← The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
430: Pocus: From Founder Pain to First $1M ARR in One Year - with Alexa Grabell
00:50:27
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- [00:00]
Omar Khan
Foreign welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talk to Alexa Grable, the co founder and CEO of Pocus, an AI powered sales prospecting platform that helps sales teams generate pipeline more effectively. In 2019, while building the sales strategy and ops function at Dataminer, Alexa was frustrated. Seeing sales data scattered across multiple tools and systems, she decided to hack together her own solution. Later, during her time at Stanford Business School, she met her co founder and they began working on a way to help sales teams spend more time selling instead of drowning in data. Through Stanford's Lean Launchpad program, they interviewed 350 sales leaders and professionals to validate their idea before writing a single line of code. It took them a year to build their first version of the product, but their patience paid off. Within the first year of launching, they hit their first million in ARR. Yet as first time founders with no enterprise sales experience, they struggle with everything from building business cases to managing complex negotiations. Although they faced constant pressure to expand beyond sales into other teams, they stayed focused on serving sales teams exclusively, a decision that proved critical to their early success. Today, Hocus is a series a company with 30 people generating seven figures in ARR and helping customers like Asana, Canva and Miro. In this episode you'll learn how Alexa and her co founder validated their idea through rapid experimentation before writing a single line of code. What strategies they used to grow from 0 to the first million in ARR in less than a year how they built a thriving community of over 4,000 members that became a powerful lead generation engine. Why their approach to AI focuses on augmenting rather than replacing sales teams. We talk about how they overcame the challenges of enterprise sales as first time founders and what methods they use to differentiate themselves in a crowded market of sales tools. So I hope you enjoy it. I talk to a lot of founders who have this same challenge. They've got an amazing product idea but need a technical team to build or scale it. If you're looking to develop a B2B SaaS product but don't want to hire and manage an in house team, listen up. Gearhart is a product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your software. They've built over 70 successful products including SmartSuite, who's founder trusted Gearhart after his $200 million exit to help build his next big venture. Some of Gearhart's customers have gone through YC and their portfolio companies have won over 10 startup competitions. Until the end of March, they're offering our listeners free strategy sessions with their leadership team. Just visit Gearheart IO to book your session. That's Gearheart IO. Alexa, welcome to the show.
- [03:09]
Alexa Grable
Thanks for having me.
- [03:10]
Omar Khan
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
- [03:15]
Alexa Grable
I love the quote by RBG of you can't have it all all at once.
- [03:20]
Omar Khan
Nice and simple, but very profound.
- [03:23]
Alexa Grable
Very profound.
- [03:24]
Omar Khan
Cool. So tell us about Pocus. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
- [03:30]
Alexa Grable
We're an AI sales prospecting tool. So in short, we help sales reps generate a ton of pipeline. And how we do that is we have always on AI agents that are constantly monitoring accounts in your book of business and automating all of the manual tasks that a rep would have to do so that the AI can say, hey rep, here's who you need to focus on. Here's what you need to know. This is how you go break it and win the deals. So customers like Asana, Canva, Miro. We generate half a billion in pipeline a quarter for our customers and save them lots and lots of time.
- [04:05]
Omar Khan
Awesome. Give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue? Customers, size of team.
- [04:12]
Alexa Grable
Yeah. So we're a series a company, about 30 people and seven figures in revenue.
- [04:18]
Omar Khan
Cool. All right, so let's go back to 2021. When you, you started this business. What were you doing at the time and where did the idea come from?
- [04:31]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, so going back a little pre2021, I was building out the sales strategy and ops function at a startup called Dataminer. And when I was there, I was feeling the pain of Pocus firsthand, where we had all this data spread out everywhere. So we were looking at BI dashboards in the CRM, in sales, nav, zoom info, Google sheets just to get sales reps access to information to figure out who should I focus on for prospecting and spending my time and how do I go after them. So I hacked something together there. Fast forward. I went back to business school at Stanford where I met my co founder and that's where we really started working together in 2021 with this vision of, okay, how can we supercharge sales teams and how can we make it really easy for them to spend time selling not digging through data. And that's really where focus began.
- [05:23]
Omar Khan
Okay, great. So it was a personal pain. You spent a couple of years there, I think at Data Miner. So you're kind of experiencing this firsthand for a while. What did the two of you do to validate the idea? Did you start going out, talking to customers? Did you just got to build a product or a prototype? What was the approach?
- [05:46]
Alexa Grable
We were fortunate to take a class at Stanford called Lean Launchpad which there's a lot of content online for folks that want to learn more. Essentially what they do is help you run series of experiments to test different hypotheses of a business that you want to build. So we had this grand vision, right, of supercharging sales teams and making it very easy for them to do their job. And that could be a lot of different solutions. And so what we did is we operated in one to two week sprints where we'd say we're going to talk to 10 people this week and we're going to test a specific hypothesis on is this a top three pain that the seller is feeling? And it could be a seller rev ops sales leader that we were talking to and we went through a lot of steps, series of different tasks, really scrappy. Sometimes we'd show up with Figma mocks of. Does this resonate for you? Sometimes we'd go as far as we'd see another seed stage startup in the place and we'd pretend to be sales reps at their company and see how it landed. So we did everything scrappy to figure out what were the pain points that were resonating the most.
- [06:47]
Omar Khan
How many of these sprints did you do? And then how long did this go on for?
- [06:50]
Alexa Grable
So the class was 12 weeks. I think we probably started coming up with the specific company we were going to build at the six week mark.
- [07:00]
Omar Khan
Wow, that's pretty quick. So what were those first four or five experiments that you did? How did you figure out what to do, what to test?
- [07:09]
Alexa Grable
They're actually companies that all exist today, which is funny. So let's see how I can carefully word this. So we started with the Reverse ETL tool, which hitouch is amazing at it in Census because in that world we were saying, okay, how do we transfer data from the data warehouse to the CRM to make it actionable for sales? What we learned is we don't actually want to build a data tool, we want to build a tool for sales. And data is powerful for sales, but there's more of the interface and the workflows that we're more passionate about. There was another sector of tool that I won't say the name for the other companies, but they still exist where we would go into interviews, kind of fake selling their product and we, we heard this is a nice to have, not a need to have. And for us we were like, we want to build a painkiller, not a vitamin. And they actually flattened out so they had growth and then stopped. So we predicted that. Well, lots of other silly bad ideas too of just like things that were features, not real products that didn't really land. So really the pain that we got to in the end was very specific for product led growth businesses where they had a series of product users on their product and sales teams need to tap in to unlock that data. That was our stepping stone into owning really all of prospecting. Because once you have access to product usage data, we can then pull in all this other data as well, such as who's on your website, who's talking about you online, what's happening in blogs and podcasts and LinkedIn which exploded with AI. So for us it was really driven by us being brutally honest with ourselves of is this a top three pain for these potential customers?
- [08:48]
Omar Khan
How many people did you have to speak to to be able to get to a point where you were like, okay, this is the business, this is the product. In a very short space of time, I guess.
- [08:56]
Alexa Grable
Yeah. So by the time we raised our seed, which let's say was so we did six weeks, we got our idea after those six weeks, we were maybe it was eight weeks, whatever that was, we were still iterating on a lot. Like when I say we have the idea, it was as vague as like there's data in the data warehouse, there's data in a CRM, we need to bring it together to unlock it for a sales rep. Like that's as. So there's a lot of ways that that shows up. So we probably did another 10 weeks of work and then raised our seed round, maybe less actually. I remember by the time of our seed round we talked to 350 different sales teams. So we did a ton, a ton of research.
- [09:32]
Omar Khan
Wow. And when you say talk to 350 was this at least you were spending 15, 20 minutes per person having in depth conversations.
- [09:45]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, we went deep and fast. So it became both of our full time jobs to just get people talking to us every single day.
- [09:52]
Omar Khan
How hard was it to get people talking to you?
- [09:55]
Alexa Grable
Not that hard. I remember I just looked at everyone I'VE ever known in the tech industry or even my consulting days or alumni to my college or I was at Stanford at the time, so people that were also at Stanford or recently graduated and I just reached out to anyone that would talk to me. So I was like capping out of my LinkedIn messages, like fast and then asking after every single call, I'd say, who are the other three people I should talk to to get feedback? So I was just like hungry to talk to anyone that would answer me.
- [10:25]
Omar Khan
Okay, so you're having these conversations. I'm sure by, by the time you have like 300 plus conversations, you've got a pretty good idea of what the problem is and what the solution should. Like, how did you go about building the product?
- [10:38]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, so we, by the seed round, we didn't have our product. We had a vision, we had a clear understanding of what the pain was, what we needed to build. It was just my co founder and me. Right after we raised a seed, we hired one engineer who's still with us today, who's awesome and kind of the two of them locked themselves in a room. So I'm not technical, my co founder is the cto. And it was very much like build, build, build. And then get on a call with me and a customer to validate. Build, build, build, get on a call. Not a customer, a prospect to validate. So it's this constant cycle of just we're going to schedule weekly calls and by the next week we better have an update for this person to give us feedback. So it was very much just one of our values is ship, orate to ship and iterate. It was very much that just ship things into the world and see what people react to it.
- [11:26]
Omar Khan
How long did it take for you to get to something that you could get into the hands of or at least start selling it and asking people to give you money for it.
- [11:36]
Alexa Grable
I think we did a year of building before we started selling. We had a very technically complex product to build and so it really took a while to get that going. So we had design partners, but the goal of those design partners wasn't necessarily get dollars out of them. It was build a product that is very meaningful to their business. And you can argue that collecting dollars is a lever or an input to seeing if it's valuable or not, which I do believe in. But in the early days, we wanted to make sure for end users first, it was something that they loved.
- [12:13]
Omar Khan
Yeah, so let's talk about that. The icp. Who is, who's the end user of this product. I mean, I think I know the answer to that. And then who's the customer? Who's the person that you have to go and sell this to?
- [12:25]
Alexa Grable
So Sales reps use Pocus, so AES, SDRs, AMs, even C CSMs, we are selling. Usually the buyer is the CRO, but in order to get, you know, deals across the finish line, typically the VP of sales, VP of rev ops also has a big say there.
- [12:42]
Omar Khan
Okay, and were you clear about that once you started selling the product, like who you needed to be going and having conversations with or at least pitching the product to?
- [12:50]
Alexa Grable
So always sales, like 100% sales, but we often got pulled into different directions. So we'd get pulled in from marketing OR product or CS or RevOps or data teams. And that was kind of. We had to have honest conversations with ourselves of who do we want to be building for. Because once you have a product where you're consolidating all data and then helping expose that information to a sales rep, everyone else wants their hand on it. But when you're a startup, focus is what makes or breaks you. And so for us, that was definitely difficult to try to figure out. You know, do we stay with sales, do we expand beyond? And what does that look like?
- [13:27]
Omar Khan
Maybe share like some of, you know, one or two challenges you had, like selling in the early days, like you got the product, you've had a lot of conversations, you understand the problem pretty well by now. But how, how easy or hard was it to sell? What kind of, you know, obstacles did you face? What were some of the biggest, big struggles?
- [13:51]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, so my background was never in sales, it was sales ops. So it was adjacent. But I never knew how to actually run an enterprise sales cycle. And closing that first 100k deal, when I look back on it, I'm like, how did that close? Like just you think about founder led sales, you get pretty far based on being so passionate about what you're solving and thinking first principles. This is what they need, this is how I can deliver it to them and making sure that you're just obsessing over their problems and giving them that rapport and trust and just like brute force, honestly. But there's a whole other art of sales that I think can't come naturally. It has to be learned. And that was hard for me. And what I mean by that is I didn't know I was supposed to build a business case. I didn't know how to do a proper negotiation. I thought I knew from the one negotiation class I took at business school, but clearly did not know the fact that how you manage multiple stakeholders and when you bring in this person versus that person, there's a lot of art to it that I had to learn by doing it a couple of times and watching others do it. That that needed to be supplemented with the founder led selling.
- [15:03]
Omar Khan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was on the other side often at Microsoft where, you know, founders were coming in and more sales guys and selling stuff. And it's like, yeah, you come into the organization and I was going into meetings where I was meeting other Microsoft people for the first time. Right. It's kind of weird. And then thinking it makes you realize how big the organization is. And then thinking it from the perspective of somebody who's coming in and trying to sell to try to navigate that and figure out who are all these people, who am I supposed to talk to? Who matters? Who doesn't matter? Who should be in this room, who shouldn't be in this room. That's not an easy thing to figure out for anyone.
- [15:41]
Alexa Grable
Totally. It's difficult.
- [15:43]
Omar Khan
So did you get help on closing that first 100k deal, or did you just manage to get that to the finish line and then realize, oh my God, I need help? Like, how did that happen?
- [15:53]
Alexa Grable
That one I think I might have brute forced. And then I got help. We brought on an advisor through First Round Capital, our seed fund named Emory. And my seed investor mecca came from a sales background, so I definitely leaned on him. And then Emory got more involved and they helped a lot with the. Like, I would do the first negotiation with the cio, I would record the call and then I'd send it to them and they'd be like, here are all the things you need to do differently and here are the next steps. And so it's just. That's another example. Like, working with the CIO is a new beast that I had to learn and procurement teams and all of that. So they helped me a lot with that.
- [16:31]
Omar Khan
What were some of the things that you did differently once you started working with them? So I'm curious, like, if you said, or maybe like the. The example of that first deal, 100k and maybe somebody's listening to this, going through exactly that, that pain right now. What were one of the first one or two things that you. You changed, that had the biggest impact for you in terms of starting to make more progress faster.
- [17:00]
Alexa Grable
So many. And then I learned so much more. Also when we hired our first salesperson first, I would say having a very structured process and timeline so guiding the prospect on here's how the sales process looks, here's what each stage one, two and three looks like, here's the timeline, here's what you should expect. And I think learning that prospects want you to tell them what the process is rather than them telling you. I think another one is founders often want to jump right into demos and here's our product because we're proud of it. It's like look what we built. It's so cool. But I had to learn to do deeper discovery and learn to lead with the value. So just say what are our businesses pain points and how do I deliver the product? And honestly a lot of that is how our product works itself today. Of we now help companies do just that. Of this is the pain point of the prospect and this is how you value map your product. Which I wish I had that when I was starting out because it's not clear to me right away that people don't want to just like see the product.
- [18:04]
Omar Khan
So the first customer you mentioned, 100k.
- [18:06]
Alexa Grable
Deal, we had other, we had smaller deals. We had like I think our first deal was $6,000 and then it worked its way up. But once you get to that, we probably went 6k, 20k, 20k, 20k,. And that 100k felt different than the 20k.
- [18:21]
Omar Khan
So the first 10 customers, you know, the mythical 10 customers, how long did that take you to get to?
- [18:27]
Alexa Grable
We went zero to a million in less than a year. So I don't know exactly. So probably a couple months.
- [18:36]
Omar Khan
Did all the work, all those hundreds of conversations and that build, what did you call it? Build rate. This thing about just constantly chip rates. Right. Constantly getting feedback and improving the product. Did you find that once you then started selling it, the product was in reasonably decent shape or did you still have a bunch of oh moments when customers start using it?
- [19:01]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, it was definitely in good enough shape for our smaller customers to get value. The oh moments were the scale of data. How do we actually roll this out to where admins need some enterprise ready functionality? That was the oh of go back into a dark room in code and build it as fast as possible.
- [19:23]
Omar Khan
What were the growth drivers? So getting to the first million in ar I used to. So fairly quickly was it all outbound or what were you doing to generate.
- [19:33]
Alexa Grable
Leads so early days like I told you, it was me just brute force get anyone to talk to me. So that helped kind of creating some word of mouth conversations. Oh, there's this founder building this thing that could be interesting so that helped me do some of the first deals our investors helped make introductions, friends of friends. After every call, I'd say, who else should I talk to? Then once we had those early stages of product market fit, we started to really invest in content and community. And so what I mean by that is really building content that was about the future of sales. What does it look like? How can we help you? What are the best practices? What are the frameworks? And posting about it on LinkedIn, but then also creating a community in Slack where people can ask these questions. So it started as me inviting 10 people to a Slack channel, which grew to 20, which grew to 30. And then we had events and now it's over 4,000. So it's this flywheel of honestly, it was posting about the future of sales and how to help people less about pocus. But it grew our brand awareness, which then started to generate inbound.
- [20:45]
Omar Khan
Okay, great. So let's talk about the content side first. So you're publishing content from your own profile on LinkedIn. How frequently were you posting? Was it. Were you posting daily? How much time were you spending on it? Where was all this inspiration for this content coming from?
- [21:04]
Alexa Grable
So we experimented with a lot of things. Should we post daily? Should we post every other day? Should we post long form or should we post tweet size? What should we talk about? So a lot of the inspiration came from my conversations I was having with prospects or customers or the conversations that were happening in the community. And again, it was one big flywheel of this week. I'm hearing a lot about one topic. It could be intent or scoring or doing discovery or crafting a point of view, whatever that is. And usually once I hear it in my brain, I start thinking about it more and more and I become obsessed with it. And then I'm seeing what people are posting about it and then I have some ideas about it to generate kind of what could potential best practices be? And so that would be how I came up with the ideas and then it would be, okay, what are people saying when we post about it in Slack versus LinkedIn and how can we cross reference that in terms of what works? It's going to be different for everyone. So the reason LinkedIn works for us is we sell to salespeople and SalesPeople live on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. So there's different channels for people, there's different types of content that works, the different cadences, and you have to ship rate like there's no silver bullet. You just have to experiment and try it.
- [22:19]
Omar Khan
With. With Slack, you mentioned you invited like 10 people, and then the things started to grow. One of the things with like any type of community is you can have a bunch of people who kind of join and then unless you're actually active there, you do things. It can just be crickets and, you know, not a very exciting place to be. So what was your experience? What were you doing to build this sense of community?
- [22:48]
Alexa Grable
So the community was never a place to sell pocus. It was a place to bring people together, to help them learn about, go to market and share best practices and build categories together. And so in the beginning, it was me, like I was answering everyone's questions. I was tagging people that I thought would have a good answer if someone asked something. We held weekly AMAs for the community to ask industry experts. Any questions? Top of mind. Today we do that, but at a bigger scale. My head of marketing, Sandy, owns the community and she'll make sure that every question's being answered. We're keeping keeping it so that no one's spamming anything. Like, if people start selling their own stuff or DMing people, we kick them out. Making sure that we're gathering the best topics they want to hear and bringing in speakers. We do at least monthly AMAs still where the community can ask experts. I just got off right before this with Kyle Assay. He's a sales leader at LaunchDarkly. We just did 30 minutes with him. So it's a lot about how do we make sure people are getting value from meeting peers and folks similar to them.
- [23:56]
Omar Khan
Okay, great. So you were doing Outbound, which was mostly you in the early days, and maxing out, as you said, your LinkedIn, you know, messaging requests and all that stuff. You've got this content piece building up, which again is mostly you posting on LinkedIn and, you know, just building the brand and trying to raise awareness alongside the this Slack community that you're growing. What else were you doing in those early days to help drive growth? Hey, have you heard of SmartSuite? They were just named 2024 SaaS Startup of the Year by Startup Grind. Well, I recently discovered that Gearhart was the development team behind their success. Gearhart is a product development studio that specializes in scaling B2B SaaS. Companies built by serial entrepreneurs. They understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. With offices in San Francisco and London, plus a distributed team of 43 experts, they've helped build over 70 successful products. To learn more about how Gearhart can Help scale your development. Check them out at Gearheart IO. That's Gearheart IO.
- [25:06]
Alexa Grable
So once we got to that phase where I'd say, okay, we have product market fit, we're getting meetings, then it was okay. How do we actually do Outbound ourselves? And not just Alexa, but other people on the team doing prospecting and doing Outbound. So that's where we've tried a million different ways of doing outbound and that actually led to evolving our product to be more of a cold or warm outbound tool, along with just tapping into product users because we were feeling the pain ourselves. And things that we learned there was, you know, warm Outbound is way stronger than cold Outbound. So what I mean by that is people who know about your product or your brand or have interacted with you at some point, way easier to get someone's attention. If you're doing cold Outbound. You usually have to warm them up with awareness before coming in hard with the cell. I'd say also Outbound has to be extremely tailored and relevant and timely and delivering value and insights to the prospect for them before you hard pitch them your product. So for us, this leading with value and making sure we're leading with insights, that's what we started to do and then we started to productize that in our own product. And so the way it became really game changing was dogfooding or drinking your own champagne, using POCUS to do this type of prospecting as well.
- [26:25]
Omar Khan
So just explain, how does Pocus help with the warm outreach? It's basically looking at different data points and then helping sales reps to figure out, okay, these are the hottest, warmest, whatever type people you should be talking to right now.
- [26:40]
Alexa Grable
Exactly. So we have dozens of AI agents that are scraping and learning anything about your prospects possible. So who's on your website? Who's talking about you on social? What's happening in the industry that's relevant to a way that you can solve their problem? What did the executive just say? Was there a job switcher who was previously at one of your customers and switch to a new Hot target account? We're capturing all of that, then giving the reps the prioritization of here's who you need to reach out to and then also giving them the point of view and the insights. This is what's happening. Here's how you should sell your product to them. We can even write using AI based on this information. The email, the LinkedIn, the cold call script and help you take action from there.
- [27:20]
Omar Khan
Cool. Now there's no shortage of prospecting tools out there. What was your experience in terms of figuring out how you were going to differentiate pocus compared to everything else that you know, sales teams could be using? And were there any lessons you learned about how to articulate that value prop?
- [27:47]
Alexa Grable
So there's been an explosion of AI sales and prospecting tools because the old school prospecting tools don't work. It's just like it's ready for an upgrade. Where we've seen a lot of explosion for tools was in the revop space of how do we make data enrichment better or automations and doing scaled as well as the AI SDRs, which is we're going to replace a SDR and just use AI to do the work instead. We said we don't want to be either of those. What we want to be is a tool that supercharges sales teams and give them all the insights that they they need to know in order to do their job well. And so you can think about it as AI to do the first information gathering, researching, thinking, reasoning, to set up a rep for success, to then do the second level of critical thinking beyond that of who do I engage with, what's relevant, what's exciting for them to know. The big differentiator that we leaned into is one of our agents, which we call a relevance agent that is constantly learning about their business and their prospect's business and getting smarter over time so the insights become more relevant. So for us that's the bet that we take. So we're saying we don't want to be an AI SDR. We're not a RevOps tool, we're a tool for salespeople to do this better. And funny story, we built the AI SDR product about a year ago. In about a month we started running it and then we killed it from our code because we deeply didn't believe in it.
- [29:16]
Omar Khan
That was the follow up question I wanted to ask you was what is your view of AI SDRs and that whole space just generally how do you feel about it? Because you're writing about the future of sales and everything and secondly, where do you think this is headed?
- [29:37]
Alexa Grable
So maybe in the future I'll regret saying that AI SDRs aren't great because you know, AI is getting better and I do see a world where AI gets so great that it's going to work. What I see with AI SDRs right now is it works okay for very transactional small, small, small SMB startup deals where they just want a volume game for companies where you need More of a strategic sell, or you need to stand out from the crowd and you don't care about ruining your brand reputation by spamming the universe. That's where it doesn't work. So for me, the reason we didn't like it was it felt different from our philosophy of, you know, we don't want to replace sellers, we want to supercharge them. We also don't want to spam the world. We want to actually provide value. So to us, it didn't work. And I don't see many companies getting value out of them. I think that'll change once the AI gets smarter. But I do think right now it's a lot of hype and a lot of churn.
- [30:34]
Omar Khan
Yeah. And I always wonder, like, you know, I see a lot of stuff on LinkedIn where people are saying, oh, this AI agent will, you know, do this and basically send out hundreds of DMs or emails every day and whatever. And I'm just waiting for the day when the recipients are also going to have their own AI agents to either ignore or reject or whatever, so they don't have to deal with it. And so where do we end up and where people are like, no one's actually talking to each other. It just seems like there's a future here where I think AI is undoubtedly going to be a part of it, But I think the way that it's kind of being implemented right now, it just feels like I'm not sure it's being used to solve the right types of problems. And so it's interesting that you're taking that approach of we're not going to go down that AI SDR route, but we are going to use this technology to, as you said, supercharge sellers. I think that's a smart way to do that. Let's talk a little bit about the value prop and sort of the messaging. So you've kind of explained how you sort of figured out where you fit in. What was the experience of trying actually having those conversations, pitching to people? Did this whole idea resonate? Did you have to kind of do multiple iterations before you got it right? Just generally, like, how easy or hard was that process? Sort of figure out, like, okay, this is our pitch. This is how we need to communicate the value so people get it as quickly as possible.
- [32:13]
Alexa Grable
Positioning's the most important part. I mean, there's a lot of important parts, but it's very important. And I don't know if a lot of people realize how much time is spent on positioning. It was Six plus months of iterating and it was always having a running pitch deck that was changing every day. And I mean, it's always changing. Our pitch deck has changed like every quarter since we've started pocus because the market's changing so fast and you have to keep up with that. And so for us, it's pitching the future, pitching different narratives, getting feedback, having dialogue, understanding what resonates. You can tell when a prospect is nodding along and like, yeah, yeah, that's really key for me versus kind of like tuning out of the conversation.
- [32:57]
Omar Khan
Yeah, I think the thing for me has really been about you have this. It's a pretty crowded market and as you said, there's a whole bunch of tools out there and you know, just, just like, how do you get to a point where you have a clear, clear differentiator? And you said about the positioning piece, but just maybe give me an example of one of the struggles that you had early on when you were trying to articulate this to potential customers when it wasn't working.
- [33:33]
Alexa Grable
Yeah. I think the hard part of being a founder is you have to be thinking a year plus into the future and so you have to be saying this, this is important. You might not know it yet, but it is important and it will be a differentiator. And you kind of have to bet on yourself. And all of our bets of differentiators have been more backend focused, actually. So it's how we collect data and surface it to make sure that the data is more timely and accurate and interesting and relevant. So that has been really the core of our differentiator. So what's hard sometimes is telling a sales rep or a sales leader of this is our differentiator. This is why it matters so much, because it's hard for them to understand. Okay. You know, they're not, they're not data people and they shouldn't be data people. But it's hard to kind of articulate that to someone who doesn't know the backend as well until they're in the product and see the magic. So for us, you kind of have to bet on yourself that you're going to believe in this differentiator, in this moat six plus months down the line to keep investing in it now so that there is that light bulb moment for the prospect in the future.
- [34:35]
Omar Khan
What's been one of the hardest parts of building this business for you as a founder?
- [34:41]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, so. So many, so many problems, so many hard things. I think the first thing is I was learning to be a founder but also a CEO and a manager all at the same time. So it. It's hard to do one of those at a time, let alone all three. You're learning, you know, how to hire, how to fire, how to give feedback, how to articulate your vision to your team, to investors, to customers, how to kind of give people enough rope so that they can do their job well, but also hold them accountable. It's a big learning journey all at once.
- [35:17]
Omar Khan
And give me an example of maybe a struggle or a challenge you had in terms of growing as a leader, manager, CEO in the company.
- [35:27]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, I think the first year I probably made every mistake, and I think the biggest impact probably made mistake in terms of management and being a CEO. I think being a founder came naturally to me. Like, I had this big vision I wanted to execute. I know I can outwork anyone. Being a manager was the harder transition, and I think it had a big impact on my direct reports and the people on my team or the people I manage, where I had to get better at giving feedback. I had to get better at showing them where I stood, and I had to get better at, you know, giving them kind of clear path to what their role looks like. And I needed to give them time on one on ones. And they definitely stuck with. A lot of them are still here. And I'm very grateful that they stuck with me through that time, but it was definitely messy for them.
- [36:16]
Omar Khan
And how did you. How did you learn to overcome some of those. Those challenges?
- [36:22]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, I just consumed as much information as I could, so I read a lot. I listened to every podcast, I talked to every founder that I admired. That was a couple stages ahead. I hired an executive coach, so not only did I get feedback from my team, like, I would constantly ask them for feedback, and I have great rapport with my direct reports, so they gave me good feedback. But I also had my exec coach often go in, interview my leadership team, or at the time, we didn't even have one, interview my direct reports to then consolidate the feedback for me.
- [36:55]
Omar Khan
How do you get to a point where you have enough rapport with somebody that they're willing to tell you what you need to hear?
- [37:04]
Alexa Grable
I think fast. So long as you make the right hire. The hires that I've made that are right, that we have trust right away, and we can build from a place of respect for each other. And I give them feedback, and they see that it's coming from a place of I want to help you grow. And I set off a pretty comfortable environment where people I think feel comfortable telling me things. They. They're open to giving me feedback early on, and I'll ask for it.
- [37:33]
Omar Khan
Yeah, I think that the feedback piece is like, this. This stuff that a lot of people ask for feedback, but you're not always ready to hear some of the things that people say. Like, even with this podcast, like, I might get feedback from, you know, somebody about something. And, like, I had feedback once. Like, you didn't look. Some guy said you didn't look like you wanted to be there. You just look like you had no energy. And I was like, well, maybe I probably didn't. Right. And it's like this one thing, and you just kind of obsess over it and over and over again. But it's just like sometimes it's like there's always something valuable you can learn from these things. Right. But it's. It's. Number one is like having people around you who'll tell you stuff that you need to hear. And number two, trying to figure out how to turn it into something that you can actually, you know, action or do something about. Right.
- [38:31]
Alexa Grable
100%.
- [38:33]
Omar Khan
You know, when, before we start recording, you were. We were talking about, like, life and just, you know, dealing with, you know, hundred things. I'm sure it's no different for you as a founder. You have to, you know, you're pulled in all different kinds of directions. How do you deal with that today? Well, first of all, is that true? Is it really crazy every single day? And how do you deal with that?
- [39:00]
Alexa Grable
Yeah. So I think, well, there's two parts to the question. One, like, how do you deal with everything in life? Then how do you deal with everything at Pocus for everything in life? I'm going to be honest. Like, unless you're willing to give up everything for a company, you shouldn't be a founder. Like, my focus has been. Not just my focus has been Pocus. And that's true. Like, it's. And you give up other things and you sacrifice in order to make a company work. But within the company, I'm also pulled in a million different directions. And I think that is a skill I had to learn where I used to focus, focused on everything like it was if something needed to be solved, I was like, I'm the one to solve this, and it needs to be solved right now. So it was a learning curve for me to understand what my priorities were and where what actually needed my focus. And I think a lesson for me was instead of trying to do everything good, pick one or two things to do really, really well, then move to the next two things.
- [39:49]
Omar Khan
And so in sort of practical terms, what does that mean for you on a weekly or a daily basis?
- [39:55]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, I've gotten pretty intense at following a weekly and then also a monthly reflection process and goal setting. So I'll talk about my weekly one. We usually for the company have a focus and three goals. And every single week I'll do a reflection of, okay, what happened in the past week? Where did I move the needle? What goals did I not move the needle on? And then other things, what went well, what didn't. And then for the next week, what is the one or two things I actually have to move the needle on? And then what I do is because I'm on East coast and a lot of people in tech are on west coast, which is nice. Usually from 6am to 9am I block my calendar and that's where I work on that thing I need to move the needle on. And if it's other things, I try to delegate, I try to say no. Over time I feel like I've gotten better at what I need to do versus what I can delegate. But it still can be hard when everything feels on fire.
- [40:47]
Omar Khan
There was an example you shared with me earlier about managing time. And the example you gave was dealing with a customer who's paying like $20,000 and they're unhappy, could easily consume a whole day. While there might be a 500k deal that you should be focused on because that's the thing that's going to move the needle, help drive revenue, do those kinds of things come up often? And how do you decide what to do?
- [41:18]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, I think the first step is kind of detaching your emotion from it. If you get so obsessed with this angry customer, you can lose sleep, it could fog your whole day. Instead, just fixing it and moving on is helpful and so you don't put a lot of mind space to it. I think another is sometimes a 20k deal. Angry customer could be more important than the new 500k deal because they're a referenceable customer that you really want to show that you're prioritizing them and giving value. And you think there's big expansion opportunity in the future. And really just for kind of trust purposes, you want these people so you have to weigh options. I think for me, I also have a co founder that is kind of can play double of me sometimes. So a lot of times like will kind of be like, I'll take this, you take that and we can swap who takes What? So I think having a co founder helps with this a lot if there's multiple things that are on fire.
- [42:13]
Omar Khan
Yeah, I bet. I always have a lot of admiration for solo founders because one, I think it's a really hard thing to do. I mean, being a founder is a really hard thing, but having somebody who can be a co founder or a trusted sounding board maybe doesn't make things. You still have to deal with the challenges and the struggles and all those things, but there's at least some kind of bouncing board that you can rely on and then get some feedback and so on. So it's definitely, I think, finding a great co founder, I mean, if it was easy, right, it was like to do that, everyone would be golden. But. So I think anyone who's got a good co founder is in the lucky space. There was one other question I want to ask you and then we'll wrap up and go into the lightning round. When you look back over the last few years, in many ways you seem to have done a lot of things right. Going through and doing these initial, you know, one or two weeks sprints we talked about to figure out the idea, talking to hundreds of people, iterating on the product and constantly getting feedback on that. And that showed ultimately when you launched and were able to hit seven figures, you know, pretty fast. When you look back, is there anything that you wish you had done differently?
- [43:49]
Alexa Grable
Oh, everything. I think that you can always look back and see, see things you wish differently. Like, should I have invested in this product feature instead of that? Should I have, you know, prioritized this marketing channel instead of that, should I have hired this VP instead of that one? Like there's always a what if. I think because you don't ever know the right answer in a startup because there is no right answer. It's a lot of intuition and a lot of guessing. You just have to make decisions and then iterate quickly based on whether it worked or not. So yeah, there's so much I wish I could have done. Like I mentioned to you before, of I wish I knew how to be a manager before I started out. I wish I knew how to prioritize my time better and the list could go on, but I think the more important thing is getting the data and feedback fast to iterate as needed.
- [44:39]
Omar Khan
And when we think about the future of sales, where do you see a product like Pocus going?
- [44:46]
Alexa Grable
So for us, we want to be the product that takes away all manual tedious work that can be done by agents to set up the sellers for just doing the relationship part of sales. And so to me, a seller is deeply building relationships, doing the stuff that AI cannot do, and AI does the rest. So we are the tool that is doing everything for a sales rep besides the actual relationship part.
- [45:10]
Omar Khan
Great. All right, and on that note, let's move on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Ready?
- [45:17]
Alexa Grable
Yeah.
- [45:18]
Omar Khan
Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [45:21]
Alexa Grable
To not listen to anyone's advice. I think a lot of people have advice, whether it's your team, other founders, your investors, your customers. You have to take that all as one data point to then inform your own intuition.
- [45:36]
Omar Khan
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [45:38]
Alexa Grable
Can I give you multiple books?
- [45:40]
Omar Khan
Absolutely.
- [45:42]
Alexa Grable
My three must reads if you're a founder or at a startup. First, great CEO within just to get basics of accountability and management and time and everything. Second, hard thing about Hard things. That one's really good. Especially if you're trying to do something risky. Make a hard decision and then amp it up is a is a classic by Frank Slubin.
- [46:06]
Omar Khan
All three great books. Hard Things just comes up over and over again. And the funniest thing was like I remember a founder saying, I started reading that book and I had to stop because it reflected too much of what was going on in my business. And I didn't want to know where it ended because everything seems so depressing. But it's a great book. Okay, what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
- [46:33]
Alexa Grable
Persistence. I think just being able to keep going. You get more no's than you get yeses. So someone who can just take those nos and figure out a way to turn them into a yes.
- [46:43]
Omar Khan
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [46:47]
Alexa Grable
I use Superhuman and Notion a lot, so Notion. I have very robust templates for journaling and reflecting, so I use that a ton.
- [46:59]
Omar Khan
Uh, what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [47:03]
Alexa Grable
I was just texting this morning with two different female founders. We said, you know, in the future. We all have been going through the egg and embryo freezing process and it is so awful. In Women's Health, we in the future, it's got someone's gotta be making it better. It may be us, but hopefully someone else can work on that.
- [47:24]
Omar Khan
That's a whole world I have no idea about. But it's a good example, I think, of, like all around you. There are still so many opportunities for things to be done better or for. So we'll keep a lookout for that. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [47:41]
Alexa Grable
I'm obsessed with reality tv. It's how I unwind.
- [47:47]
Omar Khan
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [47:51]
Alexa Grable
You know, right now my passion is pocus. I put really a lot towards it, but when I'm not doing pocus, I love spending time with my husband and my family and just trying different workout classes. Very boring. But honestly, all my energy goes towards pocus.
- [48:07]
Omar Khan
Awesome. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. If people want to check out pocus, they can go to pocus.com and if folks want to get in touch with you.
- [48:18]
Alexa Grable
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, so. Alexa Grable on LinkedIn.
- [48:21]
Omar Khan
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It's been pleasure. Thanks for sharing your journey and some of the lessons that you've learned along the way of building this business. And I wish you and the team the best of success.
- [48:35]
Alexa Grable
Thank you.
- [48:35]
Omar Khan
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