Building Cred: Lessons in Resilience, Reflection, and Scaling with the Right People

Speaker A: Welcome to the Uncharted podcast. This is Poya. I have John Carr Harris joining us from the Bay Area. It's raining today, but, John, how are we doing?

Speaker B: We're good. Luckily, we had no rain for the plane yesterday.

Speaker A: It went from, like, super sunny to being really cloudy and foggy. But hopefully sunshine will return. John, I'd love to kick it off with a quick personal business bio, uh, give everyone some context to who John is.

Speaker B: Been an entrepreneur most of my life. Started my first company when I was in college, so been on that entrepreneurial journey for a long time. Also more of a fun part of me, uh, really curious about the world. Been to almost every country in the world, 20 to go. So hopefully go to all of them at some point. But, yeah, ultimately lived in over eight countries, seen a lot of different cultures, and I hope that also provides a lens on how I think about product, how I think about businesses, how you build things that are global in its nature from day one.

Speaker A: I also grew up living in a lot of different places, and I just know how that's impacted my personality. If I'm not mistaken, yours was like, family, was in the UN or something, or worked for the un. Is that.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So my mother worked for the un. My parents met and then I spent. She was, like, Canadian, British, Georgian, living in India with red hair, very unusual. And helping women with land rights. She's done some interesting things. And obviously, I'm more of the capitalist in the family. I've taken on that side of the world.

Speaker A: Talk to me a little bit about how has it helped you? What's the advantage it's given you as an entrepreneur? Just having that expertise and experience.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think when you live in developing countries in general, you're, like, constantly problem solving. I think it's like part of the DNA. Things just don't work. The electricity goes out, this happens, that happens. You're always thinking on your feet. What do you do next? How do you avoid this or that situation? I think that's why some of the best engineers come from these countries, because they're just used to solving problems. And then I think the other thing is dealing with stress is, I think, an incredibly important skill as an entrepreneur. And you have to deal with a lot of stress, like, from a young age. And if anyone's been to India and spent time in India, it's like stress and chaos all the time, but be able to normalize. And you're like, okay, I can handle this. Not a big deal. If the electricity is out for the Day I can manage. I can figure it out. And so you learn patience, you learn to deal with things, but you also learn resiliency. And I think it's like a combination of those things, I think, that are pretty important.

Speaker A: Yeah, 100%, at least for me. I've lived in so many different areas. What comes really natural or is a little scary to me is become like. Like, you can just walk through a door, make friends easily because you've had to do it so many times.

Speaker B: I don't know if you sympathize with that.

Speaker A: So you take for granted. Others, like, get a little anxious because they're used to their comfort to say, yeah.

Speaker B: So when I was a kid, my mom would drop me in a village. I wouldn't speak the local language, and I'd have to figure out how to handle myself. And so sign language went a long way. You would just learn to be with people and be okay, like, being able to communicate in, like, suboptimal ways. But I think that makes you better at the. The whole dynamic of dealing with different people from different backgrounds and understanding people and empathizing with them better. And I think that's really key to being, like, a good entrepreneur a hundred percent.

Speaker A: Uh, one of the things you also alluded to is this isn't your first time being an entrepreneur, starting a company. One of my favorite questions I'd love to ask is, as you've gone through this journey, what gets easier over time when you're starting your third, fourth company, and what is as difficult, not more difficult?

Speaker B: I think when you're really young, you have so much energy, and it's disorganized energy, so you're like, just, like, putting it everywhere. And I think, like, over time, you become, like, more thoughtful of, like, how to allocate that energy efficiently and effectively. I think a third of the time that I had in the past, I would be, I can do the same task or do tasks that have the same impact. And so I think over time, you start to get better. Pattern recognition of how do you allocate time effectively and how do you get the most out of what you're doing? Because I think sometimes you might just be like, I'm just gonna put in hours and hours. Doesn't deal, like, necessarily lead to outcome. And so sometimes you have to just be thoughtful about, hey, maybe I should be focusing on this outcome instead of that outcome.

Speaker A: There's been a lot of talk about this 9, 96 mentality, and I've actually seen you. You alluded to, like, Two types of the question, which is like at the beginning you got to put in hours, but over time you get experience, you have the pattern recognition. Which side of the aisle are you on? As it pertains to this debate, I,

Speaker B: um, still believe like you need to put in hours, but I think you also need time to reflect. And if you're just go, go, go all the time, you're like, not like, hey, like, can I take a step? Like can I take a moment and say, is our strategy sound? Is what we're executing on, make sense? And so I think you have to have that balance of being able to like take time to think about those things. And it's even like micro moments in the day that you need those moments. Things I will do, like a long shower. And you like spend a lot of time thinking in the shower. And so those are the times where you're like, not on your phone, like not on. So I think it's important to take those times, make sure you have that, uh, space to do that.

Speaker A: Well said. Why did you decide to tackle this problem that you guys are tackling at credit?

Speaker B: I think we're like in a once in a generation time where we are moving towards a world where automation has become, going to become much more central to the services industry in general businesses. And the team had been collecting data for 10 years and it was like we were working on problems in reinforcement, learning and other kind of problems. But when LLM started coming out it was like, okay, this is now a applicable use case driven approach that's going to work and was like computationally subsidized to the point where we can actually make this work. So it's like there's a lot of things going that allows us to be possible today. Amazing.

Speaker A: Uh, and you collected this data? Uh, what I'm always interested in is how people get their first set of customers. It could be one, it could be ten. Talk to me a little about the early days. How did you go and convince customers to come on board? And what I really care about is what tips you have that might be transferable for other entrepreneurs or founders listening to this.

Speaker B: Yeah, so like you need someone who has an open mind and like, who's like early on the adoption cycle, who's willing to like take a risk. But you also have to understand like, they may be putting their job on the line. So what you have to do is instill in them the confidence that you can execute and do what you tell them you can do. And we did weekly calls with three Customers for the first, like, nine months. And every week we would be like, here's what we're working on. And we would show them designs. And so they were very bought into what we were building and what we were designing and were invested in that. And they would take credit for what the platform was delivering internally as well. And so it'd be, like, something that they could use for getting a promotion or getting internally recognized. And so I think that's, like, super important to do, and it takes a lot of effort. Like, it's, uh. But it's also, like, really gratifying. So, yeah, it's a combination of those things.

Speaker A: At some point, you decided to hire a sales rep, and I think for a year, you only had one sales rep. Talk to me about whether it was using insights, data, anecdotes. When did you know you had to hire someone else?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we've been, like, selling for just, like, over a year, like, year and a half or so. And we've only had one salesperson for that until a few months ago. And I think the takeaway was, like, look, like we want to focus on product before we start, like, pushing this out and spending a huge amount on sales and marketing. We want to make sure, like, what we're delivering is adding value. And we were very fortunate to get to close to 30 customers with just one salesperson. And that's like, big enterprise deals. We had no customer support, no account management, no technical support. It was like me and the salesperson and the rest of the team, and we were just did everything. And so we would be up crazy hours and doing everything, but it was like, we wanted to be part of every single part of that experience. Because once you know that customer journey, like, in and out, like, you're, you know, exactly the roadmap you need to build, and you're, like, super dialed in. And then at that point, you can be like, okay, we've got this thing. We are now getting our first renewals. People are signing up for the second year. That's exciting to see. We know that this is, like, a real business, and we can spend much more money on sales and marketing now.

Speaker A: So that's awesome. On, um, the customer end, especially when you're selling to enterprises, it's gotten a lot more nuanced. Like, you can't, like, go through one buyer champion. Maybe 10 years ago you could, and even up till three years ago, you could. Now there's, like, buying committees and different teams. Have a say. Talk to me a little bit about what you learned about enterprise sales and what tips do you have?

Speaker B: I think like, time to value is like super critical. So, like, we've got our product down to the point where, like, we can show we can get them onboarded and ready to go, like within 24 hours. Most enterprise products take like ages to set up and like, you don't see value very quickly. As long as we can then have someone who can hold their hand and like, get them to be like, confident in what they're doing, then they can start seeing outcomes. And then it's the challenge you'll see is are you dealing with someone senior enough in the organization that has buying power? And that's something that you have to figure out early on. I'm not saying that we did that perfectly. And actually, like, in some ways we didn't really care about that for the first little while because we wanted to get feedback from the end user. And the end user is not always the buyer. And that's the dilemma you have to deal with is can you equip the end user with enough data to sell it to the buyer, but you also have to directly, ideally go through the buyer or go through the buyer's boss. And so that's like directionally, like how you differ depending on the stage you're at.

Speaker A: Even getting to the data is so hard with security legal, I'm assuming you have to use the buyer's data at

Speaker B: some point for sure, a hundred percent. Without the data, the product is much less valuable.

Speaker A: Did you find it challenging to even get the green light to have them go through the security legal to allow you as a smaller company to use their data?

Speaker B: We had to do a bunch of stuff like we had to do the SoC2 and we had to equip our infrastructure, have architecture in a certain way. We had to do like a whole, whole lot of things to get them in a place where they were comfortable. But ultimately it's like they have an outcome they want to drive. And if you want that outcome, you need to do this. And so then it becomes, okay, maybe you're going to give us a sample and then we're going to show you what that sample could do and how that can deliver value. And so like, over time that becomes easier to demonstrate because you're like, demoing the value of that data.

Speaker A: I've listened to a couple of episodes where you've talked about opt, um, outs and pilots and this, which, which tells me you've gone into the weeds. How often in the early days did you like, overthink pricing versus your like let's just get something for it.

Speaker B: I don't think we overthought pricing. I thought we underthought pricing. I think we just thought in a lot of ways it's like we didn't know what the market was willing to pay for something so we just put numbers down and said are you willing to pay for it? And initially we started more on a seed based model. This was like really early on and then quickly we realized like we need to move to the platform fee plus credit model. And that's been the model that we followed and we changed the entire business model like a year ago and I've stuck to it since.

Speaker A: As you've hit scale, what are like the challenges or problems? I think at the beginning you gotta try to build the playbook, finding the customer journey. What are like the common challenges or problems or a different set of problems you're dealing with now that you're hitting the scale?

Speaker B: We're still hiring the sales team and so still in that process. But I'd say like at a high level the differences that you see is what opportunities do you want to focus on and then like you start getting into better. The biggest challenge is like the lack of data, right? So like now we know the average deal time for us is like pretty, it's like 57 days. That's very fast for enterprise. And so we know that and we know what our ACVs are, then we can like know like we can have more predictability. And so what we're trying to do is get as much predictability and then like how do you get predictability per salesperson? How do you get them to have a clear focus or geo geographical focus, an account based target focus and then a vertical focus. And so we've done very well in certain verticals and now we want to expand to more verticals and like how do we create that repeatability and that same like outcome of like fast sales, efficient sales and high ACVs.

Speaker A: Fascinating. I would say the biggest challenge, at least my opinion the biggest challenge right now is top of funnel. Like just trying to get enough at bats is so freaking hard. Do you sympathize that with that? Do you think it's a different challenge?

Speaker B: We largely grew around like referral based growth in the vertical. If we think of entering a new vertical the challenge is like how do you get those initial the same way we did in um, the previous verticals. The first few customers to be like, hey, we're going to go on that journey with you. We're going to build it with you. First of all, you're going to get way better support and servicing from us because we want this to work. And then once that's the case then hey, we're going to bring this out, uh, get a lot more customer adoption in that vertical. So I'd say that's part of it.

Speaker A: How often do you do things that are vertical based versus just horizontal and do you think it makes a big difference?

Speaker B: I think product wise a lot of things will have horizontal impact. But you need a sales approach that like people want personalization, like especially at the enterprise level. And can you deliver personalization without personalizing the product from an uh, architectural perspective? And so that's like what we built out is hey, you can personalize the product as much as you want, but that doesn't change. That doesn't mean we're like doing custom builds. Like we're not in that business and we want to have like a very like this, like, like a product that's extremely malleable but has an amazing architecture that can allow for this different use cases, different workflows, different verticals and such.

Speaker A: Do you guys self implement? Do you advise them?

Speaker B: So it's funny like a bunch of organizations have a dedicated cred expert in their organization and they'll like task like if there's questions they'll just go to that person. We don't need to train the whole org. We'll train like one or two people and they'll be like the go to people that know everything. But at the same time we have a bunch of things that we have an assistant and we have a lot of things that make it a lot easier for the average user to use it. It's a lot less complicated than a lot of other enterprise products that are out there. But there's still so much you can do with it, which is part of the challenge. It's almost like workflow direction as opposed to hey, it's not usable or something

Speaker A: if you really want to know. The trick of growth is help your cred experts find other jobs at companies you've not sold to.

Speaker B: Ironically, we've seen people who have moved jobs and brought cred to those other companies. That's happened at least three times.

Speaker A: So uh, that's like anecdotally one of the best things you can have that you have some at least virality. So kudos to you and the team, which is awesome. This has been a lot of fun. One of the questions we'd love to conclude with, if you could go back to any time. What's one piece of advice you would give your younger self?

Speaker B: It's all about hiring the right people. I think there's different CEOs have different approaches, like some will micromanage or some won't. I tend to like, strongly believe you can hire good people and not have to micromanage them. That's a lot more sustainable as a CEO and in running a company. And so just find people that are, uh, really good at problem solving and will take on initiative and take on responsibility and are, uh, not okay with the status quo. They're always going to push the envelope.

Speaker A: What's been the hardest role you've recruited hired for recently?

Speaker B: I'm pretty good at hiring technical roles, so I think hiring enterprise sales roles is a whole new world for me. So I've been learning all about that.

Speaker A: This was really good. I appreciate that. The credit PR team known for many years for bringing this together. Until next time, be safe, be well. We'll catch you on a future episode of the Uncharted podcast.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks, William.