47. Make your product business critical (Neil Gandhi - Send.co)

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Speaker B: All right, Neil, warm welcome.

Speaker C: Thank you for having me. Max, excited to be on here and share my story building page at Send.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And can you take me Back to day 0 because you have two companies page and Send. What's the story?

Speaker C: Yeah, so Paige actually started as a spinoff from another company I was building, which was one of the first AI SDRs. And we could talk about that later as well and what that experience was like building that business, uh, and it's not a good business to be in. But in any case, uh, one problem I kept running into with uh, that business was, you know, I'd send these follow ups to people and I had no idea whether they read it and if they forwarded to anybody like that. And so I thought, hey, rather than sending somebody an email, what if you could just put all that sales material into one link and then you could track that link uh, and see who views it and who they forward it to. And so that's how the idea for Paige was born. And so funny, when I was building the aisdr, so many people like, after they would churn that was a big problem with that business. People would be like, I don't really need the aisdr, but I really like that little landing page that you had sent me, uh, so I could share that with my team. And so I'm like, oh, maybe there's a business there. So that's how Paige was born. I worked on Paige for about two years and still running and that category has now become digital sales rooms. Uh, and now my goal with SEND is basically a spin off of Paige, which is like a, it's ah, a much simpler version of page. So Send basically lets you track any document and take, take any existing document you have, PDF, Google Doc, notion, whatever. And if you Want to know every person who use it, their name, their email, who they forward it to. You collect that information with send. So Send is I think uh, going to be the Page killer, the digital sales from Killer.

Speaker B: I love that you're launching a new product that's going to kill your own previous product.

Speaker C: Yeah. In my opinion. I'm like, why let somebody else profit off on my demise if I can do that myself? That's us. It doesn't work.

Speaker B: Rather you than someone else. Right?

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. All right. But uh, tell me a bit because you've bootstrapped both of the businesses. Tell uh, me about that decision going into it and that foundation to build upon.

Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So for some context, Page is doing well up to six figures in ARR and Send will cross that uh, in the next week or two. So the reason to bootstrap it. So, you know, I have, I've, I've uh, met many people who've gone down the VC route and I think there are some pros to it in that you get a lot of capital up front and sometimes that's nice because you don't feel that stressed going into things of I have some Runway ahead of me. You could hire people, work with really smart people and I think you can make more strategic decisions that way. Uh, but one of the challenges when you go the VC route is if you're not a winner from the gate, just out the gate, then it, it uh, can pose some problems later on in fundraising or whatever you choose to do with the business. And so I've never been against VC funding. My opinion was let me try to prove out product market fit. And so yeah, I'd have to kind of bootstrap my way there. But if I can prove that there is a massive, massive market here, meaning there's a potential for like a nine figure exit as an example. And I see a way of deploying capital in order to capture that market then you'd be silly not to raise money. You know, you want to capture. You're going to be working 12 hours a day anyway.

Speaker B: Um, um.

Speaker C: And so the, the reason why I wasn't for fundraising with Page from the get go is because it's a new category. And so I'm like, I don't know if this is a massive market or if this is a tiny market. I'd rather prove that out first than set myself up for something I've spent five years on. And so that's why I chose the Bootstrap page. And Paige is currently funding send in A way. So, uh, that's why I chose NFT SEND as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. And, uh, can you tell me a bit about, like, the balance right now, your time, and also the revenue from the different products? Because SEND was sort of recently launched like a couple of months ago.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the revenue with Page is. You know, one of the great things about building a PLG SaaS is you don't have to do much maintenance on it. Uh, as long as you build something really good, people use it. The really hard part of building PLG SaaS is one, uh, you get a little bit of churn, like higher churn than you do with enterprise. And it's really hard to get that flywheel going or getting users onto the product. Um, so luckily Paige is in a pretty good position where churn I've been able to get pretty low. Um, the product is doing pretty well. The reason why in general I chose to focus more on Send is because I think there's a bigger market there. But, uh, in any case, uh, yeah, yeah. So Paige is basically funding Send. And then when I launched Send, I kind of wanted to validate whether people are going to be using this in the first place and also get some cash up front. And so I did this early access program I just posted on LinkedIn, like, hey, if you want to buy early access send, it's going to be $30, uh, per month and you'll basically get that price locked in forever, um, before I ever increased press or anything like that. And so that's kind of how I got some cash up front with Send to spend on some things. But, um, Page. Yeah, it's kind of like funding everything right now.

Speaker B: Okay, cool. And I can imagine that you're touching upon a classic mistake that you start building and then you put up the wait list and then, uh, oh, it wasn't a lot. And then you just scrap the whole thing. But now you did, obviously, the vice versa when it comes to the early access. How did you think about that? Did you have some sort of minimum to proceed or what was the story?

Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So, my God, it's so, uh, tricky sometimes because when you're in building mode, that's all you want to do is just build, build, build, build, build, and think that, oh, when I launch it, you know, we're going to be the next Facebook and somebody will make a movie about me.

Speaker B: But, you know, I don't have a feeling.

Speaker C: I think everyone has that feeling and sometimes they're right. Um, but you know, with, with Send. I'm like, how do I offset as much risk as possible? So actually what I did with Page was I built some of that functionality that send, that's core to send now into into Page. And so when I was able to validate that, like, yeah, this is going to be a winner. Like, yes, people are going to want to track their documents and yes, if I can make that frictionless, it's going to be good. So I had kind of built like a much simpler version of Page just from the get go and send it to some Page customers. I'm like, I just want to see how they use it. Um, what I've learned is like, you don't really want to see what people say, you want to see what they do. Um, so I was just religiously tracking their usage in their product. Once I got a good sense there, then I started building Send. And even with sun, like buying that domain was, was pretty pricey at Sun Co. So before I did that, tried to validate it with another domain as well. And then once I had those two things validated, I'm like, okay, I think we are cooking with something here. Um, but still, I, I only want people in the beginning right now who need it so bad that they're willing to spend money, uh, for the product. And I didn't even show a demo of the product. I'm like, you have to pay to even see what the app looks like. And that's all as a filtering function to see who really needs it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. I think that's a really good positioning standpoint to start from. Uh, both what you see is actually working from a user perspective in the product, not just hearing words, because then it can be a lot of talk, right?

Speaker C: Totally. Yeah. And sometimes you can be led astray into thinking you need to build something because somebody requested it. But then you build it and you're like, why is nobody using it? So it's very.

Speaker B: I saw that you shared on LinkedIn that tracking Google Docs is one of the top use cases for Send. Not the, maybe more flashy or thoughtful, uh, put together sales rooms. Uh, what surprised you most about that?

Speaker C: Oh my God. So what? Let me backtrack a little bit and share some experiences and learnings from building a sales room and from talking to a bunch of customers who bought a sales room insurer. The idea of a sales room is very compelling because you, uh, it's actually more compelling for the recipient because now rather than sending them 10 links, you could just send them one link and they could go to that one link and find whatever they need. The problem then becomes for the recipient, they kind of have to filter through all that stuff you sent them to find the information that's going to be most relevant for them. And for some really big enterprise deals, like I have customers on page who have six month year long deals, right, they only do two, three deals a year but that uh, enables them to hit quota for them, Paige is perfect. And if you're doing a lot of onboarding materials and all that stuff, you have a lot of material to share. Sometimes digital sales room is actually a really good fit. But for most sales cycles that are even like three months or four months, most people, they are not going to go click into a digital sales room. They just want to see whatever is most important to them at that moment. So maybe it's a one pager on what your product does, maybe it's an explanation of how your integrations work, maybe it's some information on how your pricing works, anything like that. They just care about that one asset at the time. That's where the recipient, they're basically expecting that. And the other challenge with the digital sales room is whenever you send that to somebody you have to explain to them what this product even is and why they should be using it. And you have to learn this new interface. And with Page, it's so simple and trying to make it really straightforward, but still there's a little barrier to entry in that people are so used to receiving a PDF and now they're receiving a web page. So it's that. And I'm like, I bet, I bet PDFs still around the world. Uh, and so yeah, I launched a product with the idea of just being able to seven track any document. And what's surprising is yeah, Google Docs is there, but number one, I think 60 or 70% of the documents are being shared through send right now are still PDFs. So technology that was created uh, 200 years ago still are.

Speaker B: We'll see when the, when it changes.

Speaker C: Yeah, maybe, maybe we'll see. Yeah, if it changes.

Speaker B: But on that topic, I remember uh, when I worked in sales, we had a new signing tool, sending out contracts and quotes. And then you got the notification, right, that they looked into the document and then you saw each page, the time spent and it was like 0.5 seconds, the first 10 pages and then price two and a half minutes and that's it. So they were like scrolling down to the product and then jumping out.

Speaker C: Yeah, but as a seller, like that Information is really valuable to know.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: They didn't read anything else. So when I follow them, m. I know I'm going to have to talk about that or they spend a lot of time looking at the pricing. So that insight is very valuable. But yeah, like the recipient people have very short attention span. They just want the information very quickly.

Speaker B: Yeah, right. And, uh, talking about that, uh, you've mentioned that you've stumbled upon a couple of PLG mistakes. Yeah. And you sent them to me before. And one of the things that you mentioned first is complicated pitch. Do you want elaborate on that topic? What is it?

Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So, you know, going into page, I kind of thought, you know, if people just naturally understand what your product does, it doesn't really matter how simple your pitch is. As long as you kind of incept them with the idea of what it does, you'll be fine. What I learned though is that you have to be able to explain what your product does in like four words or less. And the reason why that's important is for actually many reasons. So one is when somebody lands on your webpage, you have again, two seconds to explain to them what your product does. When you're crafting a landing page, you think they're going to read every feature, every subtitle. In reality, they'll probably read the H1, they'll maybe read the button text and they'll look at the pricing. And that's basically all the attempts you get explaining what your product does. So if you can't explain it very concisely, you're going to struggle with converting people. But the real downside of having a complicated pitch and complicated meaning more than four words is the, like the downstream effects of how people talk about your product with others. So think about products that are so viral today, like cursor or lovable or whatever. These are products you could explain in four words. Like turn in a. Turn an idea into a website or the AI code editor. People just understand what that does. And uh, what that means is whenever somebody talks about a problem, you can be like, oh, just use cursor or something like that. Uh, but if your product takes three sentences to explain, my God, that's just so much work to explain what your product does. And so you struggle to get that word of mouth virality. And so going into building send, I'm like, I need to be able to explain what this product does in three words or less. Ideally less than one word. That's. But, um, so. So the way I went about that was like, I Just wrote down on a piece of paper, like in a pair, like with pen.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker C: And paper. Just explaining everything that Paige does. And it started crossing out words that I'm like, these things are just complicating the product. And I want send to just be the simplest version of the value that Paige delivers. And that's how I landed on track. Any document like it.

Speaker B: I think that's a really good exercise that you're saying as well, like, write it down in the sentence. And that is starting to remove words until you have those key. A couple of words.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's so helpful. And you start explaining to people. And I would just hop on calls with people like my friends. Early on, I'd be like, I'm building an app that lets you track any document. And I would just hear what their responses are. And if they're like, what does that mean? That's a little bit concerning. But if they're like, what kind of documents? I'm like, okay, that's good. That means they're going to, you know, when I show them a web page, they're going to let me. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's pretty good. Right? And the second one that you mentioned is too many clicks to get value. Elaborate.

Speaker C: Yeah. So like I mentioned, one of the problems with the digital sales room is that, uh, the idea of it's very compelling. Like, if you could have a sales room built for you, that's pretty great. But in order to build one, you have to go find that PDF, you have to go find that loom video, you have to find that doc, you have to find that pitch, that pricing, you have to go find all that material and put into the link and then send it to the buyer. And one, that becomes a lot of work every single time you're following up with a client. Imagine you, uh, know people who are using Clay. Uh, Clay. People who work at Clay using scent. They have like 15 sales calls a day. They are just drowning in inbound. He's like, I don't have the time to go build a sales room for every customer. He's like, I already have a PDF that my marketing built out. So he just keeps throwing that inside. Like, man, that. That is really hard. And. And also the onboarding becomes really hard as well. Because, man, maybe you're lucky enough to get somebody to sign up on your website, but if it takes them more than five clicks, maybe to immediately see the value in your product, it's going to be really hard to get them to retain. And then, like, I mentioned if it's a lot of clicks, uh, for, you know, habitual usage, it's going to be really, really hard to get them to retain. Uh, so again with said, I'm like, I need to get this product down to either three clicks or it has to be an enterprise play. And that's, I think my philosophy these days is if, if your product requires a bunch of integrations or plugins or just a bunch of setup, it has to be an enterprise play. Otherwise, if you get down to three clicks, then, uh, you could be, uh, PLG light.

Speaker B: I like it. Three words and three clicks. That's when you can talk PLG and, uh, go viral.

Speaker C: I like how you simplified it even more than what I had. So, yeah, three words and three clicks, that's a move.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, nice. All right, and moving on to the list here, you mentioned also not a utility, it's a change in behavior that's needed. That's sort of what you're talking about now that the value has to be really, really fast. But can you talk a bit more about that?

Speaker C: Yeah. So one of the things I learned is, um, you know, when you're. I remember when I was building startups in the beginning, I was like, no one's thought of this idea before. I'm a genius. And, oh, it's going to be great. No one's ever seen something like this before. And when I realized those are horrible ideas to pursue. In reality, what you want to do is enter markets that are very competitive. And the reason why that's good is because it proves that there's already demand there. And then your job is not, is not to build demand or convince people they need your product. Your job is just to build something slightly differentiated, uh, and something that people go like, okay, I'll use your product over some existing solutions. If you look at some of the most, like the hottest companies right now, and they're all just like, you know, like, look@recentresend.com Fantastic product. I love it. It's just a better version of SendGrid. Right. So they're highly competitive markets. Uh, in any case, what I mean by that when I say you need to build a utility and not a behavior change, is that when you build a utility, you're basically building something that people already know that they need to do. Your utility is a tool that enables them to do that. And so that demand already exists, the behavior already exists. You're just building something that enables them to do that 10x faster. So coming back to that lovable example, building a website was something that anybody would have to do in order to build their business. This just enables them to do that much faster. Um, so with send as well, I'm like, I learned with Paige that man, convincing people that they need a digital sales room is a massive uphill battle that'll take 10 years to do. Uh, but people are already sending documents right now. Would you like to know if they're reading those documents? Yes. And so I want to pitch it more as a utility rather than as a behavior change.

Speaker B: Makes a lot of sense. And also, as you said, the digital sales room, it's sort of like a new category. And, uh, there are a couple of players. I mean, the line, the get, accept, uh, getting in there and then the proving traction. But then, uh, I can imagine, as you said, the pitch of explaining the value of the platform is not three words, it's maybe three sentences, because some people have never seen it.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think sometimes that's fine, but you have to recognize that that's going to take a lot more effort to convince people to use your product, and you're going to end up being an enterprise play. You can't do PLG that way.

Speaker B: And talking about pricing in plg.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So pricing, pricing, man, it's a, uh, dark art. It's so hard to figure out exactly how to price things. But there are some things that I've learned in how you should not price things. So with PLG, one thing to remember is that, you know, 60% of the time people will be able to expense things through their business, but 40% of the time they're going to be using their own credit card. And so you need to price things in a certain way where, um, you kind of fall in the category of like, yeah, I can justify spending this, but it's not so much that every month they're looking at that bill and they're like, oh, my God, like, I didn't get value out of it this month, so I'm going to cancel it. And it's hard to come up with the number. But the way I like to think about it is you should be able to figure out a way to quantify how much, how much dollars you're making that customer, or they should be able to quantify that ideally. And then you want to price under that. So say take something like ChatGPT. Like, I get. It's. It's like my co founder. Okay. At this point, so that's like, it's like $100 million in value. I'm getting out of it. So when I see a $20 a month charge, I'm like, that's nothing to me. Uh, in fact, I feel like I'm getting a bargain. Um, and so with Paige, it was a little bit tricky because the market is much smaller. So I had to price it a little bit aggressively in order to make ends meet. Um, so the product starts at 60amonth. But what happens when you price. And that's how all digital sales from products are priced. But what happens when you price it that high is every month people look at that and they go, did I get $60 of value out of it? Uh, whereas with send, I priced it at half that price, and it's actually going to be even less when I publicly launch. Uh, the goal there is like, yes, you're getting a ton of value out of it. Like, you're identifying which deals to focus in on. You're identifying which deals, uh, are slipping through the cracks and there's a lot of value there. And so I want to price in a way where people feel like they're getting a steal, basically.

Speaker B: M. Yeah. And I think the business climate, uh, now as well, if, uh, people are moving more from maybe working at the same company for a bunch of years, then you had your corporate card, and now people are maybe moving a bit more and then expensing a lot more from their own credit cards. And then I think it's really important to say, as you, as you mentioned, to balance it so that it's not a, uh, crazy amount for the individual contributor to put that money out there.

Speaker C: Yeah. You know, it's funny, I think for the last 15 years, every go to market, uh, AE has talking to a customer and they've been like, why are you better than Salesforce? From the fact that Salesforce is, whatever, a hundred a month. So if your product is more than a hundred dollars a month, they're like, you're more, you're more expensive than my CRM. Are you kidding me? And that was always a forcing function that forced people to price things at around a hundred dollars a month. And then they get creative and do a platform fee or whatever. But that's kind of what the price was set at. Now ChatGPT has 1/5 that it's $20 a month. And so if you're like, you're selling a product and you're like, your product costs more than, like, you know, another human, like, that's, that's crazy. So we'll see how things develop in the future. But My hunch is that prices will generally start coming down.

Speaker B: M. Yeah, I agree. And the last one, not habitual usage. Talk about this one, please.

Speaker C: Yeah, so sometimes you come across a real pain point that people have and you're like, oh, this is great. But, uh, the mistake I've made in the past is building a product that has usage maybe once a month or sometimes even worse, maybe it's a couple times a year. So I'll give you an example. When I was in college, I built a bunch of mobile apps and they were all around like, um, sports betting. And uh, it hinged on the NBA, uh, playing, like betting in the NBA. And that's great. But one thing I learned is that in the NBA, people basically follow the sport between September and November, like when the season kicks off, and then like April to maybe June. So for like, you know, eight months of the year, people are not even interested in the sport as much. And so that makes it really hard to convince people to use your product if it relies on some external factor. The same thing is true for SaaS. Maybe you don't have a product that's seasonal. Maybe you have a product that people do get value out of, but it's once a month. And what, what becomes you, uh, know, the problem that you start running into is it becomes really hard to retain customers. It becomes really hard to get word of mouth because they're not using it every single day or very frequently that they want to tell their friends about it. And so what I realized is, like, you need something that not only are people using every week, but ideally they're running to this problem several times throughout the day. Uh, and, you know, it's like, how do you validate that? Like, how do you figure out what problems people are having every day? One easy tactic I found is just talk to some people who, uh, you want to serve and just have them screen share with you for an hour of like, just going through their workflow. You'll start saying things like, oh, you know, this is how they send emails to people. This is how they follow up with people, or this is how they update their CRM or whatever it is. You start getting an idea of the things that they have to do every 30 minutes, every hour. And it's much better to both build a product that solves that existing pain point that they have, but also something that they're doing so frequently, because now you get more shots on goal to be able to solve that problem for them. Whereas if you do it once a month, then it becomes really hard.

Speaker B: Well, I think that's really good insights to just look at their screen and what they're doing and as you talked about earlier as well, look at what they're actually using, not just saying. And then that in combination is of course the most powerful thing.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. I think usage does everything. And you know, another mistake I, I definitely made in the past is I'll talk to somebody and they'll be like, oh, that your product is awesome. And I'm like, that's all I needed to hear. We're good to go. They don't use it. And really what you want to be tracking is usage. It doesn't even matter if they pay. If they're using it a ton, then you could convince them to pay maybe. But the usage is so hard to crack and it's so rare. Uh, yeah, you need to be getting usage. So the way you get usage is to figure out something that has a hard enough pain point, so much so to the point that they've already hacked a solution around it and also something that they're very frequently using. If you could do those, if you figure out those two things, you could basically figure out a business.

Speaker B: Really good advice and unfortunately, uh, some costly mistakes. But uh, we learn from mistakes. So that's really good insights on the PLG side. But my question to you now, Neil, is do you think it's possible to build a business if you don't solve these five, but it's not the PLG motion or do you think it's going to be super difficult regardless?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I mean, enterprises, I think the other option is you enterprise. But I think the same is true there. Like in enterprise, you probably have a really good sales pitch and that's sometimes all you need to convince people. And you could get them on an annual contract. And you see a lot of AI, uh, companies doing that right now, where a lot of companies have an experimental budget and they'll throw money at anything, but then they have to renew. And if that product is not being used by those end customers within the company, they're not going to renew. And so you're going to have downstream effects. So plg in my opinion, is actually a much better and faster way of validating whether you have product market fit. Because if you get usage, then you could go sell to enterprise. You can figure out whether you want to do plg, whatever. And there's sometimes, actually I think a correct answer of whether you should be doing enterprise or plg. But yeah, I think you have to figure out Usage, no matter what. Um, because if you don't figure out usage and maybe you still figure out a way to get revenue, you're not going to get word of mouth growth. So figure out usage, that's all that matters.

Speaker B: That's good advice. All right. And, uh, if we're looking at your building of, uh, these two companies now, you're posting a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. Uh, one thing that I saw is, uh, that you went self service and noticed a bug which, uh, actually revealed some of the things in the stripe integration that, uh, people were using your product for free because you thought you had lower paying customers than it actually was, Right?

Speaker C: Oh my God, it was hilarious in a way. So like I mentioned, I did that early access to Sendin. So I just send people stripe checkout link and they, and a lot of people pay. I mean, it was like 70% of people I'd send that checkout link to would pay. I'm like, oh, this is fantastic. And then after doing, uh, a couple hundred of those, I'm like, okay, I'll just let anybody sign up and start using it now. Uh, and so I set up stripe and I'm like, oh, it'll be great. And then a week or two goes by, nobody has paid. I'm like, what the hell is going on? And then a customer who became a friend who signed up for send, he's like, by the way, I realize if you just don't upgrade before the free trial ends, you just wait it out. Stripe gives me the product for free forever. I'm like, what the hell? That's why no one's paying. So, uh, yeah, that's something that needed to be fixed.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, one of those costly mistakes.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. But I was, whatever. I'm like, you were using the product. That's all I cared about. Stripe I could figure out. But if you were not using it, oh my God, then I'm in for a world of pain.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. That's good, right? And one thing about the PLG stuff, and especially bootstrapping, um, by yourself, um, how do you think about self service, support, uh, those type of things in order to scale.

Speaker C: Yeah, those things become a little bit challenging. You know, support is something that I don't really see it as a, like, I'm trying to help people solve answers. I see it more as a way of letting people know that there's human behind the business. And I always like to let people know that, like, hey, Paige is a solo founder, bootstrap business. Like Even in the onboarding flow, I tell people that just so they know there's a human behind the business. So that's kind of how, um, I tackle things. And you know what that does is it buys you a lot of grace in that, you know, oftentimes when you go to support, you're just like yelling at them. But when people reach out to support on page or they DM me about send, it's always like they're the kindest people ever. They're like, yo, Neil, I know you're super busy, whatever. I saw your LinkedIn post, like can you please fix this thing? Or whatever. So I really like building that. So it doesn't really matter that I have a in chat support or like in app support chat or whatever. It's more so just building that relationship with them because they'll find some way of contacting me on LinkedIn or some of them have my phone number, a lot of them are on Slack or whatever. Um, and then the other thing I tried to do with support is if I ever get a support ticket that seems like, um, it's a product problem or whatever and it's like a 15 minute fix or whatever, I'll just try to fix it right then and there. Um, so that way, you know, people don't run into that problem in the future. And I've seen that like in, in Paige, like in the, in the early days, every day I was getting like maybe five or eight support tickets. Now I get like one or two a week because so many of the problems have just been ironed out or I built documentation around it inside the product and with experimenting with a few different things as well to make that uh, even better. But yeah, those two things I think have helped tremendously.

Speaker B: I think it's a really good approach, as you say, to talk about the human now, especially when a lot of things is becoming more automated and the support is one of the most popular things to just do. The chatbot, uh, which removes the human touch. I think that's actually a really uh, smart move to get some EQ in the business. Right?

Speaker C: How many times are you like following somebody on x or on LinkedIn and you're like, their business is not doing well. Be like, I love this person. I just like want to support them, I want to see them win. That's perhaps probably the greatest marketing leverage you can create. So to whatever extent you can create that, it's very easy.

Speaker B: Definitely. Ah, one last question about these uh, companies. How do you think about ICT and buyer Persona? Uh, have you done a lot of interviews, Evaluations? Do you map the users somehow, ask them questions or how do you validate this?

Speaker C: Oh, totally. So, man, I, I think I had this mistake early on with Paige where I'm like, I'm just gonna sell to anybody who's in sales. And what you realize is that in sales there's different departments. There's SDRs, there's new SDRs, there's season SDRs, there are junior AES, there's senior AES, there's enterprise AES. It's like each Persona, maybe they're effectively doing the same thing of their selling, but their behavior and the way they approach park is very different. So as an example, an enterprise AE is generally more trusted within a company. So if they go to their VP of sales and they're like, hey, I want to buy this tool, that's whatever, 50 bucks a month. The VP of sales is probably more inclined to do it because like, you're closing us million dollar deals, maybe I'll let you do it. And they're also, they've been around the block, you know, they've done sales for maybe 10 years. So they know how to approach a product, they know how to use the product. Whereas if you just sell to sales generally, then you're going to get a lot of new SDRs who just got got out of college or high school signing up for your product. And they have sometimes unrealistic expectations. They'll go to your product and they'll be like, I use your product and I didn't hit quota, therefore your product is a problem. So that, that's probably. Or like they don't have high willingness to pay. They themselves churn within businesses. Usually a company, if they can retain an SDR for longer than six months, that's a success. So you have to be very careful around, um, especially in the early days, which customers are going to help de risk your business. You don't want sell, you don't want to have a winner, but you sell to people who just get fired so quickly within a company, then it's like, then you don't know that you have the winner. So you want to try de risking that as much as possible.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's good insights. And uh, if you would say your like ICP or Personas that you're targeting right now. Uh, can you say that in a couple, maybe, maybe three words or.

Speaker C: Yeah, so with page, it's a B2B sass, AES. I think if three words, that's the way I would do it. And then with send, it's anyone who's tracking documents or sending documents, um, even that I'm still figuring out. Like, I kind of want to launch it and just see who uses it the most. And right now I'm seeing it's. Again, it's mostly salespeople, and a lot of founders are using it for fundraising as well. It's a fantastic way of fundraising. Um, I think I'll double down the sales category, but send is early days. We'll fit. I'll be able to get it down to three words. Right now, it's 10 words. I'll get it down to three words.

Speaker B: I like it. Really good. Cool. And, um, if you were to give one advice for people, uh, wanting to jump into starting their own business or any of the mistakes that you can share one key summary, what would that be?

Speaker C: Yeah, figure out usage. Figure out a product that has a high frequency of usage and solves an intense enough pain point. If you figure out those two, you'll do just fine.

Speaker B: Cool. And, um, do you have any, um, goals? I mean, what would spell mission accomplished when it comes to, uh, send or page the North Star that would make you look back at it and say, we nailed it. Yeah.

Speaker C: Or I nailed it. Yeah. I think every founder has basically been inspired by watching the social network. And not because, like, oh, he became so successful or whatever, but how cool is it when you build something, you see other people using it or you just see it in the wild? That's like the greatest feeling ever. Fortunately, with send, the market for it is much better. And I'm already seeing a little bit of that. Like, I'll stumble across somebody posting their send, um, on LinkedIn, or they'll DM it to people or whatever. I'm like, oh, I just want to. I just want to, like, amp that up to like a million, uh, like a million times that. So, uh, the goal. Yeah, that's. I say the goal with send. How we end up doing that, whether we fundraise or how big the team gets that stuff, is all to be, uh, determined. But that's, that's the end state is what I'm trying to reach.

Speaker B: Nice. And, um, I think with you and your co founder, ChatGPT, we're on a good path. Right.

Speaker C: I have three co founders, I have ChatGPT, I have Claude, I have Grok.

Speaker B: So great tip.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: All right, and, um, the last question, uh, wrapping up here in the, in the podcast, do you have any advice for future guests that should come onto the pod that I should reach out to.

Speaker C: Yeah, I, uh, have a friend named Mitchell. He's running this company called Kondo. K O n D o. It's like a superhuman for LinkedIn. Really sharp guy. One of the best marketers I've ever met, so you should chat with him.

Speaker B: Perfect. Awesome. Great advice. And, um, with that said, Neil, thank you so much for dropping in and sharing both your learnings when it comes to scaling to bootstrap businesses, but also the five costly PLG mistakes and dropping knowledge bombs here about what not to do when running a business and of course, what to double down on.

Speaker C: Yeah, totally. And happy to help out anybody who's in the thick of it or you just want a brainstorming partner. Just add me on LinkedIn. Uh, just look up Neil Gandhi or go to send. Co my LinkedIn's there as well. I'm, uh, happy to chat with you.

Speaker B: Awesome. Good luck with both, uh, page and, um, send and, um, have an awesome 2025.

Speaker C: Thank you so much, Max.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker C: Last quarter I smashed my quote a short memory. I forgot what I sold you.

Speaker A: All right, shifting the focus to you that's been listening. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any advice on future guests or want to see short video clips from the podcast, add me on LinkedIn. Enjoy this episode, leave a rating and share it to someone that might be curious. Friends, co workers, or that random person in your LinkedIn it. Enjoy the rest of your day Scale Spicy M.