UserEvidence: MarTech Category Creation and Mountain Town Sales Teams with Evan Huck of UserEvidence

Evan Huck: Foreign.

Pete Kazanji: 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. I'm Pete Kazanji, author of Founding Sales the Startup Sales Handbook and your host. Today we have Evan Huck, CEO and founder of User Evidence, makers of a customer evidence platform that helps B2B tech companies harness the voice of their happy customers to create compelling proof points at scale. Evan has successfully grown user evidence to $7 million in ARR with a team of 15 sales professionals, having raised $21 million from investors to build this new category in the crowded Martech space. I'm particularly excited about today's conversation because Evan comes from the vaunted tech validate sales mafia. He he's a sales leader by background who's now doing it as a founder, giving him a unique perspective on category creation. My biggest takeaways from our discussion were Evan's clever community thought leadership approach that generated their first big logos, his deliberate NRR curve design strategy that was critical for fundraising success, and his unconventional talent strategy of hiring ski instructors and raft guides in Jackson Hole. Instead of competing for experienced sales talent, we'll also dive into how User Evidence evolved from charging whatever we think we can charge to a sophisticated multi product platform selling six figure deals to enterprise customers like Salesforce and Siemens. So with that, here's Evan. Hey everyone, uh, 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. Today we have Evan Huck, CEO and founder of User Evidence, makers of a customer evidence platform that makes it super easy to gather compelling marketing evidence at scale. I'm pumped because Evan here is a sales leader by background coming out of the vaunted tech validate sales mafia. Other members include Kelly Del Cordo, who ran large parts of Lever's sales organization, and Dhiraj Singh, current VP of sales at Canary Technologies. But this time Evan is doing it as a founder so he has a different view on things. Uh, the marketing technology landscape is super crowded also, so carving out attention and budget is super tough, especially with a new category of solution like user evidence. But Evan, uh, did it and he's going to share with us how so far user Evidence has ramped to 7 million in ARR. They now have a 15 person sales team. But it all started with Evan selling the first deal. So we're going to talk about that. So Evan, I'm really glad to have you Here. Thank you for taking the time.

Evan Huck: Thank you. I would not say we've made it. We're very much still in the middle of it as well. But uh, done some good early motions at least.

Pete Kazanji: Hey man, I think Lemkin talks about this a lot, but I think if you get already fewer than 90% of organizations get to better than a million dollars in ARR. So if you're like north of $5 million in ARR, I have to imagine that that's, we're probably down in like the 99.9% range or at least maybe 99.5, who knows? 99.3. Yeah, totally. So I mean for folks who don't know, I'm very familiar with user evidence because I was very familiar with Tech Validate because I love, I love the Tech Validate sales mafia, which is why I wanted to provide a little love letter there in the intro. Maybe you could kind of tell folks what the problem is that user evidence solves what the organization type is, who are the specific humans in the organization that care about it, and so on and so forth. Kind of like the parameters of the sales motion.

Evan Huck: Yeah, so our customers um, are typically like B2B technology companies. Really like north of like 150 employees, um, anything that's like expensive, high consideration sold in a competitive market. So a lot of like enterprise IT security, enterprise software, anything where you need like references, case studies, analyst reports, ROI data, competitive proof to go convince a person to buy, you know, your expensive thing versus the other six options in their space. Um, because if you sell something like that, you know, inevitably you're going to get asked like hey, you know, can you show me someone that looks like does this work? My industry like that's also seen success. And then you go scramble and try to find that. But yeah, so those are the types of companies we work with. Um, we sell typically to like product marketers and customer marketers in the organization. The people that are responsible for creating customer um, stories and customer content and proof. Um, but then there's a bunch of consumers of the content that we create. Salespeople of course, you know, demand gen marcom. Um, but yeah, it's like our ACV is in the kind of like 30 to 80k range for like smaller companies. And then enterprise ACV can go, you know, 100 to half a million at that very high end, um, if you know, after a successful deployment. So um. And yeah, not, not much of a defined existing category though. Customer marketing is starting to get a little bit more uh, table stakes and defined. But yeah, in the beginning especially it was just yeah, very evangelical type of sale.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah. And so I would imagine it's probably different on a per segment basis, but probably the person who has a white hot burning need for this is the customer marketer. And that Persona probably only shows up when you get to a certain size of marketing organization which is probably not a small marketing organization.

Evan Huck: Yeah, generally around like 200 employees or so you start to see like customer marketers show up. We do have like a segment of customers below that where the product marketer essentially has that customer marketing job but it's one of three or four jobs that they have and they don't get to it often. So that can actually be a decent segment for us. Obviously that segment has got its own inherent challenges in terms of churn and budget concerns. But um, can be an interesting fit for us as well. But yeah, customer market is starting to become, starting to creep down. I think as both upsell and cross sell and net retention and lifecycle marketing becomes more important in SaaS, which is a part of customer marketing. Uh, and just you know, there's so much noise where you know, telling good customer stories and showing proof and evidence that your solution works is increasingly important. So we are starting to see that customer marketer get hired a little bit earlier which is good for us.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah. So but I would imagine that like really early on when you were selling Those like first 25 deals or whatever it was that you had kind of mentioned were your first ones is was more focused on like the people who had this specific title. Like they were supposed to be doing this as their day to day versus what they. One slice of, of what it is that they were doing.

Evan Huck: Our first customers just because you know startups tend to sell to startups and those, those who will take a risk. I mean we, you know I had like a, I should add Figma but as Adobe XD back in the day, like uh, a little clickable prototype which is how I sold our first customers. But yeah, generally it was like smaller, you know, series B type companies where it was just like a VP of marketing that has, has to do everything and like they didn't get to customer story creation much. And so it was that person.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah. Or alternatively that's a really interesting point. They probably had a marketing deputy. But the point was, is that the field was coming to them, the salespeople were coming to them and saying like yo, we need case studies. Yeah, we need case studies. Yo, we need case studies. And so in that scenario rather Than it being like an orchestration platform or whatever in order to scale like all the nooks and crannies. Because a uh, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away when I was a baby, PMM and PM at, at VMware, I actually started doing specifically like customer marketing M the sub genre of PMM on that. And of course it's just like all the permutations where it's like you know, size of organization and like you know, and industry and so on and so forth. So what you want to do is like fill that out as much as possible. But when you're early on it's like we need non zero, we need five. Right. We need. Or we need 10 and tomorrow. And ideally like tomorrow. And so in that case, uh, it's like for those startups you were selling a speed story versus a completeness story for the, the other guys.

Evan Huck: Yeah, exactly. It's a different problem. But yeah, if you're, especially if you're selling a large enterprise as a small company, you just need that initial validation period to go of course claim that you've done this with other businesses. So yeah, definitely just like a speed to creation of getting that initial evidence initially.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, which I think that that ends up being kind of a theme that we hear a lot. So like you know, when Delve was on the was did their founder led sales story and like when Warp did their founder led sales story like the notion of just like you know, founders and founders and in the, in this case the series B, um, startup like the, the, the C suite or the E staff kind of like too many things to do and will pay for time like for speed and time recovery as comp. As compared to like the big organizations who. And then the nice thing about the startups of course is that they, you know, as you point out, like they'll take a risk, et cetera, et cetera. And then ultimately but like they're probably churny and a pain in the ass and like once they, once they get their 10 customer stories they're like thanks, that was really great. Like three years from now, right? So the money's green. It kind of like, you know, makes your NRR look stinky. But. And then I think like one of the things you can do there is like if those deal cycles are fast and you can get those logos, which I think is what you kind of talked about, like the money can be green and that can be nice. And then like, you know, who knows, maybe you can like raise funding before they actually churn like the timing on

Evan Huck: the story is like, there's probably so many versions of this, like, where we wouldn't have been able to raise subsequent rounds unless like one or two deals that had an expansion went right. But yeah, like the net retention wasn't like great for that initial set. It was probably like 70%. But there was a couple of them. Like build.com was one. They acquired one of our customers called Divi. And so he went from like a

Pete Kazanji: 30 great sales order with div to

Evan Huck: you know, an 80k contract with build Up. Oh, the rest of our customer base

Pete Kazanji: was we did that with Atrium that did that big 60k that NRR was just like blowed out 115. Look at this net retention. Oh my God. They buy and they expand as long as someone else buys them.

Evan Huck: Um, one out of 30 customers. But yeah, it's uh. So, yeah, so there's.

Pete Kazanji: Hey, that's why it's NRR and not ah and not gross retention. There was that Sterling who bought for

Evan Huck: you guys now at the marketing department, um, as VP of product marketing, Pranav who now runs his own little marketing startup.

Pete Kazanji: That's awesome. Yeah. Anyway, but I think what you're describing there is kind of like a two stage kind of jump. And in this case, one of the things, uh, Evan and I were kind of joking about this before the show is like, I'm excited to have user evidence here because it is the new category. But if you're thinking about doing a category creation, maybe go slam your head against the wall instead of doing that. Don't do it. Run away. Um, but if you're gonna do that, you gotta like get in where you fit in. And in this case it's like, sure, we'll sell to you who has this, like knowing full well that you will use us for a quarter and then never log in again. And like you will probably churn. But the good news is is that in the meantime, like the revenue is. The revenue is, is, is worth it. And like, that's just some of the things that you have to do when you're doing a new category. Um, I, I love it. Um, and so background. Before starting the company, I think we've had a couple of folks who are like former sales leaders on here, like Matt, uh, Matt Pasternak from, uh, from once, who was the, the VP of sales at Clever, what have you. Um, so maybe you can kind of tell folks a little bit about that, uh, here.

Evan Huck: Yeah, so I, I graduated in 2010 from Stanford and I was an E Comm major, which is the dumb choice. But anyway, as it sounded the most like business. Um, um, so I was like, yeah, we'll do that one. Uh, yeah, at the time, like econ majors, like, the path was to go to like, I banking or consulting. And. And so I, I got my, my suit and I went to the interview and this woman just like, grilled me on the price of like, corn futures or something like that. I was like, I have no idea. She's like, what are you doing here? I was like, I don't know. Um, and I'm like a surfer from San Diego. And I was like, this is not my thing. But at the time, like, my buddies were starting to start startups. So like, one of our, uh, roommates was one of the co founders of Snapchat. One of the other guys down the hall did Robin Hood. Um, and so I was like, all right. You know, and they were tiny at the time. I was like, that looks more fun and kind of my pace. Um, so I found this random company called Tech Validate and it was the first SDR there. I didn't know anything about sales at all, but, uh, you know, as the first SDR, especially back in 2010, it was kind of like a, you know, you would benefit a lot if you have like, a little bit of like, systems building, like Revoff, what people would now call like, Revoff skill sets. So I was started ripping, you know, mail merges through Microsoft, Entourage and Word and Excel. And like, you had scheduled 17 meetings from a blast to like 700, 500 people.

Pete Kazanji: I was just. It was fish back then. It was like fishing with dynamite. People are like, whoa, whoa. This person merged in my, my first name. And then maybe my company, this must clearly has been like, you know, customized specifically for me.

Evan Huck: Yeah. So I did SDR and then eventually learned how to be an ae. We had a great, we had two great co founders of Tech Validate especially. Brad o' Neill is like one of the best salespeople and trainers and coaches. Also we actually worked with an outside trainer from Sandler, this guy Hillman, um, who was really good too. Uh, so I had incredible training. So, yeah, I became a seller. Eventually sales manager and director of sales and account management for like a, you know, 60-70person.org, and then went on to run enterprise sales for Survey Monkey for a bit. And then in 2018 just, uh, became an enterprise rep and moved to Jackson Hole. And I was the top rep in the company and skied most of the day. And that was pretty fun.

Pete Kazanji: I love it, yeah, Hillman, uh, uh, Hillman, sorry. And Corey Bray of course run Closed Loop. Corey, uh, now has a uh, startup, um, in the sales enablement space. Um, I forget what it's called right now. It's called Coach CRM or maybe it's calling it Closed Loop or what have you. But um, um. Cool. So like what was the initial hypothesis behind user evidence? And like how did you validate it?

Evan Huck: Yeah, I mean the honest answer is, you know, Tech Validate was kind of in a similar space. So yeah, we spent a long time around it. But it was also like, you know, we felt the problem personally as salespeople. Like even at Survey Monkey, like you know, our marketing team would have these beautiful case studies from like Warby Parker and stuff like that that looked awesome. But like, yeah, you would be selling

Pete Kazanji: a totally different product to like Napa Auto Parts. They're like whatever.

Evan Huck: That's not super relevant. But um.

Pete Kazanji: Yep.

Evan Huck: But so like we had all these customers. There's no shortage of users and customers. But yet we only tell stories from like a small fraction of them.

Pete Kazanji: And so the idea collection problem, yeah,

Evan Huck: how do we get a more diverse representative sample Survey is a great way in a one to many way to capture feedback at scale from customers. And then if we could just figure out how to transform that feedback into good looking, designed, elegant content, uh, and then kind of position ourselves as this third party and stamp it as credible. That was kind of the idea. And now obviously the tool set with AI has gotten a lot cooler to solve that problem. See distribution stuff, you can like, you know, talk to customers in a kind of synthetic way. So it's uh, there's some more fun stuff now. But I think the core principle is, you know, one that all salespeople would understand. It's like you're trying to go prove your thing works. Like the best way to do that is just show a bunch of evidence, like here's 18 people in your industry that used it and here's, here's what they could measure the dip.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, that's really fascinating. I wonder if there's other examples. Cause like Tech Validate was essentially that. Right. And the problem was it was super early on and like probably maybe too early because like the marketing usually like you have to have certain jobs, core jobs have to be executed on before you can kind of get to the like the third priority or fourth priority or fifth priority. And so the like, you know, back when Tech Validate was operating, you probably had folks who were deploying like cloud marketing automation platform so people were like actually getting their act together around like Marketo or you know, um, Exact Target or HubSpot or what have you and before they could like go and pick something else up. Right. And so you know Tech Validate was very successful. I forget what ARR.

Evan Huck: It went to 11 or 12 and it was self funded companies. So it was a good sale.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, totally. But, but then I think what ended up happening was it like went in house at, at ah, Survey Monkey and kind of like went sideways.

Evan Huck: Yeah. And just kind of sat.

Pete Kazanji: Right. But. But I think that's like, like I think that's actually a more common pattern and. Sorry, it's not like exactly. You can't necessarily run around like looking for that and being like all right, let's like find this entrepreneurial situation where somebody like was early and then uh, you know, somebody was early and then they got acquired and then it kind of went sideways because the acquirer didn't. Well I think. But, but if people find themselves in that situation like oftentimes things change. Kind of like Instacart works because of the iPhone even though Webvan didn't. Right. And those sort of situations. And I think that's kind of interesting here is like, it's like a new category but it's like where there had been like a pilot category like, like, like trial bloom that happened and like you could actually make the argument that gong is that on top of um, like Exec Vision and some of the early call recording folks were like, they maybe were kind of going about the use case a little bit wrong where like Exec vision was focused on like exec vision because it came out of um. I forget the name of the SDR consulting uh, shop. Um, they like needed to like listen down across like all these SDRs in order to make sure that they were on message as compared to just like you know Gong essentially early on was just like ah, a, a stenographer. Right. With, with like a, with a sales coaching narrative so people could tell themselves a story that they were going to do sales coaching but it was a stenographer. Um, I think that's, that's super fascinating. So like somebody else de risks the initial hypothesis um, a little bit and then like you're able to run after it which obviously you guys have, have done so far.

Evan Huck: Yeah, I think that was like an important de risker. I mean for me especially totally. Yeah. Like I didn't have a young family yet but like you know uh, taking a startup is always risky but you know, if you if you have some experience in the space, obviously that's going to de risk it because you know, there's product market fit, especially in a category list like space like, you know that that's got its own challenges too. So yeah, picking something that we knew really well was obviously, you know, a lot less risky.

Pete Kazanji: Who. And so we. You kind of mentioned this a little bit. Um, but about like focusing on kind of earlier stage startups. It's not like early early stages, like kind of just, just pre growth startups like series B, et cetera. Um, how did you guys, you know, how did you guys take those folks down? How did you get in contact with them? How'd you close them?

Evan Huck: Yeah, there's a lot of, I mean, you know, we happen to know a decent amount of other founders. I mean our very first customers were like, you know, very early stage, just like our buddies, just like tinkering on the things and like giving us quotes and stuff.

Pete Kazanji: Uh, so like wildly non icp.

Evan Huck: Exactly. And they didn't pay us anything, obviously.

Pete Kazanji: Um, they paid you in quotes.

Evan Huck: Investor intros. When we did get for our first investors, like that was helpful because they obviously had a bunch of other series A and series B companies, you know, that would, you know, we didn't charge them much. It's like 5k or something, 10k, like the first couple deals. Um, but yeah, investor network I did do like, I had some old customer contacts from my tech.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, I would imagine that I definitely

Evan Huck: pinged and then I just did some cold outreach on LinkedIn. Um, pretty soon though, like, even though like you and I both know I know how to build and run the whole cold outreach machine, that's like, that's my specialty. But to your point on like buying time, we actually did get an agency to just rip emails is called receptive marketing. It was great, um, because even though we knew how to do it, like it wasn't our comparative advantage. And so like that generated some meetings too. Just doing like, you know, email campaigns through someone else, um, which was helpful. But I think the most productive was probably like investors in my own LinkedIn outreach in a more targeted way.

Pete Kazanji: Well, let's talk about that a little bit. Let's talk about that outbound. Because like this is a thing that's like super annoying about new category creation is like no one's searching for it. Like, I need a customer evidence platform. So, um, you have to show up and get in their grill and be like, hey, you probably have this problem, like am m I off in left field? But here's the problem is that, like, Martech is super crowded, right? Like, everyone jokes about the, like, Martech Lumascape, but there's like just a jillion

Evan Huck: logos, sprinkles or something.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, exactly. And so, like, there's that. And then also, I guess you were doing this in 2018, you said, or 2019.

Evan Huck: 2020 is when we started the company. So really we're starting to do outreach in 2021. So I was like, still kind of working, but still, like, not as effective as five or six years ago, you know.

Pete Kazanji: Well, so that's the thing though, right? Is it's like, so you have super credit space, right? The buyers. And so maybe in your case, you were targeting, you know, VPs of product marketing. But like. And so, like, they're probably not getting attacked. Downside, they don't have any budget. Like, the vvs of marketing. They might be able to, like, put the CMO in the headlock and get the budget out of them. So was that kind of like, the crux was like, targeting someone who wasn't typically targeted, like the VP of product marketing, or did you guys just, like, do really good messaging or what was like, how did you break through?

Evan Huck: We saw the marketing, so, you know, we were hitting, you know, director level two. I think marketers get fricking hammered with Martech.

Pete Kazanji: Totally.

Evan Huck: Uh, it's the noisiest crap. Um, so, yeah, we were not exempt from that challenge. And like, totally. Email campaigns yielded some meetings. It wasn't like wildfire, but, like, it was a good trickle. Enough for, like, enough for early. Right. Because if you generate two, three meetings a week, that's like, that's not bad when you don't have a whole lot of.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, if it's you.

Evan Huck: Yeah, exactly. So that can kind of feed me plus my own, you know, outbound and stuff like that through LinkedIn, which was more productive. Um, um. Yeah, over time, like, you know, you know, it used. We used to be 99% outbound. Right. And over time, we had to switch that, especially as outbound got a little bit less effective, particularly email. So, yeah, we've become a lot more diverse over the years and more marketing led, brand led, content led, um, customer led to just building a good.

Pete Kazanji: Weird.

Evan Huck: Yeah, right. Customer evidence works. Um, but yeah, so the early days is like, it's always a grind, but it was a grind because outbound is all we had. Right.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah. Well, um, one thing I always like to ask folks is about how they got over kind of like their fear of sales and what have You. The funny thing with you though, is that that was so long ago. That was not you as a founder having to figure out how to do, you know, founder, founder selling. Now, that being said earlier, like, you were at Tech Validate and like, Brad and the other guys were like, I

Evan Huck: used to pick up the phone and be like, like, don't pick up. I used to have like a printed out, like, sheet of people to call and be like, God, don't pick up, don't pick up, don't pick up. And like, I feel this like, knot in my gut. But yeah, no, this time around, like, obviously knew what I was doing well,

Pete Kazanji: but, like, maybe you can kind of talk about how you kind of got over that when you were a little baby sdr, because I think that's really helpful for founders to understand. Will I ever get over this? How did you get over it? Et cetera, et cetera.

Evan Huck: I think, uh, obviously practice and reps, but one of the things that develops through practice and reps is you start to kind of decouple your individual worth, if you will, and your person versus your role as a salesperson. So if someone's like, screw you, why are you calling me? Whatever. That's just going to like your salesperson.

Pete Kazanji: That's not about Evan.

Evan Huck: There's a decent firewall between that and like your individual, like firewall how you feel about yourself. So, yeah, Hillman used to call it in Sandlers, you know, your I versus your R, your individual and your role. But I think that was like a really important concept. Like once you start to kind of play a, uh, Persona essentially. Right. Um, you know that, that you're, you're a lot less exposed, which is really important in sales because you are going to obviously face a lot of rejection and whatever. So I think that was a really important component.

Pete Kazanji: I love it.

Evan Huck: Also, you obviously develop confidence. Like as a founder, there's like just being yourself and having some product knowledge and just caring about the topic that you care about. Uh, I think is really important. Um, one thing I did this time that was new for user evidence that we didn't have back in the tech validate days was like, really leaned into like thought leadership, particularly in communities. Right. I mean, you obviously figured this out earlier than we did. But like, there's, there's like customer marketing communities that have a slack group. I would just hang out there and just like, answer questions that like, didn't really have anything to do with user evidence. Some might be close to what we do, but like, but I just have A lot of experience in this space. I just answer questions and share experiences. And that actually eventually brought in some like, inbound for some like pretty impressive people that became like big logo customers. Like our first big logo customer is this guy like ping me on Slack. He's like, hey, I know you from your influence in the space, which I thought was kind of funny. Um, I was like, all right, me? Yeah, yeah. So that was like, I think that formula obviously and now it's been, you know, blown out a little bit more. This kind of like founder led brand. But I think that was like a really good little wedge there for a second and interesting, uh, complement to the outbound for sure. And it just helps you like kind of frame your perspective and develop your own voice. And then it becomes a little bit like less selling and more consultative and you're kind of giving advice and that's a better place to sell from.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, totally. Because like people show up when they have a problem in that scenario. Like, I don't know, I'm pretty vocal about this on LinkedIn, about like the stupidity and the selfie videos and what have you. And like, that's very different. It's, it's kind of like, it's kind of like the personalized email that is not relevant. Hey Ev, how's it going? Uh, did you go to the tree house much when you were at Stanford House Palm Drive, and you're just like, get the out of here, man. Like, this has nothing to do with anything that I have a business pain about right now.

Evan Huck: About the treehouse. I would absolutely. I've never gotten that. That would be epic. I would answer.

Pete Kazanji: You're ruining my point. Um, but the point is, is that like versus I have a problem right now. My CRO is up my ass about uh, stories, customer stories, and specifically around like in these ways, can you help me? And then of course, like they have need in some sort of capacity. And I think that one I'm reminded of the Zig. I think it's the Zig Ziglar quote around. Like, you'll get everything you want as long as you help everybody else get everything that they want.

Evan Huck: Mhm.

Pete Kazanji: So like start by answering questions. Q and A is a great example of this. Like, I'm wearing a modern sales pros shirt right now at this point. Like most categories like probably have a community where people hang out. And so instead of you being able to own the community, which is something that frequently marketers will do, is they'll be like, I want to create a community. I'M going to buy some software and then it's going to be empty. You can like go to Dan Schmela, who was an early operator at Modern, um, Sales Pros. And then he went on to lead community at Chili ah Piper and then, and then Apollo as well. He this really clever thing at Chili Piper when um, you know, the, the founder of Chili Piper is like, hey, make me an msp. And it was like, I'm sorry, I can't. Like there's network effects. Like you're not going to be able to break in to like Ms. Like this. But we can distribute and we can have voice in all the different places and we can, but importantly we can be like helpful and thoughtful in uh, in those various places. And then it's funny, it's like, I, uh, think you talk about the long game, um, as part of your message. In this case it's the long game as like a founder brand which then metamorphoses into the company brand. But like what. It's essentially expertise. Like I'm obviously a pretty good example of that as relates to atrium and what have you. And then ideally you're able to capitalize on it when it comes to product, but at least you can kind of like it's almost like fake it till you make it. Like, yes, we are highly reputable because of all my expertise. You should give our product a try. They're like, I will give your product a try for one annual contract and then you better deliver on it. Maybe you can talk with uh, folks about how pricing worked, like how it started out.

Evan Huck: Yeah.

Pete Kazanji: Paid with quotes from your homies, uh, and evidence there. And then like how it kind of changed, uh, over time.

Evan Huck: Yeah.

Pete Kazanji: Um,

Evan Huck: so yeah, at first we just like we need logos. Like we weren't, you know, whatever. Tiny revenue was not going to move the needle anyway. Um, so just whatever it took. There is a difference though. Like for an enterprise thing, there's, there's a little bit of value signaling. Like we tried a few free trials and that just like try a decent amount of them, you know, six to ten. They never worked. Like you have to have some skin. But even like $1,000 pilot, like that would work. They like you got.

Pete Kazanji: It's just enough to DQ them open.

Evan Huck: Yeah, exactly. So it's like a little bit of friction is good, I think just to really like product market fit, I think. And granted I'm not like a PLG self serve thing, but I do think that was important like really early we were asking for money with real Prospects. Um, you know, would you, would you pay for this and you know, do it. Uh, so I think good signal. Other than just people being like, hey, I love your product and I'll give it a try.

Pete Kazanji: Sure. Yeah. I mean I think that's. Yeah, totally. And I think that that's. So first of all, you don't. So selling to your friends if they don't have need is stupid because you're going to. This is like the joke I talk about about like you know, people doing revenue trades inside their accelerator or what have you because then it just like it all shows up in churn. But then importantly you're like losing the market signal. Right? Like the Hayekian like price signal as to whether or not like someone gives a shit about this in a real way that like they'll, they'll throw down and so that it can be a friend. So it's like, hey, I have a friend who is a VP of marketing. They do have this problem because they have 20 sellers. I'm able to get access to them because we are friendly or they, you know, they're in uh, a network. However, I know that they're title qualified and org qualified and actually like I will give them the friend price but it will not be the zero price because in that case they will not have skin in the game and I will, I will break the mark. The market signal. Which of course is like really bad.

Evan Huck: Yeah, totally. Exactly. So yeah, the first iterations like when we started getting some real customers, 5, 10k and then our first pricing model is basically like once we got some decent comfort that we can deliver some value is basically like just charge whatever we think we can charge. Like there's no differentiation.

Pete Kazanji: Say more about that. I love it.

Evan Huck: We call it. I took Econ again, don't recommend it, but if it did, perfect discrimination is what we call that.

Pete Kazanji: It's so great. Uh, you're used, you're a car salesman. Someone walked into, they're like rocking a Rolex or whatever. You're like 90k big, 45k.

Evan Huck: Um, yeah, V1. Because we didn't have like a whole lot of features and functionality to do, plan our addition based pricing. So it's just like here it is. Charge you whatever. We can charge you. V2 when we started to get enough like features and additions. Yeah, the classic kind of like good, better, best, um, additions based thing. And that made a huge difference. Like it's so crazy how like strong that human concept is to want to like find the good deal and choose the Middle package. Yeah, it was awkward when people like a couple of times people chose the upper package and we intentionally threw shit in there that like wasn't even a feature. Just like sounded so dumb and unnecessary. They're like yeah, I want that.

Pete Kazanji: Jet packs, jet packs.

Evan Huck: But it did its job mostly of getting people to choose the middle one. And that's. That brought up ACV quite a bit especially as we were starting to like target our ICP towards a little bit more mid market at that point. And then you know we've, we've thought about a little bit of like usage based pricing. It doesn't like number of sales people consuming the content. We never really had the setup to do that yet. Um, what does work at a bigger company like Salesforce or Cisco or something like that? It's like licensing on like a per product family basis. So like at Salesforce for instance, like per PMM sales cloud, Next one service cloud.

Pete Kazanji: Service cloud, commerce cloud, marketing cloud.

Evan Huck: Yeah, exactly. That works to get to like pretty big ACV over time and also helps with your net retention. Is like landing these small proof of concepts of these bigger enterprises and then just landing and expanding. But I don't know, I've thought about usage based compricing. I know the new ones even trend. You're like, you could have consumption based pricing on how many assets people are using but I don't know, it's like whatever. Um, the next iteration for us, the final iteration where we're at now is like a combination of additions based pricing with that uh, you know, scaling by product unit. And now we have multiple offerings because we just acquired a company called Zealot that has functionality and advocate engagement and customer uh, references. And then we have one more offering which is like these longer format research reports analogous to like a forest or total economic impact report. So we had a customer yesterday. It's like I want UE Core Pro plus Zealot Advocacy Silver plus Zealot references plus an arrow the truck.

Pete Kazanji: Sweet.

Evan Huck: And uh, like that was like 100 problem boss.

Pete Kazanji: I'm right on it. Yeah, let me, let me, let me draw that right out. Let me draw that proposal up for you.

Evan Huck: I don't know, I'm not too concerned around the usage based up just because we have so many different routes right now for cross selling expansion once we land. Um, that, that works.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah. But I think the other thing here too is that it's important to like uh, price how people are like used to buying in this case. And so I would imagine that most of the organizations that are buying, you guys are probably the indexing off of like a marketo like a marketing automation platform or what have you. And so in those, in those sort of situations, like obviously it's going to be like platform, like, like size of platform, size of database, um, which probably was one of the reasons why people were like more comfortable when you were like, you're giant, you're going to pay this. They're like, they probably had a huge database and they were probably paying marketo like an ungodly amount of money. And they were like, okay, cool. Like this is a, this is a totally reasonable fraction of uh, my marketing automation platform spend. But I think a great thing that you observe is how to naturally add more. So you don't like, you want to make it easy to get in. Not like, hey, free trial, but like easy to get in in some sort of capacity. Especially in the enterprise.

Evan Huck: Right.

Pete Kazanji: Um, get in a 25k or 50k where they're like, yeah, this is real, this is a VP can say yes, right? Versus it like going up above that. But, but then you don't limit your upside. So you can then go. And I think you guys did a really good job of chunking that on a product basis.

Evan Huck: It's also really important like you know, thinking about the founders that we're talking to, like when that are trying to raise, you know, an A or something like that. You know, I, I think a lot about curve design in the early stages, which means nrr, NRR curve design. So like two year deals with a step up were a great little tool. All right, 10k year one, 20k year two. Guess what, you just built in 200% NRR. So like that tricks like that, the, you know, the land and M expand with a small contract because like you can't go raise if you have 80% NRR. So it's just a binary, you just can't do it. So like, you know, you're sequencing your priorities. Like first is like curve design to get to 115 to 125% net retention. Then you worry about, you know, optimizing for overall revenue. And so yeah, I think like that was an important realization pretty early where it's like, all right, we need to also just to be really thinking about our NRR curve design.

Pete Kazanji: That's so funny. I really appreciate you commenting on that Evan because um, just for everyone's uh, I've known Evan for about a decade now because I forget exactly how it was. And when I was doing early, early uh, research with Atrium and um, and and like I was able to do this, this uh, interview with this guy who was like leading sales at Tech Validate at the time. I forget how I got referred into you but like essentially all the roads pointed back to Tech Validate the same way that like many roads point towards like Mulesoft or whatever essentially like or Fisher Investments essentially like I ended up finding like all the like the river

Evan Huck: Sears was in MSP and that's why

Pete Kazanji: yeah it was like essentially I was found my way to like the data driven sales organizations and then I was able to meet Evan and then of course I went back down again to all the like children of Tech Validate to find all the other data driven sales salespeople who, who obviously were very data driven, very thoughtful because they had a sales leader who was ah, like wicked smart and also very um, you know very uh, data driven as, as a result of, of that. But also this is data driven in a different way which is hey man, like you don't screw yourself because if you can like maybe if you hang a big transaction on an organization and they don't realize value and you're like wow man, that a hundred thousand dollars is so great. Let's we're going, we're going to Vegas. Let's go right and then, and then like lo and behold they churn notify like month six. You're like oh yeah, my God.

Evan Huck: Yeah, I get like I, we double click hard on like the bigger deals now and I think a lot about like all right, are we dang confident that we're gonna like deliver value? Obviously multi years and stuff like that can help but like yeah, we just don't bite off more than you can chew because like yeah, uh, the 100k it'll get you next six months but that could be disaster in it's the

Pete Kazanji: uh founder led sales uh marshmallow test, right? Like you can eat your marshmallow now and and like and forego the 3M the the 5 marshmallows later from the series A when you're like and we are like toxic we ways like we can't raise any money. I mean I think like this is why land and expand is very helpful in the enterprise for a variety of reasons. One, it's going to raise your win rates. It's going to like it's going to compress your deal cycles. Um, it's also going to make it such that it's easier to go up. Like not only easier to go up but also probably easier to renew too. Jason Lumpkin talks about this quite a bit about how oftentimes in the enterprise your first year renewal is often like kind of like we only just got implemented six months ago, like what's going on. Right. And, and so if, if that transaction is 25k or 30k and like the total value, like the total size of prize in the organization is potentially 200k or like you know, 300k or what have you. Well then this little like 25k or 30k um, business unit transaction is being looked at in the like okay, cool. Like we'll do our second year pilot to see if we can go all, all the way in and like deploy to what would be 200k or 300k versus if you throw down with that 100k initially, folks are going to have like, they're really going to have. Yeah, they're going to have their eyes on that and they're going to make a decision within. Whereas you know, with a 50k transaction they might have given you another year to figure things out. They're going to make a judgment at like month 6 as to whether or not they're going to, they're going to renew or not. Yeah, and that can be really problematic with an early like you know, light product market fit, like feature, feature poor product. Um, that I think that's, you know all of that is really um, really good. What one thing that I think is ends up being really tough. And I remember having this conversation with both you and D. Um, I remember talking about uh, deal cycles and win rates at Tech Validate. And I, if I recall correctly the win rate was like, it was like under 10%. Um, it was the way we measured

Evan Huck: it I realized is different than people talk about it. I mean it was like it was win rate from like very first intro call off a cold email or a cold call to close.

Pete Kazanji: That's still fine.

Evan Huck: Uh, which yeah most people are probably doing now like sales qualified to close. So I don't do that.

Pete Kazanji: Like uh, like I want to be negative right. Like I want to see how many of your deals are you winning from first meeting and, and so but like by the way we had this with Atrium, like new category stuff. You're always going to have a really low win rate and you're gonna have a really low win rate and you're gonna have like, like egregiously long deal cycles. And so this is why it can oftentimes be really powerful. So one, when you find a true believer it has to be like economically viable. So Ideally like the ASP can be higher and then, and then two. You have to like if you can find a compelling event so that you can hitch onto that or if you find a way of like hanging out around the hoop forever, like just like nurturing like really, really, really well. And so I'm kind of curious about how you guys kind of contend with that. It's not obvious to me what compelling event there would be for someone to be like I really need some user evidence right now.

Evan Huck: Yeah, I mean sometimes you can like there's like weak ones. Like we have an event, we need something for sko. But like usually it's not like great. Um, the win rate thing is an interesting one. Especially when you combine it with a nurturing like the way I look at it, especially in a non category in a category it's like yeah, you know, either win or you lose. Right. And that's kind of it. Like these ones because it's a lot more evangelical. They don't like, they don't have a budget for it. Uh, they don't have a concept for takes three or four whacks at them. Usually where it's like it'll look like in HubSpot, you know. Yeah, there's three or four opportunities but realistically it's like over an 18 month period it's like it's kind of the same opportunity in a way. So like yeah, that initial close rate might be sub 10% but after three or four opportunities if you add that up then you're kind of getting to that like 20, 25% mixed M. Then, then your Gibbs. Yeah, that was a big thing even for us. Like when we set out our annual plan this year was like we need a model or marketing and sales models should consider that like we're not going to win the deal on the first try every time. So given that, how does that change our thinking? Um, and I think that led to some like really good.

Pete Kazanji: This is. Yeah, I think there are. So for folks who are um, dealing with new categories who are listening to this after the fact, uh, there's a bunch of ramifications that come from that. One is like EV is saying multiple um, passes over the target. Uh, we call that deal Source resurrection. Um, just to be creepy about it. Um, and so we would systematize that heavily in our uh, in our sales organization. Right. It was like we wanted to make sure that people SDRs, we had like a whole system to it where there was like a Salesforce report where if the close date, you know, the Close lost date was greater than 90 days. It would like pop up on the report. Sorry, like close date greater than 90 days. No open opportunity right now pops up in the Salesforce report. The SDRs are in there and they're like all right. Because like they're like wonderful source of lead. Yeah, they're wonderful source of leads usually. And I think you have to be thoughtful as like a founder seller and of course then when you're managing AES not to blow up the deal, like all right, you have to buy or like uh, you're dead to me. Right? Like, because it's, it's definitely like a sushi boat sort of situation. Like it's going to come back around again. Um, yeah. And you don't want to m. Like it's going to come back around again. It's going to come back around again in 90 days. It's almost like an account management behavior. Until they buy. Like you're going to buy. Just a question of when.

Evan Huck: Right?

Pete Kazanji: Once we get the priorities straight. And then the second thing, uh, so like doing that and systematizing that and then the second thing is really just like following your champs. Um, like we were big fans of using user gems for that at Atrium and because like once you find a true believer you just gotta like follow them. Right. And then not just like the true believer but then also like users to the extent that you can, that can be a very powerful thing. And so what ends up happening is like the compelling event actually be is like their job change. Um, but, but unfortunately that's not the same kind of like volume as you know like scales happening or what have you.

Evan Huck: But we like. So there's two things in there. Like one, I think part of the reason beyond just struggling to generate enough pipeline through Straight cold outbound that we want heavy. Like we made some big bets on like brand content. Um, really before they yielded it took like eight quarters for them to actually even do anything. But like that was part of it. It's like all right, if we're gonna have three or four opportunities we need different touch points, right? We can't just like continue to email them, right?

Pete Kazanji: So it's like how about a demo? How about now? What about now?

Evan Huck: Get having a big content report to send them or inviting them to jack small for Highline or something like that. Like you have a much more diverse portfolio of ways to nurture and engage which matters in a multi period game where you're gonna have to do this over three or four or five opportunities. But yeah, so I think that's important. And the other one, um, on the kind of like signal based thing that you're getting to, that's actually been a really big lift. Breaths this year too is like this kind of concept of like signal based selling, which could be job changes. It could be they're new and new in a role even within their current company. They got like a promotion or something like that where it's like these moments in their career where they're like, all right, they have a little bit of leash to do something or they want to make a big impact. Right. And finding people at those moments I think has been, um, you know, definitely helpful for pipeline generation as signals for our sales team.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, like the T in Bant timeline historically has been harder to detect. Uh, but you, if you can find it, not always, but if you can, it can be great. Right. And so a job change is a good example of that. And somebody like, like as an example, some m. Someone titled customer marketing or like director of customer marketing, customer marketing manager or whatever, like as soon as they show up in an organization, I wonder why they were hired. Right? Yeah, exactly. Like they, especially the first one, it's just like, hey, I wonder, I wondered what uh, I wonder what pain point they're hiring was. Uh, and I guess in this case it would not just be like them landing in the job, but maybe even like the job wreck lighting up on the applicant tracking system. Right. Um, okay, so, um, kind of doing some more thinking there around kind of compelling events and like, you know, triggers and what have you. Um, ah, what worked really well from a, you know, a pipe gen standpoint. Ah, like what worked really well for like pipe gen and like founder led during your founder led sales motion.

Evan Huck: Yeah, um, yeah, again the investor network was good. Uh, definitely. My own LinkedIn outbound was huge. Uh, that outsourced email campaign was great initially. We eventually hired two STRs. We knew how to train STRs really well. Um, so they started doing calls and emails and started generating some ops. Um, yeah, eventually emails like got a little bit less effective. Um, and we ended up, we did buy Nooks. Nooks, uh, has been great. I'm so shocked at how many people answer their damn phones. Like I never answered the phone. Unknown numbers, but luckily some marketers do, which is great. So yeah, I think we've generated a lot of pipe from cold calls. Um, which is cool. They've also gotten just like so good at it. Like they get so many more reps when you're using an auto dialer oh the strs.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah.

Evan Huck: Oh yeah, stuff like that.

Pete Kazanji: Like there's.

Evan Huck: They're so much better than I was. I would get like, you know, one connect every once in a while and was terrible at it. But yeah, they just, they're really good now. It's crazy. Um, so, yeah, so that's been good. Um, content, been a big channel. Right. So like our, one of our highest performing assets last year was like this evidence gap report where we surveyed 200 sellers, 200 marketers and 200 buyers and asked them basically the same questions to kind of expose, you know, what, what kind of evidence buyers aren't getting and what sales is using and the differences and all that. Anyway, that got like 1600 downloads which is like we're not. Again keep in m mind we're not in a category, we're not a well known company. That's a lot for us. Um, and that generated some serious pipeline. So this I think in today's like AI age, like one thing we did is like we used to do blog posts like every week and we're just like all right, screw that. Like um, let's just.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, tenpole. Yeah, I call it like in the founder led sales forum, I call it like tentpole content.

Evan Huck: Yeah.

Pete Kazanji: Right. Like, like, like a book or like surveys are great. Yeah. Um, ideally it's uh, it should be aligned to the problem that you're solving. People love to do salary surveys because they're really like, you know, high fomo. Like yeah, I would love to see the salary survey for a product marketer or whatever and it's just like okay, like cool, you got a form fill from some PMM like who has like no, like no intent as ah, as related to like you know, customer evidence or what have you. But so if you can figure something out that can be like really tent poly that is aligned uh, with like the problem that you solve and especially even a new category because like probably the thing is being done in some sort of capacity. It's probably being done with like you know, Google sheets or uh, or what have you. So. So like if you can do a survey or you can do content around that, that can be good. Okay, so that's something that like worked um, worked really well. What, what didn't work well at all?

Evan Huck: Um, let's see. I mean and if you're in a non category there's, there's no such thing as any sort of like search marketing. I mean you can do branded search and competitive search and stuff like that. Like that works but like we tried to, I knew this wasn't going to work but we just tried it just to check the box. Like some non branded search around like you know, B2B case studies software. Like how do this is like what do you look. No one's looking for that stuff in a coherent way such that you can capture demand. So that was a, you know, in a non category there's just no sense in spending time there. Yeah, that's one thing that definitely didn't work.

Pete Kazanji: That didn't work.

Evan Huck: Um, I mean email, you know, just like, just straight email campaigns are just like becoming just less and less effective. So it's just you have to have it, you know, either they have to be relevant or timeline or life cycle oriented but just like the raw email blasts just get less and less.

Pete Kazanji: Take a demo, Take a demo, please.

Evan Huck: I'll send you AirPods and all that shit's just a pain in the ass too. It's just like I hate email. Um, uh, so yeah, so those are my two examples of stuff that didn't work.

Pete Kazanji: Nice. Um, I think one of the things that we talked about was um, tying to a compelling event or what have you. Um, how did you remove. What were things that you figured out for removing friction over time in your deal most soon.

Evan Huck: I mean one thing that we've always done just again me being now a uh, net retention focused person is that uh, we do deploy every agreement that we have with a 45 day out for convenience. And so that like you know, if that person's gonna cancel, I'd rather have them cancel 30 days in than cancel 330 to 330 days in.

Pete Kazanji: Like you'd rather, you'd rather know and not actually book the revenue?

Evan Huck: I'd rather yeah. Not have the revenue. Cause then like versus like have to chase down a hard renewal. Like I'd rather just get it out of the door quickly. Um, um. So yeah, and it's also the thing, it just, it's good for the customer.

Pete Kazanji: Right.

Evan Huck: They don't want something that's not gonna work. And so it's just Anna de Risk it. Right. So it's a little bit easier. So yeah, that 45 day out for convenience, uh, I believe in that works well for our style of product where you can get in there pretty quickly, run a survey, create a bunch of content within 30 days.

Pete Kazanji: So yeah, they're like here it is. Do you want to do more of these? Did that scratch the itch that you were here? Yeah, it did. Okay, great. We're on our way Right.

Evan Huck: So that's good. I mean, customer evidence of our own. Like, we have such good content now. That's like, hey, here's why. Product marketers who switch from spreadsheets, you know, chose user evidence, and here's the results that they get. So, like, it's funny because we have such good content and, like, our deal sizes aren't huge. Like, I rarely get asked for references anymore. Like, if we've done, like, we do, like, two or three a year, maybe

Pete Kazanji: because you did the references is the top of the funnel.

Evan Huck: Yeah, we already have such good customer proof where it's like, all right, we get it. Like, that checks the box. So that's been kind of interesting. And I think, you know, obviously helps reduce the friction. Um, but, yeah, I don't know if I found anything like Silver Bullet on compelling events or even free pilots and trials. I've been mixed. Um, definitely not Trials Pilots are much better.

Pete Kazanji: But, yeah, I think what I'm hearing here is the way of removing the friction was to pull the customer, uh, references forward by almost making them the story. Which is kind of funny because, um. Uh, a buddy of mine, Rob Snyder, is writing this book called, uh, I think it's called. It's called poll or. I don't know if that ended up being the eventual name, but he talks a lot about this notion of repeatable case studies, where essentially your organization is a repeatable success story delivery machine. Um, and then you obviously want to get one of those or multiple of those. And what that means is not the documentation of the success story. It's like the success in the world has been delivered, and then we document that, and then we get it out there as much as possible, and then people are like, hey, that's me with a different name. Right. And so in your. And. And then. So if you start out with that and an organization that actually was extraordinarily good about this was, um, was Salesforce back in the day. Um, I don't know if folks have read, um, behind the Cloud. They talk about this quite a bit about how Marc Benioff was always focused on, um, I think it was less about proof, and it was more about, like, vanity. Um, and like. But they would you see this even now with. With, uh, Dreamforce. Uh, you'll see people all the. Most of the marketing. There's always a human. There's always a human. There's a quote, there's a logo. Right. It's a very identifiable logo. Ah, usually. And so people are like, yeah, okay, they. They show up and they trust because there's, like, a human there. And I think what. What I'm hearing here is, like, obviously part of this is like, drinking your own champagne. But in a situation where there is. Where it's hard to, like, remove friction because it's a new category, what you can just do is like, like, mind virus or incept the entire, like, market into the fact that they ought to be doing this because these humans are. Are doing it.

Evan Huck: Yeah. I think, you know, like, today especially, there's so many dang choices when it comes to vendors. Like, it's not necessarily like, who's the best vendor. It's who's the best vendor for me. And people expect, like, you know, think about the difference in how we search. Like, we used to search best CRMs. Now it's like, all right, you already know everything about me, so what's. What's right for me. And so, like, getting towards a more personalized, relevant, specific delivery of stories and proof or evidence or whatever you want to call it. I do. Obviously, you know, that's what we sell, of course, but, like, I do think it matters, especially in a non category over the, like, all right, what the heck is this thing? And, like, is it going to work and deliver ROI for me? Um, you need to see some. Some proof before you make that leap. And it's gotta be, like, ample and obvious. Um, or else you're not, you know, you're not gonna go to your boss and be like, here's a $45,000 survey tool thing, like, let's rip it, um, versus, like. Like, here's CRM or marketing automation, which we know we need to have, is, like, a lot easier conversation to have. Right?

Pete Kazanji: Yeah. So, uh, in terms of getting people successful, uh, that must have been very important. What was particularly important when it came to kind of customer success, um, early on with you guys?

Evan Huck: I mean, we weren't great at it. I mean, the cool part is, you know, obviously you get to, like, be supported by the founders, which is fun. So, like, you know, we obviously sharp and, like, we listen and, like, we can build stuff, but, like, we weren't checking in as often as we needed. And so, like, definitely, like, the frequency of, like, customer success motion was not as great. Uh, and that, like, our retention rate beyond just icp, focus, product, you know, maturity. Our customer success motion, after we hired our first, like, VP of customer success, this guy Miles, who was an early outreach csm, um, and, uh, ran CS for postal, got a lot better. That made a big difference, like, having Stronger touch points, more repeatable motion. So I don't think we, like, it was fun to work with the founders, and I think that's one of our. Even at 150 enterprise customers, Ray and I, my founder, are still in every slack group. So we get to see what's going on, the questions people are asking, the bugs they're encountering. And so it's really good pattern recognition across that. Um, and. And like, I get to jump in and like, do the same thing I did when I was talking about community thought leadership. Just like, not only just answer questions like, here's how to do this, but, like, give more framework and guidance on, like, all right, given what I'm hearing you saying, like, here's a different way to think about it. And I think that's a really cool, like, touch for, for customers that they appreciate.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, and they, they like that too. I mean, I, uh, think even once you're. Cause you're at the point where you guys have six AES, six SDRs, you probably have like three to five CSMs at this point or what have you. Yeah. So, uh, like, at that point, the founder is like, out of it, but they can still kind of like run around sprinkling fairy dust on things. And so someone's like, whoa, Evan answered my question about appropriate collection strategy or, you know, this annoying case over here or whatever. Yay. Warm fuzzies. Right? And they, they really, they really appreciate that. Um, how many, um, how many customers did you end up closing before your. Your first sales hire?

Evan Huck: M. Probably like 20 to 25, maybe 30 at the high end.

Pete Kazanji: At that ASP. At that 50K. ASP?

Evan Huck: No, no, it wasn't. The ASP wasn't nearly that. Yeah. That initial 30 customers.

Pete Kazanji: 10 to 10 to 20.

Evan Huck: 10 to 12.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah.

Evan Huck: Okay, so it was like, it was early. I mean, given that especially with the technology experience, knew the product market fit was there and it would get better once we built out more stuff. We also really knew how to train SDRs. So I think that was like, it's not like we're like, we're going to go hire a salesperson and see how it goes. It's like, no, we know exactly who to look for.

Pete Kazanji: We're going to make them a machine.

Evan Huck: Yeah, exactly. So it was like low, relatively low risk in that respect. And eventually I was like, I. I believe pretty strongly I. I've never successfully hired an AE from the outside, to be honest. Not that I tried a little bit, but it just never works. But so I love just like you know, obviously growing, um, them developing SDRs. So in order to get AES, I knew I had to spend, you know, find some SDRs and give them a year at SDR, uh, to get them to AE. So I had to start the clock sooner or later. Right.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, I. Yes, that's. So where did, where'd you go shopping for that in Jackson Hole? Just went shopping for ski. Ski bumps?

Evan Huck: M. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, exactly. Like there's kids that like, want to get school and like hardworking. Like if you can plan a backcountry tour for like a high end client or something like that, like, you know, you're pretty just cool and interesting and like, you know, you could obviously talk to people, but you can, you're organized. Um, if you're a professional athlete, you know, you're probably like, if you're a pro skier, you're probably, you know, know how to work hard and take risk and stuff. Yeah, there's some really cool people, like very diverse backgrounds. You know, one guy was a sushi chef, one guy was, you know, pro skier. A lot of like raft guides, fly fishing guides, and there's a subset of them that you know, again, like went to good schools and like, wanted to get back into like career oriented things and traditionally would have went, you know, home to the east coast, wherever they're from. But this gave them an option to actually like stay in Jackson but have like a more like velocitous career while still doing all the cool outdoor stuff they love. Um, so yeah, the people we have here are pretty, pretty sweet.

Pete Kazanji: Got it. So that was kind of like the, the profile, um, is the sales work all still in Jackson?

Evan Huck: Uh, we have six here in Jackson with me and then we have ten in Denver. Um, because we had some people move from Jackson to Denver and then we just kind of started building around them with Jackson's not big enough. Like we'd look for a person here three or four months ago, didn't find anybody. So sometimes you find them, sometimes you don't. But it's a small town, like 10,000 people. Yeah, the rate of we're scaling, like we have to be able to hire outside too. But I do think like, especially for SDRs, with our model of growing internally, having an in person component is, is huge for speed and coaching and development and just like fun, like doing cold calls in your bedroom is like freaking depressing. Right. So, uh, just having a social component I think is, I mean, you remember like in San Francisco, that shit was super fun, right?

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, yeah. I Mean, like the buddy of mine, uh, Martin Roth, who was the CRO at, at Level Set. Yeah. So Martin was, uh, you know, CRO at what was originally Z Lean and rebranded to thankfully, uh, to Level Set. You know, I was in New Orleans, uh, great place. They kind of had like the run of the talent there. Like, they were the, like, they were the cool kids in, in, in New Orleans. And then they kind of ran out of humans and so then they, they stood up a location in Austin and it worked really well for them. But they didn't have like, hey, let's just like hire people all over the place. It was like, no, no, no, Nola, Austin, when we've got like both of our sales floors there and like, we're going to take people from M here, we're going to drop them into Austin and we're going to stand up the office there and then like, we're going to have like, you know, people who are hanging out there to kind of

Evan Huck: infuse it relative to like, you know, San Francisco and New York. Like, I remember, like, even technology, it's like we were in Berkeley and like, we didn't pay him as much as like, you know, the tier one startups. But like, you're always just worried, oh, you know, Gong just offered me $175,000. Like, oh, well, I can't compete with that. So like, goodbye.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, bye.

Evan Huck: But like the nice part about like, not a whole lot of competition and like, and certainly in Jackson, but like, even like the slightly less traveled ones in Denver and whatnot, we have obviously, like, I think a great company and great culture, which is the most important thing for retention, but like not having to compete with friggin, you know, notion or anthropic throwing, you know, $300,000.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, totally. What? Um, so, uh, you were talking about, like, we know how to grow SDRs. We know how to like, you know, advance, uh, them into AES. What, you know, what did you do well in hiring and onboarding and kind of managing those folks? You know, what's the secret there?

Evan Huck: Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, the raw ingredients is the most important thing. So in interviewing, it's like you're really looking for creativity and humbleness and curiosity, which is all about your ability to learn quickly and just raw intelligence, of course. Um, but also just like your drive and hustle and like, ability to like, work through what's a pretty challenging role. Sdr, you know. Um, so, yeah, hiring I think was like, you know, obviously where it all starts and the first couple reps, you know, obviously had very frequent direct access to me and Ray. Um, we're both, you know, ex SDRs, ex sales leaders, so that worked. The middle ones probably had a little bit of challenge where they got, like, a little bit less time with us, but we also didn't have much process. And so, like, our first SDRs. And then we started to, like, when we got, like, our first SDR manager, um, who was an sdr, of course, to start, um, and then a teacher by background. Uh, there you go. She started to, like, you know, put in curriculum as teachers do, uh, which definitely made a big difference. And, like, yeah, now the onboarding and training machine is pretty dialed, even though they don't get as much interaction with me. But, like, there's a bunch of really good curriculum because someone created it. Um, yeah, so the first one was just really exposure, and then there was a gap in the middle, and then eventually curriculum.

Pete Kazanji: So aside from that gap, what were the other kind of mistakes you made in, like, hiring and onboarding?

Evan Huck: Um, see, uh, I don't know. I had the benefit of, like, I

Pete Kazanji: never m. I never make mistakes.

Evan Huck: I know 100 people where it's like, you've kind of. I've made a lot of the mistakes in the past. Uh, I've definitely made some mistakes on, like, you know, hiring here and there, just the over. But, like, I don't know, especially with sdr, it's like, you're gonna have some misses. It's okay. Um, it's a super measurable role, so it's not like an expensive miss when it happens, um, versions like leadership, which is different. But, um. So, yeah, I think it's like, I. I actually like taking a little bit of risk on SDRs and, like, sushi.

Pete Kazanji: Sushi chefs.

Evan Huck: Right. This one's. This one's high beta. It might not work, but it could be really great. And some of them do, some of them don't. But, um, so, yeah, I think of it kind of as, like, a portfolio again, especially for us, where it's like, yeah, we need these STRs to eventually become AES and directors of sales and stuff like that. Like, looking for that upside, um, is definitely, like, a focus in addition to just being able to do the role.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Well, this is super awesome. Uh, and if you were to kind of, like, give the parting shot to someone who's in your shoes, but maybe, like, 18 to 36 months behind you, you know, selling a martech maybe has a new. New category of, uh, of Software that they're trying to take to market and popularize. What would kind of your. Be your uh, your takeaway and your advice for them?

Evan Huck: Yeah, I think just take it kind of like, you know, one week at a time. Right. Like I never decided to start a company. We just started doing stuff and eventually got enough good feedback where we just kept doing more stuff and then building some stuff and then charging some money for some stuff. And eventually we're like, oh, wait, there's a company here. Um, but it wasn't like a moment where like, all right, we're officially doing this thing. It's just we just took some steps. So I think like taking some steps, just making incremental progress. I think a lot of company building is just doing a lot of incremental progress which seems boring and non sexy and when you're in it is frustrating and messy and then you look back and you're like, all right, cool. Like we've, we've actually gone somewhere and it still seems like that like even my own advice I don't take where it's like in a given week I'll be like way up and way down, like this thing's gonna freaking fail. And then two days later is the biggest company ever. And so just staying like even keel, like, you know, definitely have moments where you're revisiting and like taking an honest look. I uh, think one of the toughest things is like for a lot of my friends, companies that just like they spent three or four years on it and then they doesn't go anywhere and they have to shut down. Like not to say those aren't good experiences because you learn a lot of stuff. But like, so you do have to take honest looks at your company. But at the same time, like don't look too often and like have long periods of just execution where you're just doing stuff and just if you do it. Yeah.

Pete Kazanji: And also like look, look at the leading indicators. Right? Like, like are we like, are, are just like sales management, right? Like are we getting first meetings? Because if we're not getting first meetings, that means no one gives a shit. Yeah. Right. Are we getting second meetings? Because if we're not getting second meetings, seems that they don't believe us.

Evan Huck: Mhm.

Pete Kazanji: Or they don't think that they have the problem or like our demo is like not compelling. Right. Um, and I think that those like the leading indicators. There are other kind of like leading indicators as well as relates to, you know, just company, um, you know, company building as well. And um, you know, one of my favorite business books is the Score takes care of Itself. Bill Walsh, Stanford Football. Yay. Um, and I think that like, to the extent that you can measure those things, you can manage them and that applies to company building the same way it does. Like if you're doing founder led sales, um, or if you're, you know, onboarding reps and managing those folks, um, as well.

Evan Huck: Right.

Pete Kazanji: Because if you're like, if you're just looking at your AR counts or like your NRR accounts or whatever, like that's not going to fluctuate very much. And then moreover, like, it's very difficult for you to video directly. Yeah, Directly impacted versus saying like, oh, we have NRR problems. What's the NRR problem? Let's have like some, let's create some hypotheses around that. Okay, cool. Like let's look at utilization or let's look at like, you, uh, know, do we have different cohorts or customers?

Evan Huck: That is a good advice that I just give to people on the way in. It's like, even in sales, like break down whatever your goal is into like the smallest components you possibly can. Then you'll get things you can actually like, do something about.

Pete Kazanji: Do.

Evan Huck: Yeah, yeah. Like the more you understand your equation for how the business works and the smaller, you know, you can make that equation into smaller and smaller variables, then the blueprint for action becomes a lot more apparent, you know, once you look at it in that light.

Pete Kazanji: Yeah, you can do things and you can measure the doing things of that and, and like measure whether or not like, and then kind of form, uh, experiments and hypotheses around that in order to do that versus just like a big ball of, you know, lots of variables and vibes that just like gives you, you know, existential dread. Um, wonderful. Well, Ev, this is super fantastic. I appreciate you taking the time and uh, you know, we'll, we'll see you around. Okay.

Evan Huck: That should be the title of your next book. Just a big ball of vibes that gives you existential dread. How to build a startup by Pete Kazanji.

Pete Kazanji: A big ball of vibes that gives you existential dread. How to be a non data driven CRO. Right? Um, awesome, Ev, thank you.

Evan Huck: Great, thanks. Good to hang out, Pete.