Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This week's interview is about two guys who bootstrapped a SaaS business and went from zero to $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue in less than nine months.
They didn't do much validation or any customer development interviews.
They were driven by solving a problem they had experienced themselves and wanted to fix.
We talk about how they turn their idea into a product and specifically what they did to acquire custom customers and grow revenue.
We talk about why customer success is important and not just a buzzword.
How partner integrations can help you grow and the key to finding and working with the right partners.
Not just on the technical integration, but also on how you actually use the integration to help you get discovered by customers.
We also talk about simple things the founders did to convert free trial users into paying customers and how they used outbound sales.
Also find prospects and things are coming together nicely for these guys.
They've just raised a million dollars in VC funding and a few weeks ago they made it into techstars.
There's a lot to learn from this interview.
Today's guest is the co founder of Prospectify, a B2B prospecting platform that helps you automate your lead generation process.
Prospectify uses data search, data enrichment and verification systems to help you build highly targeted prospect lists.
The company was founded in January 2016 and has been self funded until last week.
And they're just about to close their first round to raise a million dollars.
So today I'd like to welcome Matt Ekstrom.
Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Ekstrom (02:22.870)
Thanks.
Glad to be here.
Omer (02:24.950)
So let's start by.
First of all, I should say you and I know each other.
We've been talking for some months and trying to schedule this interview for a while.
So I'm really glad to have you here finally.
So thank you for joining me.
I wanted to sort of start by helping the audience to get to know you a little better as well.
So let's just start by, just tell us like, you know, what gets you out of bed, what drives or motivates you to do what you do with your business?
Matt Ekstrom (02:52.140)
Oh, it's, you know, it's really for me always been about solving problems and finding new, better, more efficient ways to be productive in whatever, whatever job you're doing.
You know, I spent better part of 10 years or so in recruitment tech, but now with.
With perspective, it's really.
I'm getting to scratch my own itch, too.
So it's.
The better we do for our customers, the better our results as a company are going to be from a sales and marketing perspective as well.
So what drives me is, you know, I've faced a lot of these problems for a lot of years being in sales and marketing and different growth positions in a different industry, and now I'm getting to solve those problems myself.
Omer (03:41.180)
Now there's a lot of prospecting tools out there that people can choose from to help them build prospect lists.
What's different about Perspectify?
Matt Ekstrom (03:55.390)
Yeah, I would say to date, I think Perspectify does a couple things really, really differently, which is we've, you know, I would say the top one is.
Is being able to personalize your outbound messaging at scale as well.
So, for instance, we will give you, you know, different things, whether it's interests of that prospect or skills of that prospect or, you know, people that, you know, common connections between you and that prospect that you're able to use with whatever email system or CRM that you want to push them to that were integrated.
If we're not integrated, you can export it just the same into a CSV for now and then upload it in, but it really allows you to personalize that outbound message.
And one of our focuses as a company has been making outbound and cold email and cold calling a little less painful for both sides.
Salespeople in general don't love doing it, and certainly the recipients aren't always so happy to see it.
But being able to personalize it in some of those ways has really, you know, for us anyway, as a company and our customers have seen a great, you know, much different response, I should say.
Omer (05:22.610)
Okay, so the other thing, I think for me, what makes Prospectify a little different is the fact that you guys are not only just giving people access to data that's available on the web, but you're also doing a bunch of kind of funky stuff with the data in the back end.
So can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Matt Ekstrom (05:49.290)
Yeah.
So, for instance, today, if you were to sign up for a free trial, what you would probably see pretty quickly is that we allow you to.
On the Web, you see the name of person that you want to prospect, and you click a button.
And what we pull back is some of that personalization stuff that I was just talking about, but also links to their social profiles, which sometimes are really key.
But we're also guessing and verifying their email address for you.
So we go through a number of different formats without sending them an email or sending all these bounces or anything.
But we're just pinging the servers basically to make sure that is this format correct and waiting for the right response to come back.
So what we're, what we're ultimately providing you is a verified email address that, that won't bounce, at least won't bounce for, for the typical reasons, which is that you have the email wrong.
It might bounce for other reasons but that are out of our control.
But you know, we, we stand by our, our verified emails with a 99% or so guarantee that it won't bounce because we were wrong.
Omer (07:04.130)
So how did, how did you guys come up with the idea for this, this business?
Why did you decide that a prospecting tool?
Matt Ekstrom (07:12.190)
So it was, you know, so far what we've built and what we've, you know, grown as a company on is, is just the first step of, you know, scratching our own itch.
I spent a good time in recruitment, tech industry, but always in a sales, marketing or growth position of some sort and face these challenges that, that exist today.
You know, for instance, if you're an early stage company, it's great to talk about inbound, but if you're, if you're a day one or day 50 of your company inbound, just, it's not going to drive usually I should say not going to be driving the traffic that you'd hope.
So outbound in a lot of cases and even bigger companies is still a huge part of the business, but it can be done more efficiently, I should say so in between startups.
My last startup hiring solved and this one, I did about 18 months or so of consulting and most of my clients were facing the same problems, which is, you know, how do we find and identify good leads, but also how do we ensure that the leads that we currently have are up to date?
Because, you know, B2B contact information decays roughly somewhere between 7 and 10% month over month.
So being able to find leads and verify their contact information in real time is really important.
The second, and where we're ultimately going to be going in less than a month is being able to target with more precision the types of companies you want to target.
So things that you can't typically search for in most cases, or at least you might have to use multiple tools to do all packed into one.
So being able to find a B2B SaaS company that's raised $2 million and installed Infusionsoft in the last 30 days and then being able to come up with a list of those companies and then targeting the right people by prospecting them, getting their verified contact info, and then all the personalization data as well.
So that's.
So ultimately where the idea came from is it's a problem that both myself and my co founder had in different roles, and we were working together enough to try to solve this problem the hard way, the longer way that after a few months we just said, you know, do you want to do this?
Do you want to.
Should we just build this?
And that's, that's how we got here.
Omer (09:52.310)
There are a bunch of other sort of prospecting tools out there.
What was it about this particular situation that had you guys feeling that you needed to build a product?
Matt Ekstrom (10:03.860)
You know, like I said, the prospecting tool that we've made our money on to date so far, you know, is there's a lot of others that are fairly similar, but what they didn't give us was the personalization aspect, you know, the ability to use that, you know, like I said, making the cold outreach or the outbound outreach, whether by phone or by email, a little bit more pleasant than it typically is.
But again, that's just the first step in that path.
The second step in that path and what we're, what we're going to be Releasing on January 9th is a company search that we could not find anything that would do that in a, in an efficient way.
So we found different, different tools that might give you good information on whether or not they've raised money and what stage they're in.
We found other places that told you great information about their tech stack and things like that, others that had really great granular categories or industries that you typically need to really refine your, refine your list of companies.
But we didn't find and never could find anything that put it all together into one database and then also allowed you to prospect in real time and verify their contact information in real time and give you that personalization aspect on top of it.
So it was just, you know, matter of taking, you know, we have one, one great quote from a, or testimonial from a, from a client who said, I just did right at the day he signed up, I just did in an hour what was taking me all of last week to do.
Wow, it's a lot of time savings and I would say just the ability to be much more precise.
A lot of salespeople, the best salespeople out there are trying to Be really precise about their ICP without just blasting emails to a bunch of people, much less unpersonalized, and then getting a lot of bounces as well.
But in order to do that, it takes a lot of time.
Hopefully, until now, hopefully we have a solution that really works.
Omer (12:21.910)
Okay, so you've got the idea and you feel like there's enough there to enough of a need or an opportunity to build this product.
Did, what did you guys do next?
Did you kind of go out and start doing some sort of customer development type interviews?
Did you, what was the next step in terms of trying to make sure that you had done some kind of validation before you started investing a significant amount of time and money into this business?
Matt Ekstrom (12:49.880)
Probably not the way, not the answer that we should be giving, but we didn't do a lot of customer interviews, honestly.
And the reason being to a degree we're scratching our own itch.
But to a degree too, we, we weren't going to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or months and months of development time to get something out there first just to see if, you know, we went.
It was probably a little over engineered, but it wasn't much over engineered and today it doesn't cost a ton of money to build a prototype and put something out there.
And we went through a beta.
Probably wasn't long enough, but still we did and enough people were really gravitating to it and we saw, saw them logging in on a daily basis and how many people they were prospecting and it didn't, you know, to us it was good enough to, okay, let's, let's, let's see about, let's see if people will actually give us money for this.
So our validation, you know, it, you know, I see the value in doing a lot of customer interviews and I'm not saying anyone shouldn't do that either.
I think the ultimate validation comes when customers are willing to give you their credit card and willing to put it down and pay for it.
Because until they do that, I don't think, you know, they can say all day, yeah, I would buy that.
Absolutely.
But the moment of truth comes sometimes.
They don't.
Omer (14:20.520)
How long did it take you guys to build the first version of that product?
Matt Ekstrom (14:26.450)
You know, I think my co founder Noah probably was working on it a little bit before we decided to really go for it.
Ultimately though, it was October of 15 when we decided, actually, I think it was November, November of 15 when we decided, okay, we should really go for it.
And we had a beta out in early January.
So only about 2 months.
I think collectively we probably sunk 30k into it is a significant amount of money.
But we had enough validation just in our own use cases and scratching our own itch and knowing a lot of people facing the same problem that we felt pretty confident in going that distance with it.
Omer (15:13.390)
And it was just the two of you.
So you spent the 30k, but did you hire any other vendors or any people?
Matt Ekstrom (15:19.800)
Okay, not at that time.
Omer (15:22.360)
So I think one of the things that I want to point out to the listeners is that you guys launched the.
The business in January of 2016, and you went from zero to $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue in somewhere between six to nine months.
And so I think that is like, you know, awesome momentum.
And particularly given the fact that it was just the two of you doing everything, I want to kind of really sort of dig into that a little bit and sort of figure out what we and what the listeners can learn from your experience, what you did to grow that revenue.
So kind of looking back, and it's not that far back.
I mean, we're in December 2016 now.
So kind of looking back, tell me about what were some of the things that you now look back and say these were kind of like some of the critical ingredients to our early success.
Matt Ekstrom (16:38.160)
Our assumptions in eating our own dog food, using our own tool, our assumptions of who might be, you know, our icp.
And we still need to be perfectly clear today.
I still can't tell you exactly.
You know, we have.
We have better ideas about it, but I think our early assumptions were pretty good.
Omer (17:01.820)
So just to clarify, just for people who aren't familiar, when you say icp, you're talking about ideal customer profile.
Yeah.
Matt Ekstrom (17:09.660)
Yeah.
So I think our assumptions were pretty good in that respect, which was great.
And then the customers that we did get, obviously, for a lot of reasons, we paid very close attention to them, gave them great customer success.
Not just support, just ensuring that they're getting the most out of it, going the extra mile for them especially.
I think that led to really good word of mouth.
In fact, I know it did, because we had a lot of people that were never on any of our target list.
But they came to us and told us so and so told us about you guys, and that really did drive a lot of revenue.
And then beyond that, we picked some, I think, what are really good integration partners.
We were pretty selective early on about who we were going to partner with.
Obviously Salesforce, because they own so much of the CRM market.
Beyond that, HubSpot.
Reply App and Salesloft, Kadence or Salesloft in general.
But our integration is with Kadence.
They've all sent referrals our way and vice versa.
So I think that's really paid off.
Knowing who to integrate with first and building a partnership with them and doing some co marketing with them.
But really ultimately it comes down to will their salespeople and will our us as a company, will we send people back?
You know, it really helps.
Omer (18:45.870)
Let's kind of focus a little bit on the partners and the integration then.
So give, give me kind of one example of a, what you kind of consider a successful integration, like who was that with
Matt Ekstrom (19:01.550)
using Reply?
I think they go by Reply now, not Reply App, but Reply as a good use case.
I think they were a company that wasn't that far ahead of us as far as how long they've been a company and how established they were, number one.
And number two, it makes a lot of sense because often people will come to us and say, okay, great, now we've got these leads.
What do I do with them?
So it's a natural question that they might ask us, you know, who should we.
Do you have any recommendations on how we utilize this data, how we email these people now that we have verified contacts, you know, and if it's not, if it's not directly into a CRM, then it makes sense to go directly into an email platform.
And so vice versa, they might go to Reply because they're looking for a new solution of how to get prospects or messages out to prospects using their Google Apps account as opposed to a marketing automation tool.
And if that's the case, then the natural question is, okay, where I need new leads as well.
And so facilitating that partnership.
We did a little bit of co marketing early on with Reply after the integration, but it wasn't much.
And ultimately I think most of the leads come about naturally that way during the sales process.
So it's just making sure that, you know, the whole team, however big it is at any given point, understands, you know, you know, what we do and what we do well and can make recommendations to their customers as well.
Omer (20:43.800)
So describe the integration with Reply App.
I mean, is this something in terms of once people have found prospects in Prospectify, they can basically just push all that data into Reply App.
Is that how the integration works?
Matt Ekstrom (21:00.850)
Not all of it, but all the key stuff, but you can also self select out.
So just like a lot of integrations, you can map certain fields and not others.
So for instance, we pull back a lot of Social data.
They may not.
Our customers may not be interested in pushing all of those social links to other platforms, but some might be important.
But then going back to the personalization side of it, the stuff around interests, for example, they're allowed to select one of the interests per person and it's really easy to do just by clicking a star that can go with it.
And so in Reply or Cadence or any other CRM that can be a custom field and then they can use that as a merge field in their emails or just a good reference for their outbound phone calls.
Omer (22:05.340)
Doing an integration these days is becoming easier and easier with a partner.
You know, once you've got access to somebody's API, you can kind of figure out, you know, relatively easily what you want to do.
But I guess that's kind of just one part of the, the kind of the process.
The other is actually how do you, how do you get benefit from the integration?
How do you market that to be something that's, that's kind of mutually beneficial?
So did you kind of have to work with the Reply app team to sort of figure out what that was going to look like or did that just kind of happen organically once the integration was kind of completed and kind of available for people to use?
Matt Ekstrom (22:59.570)
Yeah, so there was one or two things that we needed clarification on during the integration, but I think that kind of bubbled up a little bit and their, and their team was great about reaching out and saying so was so is Salesloft for that matter.
You know, what, what can we do to, to make this a win for both of us?
You know, they were really happy that I think we're.
I, I can't say this for sure, but I think we might have been the first outside the integration to go and integrate with Reply.
They had other integrations that they had built with other tools, but I think we were the first person to, to go, you know, from, from our end to them.
And so I think they were pretty excited about that and they had a lot of great ideas they brought to the table pretty quickly, like, you know, different ideas how we could, how we could co market and things like that.
So I think it's, I think, to your point, you know, as integrations are becoming easier and easier, for the most part, you know, so is the idea that, you know, if you have an integration partner and you think your ICP is probably fairly similar, it makes sense to take full advantage of it from both sides?
Omer (24:19.300)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
So finding the right integration partners and like Reply Salesforce.
What were the others that you mentioned?
Matt Ekstrom (24:36.170)
Salesloft's email and phone call tool that they have, which is Call cadence and then HubSpot as well.
So we integrate with HubSpot CRM which interacts with their Sales Pro tool.
Omer (24:51.140)
Got it.
So those, those partner integrations help to drive referrals and new signups for Prospectify.
What else did you guys do to get to the 20, $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Matt Ekstrom (25:11.780)
So I think we talked about, you know, our assumptions on the ICP were pretty good and the customer success early on, really taking care of our customers led to great, great word of mouth for sure.
Omer (25:24.940)
Give me one example of that.
Like, like when you say like taking care of your customers.
Yeah, so.
Matt Ekstrom (25:32.020)
Yeah, so, so naturally as a, as a founder, our early customers, you know, like we did with beta.
In Beta, you know, I would, I would go out of my way even if, even if our tool is pretty simple to use and most people get it going through a demo and just hearing, hearing what questions they ask, things like that.
But then post sale as well, you know, sending regular follow ups throughout that process to ensure that they're, that they're successful.
Monitoring via, you know, like for instance we use, at the moment we're using Intercom, which can tell us what features are being used and which features aren't.
You know, noticing if someone hasn't used, you know, has used the tool for a week but not use a certain feature, making sure that they understand that that's available to them.
Things of that nature that you know, allow, you know, giving them best practices on how to, how to prospect and you know, knowing when, how to, how to search for the right companies and the right people and things like that.
Giving them some pretty cool tips and tricks and things like that really paid off and I think overall led to them having a more positive experience and, and then telling other people about it.
Obviously it's going to come up in conversation.
Omer (26:59.340)
Was this kind of an automated process where when somebody signed up you were kind of providing them this kind of help and support along the way or were you guys manually reaching out to new signups, new customers and you know, getting on the phone with them and sort of helping them through the process.
How were you doing this?
Matt Ekstrom (27:22.460)
Good question.
So you know, initially we, we did have a series of automated emails post signup that would give them, you know, you know, one, one thing a day or one thing every other day that showed them something new that they probably that they could do in Prospectify.
So a, it kept us at the forefront of their minds.
Because often if you sign up for a free trial, especially if you haven't put a credit card in yet, you can easily forget about it.
But then the other.
So it's a little bit of a mixture of both.
So that was the automated portion of it.
The non automated portion of it is that we could have automated but we didn't, is it's been a week and they haven't used this feature.
We could have sent them an automated email about it, but instead what we chose to do was more manual outreach.
Whether it's a, you know, we see them logged into our portal, we could send them a message from there or we could pick up the phone and call them, we could email them any which way.
But I think overall, especially, especially customer, there's something about a founder reaching out to them in a personal one to one way that I think really makes them feel more special, I guess, for lack of a better term.
Omer (28:54.740)
Yeah, totally.
Matt Ekstrom (28:56.100)
And I think that really paid off.
Omer (28:58.660)
Okay, good.
So the second lesson around getting 20k in monthly recurring revenue was the way you guys focused on your customers.
Really try to be invested in their success and you use the combination of automated follow ups as well as manual outreach to help them get the most out of Prospectify and start to see results as quickly as possible.
Now you guys were, from what I understand you also did a lot of outbound sales yourself.
You're reaching out to prospects and I, I assume you were using Prospectify to do that.
Matt Ekstrom (29:52.390)
Absolutely.
Omer (29:53.270)
So, so tell me a little bit about the process that you were kind of going through to, to find people.
And then what did the outreach look like when you contacted these people?
Matt Ekstrom (30:07.510)
The outreach kind of depended on obviously the segment in which we were targeting.
But one thing that I found particularly helpful in light of the fact that still to this day we don't have our company search completely done yet.
Like I said, it's coming in January.
So the part of the process that was still difficult was finding the right companies, making sure that they're a B2B company, making sure that, that they're the right employee size so that they probably have the right, right number of salespeople that we think is our ideal customer profile.
But what I found particularly shouldn't say it's not easy but helpful is looking for, looking for groups where people are, you know, hanging out or meeting together over a common interest or common career or profession, things of that nature was the best way for us to target and then use our own tool or eat our own dog food and actually prospecting them into our system.
Omer (31:24.850)
Give me one example of that.
Matt Ekstrom (31:27.010)
So when we did a Salesforce integration, right, there's groups online that are Salesforce power users, right?
So that would be a very basic example of it.
So our assumption was, okay, we built an integration with Salesforce, Salesforce power users, probably mostly salespeople, and in a lot of cases, if not all, maybe in B2B, that sort of thing.
So that's where, you know, again, that's the part of the process where we're still looking to solve with our upcoming release.
But that's the way we.
That the way we went about it.
Assuming that they're in sales, assuming that they're in B2B, that there are.
That they are in a Salesforce power user group of some nature, we're able to target them a little bit better than just using the typical means or the much harder means which I described before, which is using four or five different databases which require in most cases, annual subscriptions and things like that, and matching the data that you export from each of those and all of that.
That's primarily how we did our.
Our outbound really is around professional interest groups and things of that nature.
Omer (32:59.320)
And then in terms of what were you trying to do?
What was the goal to get them on the phone for a demo or what was kind of like the next step you were trying to get to with these people?
Matt Ekstrom (33:14.200)
Yeah, great question.
So.
So at first, and this is part of the.
I wish we had done a little bit longer beta.
So early on it was, hey, let's get them into the, you know, let's have them sign up for their free trial and everything will be great.
And you know, it's a glaring omission in hindsight, but, you know, had we done a little bit longer been we probably would have come across this is we had no real onboarding experience inside the app, so that didn't work.
A lot of people got in and they were staring at a portal and like, okay, what do I do?
Some of them would share that with us, like via intercom and our in app chat.
Okay, what do I do now?
And so that's something that we kind of scrambled to put together.
So.
So I went away from that to, hey, let's.
Let's do a demo while we figured out what a good onboarding experience might look like.
And it's by no means perfect yet, not even close, but we're getting better and better at it.
And so.
But doing the demos really did help, as I Said before, you know, it kind of set the stage for a relationship, particularly if they purchase post demo obviously.
But it got a lot of the questions out of the way and really helped me help Noah and guiding what we should build next and things of that nature.
Omer (34:54.810)
Okay, cool.
So again we kind of recap on that.
In terms of my takeaways were sort of the three main things that you guys did to get early revenue, get to 20k mrr were the partner integrations, the way you kind of focused on new customers and sort of automated and manual follow up to help them be successful.
And then the outbound sales that you guys were doing yourselves to find the right prospects and get them to become aware of Prospectify and try it out.
And I know things are continuing to build up for you guys.
So first coming to the close of the first year, well before the close of the first year, you were doing multiple six figure revenue.
I know next year is looking, you know, even stronger for you guys.
You've raised or just about to close a million dollar round.
So all of those things, you know, overall it's been a great year from, from the, from my perspective.
Right.
But when you kind of look back, what, what were some of the big lessons that you learned through 2016 or things that you wish you had done differently?
And I think you talked a little bit about maybe the beta being too short.
So maybe that's one area that maybe we can talk a little bit about.
Matt Ekstrom (36:32.660)
Yeah, yeah, in hindsight I probably would have extended the beta a little bit more.
So I think for a couple reasons.
The main one though I would say is in hindsight we probably had too many of the same type of potential customers in our beta.
And most of our beta users did ultimately translate into pay customers.
But once the doors sort of opened and a little bit of word of mouth got around things of that nature, we got different types of customers that all had somewhat different use cases and different levels of knowledge.
So going from beta users who probably in most cases had used some sort of prospecting tool and had sort of an idea of what Perspectify was doing or trying to do and how to use it to potentially getting and one good example of that would be we had a couple of wealth advisors who had never used a tool like this, but they heard about it and they heard they could get great verified contact information and things of that nature coming in and really not having any idea what a prospecting tool like Perspectivey does, how to use it, that sort of thing.
But also in hindsight they have a completely different use case.
So for a wealth advisor, compared to inside sales or BDR at a SaaS company, one sale to them means a lot more than it does to the BDR whose primarily setting appointments for sales execs and closers, you know, so that's.
And they care about different things.
So not knowing that, which I think we could have sorted out in the beta as well as, like I said just a couple minutes ago, the onboarding experience, just one of those things that seems like a glaring omission at this point, but we just didn't think about coming out of beta that, you know, an onboarding experience would be really helpful.
Omer (39:08.020)
So, so, so you, you basically feel like the beta was too short.
You had a lot of people who were very similar in the beta, and
Matt Ekstrom (39:16.180)
then
Omer (39:18.260)
everything kind of looked good.
So you were like, okay, let's kind of, you know, pull the trigger and kind of, you know, let's kind of open this up to the world.
And then you realize the diversity of people you were getting who are using the product and realized there were a bunch of things that you needed to address for those type of people.
Matt Ekstrom (39:38.310)
For sure.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's more forgivable, obviously, in beta, right?
Especially unpaid beta.
It's a lot more forgivable, like when you realize, oh, we don't have an onboarding experience.
Okay, cool, we should do that, right?
So then when you get paid users who just sign up for the free trial, some of them even went straight to a paid account because they heard through word of mouth to someone they trust.
But then they're stuck there and they're looking at the screen and not knowing, how do I download a Chrome extension or what even is a Chrome extension?
I would look and I could see through our tools that they're, you know, on Microsoft Edge or Firefox or something.
No, you need to be in Chrome.
Here's how you download Chrome.
All those types of things that, you know, once they've, once they've paid for or even just want to pay for it, you know, it takes a totally different tone.
So I would, you know, my takeaway is, you know, probably when you, when you, when you think you're done with beta, probably at least extended a few weeks, if not double the time you've done it.
Omer (40:59.930)
Yeah, Good advice.
Okay, in, in terms of other lessons or, or mistakes that you guys feel that you made is, are there any other kind of big takeaways that you sort of think about and say, okay, this is kind of one thing that we're going to do differently or we wish we had done differently?
Matt Ekstrom (41:23.300)
Yeah, I think so.
Kind of in a little bit, kind of piggybacking on the last one is that pricing is hard and just being a little bit more thoughtful into different ways that people might use your system to be able to value price for different use cases.
And I think it's similar to what we're about to do with company search which is using very controlled cohorts or segments that we allow in at a time to help us a figure out do we have the right price, you know, have we experienced friction yet, things like that.
But also allows from a marketing perspective, you know, it allows us to use exclusivity about, you know, well for right now we have X amount of seats available at this price and you'll be grandfathered in, yada, yada yada.
That creates, you know, interest and urgency.
So that's the good side of it.
The other good side of it too is that what we experienced, for instance when we got to about 12k mrr was the first time I looked over at Noah, my partner, co founder and said man, we have probably too many users and too many customers right now for just the two of us.
What do we do?
You know and at that point, you know, where we're putting all the money back into the company and we were getting very close to needing getting to go back to pulling some income to support our families and things like that.
So it's, you know, getting, getting stuck in that spot was, was unpleasant.
So you know, the rapid growth at that point, you know, kind of had a double edged sword to, was great.
It looked great on paper but in reality we're spending 16, 18 hour days and not quite catching up and not being able to support our customers the way we were early on.
Things like that, that kind of fell by the wayside.
Omer (43:46.780)
Yeah, it can be a scary experience where you start off and you want to get as many customers as you can and in the early days it can be, you know, a lot more work and but you have more time to spend with every new, new customer and then you kind of get to this point I think where it just feels like the train is about to run away and how do you, you know, given the limited resources that you have is still to, to kind of provide the quality and do all the things that you want to do to be able to build the business in the, in the right way.
So yeah, I mean I think that's kind of like it's so true in terms of you know, any new business in the first year, the best thing you could have is, you know, you know, a thousand customers you never expected.
And probably the worst thing you can have is a thousand customers you never expected.
Right.
So it's just, it's a totally, it's a tough place to be.
Matt Ekstrom (44:45.030)
Yeah.
And it's one of those, you know, in I guess modern language, as the quote, the kids would say, you know, middle class problems or upper class problems.
But you know, so talking to other founders at times, you know, we found ourselves kind of getting blank stares back at us like, oh really?
That's your problem.
But, you know, it is true.
And you know, to a customer when, when there's a, you know, a bug in the system or something that they come across and it takes a, you know, it could take 12 hours to resolve and it shouldn't take a half an hour.
They don't care that you're only two guys.
Right.
They've paid you the money.
Right.
They want it fixed and they should.
And that's the, that's the correct expectation for them and it's the right expectation for us to be able to fix it effortlessly for them in a short amount of time.
But you know, when you're at that point it's, it's quite difficult.
But then you're also still trying to grow because if your goal is or you think at some point you're going to have to raise money, you really don't want stagnating or declining revenue at all.
So totally.
Omer (45:58.630)
What is that noise behind you?
Have you got some landscapers outside or something?
Matt Ekstrom (46:02.470)
Yeah, unfortunately they're almost gone.
They're almost gone.
I've watched them move away.
Omer (46:09.900)
Cool.
So listen, congratulations on raising the million dollars.
What are the plans with that?
How are you guys planning to spend the money?
Are you going to hire some people?
Matt Ekstrom (46:21.420)
Yeah.
So we've had off and on throughout the time.
After we started accumulating a substantial monthly recurring revenue, we've had some contractors working on various parts of the product, including integrations and things like that.
Now we're looking to bring on full time people.
We've brought two on as of today.
I think the second one just agreed today.
Great.
So now we're four.
Omer (46:54.370)
You've doubled in size in 24 hours.
Matt Ekstrom (46:58.770)
Well, actually one of them joined us last week today and then, yeah, I think we're probably going to bring on two more before mid January or so and that's when, you know, new product roll out and things like that.
So our focus primarily is on engineering.
So being able to not only support and maintain the current code, but continuously being able to innovate, build, and then on sales and customer success.
Those are the three main areas that we're focusing on hiring at this point.
Cool.
Omer (47:43.080)
All right, it's time for the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Matt Ekstrom (47:49.480)
Ready?
Okay.
Omer (47:51.160)
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Matt Ekstrom (47:56.820)
I think it's knowing when to say no and that it's okay to say no.
Omer (48:01.540)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Matt Ekstrom (48:08.580)
Why?
For many reasons and also its type of mind.
Because I'm reading it.
It's the obstacle is the way it's by Ryan Holiday.
Not your typical business book like you know, but it's great.
Great stories from history about great leaders that you can certainly apply to your everyday business life.
Omer (48:30.580)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Matt Ekstrom (48:36.980)
Fearlessness.
Omer (48:38.980)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Matt Ekstrom (48:43.940)
So, outside of perspective?
Omer (48:45.300)
Outside of perspective of course.
Matt Ekstrom (48:48.480)
I really like Pocket because I come across blog posts or articles in various publications, even some ebooks that I've downloaded that I can't spend the time to read right away.
But maybe I'm going to be hopping on a plane four or five hour flight in a few days or a few weeks.
So being able to easily save it and then return to it, I love it.
Omer (49:14.820)
Does Pocket grab ebooks as well?
Matt Ekstrom (49:18.500)
If you open it like on a Mac, you can open up like an ebook in PDF form into a URL.
Does that make sense?
Like you can preview it like in Chrome and then you can grab it.
It won't look as good as a typical blog post or article, but yeah, it gets the job done.
Omer (49:39.220)
As long as you can read it, right?
Yeah.
Matt Ekstrom (49:41.580)
Cool.
Omer (49:42.380)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Matt Ekstrom (49:48.940)
I've had some great ideas for B2C apps, particularly around, for whatever reason, grocery shopping.
I don't know why I do it often enough, I guess that's why.
But yeah, I'd be scared to do that though.
I know the B2B space so well.
Jumping into B2C might be difficult.
I've had some good ideas around that.
Omer (50:15.960)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Matt Ekstrom (50:21.640)
This is the answer I always use for this, but I was a child model and actor.
Really not very famous, but I was in Target stores And some magazines, a couple movies.
Omer (50:37.320)
Wow.
I did not know that.
There you go.
Matt Ekstrom (50:41.970)
Very few people do know until now.
Omer (50:46.290)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Matt Ekstrom (50:51.410)
Yeah, I mean, outside of family and my wife and daughter, I think the only time I really give myself to relax is with them and with fantasy football, which is quickly coming to an end.
Other than that, it's, you know, being an early stage.
It's all about the company.
Omer (51:10.540)
So you're in Arizona.
Are you a Cardinals fan?
Matt Ekstrom (51:13.980)
I'm not.
I'm originally from New Orleans.
I'm a diehard Saints fan.
Omer (51:17.100)
Ah, okay.
Matt Ekstrom (51:19.020)
Yeah, yeah.
Omer (51:20.940)
I was going to say the Cardinals are having a tough year this.
This season.
Matt Ekstrom (51:24.300)
They are.
And I kind of like watching the.
You know, it's a newer fan base because they've had some success in the last decade or so.
How they react to a down season like this.
It's.
It's kind of funny coming from where I came from, which.
Which we had dismal seasons for decades.
Pretty interesting.
Cool.
Omer (51:44.830)
Hey, Matt, I'm really glad we.
We kind of managed to.
To finally schedule this, and I appreciate you making the time to do this.
Matt Ekstrom (51:54.590)
Appreciate the invite.
Thank you so much.
Omer (51:56.470)
It's a good conversation.
I think you guys are doing great.
You know, you've got a great story in terms of what you've just done in.
In a very short space amount of time.
And, you know, I definitely will look forward to staying in touch with you and.
And seeing where you.
You guys take the business over the next year or two.
If folks want to find out more about Prospectify, they can go to Prospectify IO and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Matt Ekstrom (52:27.560)
Easiest way is just Matt at Perspectify IO.
Love to answer any questions, whether it's about the app, whether it's about business, whatever.
Yeah.
Sweet.
Omer (52:40.120)
Thanks, man.
It's been a pleasure.
Matt Ekstrom (52:41.960)
Yeah, thank you.
Omer (52:42.760)
Cheers.
