A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:42:39 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
Sometimes we go for coffee. [00:42:41] S1: It's a tension. Like it's the difference in cold and warm. I mean, it's an, it's a massive, massive difference. And the reason aside, like if you become warm versus cold, like it changes everything. [00:42:51] S0: So we've even found that it also just changes how we build because we, we get a lot more real insights from, from customers and what's going on in the market. Like we hear their stories of what they're doing. Like we've brought engineers to these dinners and I didn't bring this up. Like our first engineers were also selling, like we just, you'd have them go do sales calls just to see, you know, what they learn. I've had some of these dinners. We did one where like I was so scared. It was like a standing dinner or event, still pretty small. And I remember like being so nervous for 30 minutes of the event, I see like a GC at a big company is like cornered in the room with two of our most junior engineers. And I'm like, what the hell could they be talking about? Like, I might need to go over there and check it out. The engineers like ran out of the event. They're like, we've got something new we need to build. Like this is going to be game changer and we're going to email him a demo of it tomorrow. And I'm like, you can only do that through in person, right? That just would never happen on Zoom. It would only happen if we set up events like that. And those are the kinds of things that like that customer will be a customer for life if we deliver that thing for them.
00:42:51 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
[00:42:51] S0: So we've even found that it also just changes how we build because we, we get a lot more real insights from, from customers and what's going on in the market. Like we hear their stories of what they're doing. Like we've brought engineers to these dinners and I didn't bring this up. Like our first engineers were also selling, like we just, you'd have them go do sales calls just to see, you know, what they learn. I've had some of these dinners. We did one where like I was so scared. It was like a standing dinner or event, still pretty small. And I remember like being so nervous for 30 minutes of the event, I see like a GC at a big company is like cornered in the room with two of our most junior engineers. And I'm like, what the hell could they be talking about? Like, I might need to go over there and check it out. The engineers like ran out of the event. They're like, we've got something new we need to build. Like this is going to be game changer and we're going to email him a demo of it tomorrow. And I'm like, you can only do that through in person, right? That just would never happen on Zoom. It would only happen if we set up events like that. And those are the kinds of things that like that customer will be a customer for life if we deliver that thing for them. [00:43:47] S1: And so tell me a little bit more about the like, let's say I'm like, okay, you know what? This I'm sold. I want to do this. How do you do it? What's the process for not just running one event, but also then many events?
00:43:56 · Nick Fleisher
[00:43:56] S0: The first one is like, you have to have the right people on your team who know the network loosely well, right? Like our team is maybe 35 people. Now we have 10 lawyers and we have a lot of people who come from the community, like they're ex-legal ops or they, you know, they've been in and around. They know like a baseline of contacts that you can start doing a dinner with. If you're a founder and you've never been in the space before and you just want to start doing a dinner, I would say you have to revert to LinkedIn and like going cold direct outreach. And we've done, I've done a lot of that myself. Like even on this call, I will have agents that have been running and doing outreach to a subset of GCs that like, I don't know yet. You would be surprised at the hit rate on those if you said, hey, I don't want to sell you my product, but I do want to like take your brain on what's going on in the market and run things by you and like just have a nice night. And by the way, there's going to be GCs, whatever your persona is from XYZ types of companies there. You'll get a pretty good response rate on that. And so some of it can be cold outreach. Some of it's just hiring the right people to build the right network. Once you do one or two, you can start to recycle and bring people back into events, right? You ask them to bring a friend, like almost all of these events we ask, hey, bring someone from your legal team or, you know, a friend from another legal team that you think we should need. And that's been super successful for us. So that's kind of how you think about like building the audience and the network of it. One other kind of hack that we found in terms of location is like either partnering with venues where like we build some sort of a long term relationship and deal just because dinners actually can be very expensive over time, especially if you're early stage. The other one is like there's actually like lawyers and GCs that own restaurants and bars and are like super keen to partner on community events. And like that's been a huge lever for us because they don't want to charge you because it's their community as well.
00:45:37 · Pablo Srugo, Nick Fleisher
[00:45:37] S1: And how do you translate from that to a demo like without being, you know, kind of like cringe where it's like, okay, cool. Now check my product out. You know what I mean? [00:45:43] S0: Honestly, most of the time, like after a natural conversation, these people will say, I would love to see Sandstone and I would love to do a demo. A lot of times it's not even us prompting it. That said, like I will still do a one-on-one message to everyone who came to one of these dinners and say, hey, thanks for coming. If you and your team have time, like I would love to spend 15 minutes walking you through Sandstone. It's very rare that they say no. They usually loop in the head of legal ops or the right person and like we do a demo. [00:46:09] S1: And do you have a full-time person now dedicated to this? Just doing these events because at two or three weeks, it's a decent amount.
00:46:09 · Pablo Srugo, Nick Fleisher
[00:46:09] S1: And do you have a full-time person now dedicated to this? Just doing these events because at two or three weeks, it's a decent amount. [00:46:14] S0: We do. We have full-time person kind of helping organize and manage them. But I would say it's like kind of on the whole team to be going. Part of the vision is like if we're building a community here, like everyone has to be partaking and like everyone should feel comfortable doing them. And so in terms of like who actually leads and goes to these dinners, we definitely rotate. The other thing is like we also work with some partners. So like in legal, there are a couple of communities that already exist where we can like pay to co-sponsor a dinner with them. And it's a very similar motion, but they just bring more attendees, right? And so we've started to do more and more of those, which means that we manage a little bit less of it. It's just it's lower ROI, right? Because we're spending more up front for potentially less targeted returns on the back end. But it's still very helpful. [00:46:53] S1: How many customers do you have today? [00:46:55] S0: Today we work with somewhere in the sort of 50 to 100 range of customers and it's growing every day. And so that's why I give it a range.
00:46:55 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
[00:46:55] S0: Today we work with somewhere in the sort of 50 to 100 range of customers and it's growing every day. And so that's why I give it a range. [00:47:03] S1: And these are obviously like relatively large companies. You can kind of get a sense of the scale of it all. I'll end with this question that we typically end on. Like what would be your top advice, your most common advice for an early stage founder that's still in that early phase of seeing if they really have product market fit?