Nooks: From Virtual Classroom to $70M AI Pipeline Machine with Rohan Suri

Host: Foreign. Hey everyone, thanks for joining us. For another founder led sales story where founders who have successfully navigated their founder led selling 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 Rohan Suri, co founder of Nooks, an AI pipeline generation platform that helps build B2B sales teams, dial faster, coach reps more effectively and build targeted prospect lists. Rohan has led Nooks to millions of ARR with a remarkable journey from a Stanford student project to securing $70 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Lucky Groom and Tola Capital. My biggest takeaways from uh, our conversation were around Rohan's ability to follow customer heat signals rather than his original vision. His trial based sales motion that created both faster deals and and product velocity and how they transform from a virtual classroom tool to a multi product sales platform by obsessively watching what customers actually used. I was particularly impressed by how they use real time callblitzes as their demo environment, letting prospects immediately experience value before purchasing. This try before you buy approach became their secret weapon for both sales acceleration and product feedback. You'll also hear about their clever LinkedIn acquisition strategy that created outsize awareness for a small company and how they balance founder selling with their first sales hires. So with that, here's Rohan. Uh, hey everyone, 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 Rohan Suri, founder of Nooks. I'm excited to be here with Rohan in that I feel that Nux has done an amazing job of pivoting their way to rapid success and really catching up and taking, taking the lead in an emerging category and, and that usually only kind of happens from the amazing product feedback and kind of like heat seeking missile behavior that you get in a founder led sales motion. And it's helped vault them to what I'm going to call oodles of ARR and $70 million in funding from names like Kleiner Perkins, Lockheed Groom and Tola Capital. Rohan, I'm really pumped to have you

Rohan Suri: here to be here too Pete. Thanks.

Host: Wonderful. Well, so for folks who aren't familiar with what Nukes does and you know, I think our audience, our founders here, as opposed to sales, uh, sales leadership or what have you, who of course would be like Nooks, obviously I know what Nukes is, um, maybe you can kind of share with folks the problem that NUXT solves um, for what type of organization and like who the humans in the uh, organization are who kind of care about solving these problems.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, yeah. So nux, you know we're an AI pipeline gen platform so we help basically customers build more pipeline. Um we do this in three ways. Uh we help them dial faster and get more conversations over the phone. So we specialize in phone conversations. We have a coaching product which helps people get better at those conversations. Um, do things like AI role play scorecards, things like that. And then we have a prospecting part of the product which helps people use intelligence and AI to build targeted lists so that they're calling the right people. Um, but you know we kind of sell it to anyone that is has B2B sales team uh selling to other businesses. Um typically if you have inside sales SDRs, BDRs, we do sell to AE teams too. But doing any kind of like prospecting outbound motion nuxt, uh is a good fit for um but like you know kind of our ICPs like sales leaders, um, SDR leaders, um, those types of ah, people in an organization are usually great fits for us.

Host: Yeah. And kind of maybe you can characterize for us like what your rough deal size is. Um, this kind of now and maybe like what it was, I don't know like 24 months ago or what have you and also kind of what the current sales organization looks like.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, so we, I mean it's funny we have like a really, really wide range of ACVs from you know half, uh, half million dollars to um, you know 5k. So we literally have like 100x range. Um so we do have segments and um, uh but uh, you know I think um, we started definitely more down market like I would say more on the SMB commercial. I mean I think a lot of companies start there. It's hard to go close a really really big logo when you're first starting. Um, so it's definitely shifted more and more mid market enterprise over the time and intentionally. Right. Like we put specific efforts there and so it wasn't something that just happened by chance. Um but we still have this really strong growing, you know what we call our SME and commercial segments. Um, the team right now is we have uh, almost, I want to say 30 sellers. Uh like individual, I see sellers across uh four different segments. We have SMB, commercial, mid market and enterprise. Um, so yeah that's, that's what the team looks like today.

Host: And so I mean and this is what I kind of mentioned in the Intro is that you guys have really kind of hit an inflection point um, where you found something that fit the market by kind of like pivoting your way there. And then I've really kind of scaled up but 24 months ago, um, I feel that your sales organization was not nearly this size and I feel that that's the point at which know you kind of had that lower um, average selling price. Maybe you can kind of characterize what that initial um, kind of like ASP and kind of who the humans were in the organization that you were selling to when it was, when it was primarily you selling.

Rohan Suri: Yeah. So uh, when we started I think so we started with a product that had like a really low acv. Um, it was like our, just our virtual sales floor, um, that we were selling that for like anywhere between 8 and 15, sometimes up to 20k. But it was like right around the 8 to 15k mark. And then we started launch like you know, initial product like pretty early on and we started. We're able to charge a lot more for that. So we had our dial launch uh, and then that boosted ACVs a bunch. Um, but we were still probably closer to the 20 to 30k um ACV and that stayed true for quite a bit. And now you know our ACVs are closer to like 50k across all segments. It's like blended. Yeah.

Host: And maybe actually I think it would be really kind of fun is for you to take folks through that kind of journey where you guys started right post Covid I want to say and had like initial hypothesis around virtual collaboration and uh, not necessarily of a sales capacity. Went to sales, you know for a specific use case and then, and then started doing other kind of like use cases within um, you know, within, within sales. Maybe you can kind of take people through that because I think that that's really the crux of, of what has driven your success is, is kind of like, like I was saying being that heat seeking missile and finding pull in the market.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, we, I mean we started um, I started Nuxt with two other co founders uh back in 2020. It was during COVID Uh, we were, we were actually studying at Stanford. Um, and you know school was remote and so we were bored and we didn't know what to do. And uh, this seemed like uh. My other co founder was Dan. He was, he brought the project to me and was like, you know, like you know, hey, like getting feedback and advice and eventually he was like why don't you just help me build this? And so that's kind of how it started. Um, we initially had this theory that like you know, people were, thanks to Covid, a lot of what was happening in person was now having virtually. And we had this hypothesis around, hey, we can make this like virtual collaboration and like we could replicate the best parts of in person virtually. Um, and so when we first built no, except actually like almost was focused around schools and you know we were at school at the time and so we actually gave it to Stanford. I want to say like at some point, um, that you know, 20 in 20. 202021 half of like Stanford's CS program was basically using Nux, uh, for the first. I still have friends today that will, you know, um, uh, you know, I'll catch up with. And they're like oh yeah, you're on that like virtual classroom thing, right? And like so great. Yeah, they're like I used that in class. I remember that. It's like really funny. It's like how much the product has changed um, since then. Uh, but we literally had like half of the Stanford um, department like you know, students using YUX at that time, um, for like basically all things like virtual collaboration. Um, we, there was actually a point at which um, Stanford was interested in buying it and like purchasing it as a proper thing because so many people were using it. And I remember just getting like vague prices of like what it would cost and like, I mean we were talking on the orders of like $3 a user. It was like such low. Like basically the willingness to pay was so low. And I think we talked to some advisors and I remember them like actually there's like one conversation we had with someone I was like, literally like he's like, look, he's like I personally built an edtech business. And he's like let me tell you this, I do not recommend starting edtech business if you have it is extremely hard. And it's like if you can do build an ed tech business, successful ed tech business, you could just as easily build a uh, normal SaaS business that's 10 times larger. Like it is just extremely hard. And so he's like, he's like, it's not saying you can't do it, but if you could do it, the amount of effort required is like the same as building a business. Like 10x is big. And I think that just like, you know, we saw how hard it was to sell it to Stanford. We had this idea of like people are going to go back in person anyways in schools. And so that's where we really Refocused and said, well, why don't we focus on um, ah, you know, workplace collaboration because you know, those people are likely going to be um, continuing to work remotely. And we actually had a couple people kind of using that just through natural as like we uh, just like just the product was open. Yeah, exactly.

Host: Adopting it.

Rohan Suri: Yep. Yeah. So we kind of had naturally some people there. And um, that was kind of like our part one pivot which is kind of refocused and said, hey, like let's do virtual, uh, you know, virtual workspace. And so we, we, we dug in there, um, and we got some users and like we got some people, but we never got anyone paying for it. And I think like the thing that we saw that like was like, you know, we tried that probably for about like, I want to say six to nine months of coming up with something. Like really we were just focused on like product adoption metrics. It was like, how do we get people to really, um, uh, use it on a daily basis and have success with it and be willing to pay for it. And like we tried it, we tried to grow probably for six to nine months, was not successful. We tried different things in the product, tried different form factors. We had different epochs on what that virtual collaboration would look like. And there was a point basically where um, I think someone on the team had left because we weren't making much traction. So we were losing momentum as a startup. And um, we, you know, the founders and I sit in and be like, all right, we need to like change something significantly, uh, because this current path's not working. Um, so, so that's ah. And there was actually a couple candidate options. Um, sales was one of them because we actually had a sales team using nu. Um, but that was like, but like there was other ones. We could talk, we talked about like could consulting teams use it. Like it was kind of interesting. But our high, high level idea was like, let's focus on a uh, more niche use case. Instead of being broadened any workplace, let's focus on a more niche use case.

Host: Was the sales team that was using it, Were they like having a lot of success and so you saw some initial sparks there or were they also kind of like.

Rohan Suri: No, they were using it quite a bit actually. So they were using like they were the ones that were in it the most. Right. So they were doing like six, seven hours a day. Um, and so we saw that and we're like, okay, that's pretty interesting. Um, and so you know, of the candidate options, I remember I was Actually, the one that I kind of exploring all that, I was like, okay, let's go try to get a couple teams from each of these. And, like, we got, um, each of the different verticals. Like, yeah, each of the different verticals.

Host: Consulting.

Rohan Suri: Exactly. From each of the different hypotheses. And, you know, we went through our network, we got a couple investor intros, things like that, or referrals, and we managed to get, like. I think it was like, on the sales side, it was just like, two teams. M. Actually that we got to be, uh, interested in looking at it. Uh, uh, you know, we had this hypothesis that, like, okay, like, we were in virtual collaboration at the time. So it was like, we started, like, saying, like, how do we, like, build this specifically for sales? And, you know, they were doing call blitzes, and we're like, let's. Can you make the call? Blitz is more efficient? Um, and, uh, we really focused. Like, our thing, you know, in the early stages was like, how can we have, like, a team. Come on, try it out for, like, a call blitzer session and, like, want to continue using it? And it was like, that cycle, and it was like, every week we had one coming up, and we would want to make sure that, like, that would be successful when we build a product towards that. So those were, like, the really early days, and we were just still kind of finding product market fit.

Host: Yeah, well, and I think the cool thing about that is, like, you know, you initially had a hypothesis that there would be a need for this virtual collaboration space. And, like, I'm sure it was fine for school. And then, you know, businesses obviously have a much more, uh, you know, much more substantial economic impulse, but then, you know, what's the thing within that? And I think what you observed, and I think anyone who's done sales would. Would, you know, would. Would tell you, like, yeah, you know, sales is hard, and, um. And kind of being isolated by yourself, without pure accountability and peer camaraderie or what have you. The kind of, like, the. The buzz. It's not just the buzz and the learning of the sales floor. It's like the backbone and, like, the invigoration and what have you. And I think you guys kind of saw that, like, you had you empowered serendipity for yourself. And then, um. And then probably what ended up happening was you probably saw, like, higher performance in those teams who were then doing their call blitzes together. Like, oh, actually, we do our call blixes versus just skipping them and actually not doing them, and then being in that Position to say, oh, okay, well, like, yes, we're a virtual sales floor. But like, really what we're the business of is helping people call more. Right? Because the virtual, because the collaboration is the thing that makes people be like, all right, let's go Papa Zen in, let's rock. Um, and then that kind of led you to the next thing, which was, all right, well, maybe there's other ways we can make these guys call more. And maybe you can talk about that a little bit.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, exactly. I think, um, we always had this hypothesis actually, even when we were in the virtual office. It was like, can we replicate that in person experience virtually? And then can we, because we now have all these interactions in one place that's normally happening in person, can we add AI on top of this to make it even more efficient? And we always had this hypothesis. Um, being engineers is kind of like the initial thought was engineering teams and product teams. And that's where we started. Then, you know, like you said, we got to this, you know, these, um, ah, sales teams that were using it and you know, we saw like one. They wanted to do it again, right? They did it once and they were like, let's do it next time. We actually had good success. And then you actually had like, you actually had like those numbers increase. And it was like, um, compared to engineering, where it's like, it's a lot harder to like, replicate what one rep or one, like, engineer is doing with another. Just like, very different, where sales are like, they're all trying to do the same thing. And so like, the benefit of that, like, collaboration and like, it's easier to automate with from an AI perspective, um, it really like, fit our hypothesis a lot better as like a kind of an ICP to focus on. Um, but like, to your point, I mean, we got some initial early success with, with um, with this, uh, with the Salesforce product. Um, and it was like, it got to the point where we could pretty consistently, like, if you told me like three things about a company, I could tell you they're probably a good fit. Um, and so like, once we got to that point, that's when you knew you had emotion of like, okay, this would work. Do they like, you know, do they make calls like, do they have an SDR team? Like, you know, are they remote? Probably good fit. And like 80% of the time I'd be like, yeah, I'm interested. So that was like the, uh, that. That's kind of when we hit, like, I wouldn't say like PMF, but like least like some sort of like fit product market fit around ability.

Host: Yeah. Like the promise resonated, right? Like you actually had identified a need in the market where, you know, the consulting teams and engineering team, like you could imagine. Well, have you ever thought about your engineers getting together on a, on like, you know, a virtual workspace and be like, what are you talking about? Like, I don't want the engineers to get interrupted. I barely want them to have like Slack alerts. What?

Rohan Suri: Get out of here.

Host: Right. And then I think what you guys did was you. You positioned yourself well to be able to see kind of those bright sparks. And then to your credit, you've kind of followed that, um, you know, you followed that impulse and that pull. Um, and then just thought about, okay, we are actually being hired like, you know, nukes is being hired to enhance calling performance of these, of these SDR teams. Right. So it's like focusing on the job to be done. Right. Which is helping these organizations call better and generate more pipeline or actually initially call better and then expand that. Like. Why, why are they calling? Oh, they're calling in order to, you know, enlarge pipeline. Oh, okay, well, like, maybe we can help them call better. Let's add a parallel dialer. Maybe we can help them with like list like list cleaning, etc. Etc. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that when it comes to kind of like following the, uh, you know, following your nose for, um, for poll there. What. Who was your first. I know that you had a couple of those, um, kind of like quasi customers. Who's like the first customer who really, when you showed up and you're like, yeah, this is what we do. We help, we help sales organization. We help, you know, remote sales organizations have better accountability and better learning and better esprit de core and it drives better performance, et cetera, et cetera. Who was the first customer that um, were like. That really kind of like clicked with that. That message and bought.

Rohan Suri: Yeah. So I mean I'll the. The first customer that like stands out to me. Um, they were, um, and I can, I'm going to share this with actually Modern Health. Um, uh, they were um, they weren't actually our first customer, but because the actual procurement took longer. But like, they were basically like very close to the first customer.

Host: Um, they were the first and biggest on a size adjusted basis. They were, they were the first.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, they were like we like. But they were basically the first deal cycle that we almost. I ran effectively. Um, and I remember we brought them on the FTR team. And, like, it was just so funny. Like, you know, we did the session on, like, the call blitz, and then we had a feedback session with, uh, their. With their directors. Oh. And, like, we actually got introduced from our. It was actually funny. Like, our lawyer introduced us to the team. Like, there. Our lawyer was the same lawyer as, like, Modern Health. And so, like, that's how we got the connection.

Host: Lawyer SDR is kind of. Kind of expensive lead gen, but, you know, whatever it takes at the beginning.

Rohan Suri: Yeah. Um, so it's funny, but I remember that, like, this. This was a funny meeting where, like, basically we had a session for feedback. And, uh, you know, at this point, like, we didn't really have something like, that worked for us yet. And so I remember copying on the call and, you know, I'm, like, prepared to go in asking, like, you know, like, do you guys want to use it again? Like, how did it go? And then they come in and they're like, oh, we want it. And we have one really, really big ask. I'm like, what's the ask? And they're like, we just want to keep it on while we're getting it through procurement. And I was like, oh. I was like, keep it? I was like, sure, Yeah. I was like, no problem. Like, we were just worried about people using it, and I wasn't even thinking about paying. Um, and it was like, okay. Like, that's clearly, like, that's something that they're willing to pay for and they want, um, and they're willing to send it. So that was like, one of the first moments of, like, an actual deal where we got someone to really be like, hey, we're going to cop up like, 10 grand for this. And then, you know, it's funny, they were one of our first customers. They ended up buying every single product we released since, um, when we came with the dialer, they bought the dialer. When we came out with our coaching, they bought the coaching. When they came out with our AI. Ah, Prospector, they bought that. And so every year they kind of upgraded and grown. They basically doubled in ACV every year, which has been awesome. Um, but it was one of our very early customers that we grew with. Um, so maybe that's one of the deals that early on that I think,

Host: um, but I think stands out what's kind of. What's kind of cool there is having done those three pivots, right? So, like, from classroom to business, from horizontal business to vertical sales, and then saying, like, you know, I guess that would be Two pivots there. Um, and then importantly maybe like a little bit of a messaging pivot. It was a third skip here from hey, collaboration to no sales floor accountability. Right, like esprit, uh, de core, et cetera, et cetera. And then when you got that and you showed up to those folks and you're like, hey, this is what we do. They're like, you're right, that is exactly what it does. It just did it for us just now and we'd like it to do it again and we'd like it to not stop doing that. And so, you know, you kind of at that point kind of felt like you're off to the races. You kind of mentioned pricing a little bit there. How did you end up evolving pricing over time? Did it change at all? Like how did that work?

Rohan Suri: Yeah, I think the, the lesson, which is the lesson that I heard from other people but like they, I didn't really follow it which was like simple as better like try not to over engineer pricing. Um, you know, I think we like first, like literally, I remember the first kind of a packaging I put together was like, it was like tiers of seats or something like that. It was like 0 to 10 seats is like 5k and like 10 to 10 to 25 is like, you know, 15k or whatever. And we did these tiers and based on number of seats. And um, yeah, I think the takeaway was like that was overly complex. People are used to buying seat based pricing. Just give them seat based pricing and they're used to that. Um, and so uh, we just ended up going very simple seat based. Uh, that took us probably maybe a month to get to that point. But yeah, I think a lot of people probably including me, I even heard that advice probably from someone and like I didn't really heat it and I was like, oh, I think like this like tier base makes more sense. And um, and then you know, like just like try to try to lower the friction for people to buying as much as possible early on you don't want to like over like don't add more friction to the deal because they don't really understand how your pricing model works. Um, that doesn't make sense. And so yeah, we just, you know, we go into seat based and we've been seat based and now our pricing got a little bit more complicated as we have consumption now and like a couple other things like that. So, um, but I think definitely early on you don't want to overcomplicate it.

Host: Uh, you want to be easy to do business with. And this is something that I talk about in founding sales and the product marketing kind of chapter, which has pricing in it, which is if there's a dominant paradigm for how pricing is done in the vertical that you're in. And of course in sales tech, the king of sales tech is Salesforce. And everyone's just used to, you know, just used to see based pricing there than just, you know, generally speaking, you want to kind of follow those, those Cal paths there. We have the same issue with, with Atrium as well. Unless there's like a particularly compelling reason why it needs to be different. Right, but it has to be like really compelling in order for it to be different, because otherwise you're just going to confuse the hell out of the buyer. And then maybe you want to confuse the hell out of the buyer, but certainly you'll confuse the hell out of their finance team. So they may get it, but then now you're gonna have to get them to communicate it to someone else. And that can be kind of a disaster. Um, kind of related to, um, iterating pricing, kind of. How did your ideal customer profile shift over time? And I think part of this is you talked about like, well, first it was colleges, and then we figured out they had no money and then it was like horizontal, like it was, you know, horizontal businesses. And then we realized that they had like hyper diffuse needs, right? And we didn't want to be at a 5 or $10 or 15 dol a month, kind of like zoom slash, notion slash whatever cost. And then you got into sales, so that was like obviously an iteration there. But then how did ICP refine even further? Like after you saw Modern Health being like, no, let's go. Don't you dare turn it off. What did that, how did that inform how you guys tuned up ICP over the next 12 months or so?

Rohan Suri: Yeah, uh, honestly, I don't think our ICP actually changed much from there. Like, it was actually just to your point. It's like we're finding the job to be done, right? It's like your job to be done is not a virtual collaboration. Like, I think like that was a really important like insight and observation that we had early on is that like if we were like a collaboration tool, like, you know, we'd be still charging like $20 a month per team. You know, our job to be done is actually like, like, like our job to be done is like, you know, like the first level is like, okay, make more calls, right? And then it's like like a level above that it's like actually like build pipeline using the phone. Now, a level even above that is just like make more pipeline in general, um, and you get to earn the right to tackle each of those higher rings, uh, as your product evolves and as you build more trust with your users. So, um, I think that's kind of how it evolved. Um, but honestly, today we solved a very similar team that we started with. Um, and we kind of actually intentionally went deep within one icp, rather than going broad and saying, hey, there's a bunch of other verticals that we can go after.

Host: Yeah. And I guess in this case probably what you've done is you've just gone up in terms of segments, but still looking at organizations that meet those criteria, like, you know, large sales organizations, primarily SDRs. Right, primarily SCR. Um, and also phone based, which, I mean, I think the good news there is that with the rise of sales engagement tools like, you know, outreach and sales Loft and Apollo and so on and so forth, um, you know, prospect inboxes are kind of disaster areas. And so that has really made it such that the phone has become much more important or back to the future where the phone has been much more important there. And I would imagine at this point, you know, given the fact that it's not just a virtual sales floor, but also it's parallel dialing or what have you, you probably have removed the virtual sdr, sorry, virtual, um, you know, or distributed remote organization requirement. Because you can imagine if you have like 50 SDRs in San Mateo or Austin or what have you, those folks could still very much benefit from a nooks, um, parallel dialer. And at this point now, you know, list builder, etc. Etc. Um, has that, has, like, has that evolved as well?

Rohan Suri: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, that is maybe one of the early criterias that we, that we changed, which was like, okay, we don't actually need to be remote. Um, you know, any team that makes builds pipeline and yeah, like originally it's like has to be building pipeline over the phone. Now it's like, really we can actually work with any team. Um, we actually, like, there was, there were some things that changed. So like early on, for example, like, we didn't work well for teams that had no existing calling motion. Um, and if they don't like build any, you know, it's like they had to have emotion already works and we're like putting gasoline on that today. We can actually take organizations that like, do not have a strong calling culture and build that out because we just, our product is so mature. We have the things, we have the tools like the AI roleplay simulators where you can actually practice right. With AI and like we have a trainer and like, you know, we have a lot of the coaching enablement things that enable teams that like, don't have a strong calling motion to do it. And even our CS team is built in a way that can help customers be successful that way. So we've actually that, that's one thing that has expanded our TAM a little bit. Um, where I think early on we just saw like those trials would not go successfully and we were like, okay, we should qualify those out. But now today I think we're actually pretty, we're, you know, pretty reliably able to take a company, regardless of whether they have a cold calling motion, make sure they have this, you know, the pieces in place. I mean they need to have some sort of PMF that the company does. Uh, we can't, we can't build that out. But um, but we can kind of get them uh, to figure out, uh, prospecting over uh, over the phone. So.

Host: Yeah, yeah. And part of that is like a kind of like Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm sort of situation where when the people, the, the first folks that are going to resonate with the Nooks value proposition would be the folks that are in the white hot center. Right. So distributed. Yes. They have a, they have a calling base motion and that's the only way they can connect with their customers. They actually can't email them. Right. That would be someone. We were like, oh man. Our distributed organization because of COVID is making it really hard for us to enforce and drive calling behavior. And we're just hosed. We're hosed. Right? And then of course you guys show up and you're like, well check this out. They're like, oh my God. Yay nux. And then you know, as you kind of advance along the product adoption life cycle, then you get to the next folks who are like, yeah, you know what? We have noticed that uh, email response rates are deteriorating and we haven't done a ton, a ton of calling historically, but boy howdy, we've like, we have a C level initiative to start thinking about what that might look like because we're observing the email. Just the email situation is a disaster. Right. And that's not like, and that's not like a, you know, ah, an early adopter pioneer. Um, that's more maybe like early majority sort of thing. And then you could imagine, but the other thing too is imagine trying to fight that battle with your early product, which was probably super janky and like buggy and so on and so forth. So you want to start out with people who have the white hot pain and then you can start and then like your CS team gets better. Your CS team is like, oh, we actually can help educate people on how to actually call. And then now you can kind of get the higher and higher hanging fruit versus the kind of low hanging fruit initially. Um, I mean, I think that's like a very kind of common thing. And then especially when you have like a new category where you know, in you guys case, like, yeah, there were parallel dialers before in the form of like connect leader and connect and sell and what have you. And. And then of course Aurum had kind of gone out the gate, um, a little earlier than nukes, but you guys like were able to catch up very quickly regardless. It kind of was like a new category. And so generally speaking those like larger organizations are going to be less apt to resonate with a, like a new emerging category. Unless of course it's something that only they can like, only they can use. Right. So like, you know, um, uh, you know like workday is the example that I like to use. But in the, even in that case, like workday was an existing category of HRIs that was moving from on prem to the cloud. Um, you had mentioned trials earlier, um, and I think that there was some. You had mentioned previously that the trials were something that was really important to you guys early on. You're like, hey, we're going to have someone do a call blitz and then say, hey, how was that? Did that continue to be the case where you guys did a lot of trial kind of, um, components to your sales motion?

Rohan Suri: Yeah, I would say like the trial part of our sales motion was probably one of the biggest reasons we were so successful and our product velocity was so high. Um, because it's really strong forcing function for engineers for the whole company to put your product to the test of like, hey, can you actually double pipeline for your customer in this time period and you get this feedback loop immediately of like they either buy or they don't and you're put up to the test. And like a lot of product velocity is just about how do you empower your engineers and your entire company around very clear feedback loops from like, are they successful? Like part of the reason sales is so successful is like a, you know, kind of like, you know, you either hit your quote or you don't People don't typically have this for engineering. Right. There's no like very clear like benchmark of success for engineering. The thing is like when you have this like really tight feedback loop, whereas like you literally your product has to work really well. You know, you have two week cycle, um, and you have basically dozens of these running every month. You have this really strong feedback loop. Then if the product did a great quality to create slightly, you really quickly know and you can address it. Um, and so I thought it was a very successful part of our motion. Um, we never did plg. We actually like, it was never like, we actually explicitly avoided a PLG motion, but we always did this like trails, uh, trial sales LED motion. And it worked really, really well.

Host: It's almost like you could KPI your engineering team on win rate.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, honestly that's very similar.

Host: Yeah. Um, Slack talks about this a lot. One of the benefits of month to month product pricing is if somebody churns because they're not getting utility, you know, uh, the annual contracts have a tendency to hide those sort of things. And in your case what you were doing was it was like, you know, pre sale environment where it's like, no, no, our promise is that we're going to, we're going to do like a collison, you know, stripe collison install on your call blitzes and you're going to see a change in your behavior and if you don't, don't buy it. Right. Um, and I feel that um, uh, a uh, friend of mine was an early seller at ah, Chorus and she had, she figured out this really clever um, kind of trial motion where initially Chorus and Gong and those guys had um, you know, a lot of most of their product marketing was around call coaching, right? Like hey, you're gonna install a coaching culture. You're gonna get. The managers are gonna be able to listen to calls and they're gonna be able to coach reps. But it was like this kind of like Rube Goldberg machine of like, you know, first like the mousetrap's gonna hit like this and then the thing's gonna go up and then, and then win rates are gonna go up. Right? And what um, this woman Katrina London figured out was that um, the people who really had a high intensity of need that um, call recording software could handle were the reps. Right? Uh, like literally just recording things that they had forgot they would forget. Right? So like as an example, um, you know, when is the CFO going to be back from paternity leave? And so she realized this. And so she started doing these parallel, uh, trial motions where. Because early on they'd be like, all right, you're going to go ahead and listen to some calls and you're going to give your rep some feedback. And it's just like, dude, this is never going to impact anything anytime soon in any kind of, like, short term. And what she did was she said, like, hey, we're going to. We're going to. We're going to allow the managers to pretend that they're going to listen to calls, right? Because they need to feel it's kind of like Maggie. Maggie Shelton in the, uh, uh, in the, um. In the, um. In the Simpsons. Right, sorry, Maggie Simpson in the. In the, uh, in the Simpsons, with the fake driving wheel or like, steering, ah, wheel in the car, where it's just like, hey, Here you go, Mr. Manager. Like, you can go ahead and pretend that you're going to listen to these calls and coach on it. But the reality is she would go and she would talk to the reps and say, hey, so here's the situation. I'm a rep, you're a rep. You're going to get on a call, you're going to jump off the call. You're going to forget when the. When the CFO is coming around for attorney leave, you're going to forget who the other person was. You're going to jump into the call after it's been transcribed, you're going to look it up, it's going to save your ass. They're like, okay. And then she would come back a week later and say like, hey, how many times did you do that? And every single rep would be like, me, I did it. It saved my ass. Uh, it's amazing. And she's like, okay, cool. Did you want to turn this off or you want to keep it on? And all the reps are like, keep it on, keep it on. Right? And I think that that's a very important thing is to say, can you do impact in the short term? Uh, and then I think what's kind of cool about that is, um, you can almost manufacture a compelling event in that situation where if you can get people to turn it on versus if you can't prove impact in the short term, oftentimes you need the business to have decided that they're going to do a thing, and that can be a lot tougher. Um, kudos to you guys for figuring that out and then putting the challenge to engineering and product in order to. In order to do that, do you guys still do that today?

Rohan Suri: Yes. I mean it's a different scale. I mean for newer products. Absolutely. Um, and so that is like we're very driven around, you know, um, new deals and we have that like that, that motion. Um, so absolutely. I think um, to your point like you know the sales motion, obviously it helps with product velocity but it also you know it's one of our biggest levers for accelerating deals because like, like you know there's only a few ways to create demand. Right. For people that don't think they want to buy can try to convince them over a slide deck or you know you can have someone else tell them um, one of the best ways is like they see the results themselves for their own company and like now you're suddenly like okay, well that, that's compelling data. Right. And so um, you know, using the data from their own company, do you

Host: want to keep generating this pipeline at this rate or did you want to go back to the old version how you generate pipeline at the rate you

Rohan Suri: have to have a product that is like very low implementation. I think that's like one of the key things. And so we always built that from the get go that it was literally two minutes to set up nooks. I mean like a rep could do it themselves and start dialing. Like it was that it was that easy. And so we always built it in a way that was really, really easily set. You could set it up so easily so that like you could go through that trial motion with low friction.

Host: But uh, yeah I, and, and I think the, the example that I like there's um, there's a, A ah publication called uh, Sequoia publishes called the Templeton Compression and it's about um. And I think the term they use is the sales ready product. There's a product and there's a sales ready product. And so oftentimes what ends up happening, like I think that PLG is just this huge psyop that essentially has it's like founders coping so they don't have to talk to customers. Now that being said, providing leverage and removing friction such that you can do a collison install. Right. And like you know Looker did this during their sales motion. So actually like Lloyd Tabb who was the founder of Looker, he would go in and like install Looker for organizations and like you know get, get them you know tied into the cloud data warehouse and so on and so forth. Early on Looker for the longest time they had a one to one AE and SE ratio because they would show up and they would like install Cloud Bi into the organization. Was it plg? No, it wasn't plg, but it was sales ready. Right. Um, and, and it allowed people to have this. Wow. And then you would say, okay, cool, we're going to take it away. And people would be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, please don't do that. Please don't do it. Right. The example I, I like to you use is, um, uh, in the movie the Ghostbusters, right? Where like they, they get the, they get the ghost out of the, the, uh, the ballroom, etc, and then they tell the person what the price is going to be. And the guy's like, I had no idea it's gonna be so much like, I won't pay it then. And then, you know, Bill Murray's like, that's okay, we'll just go ahead and put the ghost back into the ballroom. And the guy's like, oh, don't do that. Please don't do that. Now people have to actually want it. And like, this is something that we always struggle with at Atrium was installing, you know, performance analytics into organizations. It was cool and important for people to see, but it was also one of those things that like managers and sales leaders and what have you could like maybe be like, yeah, like we aspire to have better metrics and better analytics, but doing something with it is probably something that it's like going to be a longer burn. And so even though we were able to install, like do a very quick install of Atrium into an organization, it didn't have the same sort of impact where like, if all of a sudden it went away, they'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. Right. And so that I think, I mean, analytics products generally have that issue as opposed to workflow products. Um, but I think that your point is well taken, which is you want to make sure that you, you're like delivering business impact in a way that if it goes away immediate. Really sad.

Rohan Suri: Yeah. Yeah. That's one of our big levers for accelerating timelines. Yeah, absolutely.

Host: So trials work really well. What was something that did not work well at all?

Rohan Suri: I mean, there was a time early on we actually had an advisor that was like very against trials. It's kind of funny. He's like, look like, no one does trials. He's like, so much software. Not no one, but he basically most software sold it out of trial. Um, and it was like, like, like, let's just try that. Like, let's try doing deals without a trial. Um, it's like, you know, people do this like a thing, um, you know, most like true actually. For, for what it's worth, a lot of software sold without like any kind of trial. I would like to do paid POCs and things like that. Um, and so we tried that early on and I was actually pretty against it. And then we did the data and like, basically like um, the ones that we tried without it, like we just, we sold a couple but like it was a slower conversions and um, we just like we went back to what was working and we just did that.

Host: So yeah, it's hard when you're doing a new category, right, because people are like, what is this craziness? What are you talking about? What is this crazy voodoo magic? And then so if you can figure out a way of impacting like you were saying, that can be a superpower. Like sales loft and outreach were a good example of this. Um, now they had kind of a heavier lift where if an organization didn't have good data, hygiene or good data in place or what have you, that would be a very big constraint. But like if you could deploy, you know, outreach into an organization in 2016 or 2017, then all of a sudden like their email volumes jump up. Like by 5x you're going to see the impacts and taking that away is going to scare the hell out of people. Because now imagine the alternative where you're like, hey, you should just go ahead and give us $50,000 so we can give these email Gatling, uh, guns to all your SDRs. The head of marketing or the head of marketing office or whatever is going to be like the what now? Right? And so that's why early on being able to prove that so people could say whoa, actually this is super impactful is important. Usually you can oftentimes you can get away with uh, you know, a non trial or a paid poc. If a, if there's no other way of doing it, right, like you actually can't do a deployment like that or B, if it's an existing category, right, where it's just like, oh, okay, cool, like it's like this, but it's better for these reasons right here. And you can like potentially try it out or like at least have a credible narrative but like you know that you need this thing versus adding something on that you've never had before. It's oftentimes a little bit tougher, um, tougher there I hear.

Rohan Suri: I think like it's easy. Like one of the reasons I think that like we got this advice is because like, there would be trials that would happen and we would lose them for factors outside of our control. Right. And we'd lose them because maybe their team wasn't ready or maybe they didn't adopt. And like, you know, if you have an outsider kind of looking at this and they might be like, well, like, let's, let's factorize all the things out of our control because we can't control those. And let's try to create a sales process that like, is around the things that we can control. And I think like, that was the instinct that we got from like, you know, advisors and other people we talked to. And it kind of makes sense, like, especially if you're coming from like a more mature product and more mature category, it's like a very reasonable thing to do. But I think like, if you're a founder and like you like, that's kind of part of the like, job to be done, in some ways it's a, solve that messy and be okay with that. And like, even if you see that it's like, it's actually not a huge deal because again, you're going to be learning so much anyways from those, uh, those trials that you're doing. So it's like you're going to, you're increasing your body velocity. Maybe you don't come alert them, maybe it's not as efficient as it could be. But like, I think it's always net positive.

Host: Yeah, I mean, I think that this is part of the, the reason why founder led sales is so important. Because imagine if that was being executed by, you know, a, uh, sales manager and four reps and what have you. And so there was like this giant game of telephone that was happening versus you being the one. Or like you with some sales reps being the ones to do it. And then saying, oh, okay, the reason why this failed was because they didn't have good call, uh, data. Right. They didn't have good, good phone numbers. Okay, that will now be part of our, that will go back into discovery questions where we say, hey, do you guys have a calling program right now? Yes, we do. Okay, cool. How, like, how do you guys get phone numbers? How would you rate that? They're like, oh, it's really good. We actually have three different data sources. We do a munch thing, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, all right, this is going to be great versus, like, I don't know, the last time we downloaded Zoom info CSV 24 months ago. And you're like, okay, great, let's Go ahead. We're going to fix that first. And so that just ends up being a feature, like a bug in your sales motion. Right. Maybe has a product fix to it, but maybe actually has a discovery qualification fix and maybe has like a, like a sales motion fix and then like you just patch the sales motion and like, you know, and then recurse and recurse and recurse. Um, kind of changing, changing gears a little bit here. What, like what worked really well for customer acquisition for you guys?

Rohan Suri: We did pretty well on LinkedIn. We found that early on LinkedIn, um, was a pretty good channel. Uh, a lot of salespeople.

Host: Like content?

Rohan Suri: Yeah, content. Like founder led content. We did founder led content. We did users, we did like live events, like LinkedIn events. We did these like early on, like cold call competitions where people would like live dial with everyone. Um, so like community kind of events. So it was. Yeah, we did. And like basically we just, I mean sales people are on LinkedIn. It's like pretty simple and it was like a good channel to push content down.

Host: That's what, that's uh, where they're at. Right, right. And they, they're supposed to be prospecting and instead you could hit them while they're procrastinating instead of prospecting, uh, they're paying attention to Nook's content.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So yeah, we identified that early on and we basically, I mean early on that's how we got a lot of good traction. We would get people saying, I've just seen Nooks all over, I've just heard about this. And so even for a relatively small company at the time, we were able to build a pretty good amount of hype. Now it was a little bit of an echo chamber. It's not like really touching at the full market, but it was, I mean we would do cold calls and people would be like say, yeah, I heard of nooks on LinkedIn and I, uh, mean we still have that today. But like even early on, I'm thinking like two and a half years ago we would get that. That was a good customer acquisition channel.

Host: Nice. And so post sale, I mean you talked a lot about the trial motion working and so if utility is being proven pre transaction, usually that that kind of takes a little bit of pressure off of customer success. Um, what, you know, what was particularly important when it came to CS and how did that evolve over time? Because in you guys case, because this can happen where if somebody's buying site unseen or they're buying they're like, oh, man, that deck was really great. I'm gonna buy here. You're like, here you go. See us have fun, guys. That can be a little bit more fraught, but in you guys case, people were not buying unless they saw some sort of utility. Now, it might have been an individual team as opposed to, like 10 teams. Right? And then you'd have to go and like, resell it or whatever. Like, what were the kind of the wrinkles that. That you guys figured out from a CS standpoint?

Rohan Suri: It's funny, our first csm, we hired Shout out to Terrence, uh, who's awesome at Start Nooks. Um, he. He actually was. So he was an AE before. Um, and he actually. We actually had him working on the trial. So like, we just viewed that as like, implementation onboarding. And so he would. Yeah, like, I mean, he would run. Help run the trials that we were running, uh, very early on. And he would do it with, um, our Dan, our CEO would also be pretty involved in that too. And so, um, they would. They would parent that. And so then eventually, at some point, it made more sense for, like, this, you know, cs, not to be involved. Preach pre sales. But we did that early on, I think, actually, like the one that we. Yeah, yeah. Well, they actually are for like, larger enterprise deals now, which, um, we do do that totally. But, um, you know, I think probably, uh, um, like you said, like, I think the trial is like, like, onboarding often was easy, but it's still. You need, like, success because, like, you might have one team get on, do the trial, and there's like five other teams. Um, and then, like, even as, like, you know, as you go throughout the, like, um, uh, um, you know, months go by, you know, things change, and you need to have continued success. So I would say, like, I don't think we did anything particularly different other than really having strong customer obsession across the Org. Like, we hired people that cared. Um, we. We consistently get, like, reviews. And I think this is easier to do early on. And so as a founder should lean into this advantage that like. Like, no. Really cares about the outcome. Like, we listen to customers, we help them. We're more of a partner. We've done. I think we've just hired a ton of people that like, really, truly care about the customer. And we've invested, like, a lot of money into that. And, you know, we have the ratios that make sense, um, where you can actually, we've scaled that up to, you know, the. The size of a business route today. Um, and so like, you know, if I. One advice for other founders is like, you know, I, you know, I'd recommend like invest a lot into that because like the last thing you want is like, you know, people to churn. That kills your business. So like, you know, we, we don't view it as a cost center. We obviously have like a really. We have good ndr. We now expand a company, we sell multiple products. And so we always view that as like a really key investment that, you know, is probably pretty expensive. So if, you know, if you venture back, it's helpful. You have a lot of money. Um, but it's. I, uh, think it's, you know, it pays long term dividends. For sure.

Host: Yeah. But I think there's a couple things that to kind of call out there. One is focus on outcomes, kind of like the jobs to be done thing. And that's really the criticality. It's like identifying the need in the unmet need in the market, which you guys pivoted to, which is great. Which I think is like one thing. There is like being ah, humble, right? And saying like, hey, actually this isn't working, but there's some heat over here. And then once you identify that that was the thing that they were hiring you for, they were hiring you not because you had like wizzy AI or this or whatever. Like, no, no, we're hiring you in order get us call more. Right. And one mechanism by which we're going to do that is through, you know, a sales floor and then a parallel dial or whatever. And so then the CSMs are like, all right, we are here not to deploy nooks. We are here to help you call more. Yes, yeah. And then. And like, and so, you know, friend of mine, Nick Mehta, uh, who's the CEO of Gainsight, talks about this like, you got to focus on outcomes, outcomes, outcomes and make sure. And then the second thing that I think is really powerful that you guys had, you said it was Terrence was the um, early csm. So I think what's cool there is you had um, two things going. One, you had a former practitioner. So I don't know what you said that Terrence was previously an account executive. I imagine at some point he was probably an sdr. And so he was used to calling. Right? So he had credibility. And not only credibility, he could speak the game. Right? That's the first thing. The other thing too, and you get this with new categories of software. Oftentimes CSMs view their role as being like a waiter. Like, hi, what would you like to order versus what I like to call a personal trainer where you're like hey, so you are here today in order to generate more pipeline. And the way that we're going to generate more pipeline is by making you guys badass at ah, calling. And so one component of that is going to be this wonderful, you know, virtual sales floor. Another component of that is also going to be this uh, you know, this parallel dialer. But part of it is also just going to be expertise and also me kicking your ass if you don't do it right and don't get, don't get like. And by the way, I'm not the one who's saying, saying this. Your CRO is the one who bought this. And I think an important thing there, like this is always a thing that, that customer success struggles with is usually that sort of like polite aggressiveness, um, can be something that's a little bit absent in customer success. And so in your guys case, having someone who is a seller who probably didn't have any issues around being candid or not aggressive per se, but polite aggressive, um, is a powerful thing. And I think that all those things kind of work really well together when you're talking about a new type of software. Because otherwise if you're just like dropping it on someone, being like all right guys, have fun, figure it out and people have never used this before, then you know that's going to be a recipe for non adoption and, and ultimately churn as you know, I will say

Rohan Suri: like, you know, I'm sure probably most companies go through this phase. So RCS definitely started out very reactive. It was basically like putting out fires, right? Like basically. I mean when you're early on and we actually probably understaffed it, um, and when you're early on it's basically like which customer is complaining now and let me go figure out how to fix it. And that was kind of like the function. And um, I mean that's kind of what you have to do. Like you do want to prioritize the fires, right? You don't want to proactive putting out fires probably, yeah, don't leave the fires burning. Right. And so that's kind of what you have to do. And then we started staffing out. We hired a VP of CS and we got like a lot more people and that's really when it started to shift to be more like proactive and you actually had the bandwidth to go and be like okay, like let me actually guide you through what other orgs do and like let me Talk you through. Your connect rates are. Well, let me give you advice on like, how you can improve those. And um, and so like, like, that's maybe like a mistake we made where we didn't invest early enough. Um, uh, and like, basically like our, our CS was doing support. It's kind of like, you know, effectively what was happening.

Host: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Versus being the. Yeah, it's like being reactive. Like, what would you. Like, what's the issue? Oh, you ran into something versus, like, hey guys. So your connect rates, like, we're coming back to our second meeting in week two and boy howdy, no one's calling. What's the deal there? Oh, we don't have any data in the CRM. Oh, okay. Well, like, let's pull revops in and fix that because versus waiting for you guys to come to us and be like, no one's actually being. No one's doing any dialing. Right. Like, let's go ahead. Be proactive. Totally. Like, hey, you came to us in order to get your beach bod together in order for, uh, in order for your wedding. And you know what, you're actually not doing your crunches in your push ups. So, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna get on top of that and I'm. And, and like, I'm gonna have to report this to your CRO, right, because he's looking to me to be the one who could drive. To drive your success. So like, you know, don't get me in trouble and I won't get you in trouble. Right, yeah, that sort of thing. Um, how many, how many customers did you guys close before you hired your first, um, kind of dedicated sales hire?

Rohan Suri: I don't know exactly. I think it was on the orders of like 20 or so.

Host: Yeah, probably to the point where like, it was kind of on repeat. Right? You're like, all right, look at this. You can imagine doing your pre call planning. You're like, okay, it looks like they got 30 SDRs. Okay. The SDRs are all over the place. I see that. Some are, you know, some are like, they're all in different states versus in one thing here. Okay, great. Right. And then, you know, probably had like a 20 or 30% win rate on, on like, well qualified things. And like, at that point it was like, all right, cool, now let's bring in incremental sellers to then repeat the sales motion that you had concocted and kind of refined there. What, um, what was the profile of your. Kind of your first sales hires?

Rohan Suri: Yeah, I mean, we looked for early startup experience, we looked for people that would work really hard. Um, that's like super important. Um, it's a startup, you know, we expect everyone to work hard. So um, across the team. Um, so I don't know for a

Host: hot second there in uh, 2021 and 2022, you know that, that wasn't fashionable. I guess maybe in you guys case you were, you were hiring your first, your first sellers like post SaaS recession and in kind of like mid 2023. Perhaps that was, that was helpful insofar as like everyone had. There have been tons and tons and tons of layoffs. So now people were like, oh, okay. Actually I guess it is, it is important to work at work again.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, yeah, no, it's, I mean we, for what it's worth, we've done remote for uh, a while. I think it actually worked. But like you just need to hire, if you're new remote, you need to hire the people that are going to remote, as I'll put it that way. Um, but that's a whole topic to unpack. But yeah, I mean like hard work was like super important. We wanted like clear evidence that they would work hard. Like, I mean we just tried to ask them like, you know, how many hours did you work? Right. Like it's um, that simple. And so that was important startup, uh, startup experience. There are people that want to build process and like, like that kind of part is important as well. M. Uh, but yeah, I mean it was our early hires. I won't say we like knew what we were doing either. Right. I think we're now much better at sales because like it's one of those things. I mean even as a founder, just like interviewing in general, I, I've gotten much better after hiring, you know, hundreds of people and doing hundreds of interviews, thousands of interviews probably at this point. So it's like it's just a muscle you build. Um, but you know, those are kind of the criteria we're looking for.

Host: So working hard, right? When you say people who will do well, remote, I mean usually where my brain goes there is like adults like hiring like people who like have come up through, maybe already have gone through, you know, an in office experience. But what were your kind of indicators of someone who's going to work well? Remote.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, I mean, yeah, we definitely looked at people that were like five plus years of experience. I mean we were not looking anything younger than that. I mean it's for your first sales hires. You don't want to like skimp. You want it like people that are experienced. So like it just doesn't make sense to hire like less junior, junior sailors. Um, they're going to be building a lot of the process and especially as a founder, you don't want to have to be like coaching small things. That's not like your probably as a founder, that's probably not your specialty. You want to be able to trust that they're good sellers and you're operating more at the product level. High level strategy questions. Not the are you fault sending the email after the deal kind of thing. Like that's like not the thing that you should hopefully having to be managed for your early sellers. So um, yeah, yeah. So I would say we were looking like five to eight years of experience. Boss.

Host: There you go. What um, what did you guys do particularly well, aside from, you know, hard quality. It's funny, I was literally having this conversation with um, a high growth company that I do some sales coaching with the other day where the person who's leading sales right now was talking about um, authenticating willingness to, you know, to work and grind and what have you. And I was like, well have, have you articulated this, have you like put it into like the spec. They're like, no, no. Like we communicate it to the, to the recruiters via Slack. I'm like, no, no. Like do you, do you have like a specification that says like this is an important thing. And then moreover, one of the things that I'm a big fan of is written, uh, screens. Right. Or at least like a screen. Right? Just it's almost kind of like an inbound form. Right. But instead it's Google Doc and you could just add criteria to it. Like, hey, just to be clear, you know, we have an expectation that folks work 10 hours a day because we have so much demand and we have a transactional sales motion. So I need you to type out here. Yes, I understand that I'm going to be working 10 hours. Like even sounds kind of stupid, right? But it's just like a hard qualifier. Yeah, like it's just alignment. Kind of like from a customer standpoint where it's like, hey, on a scale of 1 to 5, you know how like, how rigorous would you say your current calling program is? Oh, it's like a four. Okay, okay, cool. Like, and where do you want it to be? You know, like just essentially getting people to declare so everyone's just like aligned can be a very, a very helpful thing. And that applies to hiring. Hiring very much. It's like, you know, it's just hard Qualification. And then don't be afraid to strip line folks either. It's like the same way where you might say, hey, you know what? Like, I get that you guys say that you want your AES to be doing pipeline generation and calling, but generally speaking, like, you know, you guys have a fairly high average selling price. You seem like you have an enterprise motion. Enterprise sellers don't like to call me. Like, I don't think that.

Rohan Suri: I've never, I don't, I don't think I've ever seen an enterprise caller that's like really big on pipe gen. That one's got STR support, right?

Host: So you could say that. Like, you could imagine saying that to a customer, where you have a customer who's like, no, no. And he's like. And then you like, pull it away from them. Um, and you're like, look, man, I think this is. And they're like, no, the CEO specifically said, da, da, da, da. And you're like, awesome. Okay, well, now that we're all aligned, right? And just do the same thing from a hiring standpoint too. This one, I'll share this one really quick story. Um, and then I want to jump to things that you didn't do well. But, uh, we were hiring these roles so early on with Atrium. We had this forward deployed motion. We had what we call GTMOps that was helping to deploy these trials because, like, Atrium required a bunch of tuning. And so we needed really like rigorous, kind of like anal people. And so there's like a whole hiring process that talked like, went through that. You had to like, you know, do a bunch. You had to like set up a zapier, you had to follow instructions, you had to set up a zapier and then like fire it off and so on and so forth. And I got this nasty LinkedIn message from this candidate. Sorry, they didn't even apply. That. That was the funny thing. This woman saw our job posting, uh, and that what was going to be involved in it, and she messaged me on LinkedIn and she said, hey, I'm not going to apply to your job, but I just wanted to let you know that you're awful and I hope you don't hire anybody because of this, uh, the ridiculousness. And I was like, like part of him was like, fuck you, man. But on the other side, it's just like, cool. I'm so glad that you didn't apply. I'm so glad that you didn't apply. We had other people who are like, we had other people who Are like, oh, my God, that was so much fun. I had never used Zapier before, and I went through this process and now I. Now I know how to use Zapier, and it was super cool. And of course they ended up being like, really amazing hires because they were super high attention to detail, they're very curious, et cetera, et cetera. So it's about fit, right? It's about. About alignment and fit. Uh, so, so, so given all that, what, um, kind of said the things that worked well. What. What didn't work well in your hiring kind of onboarding process.

Rohan Suri: We hired our first ae and um, yeah, at first we wanted to just hire one person. Um, I think as like a founder, you're kind of very apprehensive to hire. Yeah, yeah. So, like, you know, you're always apprehensive to hire, you know, more people than you need. Um, and you, uh, you know, early on, it's. It's actually a mindset shift as a founder to like, start to like, that you actually should hire. Like, it's important. Um, and especially as jobs come up. And so early on, I think, like, we probably underhired, uh, early on in the growth phase of next, but easy to say the opposite, right? So anyways, um, we. We did that and we got really advice. I was like, hey, you should do two people. Um, and, you know, um, that turned out to be very, very smart. Um, one of the early hires didn't end up working out. Um, but, you know, if you don't have to, it's really hard to, uh, know, um, what's working, what's not working. Um, and so that was one thing that maybe we got wrong initially, but we very quickly fixed it, and within a couple months we hired the second person. So, um, that was one thing. Um, the other piece is, uh, we learned actually, like, domain expertise is pretty valuable, um, just for getting things off the ground. One of the person that didn't work out wasn't a good fit, like, didn't have the domain expertise of, like, selling to other sellers. And so that turned out to be a really valuable skill set. We don't exclusively do that today, but, like, I think a lot of our early hires, the ones that people ramped really quickly, they just. They knew the space, like, cold. Um, and that was. That was a valuable skill set.

Host: Yeah. Um, I mean, especially given. Given the. The fact that you guys were selling a tool that was not yet deployed in sales land. So, um, like you could imagine, any seller could probably sell CRM pretty well. Because they use CRM all the time. Whereas like a parallel dialer is kind of an emerging category three or four years ago. And, and so as a result, even though if you had someone who's like, yeah, I'm a seller, I know how sales things work. So I, or I was an sdr and I know how it's like, yeah, but you were an SDR sitting in a bullpen at Oracle. Right? Dialing using RingCentral. So like things are a little different now, like this distributed environment, this parallel dialer, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Um, so I think that, you know, I think that it's important to be kind of, kind of be mindful of that. And yes, you know, getting to is important. Now what's even more important, of course, is to have a statistically significant sample size of founder selling so you can say, hey, you're not working out. And like, hey, I know that I'm like really smart and handsome, But I sold 20 deals and I've never sold before. So I think that like, you know something, I think a normal human being should be able to do this right Now. Imagine a scenario where you only hired one and you hadn't done that. Like, maybe you'd close one deal.

Rohan Suri: Yeah, you wouldn't know, man.

Host: Does the product not work right? And this is like why, you know, uh, getting to the top of that S curve from a founder led sales motion and like making sure that the, you know, the sales motion is refined and dialed in is so powerful. Nice. Well, I think those are all the things that I wanted to cover today. Thank you so much. The last thing I would really kind of like just kind of ask you is if you think about the folks who are 24 months behind you guys, you guys are pretty far out there, 36 months behind you. What would kind of be your biggest recommendation to those folks who are kind of in the middle of their founder led sales motion right now? Just trying to either A, trying to knock down those early customers or even B pre that looking for actual demand and some sort of pull. Kind of like the two stages of the, the Nook story there, you know?

Rohan Suri: Yeah, uh, yeah, I would say so. Like the early, early PMF days. I mean, I think like to me when we started to get to like consistent. What I would call like the early inklings of PMF is you can go into a call, you can do discovery and you can get a pretty consistent. They have a problem, they're going to move forward. And like once you have that kind of like mental Model. I think that's when you can see like, okay, there's a, there's the inklings of repeatable motion. I just remember like coming after a couple calls and I'm being like, okay, like I think I know how this works now. Like, it's like I can, you know, we need to find more of these people and we need to you know, build pipeline and all that stuff. But that, that was kind of like the inklings. Um, so if you're looking for like signs, I think like look for like signs that you can predict the problems someone has based on like you know, high level attributes or one or two questions that you can ask about them. Um, so that, that's like my one advice, um, that I felt I learned on the, on the finding PMF and then on the sales side I think, um, yeah, I mean I said this earlier but I would say like the um, trial based motion was incredibly effective from an overall company perspective. Um, and it just like it orientated, it gave clear goals for the entire company and it was one of the reasons our product moved really fast. It was one of the reasons our sales move really fast. Um, you know, so I think it was a good constraint for the company. Um, and it has downsides but like overall I think it was very, very, very positive. So um, yeah, and I guess like my final thing is like I thought actually personally selling was incredibly helpful for building product. Um, so I do mostly product right now. I don't lead the sales org, but um, as we build new product, that experience selling is like so impactful to me because I am now able to um, you know, as we think about new product, like how would we actually sell this? Right? Like all product needs to be sold and so you need to have that perspective. Um, and so I think like if

Host: you should just like build in a closet and like hypothesize and just be like here you go, have fun versus like no, no, no, like how literally how this, how is this going to be demoed? Yes, literally like, like how's it going to blow people's minds such that they want to buy the thing put aside like the deliverability of it. Like how, I mean it's like the joke about how Apple, when they're designing a product they start with the press release. It's kind of the old jokes like what's the press release? Or what's the advertisement? And then work backwards from there. In this case it's like what's the demo to get people excited. What are the discovery questions and what's the demo? So, so they're like, yes, I want to buy that. Right?

Rohan Suri: Yeah. Because the reality is if you can't do that, you probably don't have a viable product. I mean like, uh, you know, like basically if you can't think of something, but you could demo in a 30 minute call and have people walking away like, jaw drop, like, holy shit, did they just do that? Um, um, I think, uh, you know, probably like it's going to be really hard to sell. Uh, so we, uh, I mean for us that was like we would do live calls with customers and we would. They're like, are you calling real people? And like, you know, they would just like they would have this. Um, and that worked really well. Um, for us. And you know, every, every new part of the product we do similar stuff where we have like real time. Like what's that wow factor? Yeah, so, yeah, that's my. Those are my two pieces of advice.

Host: I love it. Well, Rohan, thank you very much for taking the time to share with everyone. I mean, I think like I kind of said at the opening, the kind of the pivot, like the pivots over time and kind of like following, like listening for the sucking sound, being the heat seeking missile is, was really the kind of the key to what you guys, you know, have achieved. And then once you were doing that, also making sure that that feedback loop continued to be the case, that, that, like that OODA loop happening in, by, by forcing it in the trial function or in the trial motion, those two things together really just have like, you know, made it such that Nooks could keep adding incremental jobs to be done that like hit the ground running in an oh, wow way such that people, you know, people buy. So, you know, congratulations on, on all that and uh, and I'm. And people are going to get a lot of value out of this. So thank you very much.

Rohan Suri: Thank you, Pete. Really appreciate the conversation.