like, oh, I love poker. I play. Or comedy shows is like, ah, I haven't been to a comedy show in a while. And the comedians are like Netflix special comedians. You're like, oh, this would probably be fun, like, bring my girlfriend or like, bring someone on the team or something. Or so it's like you actually want to go to it. And like, you.
- [49:38]
B
You remember it, what you just described or version of what you just described. You have to like, do things that are different. You said the dinners look at some scale. It probably matters to host dinners. And you can have like a special guest speaker and those sorts of things. It's certainly not like, that creative. Like, lots of companies are having dinners. I think the bar for a dinner, like, it's just. It has to be like some really cool restaurant. Like, I don't know why people are gonna show up otherwise, but I do think that. And that's why I took note of the comedy thing. I was like, oh, that's actually a really good idea. Because, like, people love to laugh and, like, it is different. You don't see a lot of startups or VCs or anyone that are hosting, like, a comedy show. That would be pretty fun. Could even do, like, maybe an iteration on this. And, man, we'd have fun planning something like this. We do like a roast. Like a roast of sort of like a prominent figure that's like, up for getting made fun of that I suspect a lot of people might find entertaining. So that's an idea. And then I'll come up for. Aaron, you can control the show. There was one thing that I wanted to come back to that sometimes I sort of, like, forget because I have. I said to you earlier, I don't do a lot of, like, the podcasts anymore, but one on one, I'll have similar conversations to folks that are sort of in line with the one that we're having right now. There is something about, like, yeah, but you've raised a bunch of money and everything that you're talking about is really expensive. Or many of the things that you're talking about are really expensive. There's certainly some truth to that. Here is. Here's maybe like the. In a world where you are bootstrapped or you have sort of like seed stage capital available to you that you're not going to be spending six figures on billboard campaigns and more. I think there's like, a bit of a process to follow. But also, like, certain things can be incredibly effective and not that expensive. Uh, so the process to follow is like, just every single month, force yourself to do, like, what is our creative idea for the month? Like, you know, you meet with a group, you put stuff up on a whiteboard, you maybe vote on, like, what is the best idea here? Comedy show is a great one. And I suspect that, like, comedy show, you could probably do it in an office. You could probably get like a couple between amateur and professional level comedy folks to come in and do it for, like, not that much money.
- [52:20]
A
Yeah, I'm trying to think of what did we pay? I think we used Merges office. I don't know if you know, Merge in New York City. Okay. Merge.dev is the website. They're actually. They may actually be sponsoring this episode of the podcast, but they're our sponsor. And then we had my friend Alexis Gay. I don't know if you know her, she's kind of like a professional corporate comedian. Yes, she does like B2B comedy.
- [52:41]
B
I see her, I see her on Twitter. I think a lot. Funny stuff.
- [52:46]
A
She's really funny.
- [52:46]
B
Impersonations, I think a lot. Right?
- [52:48]
A
Yeah. And so she helped me plan and run it and then helped me get some friends that were kind of amateurish but pretty good. We had people who worked at some tech companies that were kind of, you know, comedians on the side that kind of like volunteered. I think, I think we paid them a little bit, but it wasn't a ton. And so, yeah, it's just generally the very first one we did, it was in an office. We basically just like paid for food and like a little bit for the comedians. It was like really, really reasonable. Like it was like maybe a couple grand total.
- [53:19]
B
It's a perfect example of something that you can do, is really fun and maybe we should do a version of it. We did the poker sets. And I think the trade off here is like, oftentimes there's maybe two things that you should orient around when you don't have a huge budget on a campaign. The first is like, really creative and sometimes it's operationally complex because like the things that cost a lot of money, you know, like the third party advertiser type stuff, paid ads, billboards, those are things it's pretty easy, pretty easy to like put up billboards. Pretty easy to put up paid ads and like pay Google a lot to like surface this to somebody who maybe Googled something that you want to literally
- [54:07]
A
put in your credit card.
- [54:09]
B
That's exactly right. And it does it. And that is why everybody is doing it. So force yourself to try and come up with these creative things. We did the. We did the poker sets. You know, like maybe the retail on them was 180 bucks and we paid 100 bucks for them. But if you send those to 100 different founders, you're at like $10,000 of spend on and it's like very targeted. And you're giving something that's like kind of cool to somebody. So it's not free, but like $10,000 to target a hundred of like the Best potential customers that you can acquire. Gosh, like, if you try and do that on LinkedIn or on Google, that money goes by, like, very, very fast. And this stands out in such a way. Like, imagine you as the recipient of that poker set. Would you rather have the person that's advertising to you pay Google to, like, track you and surface their ad? Or do you want the poker set like you want the poker set? So do things that stand out. It doesn't have to, like, totally break the bank. You can set budgets. When you come up with these creative ideas, I think, like, the worst thing to do is nothing at all. Just, like, try stuff.
- [55:21]
A
Yeah, and it's interesting too. Like, with, you know, physical thing versus the Google Ads. Like, I'm sure I have gotten ads. I just don't remember. Like, I just don't even remember seeing them in my feed necessarily or when I'm searching, versus if I literally got a poker set, like a big package and I opened it up. Whether I used it or not, I'll just remember that that happened. Like, I may throw it out. I may be like, I hate poker or whatever, but I will always remember that. I got shipped this thing. I have people that send me stuff now. And, like, I have my wife joke on me. There's this one guy who just keeps sending me stuff. My wife is in on it. Now my wife knows about it because it's, like, so memorable. And I don't even remember what. It could probably be a better thing that the person sends me, but I talk about it to people.
- [56:10]
B
Yeah, you just said something that was really insightful, which was the thing could be better. I have maybe a cliche saying that is like, it's not the thought that counts with the gift. Do not send, like, a T shirt with your, like, startup, you know, logo on the T shirt to somebody that you want to sell to. The gift actually does matter. Like the thing that you're sending to somebody. In a way, it could be like, negative value if the thing is like some tchotchke that's like super. Like, it actually could have the opposite effect that you wanted. So actually do be thoughtful about the thing that you are sending to somebody. And I think the bar is actually quite high where it's something like, would you think that this is cool and, like, genuinely cool, not, like, because you're the one doing it and you're like, inherently biased or something like that. And then the only other thing maybe is like a takeaway would be something like, try and do a little bit of A thought exercise. And you can actually do. You can measure this if you think about like all of the dollars that you're attributing to marketing spend.
- [57:18]
A
Yeah.
- [57:19]
B
Try and have like some meaningful percentage. Could be 50%, could be 30% that you sort of label as directly benefiting the target customer versus like a third party advertiser. So this is gifting, this is the like poker tournament that we are hosting. That would definitely be in the category of like, beneficial to prospective people that like, they come, they have a great time. Like, that's way better than the like, we're putting up a bunch of billboards, which we also do. But again, I think just like a bit of a thought exercise or framework, like how many of the dollars that we're spending on marketing directly benefit the people that we are marketing to versus benefiting the third party advertisers that are marketing to them.
- [58:05]
A
One of my favorites on this is it's a company called GRE Diale. It's like AI code review. What he did is he sent Greptile branded energy drinks to engineers. It's like super tangible. Like, hey, you're up all night coding. Just drink some Greptile energy drink and then maybe check out the code review
- [58:21]
B
and they'll probably use it. Greptile is great. Docs is the CEO. They're Monaco customers.
- [58:28]
A
So amazing. That's cool. Hopefully they have a good revenue engine that they've got going now on the Monaco platform.
- [58:33]
B
They seem to be crushing it.
- [58:34]
A
That's what I've heard.
- [58:35]
B
Yeah.
- [58:35]
A
Um, one thing I wanted to ask you. Even when we were like thinking about all this branding and just general stuff like that, like, should you be doing this before you have a product? And then even like, should you be doing it before you have any customers? Like, what's this order of like, should you just like talk to customers first and then this informs all this stuff? Like, what order should you kind of be doing all this?
- [58:58]
B
So this is one where like I will speak to the Innovone experience of building Monaco.
- [59:04]
A
Yeah, maybe that'd be interesting. Is like, yeah. What did you do?
- [59:07]
B
What we did. And let me qualify this with something like, unlike I think a lot of the sales topics, customer acquisition, those sorts of things, I have less experience on the, like, when do you start to, I don't know, do some brand spend and like, as you're developing your product, are you spending anything? So I'll just tell you what we did with that qualification. So we were building for maybe about a year. We deliberately built in Stealth. During that year, the one thing that we were doing that gave us growing confidence in what we were building towards is just pretty regular customer interview like feedback sessions. And we would just, we would schedule like a discovery call. We would pitch a little bit what we were building towards, get people's feedback, could be founder, it could be salesperson, and just get feedback on like the concept and you know, those sorts of things.
- [60:13]
A
So this was with existing customers or potential.
- [60:17]
B
We didn't have a product to sell. So it was, it was just like discovery with the potential customer base that it was educational but at a minimum it like reinforced and gave us more confidence that we were building in the right direction. I do think, you know, I went back to this like we built a very broad sort of compound startup. We're, we're replacing a bunch of different tools. And that is like one of the downsides of doing that is it takes a little bit longer to build even in the world of AI and Cogen tools and those sorts of things. And so we didn't want to like sort of be building in the dark for a year. And so as we were building, we were just getting feedback from ultimately potential customers, just doing things like discovery calls. We then we didn't charge. This is like a little bit contrarian, but during the, during the design customer phase, which was about six months of time where we picked, let's call it 15ish design partners, we had a product that they could start using. It certainly wasn't like the quality bar to launch and like the real value for our business during that design phase was improving the product. It wasn't like the ability to generate revenue. So we onboarded these 15 design customers. We actually didn't want to charge because it would have been friction in getting the thing that we really wanted, which was a bunch of the feedback we did though, we had to get people to commit that they actually would make this their platform of record. They wouldn't use this as like a long side, another tool or something like that. So we got sort of buy in and commitment that we were gonna build this together during this design customer phase.
- [62:02]
A
Okay, so they weren't on it yet, but they like promised you in three months when it's ready, they would switch over.
- [62:09]
B
They switched over, they switched over when it was ready for the design phase. So it was, it was rough around the edges. But we also, you know, we had services that accompanied it and that sort of thing. But they, they agreed to partner with us. We didn't charge them. And up until our Public beta launch, which was in February. We were operating in this like stealth mode, partnering with design partners, not charging them for using the product, getting a bunch of feedback, getting the product. From like day one of where it was the design customer phase to when we were going to launch, we spent $0 on marketing. We were doing outbound to test the product and maybe acquire some of those design customers. All of the design customers were either through Monaco or through introductions. So investors, employees, just personal networks, that sort of thing. And then we really wanted to do the like coming out of stealth launch. And that is when we switched from zero investment on anything brand related and in fact invested in not having a brand. Meaning all of our linkedins said, you know, like company and stealth instead of what the company even was called. Our website said like coming soon. So you went to monaco.com, it was just like literally coming soon. And then we wanted to do the like zero to a hundred sort of like shotgun blast style, which was like on the day that we launched, which is February 11, all sorts of stuff happens. It's like you get the delivery of your poker sets and billboards go up and we have the launch video and tons of outbounds going out. And so everything sort of coming together all at the same time and going from like totally unknown to hopefully some level of brand recognition in our target market as fast as we possibly could. That, that was the sort of mindset shift.
- [64:11]
A
Okay, so why do that? 0 to 100. Like, I feel like a lot of people, they're, you know, they'll post publicly of like, hey, like we're not launched yet. Looking for design customers. The website will be there, but they haven't really put much demand gen behind it. Maybe some investors have it listed on their website, but again, they're like not a big launch. So why did you go from like literally stealth.
- [64:33]
B
Yes.
- [64:34]
A
To this, the, to the 100?
- [64:35]
B
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, maybe a reason not to. And this is probably the wrong approach for most people in companies. Meaning the like 0 to 100, stay in stealth for as long as you can and then do like a big bang with your launch. I think like something that enabled us to do that. And this was true both at Brex for different reasons and for us now at Monaco, which was like, we didn't, we didn't need to be known to acquire the initial set of customers that we needed to, to get the product to the level of sophistication to launch it. Brex. Brex was a YC company. Brexit like you know, all of their. The reason Brex was Brex is because their batchmates couldn't get credit cards. There were a lot of like international folks, younger people that didn't have, you know, a lot of credit history. And so in a lot of ways Brex like built the initial product for their batch and so then like, you don't need to be well known for that. And then like, you know, the next batch is kind of the same idea. It was like, you know, very early to market and those sorts of things. So Brex, for let's call it six months, was able to build in stealth because of the like word of mouth that enabled them to acquire design customers before this like big public launch for us. I think that like the outbound was working. I had the ability to offer to be like a bit of a go to market advisor to some of the customers that signed up as design partners. That's something that's like a little bit unique to me and a complimentary skill set to the founders that we're working with that many founders don't have that capability. And so I think like if you don't have the ability to acquire a set of design customers through like network effects or some way that is different than actually being known, it's going to be very difficult for you to get to people to agree to use your service if like you don't have a website as an example. And so that was a luxury that we had at Brexit and we have at Monaco also. I think the, the benefit of doing it is, you know, like maybe this isn't the perfect analogy but like that there's like a frog in boiling water that like doesn't totally notice as like the temperature rises just a little bit. And then like, you know, maybe over the course of and for context, Monaco launched about three months ago. You can imagine if we had sort of like spread this out over the preceding nine months when we were in like some of the design customer phase to today you lose the sort of like all of a sudden I'm seeing this thing everywhere, which again the probably imperfect analogy that comes to mind is the like frog in potentially boiling water that like there's some real benefit to. And I think maybe the outcome of that is you're able to just. And everything orients around growth. Right now you're able to go from zero to very fast growth versus if you had started in the sort of like design customer phase. You have a website, you start like posting on social media. The clock is Ticking a little bit longer. It's harder to make a big splash when you come out. People have kind of already heard of you. So I think for us, the real benefit was our growth trajectory went like this instead of like this or something like that.
- [68:09]
A
And I think too, just speaking from my own personal experience, there's probably quite a few products where you see them when they first start working out, they launch it, and you're like, that's not that great. Honestly, you know, you're just like, it's kind of cool, but whatever, kind of skip past it. And that's the perception you have, and it might be a year later and it's a great product. And I just. I've never noticed because I just remember it for, like, that very first thing that, like, wasn't that good. And I just, you know, and. And maybe I wasn't the target customer or whatever, but I feel like that's also the other downside to this or the upside of. I remember when. When you launched, I remember seeing it, and I remember thinking, oh, this is like, pretty good. Like that. That was my thing. When I saw the product, I was like, oh, this looks like. Like really robust. Like, to your point of. It kind of has a couple different features. I've seen people build AI, native sales companies, products around all in one. And then of course, like, all the other things that kind of went into the launch, but just seeing the product, I remember thinking like, huh, this is pretty good.
- [69:07]
B
Well, thank you for the compliment. Yeah, I think it's so subjective. There's another topic that is this sort of like, how do you know when you're ready to launch?
- [69:16]
A
Yeah.
- [69:17]
B
And how did you know? There's another one of those where it was like the marketing example, where it's like, we don't measure it. It was like we just thought we were. It's. It's like, it's a sensation, what we did. And we think about, like, company building in different phases. We did, like, the design customer phase. We felt like we had sort of, like, reached a level of quality and impact that we could go into a public beta. So it was sort of like private beta when we were design customers. We're now in this, like, phase of public beta. What does public beta mean? It's sort of like we're metering who comes in. There's a wait list for companies that aren't, like, right in the strike zone of who we think we can be really successful partnering with, and then we will ga. And so then I think that this, like, Public beta phase. It probably bought us some time and goodwill to start to get brand recognition. But also have the folks that we're working with understand that we're still pretty early. We are a public beta product and ga, which should come in July, I think that then that is what we should really earn our reputation around. We're in the fortunate position that we have incredible customers that really love us. And I think actually most of our revenue today comes from referrals, which is maybe the data point that suggests that more than anything.
- [70:49]
A
Can you kind of walk us through sort of the, the launch playbook? I know you, you post about it, we'll throw a link in the, in the description if people just want to read it and maybe they can follow along while you're talking through it. But what was kind of the playbook that you used to launch?
- [71:03]
B
Yeah, well, I think there's, I think there's one sort of table stakes thing that everyone should do and if you don't, it's just a missed opportunity. And maybe even before I get there, you can launch a bunch of times.
- [71:20]
A
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's actually one of my favorite things. When someone's like, we're launching again. Okay, cool.
- [71:24]
B
You don't even have to say again. So we did our public beta launch and we had like a very product centric video and we announced our Series A funding that probably helped like amplify that and certainly earned us maybe like some of the media. I think TechCrunch did the A, we did like the Series B announcement which almost came off like a launch. It wasn't, it was just like a Series B announcement.
- [71:50]
A
This was a couple weeks ago, right?
- [71:52]
B
Yeah, it was a few weeks ago.
- [71:53]
A
Yeah.
- [71:54]
B
And we are going to do like our GA launch. This is all within a span of, we're talking about like February 11th to mid July. And so this is in a span of like five months and we're like three launches in, in a way. And so then like maybe that's like the first qualification is launch. Do like a product launch. Do like a fundraise launch. Like just, just keep taking advantage of these sort of like point in time opportunities that you can get, you know, sort of attention and amplification around the company and what's happening. And then so the like table sticks thing is, especially with the product launch, I like the video. So I like the format of a video. And then you want to have like a deliberate social media strategy around like doing the launch video. And then how are we getting the Distribution. So first is on the content side. Content side, like, what is the post? What is the video that matters? What matters equally as much is the distribution. So the way that we do this is you get a spreadsheet. You have a few different tabs on the spreadsheet. You have employees, investors, like friends of the firm and customers. Those might be your four tabs. And then when you do your launch, you sort of, like, track and certainly have outreach to both the day before and then day of each of the different people in these categories. And so then, you know, one thing with employees is you probably want to ask people, like, who are the three to five most influential people that you have in your network or that you used to work with or that have the largest followings and, like, add those to the, like, you know, friends of the firm tab. But you do want to be deliberate about this, like, distribution on top of just, like, what is the launch thing? They're sort of equally important. That, I think, is, like, the table stakes thing to do, and everyone should be doing that. I do like the launch campaigns. So we did a few. We did. I've talked about it a few times. The, like, poker sets that we delivered. We had trucks that were driving around San Francisco that had, like, the LED sides and the LED backs to the trucks.
- [73:59]
A
Yeah, what's this? Can you tell the story there real quick? I think it was, like, hangover from the super bowl kind of a thing.
- [74:03]
B
It was. Yeah. The story was I was out for a run, or probably more realistically, a walk on, like, the Saturday before the Super Bowl. And there was just, like, as far as the eye could see, these LED box trucks that I'd never seen in San Francisco before. Maybe they, like, exist for conferences or something, but I'd really never seen this.
- [74:23]
A
This is like a truck that has, like, a screen. An LED screen that, like, both sides and the back.
- [74:28]
B
Yeah.
- [74:28]
A
Okay.
- [74:29]
B
And it was all gambling stuff. It was all, like, you know, whatever draft. Like, I don't know the specific advertisers, but it makes sense. Like, it's a Super Bowl. And so then it was all these, like, gaming companies that were advertising on these trucks. And we were launching. We launched on February 11, so I think that was the Wednesday following the Super Bowl. And I went over, like, across the street and just, like, met one of the truck drivers or whatever and. And ask him, like, are you guys, you know, here this week? Or whatever. He was like, here's, like, the card for the company. So anyway, I started calling around to some of these companies. And we took advantage of this like excess inventory that was already in San Francisco. And so I don't know what like the regular price of this stuff would have been, but maybe it was just like literally the. The Saturday before launch we sort of fell into like even doing this campaign because I was walking around and like I saw a bunch of these trucks. And then we sort of benefited from, I think financially from the inventory that was already here around the Super Bowl.
- [75:25]
A
It was unused. Like, it wouldn't have been used anyways.
- [75:27]
B
Well, yeah, I think, I think like, and maybe we'll do this again, but when you do it sort of organically, like had we done this without the trucks being here for the super bowl, they've got to like drive in from Vegas or LA or wherever. Like, it's probably more common to have the trucks driving around. There's like expense associated with that. It makes sense. They have direct costs for the drivers and everything to get up here. So you know, we got like crazy discount rate to have folks that were in the trucks that stayed here outside of that, the process. And I mentioned this, and I've done this with a few of our customers, but I mentioned this in like a different format. But when you get ready for the launch, like 45 days before the launch, get the company together, your company might be five people. Or just get like the five people in the company where this makes the most sense. Have that be the launch committee. Let's see, maybe you meet on Friday afternoon for lunch or happy hour or whatever. And then like the weekend assignment is all right, everybody come up with like two to three ideas for our launch. And like in a lot of ways, the crazier the better. Like nothing is off limits. You may want to establish some budget constraints. Like you may be like, look, we can't, like we can't spend more than X amount of dollars on each individual campaign. But then you got five people, people. Each person comes in, they like sort of whiteboard what the thing is. The like creative idea to amplify the launch. And then you're all sitting around and you leave the room with maybe like three or four that you think are the best ideas that you can then do.
- [77:01]
A
And these are usually offline or these are like non related to the specific launch post or.
- [77:10]
B
Yeah, generally. Generally separate from the launch post. There's this customer of ours who we love and they're in some of our videos and mutual customer. We're also using their product called Judgment Labs. And Judgment Labs had their launch and they receive all of the credit. But we did a couple workshops where I came into their office, and they did, like, an ice cream truck that they wrapped with Judgment Labs, branding or whatever. They named ice cream flavors after some of their customers. And it was like, you know, they had different locations, and then they gave out free ice cream, and they told a bunch and they had a bunch of posts about it that was, like, one of their ideas. I'll say one other thing that they did, and hopefully this is helpful to just, like, maybe pattern match to, you know, like, I'm not suggesting you should. That an ice cream truck is, like, the thing that all customers should do. You want to do things that are, like, new, creative, stand out, like, take some risk. Another thing that they did that I thought was really clever, which was an iteration off of the. Or a version of our poker sets, which were on brand from. On literally branded Monaco, because Monaco has a casino. And so we ordered sort of like prefab Monaco poker sets. They did this really cool thing where they sent 3D picture frames with Legos that were built of the company. Like, it was Monaco's logo In the, like, 3D picture frame built out of Legos. And, like, we're hanging that in the front entrance to the office. Like, you see it every single day. And I don't know exactly what they would have spent on it. My guess is not, like, totally different from the 100 bucks that we spent on the poker sets. And so, you know, you do that. Maybe do 50, maybe you do 100. I don't know the exact number, but, like, it's a reasonable marketing spend. I'm just like, try stuff like that. Those are the types of ideas that you may come away with.
- [78:59]
A
Yeah, that's what. There's a venture fund. It's called Shrug Capital. If you ever come across Neve. Neve drawer. Yeah, so they do. I wouldn't. They almost do, like, stunt marketing. They almost did, like, meme marketing, but they do a lot of, like, physical products. And one of the things Nev told me that I've always kind of hung with is you want to. You want to gift something that they will stick somewhere and look at. So he would do, like, a keyboard mat that went onto your keyboard. They did a calendar. So they did this really big thing was called, like, the Shrug calendar. And I think every day it was like one of those, like, little flips desk calendars. Every day, I think there was, like, a tweet from someone that was. It was either, like, something funny that happened on that day or like an, like a stat of some kind. I can't even remember exactly what he did. But the thing was you just like set it on your desk and like every day you see this calendar. So I feel like that's one thing I've always thought about is just like the physical. You put it up somewhere and you always look at it. I have like mugs that I use and I'll just always remember like who gave me the mug.
- [80:01]
B
It's cool and it's smart. It is. Judgment Labs did a better version and some of the examples that you just gave are probably better versions of what we did. Our idea was like, you know, startups have poker nights and so they're going to like break this out and every time they break it out it's going to be like the Monaco chips and there's going to be like, oh, Monaco. You know, the company gave us this thing, the Judgment Labs things. It's like you see it every day when you walk in. Similar what you just described as like the, you know, the key bad keyboard board. Matt. Like that it's a good theme. I think the other theme, the thing that we did at Brecht's that was really effective in the same vein was we sent bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne which is like $50 a bottle.
- [80:43]
A
So but it's like kind of fancy champagne, right?
- [80:46]
B
Certainly perceived as like, you know, very high end champagne that like it's going to even, you know, there's, there's a lot of people that are drinking less and those sorts of things. You still know somebody who's gonna drink this bottle of champagne. Like it will get used. And so there's like two reasons why it was super effective. And this is one that like you can kind of copy it. I think it can be reused. The reasons that I think it was effective, one, we oriented it around congratulations on a fundraise. And so then there's like a reason it's like celebratory champagne and it was like on brand for like this thing that like, you know, within the last months they'd ra six months they'd raised funding and so it's like congratulations, like a heartfelt, you know, thing. And then the other thing is like it's, it is social. So I think in the card that was from Enrique probably who is co founder and CEO at Brex is probably like hope you're able to enjoy some nice champagne with the team as like to celebrate or something like that. So then like you bring the team around, it's like, you know, Brecht sent us this champagne and so it's social and you're like telling other people about it. So that'll get consumed, which is different in one time use, but something else that was effective.
- [82:02]
A
So was there like a relation between poker and Monaco and maybe like, why poker? Why'd you call it Monaco? Like, was there any thinking around this or did you just like the word? Do you like poker?
- [82:15]
B
The poker was maybe secondary. Monaco, man. Naming a company is hard and it's also like not a social activity. What I mean by that is like don't get like four people in a room and try and come up with a name. It's so subjective. I know you have children, it's like naming kids. You and your partner should come up with the best name for your children. Probably not socialize that with a bunch of different people because they're going to have differing opinions. And I think names, company names, there's
- [82:45]
A
literally apps where you can. It's almost like Tinder, but for baby names. You and your partner both get it and you swipe yes or no. People go so intense on this stuff
- [82:55]
B
and it's hard and it's subjective. And so we were, or I was, I guess like I sort of took ownership of naming the company. Okay. I was thinking through sort of like things that people, words that people associated with some combination of like luxury, success, like, like these, these different categories. And then eventually got into maybe like geographic locations. Thought of Monaco. I like the word Monaco. So just like it's a nice sounding word. And then one of the big things was the.com was available.
- [83:31]
A
It was available like someone had it
- [83:33]
B
for sale, it was unused. So like we. And after like very little diligence, we understood that there would be an opportunity eventually to acquire Monaco.com and so then that was like a big part of the calculation. But the framework was sort of like success. The things that we wanted to be associated with as a brand. It was like success, wealth, those sorts of things. And I think Monaco ties nicely into that. Now Monaco, there's a lot of things that we can do as sort of like French Riviera that are on brand with Monaco. And then I think that there's also, you know, there's like the casino that it's well known for, that sort of thing that we can do, the poker tournament. So just a lot of things that we can do at the brand itself.
- [84:15]
A
That's fair. I had a similar, I guess naming ideating the naming maze with banana Capital. Like it Was. I mean, you try to come up with a company name. Every good idea you have, it's taken. Like, there's literally no options out there. Specifically with investment firms, like, not just venture, but like, real estate, hedge funds. Every good name is taken. Like, everything. So my wife was like, it's probably after about a good eight hours, literally all in of just coming up with names, looking them up, and be like, man, this is taken. My wife was like, well, Apple's the most valuable company in the world. What if you name it after a fruit? And I was like, man, that's so smart. Because with, like, the geographic location, you're like, nobody's naming things after geographic locations or fruits. So then it was like, okay, well, Banana. I kind of think it's kind of just a cool word. Banana Capital. I don't know. It's kind of like, you know, it can be very bold, like, benchmark Sequoia Banana. I don't know if I'm quite in that level yet, but it's like. It's a word. But I'm also. It's kind of funny, too. Like, just Banana Capital. Like, is this. Is this real? So it kind of like hit kind of everything I was going for.
- [85:26]
B
I am not just saying. I wouldn't say this if it weren't true. I would. Let's see. If I didn't like the name, I just wouldn't say anything. I really like the name. And you actually took the words out of my mouth. It's a cool word. Like, just saying banana is kind of like rolls off the tongue and like the A's. Anyway, I think it's. And it definitely stands out to your point. It's like, you know, a lot of times, like, last names, those sorts of things are the, I don't know, investor names. And so then it's memorable.
- [86:02]
A
Yeah, I feel like maybe a 16Z did a good job with, like, the last names. Like, they kind of made it a little sexier. A16Z, you search that, it shows up Banana. I don't know if I'm ever going to win the SEO for Banana, but Monaco, I think we were just talking about. You guys have the first or second result now when you search Monaco, which is pretty crazy. You're beating a country.
- [86:25]
B
The dot com is probably helpful. I think that was not a consideration. As you and I were saying before, maybe it should have been. But I do think that if people want to find us, they can, regardless of where we sort of stack, rank with the Monaco. But in, you know, we're sitting here less than four months after, you know, I talked about this phase of the company where we were like stealth to like public launch and we're already like, you know, sort of up there. So I think maybe also like does
- [87:01]
A
it really matter like if I'm, if I vaguely am familiar with Monaco? I like I knew it's like software for sales and I'm googling it and I got fuck. I clicked the Wikipedia page for the country. You're not going to get tricked and find the wrong thing. It's like one of them is a country, it's customs thing, literally the sales software. And then it's another thing related to the country. You're going to find it if you're
- [87:23]
B
searching for it, especially if you add in another word. But I have heard zero times we had trouble finding you online and I do think that we have a bunch of campaigns up right now where like you don't know what Monaco or Monaco.com is and so it just directs people to the website. And so then just like the traffic that we are getting right now is pretty crazy for a three month, four month old startup from public launch.
- [87:55]
A
Interesting. And so we've talked quite a bit about Outbound actually maybe not enough. We talked about a lot of like pre launch Outbound. Like so how does outbound change after you launch? Have you guys made any? You said that like a lot of things became more effective after you'd kind of been out there publicly. So how do you think about Outbound now?
- [88:14]
B
Well, this is one where like the opinions that I will express here are sort of ingrained into the platform itself. But when you get started there is, there are a few things that matter. Who is sending the Outbound is actually like something that's very important. And so at startups, even at startups that have early salespeople, you do want the, or you want the origination of the outbound to come from the founder because founders are going to get higher reply rates than early salespeople because the recipients of that, they know they're going to get sold to if it's a salesperson. Here are a couple other things that matter and then I'll talk about maybe where it starts to evolve a little bit. The other things that matter are timing and also like the mediums that you're reaching out to people. You want to be multi channel. You want to be at least LinkedIn and email, not just like spray the universe with cold outbound email through like, you know, domains that aren't actually your real domain. And that sort of thing, you're going to have far better efficacy if you are multi channel at the same time as part of the same sequence. And then the message and sequence structure really matter. So like how many touch points are there, how is the message structured itself? Those sorts of things are things that like again, nothing that we are doing is necessarily earth shattering, but it is sort of like just already set up for you. And then over time what starts to happen is you can expand outside of the founders that are sending the outbound. You do want to be, I think you potentially want to be targeted and certainly thoughtful about like prioritizing companies that meet certain characteristics. So for us we are primarily orienting around like San Francisco based founders as an example and that plays into a lot of the campaigns that we have around San Francisco right now. How does it evolve? I think, well, so, so why was
- [90:32]
A
having the founder send the message so important?
- [90:35]
B
It's because, well, if you think about your multichannel, so if you're starting over LinkedIn or something like that, you can like click and see who is originating. Yeah, that's exactly. It gives credibility to the person that's reaching out. And I think that's, that's probably the biggest thing.
- [90:55]
A
So it's. So the biggest reason the founder should do it is that they know that it's like the highest, most trusted person at that company. It's maybe like a founder to founder type thing. Not a, not necessarily I'm selling you something even though it really is. But like maybe it's more of a trusted sale or something like that. Or you know, maybe you'll learn something by talking to this other founder. Like they'll kind of get you more.
- [91:20]
B
You, you can, you can also be more creative with messaging. Let's see. I. One of our customers is called Parley. They're a YC company that does AI for immigration law. And so they're selling into like immigration law firms. And so Phil, who's the CEO, the message structure says something like I started Parley after watching my father for years, you know, could say something like and I don't know if this is literal but like missing a family event because he was like you know in docs that now like you can sort of see where I'm going with this without
- [92:10]
A
me relatable versus it being like a salesperson could probably not say that is exactly right.
- [92:15]
B
So you can orient the message coming from a founder about like the origination story of the company. So there's like this layer of credibility but there's also the like, what do you put in the message itself? Like only a founder can kind of do an articulate that will lead to significantly higher reply rates.
- [92:34]
A
And I think like a lot of people listening to this, they're probably, we probably can all sympathize with like the AI email inbound slop that that is out there. How, how should I be navigating that if I'm the one that's like sending the AI generated email? Yeah, like how do you get around just people immediately just not even opening your email and just deleting it for sure.
- [92:58]
B
Here's how I think about this as maybe like a evolutionary thing. There's like sort of old movie, I don't know, probably 80s Glengarry Glen Ross and they were using like yellow pages to cold call and there was like, you know, the quality leads that like they always wanted to get to but they couldn't get to. And so anyway, maybe going too deep in the movie itself, but from like you know, many, many decades ago, this concept of like identifying a potential buyer based off of their company or who they are, like the individual and then like trying to target them to get them to buy your thing, um, it has existed for you know, many, many decades certainly. And, and it has evolved from the like yellow pages of Glengarry Glen Ross where people might make phone calls. Gosh, prior to that I'm sure it was like, you know, door knocking, that sort of thing. And I won't go too far back. And then you've got like the innovation around email. So like email comes on market. When I joined Echo Sign it was pre and I'll get to the point by the way, it was pre sort of like SDR outreach type tools. You know, outreach and sales loft and some of those style tools that allowed SDRs to almost do like marketing automation the way that maybe like a marketo enabled prior to that.
- [94:22]
A
So every email you got was literally handwritten by someone most likely, most likely hand sent.
- [94:28]
B
Certainly the ones that I was doing in like 2007, 2008, it was like copy paste. It was like the body maybe stays the same and then I'll like just plug in high turner or something like that at the top and then like copy it, I'll paste it and then I'll like do it again over and over again. And then there were the sort of like outreach I think was early or the first to do the sort of like marketing automation from an sdr. And so then, gosh, I was able to send like 200 a day just by like throwing, you know, new contacts in the sequence. And I didn't have to do this like copy paste one off send thing. And so the point of all of this is something like, I think this like concept of outbound and there was this like meme for a little while. Outbound is dead cold, email might be dead, those sorts of things. It is not dead. I think that, you know, it is evolving. And I do think that if you just drop thousands of email addresses in a like outbound email thing with the same templated copy and that's like your outbound strategy and you have no brand, like you don't know who the person you're reaching out to doesn't know you personally. They've never heard of your company. Your website kind of sucks. Like they're not going to reply to that email. Your reply rates are going to be like 0.0 whatever percent. And so there is an approach that is today effective. Let's see. I don't want to talk my own book too much. Just in terms of Monica, the reply rates that we are seeing are higher than I ever saw with this sort of outreach style outbound. And it is leveraging AI. It is leveraging intent signals on why you reach out to somebody. What you say, it's a custom message, those sorts of things. It will be different in 2030. There'll be like something. So you just have to kind of like stay up with the times.
- [96:20]
A
Yeah, I feel like the thing that I see that I see a lot is I see like the quick question is the subject and then like I don't really read them all anymore, but that used to get me all the time. Lowercase in the subject just generally seems to like work pretty well.
- [96:36]
B
Re like it's like a reply.
- [96:39]
A
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Those ones kind of do well, anything where it doesn't seem like it's an AI generated email and I open them like, fuck, they got me again, like.
- [96:49]
B
But yeah, I think the multichannel thing really matters.
- [96:55]
A
So multichannel is like you message them on LinkedIn and you email them.
- [96:58]
B
Yes. And maybe depending on the industry, you also either yourself call them or you can have a service or whatever also call them. So there can be a third channel gifting, could be a fourth channel. We've talked about a lot of the keyboard pads and those sorts of things. And so the multi channel really matters. And certainly I think the table sticks ones are LinkedIn and email. It's not one plus one equals two. It's, you know, one plus one equals four, whatever you want to plug in there. But it's like you can say something like, following up from my message on LinkedIn. And then they're kind of like, oh, like I did see this person's message on LinkedIn. So you sort of like try and tie it all back together.
- [97:44]
A
Yeah, I feel like one of the big mistakes too is, you know, you just keep following up, like on email and you're like, hey, just following up. Did you see this? Hey, just following up. Wondered if you wanted to chat. Like, I feel like that it could work, but I feel like the better one is like, hey, we just launched a new feature. Check it out. Like, you just don't even acknowledge that you're just following up. Like it's, you're just continuing to, I guess, like add value in some way, whatever way you've chosen to do it.
- [98:09]
B
Any thoughts? Question mark?
- [98:11]
A
Is that a bad one or a good one?
- [98:13]
B
Oh, I was piggybacking off what you said, which is like, not a good one. Oh, yeah, it's like now, like, sometimes that will work, but I think at this stage of the game, reaching, diminishing returns, like, everyone knows that that is automated. You don't feel the sort of like psychological impact of like, oh, this person keeps reaching out to me. I should let them know, like, I'm not like, you know, it's, it's, it's not real.
- [98:42]
A
Yeah. I feel like usually I will respond to those. If it's someone that I know in person and know I will probably talk to again in person in some way and I'm just like, you know, not interested, but otherwise I'm never going to respond to you because, like, there's, you could be fake you and like a lot of times you'll see like, someone will make up like a fake. I've seen this actually. People be like bragging about this like they're, they're, their lead gen strategy is like on LinkedIn, attractive woman, you're messaging founders. And the reply rate is a lot higher. Like, I just like a fake person. It's like they don't even exist.
- [99:17]
B
All of the AI SDRs look the way they do for a specific reason.
- [99:21]
A
Yeah.
- [99:24]
B
There are things though, that really do work. And interestingly, there's probably like some, I don't know, moral or listen in this, but they work because, like, they're actually relevant. What I mean by that is, let's see, here are a couple examples of intent signals that you might pick up on that actually benefit the recipient of the email. There's a lot of like, I see you have a job posting for this role. We actually automate what that role does here. Could be like an executive assistant. Like somebody may have a job posting for an executive assistant. That would be a reasonable time for like an AI executive assistant company to reach out and be like, hey, saw this posting with maybe like a link hyperlink to the job posting. Do you want to try us for one week for free? And if we don't work, like you just like keep your job search going. That actually is like, that will convert. It won't convert 100% of the time, but it'll certainly convert more than just randomly blasting everybody to see if they want your aiea. I'll give another example. And they're like a bunch of these. And maybe the takeaway is like, you should be leveraging these. If you're a founder or company. We have a customer called nowadays that does AI event planning. And one of the intent signals is something like agent, crawl the Internet and see if you can find a blog post about like a company kickoff or a recent off site that they had. And then it's like, hey, saw your blog post. Like, we can help you plan to the next. Plan the next one. So not only are you reaching out to like the right person at the company that planned the thing, um, but you're also it. It's like top of mind, they have a blog post. So it. People read it. So those, those dramatically increase the likelihood of somebody replying relative to I'm going to send 10,000 emails to everyone in my TAM with the same message type.
- [101:42]
A
Yeah, one thing that always, it always gets me. And I, I know that a lot of it just like that that tactic is people say that they really like, oh, I listened to your podcast episode with Sam. It was really good. I like the conversation about intense signals and timing of when to reach out to people. I really like that part. Then they jump in their thing and they suck up to you. They compliment you. You're like, oh man, I got to respond to this at least or at least acknowledge it.
- [102:09]
B
I received those. Some also, I think maybe better than a template. Like depending on depending on the thing. When it works is when the personalization is relevant. So in other words, I talked about, hey, I see your job posting for an ea. We are literally an aiea.
- [102:32]
A
Yeah, we're literally solving the problem.
- [102:34]
B
That's right. The alternative would be something like, hey, saw that. And we've talked about where we're from a few times in the conversation. Saw you're from like Kansas City. Go Chiefs. Are you thinking about finance workflow automation? Like, like that, that one I actually am like more averse to than the like just tell me about the finance thing that you build.
- [102:56]
A
Yeah, like the random, like hey, I also have a brother who went to Alabama University. Like you know, I love, I love watching Nick Saban interviews, whatever, like, and then you jump in, it's like what's the relevant.
- [103:07]
B
Totally random thing. Yeah, exactly.
- [103:11]
A
So in terms of when you're kind of convert, you're kind of going from founder led sales to like a system, right? Like you have other people on the team. I don't know if we're going to get a chance to really. And I don't know how relevant is to talk about actually hiring other people right now specifically. Maybe this is the answer to the question, but where do you see founders most mess up? Like the systematizing, their just initial duct taping it all together. They're using Monaco, maybe they're not. They start to have a team. Like it starts to go from like, you know, it's like startup to this is a company, we're building this machine. Where's the biggest mistake you see people
- [103:49]
B
do, let's do maybe in logical or sequential order which is like we have zero customers. I have seen a handful of times founders struggling to acquire customer number one or like very early customer and assign attribution of that to I don't know how to sell. Like I'm not a salesperson so I'm going to go hire a salesperson. That is the wrong diagnosis and that is the wrong solution. And so there's no one better in the world at acquiring the first small handful of customers than the founder themselves. So if you're not acquiring customers, maybe you like want to shift things a little bit in how you present the product or something like that. But it is likely like a product market fit thing. And if you can't do it then like sort of random third party salesperson isn't going to come in and be able to change that for you. So I think that is the earliest maybe mistake that someone might make. This is maybe true beyond the like next phase that I would just describe. But seemingly I think the bottleneck for acquiring customers in, let's call it 4 out of 5 to 9 out of 10 companies is demand gen. It's opportunity creation. And my intuition is something like 4 out of 5 to 9 out of 10 either founders or early sales folks, sales leaders actually misdiagnosed the bottleneck to effectively being conversion rates. And I think a way to understand or like a symptom of this is something like when you talk to a founder and we're early in a month. So last month, if you didn't quite get to the number of customers that you wanted, or if you didn't quite get to the amount of revenue that you wanted, two sides of the same conversation coin. If you sort of attribute that to. There was this deal that like the week, the week, the last week of the month, I thought it was going to close and it pushed like they decided not to use this. They went with a competitor, it pushed to this month. Whatever it is.
- [106:31]
A
If we just could have converted that, we would have hit our numbers.
- [106:34]
B
That's right.
- [106:34]
A
Okay.
- [106:35]
B
Or like there were just a couple deals that like, they, they didn't convert. And so like, what we're really going to do is we're going to try and like, we think we know why those deals didn't convert. And so we're going to like start changing stuff based off of that. What you are effectively doing, whether it's intentional or not, you're effectively diagnosing the like problem or the bottleneck to acquiring customers and growing revenue as a conversion rate, like you didn't convert that customer. And you know, back to like, my diagnosis for we'll just say 9 out of 10 to keep it consistent. 9 out of 10 startups is like the bottleneck is actually demand. And the problem isn't that you didn't convert that one customer. The problem is that you didn't have like five customers that you were talking to that last month. And if one of them had converted, you would have hit your number. And if two of them had converted, you would have beat your number. And so I think that there's like a disproportionate amount of emphasis placed on conversion rates relative to generating demand. And I think that like influencing conversion rates is far more difficult to do than influencing demand gen. And just like, you know, sort of thought exercise on this is something like if you convert 10% of demos that you have 1 out of 10 demo, I get it's going to convert. Moving that to 15%, you might think of like, you're increasing your conversion rates by 5%, you're actually increasing your conversion rates by 50%. And that especially at scale, that's like a hard thing to do. There's just like a lot that goes into it. If you think about like last month we had 10 demos going to 20 demos, which is like effectively doubling the number of demos that you have in a month, it's not one size fits all but like I suspect it is far easier to accomplish than that. Like 50% increase in conversion rates.
- [108:44]
A
You might need to build a new feature or you might need to like cut the price, change the price. You might need to go after a different target customer.
- [108:51]
B
This is on conversion rates.
- [108:52]
A
Yeah, on conversion rates, yeah.
- [108:54]
B
You might need to like really learn how to sell, like do discovery quite well and like peel back the onion. Like there's a lot that goes into it or you can just spend some more of your focus and attention on the demand gen side of things and you don't even have to improve conversion rates. Like they can just remain consistent. And if you're able to double the amount of leads that you're generating, you've just doubled sales effectively.
- [109:19]
A
You could in theory. I don't think you would agree with this, but you could just like pay more for Google Ads and just fill up the, the email signup list and get more demos.
- [109:27]
B
Well, here's something that I wouldn't disagree with which is a version of this. If you have a channel that is working for you in demand gen, just like double and triple down on that until you get to the point that this could be you as a founder or your team, until you can't take more demos, until you're at the point where like I now have too many opportunities that I am actively working. Until then focus and allocate resources towards demand gen. Until you sort of accomplish what I would describe and we're in the fortunate position of having this today, I would just like define this as like a demand rich environment. And until you have that really focus on generating demand.
- [110:16]
A
And I wanted to ask you this because I think it's kind of unique. I don't know of anyone who does this specifically. So there's a concept of a forward deployed engineer. You guys do the forward deployed sales executive. So what is that at Monaco?
- [110:30]
B
So FDE is the maybe famous acronym at this point and we're fdae so account executive. So I think and FDES more often than not the application that I've seen for true FDES is sort of like relatively technical product and potentially a large enterprise. And so this is like the extensions of the world. And now you have open and anthropic that are probably investing in or building in their own sort of like almost FTE arms of the businesses. If you think about Monaco's customer, which is a startup, Monaco itself, the agents are technical, but it isn't like a highly technical application in ways that like the most technical products are and these aren't enterprises so they don't need the like bcg. Historically speaking Accenture could come in like map everything out and do all this stuff for us. So what our FDAE does is twofold. The first is they provide a complementary skill set to many of the customers that we have that are, that are in founder led sales right now. And so then they can leverage this resource as like an extension of their team that is helping them with messaging. You and I talked about like the multi channel and like what should the message say? That is somebody that all of our sales reps have a lot of experience doing a B testing this stuff and they're like you know, in the trenches with the founders doing this stuff alongside of course the AI which is maybe natural segue to our fda. Also have like a deep understanding of how Monaco and Monaco agents operate. And so then that if you try and deploy an agent, a demand gen agent, let's just say, and you are maybe a founder or a sales leader, you have to manage that agent. It's work to manage the agent, to set it up, to program it, to make sure that the message, all that stuff, we just do that for you. And so then both the complementary skill set but also the like making the platform effective through managing the agents in ways that are just definitely definitionally not possible for a founder or a sales leader or a salesperson. They just can't understand how Monaco works the way that a full time Monaco employee does. And so through that it's like far more effective and efficient.
- [112:56]
A
So one thing you mentioned is like you guys kind of manage and run the agents for the customers. Is that, does anyone else do that?
- [113:04]
B
I'm not aware of anyone else that does that. It doesn't mean that anyone else is not doing makes a lot of sense. I also do think that you know, look, there are AISDRs and I suspect that like if you're an AI SDR company and you have some really large enterprise customer that you should be providing some FDE style service to a company. That's super logical. I do think that in the category that we're selling into, one of the competitive advantages that we have is our ability to build out like a startup, go to market organization. And if you think about most of the players in the space, they don't, their backgrounds are like more technical or product oriented. That of course is like an advantage for us in terms of like understanding the customer and knowing what to build understanding the outcomes, those sorts of things. But we also like, we have an incredible go to market organization in the same way that like one of the best engineering leaders or a very experienced engineering leader turned founder could build out a really great engineering organization. And so then our go to market function like the sales org at Monaco is a competitive advantage that we like really want to lean into. Because of the dynamics that I just mentioned.
- [114:23]
A
It's probably just like letting your customers leverage that too. Like if you think it's best customers tap into it.
- [114:29]
B
You nailed it. It's like, and this is one of the things that interestingly during the A, the biggest objection was like how does this scale? It was like the margins and the that sort of thing. Then like the FDE thing, unbeknownst to us, we were already calling it an fda. It started to like really take off. And in the B it was like we hear this is like the big competitive advantage that you have or something like that. And so it was a little bit coincidental in a short amount of time. But yes, we want to lean into this thing. That is a pretty big competitive advantage for us today and I think hard for players in the space right now to either replicate or compete with.
- [115:16]
A
Yeah, it almost sounds like the forward deployed employee, like the forward deployed specialist. The forward deployed expert is maybe, maybe in 18 months I'll be talking about it after Monaco makes it a huge thing.
- [115:28]
B
Yeah, that would be great.
- [115:30]
A
Yeah. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for taking the time to do it.
- [115:33]
B
Thank you so much for having me. So much fun and just had a
- [115:36]
A
blast and I hope you had a blast. Thanks again to this episode Sponsors Flex Upgrade your business banking and credit with the link in the description numerl put your sales tax on autopilot@numerl.com amplitude for AI analytics. Just ask amplitude and merge. Secure AI access for every employee with Merge. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like comment, subscribe and share in the group chat with friends who are trying to learn more about how to sell in the age of AI. Make sure to check out the back catalog of over 100 episodes with founders of companies like Robinhood, Sweetgreen and Mercury and investors like Gary Tan, Elad Gill and Chathan and Eric at Benchmark. Tune in over the next few weeks for conversations with Dan Turan at Gutter Capital, Will at exa, Charles Hudson, Precursor, and Hans Swilldens, who just sold his secondary firm Industry Ventures to Goldman Sachs. If you don't want to miss any of these, subscribe to my newsletter. The Split linked in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. Thanks again for listening. See you next time. Sat.