← The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
B2B Product-Market Fit After 2 Years of Nothing
00:45:03
Tito Goldstein (TeamBridge) on finding B2B product-market fit by replacing a scheduling tool with composable Legos and outselling 2 years in one month
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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 Tito Goldstein, the co founder of TeamBridge, a workforce management platform for companies with hourly workers. Before starting TeamBridge, Tito and his co founder Arjun were product designers at Uber. They spent years interviewing thousands of drivers all over the world and they kept hearing the same thing. The pay at Uber was worse, but the app made their lives easier. That one thing stuck with them. What if they could build software that helped other companies do the same for their hourly workers? In eventually they raised a seed round and started building, but it took two years before they made any real money. They built a scheduling product first. It seemed like the obvious thing to do, but when they took it to the market, customers kept telling them something different. The pain wasn't scheduling, it was everything that happened around it. The workflows, the automations, the stuff that was stuck in spreadsheets. So they went back and rebuilt the product, which took another year. When they finally launched the new version, it made more money in the first month than the old product had in two years. Finally, they felt like they were getting some traction, but growth was still a grind. They were talking to anyone who would listen. Restaurants, movie theaters, retail shops. They needed to find their focus and learn to tell their story in a way that resonated. And once they did, things finally started to click. Today, TeamBridge is doing multiple seven figures in ARR with over 200 enterprise customers. They have a team of about 60 people and have raised over $35 million. In this episode, you'll learn why their first product completely missed the real pain and how listening to what customers actually wanted led them to rebuild everything. How casting too wide of a net on their ICP kept them stuck for years and what finally gave them focus? What changed when they stopped trying to sound impressive and started being more transparent about where they were as a company. We talk about how they figure out what matters to customers in a brand new vertical before they start selling, and why that process is essential to their growth. And why Tito believes the first half of every sales call should be questions, not product demos. And how that's changed their close rate. So I hope you enjoy it. If you're building or investing in a SaaS company, you already know security isn't optional. One breach and everything you've built can be at risk. That's where ThreatLocker comes in, imagine having the power to decide exactly what's allowed to run in your environment and blocking everything else by default. No guessing, no hoping your existing solutions catch it. Real Enforceable Control threatlocker is a zero trust platform that locks down your environment without disrupting operations, gives you total visibility, and stops unauthorized applications before they become a problem. If you want stronger security and tighter control, visit threatlocker.com that's threatlocker.com 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, 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 at Gearhart IO. That's Gearheart IO. You've built the product, you've got a few customers, but 10k in MRR still feels miles away and you're not sure what to do next. That's the hardest part of the early stage. Not building, figuring out what actually moves the needle. SaaS club launch gives you a clear plan, weekly coaching and direct access to me. So you're not guessing anymore. Apply@SASClubIO launch. That's SASClub IO launch. Tito, welcome to the show.
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Thanks for having me.
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My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
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A
I actually have two quotes. One maybe I'll paraphrase and the other I'll say more directly. This first quote is from this Boy's Life by Tobias Wolf. I think this quote is meaningful in a lot of different ways and maybe my second quote will add some insight to it. So the quote is knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end before we get it. We live in a continuous present and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own. Sure, passing pain is endless pain. So that's like one of my favorite quotes and I've had that quote since high school. And there's another quote I'll maybe paraphrase which is basically that in order to become our best selves, we need to allow our former selves to die. And I think those both kind of play off each other, especially from an entrepreneurial sense, where you have to have that kind of utmost optimism about the future, but pessimism of where you are today to be critical and focused and drive towards that optimistic outcome you're hoping for.
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Yeah, love it. I didn't expect that much out of a quote, so thank you for that. So tell us about TeamBridge. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
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Yeah, so when we looked at the market, we realized that 60% of the world's workforce is hourly and they are being asked to do some of the most complicated tasks with some of the most rudimentary and legacy tools. So our focus is really on what we call like that forgotten demographic, those folks who need technology more, but just have been given something honestly off the shelf that no one should have to use. So TeamBridge is a workforce operating system. It allows you to find, attract, manage, engage, and now even pay workforces in a way that helps you stand out. It helps you as a company leverage your differentiators, your secret sauce, to actually give the best possible employee experience and in doing so, win and increase your revenue. I think we have a quote from a customer who said, as soon as I signed up for TeamBridge, I took my admin staff and I took them off of keeping the lights on and I put them on revenue generating activities, the things that actually were the inputs to the flywheel. And the way TeamBridge does that is with composable Legos and building blocks. So we let people start with a template, but then stand out with unique features, products, experiences in the mobile app and in the admin experience as well. And it's been a really exciting journey to date.
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B
Why is that composable aspect so important? Like, why is it at a pain with other workforce management solutions?
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A
Yeah, if you think about it, you know, standing out is half the battle. And during COVID and even still today, nurses, forklift operators, construction crews, they're some of the most in demand jobs out there. And so whichever company can actually find the worker actually wins. So how do you incentivize, how do you attract that talent? Well, if you're using a workforce management software that's off the shelf just like your competitor, and that's your main touch point with that employee, well then you're a commodity now. And now you're gonna have to hire a lot of admins or do something or pay a lot more. But you know, if you can actually provide them a unique experience, a more self service experience, give them the agency. And the only way to do that is with those composable Legos.
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Right.
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You can't stand out if you have the same software as everyone else. And what we saw, you know, 10 years ago, Project management was upended by things like notion airtablemonday.com and we thought, oh my God, like there's an opportunity here to give that same composability underneath a use case driven tool like a workforce management platform.
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B
Great. Give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
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Yep. So we are about 60 employees. We are north of, you know, we're multiple seven figures and we have over 200 enterprise customers and that accounts for over 500,000 end employees.
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Awesome. And I think you've raised at least 38 million so far.
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Yep. So we've raised, you know, north of 35 million across three rounds, a seed, an A and a B.
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Great. So let's talk about where the idea came from. I know both you and your co founder Arjun were at Uber at the time and part of the process you went through was you ended up interviewing like a hundred or hundreds of Uber drivers to understand some of their pains. And was that a customer discovery thing because you had this startup idea or was that something that you were doing as part of your jobs that led to a startup idea?
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Yeah, so that was just a core function of my day to day job at Uber. So me and Arjun were two of the first principal product designers Uber ever had. And we also owned large parts of the product, both the rider app, the driver app, and even internal tools that Uber was building. And that afforded us this amazing privilege to do a lot of our own user research to, you know, come up with our own product ideas. And because of that, we interviewed thousands of drivers all over the world. The United States, you know, east coast, central, west coast, Brazil, Mexico, India, Singapore, Australia, you name it. Like we went to all these markets to truly understand why the nuances of their communication habits and their riding habits, you know, changed the metrics in the Uber experience. And one thing we always heard, every single driver, they said, I know I'm making less money than I used to, but I choose to drive for Uber. And to us that was like a, oh my God, like how is this company, how is our company differentiating against a traditional employer who's paying More and also giving probably more consistent hours because Uber drivers were, you know, working longer, longer hours and the pay, you know, honestly wasn't great. But they were choosing that because of the agency and the self service aspect, the ability to go on their mobile app and work with a modern company and press a button and start earning. And we thought, how do we give that level of agency and self service to all these other employers that are competing now with the gig economy? So it really was kind of an idea that organically formed after all these conversations, usually more pointed around a specific feature, but a consistent theme that we saw as Uber became the behemoth it is today.
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Okay, great. So it sounds like what you heard was from these Uber drivers, the Uber app is actually pretty good compared to what I'm used to. And these are all the other problems I face with the other products that I've used with other employers. So that tells you how good the Uber app is and how crap some of the others are. But how did you then figure out what were issues with these other apps? Like, did you do more digging? Did you find hourly workers that were not Uber drivers? Like, how did you connect the gap?
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Yeah, so when we initially were, you know, starting out on this journey, we actually went door to door. We went to a movie theater, we went to cafes, we went to restaurants, we went to retail shops. And we started realizing how fragmented and how low quality the technology that they had in their hands was. Employees couldn't request time off. Simply, they couldn't even see their schedule. They couldn't put their preferred schedule in. I worked at In N Out during the summers when I was younger and I remember I would commute an hour to the store and an hour home. And I only worked a four hour shift because that's what initially like the manager put me on. I'm sure he would have liked me to tell him, I will work as many hours as you give me, but as a 17 year old, I don't think I was ballsy enough to do that. So reducing the barrier to entry to allow employees to do oftentimes what a company needs and wants was like the key differentiator. And if you want nurses to pick up another shift, giving them the biggest, easiest button to click in the app probably will increase that. Step one, product design. And so I think we went out there, we heard about what was in the market, and then we started designing because that's what we and Arjun were inherently good at. We were product designers, we were product guys through and through, and we said let's start with what we think is best in class, and let's learn from the market itself.
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Okay, great. So you raised a seed round of around 3 million, but you didn't generate your first dollar or any significant revenue for another two years after that. Tell me about what, like, how did you raise that seed round anyway? What did you have to pitch at the time?
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A
Yeah, so we'd actually been hacking nights and weekends on some ideas. And then eventually we realized, hey, it's time. And so we were lucky enough to be relatively high up at Uber. So there was some kind of, you know, brand recognition with the culture that Uber had, you know, at that time. And we, we went out to some of our, like, colleagues at Uber. They connected some of the dots and we sent out this kind of mass email to VCs. Now, I think one of the important things we did is we said, hey, like, we are taking two days, three days at most, you know, to like, meet with folks and see, you know, what the interest is here. We did a couple kind of trial runs with some VC friends of ours, and then eventually we packed in two meeting days full from, like, morning to night of VCs. And I think that helped us, you know, create that urgency, but also helped us just really refine in that, that pitch. And the pitch was we have this, like, working prototype we had built. We have some folks who are actually using it now. We were giving it to them for free. And we're, and we're very intimately involved with this pain point, given our experience at Uber. And so I think any VC is going to ask those same questions. Are these the right people to be doing this? Like, do they have the chops, the grit, the understanding, the technical ability to be able to execute on it? Do they have the passion? Do they have the chip on their shoulder? Not to just from a VC perspective, right, Sell out early because VC wants to return the fund. So I think we checked a lot of those boxes. We had significant experience. We were top class in the one thing we did well, which was product and design. And so we were able to kind of tell that narrative. So I think at the seed round, Avisi is really investing in the founders. They're saying, like, hey, you know, maybe that changes a little bit now with, like, the AI dynamics of the world. But still, they're investing in kind of this ethos, this idea, and the idea might even change, but if the grid of the founders is there, you know, they're probably willing to lean in. So we did kind of this very you know, rapid fire, you know, VC round. We received a lot of term sheets and then, you know, it came to deciding on who to go with. And we made it simple on the VCs, right? We had the kind of typical terms back then which was like a 3 on 15 round.
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Okay, so you raised the seed round, but then it took you two years to generate meaningful revenue. Like in that period it wasn't zero revenue, but it was almost zero. So why did it take so long? Was it about. You spent way too much time building the product. It was hard to sell what was going on.
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Yeah, so we, we built, we had our initial prototype, even the one that we kind of started with in those VC conversations, we took that to market. And then when we started talking to folks, you know, the actual buyer, not the end user, not the employee, we started hearing something that was a little bit different from that initial assumption. And it was, I, they, they basically said it's a super supply constrained market, right? So we need to stand out to get there. And they all had their secret sauce. And usually that was in spreadsheets, usually that was in some other tool. So we started realizing that our core scheduling product, our initial product, was not like the pain we initially assumed it would be. And in fact the pain was actually in between those moments. So to answer your question, like we had this initial product and then we took it to market, but we actually used that to uncover that nugget of truth that would ultimately be, you know, what Team Bridge is today. And it was that the connective tissue, the operating system, what happens after, you know, a shift is marked as late. All those cascading automations, all those, those cascading like actions was the more important and more valuable piece of the platform. So we then, you know, with this new insight, you know, basically pivoted the product a little bit and we started building based on that new core concept of composability, of flexibility, of giving our customer those Legos and building blocks. And that took about a year. And as soon as we went to market with that, it, you know, outsold the previous product in the first month. Like the entire two years it outsold in the previous month and then, you know, it 3x3x3x. So I think the whole kind of two years of what you could call the doldrums were really about listening to the market and then actually executing on what we heard rather than holding on to that initial concept and having like that sunk cost fallacy there.
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B
How much pressure were you getting from investors when you checked in.
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So I think that one, we were a super lean team. Like we and me and Arjun have always been kind of more on the frugal side. We will spend money when we see something working, but until then we're basically, you know, just holding that in our, in our war chest. So I think we were very light on burn. We were probably a team of five or six. You know, our Runway was multiple years at every given time. So I don't think the pressure was as much there from investors. And candidly, you know, like investors, they put more focus on the things that do have like the momentum. So we were probably like a little bit in the shadows. But I think the investors we chose gave us the grace to go and figure that out on our own.
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So tell me about the end of that two year period when you landed the first significant sale. How did that come about? What type of customer was that?
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Yeah, so it's funny because as I, you know, I think we, we briefly touched on, we cast a pretty wide net. We didn't know a specific market we were going after and we were building such a flexible tool that in fact we were very unfocused in our go to market and I wouldn't suggest that for any founder, but it helped us learn enough about enough industries to create the right primitives inside our technology. But now, you know, from that moment we actually had a couple key medical staffing companies come our way. It was like the height of COVID and nursing was, you know, printing money. And so we leaned in there knowing that, you know, we had something that they really wanted and that was the flexibility to create this Uber type model to ubery their staffing agency and make it very self service and help them scale with demand almost infinitely. So we signed a couple of these medical staffing companies and moved very quickly, quickly learned their language and learned what it took to succeed. So that helped inform the building blocks we would add to the platform. And so that has been kind of, you know, an ICP for us now for a while, but where we're actually able to see folks spin up a new medical staffing company with little to no admin staff and scale this to multi, multi million dollar businesses where they're now saying, hey, I'm bored. What's the next business I should start? Because TeamBridge's operating system is able to operate so much of that kind of, you know, automatically as technology should.
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B
What were some of the biggest objections you were getting from customers when you were trying to pitch the product?
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Well, I think that you know, even still today, um, we're going into an industry that typically is used to like a cookie cutter software. Something that just does one thing, it does it well. And we're coming in and saying, hey, it can do what you ask of it. With a. In the world of AI, when you know you're actually prompting something, it's not doing one thing. What you can't say, what does ChatGPT do? And in the same way, when people ask, what does TeamBridge do? It's let's say, hey, you know, it could be an amazing time tracking tool, it can be an amazing learning management system. People build the tools that help them stand out into the platform. So I think that objection and that education moment is something that is TeamBridge's greatest strength. But it's also kind of a growth edge or a learning curve where each of the industries we go into has to be kind of, you know, rewired to think, wait a second, my scheduling tool can actually make me money. My scheduling tool can help me incentivize staff to pick up, you know, more shifts or whatever metric I'm tracking towards. And that's like, you know, something that I think oftentimes requires a few objections and a few kind of educational moments.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I can imagine any busy business owner or leader kind of hearing that and saying, great, but I'm so overwhelmed with my job right now, I was hoping this was just going to be a plug and play thing that I can use right away. So presumably you had to find these early adopters, people who were actually excited about being able to do this level of customization. So how did you find those people within, you know, this, this kind of pool of potential leads and prospects?
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Yeah, so very early on we were kind of doing a lot of the typical things. We were subscribing and paying for leads from software advice, Capterra, G2, like these Gartner services that are like SEO, you know, aggregators. And I think that was good for us just to have those initial conversations. And I think those initial conversations allowed us to refine the message and say, what does this industry specifically need? For example, with a medical staffing company that does like, you know, shift based work, we could actually automate that away and make it an uber ified model. On the like travel nursing side of things, we could get you to a place where you can auto submit travel nursing profiles. So I think we had to understand the language. And so the step one was the conversations. Once we had like the, the understanding of the industry and what would inflect their revenue. We could actually go out with that messaging in any channel, whether it's calling, emailing, texting, showing up at conferences with that message, sponsoring, you know, dinners and events. There's all these different ways you can, you know, get that message out. But step one was getting that message because we. You get zero traction if you're screaming a irrelevant message into the void.
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Yeah, so I think even when we were showing up at conferences, my instinct as a builder, like Arjun's instinct as a builder, is to be like, we can build it, whatever it is, tell us what you want. And that is not something that a business owner is going to lean into. So I think the hook was already missing and I think the hook actually needed to be far more honest, especially when you're in those very early innings and you haven't figured out much yet. The hook was, hey, like, we spent a lot of our careers building amazing technology at Uber. We want to now build that to you, bring that to your industry. And so the folks who are the right customers for that stage of company will lean into that message because it is honest and true. So I think we switched that message and all of a sudden we had these customers who were the right customers who were giving us ideas, who are excited about it. Who were those first early adopters willing to go through the pain with you because they saw that same ambition and that same future that they were optimistic about. Now, obviously, as the company matures, our messaging and our, our kind of, you know, product obviously has evolved and now it is more focused. Now we're like, hey, we've got this playbook, we've got this template. We've got exactly what a massive enterprise medical staffing company or an NFL stadium needs. And we will go to them and say, hey, like, based on everything we've heard in your street, here's your template and then here's the 20% that you can start to like, you know, configure and build and stand out and optimize for. So I think, you know, understanding that your messaging has to be true because a customer ultimately will see through the lies, like, and also the right customers will be attracted to the truth of what is going on today at your company.
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B
You know, you told me earlier that you cast a very wide net initially when you were looking, figuring out who your ICP was. And there was some upsides to that because you were able to figure out all of these challenges in different verticals and where, you know, how you could build the right product that would be horizontal, I guess. But this is a problem that a lot of founders have at this stage where there's this reluctance to narrow down, niche down. And so you try to go as wide as you can. Just explain what were some of the issues that you experienced? You know, what was the downside of doing that?
- [25:48]
A
Yeah, so, I mean, downsides to me were, you know, pretty apparent kind of constantly, because even though TeamBridge is composable, even though we're Legos and building blocks, one industry is going to ask for Legos A and B, and another industry is going to ask for Legos C and D. And prioritizing one inherently means, like, you have to cut the other. But prioritizing both means you inherently have prioritized nothing, and now you're going to be the slowest moving player in that space and you're probably not even going to deliver the value that, you know, the segment you focused on wanted in the first place. So I think that, yes, we benefited a lot from hearing from a lot of customers understanding how employee management at scale across many different verticals. But as soon as we found kind of that vein and that truth, you know, with medical staffing Healthcare, we started pulling that thread and we started building deeper into that, providing more and more value. And sure, we kept as product people, we kept an ear out to be like, are these agnostic components that any employee would benefit from? But we still had to focus both in our go to market and our product to make sure we were delivering the utmost value there. Now the cool thing about TeamBridge is that we actually are able to go into a new industry, hear from them and then compose usually 80 to 90% of the way there, oftentimes much better than the incumbents who are sitting in that space building vertical specific SaaS. But from a go to market perspective, we are always going to be like focused on our ICPs. Otherwise the messaging will get lost and, and distracted. And candidly, our customers won't trust us that we are like leaning into their space.
- [27:21]
B
So that first customer was in kind of the medical field. Did you then say let's just double down on medical or were you still trying your luck in different verticals to see what would stick?
- [27:31]
A
I think for a while we probably made the mistake of like, you know, leaving the, the doors wide open. And then as we started to bring on go to market experts because me and Arjun candidly are just not that we started bringing on people who are actually successful, you know, salespeople who'd been there, done that at early stage startups, they were like, no, we got to focus and we're like cool. Then the conversations become much more pointed, they become much more focused and your product roadmap becomes the same. So I think, you know, we made the mistake of leaving that door a little bit open, but now it's much more intentional. And we have, you know, medical staffing, we have, you know, other types of staffing. There's kind of like that Venn diagram for us and we start to see these adjacent markets being the most logical next steps for us. So we actually aren't even, you know, you know, expanding, you know, just experimenting willy nilly. We're actually going after the adjacent markets that have a lot of overlap, maybe even sometimes overlapping workforces.
- [28:27]
B
Okay, great. So that makes sense. Tell me about. So you went from like having like your customers were like anybody who was interested, anybody who would talk to you. And mostly there were smaller businesses, SMBs. And then at some point you started to move up market to heavy enterprise. When did you feel like you were ready to do that, that that was the right decision?
- [28:49]
A
Again, I think it's been very organic. I think that we followed where the market was pulling us so in this case we realized that a small SMB company probably is okay with something that's out of the box and not super flexible versus a mid market company or even an enterprise probably has specific things that they want that no software can provide. And so because of this like we actually realized that our whole value prop gravitated towards like the larger companies that had more opinions, that had more differentiation, that had the resources to probably hire people to do it manually, but now wanted to turn it into technology. Because if you think about this industry, these spaces, they have like the truth, they have the knowledge, boots on the ground, but they don't have like the product skill or the engineering talent to go and execute on them. And that's where TeamBridge and now this AI revolution comes in is it shortens the distance between ideation and execution. And TeamBridge was that best of both worlds, build versus buy, where they could deploy an enterprise grade technology without spending millions and millions of dollars to whiff on an mvp.
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B
So you mentioned earlier that you started out getting customers, just going door to door, doing a mixture of customer discovery and trying to do sales. Then Covid hit and that as you told me earlier, people weren't opening those doors anymore. What happened to your, your, your, your, your go to market motion? What did you have to start doing at that time?
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A
Yeah, I mean Covid hit really early in the journey for us I think. You know, we actually signed a new lease February of 2020 and then March of 2020 SF went on lockdown. So I would walk to the office by myself, kind of, you know, futz around in there, eat some of the snacks I bought till they were gone. And then luckily we were able to get on like a month to month and eventually like close that office until we reopened, you know, our HQ here in sf. But to your point, like we thought, okay, you know, we're scrappy startup founders. Everyone always says just talk to whoever will talk to you. So we'll go just like we did early on, door to door, every cafe, find out what they're using, maybe use that as a, you know, outbound, you know, hey, we talked to your, your employee like and they hate this, like, want to see what TeamBridge can do. But since that was no longer afforded to us or possible during the COVID lockdown, we actually matured maybe faster than most startups do in terms of our channels. Like we actually started outbounding, we started sending emails, we started calling, we started texting, we started paying for lead gen sources to experiment and see what channel Worked. And that was very kind of awkward at first. Again, not having any real go to market or salespeople on the team and just two product guys who are like talking to, you know, business owners, trying to learn. And again, it allowed us to be really close to our customers, but it probably meant that our go to market was like slower to gain traction than it could have otherwise been with someone who's a pro. Hopefully that benefited us now because me and Arjun are still so close to our customers in that regard. But yeah, to answer your question, it made us kind of mature into maybe like a slightly more old school sales organization. But it, it works out when you're going to an industry that is used to like legacy tech stacks that have been operating that way for a while. So it allows us to kind of.
- [31:59]
B
Meet them where they were, you know, cold email. Every year we hear it's harder and harder to get, you know, get that working. I'm sure you had your challenges back then. Tell, tell me about what were some of the, the struggles in getting people to respond and what did you learn at the time to, to change that or improve the response rate?
- [32:28]
A
Yeah, I think, you know, ultimately it came down to the messaging, right? If you have something that's very to the point and it's the pain that they're talking about that morning, afternoon and night, they probably will give you a shot. And to what I mentioned earlier, if it's honest, if it's, hey, like I was at Uber for five years and now I'm like, you know, curious about your space. Like you can be open about like where you're at, the shortcomings and the wins. And I think, yes, email marketing is probably getting harder and harder and every channel will go through these like, booms and busts as they get oversaturated and then people drop off of them and they have, you know, a dead count, dead cat bounce. But I think the, the, the messaging, you know, really is, is what matters. And then the second piece I'll maybe double click on is that your first message is not going to be, you know, the, oh my God, everyone's clicked on this. But, but you're actually building relationships that you don't even know about. So when you then start showing up at conferences, when you then start, you know, running ads, when you start, you know, being more active on LinkedIn or wherever, whatever communities your customers are in, you actually start getting that recognition because, like, hey, I remember your name because you sent that email. I remember a salesperson on your team sent that Email and that's the icebreaker that you need to ask them a genuine question and, and dive, dive into discovery to see if their pain matches your solution.
- [33:47]
B
And for the people who responded, how, how easy was then to get a meeting with these people and how easy was it to turn that into a sale? I'm sure it was like this was just, was like okay, I'll listen. But then you've got the next level of challenges that come along. So what was your experience?
- [34:06]
A
Yeah, so I mean I think during COVID it was fascinating because I don't think our industry was used to zoom calls, especially when we were talking about the mid market SMB. So that was an entirely new ballgame for them. They were used to people like coming to them shaking their hands. And now we're kind of, you know, back to that world a little bit where especially in the enterprise world, we want to be, you know, face to face with our customers. These become long term partnerships where their entire business runs on the TeamBridge operating system. Their operating system they've configured using TeamBridge. So I think that you know, folks were reticent, you know, especially in the small SMBs to take zooms back then. Now it's more normalized. But usually when we got people online calls, they were very excited about the product because of the flexibility, because it was a completely different ballgame than they were used to with legacy workforce management solutions. Payroll, scheduling, time tracking, they all not only looked antiquated but they didn't move the needle for the business. And then we came in and said, hey, this is not just a utility, this is your differentiator. This is how you actually pull the levers to make more money as a company. So I think that you know, we've always, this has always been a case with team Bridges. Once people were like on the call, they were, you know, very excited about the platform and usually kind of, you know, ended up being, you know, customers of ours. But yeah, you're right. Like I think you know, getting folks onto the demo, seeing the, the product is something that, you know, that is that first, you know, step in the funnel. You have to have enough value and you have to position yourself as a, I'm going to help share what the latest and greatest is. It makes sense for you to come check it out, right? I think question based selling is a great book to kind of, you know, unlock some of those nuances of how you message and how you don't just sell but you actually offer up insight. And if you are, you know, whether you're podcast or whether you're a CEO, whatever it is, if someone comes to me and says, hey, would it make sense to see what's the best, latest and greatest out there? Like, it's hard for me mentally to say no to that. That's like, yeah, of course. Like I, that's my job.
- [36:06]
B
Was this something that on the emails or on these zoom calls that actually really resonated with people Because I guess many founders would go in and just start talking about how great the product was, how you can do everything, all the features. You already realized pretty quickly that that wasn't the right approach and you needed to tell a story. But I'm curious. There's usually something that once you figure out whether it's a specific pain or some kind of outcome, that really lights up your icp. So back then, what was that? And you know, did you figure that out?
- [36:48]
A
Yeah. So the interesting of a team bridge, right, is we have to figure that out for every industry we go into. So for like medical staffing, like there's even within medical staffing there is actually unique for sub verticals. So 30% of the industry is actually per diem, which is like basically shift by shift, claiming you can think of about it like, hey, I'm a nurse, I want to work tomorrow morning and I want to, you know, earn that money. Or you maybe a more popular or commonly known is travel nursing where a nurse will say, hey, I want to work for 13 weeks in California or I want to work 13 weeks in, in, in Colorado. And because of that like they're actually completely different in terms of what TeamBridge can offer them. On the per diem side, we came in and said, hey, this is now the Uber, your, your version of the Uber app to be able to like, you know, self request and completely make the entire experience for the nurse self service and automated. Now on the travel nursing side, which is a little more high touch, we use our automation engine for something entirely different, which is putting together the packets of a nurse and then letting them submit as fast as some of the biggest, most tech enabled competitors out there. So even now the mid market and smaller travel nursing agencies, or you know, the enterprise folks that come to us can be on the cutting edge of technology without spending hundreds of millions of dollars to staff that. So the messaging was completely different. That moment that you called out of, when someone lights up, completely different. And to that point, I think every founder should know that every sales call should start with a serious amount of discovery because if you just start selling your product. And then at the end of the call they say, well, I didn't want any of that. Then you've just completely burned this amazing opportunity to have a conversation. So your discovery has to be very tactical and, and you should hold that point. So if someone mentions something that you do really well, don't just jump at it, because that's the exciting thing a founder will do, but instead hold on to that. And then when you get to the demo, make that callback to that very key value point that is most important to them so that your product and their pain kind of are very aligned.
- [38:44]
B
But it seems to me that it becomes really hard to sell to these different verticals because of these nuances. And if you don't understand them specifically enough, you're going to go out with this really watered down, diluted message designed to work across any industry or vertical. So when you went into a new vertical, did you kind of go through a process and say, we're just going to do customer discovery again and we're just going to try to go deeper and understand what these nuances are?
- [39:13]
A
Yeah. So that's spot on. Yeah, that's actually spot on, Omar. Like, so every time we're in a new vertical, we know we're naive, we know we don't know anything, but we're confident in our ability to provide a know an entirely different ball game than the legacy competitors. So for example, we now have the 49ers Levi's Stadium on TeamBridge. And when we first went into, you know, the stadium space, we didn't know what they did, but we learned that because it's only 20 events a year at the stadium, they have to restaff the entire stadium every game because it's not a full time job, it is a part time hobbyist job. And so when they're trying to restaff 3,000, 4,000 people across parking, guest services, custodial security, they're sending out 30,000 emails to try to get 200 people to show up as parking flaggers. And they had no levers outside of emails to be able to do that. And their core workforce management software wasn't going to be able to do that because it was just payroll and it was like, you know, the same thing for every. But. But now they can actually build incentives directly into their Playmakers app, which they use to broadcast out opportunities and get people to show up. And so now we learned this playbook, we learned what, you know, a football stadium, which is very different than an NBA or NHL stadium, needs and so, yes, we go in very kind of, you know, eyes wide open, like, let's figure this out. And we, we, we have to find partners that are willing to, to again, back to the core messaging, right? When we come into a new vertical, we say, hey, you know, we worked at Uber a lot. We've been doing a lot of this in healthcare and other industries, but now we're interested in, you know, bringing that same opportunity to your space. If you want to be a first mover, if you want to differentiate yourself before anyone else does, like, come, let's talk. And then very quickly, because of how fast TeamBridge can move, maybe on that same call or maybe on the next call, we're actually able to deliver a solution that is more tailored to their needs than vertical specific software that spent 20 years building specifically for stadiums. And that's the super exciting thing, is that when we can build something that beats another software at its own game and provides more value to the customer, on day two, we get super excited about what we can do, you know, with a couple more Legos or a couple more building blocks.
- [41:18]
B
Love it. Love the Lego analogy. I'm a Legos fan, so that's great. All right, we're out of time, so let's just wrap up. We're going to get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. You ready? Yeah. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [41:33]
A
I think it's all about grit. Like, if the person who wins is the person who sticks with it longest and the people who give up naturally, like, don't get that big payout.
- [41:41]
B
What book would you recommend to our audience and why? And you can say the same one again you mentioned earlier, if you want.
- [41:45]
A
I think I'm going to say the book. You are now less dumb. It's a fun book about psychology that then goes into, you know, why you think something that's actually wrong about yourself. And I think that helps you kind of open up about, you know, all the mistakes you potentially could be making.
- [41:59]
B
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder other than grit?
- [42:05]
A
Well, I mean, grit's definitely top of mind. Um, but I would say curiosity. I think innate curiosity to be able to seek out the truth, understanding that you could be wrong every step of the way and admitting that and moving forward with the new truth that you uncover.
- [42:18]
B
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [42:21]
A
I think honestly, fitness is the most valuable thing for me. I think that when I am Healthy food, fitness, like sleep, all that. I am inherently better. I don't think it's actually like, you know, products or anything else. It's just like if your mind is clear, if you are coming into the space with optimism, you can truly kind of, you know, unlock, you know, a different wavelength.
- [42:46]
B
What's a new crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [42:49]
A
Oh, I'm not sharing that. That's mine.
- [42:53]
B
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [42:56]
A
I am a creator through and through. So I have brewed beer. I have made soap, I have made paper. I am currently converting a Mercedes sprinter van to a camper van in my free time, which is limited. So it's a very slow project. And I have a dog named Callie. She's half German shepherd, half husky.
- [43:16]
B
Well, out of those, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [43:20]
A
I think writing. So as a. As a child, I always really enjoyed writing and I've stuck with it. I think if I got asked the question, what would you be doing if stop teambridge or you didn't have to work? I'd probably write both fiction and nonfiction.
- [43:35]
B
And I think in this age of AI, I think real writers are actually becoming a pretty valuable thing.
- [43:42]
A
Hopefully. Yeah.
- [43:43]
B
Yeah. Great. Tito, thank you for joining me. It's been a pleasure. If people want to check out TeamBridge, they can go to teambridge.com if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [43:54]
A
Yep. So you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm probably the only Tito Goldstein out there, so my SEO is usually pretty easy, but you can always contact TeamBridge through the contact forms. And I oftentimes are very close to our customers, so I love getting to work with all types of new entrepreneurs and business owners.
- [44:12]
B
Awesome. Thanks, man. Appreciate the time and I wish you and the team the best of success.
- [44:16]
A
Thanks so much.
- [44:17]
B
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