Ep # 124: The Future of Conversation Intelligence: A Deep Dive with Grain’s Jeff Whitelock & Mike Adams

[00:00:03] Adil Saleh: Hey. Greetings, everybody. This is, Adil. We took a long time, Mike, two and a half, three months to do this episode. Not just this episode, Mike, we this is the first episode we're doing it in 3 months. And, you know, it was kind of longer waiting. You know, we had, like, so many platforms, you know, serving in the conversational AI, generative AI in this space. And, you know, we were trying to seek, you know, more information around what kind of platforms that we can talk to that are doing it at scale, especially in the in the SMB segment. And, you know, we get to know the team at Grain that we're, today, we're gonna be talking in detail, like, their go to market, how they're expanding, how they're penetrating and positioning their product across a lot of competition being one of the first movers. I know doing this today with all the AI, one one seems pretty easy, but doing it at scale and doing it with that level of efficiency takes a lot of effort, bigger team, bigger fund. So today we have the founders of Grain, 2 cofounders, Mike and Jeff, with us. Thank you very much, Mike and Jeff both, for taking the time. [00:01:15] Jeff Whitlock: Yeah. Happy to be here. Excited. Yeah. Excited to chat. [00:01:19] Adil Saleh: Perfect. So, looking at your background, like, first of all, starting off with Jeff, like how do you see yourself being from different, slightly different, you know, I would say background in terms of B2B SaaS, core B2B SaaS? So how did all that happen in the beginning for you? [00:02:10] Jeff Whitlock: Yeah. So I I just I'd say it's interesting because so when I started my first startup in B2B, I had not had B2B experience. And there's like a lot of it's an interesting question for discussion of, like, how much B2B experience, you know, helps as you become a founder in B2B. I'll definitely say when I started, I there's a lot of things I didn't know. And even when so I you know, even after a few years of doing, B2B startups before Grain, there's still a lot of things I didn't know. So and so the question is, like, is it more efficient to learn it just while you're doing a startup journey? Or is it more efficient to sort of learn it at a big company and then and then kind of when you have a great idea, jump and start start your business? And so, something I've I've I've thought about and grappled with. And, it's yeah. I wouldn't say I have, like, I I have a clear answer, but, better to I I wouldn't you know, if you don't know the answer is better to if you have an idea, just do it. And, it's B2B is something that I think is what's really interesting about the industry. It's, like, changing a lot. There are things that were truisms 5 years ago that I think are heavily contested now. And, yeah. So just some thought just those are just some thoughts to start off with, to to get at your question. [00:03:32] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. So and, working, of course, joining hand with Mike, like, bonding of initial founding team, like, 2 cofounders, how did that go, like, initial journey, with you, like, both professionals at individual level, personal level, as well as, you know, in a professional capacity? [00:03:50] Jeff Whitlock: Mike, you wanna run with that one? [00:03:53] Mike Adams: Yeah. Sure. So Grain started back in, like, 2018. Grain's the 3rd startup that I've done. I think it's the 3rd startup that Jeff's done as well. And it kinda came out of it inside of, recording, meetings and, like, lectures and in the education world. And, like, oh, this is all data we can use to, you know, better our our our student outcomes. And then, you know, saw kind of the rise of Zoom and and really lived through the rise of Zoom from 2014 to 2018. It was Mike, this is a game changer because now finally you can, like, do stuff virtually that you couldn't do before because your audio would cut out. And that was really like the origin of it. Didn't have an expectation of getting into the kind of conversation intelligence stuff that we do today or anything with AI and the bots. And there was definitely, like, an understanding of the opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence to work with the unstructured data that comes in a meeting and a transcript. But I would say our first, like, kinda act was more around building, like, a collaborative designed experience that was kinda more like a creator tool. And then over the last, I would say act 2, we've probably been in for a year and a half, coming up on, 2 years, really 2 years is Mike, it's much more of a of a anticipate value and have, you know, artificial intelligence, process your information and your data into your workflows in a way that doesn't really require nearly as much kind of creator tool usage. But because we have that as our foundation, it's a really nice fallback. I think of it as Mike almost like self driving car where, you know, you couldn't get to the point where you have, you know, billions and billions of miles that Tesla has, you know, in terms of data if they didn't have a steering wheel on the car in the first place. And so because we built kind of a a tool that had a steering wheel, we've been able to add, you know, more automation on top of that that serves as a really necessary and useful, kind of fallback for when, you know, maybe AI doesn't get it right or there's something that you remember that's not in the in AI notes. And working building those 2 systems in in in parallel has been great. And so as far as kind of the the founding journey with with with Steph with with Jeff and I sorry. My wife's name is Steph and I just freudian slipped there for a second. [00:06:22] Adil Saleh: That's your working wife too. [00:06:23] Mike Adams: Yeah. Exactly. Oh my gosh. Jeff and I probably spend more time together than I did with my wife. Is, been that, you know, Jeff started a company that I had Angel invested in and, we got to be really good founder friends and, you know, the opportunity came for us to join forces in, like, 2020, a little after 2020, right after COVID. And so he, you know, became a kind of a co founder through acquisition. And a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, he took over the CEO role and I took a little bit of time to kind of, recharge. I've been running on startups for 12 straight years. And then, this summer I jumped back in and I've been running product and Jeff's doing, you know, CEO and go to market. And so the partnership continues. We really, you know, enjoy working together. We have a a another co founder who's on the technical side and he's been there from the very beginning too. And, you know, a lot of the success in in startups is just endurance and continuing to work with it [00:07:21] Adil Saleh: and Perseverance. [00:07:22] Jeff Whitlock: Being in [00:07:23] Mike Adams: the right market with the right people is, like, 3 quarters of the, you know, of the puzzle. Mhmm. [00:07:28] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Absolutely. And, a lot of founders, they come up and say, like, product vision along the line can change. Do you agree with this? [00:07:38] Mike Adams: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I I feel like my every startup been a part of, you know, it's my third one has been, it's kind of a journey that's, you know, it's it's the value is always found in the in the making of it. Like it's I I I doubt there's a single product out there that was Mike built, you know, where the core thing that ended up working was exactly what was intended upfront. Maybe 80% the same shape. That's pretty rare, but I it's never exactly the same. I mean, Grain probably 50% of the same shape of what we, you know, thought when we got started. We knew there was this, like, data opportunity and the fact that everything was moving to virtual meetings because finally the infrastructure of clean audio and video and transcripts was, like, new. And that was kind of the opportunity that continues to be, like, the driving foundation of the opportunity that has enabled us to kind of have this act tube because we have this recording, you know, tool, because we have the data, we can do more with it. That it'd be a lot harder to, like, kinda start from scratch today because, you know, you're not building on that foundation. And so you really just have to get out and build and and simplify, simplify, simplify, like, the biggest detriment beyond, like, conflict and, you know, issues with say investors or whatever, which which is pretty rare, I think. [00:09:01] Mike Adams: We've we've been very fortunate. Our investors are great. Is overbuilding too much too fast to where you miss your window and your opportunity is you got to, like, ahead of your skis, what I call playing startup house where, [00:09:14] Mike Adams: You know, it's like a kid who's cooking, you know, eggs on their little, you know, fake skillet because they saw what mommy and daddy did. Like, they they might be a little pedantic or demeaning, but, like, that's what so many of it like, that's what every startup founder does, especially for the [00:09:28] Mike Adams: first company is you don't know by definition. So you're mimicking and you're emulating and, like, this is my first, like, you know, B2B SaaS company. My first one pivoted into it after I left but, like, I feel like a total noob in so many ways Mike Jeff was saying. And so, you know, 3rd 3rd time founder, but Mike first time SaaS founder. It's a different beast, it's a different business. And so a lot of playing house in the early Adams, but it is in the act of Mike that mimicry that you eventually grow up. And as long as you're kind of in the game long enough and you add enough value, you know, it's it it increasingly becomes, you know, real life. And that's how companies are made in my view. I I I I'd be pressed to find in a company that doesn't kind of fit that mold. [00:10:10] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. [00:10:13] Jeff Whitlock: Just one thought on that is, like, I think every startup that's successful has to capture a change. There's some change in technology, in regulation requirements, in user behavior, in customer preferences, in business model. There's some change that a startup has to, you know, for for there to be an opportunity, it has to happen. And I think that, you know, the best startups have some sort of belief or thesis around that change. And it's almost never a 100% right, but it's directionally right. And then as you build, you narrow in your focus and you get better and and and adjust and pivot. And so I think that's probably how it goes most of the time for that's how it's happened for us and how it has happened for a lot of my friends who have done it successfully. When the when you're when you're wrong about what you think that, like, the core thesis is like my last startup, it's very hard to it's very hard to find a way to being successful. [00:11:11] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Yeah. Interesting. And, you know, this this one question that I'm gonna bring up is, is more coming from my team and my cofounder who's more of a technical cofounder. Like, would you consider yourself fortunate to be, like 4 or 5 years down, 6 years down into the age of AI that is evolving so fast and so big at this Mike, or you consider yourself unfortunate? [00:11:34] Adil Saleh: Hey. If we were building Grain in 2024, we could have done it, like, 3, 4 x faster and might have built some even bigger on top. So how do you see this spectrum like AI thing? [00:11:49] Jeff Whitlock: It's a good question. It's funny. I just I just saw one of our competitors, you know, raised a fairly good sized series A. And I was like, wow, okay, another competitor with more money. I would rather be where we're at, though, to be honest. I think we have it's so hard to break into a market to get a brand, to get, flywheels going. And I think that it's hard to build a great team. It's hard to build a great product. Like all all those things are very, very hard. And so I think this idea that, like, it would be easier, like, it's never gonna be easy. Like, it's 0% chance it's easy. So I would way rather be where we're at. Does that mean that there aren't things that we could do better, faster? Given what we know now? Of course. But we wouldn't know what we know now if we didn't go through the journey we've been through. [00:12:44] Adil Saleh: I love the answer. I love the way that you you put it because, people can go out and build Grain, but you cannot they cannot take take away all the team, all the effort, all the knowledge, all the experiences, good and bad, and strategies that you applied in the past 7 years, 6, 7 years. So that is something that, that cannot be taken. Like no company can go out and build something similar to this in, like, 6 months. So, you [00:13:06] Mike Adams: know It's a little column a and a little column b. Right? It's Mike [00:13:09] Adil Saleh: Yeah. [00:13:10] Mike Adams: You have massive advantages that, like Jeff said, I agree with him. I'd rather have our advantages of being where we're at, But we have some disadvantages too because we have a, like, a you know, we have some legacy functionality and code base and plans and, you know, user basis that, like, there's a strong pull to maintain and hold on to because you don't wanna give up revenue or you don't wanna, you know, eliminate a feature that people worked hard on. But, like and and you can just kinda go straight at something. But that really comes to, like, the founder's focus of if you were to start from scratch. So it's like I, you know, we built the company we built, and we made mistakes and we did some things right. And if I were to, like, start a new company from scratch, like, I'd be taking that I'd be a fundamentally different founder starting that. Yeah. So it kinda depends on who is coming in now, and it's, like, yeah. I'd be at a massive advantage now because I'd be now me, not 6 years ago me, you know. [00:14:08] Mike Adams: So, like, I would make so many fewer mistakes. I at least like to believe that I would make fewer mistakes. I'm pretty sure I would, but like, so it's, it's kind of, it's a mixed bag with a lot of nuance on it, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's an interesting question. [00:14:21] Adil Saleh: Yeah. And, you know, quite of, these tech technical teams— I work with the product team as well. And my CTO works day and night with them because we are building a product as well. It's also a B2B SaaS. But what we are thinking like, in in your industry, like in more conversational data, this AI has evolved quite a bit, like, and it's it's evolving at a very, very fast pace. It's not you can like, we cannot assume just like programmers, a lot of these programmers they'd say, like, it's it's not it's nowhere that near for a lot of use cases, when it comes to programming, when it comes to, you know, computer science and all. But how do you see AI, you know, a lot of this is going to enable you to, build automations. You know, in on one side, the go to market being somebody, like Jeff, who's taking all the, you know, leadership on the go to market, outbound is, not as effective as it was like just like 3 years ago. It's not as, it's more like intent based, inbound. It's like more relationship, networking, all of that. On one side that these are these are disadvantages. On the other side, how do you see go market go to market, evolving with AI at scale, like enabling you to acquire more customers faster, with a significantly lower sales cycle? I know your product is Saleh, but I'm talking about some business plans and enterprise plans. [00:15:46] Jeff Whitlock: Just put a point on, put a fine point on the question. So I wanna make sure I got it. [00:15:55] Adil Saleh: Yeah. So there's, there's 2 components to AI. Yeah. 1 on, on the decent value Mike, you're on the marketing side inbound is is the real gig. Like outbound is kind of dying. There's so much [00:16:05] Jeff Whitlock: Some people would disagree with that statement, by the way. [00:16:08] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Absolutely. I would love to, [00:16:09] Jeff Whitlock: A lot of people would push back on the idea that outbound is dying. But either [00:16:13] Adil Saleh: Maybe the way people are doing outbound? [00:16:14] Jeff Whitlock: But it's gotta change. Like, what what is dying is what is dying is, you know, large generic email sequences. Right? That's dying. [00:16:24] Adil Saleh: But [00:16:25] Jeff Whitlock: that's only one portion of outbound. So I would I wouldn't agree that, like, oh, outbound overall is dead. I think it needed you need to adapt it. And, one one way it has been it has worked historically is dying and and or dead. [00:16:40] Adil Saleh: Could you also elaborate on this? Like, is that more of a intent based outbound, like marketing led, like like data led? How do you, you know? [00:16:48] Jeff Whitlock: Yeah. I think, I mean, signal based— I think signal based selling is is something that works and is working in outbound. It's not something that, like, I'm particularly expert in or or we're particularly focused on a Grain, but it's something that I've seen working and and talk to people that is working, highly, you know, highly customized multichannel outbound is is working. I think I think the thing that is true, though, with outbound is that, and we should get off this because I'm not I'm not a suit. I'm not an expert on this in in my direct experience. But, but I talked to a lot of folks in the space is is getting more expensive, I think, to do outbound well. Because even even dialing is working well. Dialing but dialing has always been more expensive than, like, large massive signal, out outbound, you know, campaign. So I think it's probably getting more expensive and a little harder, but it's I don't think it's dead. [00:17:37] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Okay. Cool. And how do you see your go to market evolving, like, at at at Grain, you know, on a high level? Yeah. [00:17:45] Jeff Whitlock: I mean, at a at a high level, our go to market is a function of, primarily product as the center of our growth engine, building a great product, delivering a great experience that people will both talk about and see. That's the nice thing about Grain is when you join a meeting with someone who use Grain, you see it, you get the meeting recap, and that's kinda core to, our word-of-mouth and our casual contact. And, we wanna augment that with really high quality, content based marketing from our users and from our company, basically. That's the Mhmm. High level model. [00:18:20] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Mhmm. And as a product, Mike, I see you you integrate with, you know, HubSpot's, you know, Salesforce, all the top tier, and also Aircall is one of them. Mike, a lot of, a lot of giants in the BPO industry, they they this is a big use case for them too. So how do you see it product, driven even for the enterprise segment? More like a product led, kind of motion where they're self, you know, they're able to, you know, expand or maybe you have account managers that they're helping them, but it's it's partially self serve how you're achieving that. [00:18:55] Mike Adams: I think I'm gonna answer the question I think is another question, which is, like, markets are always bigger than you think that they are. Like, they're always bigger. And so they're huge. Like, our market is massive. It is absolutely enormous. And you've got so many you've got $1,000,000,000 unicorns that were minted, you know, 3 or 4 years ago. And you've got then giant publicly traded companies that start to kind of come down and compete. And it's like it can be really scary or you can know where you differentiate, know where you excel, and know who you serve. And I feel like the first step is to just, like, be confident in your market. The second step is to know who you serve and how you serve in a differential way in your market. And then I think the 3rd step is, like, I would say tailoring your go to market based on on on on where that is and where you land there. Because, like, for us to get specific about us, like, we've recognized that, like, we didn't wanna be a top down enterprise play. There was already some people doing really well in that and, you know, our market is insanely competitive and so we've moved into more of the, like, SMB mid market similar to kind of like what HubSpot did, to go into a really big market that Salesforce had domination in and they use their wedge of marketing automation, that they were excellent at and and help Salesforce was weak at in order to really compete with them toe to toe in in in a a CRM. But they really stayed pretty, like, you know, medium, mid mid market at at best companies and they don't really play in the enterprise. And so, like, you know, for us, we've recognized who we're serving, what use case personas we really wanna excel in, and then tailored our go to market around that from the combination of kind of growth marketing initiatives to drive inbound and buzz and attention and content like Jeff was mentioning. [00:20:59] Mike Adams: To like product led growth to where we know who we're trying to get to sign up and we know the experience that that person needs to have to both be successful and also help drive the growth of our business. Because you've got some element of that experience that's going to be on a free plan and some element that's going to be on a paid plan and you've got these different kind of, attributes of those people. But you have to narrow it down and to know where you play and where you excel. And in order to do anything of substance on the go to market side. And I think that's if I look back across the years at Grain, that's probably the biggest mistakes that we've made is we've been, you know, haven't been narrow enough or try to be too many things to too many people. And so either didn't get, you know, specific about our ICP that was different than the market or didn't get specific enough about, like, our buyer and user personas that we're really trying to, like, stand out and and kill it for. And as we've done so, it's been, you know, a big boom. So I I think that that's kinda how I, think about the answer to your question is it's a system that's all downstream from, like, I've I've I've built startups in terrible markets, and it's like trying to paddle a canoe upstream. You're just, like, there's—I don't care how strong you are. Turn your canoe around and and go, like—go downstream. It's going to be more fun. You're gonna have more success [00:22:25] Mike Adams: . You're gonna make it to the ocean. Like, it's Yeah. So many startups are, like, dead on arrival because neither the founder nor probably the investors that are behind it [00:22:34] Mike Adams: Have really done the work or or yet have the sophistication to understand if they're in a market. In [00:22:38] Jeff Whitlock: a market. Yeah. Exactly. [00:22:39] Mike Adams: That’s forcing them to swim upstream and it's like and I've been there before. It's like everybody does it. So I knew with Grain, I didn't I just the first thing was like, okay. I feel like I've uncovered a market that's going to be like swimming downstream instead of freaking paddling upstream. And it's been a 100% the case. And, and we made a lot of mistakes along the way. A lot of things we could have done better, a lot of narrowing we could have done sooner, but like that thing has been like awesome. And that's probably the first place I would question If you think you're swimming upstream in your market, you you are. Mhmm. And so you should probably, like, go back to the drawing board, to be honest, and maybe look at another market. [00:23:16] Adil Saleh: Yeah. It's interesting to note. [00:23:18] Jeff Whitlock: When I first got in when I first got into startups, like, I used to hear a lot of sort of casual pedantic advice around, like, it's all about the team. You still hear this said a lot. Investors will say it. But I really I've come to believe it's more about the market. And I guess a great founding team can recognize when they're in a bad market quickly and potentially find a better market. But there tends to be so much path dependency that it's hard to really do that and do it well. And so, yeah, I think market is there's a quote by Warren Buffett that has stuck with me where it's like, when a great management team sorry. With a management t—when a management team with a great reputation meets a market with a bad reputation, the reputation of the market always stays intact. [00:24:05] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, that's it's it's all about it's it's significantly, understanding the market and positioning your product. As as Mike also mentioned, like, positioning the product and going narrow down to find those, those market is super important early on. And this is something one mistake we did as well. Like we spent about more than one and a half years validating into the wrong market. And, it was like we're trying to be more of a customer success platform, and we were not. We were absolutely not. We were, our use cases were different. The the value that they were trying to perceive, the customers, they were different. And now, the customers that we have today is something that we these customer, we never imagined 2 years back. So of serving. So but it's it's working and, it's delivering value. So it's it's it's all about, you know, going narrow and then going going wide. So now thinking about, you know, when when I first contacted Jeff, by the way, I was thinking that, hey. These folks are not doing agents right now. Maybe in 3 months, when, you know, we we we meet or we finally have an episode, they'll be doing some sort of AI agent kind of thing or maybe trying to, you know, automate workflows further or have some sort of autopilot features. Is that as a part of your plan, or is that something that you're not you know, you guys are putting in under the carpet or something? [00:25:23] Mike Adams: I'll I'll jump on that one. I think that the agent's hypothesis is, like, super valid and will absolutely play out. I think that you're super early in it. And every time we've taken a deep pass at being like agent first, it's been really clear that the complexity of specified knowledge in my industry, my job, my company, it will get to the point where an agent can do it. I think largely by this, like, playing house mimicry thing that we were talking about. But, like Mhmm. The foundational models there, like, I don't think that it's our core competency to, like, build the mimicry engine of, you know, the agentic world. Just like it's not our core competency to build the large language models that are, you know, powering all of this, you know, revolution. And and so that's kinda where we landed on the agentic model is, like, we rather than saying we're gonna automate all of your busy work, and just do it all for you, we've we've done that and we do some of that. But it's, like, medium value, and it's really hard to get right. It's really expensive. And then most of the time, you're like as soon as you get something wrong, you're like, I'll just do it myself. It has to be, like, a really, really, really high bar. And I think that is only really meaningfully solved at that, like, foundational model level that I think once, you know, that's done, SaaS companies will, you know, tailor to their use cases and and build on top of just like we do with the LLMs. And so I would say given that belief, we have a view of, like, really leaning into large language models to solve tasks that we're super confident are can be done better by the AI, and are going to be useful for the human to do, like, to augment their work. And so there's more of an artificial and then there's AI's augmented. And I very much believe in the augmented world until there's, you know, we Mike more than our AGI future, which I do believe is coming but I don't think it's gonna come as fast as it's being said. Like, I lived in San Francisco in 2016 when it was, like, we won't even be driving cars next year because Uber. Like, we won't even be driving cars next year. [00:27:54] Jeff Whitlock: That's we've been on the cusp of self driving cars for a decade or more. [00:27:58] Mike Adams: And it's Mike, that full self driving now in 2024 is getting pretty damn good. But it's still probably 10, 15 more years till we're not driving cars anymore, and there's no steering wheels in them. If if if that so I think it's the same thing here with the agentic world. It's absolutely valid and it's absolutely coming. It makes too much economic sense for it to not happen. But I do think that there's, Mike, it's it's a really complicated model. It's a really complicated solve that is, like, gonna do some time. [00:28:27] Adil Saleh: Efficiently today. It's it's it's not easy. [00:28:30] Jeff Whitlock: Just out of curiosity, do you use agents on for anything? [00:28:34] Adil Saleh: I right now we try we we tried, like, agents for clay that they have augmented agent. like, one, Mike, they do the data enrichment, and then you use their agents to perform different tasks. And that's all we use. And, you know, I spoke to a couple of products that are, like, they're trying to completely automate everything. But of course, if you go sign in and the story is different as well. So so it's just about, you know, people that are founders that are trying to go product led and they want their product to be bigger than marketing and sales, they are still chasing efficiency and that's not achievable with the way AI is at this moment today. [00:29:13] Mike Adams: The thing that I'd add to is that it could be a very smart play from these founders that are like, hey, we build it. We did it. We built an agent that is now a software engineer. Like, there's a famous one that, you know, the entire software engineering called boo, and you could say they're a bunch of Luddites. But, like, what I think is smart about that play is, like, overplaying their hands. Yes. It burns a lot of trust amongst, you know, the people that ultimately, I guess, they're trying to serve in this augmented world, but ultimately trying to replace in an agent world. And what that allows them to do is to raise more money to make be more ambitious and be more likely just to to be, like, a winner at this really big prize of, like, unlocking, you know, agents. And so that's the way Silicon Valley works. It's the way it's always worked. It's the way it will probably always work is that, like, they're you're rewarded for hubris and ultimately, like, claiming that you're further ahead than you are. And it's just really difficult when these investor frenzies happen in a market where everybody has the same thesis to, like, have to to really stop that with diligence or stop the momentum of that. And so therefore, founders are incentivized to, like, overplay their hands and that can blow up for the market or it can, like, end up being the thing that works. And so it kinda depends on what, you know [00:30:35] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. [00:30:36] Mike Adams: What play the founder wants to do, but, it only works if you kind of understand the game theory of of what investors incentives are too in the world. Like, what pitch you're making to those investors and the type of company that you're making and the strategy around, like, capitalization and and resourcing to to execute a extremely, you know, ambitious vision or, you know, maybe one that's a little bit more realistic. [00:31:03] Adil Saleh: Yes. And because, as much as founders want to, you know, ride this wave, investors, they also, you know, want to, you know, make sure that they ride the wave and they bid on these, these people and these technologies that are promising a lot for the future. Who knows? Is that a near future or far future? Nobody cares. [00:31:20] Adil Saleh: Nobody knows until they get banged 3, 4, 5 years down and they think about, hey, let's find some other product. Okay. So perfect. So now thinking about your team, you're about 50, 55 people on the team. Right? So you guys, like, have some sort of operating principles, like some DNA or Mike that, you know, goes down to the, to the bottom, of of all this, like from top to bottom? Like, is there any guiding principles? Like, I would love for you guys to, you know, share a little bit about, you know, hiring the team specifically about go to market teams because this has different skill set. And if you can share, Mike, a little bit about product team, there's one thing that you really want startups listening, to understand, in perspective of 2024, you know, to do and to not do. Any takeaways from your experience, both of you? [00:32:13] Mike Adams: Jeff go first. [00:32:14] Jeff Whitlock: Yeah. So you're saying guiding principles on the go to market side? [00:32:19] Adil Saleh: Yes. On the team. Team, like, you know, what what reflects as a guiding principle onto your team Yeah. And, how you hired the team, like, how you make sure that everybody fits with the DNA and vision of the company. [00:32:32] Jeff Whitlock: Oh, gotcha. So specifically on, like, on hiring and building the team? [00:32:36] Adil Saleh: Yeah. [00:32:36] Jeff Whitlock: Gotcha. So I'd say I'd say a couple a couple principles that that so, like, I think there's kind of, like which we we we actually have been I think spend a lot of work trying to define our principles. I think principles are very important to have when building a company. And, obviously, you need to constantly refine them as you learn, but it's it's really good to kinda put your stake in the ground. And there's tends to be, like, principles that are, like, principles of, you know, things you believe to be true about your market or your customer. And then there's principles about, like, this is how we operate. So, for example, on the on the hiring side, I think I think some of the mistakes we've made on hiring has been when we've sort of potentially compromised some of those principles. And so I think this is getting meta, but one of the principles that Mike and I both just, like, a really, really think double down on recently, which is, like, essentially, don't don't hire, don't hire to fill in like, to don't make a decision to hire someone because you feel like you need to make the hire. You You make a decision to hire someone because you have, like, deep conviction that they will be fantastic. There's so many times where you're like, we really need a CTO. And so it's your, like, your mental model becomes, I need to just find someone who can fit into the the position of the CTO instead of say instead of being a 100% focused on this person, they're like, this person is amazing and will change our company. [00:34:08] Mike Adams: It is, like, so easy to, like, fall into too because you're by definition a task, you know, kind of a comp like, I've got 4,000 things today to do to do today or this month. And it's like, I gotta hire a CTO or, like, I feel like a bum because I didn't succeed in the goal that I set out for myself. [00:34:25] Jeff Whitlock: And it's [00:34:25] Mike Adams: like it's a total trap. [00:34:27] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times you get by as as Jeff mentioned, like? Because you're thinking of hiring it, you need it so bad. And you were Mike a lot of times that we hired like 3 people, initial 3 people, only one left 6 months later, like, you know, that we got a had to get rid of him. And, and we didn't take, like, more than 5, 4 interviews to hire all those 3 people because every we were just biased, and we were trying to, you know, hire that person. It was front end designer, you know, full stack. So these were critical positions, and these are founding engineers, and we made this mistake a 100% agree. Now thinking about customer success because we I actually [00:35:04] Mike Adams: have one more quick thing to add to that that I think is interesting is, like, just like we were talking about markets of your business model and your strategy and everything is downstream from your market market. I never really thought about it this way, but it's totally true that your your team is downstream from your hiring market too. Like hiring and building a team now is a completely different market than 2 years ago than 4 years ago than 6 years ago. And what's the harder the market, it's better market now for employers. It was way worse back then. The harder the market, the more you have to stick to your principles. The more you have to, like, keep that, you know, standard high because your competitors and everybody else is going to be likely to get sucked into a frothy market and make the bad hires just because their investors said they should or they think they have a you know, headcount quota to fill. And it's really important, I think, to think about what market you're in when you're building a team. And, like, I would say markets that are more employee friendly are harder, obviously, to hire and there's less talent because they're working and there's a lot more money and there's a lot more jobs, you know, after I don't know if it's up to a million yet, but it's probably like pretty damn close to a million people over the last couple of years have been laid off in the tech industry. You know, not all of that is the talent that you want. But a lot of it is. And there's just a lot more talent available. And the talent that you kind of get, you know, the opportunity to engage with is by definition gonna have fewer, alternatives. And so then you don't have to, like, compromise your boundaries. And I I can't every single time we've done that over the last in that bad hiring in that harder hiring market, I should say, is, like, every time we we, like, compromise our our our plan or our whatever on because to try to win, it's like, it wasn't it didn't really end up being worth it. And so Mhmm. There are times where you just need to, like, pay up. And generally speaking, that's probably my biggest lesson is, like, when you have absolute conviction in a higher end, then you're like, we have to work with this person. It's worth the extra X k to to work with them. [00:37:21] Mike Adams: What you don't wanna do is, like, I mean, we do this a lot of times. [00:37:27] Jeff Whitlock: Optimize for money, like like, oh, this person's we're gonna be This [00:37:30] Mike Adams: person is 30% less, but you're like, but they're 4 times but the other person is, you know, 30% more [00:37:36] Jeff Whitlock: or 4 times better. [00:37:37] Adil Saleh: Absolutely. Yeah. So it's it's it's kind of a zero sum game. You you get them. At the end of the day, a lot of times, you know, you don't get quality work. And, the the person that you're trying to actually hire is really smarter person. That one person that you have on the team does most of the work, like 30% of the work. So that guy is exhausted, getting exhausted too. And this happened with us as well. Like we have, like, not everybody has, like, all of all of the team members, are A players. [00:38:04] Adil Saleh: Like you have average people too. You work with, you know, you make sure you pair them up with a players and you but a lot of times you gotta make sure that you, you're bidding for the right people and having a longer term view on the people. Not does it mean like you're thinking about, you know, having 2 years contract or thinking about, hey, they're gonna be staying with us for at least 2 years. You give me the commitment, promise me. Not like that, but having a longer term view, like if this guy develops, like, what's what kind of impact it can create across the team, across the product that is a product guy. Cool stuff. So thinking about customer success because I've spoken to more than 130 products, and, you know, I was curious about customer success in the SMB and, you know, mid market section where you guys are operating. Like how much of it it is digital? Like digital meaning, like no touch, like lowest touch. I know you have a self serve model. I'm talking about business plans. I'm not talking about free to, you know, your smaller, like, starter plan. How you guys are converting, like, at least 60, 70% of the times we are digital or or or Adil to the business plan? What kind of data do you guys have in place? Triggers, success metrics with your, you know, monitoring any tech tech stack that stands out and, you know, helps you, you know, monitor and, have your customer success managers or account managers be more proactive and, you know, take decisions faster, you know, these these kind of things. So could you explain a little bit about about that one of you? [00:39:28] Jeff Whitlock: Yeah. I mean, so your success motion has to match your ACV. Right? My wife used to work at Qualtrics and was their 2nd customer success hire, and their ACVs were, you know, 100 of 1,000, in some cases, close to 1,000,000, and that's gonna warrant a very and they would literally would have, like, ex McKinsey consultants dedicated to, like, 3 accounts. So, obviously, that's gonna be very different than, like, a more a a product like ours where, you know, we're kinda SMB to mid market in the, you know, several k range ACV. So we use segment. Right? So we have kind of revenue tiers, and, we have a different success motion based on each revenue tier. Above a certain level, we definitely, do something some of the more traditional, you know, success motions like QBRs. That's not the vast majority of our accounts of— vast majority of our paying accounts are kind of in the middle where it's more automated, but we're always willing to chat. I think that is I think that's important. It's an important customer success is not only important to, like, manually retain, but it's also important signal to product and to strategy. And so, so we always will talk to people if we feel like there's a problem or or some if there's a flashing red. And we look at certain indicators on, like, account health. If there's a, you know, flashing problem, we'll reach out and see if we can, you know, see see if we can help. But it it's not like, only at our very top accounts is it, like, proactively we're reaching out to schedule QBRs. Yeah. That's at a high level our approach. [00:41:07] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. So it's— [00:41:09] Mike Adams: I would argue that, like, it's all about signals. Like, you just have to know matching like what Jeff was saying. You just have to know what the signals are. Churn churn risk signals, renewal, upgrade signals, you know, if you have a free or trial, you know, up up, conversion signals. And those signals are going to be based on a combination of who the person is and how your understanding of what your product does for them. And then, the behavior that they are taking that's representative of their, like, readiness to to for you to engage so that that's an accretive action. Because the smaller your ACV, the larger the volume, the more precious every one of those interactions is. So the more, I would say, refined your your kind of signals need to be. [00:41:57] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. And they need to be, as you mentioned, like, absolutely relevant to that account. And any external source that is affecting, let's say if, customer success managers, sitting inside, let's say, Salesforce, and, it got signal that this customer has stopped using feature from some other product analytics that you're using inside Salesforce. Just on that metric, of course, it is not just like customer success manager cannot straightaway take an action and set up a follow-up call or maybe some demo call or maybe a document help doc for that feature. There's has to be some external, data points and, you know, contributing to that event. So you have everything pretty much biasing inside the CRM, or is that a specific customer success sort of tool or product like that is a source of truth for CSMs? Like, how does that work? like, or they just stay within the CRM? [00:42:53] Mike Adams: We have a are built so much for sales. Sorry. I'll I'll just go quick. Yeah. We’ve built so much for sales that they rarely have the signals that we're talking about, and so we we use, Vitally, which hooks into our CRM, but ultimately is kind of the bridge between the, product signals and analytics. And, like like, HubSpot just wasn't really built for it. Maybe they'll make [00:43:16] Adil Saleh: it on the all the bi syncing of data from the CRM and from product analytics and every everywhere. [00:43:20] Mike Adams: That's like like like an account that's created at a user level. Like, HubSpot, as far as every time I've ever used it, is almost entirely oriented around assuming that someone filled out a form or, you know, is is some other sort of in you know, acquisition channel and you're creating a deal or it might be some sort of, like, individual lead before it turns into a deal. But it's not like a a visual representation of the workspace that is kind of free to adopt or, has been from— engagement inside of that. So there's usually a different set of tools that are better served for product signals both on the [00:43:59] Adil Saleh: user level analytics. [00:44:01] Mike Adams: Yeah, Exactly. User and account level analytics of what's happening in the product. And those become the signals. And, it's it's it's HubSpot for us is almost entirely on, like, we've got some we've got a different funnel where people raise their hands and say, I wanna talk to sales or we'll put them into it if they have enough kind of signals on the free tier or if they're on the paid tier that we wanna up, you know, upsell them, like, then then it moves into the more manual world of of HubSpot. But we don't use HubSpot as a place to, like, understand what our accounts are doing in our product. [00:44:36] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Gotcha. And that's why you have Vitally to, you know, make sure you have a 360 view of all the activities inside the product or, elsewhere. Perfect. So now, like there's so many tools per technology, per use cases people think, but a lot of them, like 3 of them that I'm using, I've used in the past 4 years for meeting records, team notes, like summarize notes for the team, takeaways. [00:45:01] Adil Saleh: And there's there's tool for intelligence, like conversational intelligence. So how do you, do you see yourself like, you mentioned that being efficient is is is is one of of the things that you are aspiring, like making sure your product is right and, you're achieving a level of efficiency with the product and with this, you know, conversational intelligence, which is a big use case. Because if if I'm recording this meeting and Mike content team, I need to feed them like 20, 30%, I need to invest another 20, 30% of my time to, you know, feeding them, hey. This is what we spoke with with these kind of topics that we we covered. So but my point is, like, how do you see is the efficiencies that sets you apart from a lot of your competition? [00:45:51] Mike Adams: I thinkfor us, like, something that's always been at the front is we are going to be the easiest to use, the most pleasant to look at. Like, we're fortunate that our space, while there's some really great products in it, they tend not to be the most beautifully designed products. Some are increasingly more on the competitive level and it's, you know, harder to differentiate on that. But, like, I would say, you know, from our perspective, one of the advantages that we have is just being, you know, a delightful product. So we look at a lot of products. We draw inspiration from that. I'm sure if I named names, people would take qualms and be like, I hate that product. But, like, we like these products. Like, we really love Linear. We love Notion. We love Slack. We love, you you know, we love intercom. We love, a bunch of these different types of tools like Figma that are just beautiful and easy to use and collaborative and design forward. And, like, they feel modern and they feel, you know, pleasant to use versus a tool that is, like, maybe better at getting to a specific piece of data or analytics, but, like, doesn't have that kind of professionalism and polish and and and enjoy when you use it. So that's something we, like, keep at the forefront of our kind of design principles. Always has been an advantage for us, and we, you know, intend for to to continue to be an advantage. [00:47:19] Adil Saleh: Mhmm. Well, I'll definitely get like at least 2 to 3 team members on onto using, for the meetings and knows, because quite frankly, it's it's been a lot of time post meeting that we have to invest because you're not getting the right data, meaningful data enough, like not a 100%, not even 90%. So Yeah. [00:47:38] Jeff Whitlock: We I mean, we'd love to we'd love to have you check it out and give us some feedback. Yeah. [00:47:42] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Absolutely. Please, as soon as you get it, please forward me over the email, this entire note. I want to Yeah. There you go. Because I'm learning with you guys, you know, from you guys, and, you know, you guys are one of our peers. It's not something that, you know, I'm on the other side of the table and it's it's it's just that my learning curve, I've primarily have done it to, you know, make sure, I've validated my hypothesis. I learned from people that have done better than me and I have a huge respect for you both, you know, you coming on here and we'd be sharing all of this. And, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's some of the conversation I really want to keep it for the future. And any questions that I'll, you know, I'll ask you, Jeff, and if we want you guys to pair with 1 of our any other product that is, of course, not directly competitor, but, they are serving the same customer, would definitely, you know, I'll look for for your time and schedule and check with Ella. So by the way, it was really a brother brotherly conversation, and I feel like, I'm I'm talking to these brothers and just sharing, their knowledge and experiences. And that is going to help me, do things better, tomorrow, if not today. [00:48:49] Jeff Whitlock: Cool. Yeah. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Mhmm. [00:48:51] Mike Adams: Yeah. Absolutely. Enjoyed it. [00:48:52] Adil Saleh: Very much, Mike. Thank you, Jeff. Take good care of yourself. Have a good rest of your day. Thanks. You too. Bye bye.