B2B SaaS Sales: A Cold Text That Landed McDonald's

Summary

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The SaaS Podcast: Build, Launch & Scale Your SaaS

Episode: Enterprise Sales: How Blings Landed McDonald's in 9 Months
Host: Omer Khan
Guest: Josef Petersiel, Co-Founder & CEO of Blings
Release Date: January 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Omer Khan interviews Josef Petersiel, the co-founder and CEO of Blings—a personalized video platform for enterprise brands. This conversation unpacks Blings’ journey from bootstrapped beginnings to landing major enterprise clients like McDonald’s, Mercedes, and Meta. Josef shares candid stories about painful lessons in enterprise sales, building a repeatable sales process, and positioning yourself to break into difficult markets. Listeners are treated to actionable insights for SaaS founders eyeing large customers and avoiding common early-stage pitfalls.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Blings’ Origin Story & Product Overview

• Problem Insight: Text remains the default for direct brand communication (email, SMS), but customers consume content in video formats everywhere else.
• Blings’ Solution: Enables brands to send real-time personalized, interactive videos at scale via a patented format (MP5)—where one dynamic template can generate millions of custom videos without ever exposing sensitive customer data.
• Who They Serve: Enterprise-level marketing and CRM teams, especially where privacy requirements are significant (e.g., banks, financial institutions).
• "We're never exposed to any data. So that enables us to work with banks, with financial institutions...we have the ability to do that very, very seamlessly." – Josef [06:37]

2. Early Struggles & Validating the ICP

• Initial Approach: Targeted customer success departments based on logic, not market validation.
• Validation Process: Dozens of LinkedIn-sourced interviews with CS managers, only to realize these teams universally lacked the budget to buy.
• Pivot: Shifted focus to marketing and CRM, where the budgets—and the urgency for meaningful engagement—exist.
• "If you ask for advice, you'll get money. If you ask for money, you'll get advice." – Josef [10:35]

3. Landing McDonald’s: The “Big Logo” Catch-22

• The Break: Josef is randomly sent the CMO's phone number, sends a gutsy text, follows up persistently, and snags a meeting.
• Strategy: Tailor a custom video demo incorporating McDonald’s customer data elements. CMO loved it, leading to a POC.
• Cycle Duration: Nine months from initial meeting to signed POC, while still bootstrapped.
• Enterprise Chicken & Egg: You need a big logo to get credibility; but can’t get the logo without credibility.
• "You gotta be a little bit sassy. That's where SaaS comes from." – Josef [14:46]
• Quote: “It probably took about eight months, nine months to close the paperwork and everything... it was only a PoC agreement.” [15:18]

4. Surviving the Enterprise Sales Marathon (Bootstrapped!)

• Cash Stress: No funding, long sales cycle, relying on ecosystem goodwill and bootstrapping (“it was a hard year, dude” [19:42])
• Legal Help: Relied on network for critical contract work, promising to pay forward once investment arrived.
• Team Resilience: Strong founding partnership and support network helped survive the unpredictable grind.

5. The POC Mistakes & Playbook

• Key Learning: Never structure a PoC as a separate legal agreement—forces you into two rounds of negotiation.
• Optimized Play: Bundle POC as a “first month with opt-out” within a 13-month commercial contract, so conversion to a full customer is smooth if the test succeeds.
• Charging for POCs: Essential for customer buy-in and to trigger onboarding/procurement processes.
• "If you give anything for free, you just... bottom of the food chain. No one's going to really take you seriously...even if it's $3-5k, just to show they're serious." – Josef [21:19]

6. Event-Based Lead Generation: Hard Lessons Learned

• Early Tactics: Attended high-cost events, returning with 70+ leads—but no process or system to effectively prioritize and nurture those leads.
• Lead Scoring & Sequencing: Now grades, sequences, and targets leads according to fit and urgency—but not before wasting budget on unconverted contacts.
• "You have to set up sequences, right? You come back, you have a lot of leads, you have to hand pick, you have to cherry pick..." – Josef [24:36]
• The Pivot: Focus on fewer, bigger events; invest in speaking/master classes; leverage client case studies to stand out.
• ROI Focus: Bigger impact, higher lead quality; “the quality of the leads that we understood we had to bring back, that changed the game for us.” [25:55]

7. Building a Repeatable Sales Org (and When Not To)

• First Attempts: Hired excellent sales talent before having a repeatable, documented playbook—failed to produce results.
• Key Signal: Don’t hire sales reps (beyond founders) until even a “mediocre” rep can succeed using a process anyone can follow.
• "Once you have a playbook...Bring a mediocre sales rep that can make a sale. That's when you're ready." – Josef [29:54]
• Ongoing Update: Playbook is always evolving and adapted for different verticals.
• Channel Partners: Grew via strong door-opener partners receiving substantial commissions, often sourced from the founders’ extended networks.

8. Operating Lean: Efficiency with Enterprise Logos

• Team Size: Just 19 people supporting giant enterprises.
• Efficiency: Smart use of video “skeletons” and templates offers high customization with low overhead.
• Modern Metric: Efficiency is measured as ARR per employee, not just headcount.
• "AI tools... you can automate, you can be smart about what you create... IT efficiency is really part of what we do." – Josef [36:43]

9. Product Evolution: Balancing Flexibility & Focus

• Feature Requests: Strict prioritization—only build features that multiple clients demand or a client will pay for.
• Product-Led Growth Launch: Opened up a PLG pathway in January 2026—app.blings.io, enabling self-serve SMB/long-tail customer acquisition.
• Top-Down & Bottom-Up: Direct enterprise sales continues but bottom-up acquisition via PLG also in play.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Freedom’s just another word for nothing else to lose...” – Josef (citing Janis Joplin, [04:39])
• “You gotta be a little bit sassy. That’s where SaaS comes from.” – Josef [14:46]
• "Bootstrap and go after enterprise. It's like not very smart. Maybe I'd have done things a little differently..." – Josef [19:50]
• “Nothing for free. I actually got that from my mother—she’s a sex therapist… She used to always cancel. She told me, just ask for a little money and nobody cancels anymore.” – Josef, on charging for POCs ([39:34])
• On founder advice: “If you’re actually listening and understanding the person that’s sitting across from you, you’ll get very far. We have this instinct to sell and to always talk, but just stop and silence is sometimes good.” [40:20]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Product & Origin Story: [05:18] – [07:41]
• Validating the Market & ICP: [09:39] – [11:47]
• Landing McDonald’s: [13:19] – [16:13]
• Enterprise Sales Challenges & Catch-22: [18:08] – [19:55]
• POC Mistakes & Playbook: [20:23] – [22:05]
• Event-Based Lead Gen & Follow-ups: [22:36] – [27:08]
• Sales Hiring (When & How): [27:55] – [31:03]
• Scaling Efficiently with a Small Team: [33:13] – [36:43]
• Product-Led Growth & PLG Launch: [37:33] – [39:17]
• Lightning Round (Personal Insights & Books): [39:29] – [44:06]

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Final Takeaways

• Don’t build for teams with no budget—validate your ICP rigorously.
• When selling to enterprise, always charge for a POC and align on clear KPIs.
• Resist the urge to hire sales before a repeatable process exists; founders must sell (and fail) first.
• Focus on a few high-quality events and leverage speaking/client stories for credibility.
• Optimize for efficiency (ARR per employee) by modularizing your product behind the scenes.
• Embrace both top-down and bottom-up approaches for growth—PLG can unlock new segments even for complex enterprise products.

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Connect with Josef Petersiel:

• LinkedIn (he promises it’s the real Josef, not a bot)
• Product: blings.io

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Transcript

[A]

I talk to a lot of founders stuck in the same spot. They've got a clear vision. They just need the right team to build or scale it. That's where Gearhart comes in. They're an AI powered product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your B2B SaaS platform or AI agent. Built by serial entrepreneurs, they understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. They've built over 70 successful products in including SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One. Right now they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Just book a call@GearhartIO. That's Gearhart IO. I've interviewed over 450 B2B SaaS founders on this podcast. Success leaves clues and I've been taking notes. Every week I send out the shortcuts, the the blind spots and the tactics that actually work so you don't have to learn everything the hard way. Over 5,000 founders read it. You probably should too. Sign up free at SasClub IE newsletter. That's SasClub IO newsletter. You're putting in the hours, but your SaaS isn't growing. It's not your product, it's not your pricing. It's the way you're wired as a founder. And once you see it, everything changes. Every founder has a blind spot. The builder ships great code but forgets to sell. The visionary chases big ideas but can't execute. The optimizer tweaks endlessly. Instead of finding customers. Which one are you? I created a free quiz that identifies your founder archetype and gives you a specific playbook to fix what's holding you back. Take the Quiz at SASClub IO Quiz. That's SASClub IO Quiz. 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 talked to Josef Petersiel, the co founder and CEO of Blings, a personalized video platform for Enterprise Brands. In 2019, Josef and his friend Jonathan saw a problem that wouldn't go away. Jonathan had worked at a company trying to create personalized videos for customers. But there was no technical way to do it at scale. So they decided to build a solution. They started pitching their product, but after dozens of customer interviews, they hit a wall. They eventually realized that the buyers that they had been targeting had no Budget. So it was back to the drawing board. They shifted their focus to marketing teams where the money actually was. Then they caught a lucky break. Someone sent Josef a phone number for the McDonald's CMO. A few texts and follow up calls later he had a meeting. Before the call, they put together a custom video for the brand. The CMO loved it.

[B]

But.

[A]

But closing even the proof of concept took nearly nine months. All while they were bootstrapping with zero revenue. Then came more setbacks. They tried events but had no system to follow up with leads. So 70 hard earned leads just went cold. They also hired salespeople, but even talented reps couldn't close deals since there was no playbook. But they kept at it. Today Blings serves companies like McDonald's, Mercedes Meta and Rocket Mortgage. They hit the first million in ARR in 2023 and have been growing since then with a team of just 19 people. In this episode, you'll learn why charging for proof of concepts, even a small amount, completely changes the dynamic with enterprise customers and how seriously they prioritize your project. How Yousef used a simple mindset shift to get dozens of customer interviews and eventually land meetings with enterprise decision makers like McDonald's CMO. What Yosef learned about validating your ICP after spending months targeting buyers who had no budget. And how the pivot changed everything. We talk about how they broke through the classic Enterprise Catch 22, where no one will work with you without a logo, but no one will give you that first logo. And what signals tell you you're actually ready to hire salespeople and the costly mistakes that happen when you move too early. So I hope you enjoy. Joseph, welcome to the show.

[B]

Hi, Omer. Thanks for having me.

[A]

My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you?

[B]

Are you a big music fan?

[A]

Sometimes.

[B]

So I don't know why. There's a sense that always stuck with me. Janis Joplin. Joplin. Freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose. It's kind of if you let everything go and you live like there is nothing to lose, so it allows you to kind of fly higher in a lot of ways and have a carefree life.

[A]

I love that.

[B]

I have two kids, by the way, so I have a lot of care, but I try to live as if I don't.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Love it. Okay, so for people who don't know, tell us about Blings. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to Solve.

[B]

Yeah. So what Blings does is we noticed a gap. So today, in today's world, everyone's actually in video, right? So you have. Everyone's in TikTok and Netflix and YouTube. That's where everyone really consumes their data. And when you look at first party communication, so emails, sms, in app, all these brands only have the ability to send text as the real medium. And what Blings does is we bridge that gap between the need for video and the ability to communicate through text. So we do it through a unique development, a new video format called the MP5, which is essentially saying, today, if you want to create a million personalized videos, you need to create a million personalized videos. And it's not scalable. Very, very expensive. And that's the reason our inbox don't have videos today, not because brands don't want to send it, it's because they don't have the actual ability to scale video. What we do, what the MP5 does, is instead of creating a million videos, we just create a single video template and the video is actually rendered in real time on the end user's device. What does that mean? We can create 100 million personalized videos, all completely interactive, with each one, have a different sequence, different data, and all of that in a millisecond. And the most important to wrap that up is we're never exposed to any data. So that enables us to work with banks, with financial institutions, they want to communicate different mortgages, different interest rates for different people. We have the ability to do that very, very seamlessly.

[A]

Okay, cool. Now, before people go out and start looking at how to replace their MP4 videos with MP5, we should probably just. I just want to clarify here. So you patent this technology and it's pretty clever what it's doing, but right now it's not a successor to MP4 as an industry standard or anything like that, right?

[B]

Yeah, that's correct, that's correct. It's actually just a very good way to market, but it's not an actual peg. So it's not going to be the successor to MP4. But it's kind of saying MP4 has MP3 inside of it. Right. But it's also video and MP5 has MP4, MP3 and another interactive element on top of that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about that technology, but before we do that, give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

[B]

Yeah. So we're 19 in the team total today. We reached 1 million ARR in 2023. Been growing exponentially since. We work with enterprise companies, so unfortunately very long sales cycles, but hopefully a very large ACV at the end. So we work with McDonald's, with Mercedes, live Nation, Meta, Cleveland Cavaliers. We just signed with Rocket Mortgage and Tim Hortons. So there's a lot of different enterprise brands that we're working with.

[A]

So the business was founded in 2019, is that right?

[B]

2020. So December of 2019.

[A]

Okay, so tell me, how did you come up with the idea for this product, this business?

[B]

So again, it's identifying the need for that. And specifically my partner Jonathan, the CEO, he used to work at a company called WSC Sports, where they really tried to do something similar back then, but in a different way. So imagine in fantasy sports getting a recap every day of who your player, your best player is, you know, where you are relative to other ones. And there was no actual technical solution back then to do it. And him and I were very good friends. We go back since high school and we knew we wanted to do something together, we didn't know what. So while we were kind of brainstorming ideas and we had a few really bad ones, this one came up and we're like, let's, it seems like the right thing to do. Let's see if we could position this and bring it to market correctly. So that was end of 2019, beginning of 2020. You remember what happened in 2020. So that, that affected everything a lot on the strategy and the go to market, but it also shaped a lot of what we're doing today.

[A]

What did you do after that? Like, how did you validate the idea, figure out who you're potential target market was, who your ICP might be?

[B]

Yeah, so we read all the books, right. And we started to sign up for acceleration programs. And one thing we understood we had to do was interviews at the beginning. And we actually thought that our ICP would be customer success because it makes a lot of sense to help them communicate with their, with, you know, their clients. So what we did is we tried to interview as many customer success managers as we can. And back in 2020, we didn't have actual agents, so we created our own bots to do a large scale, to scrape LinkedIn. Basically we created five different profiles on remote desktops, each one with their own picture. And we had to get them up to 500 contacts. And it was a very interesting way to get to people. And basically we managed to get lots and Lots of interviews and we actually had to summarize them all because we didn't have any note takers. And then we went through and we understood the main problem was there's no budget with customer success. And when they said we had to go to marketing, so there might be, you know, gray market there, but we're not going to make any money. So that was the initial, was just to kind of validate our icp, understand that we're going to the right path. And getting to those customer success managers was also interesting because, I mean, I think everyone says it, but it's very true. If you ask for advice, you'll get money. If you ask for money, you'll get advice. So the way we approached them was all we want to do is pick your mind, you know, as a leader in the industry. And you'd be surprised how many responses we got. And then later on when we're trying to sell, we had to go back to that. All we want is your advice. And then you have to do it nicely, obviously.

[A]

So how many conversations were you able to have?

[B]

Dozens. We had dozens of conversations.

[A]

Okay, who is your icp? Is it CS folks? Marketing? Who do you focus on?

[B]

So today's marketing, so we work within the product marketing. You have CRM managers, they can also be loyalty managers. So you have to think about it as a buyer Persona because our software isn't cheap. So you'd have the CMO usually involved and you'd have a buying committee, but that's where the budget would actually come from. And the user is usually the CRM manager or the email marketing manager, where that individual's KPIs are to make the emails convert. Right. You're putting all that effort into the content, into the emails, but no one's actually opening them up and scrolling into the newsletter and saying, wow, can't wait for the next newsletter. Because no one's really unfortunately reading anymore.

[A]

Okay, great. So you've had enough conversations. You figure out who the ICP probably is, you know who probably the the right ICP is. And you, you also, I mean, one of the first customers you landed was McDonald's, which is like pretty nice brand, pretty nice logo to have, and also pretty impressive when you're like, you're a startup, you don't have anything, you don't have any revenue or very little revenue to land a customer like that. So did you intentionally go out and say, okay, we have this ICP and we're going to target enterprises from day one?

[B]

We didn't have like, an exact strategy. It was really, who can we get the fastest and how? And literally we just had someone that made randomly send me a phone number. That's really what it was. And I sent this guy a text, and he's like, what do you want from me? Like, all I want is to meet. Could we just meet? We created this great video for you. He had no idea what he was getting into for some reason. I probably got him at the right moment in time in the day where he said, fine, schedule the call. We didn't have anything ready for him. So we went, we created this video. We really dug into their brand. Like, what would they want? How would they want it? It's a very hard brand to match. And we created this video for him, which turned out to be our first poc. That video, literally, he loved it. And it was just like using a lot of data, saying, hi, first name. You have this amount of points in your loyalty program. These are your favorite products, and this is what you need, you know, for some kind of upsell. And that almost exact video was used for proof of concept afterwards. So it was just a design partner at the beginning. We didn't get paid, and afterwards turned into a client and also turned into an investor further down the line.

[A]

So this was a guy at McDonald's?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What was his role?

[B]

It was actually the CMO.

[A]

Oh, okay, wait, so you got the CMO and you just sent a text and he actually gave you a meeting?

[B]

Yeah, after I called a few times also. But you got to be a little bit sassy. That's where sass comes from.

[A]

That's right. So walk me through how you landed that deal. So you've explained how you got your foot in the door and how you moved to a POC because the CMO loved the video. How did you get to closing the deal? How long did that take?

[B]

It probably took about eight months, nine months to close the paperwork and everything we had to do. And it was only a PoC agreement, so it wasn't even going to a commercial agreement. It took us a while just to close that poc. But once we sent that paperwork, the. That's when you work with McDonald's, right? Because when you're small, it's very hard because you have to get that first logo so that anyone else will take you seriously. And no one's going to give it to you. No one's going to hire your services unless you have that one logo. So it's a bit of a catch 22 just to get started the first logo, so we didn't put it on our website just yet, but it is something we had a video to show and we were going to launch with them. So we, we weren't lying, but it's something that we're able to then take and leverage to other customers.

[A]

So what was the scope of the POC and what was the biggest obstacle or challenge you faced? I mean, you guys have come up with this idea, you've spoken to a bunch of people, but when the reality of you've got this big potential customer in front of you, I'm sure you discovered a whole bunch of things that you hadn't expected.

[B]

Yeah, oh yeah, a lot of things. So first of all, like I said before, it was a POC agreement. We didn't really understand that afterwards we would have to sign another commercial agreement. Now that was really problematic because you negotiate, even though we didn't really negotiate for an extremely large amount of money. Um, but you negotiate some, you know, terms. Who does the tech belong to? You want to, you know, you want to take care of your IP also. And then after those eight months, you have to negotiate again, which is another few months. And then, so, so it was a very, very long process and you'd think we'd learn from that one time that we made that mistake, but we actually made that mistake a few times of having a POC agreement and then moving to a commercial agreement. And it really held us back, it really held us back from kind of creating a very easy sale and a structured sale. And then what we did was something very simple. Instead of having a 12 month agreement for an annual contract, we had a 13 month agreement where at the end of that first month there was an exit clause. So either party, if they weren't happy with the results or for any reason didn't want to continue, you could continue. Otherwise, you go directly into the commercial agreement. And having that contract enabled us to, it saved a lot of time within the sales cycle.

[A]

Had you raised any money, a seed round or anything at that point?

[B]

No. No.

[A]

So, I mean, it sounds like a pretty tough situation to be in where you, you, you've got the, the potential of a big customer, but an incredibly long sales cycle that you never know when it's going to end. So what kind of pressures did that create and how did you guys get through that period?

[B]

First of all, having a good founder, a founding team, is very important. So there's always a lot of pressure. But if you have someone you could depend on at any point, it's Just something I know. A lot of founders go in alone, and some people, that's good for them. There's a lot of pressure to succeed and, you know, from. From clients or in life. So having a good founder with me was always very helpful. We got a lot of help from people that believed in us. I'll tell you the truth. So a lawyer, someone that I knew as a kid, we didn't have money to pay him, and he actually didn't even ask for anything deferred. But we're going with a client, you know, McDonald's, you need a real lawyer. You can't just, you know, pretend. So he gave us, you know, free consultation basically afterwards, you know, once we invest, once we got investment. So we made sure to pay him for his time. But we had people help us like that, just, you know, from immediate ecosystem.

[A]

So you guys were just bootstrapping your own money to get this thing off the ground?

[B]

Yeah, it was a hard year, dude.

[A]

That's pretty tough, right? Oh, let's bootstrap and go after enterprise.

[B]

It's like, not very smart. Maybe I would have done things a little differently.

[A]

Today you talked about POCs. You mentioned that there's some mistakes that you've made several times. What are the takeaways? What have you learned from that? So if you were like saying, hey, these are the things you must do or must not do to run a successful poc. If you're selling to enterprise customers, what's your playbook?

[B]

Everyone needs to be aligned on how success is defined, right? Everybody needs to know. A successful POC is if both parties agree that These are the KPIs and this is the structured time that we're going to test. This never do in the whole database. That's also a mistake that we've done. Never test an entire database, because then there's not much left afterwards. So you take a percentage, you do 10% of the database or whatever it is, you come to some kind of agreement to make sure. It's a test that everyone will be happy with. And if you meet these defined criterias, we go onto a commercial agreement. It has to be very clear, not only to yourself, but to everybody, that this is what we're trying to get to. And once everyone is aligned on that, you can, you know, you can have a poc.

[A]

And do you. Did you also learn that you. You always charge for doing a POC now?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. So another thing we learned is if you, if you give anything for free, you just. Bottom of the food chain. No one's going to really take you seriously. So you just need everyone to have a little bit of skin in the game, right? If it's 3, $5,000, just to show that they're serious, that there's two things. One, they're going to take you seriously because there is some money that's being invested. And two, you're actually starting the onboarding process. So you're going. Now you're, you're going to be an actual vendor, so they're going to open that up for you. So you're getting closer to being significant within the company. And then they're going to probably want procurement to talk to you and you're going to go through legal and you're going to go, you know, so you're going to start having things happen. So always make sure you charge something.

[A]

So you got the lucky break with McDonald's, somebody gives you a phone number and the CMO is in a good mood and after some persistence, you get some FaceTime and eventually POC. And, you know, there's a great outcome there. Tell me about some of the difficulties you had, generating leads and acquiring more customers. For example, I know you guys did a lot of events initially and there were some lessons you learned from that.

[B]

Yeah, you're kind of looking at what other people in the industry are doing. So, you know, everyone's doing the same things, basically bring in sdr, you go to events, you know, ppc. There's all these different acquisition channels everyone's doing. And you're not always thinking what's right for me right now. And I think we were a little bit into those pressures. We decided we had to go to an event. We went to loyalty event. We knew that this would be very good for us. And this is also something, I mean, just food for thought. When you go to market, everyone always says you have to be very targeted. You know, go to this industry, do only one thing, and then you could kind of expand. We didn't listen. And I think a lot of people just have to learn from their own mistakes. We're definitely one of those people. But what we did find, and this isn't true for every startup, is that we had a very, very strong horizontal use case, which is loyalty. So this is loyalty would be the same use cases for travel and hospitality, for banking, for qsr, everyone has the same use cases. So we do have a horizontal. And because we didn't listen to the actual playbook, we managed to figure that out. So we went to a loyalty event and we got. I don't know, like 70 leads. And we were so happy and we got back and we got HubSpot and so we started putting things in HubSpot, but we weren't really ready to intake 70 leads which turned out to be a real just waste of money because we spent, I don't know, 20, $30,000 on an event. You have a booth, you have the hotels, you have all these things. You come back, it needs to be ROI positive. And we didn't manage specifically for that event to make it financially feasible.

[A]

Tell me what you mean by you weren't ready to handle that many leads.

[B]

You have to set up sequences, right? You come back, you have a lot of leads, you have to hand pick, you have to cherry pick. You say, you know, grade them today. We know that. So you said this is a 10, you have to get them no matter what. This is a 7 and these are 5 and below. Put them in a sequence in HubSpot, right? This one is a good enterprise and this one might be a channel partner. How do you differentiate them and then how do you continuously follow up with them with all the million other things that you're doing, that's almost like a full time job to make that convert. So taking understanding that you have the capability to follow up and not just a game plan is something also just to take into consideration and find the right channels that are right for you at a specific time.

[A]

What happened to these leads? Do they just kind of. They kind of just rotted and went cold and cold and colder.

[B]

We have a nice nurture email campaign that they go out to. We did go back the next year and we did a very good job. We did learn from our mistakes.

[A]

So explain to me a little bit about what you did. So having a sequence is one thing, being able to effectively score the leads so you can prioritize who you're going after. But when you got it right and you did a better job converting those leads, what were some of the things that you, what were some of the checkboxes you had in place?

[B]

I think it's also about the quality of the leads that we managed to bring back. Not only the process. So it is the process and we could talk about that. But there's one thing that we understood for us is we went to a lot of events, we tried to go like on a monthly basis and we continuously had this different issues, but we realized we're going very small to all of them. So what we did is we took that budget that we wanted to spend for the entire year and instead of going to 10 and being relatively small, we, we went to three and we spoke and we gave masterclasses and we brought in also whoever clients back then begged them to come and talk about the success with us. And that changed everything because your follow up afterwards, you're not on Startup Alley in an event with 100,000 people, you stand out and you look more serious. So the quality of the leads that we understood we had to bring back, that changed the game for us. So knowing which event, knowing how to go was a game changer. And afterwards we also brought someone to help us with those leads at a certain point. An str.

[A]

Okay, okay, got it. Let's talk about building a sales org. I've lost track of the number of times I've talked to founders who will say, you know, if I can just hire a salesperson, you know, my, a lot of my issues are just going to go away and I'll be able to grow the business faster than I am. And I know with you guys you tried that a few times and effectively what you found was that you were struggling to move out from founder led sales into, you know, building, having a sales org. Tell me a little bit about that. Like maybe the first time that you went through and you decided you were going to hire somebody.

[B]

Yeah. So we tried to bring someone on even before we were a million in ARR and we were like this guy's incredible someone. I knew such an incredible sales guy and it wasn't even like a VP sales that isn't going to work. This is a hands on person that you know, and he did and he got on and he tried really hard and he was amazing. We have a very hard product to sell. It sounds easy, but there's a whole creation process that you have to go through and there's a whole integration process you need to go through and you need to orchestrate this within an enterprise and be convincing for so many different stakeholders. Probably like 12 or 13 people you have to go through before making an actual sale. And it's not easy. And so for some reason we thought someone with experience would also be able to be very good in this. But it didn't work. And we've done this a year later also. And we weren't able to really bring anyone on to be able to make a sale. And the one thing that we learned from that, and again it's in all the playbooks, but we didn't learn don't hire until you have a repeatable process, until you're able to make a playbook where anyone coming afterwards will be able to easily repeat that process. Don't hire until you can bring a medium, a mediocre sales rep, right? Once you can bring a media, you don't need a great sales rep. You need a mediocre sales rep that can make a sale. That's when you're ready to sell. Because if you have a great salesperson, it doesn't mean you have a great product. It just means that you can bring someone to make a sale. So that's when, in my opinion, you want to start, you want to bring someone. Is once you have a playbook, once you understood exactly the steps, how many phone calls does it take? Who exactly are the stakeholders in each position within the company? And once you have that, you can bring on your first sales rep.

[A]

So do you have that playbook today, or is this something you're still working through? Because it doesn't sound like you said the product, on the face of it, seems relatively simple. But when you explain the complexity of what's going on behind to work with these types of companies and the process you have to go through, it's a pretty complicated sales process.

[B]

It is very, very complicated. So we have a sales playbook. It's always being updated constantly, constantly evolving. And it would be different if you're talking to a bank or. Or if you're talking to a QSR company or if you're talking to. I know we're talking to a movie theater now, so it's also a little bit of a different playbook, but we try to stick to one as much as possible. And we didn't talk about it too much, but we have a lot of channel partners and we try to give them as much information as we can. Anything we've learned, we try to pass on to them, and we try to learn from them as well. But we have a lot of reselling partners, which is something that really helped us scale.

[A]

So how did you recruit those partners?

[B]

So it's the first step. We actually got someone that was really good at that. And it was just understanding that it could be your first circle of friends or acquaintances. So someone that's been in a position for 10 years, right, and he knows everyone in that ecosystem, just open up the door, open up the door, you'll get a commission. That's the first stage. And once you're able to make that sale and your product, you know, is ready for the market, that person might bring someone else and say, look, you could bring here and we'll Split that commission. And that just really grew pretty naturally very fast. So that we call like door opener partners in a way and we don't pay anything for them. They just get a commission. And at the beginning, by the way, it didn't work very well until we realized you have to give a real incentive. So the first year you get a very high commission and second year you get the regular commission. But you have to have a very high number, you know, very, a very large carrot that people could, could chase.

[A]

Yeah, but how did you find these people? Because it's not like, you know, you can just randomly come to me and say become a partner. They've got to be again, it's like you're trying to be very targeted, I assume with people who potentially are going to open the right doors for you in some of these enterprise companies, right?

[B]

Yes. I mean at the end of the day, it's not a very big ecosystem. You're two or three connections away from someone and then it's a numbers game. It's a numbers game. Just got to keep on trying. And you will have those people and say, look, would you like to make an extra $10,000 a month on a recurring basis? People will say, yeah, let's give it a shot. Right. So you create a one pager, you circulate that a little bit, you have these conversations and you can get very far. We have people making a lot of money on this reseller and the more money they make, the more money we make. So everybody's happy.

[A]

Cool. You know, looking at your website, there's quite a few logos that I see now. We talked about McDonald's, Mercedes, you've mentioned a bunch. Yet you don't have a very big team. Like about, I think you said 19 people. It's funny, I was talking to a founder yesterday where the number of employees used to be the flex. Right. It's like the more you had, the more impressive you are. And these days it's like the fewer you have, the more efficient you are. And so, but I'm curious, like having as you take on all of these enterprise customers, how much of a stretch is that for your team? How demanding are these customers? And just generally like I always get the picture, the picture that, you know, dealing with selling to enterprises is an ongoing thing. Even after you've closed the sale, there's still going to be a bunch of overhead for your team.

[B]

Yeah, that is very true. And there's always a need to over promise, especially if you're talking to enterprise and then having to deliver on that at a certain point. But we learned to utilize our technology very well. So we have the ability to make a video super flexible so that it's a template and we can utilize it across, you know, different companies. But it isn't a template, it doesn't feel like a template, it doesn't look like a template. But it is something that internally we know how to work with very quickly. So think about breaking up a video into lots of different scenes and then just stitching them together saying for this company it'll be scene, you know, intro, upsell, Outro and Dynamics. So if you click on this, you'll get here. If you click on this, you'll get there and then you have an entire map of different scenes that can compose lots of different videos structures. So we managed to understand that and this really enabled us to scale instead of starting from scratch everything. Our technology enables video to be super, super flexible. So of course the video for McDonald's looks nothing like the video for Mercedes because it's a different brand guidelines and different pace and different themes and everything's different, but it's made of the same skeleton.

[A]

Okay, got it.

[B]

And just about the number of employees I was listening to Grant Lee speak, the CEO of Gamma, which is exactly what you were saying. So they 30 people, 100 million in ARR. You look at companies like Lovable, 100 million, 25 people on the team, I think, and today it's exactly that. It's what's your ARR divided by the amount of people on your team and that is how efficient you are. So it's not 20, 22 anymore where we're 300 people. So it's not there today with AI tools you can automate, you can be smart about what you create. You know, just taking example, landing pages where you used to have to create a website used to take you six months and I don't know, 20, 30, $30,000. Today you can do it in 20 minutes with $20 IT efficiency is really part of what we do on a day to day basis.

[A]

So do you feel like the product is dialed in enough that you're not inundated with feature requests from customers?

[B]

If there's a feature that someone's willing to pay for, so I'll always bring it to the top of the line or if it's a feature that multiple customers request it, so then that'll be brought up on the product roadmap. Otherwise we really try to say no.

[A]

I mean it sounds like you've dialed in the Platform to be flexible enough that you've sort of covered enough of the use cases that each customer feels like they're getting a custom ish solution where on the back end it's kind of more productized, templatized, that sort of thing.

[B]

Yeah, we actually have a new motion that we just launched, pls, so you're welcome to give it a shot. Let me know what you think. It's still in beta, but we launched it. It's like a soft launch. January is going to be official, so it's App Blings IO and there we actually opened up the gates for everyone. Anyone could go in and create a video and you can pick a template and you can play with it, change your logo, change your color schemes, change the text, change the transitions. You can really play around with it. It's just the tip of the iceberg. What we actually opened up for people in the back end, we have a lot more and it's going to gradually get more complex and more advanced. But at the moment everyone's doing a plg. When you reach a certain point with enterprises, you realize that they're people. And the CRM manager and the cmo, they're also always looking what's the next best thing. So if you didn't manage to go top down, you got to go bottom up. And that CRM manager is googling, you know, increase retention. Right. What can I do? Top tools. So you want to be in those keywords and you want them to click and get to your platform and try it for free. Today we're in a world where everyone is trying everything for free. So you have to. Because what you could get with $20, ChatGPT, right. Or Gamma, it's mind blowing for $20. So you have to be in that standard where if you're selling to enterprises for much, much higher, you have to know kind of how to open that door at the beginning and then go bottom up as well.

[A]

Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, great. So we should, we should wrap up. We're almost out of time. Let's get on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you.

[B]

Okay, let's do it.

[A]

Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[B]

I talked about it before. Nothing for free. I actually got it from my mother. She's a sex therapist and she used to do a lot of pro bono. She would help, you know, couples that didn't, couldn't afford it and then they used to always cancel. So then she told Me, you know, she just asked for a little bit of money and nobody canceled anymore. So I. So I'm not in sex therapy, but it works in, you know, in my business as well.

[A]

Awesome. What book would you recommend to our.

[B]

Audience and why if you haven't read the Hard Thing about Hard Things. Ben Horowitz. It's great. It teaches you how to handle a crisis and learn from other people's mistakes. So I learned a lot from, from Ben Horowitz. A great book.

[A]

What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[B]

I think listening. So it's to everything. So if it's to an employee or if it's to an investor or to a client, if you're actually listening and understanding the person that's sitting across from you, you'll get very far. We have this instinct to sell and to always talk, but just stop and silence is sometimes good.

[A]

What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[B]

I like Vibe coding. It's the first time in history where men and computers speak the same language. So you know, base 44, big, big love of mine, lovable. Just discovered Hercules Corey, our director of marketing got me introduced to that. So there's a lot of different things you can. I play around with it to create apps for stories for my kids. Just type in, you know what kind of story you want. It's going to give you an output until my, you know, personal budget where I can upload a PDF from my bank and it'll give me like an exact breakdown of what I'm doing. So I like to use it for a lot of different purposes.

[A]

It's amazing how the world is changing now like and I think it's just going to get easier and easier for non technical people to be able to build apps. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[B]

I think there's a lot of unused data. I mean there are a lot of ideas always because there's always so much. We live in a world that, you know, there's so much going on. You have so many ideas and it's also so easy to test today. It's not like back then today you can validate pretty quickly. But one thing that I don't understand why it's not being proper properly utilizes all the data coming from, you know, like apps like the Oura ring. Right. It just tells you how you're sleeping and making you feel really bad with yourself. No founders should get that by the way. Don't get an oura ring just make you feel really bad about your life. But what do you do to actually what do you do with that data? So you know it could connect you this. There's so many different channels that it can take you to kind of well being and I think it's trying to do that a little bit. But I really think it's an opportunity that Smith's taking that data and making it accessible and telling each individual based on their heart rate of, you know, sleeping with what they need to do on a daily basis.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. It's funny even with like I was looking at aura yesterday actually I was like, oh, haven't seen this. It just, it just randomly came came in my feed somewhere and. But maybe I'll think twice before I do that. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[B]

I come from a very musical family so I play drums and a lot of music in the family. But I played clarinet for many years and I was in a band for many years. Also high school and post high school.

[A]

And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[B]

You know, it's family. I think those are the only two things I have in life right now. No more running, no more. I used to play basketball, semi professional. But today just the last thing. You know, everyone talks about work, life, balance, it doesn't really exist. So don't you know, if you have a startup there is no real life but there's something very secular. So it's if you're happy at work, you're going to be happy at work at home and if you're happy at home, you'll be happy at work. So it's something that it's not necessarily work, life, balance, it's just life and just try to be happy wherever you are. So besides work, it's really my family, my two beautiful kids and my wife that I try to invest my time and energy into.

[A]

That's a good passion to have. So Josef, thank you for joining me. It's been a pleasure unpacking your story and hopefully sharing some useful lessons for our listeners. If people want to check out blings they can go to Blings IO and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[B]

You can reach out on LinkedIn. I'm pretty responsive.

[A]

Okay. And it's not a bot now it's the real yosef. Awesome. Thanks man. It's your pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[B]

Thanks very much for having me, Omar. Take it easy.

[A]

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