From Boba Shop Brainstorming to $1M ARR with Zero Sales Experience - How Sai and Atul Built an AI Roleplay Empire

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Hey everyone, thanks for joining us. For another founder led sales stories where founders who have successfully navigated their founder led sailing journey share with those who are still in the middle of it. I'm Pete Kazanji, author of Founding Sales the Startup Sales Handbook and your host. Today we have Sai Guttaguntla and Natul Raghanathan, co founders of Hyperbound, makers of AI roleplay software for go to market teams. These two former AI engineers with zero sales experience managed to build a product that went viral on LinkedIn, closed 40 enterprise customers and reached a million dollars in ARR in just 11 months. All before hiring their first salesperson. My biggest takeaways from this conversation were how they accidentally created the perfect product by solving their own problem first, their brilliant strategy of using custom built simulation bots to drive virality inside target organizations, and their systematic approach to evolving from smbreeding to enterprise sales despite having no traditional background in sales. I'm especially excited about their insights on identifying compelling events like SKOs and acquisitions and how they turn social media engagement into a powerful lead generation engine without relying on traditional cold outreach to start. So with that, here's Sai and Atul. Thanks for joining us. For another founder led sales stories where founders who have successfully navigated their founder led selling journey share with those who are still in the middle of it. We're here with Sai Gutaguntla and Atul Raghunathan, founders of Hypervound, makers of awesome AI roleplay software for go to market teams. This is the first GTM tech folks we've had on the show and selling into sales can be both rewarding and then also a little tricky. You typically have a very strong hey man, we make you money pitch, but can also be complicated with lots of cooks in the kitchen and crowded vendor space and more. So I'm really excited for these guys to share their story. So Sai, Atul, thanks for being here.

Speaker A: Thanks for having us Pete.

Speaker C: Thank you for having us Pete. We're excited.

Speaker B: Get pumped. Um, I'm sorry that we couldn't be here together even though you guys are in San Francisco. I don't have uh, my in person studio, uh, set up, but maybe next time. So first things first, maybe you guys can share a little bit about um, the problem that Hyperbound solves, uh, who the organization type is that buys it, at least right now because I think we'll talk about like the, you know, the, the kind of journey of how that changed over time, uh, who are the specific people in the organization who care about Hyperbound, uh, and then Maybe like, you know, average deal size and kind of what, what your current sales org looks like. Um, we can start there.

Speaker C: Awesome. Yeah, well, happy to answer that, man. I mean, you know, we, we originally started Hyperbound out with selling uh, to SMBs. But you know, very quickly on we, we learned that this was a product that was definitely meant for larger orgs. And by large we're talking about typically the types of companies we sell to more than 500 employees is a sweet spot. You know, so these companies typically have at least 50 sellers. You know, they tend to have um, you know, very little enablement. Uh, maybe they have like you know, two and a. Two people in an enablement team trying to enable hundreds of reps potentially. And so it becomes really hard to give every rep one on one coaching time. And so part of our mission at Hyperbound is uh, you know, to be able to give every rep that one on one coaching time. So that during onboarding, but also beyond onboarding, they get the support that they need to constantly improve and become the best version of themselves.

Speaker B: Got it. And so who are the people that like specifically care about this? I imagine that this is probably like enablement and sales leadership.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah. Typically it would be the enablement team. Revops is also included usually in the CRO as the final decision maker. Typically.

Speaker B: Got it. And then when you think about like those, those folks, I imagine that like Revops probably isn't leading the charge, so to speak. It's probably more they're responsible for like integration, whatever. Where do you typically start? Do you start like with sales leadership? They have like uh, a, they have a problem and they, they then delegate you to enablement or do you guys start with enablement? Typically?

Speaker C: Yeah, we've seen a little bit of both. You know, it depends on the sales Org and it depends on the industry as well. Right. Um, especially in traditional industries, uh, we often see sales leaders coming to us first. Um, it's hard to explain why, but that's just a pattern that we've seen over and over again.

Speaker B: Kind of like older school organizations.

Speaker C: Exactly. More older school. Like think insurance companies, manufacturing companies. Right. Healthcare. Uh, we tend to see sales leadership come to us directly, most likely because a lot of those companies don't even have an enablement function. Their managers, their sales leaders are the enablers. Um, so we've seen that. But in the world of B2B SaaS, you know, more often than not it is the enablement team that comes to us. Um, especially recently it's all been enablement.

Speaker B: Makes sense Cool. Uh, and then so, uh, before you guys started Hyperbound, what was, what was you guys background?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, happy to shed some light on this. Cy and I have actually known each other for, what is it, 13, 14 years at this point.

Speaker B: Oh, my God. In kindergarten?

Speaker A: No. Oh, man. No. Uh, we're not that young, Pete. But, uh, we met in choir in high school, if you can believe it. Amazing, right? And it's been quite the journey since then. Even back then, we were always builders. We always knew that, uh, we were the overachievers, uh, the ones who would stop at nothing to get it done. So when it came to, uh, time to pick someone to start the company with, we were both quite natural fits for one another. Uh, what we ended up doing. Career wise, though, before Hyperbound, I got my master's in machine learning. Uh, Sai was at Salesforce, Einstein, and then he was at another startup for a bit. I was on the meta Ads Core ML team, Astroy Masters defining ICP with 11,000 axes. Uh, all right. The ultimate extreme of data driven go to market. So given that we were both touching AI and go to market in a bit, it was a pretty natural landing point for us to start with when we ended up in Y Combinator in the summer of 2023.

Speaker B: I love it. So the rest of this conversation is only going to be an acapella. Is that okay?

Speaker C: I think I'm down for it. Let's do it.

Speaker B: You're down? I don't think I could hang with you guys. Okay, well, maybe you can share a little bit about your initial problem M hypothesis. And then, um, and then maybe how you guys went about validating it. You know, obviously it's like you guys were leading a sales team and you were frustrated by the fact that like, you couldn't. You know what I mean? A, ah, very common design pattern is like, hey, I had this issue at my last company. I'm going. And we built some internal tooling. How. So what, what kind of inspired the, uh, the issue and then, uh, how did you validate the hypothesis?

Speaker C: Yeah, this is one of our favorite questions because, you know, it took a while for us to land on Hyperbound. You know, believe it or not, Pete, when we first got into Y Combinator, this was Summ 2023. So this was, I believe, May. May was when we first decided we wanted to go to our own startup,

Speaker B: just right past chat gbt. Because chat gbt was October 2022.

Speaker C: Right, exactly. Just, uh, you know, it was still very new. Most people didn't even Know what it was? You know, it was still the early

Speaker B: days, I think only three, five was out, maybe.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Four Turbo had just come out. You know, those days.

Speaker B: Interesting. Okay.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it was May 2023, and M ATO and I, you know, we knew we wanted to start a startup, but we had no idea what we wanted to work on. And the first thing we did is we went to a coffee shop in Cupertino, because that's what people in Cupertino do.

Speaker A: We went to a Boba shop, more accurately, because that's.

Speaker C: I did not want to embarrass ourselves by saying that, but when.

Speaker B: Wait a minute. Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa. Uh, okay, S. What's. What's your go to for bo?

Speaker A: What.

Speaker B: What's your favorite Boba flavor, Michael? My son's is, uh, he's a big mango guy, and he's actually less on the boba and more on the lychee jelly. So what's. What, you guys.

Speaker C: Lychee jelly is good. I'm a brown sugar Boba guy.

Speaker B: Okay. And then Atul. What's yours?

Speaker A: Oh, I do. I do caramel. I do, uh, mango green tea sometimes. Yeah, one of the two.

Speaker B: Wow. Okay, cool. So we're at the Boba shop, which is obviously where startups start. In Cupertino, at least.

Speaker C: Exactly. So, yeah, we're at this Boba shop. You know, we're sitting across each other and just like, man, we both think, um, we want to start a startup. And we came up with nearly 17 ideas in one day. Just sat down, like, threw out these ideas. A lot of Boba took us a couple hours to do that. And at the end of the day, we decided, hey, you know what? Let's just go apply to Y Combinator. So we chose one of those ideas that we felt more confident about, applied with that to Y Combinator. And for those of you that don't know, there's a question in the YC app that specifically asks, do you have any other ideas? And in there we decided, well, why not? We have 17 ideas.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: We have 16 other ideas. Why not just throw all of those into this box?

Speaker B: Why not?

Speaker C: That one answer was probably longer than all the other answers on our ycf.

Speaker B: This is, like, completely not surprising given what I know about you guys.

Speaker C: So that's what we did. And, you know, we obviously, you know, we didn't expect to get in. And we came up with this idea a week ago. We had just started doing some customer interviews. Like, no way. YC's get, you know, going to choose us and lo and behold, we get our first interview. And uh, you know.

Speaker B: And was the initial idea that you proposed was the email personalization one or was it a different one?

Speaker C: Um, no, not even. It was actually a customer support related idea. If you want me to want us to go into it, I'm sure Atul would enjoy that, but I guess we

Speaker B: can skip it because it. Because, Because. Because hyperbound. Hyperbound current is like three pivots from that, right?

Speaker A: Three. It's like 15. Like email personalization wasn't even on the list of 17 ideas, nor was what we're working on today. So it was the 18th.

Speaker B: And then, and then hyperbound. Hyperbound is the 19th. This is amazing. Just goes to show you.

Speaker C: No, so it's interesting. We came with these 17 ideas and we're like, okay, once we got into Y Combinator and somehow I don't know how we got in, but we did, uh, you know, I think the first thing that we had to figure out was zeroing in on one of these. And we have three months to do that. And so what we did is we decided to go reach out to 25,000 people on LinkedIn. Completely. 25,000 thousand, yes, completely. Cold LinkedIn messages. We didn't even know what Apollo was back then. We didn't know what outreach was. So we had no idea how to sequence emails. We were just handwriting them instead of Gmail. And um, next thing you know, so 25,000 LinkedIn 10,000 cold emails. And, uh, we got a decent response rate, interestingly enough, thanks to Y Combinator, and we were able to land 2,000 user interviews. So over the course of a couple months, we talked over 2000 people and crossed out each idea. And at the end of the day we're like, man, sending these emails was so annoying that we decided to, you know, atal, uh, actually decided to go build. Exactly. So he's like, let me just go build a script to make this easier for us. Right? So that's what he does. And next thing you know, everyone in our batch was like, oh, can I get that script? Can I get that script? Like, uh, uh, I. We're sending emails too and we're like, why don't we just sell this? This sounds interesting. And we started selling it to founders in our batch and one of the founders was like, you know, like, have you guys considered selling this to SDRs? And I'm like, what's an SDR?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Uh, and he had to explain to me what an SDR was And quickly we kind of, you know, dived into that space and we realized how big of a problem emails were in the world of B2B SaaS, especially right people, these large B2B SaaS. Companies like Vanta was an early customer at the time. They didn't even trust their own SDR team to write emails. And so that was not about, this

Speaker B: is not about the sending this, this was about the, the authoring, the configuration. Right. And so you guys were using 3.5turbo to, to make it, you know, to make it. So essentially this was like a, a baby proto like aisdr, but like only for the configuration of the content.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: Okay, yeah.

Speaker C: So that's exactly what it was. And uh, even at the time we didn't call it an aisdr, but that's essentially what we were building. And you know, in a matter of a couple months we actually managed to go from 0 to 250k in ARR, uh, by the end of the YC batch for that product. Right. And along the way, you know, we had very few at bats Pete. You know, we wanted to make sure we're the best versions of ourselves on every sales call that we had. So we were practicing on this AI that we built on the side. You know, it was like uh, a, it was like a very bare bones version of the AI roleplay we have today. But it was just to get the marbles out of our mouth, practice some objections. And you know, I remember November 2023, this is a couple months after the batch. We were selling this product and we were at a conference in New York and we were at a roundtable with a bunch of CROs. Somehow we were the only founders here, so we got a bit lucky. And I, I remember, I think Pete, we met you during this trip in New York as well when you did that atrium event. Um, it was during the same week. And uh, you know, we, one of the CROs turned to Otto and he was like, so let me get this straight. You guys are engineers, you spent the last 3 months building this product. You have 10 customers, you're at 250k in ARR. How the hell did you guys learn to sell so quickly? He's like, it takes my reps three months to make their first sale. You already have 10 customers.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: And I think that was such an eye opening moment where like, no, no, no, it's not that big of a deal. We, I mean we practice on this thing, we practice our objections, but some not a big deal. And they're like, no that is a big deal. Like what, what is that? Can I see it? So we booked a couple coffee chats with these CROs throughout the week, showed them the product that we had been practicing on and they were mind blown. Every CRO we met was like, why aren't you selling that like this AISDR stuff? They're like, I've seen this AISDR stuff, it's okay, it's cool. But I don't know about it. But this, I would buy this in a heartbeat.

Speaker A: Love it.

Speaker C: And that's how we started our journey on Hyperbound.

Speaker B: What a fantastic story. Thank you, Sai. That was really cool. I think what's kind of neat about each of those, you have iterated scratch your own itch kind of situation, which is something that YC talks about quite a bit about at least knowing that this is a non zero problem because I have it right now. Of course, the next thing becomes, okay, well do other people have it? And I think what you observe there is that very much the case. And I think that um, having market contact to make sure that other folks have it quickly, um, is important. And in you guys case, that ended up being the case. It's not like you guys were in a cave for a long time, um, with ah, a toolbot. Absolutely, baby, A toolbot, uh, you know, coaching you.

Speaker C: I'm not gonna lie, Pete. I mean at the time, I don't know if you remember Lavender, right? The email coach. Yeah. So Will, you know. Yeah. While we were building this AISDR type of product, you know, Will's product was taking off like it was everywhere. And we were like, damn, people are paying a lot of money for a coach that teaches them how to write emails. I'm like, what happens when these reps jump on actual calls? What happens then?

Speaker A: You know?

Speaker C: Yeah, and that was a big inspiration for us. Making the final pivot and being like, maybe there is something here. We're just not realizing it.

Speaker B: Awesome. That's fantastic. So who was the, ah, so you got these CROs around you, like, you should sell that. And was the response that, like, no problem, um, there's going to be a $50,000 DocuSign in your inbox as soon as I get onto my, get onto my laptop or, or who was your first? Uh, so it's, it's all well and good for someone to be like, you should sell that. It's another thing for someone to actually buy. Who was your, who was your first customer? Maybe you can kind of take us through that, that story.

Speaker A: Well, one Piece of advice for folks who get the, uh, you should sell that advice, you know. Yeah, totally is. A lot of people will say that, and they don't mean it, right? Uh, you know, they don't put their. Their money where their mouth is. They want to make you feel good for the sake of that conversation. Uh, and salespeople will do this especially hard. Uh, but it's true across other industries as well. Uh, and one thing that we learned quite early on as a part of doing those 2000 user interviews is if you get happy years, every time someone says, I want that, I want that, uh, you need to properly validate, uh, what they'll actually put budget behind. Uh, and there's one particular resource that helped us out tremendously with making that distinction. It's called the Mom Test. I'm sure you've heard of it, Pete. Yes, Big, big advocate of folks reading that. Uh, and with that, um, we did all these coffee chats, we got all this interest, and we decided that, hey, at the very least, this product is worth launching. This product is worth launching because we can build an MVP of this that is going to have the basic roleplay functionality, the basic scoring functionality, and if it goes viral on the Internet, if there's a fair bit of interest behind this, it's worth taking the full pivot away from what we're currently doing with the email personalization and going full beams on this product. So that's exactly what we did.

Speaker B: What there was. You guys knew that you had, like, at least the product worked and it moved the metric for you guys because you guys were selling. And these arrows were like, you guys are so suave. What's the deal here? You're like, I know, uh, just. You should have seen me six months ago. I was a disaster. But then I used. But then I used the Toolbot. So you knew that it actually moved the metric in question. Like, it worked, right? And then the question is, okay, can we get, you know, product story, or. Excuse me, story, market fit, where people are like, they. Other people recognize that. And, and in your case, I think the cool thing about Hyperbound, which, um, you know, sometimes applies to other organizations or other products as well, is it. It manufactures content, right? It creates, like, it naturally creates content. In you guys. This case, it. It, like, creates, like, provocative content that. That works really well on. On LinkedIn or Twitter or. Or what have you. Especially LinkedIn, where people are like, you know, use it as, like, work Instagram, where they're. They're trying to, you know, like, oh, no, I'm working right now when I watch this guy getting, you know, crapped on by this cold call bot or what have you. So I think you had a hypothesis that you could launch this and, and, and it creates content. Um, and so you might as well take that shot. And I think there's another lesson here for folks, which is if it turns out that your product can potentially manufacture content as part of what it does, then then maybe lean into that or like, you know, maybe lean into, from a productization standpoint or certainly lean into that from a, um, you know, from a content marketing or like a micro chunk. Content marketing. Okay, so what happens? You just record a bunch of calls of like the robot being mean to you and then, and then put it on LinkedIn? No. What happened? What did you guys do?

Speaker A: Not at all. So we actually, uh, we put it out there. We, we remember we talked to like, you know, 2,000 people. So we asked a couple of those folks as well to record some videos of them. Trying our AI and posting that. Uh, so it was about like 10 quick videos from folks. But what really went crazy after we put this out there, folks started recording, like random folks, people we had no connection to, started recording videos of themselves getting hung up on by our AI, getting shut down by our AI, booking a meeting with our AI, and posted that to LinkedIn, to YouTube, to TikTok, to Instagram, and we went viral everywhere. Right? Cy and I, actually, this is a fun fact. We used to have a Slack message that got sent to us every time anyone did the call to any of our bots. And there was one night when our phones just wouldn't stop ringing, right? It was buzz after buzz after buzz.

Speaker B: You like just burned down your Slack instance?

Speaker A: No, basically, like it literally like we were on the free agents at the time and we have sat on messages.

Speaker C: No, and when you think when there's two people on the slack, you don't need to turn on Do Not Disturb. But then that was like the first time I turned on Do Not Disturb on my Slack.

Speaker B: That's, that's amazing. And so, uh, that drove. So a bunch of people are goofing around in the product, which is cool. But the important thing is, and this is something that, you know, sometimes folks get kind of get twisted about with respect to PLG. Just because the users, the ICs are using it doesn't mean that the budget holder is aware of it or cares about it or um, has visibility into it. Especially when you have situations where the user might want to not let the boss know that they're using it. That's not really the case with Hyperbound, because I would imagine it's more like brownie points, like, hey, check me out, I'm doing extra credit, aren't I awesome? Um, as compared to sometimes this shows up in like open source software or infrastructure where it's like, hey, I decided to use this other data store that isn't blessed. Please don't kill me, right? That can actually be, uh, like a little bit of a. Sometimes people are like, I want to do plg. Because it's like, actually, sometimes PLG is your enemy because literally the CIO will get mad at people for adopting your stuff in a guerrilla case. So, so it goes viral, but probably with the ICs, right? The SDRs, AES, et cetera, et cetera. But I imagine it probably got on the radar of some of these leaders who did, you know, did you get a bunch of demo requests? Somebody just like, you know, why are you 50 grand? How did that work?

Speaker C: Yeah, the wire did happen soon. Uh, but before that there was one more step, right? So we knew that having a bot out there, ah, where people can just try it for free, it's great. But you're absolutely right that we had to find a way to get it to the leadership. And so what we started doing was we started, you know, messaging some of these reps that were especially excited about the hyperbound bot. And we're like, hey, I know you just tried this one bot, but what if I told you, you sit with me for just 10 minutes, jump up, jump on a zoom call, or even just a phone call with me, I will build you a custom bot for your company, right? It will take you 10 minutes, that's all. And I'll send you a link. And all you got to do is just share the hell out of that link on your slack, right? Put in your, put in your like, EMEA M slack for all like 2000 EMEA M reps, right? And just challenge everyone, right? And you'd be surprised, man. Like, uh, we did get pushback from a couple people that are like, no. And I'm not going to put myself on the spot and share this thing, but there were, uh, quite a few rep that were so excited about it that they posted it in these channels and it would just grow like wildfire within the company until their leadership started reaching out to us, right? We start getting emails and being like, hey, like, you know, one of my reps tried this thing they emailed me about. It looks really Interesting. Could I book a demo with y'?

Speaker A: All?

Speaker C: Or. So that's how that started.

Speaker B: So essentially you had a, like a lead gen that was IC facing. You were able to then use that information to qualify. Be like, oh, that's some IC at, uh, like, you know, uh, waste management or whatever. Okay. No, oh, that's, um, some AE at, uh, Samsara. Oh, okay. Wow.

Speaker C: That's like what we did with Samsara.

Speaker B: Got a good sales organization. The Samsara Samsaras and Verkada Sales organization are children of Meraki Sales Organization.

Speaker A: Same founders.

Speaker B: Um, and Meraki Sales organization was always nails. Um, and so essentially you have like the kind of cascade from that. So anyway, um. Oh, here's Samsara.

Speaker A: Hey.

Speaker B: And so worth engaging. Hey, buddy, how's it going? Can I do something even cooler for you? And then you could imagine, like, are there any specific initiatives that are going on right now? Do you guys have any specific training that's like, oh, um, all right here. And then I think. I think the important thing though is that the reason why this works for you guys is because the individual is engaging in something that will get them brownie points throughout the rest of the organization. That that isn't always the case.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Like, um. And. And so I think that founders that are listening to this need to make sure that if they're hearing these strategies, they don't just like, blindly apply them and think about. Always think about the. The personal motivations of those in, like, those ICs or the managers or the CI. I mean, this is sales in general. And in like, you know, in a nutshell, it's like thinking about personal motivations and thinking about what your counterparty is thinking. Um, wonderful. And so I will say, Pete, there

Speaker C: is, I think, one more learning moment there too that was very crucial. It's that, you know, most people, what they do is, uh, once they start getting these calls, right, what they'll do, they'll just immediately set up automations that go send, like, you know, generic cold email copy to all these people. That's not the first thing that we did. And I think that's part of. Part of the reason is because we're not salespeople. That wasn't like, the immediate inclination. It was like, let me just go message these people with highly personalized mess. Like, I would, man, I would sit there all day, watch that Slack channel. I'm like, oh, look, it's someone from Plaid. Let's go message this Enterprise rep. I would go message him on LinkedIn instantly. Right. Just put in like a super personalized message so that he can avoid it. And um, you know, that's how we kind of got in the door. So we did a lot of things that just don't scale and the automation came much later, like months later. We did that for a long time. I think that's what allowed us to get so many people to actually respond. Like those highly personalized messages that we wrote.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think that is a founder led superpower is the fact that like, you know, people connect to someone who's putting their heart and soul into something and if you um, represent that, like, oh, this is literally the founder who did this thing that I have interest in. Obviously if they don't have any interest in it, they don't care. But um, like oh, this is the person that made this thing that is that I obviously have, you know, some amount of interest in. Um, I will take a second look at this. Um, I love it. And so, um, and so that like that viral explosion to lead gen to custom hyperbound, uh, bot kind of creation, that's eventually what led to your first customer.

Speaker A: Yeah. So that fund essentially our, our first paying contract, we got this within two weeks of launching. It was very, very quick and you know, the money was wired over. This is our first 20k contract. And you know, I, I, I still remember S and I celebrating that, uh, the previous product we were selling, by the way, Pete, email personalization we were shoving down people's throats. Right. Put it from zero to.

Speaker B: They were, they weren't pulling it. You were like shuffling it.

Speaker A: We were like trying our hardest as founders to make sure that folks adopted it, make sure that people wanted it. But this, you know, our calendars were booked out. People were, our demo calendars are completely book solid 6am to 8pm every day of the week, including weekends. Saturdays we had Sundays off. But uh, for three weeks in a row post the launch and yeah, we were seeing folks happily willing to sign a 20k annual deal versus with everything we had built before. Everyone was like, I need a one month back out, I need a two month back out. Can I do a 2k pilot? Can I get a free pilot? This, it was just like, no, I'll take it. Uh, give it to me now. So from that perspective we knew that we had built something that at the very least generated excitement. And when you're in a position of something, when you have something that generates excitement, there's plenty of ways that you can take it. Uh, but it made our go to Market motion, I would say much simpler than, uh, sales that don't necessarily have that wow factor, that viral moment.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Um, well, well said. Yeah, it's like, if you can get attention and excitement, ideally, you can't always necessarily do something with it. Um, and you, or at least like the thing that got people excited may be difficult to, um, specifically monetize, but at least getting them excited, um, will like, opens the door to lots of conversations and potentially then you can pivot or what have you. In your case, literally the thing that gets them excited is the thing that then, um, you know, that they end up, they end up buying.

Speaker C: Um, I mean, the launch timing was also perfect, Pete, because this was SKO time for salespeople. Oh, right. So because we launched this January 22, 2024.

Speaker B: Oh, wow.

Speaker C: Everyone's. Yeah, like, it was on everyone's mind, like training, coaching, great observation. Like, we're gonna have like 1500 reps in house, like next week, like, what the hell are we gonna do? Right? And they see this thing pop up on their feet and they're like, wait, this would be cool.

Speaker B: I love how this is just such a phenomenal example of like, how founder led sales is supposed to work. Because you have two really bright guys who are doing things right, and doing things accidentally sometimes, which is okay, right? Like, just do it. Like, it's almost like brownie in motion, like doing things and then you see something like, oh, uh, let's like, let's record some of our own things. Let's have these other guys record it. Oh, okay. Actually, that's working now. Like, ours didn't work. No one cared about us. Oh, there's, there's work. That's cool. Um, oh, they're coming inbound. Hmm. What should we do about this? Well, I guess maybe we should make a custom bot. Right? So, like, if you hadn't seen all this inbound, then you wouldn't have like activated your brain to be like, what should we do next with this? And then you just happen to be. So like, that was probably the beginning, the adolescent form of your sales motion, where you like, grab an inbound lead. Uh, the offer is a customized hyperbound bot. Right. Um, the motion is essentially distributed within the organization. Initially through Slack, maybe, but then maybe later on through something else. But these are kind of like the not scaled version of this. And then you also identified like the compelling event, like it was accidental that you guys were launching during SCO season. But then subsequent to that, you're probably like, what's going on right now. And like three people say, like, well, I've got sales kickoff in like two weeks. And we're trying to figure out and you're like, what is this thing?

Speaker A: What's in that scale?

Speaker B: What is it?

Speaker C: Scoville literally ends.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: What's this thing? Oh, it's where we get everyone together and we need to train them once during the year. Oh, that sounds like a really painful problem. And also a highly, like, time bound, compelling event. Interesting. Right? Anyway, the point is that you earn these secrets by doing things, uh, and many of the things that you do will be wrong and you just discard them. But you would never have discovered that without launching, et cetera. Um, ah, I love this. So I would imagine that you guys probably got over your fear of sales pretty quickly by building the software a toolbot. Uh, so normally I ask people about that, but in you guys case, you have a very unique answer which is just like, oh, yeah, we just build software to get that out of it. And by the way, it became our business. So that's. Aside from a toolbot, um, and hyperbound, uh, 0.1. What other kind of resources helped you on your founder led sales journey?

Speaker A: Well, Pete, there's a very obvious answer to this question, which we will get to in a sec. But, um, I'd say the other one that really pushed us along in the early days was being part of that Y Combinator cohort. So there's one particular thing that we used to do, uh, as a part of that cohort, uh, that was called group office hours, where we would all sit there, like, it would just be like 10 of us sitting in a room. All of us did not know how to run a go to market motion. But we were sitting there sharing our sales KPIs and what we were going to achieve in the next two weeks. And the goals were always outlandish, uh, and you needed to not embarrass yourself in the next group office hours. And the fear of not embarrassing yourself in front of your peers, I think is a stronger motivator than anything else. It's why sales orgs work today. And so, uh, you know, it drives that type of hunger that allowed, um, us to really just put our face out there, you know, like, be, be open. And that drove a lot of the initial getting over the hurdle. When we had our first in 2000 conversations, we became more comfortable.

Speaker B: Yeah, like, accountability loops end up being really important because the accountability loop is there. You're sitting there and you're like, man, I think I Want to record some videos and put them out there? Man, am I going to look like an idiot? I don't want to do that. I don't look like an idiot. But then you're like wait a minute, group office hours is next Tuesday. If I don't do this, I'm going to really like an idiot there. Oh man, I'm going to record these videos. Right? I'm going to do all these things. Yeah, I mean I think finding your accountability buddy, um, I mean ideally it's your co founder but then I think also that having external accountability can be really powerful there as well. Um, so YC helps with, helps with that. What other sort of resources? So we've got hyperbound, right? Hyperbound 0.1, we've got group office hours. What else helped you?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I think the obvious one that ah ATO was mentioning earlier and obviously for the listeners out there, if you haven't read Pete's book, Founding Sales, um, that is an absolute killer resource. And I'm not just saying that because I'm on your podcast, Pete. I really do mean it. We still refer to that book every day. And I think you, you said it right. It's a handbook. That's what it is. Right? It's not meant to be like uh, at least personally I think it's not meant to be like a sit down and like let's story time. Like let's read this. It's more, it's more of a handbook like hey, okay, I'm struggling with hiring. Let me go to the hiring chapter and figure out how do I hire a salesperson. Oh, I got to figure out comp. Let me go check that chapter out.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: Oh, I got to build an outbound motion. Okay, let me just flip to that chapter on Pete's book. Check it out. So that's been super helpful. And then the other thing, Pete too is like you're always available on phone man. We would, you know sometimes like there's something, yeah there's like something missing in your book and we're just like you

Speaker B: guys are teaching me the Gen Z, uh, the Gen Z, uh, micro async communication. My, my 7 year old wakes me up at 5 in the morning and like imessage has like you know 10, 10 messages from uh, on our, on our group chat.

Speaker C: I would just, I would you know the number of times although. And I called Pete over the last year. Insane. Like we would just call you up at 11pm at night sometimes and just ask you a quick question. You'd give us like 10 minutes, get straight to the point, get it done and move on. And that was super helpful, man.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think having good advisors. Someone uh, on the show recently was talking about this. But uh, advisors that are not like far from having been practitioners themselves. So they can. Which is kind of the purpose of trying to lead sales stories is to. Because you know, expertise has a decay function to it. And so what you want is you want folks that you know, have been in it, um, they don't have to be in it right now necessarily. But ideally they were, you know, in the arena so to speak in the last, you know, 48 months or what have you. Um, and I think actually you had some other advisors that were very helpful for you as well.

Speaker C: We absolutely did, yeah. So we had an advisor who is now our head of key accounts at Hyperbound. So he joined full time after advising us for almost a year. His name is Bilal Batrali. Um, but you know, he was a huge part of helping us figure out, figure out our sales motion. Like he helped us master discovery negotiating. Right. He helped us iterate on our pricing model which I know we're probably going to cover at some point in this conversation too. That was big doozy as well. Um, but yeah, you know, for those of you that are watching this, I would say get it, get a sales advisor. Right. Someone that actually understands how to build go to market specifically at an early stage startup. That was Bilal's background. He was at seven different startups in his time as an early sales hire.

Speaker B: Yeah. Or like a handful of, of folks. Right. Like I think you can um, that's kind of what I'm trying to do with, with uh, founder led sales stories here was like you can imagine your helper who's great at like who has done go to market tech before, your helper who has and like their expert with respect to that, that segment. Or um, or your, your helper who is very like used to early stage. Like you're talking about with, with Bilal or what have you just to kind of like fill in those, those pieces and just so you have them on imessage. You know, let's talk about their pricing thing because I think you guys joked earlier that you evolved it a bunch and then Bilal helped you with it as well. Maybe you can kind of take us through how that evolved because I mean this is talked about in founding sales but um, from a pricing standpoint you guys are in go to market tech. There is one dominant vendor in go to market Tech, it's Salesforce. I can see the giant, the giant building from right here. Um, the cloud penis, um, the um. But if there's a, if there's like a big thing that you're uh, like if there's a kind of like a monopole in the industry, then oftentimes you just want to align with that, with that pricing. So like you know in, in HR tech usually that's just like employee counts, right? In, in go to market tech usually that's that seats. Unless there's like a particularly like compelling reason to diverge from that. And I think you're seeing that in support a little bit where you had like support, especially with AI where you have like support Zendesk has support seats or Intercom has support seats. And then now with like the advent of like fin or what have you have outcome based rising. Um, so in you guys case, did you start with seats? Did you start with something else? How did that kind of take us through the kind of like twists and turns there?

Speaker A: We started with a little bit of everything.

Speaker B: Love twists and turns out. Pay what you want. Pay us in Boba. It's cool man.

Speaker A: The, the nice part about having a not PLG motion, right? Uh, having the ability to not disclose pricing anywhere is you can experiment with like seven different pricing models at once. Uh, when you're selling to different industries, when you're selling to different sizes of the companies, different verticals and no one needs to know. Uh, so uh, that was what led to a insane amount of complexity in our pricing in the early days. But also I am very grateful for it, uh, for every lesson along the way because it really helped us evolve into what we have now.

Speaker B: Yeah. So you were able to test a bunch because you were having conversations, which I think is very much the mom test. And um, I think this is something that we're hearing more and more is that a lot of founders are. And this is probably uh, the result of folks getting better at founder selling and, and what have you, where they're actually asking, they're like they're not building before selling, they're selling and then building or selling a very minimal thing and not saying. And when people say well I'll try it out, I'd love to do a free trial, then our response that is like no, clearly you don't care enough about this. And that's actually a signal to us, uh, that this problem is not of a sufficient magnitude in order for you to care about, care about this. So the fact that you're able to have a bunch of those conversations allowed you to kind of ferret that out. Did you guys start with just seep based pricing? How did that work?

Speaker A: Interestingly, we started with something even more complex than seat based. We divided orgs up into, into groups. So we're like, okay, this is small or medium or large or each one gets a unique flat fee. Uh, so we're like, okay, if you have between 10 and 15 reps, variable platform fees. Yep. And then we're like, hey, now this is really complicated. What happens when someone wants 72 seats? Right. What happens when they want expansion based? Well, I guess we got to give them, uh, the pricing for those additional seats. So then we're like, okay, well now we have multiple different platform fees and then on top of those we have different additional seat costs. So now we have platform plus per se. Uh, and then we're like, hey, well what if we did, um, what if we go with the wave that everyone is talking about right now? There's a lot of interest in outcome based pricing, uh, or at least input based pricing for a lot of AI based products. So what happens if we did platform plus usage? And then at the end of the day, Pete, there's two things that you have to align to in coming up with a pricing model. The first is value, the way that your value structure should be aligned with your pricing structure. And the second is expectations. This comes in the form of the existing budgets. This comes in the form of what people are used to and people in sales tech, they want seat based pricing. Here we are.

Speaker B: Yeah, we have the same challenge with Atrium where what would happen is sometimes, um, organizations would want to buy Atrium for a subset of their organization. Like we're going to instrument the SMB team and the mid market team, but not the enterprise team and not the account management team. And so, um, what we initially, we're like, okay, we're going to do this based on what we called manager pricing, where like the manager was, was the user there. But in order to make the economics pencil, those would end up being like $499 a month for the manager. Right? Well, they have, they have like 6 reps or like 8 reps to report to them. So you know, on a, on a per rep basis it was like 79 bucks or 69 bucks or whatever. But then, you know, that seat, you're in a renewal conversation and that order form shows up to the CFO. They're like, this is $499 a seed. It's like, no, no, it's the manager. It's like there's a whole thing just do the, do the uh, you know, do the uh, the division there. And they're just like, what? Like, no, no, like let's get on a call with this. And that just goes to. I think you, you said it really well, which is like the expectations. Okay.

Speaker C: And so you guys, the same reaction we got to the platform. Sorry, I was just going to mention that's the same reaction we got for the platform pricing as well. Because when we did the platform plus seat, people are like, they show it to the CRO and they'd be like, wait, wait, we're paying a per seat and why are we paying another 50k platform again? Right? And, and we'd be like, well, it's access to the platform, blah, blah, blah. The per seat cost is actually very low. And they're like, then why don't we just do per seat only?

Speaker B: Why doesn't this look like my salesforce bill?

Speaker A: Yes, exactly.

Speaker B: That's like the higher order bid. Can you make this look like this? Um, and that's usually what ends up happening is like people look at whatever the big. And you see this is an applicant tracking system, software, H r s software, etc. Where there's like some big thing and then they look at your thing as either a subset of that or if it's more powerful, maybe it's like a superset of that. But it's usually like, here's this thing like a Salesforce. It is 150 bucks. You're like retail on it. It's like 150 bucks per, per rep per month for um, I think for just pure sales, cloud or whatever. And then they just think about this like, oh, okay, is this half as valuable as that? Is this actually like a more important than that? And then they just want to index off of that. And actually I would imagine that probably this ended up changing as your idea or like the pressure showed up as you guys kind of changed your ideal customer profile or iterated that. How did the ICP change over time? Like, I know when we first met, um, it was like SMB organizations and specifically their SDR teams, right? Because SDRS are doing the most cold calling. And the early, early, early versions of Hyperbound was like, were attuned to that. Even though in most organizations like the, the predominant uh, amount of like selling time of course is like meetings that are being prosecuted over zoom or what have you. How did that kind of change? How did that ICP change over time?

Speaker C: Although you want to take this one.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, I'm m more than happy to. I love chatting about icp. So uh, thank you for the shinsa. Well uh, the ICP changed um, quite a bit over the year, right. We went from selling to orgs that had a minimum of eight seats. Uh, that was our original, original grouping to now we don't really talk to someone unless they have 50 seats or more. And we prioritize our 250 or 500 or 20,000 seat customers uh, on the upper end. So uh, it's also not just ICP with regards to the size of the org. There's a couple of other attributes that we identified over the years and there's a lot of lessons in how we got there. So I'll list out the four and then I'll tell you the lessons that we used to get to each one. The first was they have to be B2B. Why B2B? Right? Like hey B2C folks do a lot of cold calling. The ROI is much simpler for B2C because it's a one call close, two call close transactional, really simple sales. Well B2B sales are much, much more complex. You're typically selling a large platform product on the upper end. Uh and this means that training is not a one and done type of activity. Right? Training is a continuous, weekly, monthly, daily activity. Uh and that's when you need a scalable solution like us as opposed to event based like uh, an SCO based type of training. That was the first one. We also think the B2C reps are going to be replaced by AI with a whole other side story.

Speaker B: Yeah, maybe we'll, maybe, maybe we'll get the cresta, the crest of guys on here in the future. Um, yeah. Okay, so they gotta be B2B. What was the next attribute?

Speaker A: B2B. Second one is that they need to have the problems of scale. They need to be a larger org. So 50 plus reps. Why did we learn this? Well when you have three reps on the team, you don't have tribal knowledge. They get lunch together, these reps and they talk, they can hear each other call on the sales floor. But they have a global remote distributed org, people selling different products in different languages, uh, to different buyers in different parts of the world. The amount of travel knowledge just builds and builds and builds over time and change. Management becomes a game of telephone across multiple layers of management. So yeah, another big.

Speaker B: And you're constantly bringing in like you're, you got ever boarding situation, you're constantly bringing in new reps, you're, you know, the reps are attriting, you're bringing new reps in. Um, this is always kind of a key initiative that we could tie to with Atrium was, you know, there's a new product launch because product management and engineering have been working on whatever it then has to deploy into the organization. Um, you know, like the larger organizations buy other companies, all of a sudden now they have a new product to sell. All that sort of like alignment and kind of distribution of knowledge becomes more and more and more complicated the larger you get. So I'm. That makes a ton of sense that you guys kind of like aligned on that.

Speaker A: And that touches on our third point as well, which is we sell to folks selling complex platform products because they have more change management. They simply just have more, uh, in terms of, like, someone is always launching a new feature, uh, one of your competitors is always launching a new feature. One of the competitors of multiple of your platform skus is launching a new feature, uh, that you need to align with. The market is always changing. The buyers are always changing. So from that perspective, they need to be selling a complex multi platform product with more than 50 reps and B2B. And the last criteria I'd say is the most interesting, uh, the weirdest lesson that we learned, probably the least applicable. But, uh, what I like talking about, there should be a performance gap between the top and bottom performer.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean, it seems pretty obvious, uh, which sales. Org doesn't have one.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it could be more. It could be more or less pronounced. Right.

Speaker A: I mean, because the ROI that we deliver, when you think about it, when we come into the building, ROI is, hey, we take your top performers and your bottom performers and do this.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: If, yeah, if someone is already here,

Speaker B: what are you going to do if everyone's slaying because you're selling like free money or whatever and someone can, you know, roll out of bed, uh, still hungover, maybe even drunk from the night before, and closed business, then hyperbound is, you know, a substantial nice to have there.

Speaker C: It's a nice. That's what we got from OpenAI. I mean, we tried selling to OpenAI at one point and, and that's. That's literally their director said, our problem isn't training. Our problem is headcount. We need more salespeople.

Speaker B: Yeah, we need, we need more salespeople to say, huh, uh-huh. How many seats? Right. Um, Got it. Makes sense. Um, that's fabulous. So what would be mechanisms by which to identify this? Because one sales headcount. Easy. Just go on LinkedIn sales nav. Check that out. Uh, B2B organization on their website, Complicated product or multiple products. Also on the website, performance gap. That seems to be something that we'd have to maybe tease out in discovery. Maybe ask in a form fill. Were there any mechanisms by which you could identify that externally or did that have to be in a form filler or disco?

Speaker C: Yeah, externally, it's pretty hard to tell. Um, but you can usually tell also just by how the company's doing. Right. If the company's just growing like 40% year over year or 50% year over year, you're like, yeah, they're probably fine. Coaching, training probably is not the biggest thing they're thinking about. M. That happened with a prospect the other day. I mean, they told us, like, hey, we have all these problems you're describing, but doesn't really matter because we're growing 50% year over year. And I don't really like, our CRO doesn't really care.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like, this is a problem, but it's priority six.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And you're like, all right, cool. Yeah, we will talk when it's priority two or one.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker C: And, uh, that's just something you can't tease out just from data that's available publicly online.

Speaker B: If there's only a way to get better at discovery, to make sure through role playing that you're doing a good job of teasing these things out and differentiating between, you know, top priorities and otherwise. Got it. Um, excellent. Well, what? Um, so just identifying organizational characteristics that are ICP is one thing, but organizations have lots of problems, so figuring out when it's likely that they're going to have the problem that you guys solve, um, is obviously next level. Are there particular compelling events that make it such that people would be saying, man, I really, really wish there was an AI roleplay gymnasium that I could put all my reps in to learn xyz.

Speaker C: Yeah, man, there. There are so many. I mean, SCO is one hiring, right? If you see a bunch of job boards out for salespeople, you know, they're got to onboard and train those people, the messaging rollouts, right? There are some companies that are, you know, completely. Maybe they just started working with the force management. Like, that would also be a good signal. They'll post about it. They'll be like, hey, we just implemented command of the message. And I'm like, oh, perfect. Well, let's get your reps to train on hyperbound then. Right. Acquisitions. Right. For larger Companies, they're constantly on acquisition mode. And so that's another, that's another like, really difficult thing to do. Especially like, you know, sales loft. I remember we're talking to them in the early days when they first acquired Drift. Um, that was a big initiative, uh, for them to get all the Drift reps.

Speaker B: So there's lots and lots and lots of signals that you guys can key off of, um, and then outbound against, uh, or what have you. What are the mechanisms by which you're able to kind of like track these sort of things? Because I feel that a lot of these things are like, you can see them in retrospect, like, oh, yeah, they did a product launch. But I'm curious how one could like, you know, uh, systematically track product launches or systematically track new acquisitions. I guess in the case of acquisition, you could like pay. You use like PitchBook or CB Insights to, you know, or, uh, to. To pay attention to that. What were some of the ways that you guys systematize that? Or is it more just kind of organic?

Speaker A: I wish we had a great answer for you, Pete, that we're reading the minds of all the prospects in the space and updating them just in time. The truth is they all just come inbound to us when these critical events happen. So that's been a large part about the strategy one.

Speaker B: I think that's the brand is like the, the make m. The content component is making sure that people are aware of the fact that that's the thing, right? By just pumping tons of content out in the market.

Speaker C: We're also just a little, little too egregiously active on LinkedIn. Uh, both of us, um, you know, people post stuff there that, that, you know, I use the signals all the time. Just scrolling through.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. Okay, got it. So it sounds like one. Them being aware that you guys solve this problem because essentially they've been like mind virus so much on social that, that, that this is exactly the problem you guys solve. And then secondarily, I don't know if there's any good like LinkedIn social mess, social listening stuff.

Speaker C: Like obviously I'm talking more like manual. I'm talking, I'm talking about like doing it manually. We had like a block on our calendar where it's like, hey, we're just scrolling through LinkedIn just to find signals. It's ridiculous.

Speaker B: But we did do that, do things that don't scale. Uh, you know, social listening. Social uh, listening example. Okay, so what. When you guys were kind of tuning your sales motion, we talked about the compelling events. What was something that worked really well to compress and reduce, you know, reduce friction in your, in your sales motion?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing, and we talked a little bit about this before was just having the customized bot that they could just try out and it's like value creation, uh, almost immediately. Right. Uh, like the way our demos work, Pete, is as soon as they jump on the demo, we'll build a bot for them on the spot. We build in like three to five minutes, we'll have them customize it and then we'll have them do the role play on the call. Right. And they don't know. Most people don't even know they're about to be put on a role play and we just do it and they're like, oh, I'm doing it.

Speaker B: Really?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah you are right.

Speaker B: Watch how easy it is.

Speaker C: Yeah. And it always gets people like that, that feeling, like that nervous feeling. And it's great because it makes them realize like, damn, like I want to put my reps in this situation and see how they do, you know, like, I'm nervous, I'm sweating, wonder how my reps would do, you know, um, so that, that always worked really well. And, and we still do that to this day. We always build the bot, we share it with the org, try to create a bunch of excitement internally, get some champions and go from there.

Speaker B: Nice. What was something that didn't work?

Speaker A: Oh, uh, one thing that didn't work very early on, uh, was we used to do very short paid pilots. Uh, so we used to do like a two week type of paid pilot where one week we would spend building the bots and then the second week we would spend rolling it out to the team. And I'd say the main reason why these didn't work, people had incredible expectations for what you could accomplish in a week. They're like, yeah, the entire org's behavior change is going to be within a week, going to see downstream, like deals are going to close, uh, you know, uh, because of what we did in this one week. And that's what I'm going to buy. So one of the things that we started doing as a result is we started anchoring on some of the leading indicators, some of the things that indicate that change is happening, that these folks know are correlated to outcomes. Uh, and we restructured our pilots since then, we restructured our sales process since then so that folks don't anchor on, oh, I need to see more deals closing, you know, in my six month Sales cycle. Uh, in order to know that I should invest more time in the hyperbound. Right. Like you need to have those um, those compelling training reasons beforehand and we will fix those directly as opposed to, you know, having to see what the very, very far downstream impact should be. It's taking charge of that situation.

Speaker B: Yeah, essentially just guiding uh, guiding folks on, on what the thing, you know, what the proof of value would be and then for them to understand that like it is correlated to outcome, outcome value as well. Now of course one way you can do that is you just have. Once you actually have customers in place, you have like success stories, uh, talk to your, talk to other folks, et cetera, et cetera. These are the outputs. But then when you have folks where you're either A building that situation before you have a ton of customers or B, when you're interfacing with customers who like, you know, maybe are not aware of those or don't care about those or what have you, allowing them to see what those, those leading indicators might be, um, that they, everyone agrees are correlated to the outputs there.

Speaker C: Um, it's all about expectation setting, right Pete? Because these, if you don't expectations set, their expectations are wild. Like people, people are. This is going to be the best spot ever. This is going to be the best score ever. Our reps are going to close more. It's like way, hold your horses. It's not perfect. The stuff is bleeding edge stuff. It's very new. It's going to make mistakes, it's not going to be perfect. And they're like, oh, okay. And then they're a lot more receptive, uh, when things don't go as well. And that's, that's like a tactic that works all the time.

Speaker B: Yes. Uh, my favorite version of that is using the word typically. Right, Typically. Typically the way that we go about this is we're going to do this, this, this, this and this. And what you'll oftentimes see is between this and this will be the outcome associated with this. Obviously we're focused on this outcome over here, but for obvious reasons during this two week process or what have you, we pay attention to these things right here. Does that, is that fair? Oh yeah, that totally makes sense. And then essentially what you've just done is you've redirected their brain. Right. And they understand what's happening there. Kind um, of related to that. Um, because you're talking about the effective pilots and expectation settings and what have you. What about with customers and deployed customers from a customer success Standpoint, like what was particularly important with respect to customer success to get folks up and running and on their way to those outcomes that they were signed up for that you effectively framed for them in the pilot process.

Speaker A: I'd uh, say that the simplest thing with customer success is you need to give the person implementing the platform confidence that what they're going to do is going to work. If you don't give them the confidence, they're going to half ass things, they're going to do a partial implementation. Be like, I'll put more effort into it when I see it working out when I get the engagement from folks versus when you show up with success stories or when you show up very confident being like, I know this will work and here's why. And you break down the logic for them. They're able to sell their efforts not only to themselves, which is very important, but also to all the other stakeholders internally. And the belief that it's going to work is a self fulfilling prophecy. And it does work. Uh, so when we, when we tried to be very handholding where we controlled the strategy and we would, you know, we would like move them along just one step at a time, uh, without essentially getting that buy in from them and giving them that comfort that it was all going to work, everything failed. Uh, but versus when we, we flipped the case, we put it back on them, we gave them more responsibility and gave them recommendations and gave them comfort, they took initiative. Right. They filled the little gaps in their sales org that we couldn't see externally and we ended up with much, much happier customers.

Speaker B: Yes. So giving them confidence also related to salespeople, right? That they're, you know, I think that is a, you, you've hit on a very strong like human psychology truism. Whether that's your sale, you're selling your salespeople on that this product is Right. Or alternatively selling the prospect that this thing is going to be effective and then they've already bought it, but then selling the individual like the customer, excuse me, the post implementation, uh, or sorry, post sale implementation, uh, contact who may be someone different like the CRO bot or maybe the CRO and the VP of enablement bot. And then it gets assigned to an enablement program manager who's like what's this thing? And so reselling them on why this is going to be powerful and why it's going to get them promoted. Right. And get them a better job, all those sort of things. I guess that's essentially what we're describing here is continue to sell Even into the post sale environment. But you know, in a non commercial way. Sai, you were saying something.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I, I also think, you know, this is going to apply to all founders who are maybe building something brand new, something greenfield. Because that's what Hyperbound was, is greenfield. Nobody's ever used an AI roleplay product before. And so I think the biggest challenge for us on customer success is there were no best practices to follow. Right. I, I didn't go uh, we didn't go get to, we didn't go copy like Outreach's support center. Like there's nothing that we could do. We had to come up with everything from scratch. And customers also felt that because when they do a Google search, how do I set up an AI roleplay bot? There's nothing. There's no blogs, there's no articles. We are the source of truth. And it's not just about giving them this documentation but also presenting it confidently, being like no, hey, we've done this with other customers. We're experts in our own right. We're the first case study for our own product. It works. Here's what you got to do.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And they feel so much more comfortable and cared for when you deliver it that way too.

Speaker B: Got it. What did your um, what did your early sales stock look like aside from Hyperbound all the time?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah we had hyperbound from day one of course. But yeah, we use HubSpot for our CRM. Um, I think it was just uh, well initially we were using Salesforce and you know I'm a, I'm a UI UX guy and I absolutely hated Salesforce. So we switched to HubSpot. Um, warmly vector, our B2B. We use a bunch of website visitor signal tools to de identify people who visit our website.

Speaker B: That would be important if you have a highly viral product that pushes out a ton, a ton, a ton of content.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: On a social. Gotta, gotta see uh who's showing up on the website and differentiate. Yeah. Oh, the VP of enablement from Samsara landed on the website even though he was looking at this during a meeting. So obviously couldn't try out the uh, couldn't try out the bot right then and there. But that's okay. Now we're going to get so the de anonymization of things like Vector and what have you, what else that's super helpful.

Speaker C: And then we actually have a flow that, that we built early on where we basically de identify these visitors using warmly vector RV2B. We send them to Clay. We'd Enrich their data inside of Clay and then we'd actually kick off a lemless sequence from there. So Clay, it would not only enrich but it would also figure out are they icp? Because we don't want to message people that are not ICP. So it will do that ICP check and it will automatically send it to Lemlist where we'll kick off a LinkedIn automation as well as an email automation as well. So it will connect to that person on LinkedIn both from Atho on my account and then send an email as well. And it will kick off a sequence that goes on for like a week and a half or two weeks or so. Yeah, so that's our, that's our main flow. So Clay leml. We're thinking about switching off from lemless right now to ample market. Um, but that's still a.

Speaker A: Those.

Speaker B: So those, those are sales engagement tools. They also do, they'll do uh, LinkedIn automation as well. Do you just. Because I don't know if link LinkedIn allows you to do like I don't think the APIs support the um, like messaging or what have you. Does it just grab the. Well, oh it does. Do you just grab a token or do you just like log in as them listening?

Speaker A: We don't do any automation whatsoever.

Speaker B: You know, I mean everybody does but whatever. Um, okay, so for that. So Lemless does both of those things. It does email and then it also does LinkedIn, uh, automation. Yeah, um, when I had the Warp guys on, they were talking about um, a bunch of automation around Twitter as well. That's not your audience because. Well because your audience is CROs and like VPs of sales enablement, what have you. And so they're spending their time on like LinkedIn or sorry work Instagram, which is LinkedIn. Whereas like spend a lot of their time kind of like being spazzes on Twitter and what have you. So it's interesting to see that like how a lot of the sales automation stuff doesn't support Twitter. It does do a better job of supporting um, LinkedIn there. Well, so how many customers do you guys close before you end up hiring your first sellers?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean don't quote me on this but probably around 40 customers or so. So we didn't hire our first salesperson until we hit a million in ARR. Uh and that was just fully founder led sales, just me and at those selling. So that took around 11 months or so before we made our first hire.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that's a good Amount especially for uh, especially for asp, uh, of your size. If your average selling price was like 5k or 10k and it was like a two week close or like a one week close or a two week close or whatever, you can imagine that being a lot higher. But I think that's a good amount for a 40k asp or like a 25k asp where you're kind of like hitting the top of the S curve there. Um, okay, so I would imagine that in addition to having both hyperbound which you could drop somebody in and then they'd be trained up very quickly. The good news was is that you had a pretty well documented, even if it was like tribal knowledge like recorded in, in Gong or Fathom or, or what have you, um, sales motion because you guys had done a lot, a lot of repetition. So what was the profile of your, of your first sales? Hiring hire and then you know, what did you do well for hiring and onboarding them and getting them successful?

Speaker C: Yeah, our situation was a little bit unique Pete, in the sense of, you know, there's a, most startups these days, you know, they always start out with you know, the SMB accounts and uh, and it's a little bit different. Like we, we got to enterprise very quickly. Like we were closing like you know, massive six figure deals by the end

Speaker B: of that one year. It's where the need was as we discussed. Right. Like exactly. You guys followed the poll.

Speaker C: Exactly. And you know one of the challenges we had when we were on a search for an AE was there were very few people that you know, had that enterprise experience, especially at an early stage startup. Right. And so we were really hunting for that. And lo and behold, one of our advisors who had been advising us, like I mentioned Bilal, um, that's exactly what his profile was. He was an enterprise seller, um, that had worked at multiple startups in the past and he, he offered to join the team. He actually asked us if he could join the team and be a full time rep and we're like, oh, this is perfect.

Speaker B: Good signal.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: So it was a good sign when you're, when your customers want to invest and when your customers want to come work for you. This is something that we saw quite a bit at Atrium, which we have rev ops people who would uh, say hey, like I could come be a great seller at, at Atrium. Hm. Or we'd have sales leaders who are like hey, if you guys are hiring sales leaders, like I'd love to come work. It's usually like a really good Sign of like folks who want to invest, some folks who want to join the, join the organization. Another kind of good example of like of a pull. Nice. Um, and so, and so what did you do to onboard to make the onboarding as effective as possible?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I mean again because this person was an advisor and or sales coach for over a year, uh, the onboarding was actually fairly smooth for this person. But we, that is cheating.

Speaker A: There was no ramp period.

Speaker B: Actually he closed the deal before he joined.

Speaker C: I mean he did, he did help us with uh, one of our biggest deals before that. Um, but yeah, I mean I can tell you what the experience was like for one of our second seller though because we did hire another mid market Aegis. Um, I think couple. Yeah, it's been about five months now. But yeah he was, you know he was a top performer. You know both, both roles before this he used to be up front and then zip later he has a mid market ae and yeah, so he came to Hyperbound because he wanted to be an enterprise seller. And uh, but, but you know we knew he wasn't quite there yet but he saw Hyperbound as a stepping stone to get there which was perfect for us as well. And uh, yeah, his Onboarding, honestly it was, it was all about making sure he spent as much time as possible with ATO and I, uh, that's what it came down to. We said hey, it has to be in person five days a week in the office. You're going to shadow us on every call. Right. And, and sometimes we just throw him into the fire. Week two he was running Discovery, um, and doing role plays on Hyperbound in the process as well in between the weekends and stuff like that. And uh, yeah, you know, when the rep is motivated and they're in person spending a ton of time with the founders, um, you'd be surprised by how much they absorb in such a short period of time. Pete, this guy like he came in, he was a sponge, learned a ton in a very short period of time.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, yes and uh, I think hiring for someone who is smarter than the average bear and eager to do those things early on, like usually um, one of the descriptions that folks will use for this is like a pioneer salesperson in your guys case you had done a bunch, a bunch a bunch of selling which is great but there's going to be things that are missing. You need folks to figure stuff out on their own. Obviously having five years ago having a bunch of call recordings that was extraordinarily valuable as compared to Ten years ago. Uh, now having a bunch of call recordings and a bot that literally can be all the different Personas and can kind of train you up is all powerful. Um, but you still need very, you need high quality human capital in order to, for that to stick in their noggin. Um, when you get further along, um, you know, I think you can be a little bit less strenuous, kind of like less stringent there. But, but especially for those first, those first hires, you definitely want someone who can like, jump up the learning curve very quickly, uh, especially depending on the complexity of your product. And I think the thing that you described right there is like, front is like, you know, kind of sales tech. Not really, but it's in the same kind of realm. And then of course, zip, which is like procurement, um, procurement automation software, multi, like multi stakeholder, complicated. Um, not exactly a new category, but, you know, kind of like a, a new thing for the segment that they sell to. Right. Kind of like bringing that down. Um, those are like all really good characteristics for someone coming into an order.

Speaker C: The other thing is you're selling, you're selling software to procurement leaders who are also a pain in the ass to work with. In general, negotiating with procurement sucks. And so I think, yeah, we got lucky with that too. He had a lot of experience with that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a great, uh, observation there as well. Which is one of the things that Jason Lemkin likes to note is you want to look for a seller who had a harder sales motion. So someone who's going from an easier sales motion to a harder sales motion. Uh, that's very difficult. Right? So to use as an example, uh, let's say you have sellers from Ramp or Brex or Navon, who early on, three or four years ago, it was free, right? Like, it was free software. Because then they would make money on the transaction Interchange. And literally you were just convincing people to give up their Silicon Valley bank credit cards or their, you know, their Amex credit cards or what have you, move on to Brexit. And then the company actually got paid by the banks through Interchange. Well, that's a very, you know, that's a pretty compelling sales motion, and it's not as difficult. And this is actually something that a lot of those guys had to change after interest rates went up so substantially, where they, you know, they, they still make money on the Interchange, but all of a sudden their, their debt facilities cost a lot more than they did previously. And so now all of a sudden they have to charge you know, $19 a month or whatever it is to, to card folks. So essentially it made the sales motion harder. But some of those early folks, if you were to then go and bring them into sell, like something to finance people who, um, where they actually have to write a check for 50 grand or 100 grand, it's very different than saying like, yeah, just try it out. Let's just like issue some credit cards. It'll be fine. So I think that, you know, looking for folks that are, have had a harder sales motion, um, when, when hiring can be, can be super critical. Um, what mistakes did you make when kind of hiring and onboarding? Yeah, you know, a lot have them use hyperbound enough.

Speaker C: You know, I think it, no, it was, it was less on the, yeah, it was definitely, you know, a lot of, I would say, rookie mistakes on our end. Stuff that you told us to do even back then and probably just went through one ear, went out the other until we experienced it ourselves. Um, you know, something as simple as just documenting things, right? Because you don't realize like, you know, over the course of a year, Athona had gathered so much information. Like, we knew every competitor, right? We knew every value, we knew every buyer, we knew the brand, we knew the story, right? And, and now we expect these people to come in and inherit all of that and be able to talk about it just as enthusiastically as we did all this time. And so just being able to document that, putting it in a place where they can absorb that in their own time, that's something that, you know, I, I, I personally didn't do a good job of in the early days. Still not perfect, but, you know, I'm working on that. Um, I would say the other piece is just, you, uh, have to realize like, everyone has their own way of selling, right? Not, um, everyone's going to be gonna sell the exact same way as you. And so I think in the early days we did a little bit too much of like pigeonholing. We're like, oh, hey, this is what worked for us. So this is exactly how you're going to do it. And the problem is that creates pushback that, you know, early sellers especially who are very motivated, who are experienced, they want some liberty to be able to, you know, work, work within a framework and figure it out and sell in their own way. And so I think, yeah, we started get, you know, creating more space for our sellers to kind of experiment and do things like that rather than trying to pigeonhole them into this specific way.

Speaker B: And I think that maybe works early on. But when you get to hiring, you know, five reps or 10 reps or whatever, you certainly don't want to have, you know, five line chefs that are making the souffle five different ways or what have you. Right? Like you want to. This is literally why we have hypervan, right? So like, hey, do discovery this way, like this, because then the AI is going to grade how well you align to. Did you do variations within a theme? Great. But did you hit all of the discovery questions or did you leave out two critical questions because you were so busy with, you know, your jazz hands over here? That's less. We can't have that happen. You can do variations within a theme, but you need to hit the most important kind of critical parts here. Right? Um, again, very helpful to have something that is, uh, both generating a role play for you to then do that behavior in and then grading you after the fact and giving you feedback immediately versus a manager a week later pretending to watch a call and then actually not giving you the feedback. Um, I love it. Well, kind of in closing here, guys, what, um, if you were to kind of synthesize, like one thing that you would provide as a recommendation to folks who are, you know, 24 months behind you, what would be kind of a takeaway for them as it relates to your founder led sales motion?

Speaker C: I would say the biggest thing is people still get this wrong. And I'm going to say this here, and still so many people going to do the classic go into one ear, go out the other ear. But I think it's worth mentioning, um, I think that especially if you're selling software and you're a technical founder, um, stop building and start selling. That's what I'll.

Speaker B: Start talking to people.

Speaker C: Yeah, start talking to people. Learn how to sell what you're building first before you build it. Uh, too many people get into this like, rabbit hole of let me just build this whole thing and then show it to them once it's perfect. And then next thing you know, you just spent like six months building this thing no one wants. So, yeah, Ato and I have always been very, uh, big on, you know, let's just go out, build like the minimum possible product we can and just go try to sell this thing. And if we don't get, get the bite, then let's not spend more time on this.

Speaker B: So what would your takeaway be?

Speaker A: Well, I would say my core takeaway, and this isn't just for sales, this is for every part of the startup journey, is write stuff down so you can be intentional about iterating on it. There are so many things that you're going to have to make decisions about um, especially when it comes to something as complex ah as a sales motion that you've never done as a technical founder perhaps write down decisions that you're making so that you can go back, you can reflect on them, you can do your retros and you can come up with a better strategy for next time. There are so many areas that you might be uh, letting just chug along because you're not actively looking at them and when you write these things down you do tend to so biggest takeaway.

Speaker B: Got it. Wonderful. Well gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to share your story with uh, you know, the folks who are kind of 24 months behind you and their founder led sales journey. Appreciate it and have a great rest of your day. Okay?

Speaker A: You too much Pete. Thank you for having us.