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 strategies and insights to help you build ultra, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This is a story about a couple of data nerds who were playing around with the Twitter and Foursquare APIs.
One day they discovered that there was a lot of social media data about people who were looking to buy something.
So they decided to build a product and sell these signals to automotive brands.
It seemed like a winning idea, but soon they realized that it wasn't.
First, they weren't solving a customer problem.
They were trying to find a market for a cool idea, and that is never easy to do.
Second, they didn't understand how automotive brands work.
Ford isn't going to have a salesperson call you because of your tweet.
After a year of getting nowhere, they pivoted.
They started selling data to help consumer brands run better advertising campaigns.
They started to get customers and revenue, but their product wasn't sticky.
So revenue was unpredictable and customer churn was.
Tukan Das (01:28.790)
Was high.
Omer (01:30.070)
After two more years, they decided to pivot again.
But this time they interviewed many customers and kept searching for a real problem.
They didn't write a single line of code until they were confident that they'd found the right problem.
And that approach paid off.
Today they have a business that generates recurring revenue and they're very close to hitting a million dollars a year.
This is a great story about persistence, and there are some valuable lessons on the importance of understanding your.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of Lead Sift, a platform that mines publicly available social media Data to help B2B businesses generate qualified leads.
Lead Sift was founded in 2012 and to date has raised $1.8 million in funding.
The company is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada.
And so today I'd like to welcome Tukan Das Tukan, welcome to the show.
Tukan Das (02:32.260)
Hey, Omar.
Thank you.
How are you doing today?
Omer (02:34.260)
I'm great.
How are you?
Tukan Das (02:35.780)
Pretty good, thank you.
Omer (02:37.460)
I kind of wanted to ask you about Nova Scotia because I've never met anybody from Nova Scotia and it always kind of like whenever I've seen it in movies, it always seems like there's, you know, there's a cliff and a lighthouse and not many people around.
But it's not really like that.
Tukan Das (02:53.020)
Right.
Which is pretty accurate.
There are a lot of lighthouses, there are a lot of cliffs, and we ride on the Ocean, right?
So.
So that's a pretty fairly accurate description.
But it's a beautiful place.
It's small and really pretty.
Especially summer and fall months are spectacular.
People are super friendly.
Winter months are a little rough, nothing crazy.
And yeah, it's a great place to visit, especially for summer and fall months.
Omer (03:25.930)
So let's get inside your head a little bit.
So what gets you out of bed to work on your business every day?
Do you have a favorite quote or tell us in your own words?
Tukan Das (03:34.760)
I mean, the reason what motivates me to get out of bed and get cranking would be the whole idea of the vision that we had for leadship.
When me and my co founders, we started the business, it was around mining unstructured data.
I would say I should add vast amounts of unstructured data to find meaningful information.
Like, that was the whole thesis or genesis of us starting this product or this business.
And the fact that we are still doing that and mining data to find important pieces of information that businesses can use to help grow their revenue, improve their customer service, or improve their product.
I think that's what motivates us all, our co founders.
And that's what gets me out of the bed.
In terms of quotes, I'm a big sucker for reading up a lot of entrepreneurship books and blogs, and I get here a lot of quotes, but one that particularly stuck with me, and it's not from an entrepreneur, but from this professor called Randy Pausch who wrote this book, Last lecture, he said this something like, we cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
And I think that would be probably my most favorite code.
Omer (04:55.650)
So for people who aren't familiar, can you just explain what you mean by unstructured data?
And secondly, why did you guys get so excited about that idea of mining it?
Tukan Das (05:08.610)
Yeah, yeah, sorry, I should have described it a little bit more.
By unstructured data, I mean anything that is not put in a specific set format.
Like there is no well defined format.
So for example, let's say you're reading Twitter.
It's pretty unstructured because there's no special formatting.
It's only 140 characters.
So anyone can type anything in any way, or Facebook or a blog post, or someone commenting on a forum, or someone writing something on Wikipedia or anything on the web for that matter.
It's all unstructured.
It is not.
It's not something like an XML or JSON format or any of those specific formats.
It's like free text, right?
Anyone can write anything in any way there is no fixed notion of spelling, grammar, symbols, just anything.
So that's what unstructured data means.
So that's what we mean by unstructured.
And the reason it got us excited, why it got that particular thing got excited was our backgrounds.
Myself and my co founders backgrounds are all in computer science and more specifically in information retrieval and natural language processing.
So as sort of data nerds, we love mining and wrangling with data.
And whenever we play with data, it is typically unstructured data.
That's where the, I guess, excitement or the fun comes is you see a stream of unstructured data coming in, can you make sense of it?
And that making sense could be in figuring out the sentiment, figuring out certain political or business trends, in figuring out fraud, in figuring out spam and figuring out buying intent.
It could be anything.
But that's what excites anybody who's doing any kind of data mining, data science.
So that's the reason we got excited with that.
Omer (07:02.400)
So tell me about how you came up with the idea for Lead.
Well, actually, before we get into talking about the idea, tell us just, I kind of gave a little overview of it, but just, you know, tell us in words.
What, what does the product do and who are you trying to solve a problem for?
Tukan Das (07:19.250)
Yeah, so the product is, it is a sales intelligence platform that helps B2B software companies identify target accounts and prospects to go after.
Not based on, you know, demographics or firmographic data, but, but more based on signals of intent and interest.
So that's really what the product does.
What that means is basically if you are selling a B2B software where you have a sales team that is prospecting or reaching out to people.
Our software, if you use our software, you get a list of target accounts delivered directly into your CRM or your marketing automation every day, saying these are the top 20 accounts that you should be prospecting because in the last 24 hours they were showing some signals of intent or interest.
So that's really what the product does.
For now, we are focusing very much towards the B2B SaaS market in North America and UK and typically we are selling into marketers who are basically trying to find qualified leads to nurture or pass on to their sales team to prospect so that they don't spend time researching and doing, you know, figuring out who to talk to when it's basically an automated stream that comes in every day in the morning saying, hey, these are the accounts that you should go after and you just basically prospect into those accounts.
So that's really who we are serving.
Omer (08:42.410)
And so what does a customer need to do to kind of get set up?
Like, what information do they need to provide you before you can start giving them that sort of information?
Tukan Das (08:54.730)
Yeah, that's actually a good question.
So the way we figure out a signal of intent in a B2B setting is actually based on how people are.
Certain prospects are talking to their competitors, complementary technologies, or even industry news or industry event.
So that's how we figure out who's potentially in market.
So for anyone to use our system, our system takes three pieces of input.
First is they have to enter a list of their competitors or basically players in the ecosystem that they want to monitor and track.
And if anyone, anytime they see someone talking to them, that's a signal for them to go after.
The second information that they would have to enter is a list of key industry terms, content topics, or even industry events that they want to monitor and see who's showing interest about those topics or events that they want to get in front of.
And the third thing is they define their buyer Persona in the sense they would say, do you want to go after marketers?
Do you want to go to salespeople or HR people within certain industries or of certain company sites?
So they define that.
And once we have that information, we basically crawl the web, pick up these signals, filter out the noise that don't match their buyer Persona, and keep the ones that match their buyer Persona and send that information over to them every day.
Omer (10:12.680)
Got it.
Okay, so let's talk about kind of the beginning here.
And so where did the idea for this business come from?
Tukan Das (10:21.640)
Yeah, so the idea came from me and one of my co founders.
We were playing around.
And back at that time, I. I believe Twitter had opened up their API.
Couple of foursquare had their API.
So we were just pulling in the data from their API for free, and we were just using it for trend identification.
I believe that's what we were doing just for fun.
Right.
And then one day it struck us as there's so much information about people looking to buy things that they were expressing directly or indirectly from these public forums or public social networks that we thought if we could figure this out by what this person is saying publicly, this could be a great potential target lead or opportunity for a business to sell to these people.
So that's where really the idea came from.
Initially, our focus was when we first started the business in 2012, around November, the idea was very much around helping a car company or a phone manufacturer identify people that were in market for a new car, a new phone or a new credit card, or a new house loan or whatever.
It was very much towards the consumer facing side of businesses.
So that's how the idea started.
Omer (11:41.010)
Okay, so you're playing around with the API as good developers do and you know, so this, this spark of this idea is born.
Did you start to look in the market and, and see if there were already companies out there doing this type of, solving this type of problem?
Tukan Das (12:02.890)
Yes, yes, we, I would say yes or no.
We didn't look do an exhaustive search there.
It was very much like we did talk to a lot of customers, but we didn't do a lot of detailed search.
What we found was the way businesses use my intent to reach out to people is actually through Google.
That's where intent is sort of fulfilled.
If you may.
Google, if you look at it, it is an intent fulfillment engine where basically if you need a new product, you go to Google and you search for it and Google suggests results mixed with sponsored or paid ads that you click and you get there.
So from a business's perspective, businesses always want to bid for a keyword like a car or a phone.
So anytime someone's searching for it, their data is shown, their ad is shown which is fulfilling the intent that the consumer might have had.
But what we found was intent was not generated on Google.
Intent was generated on when people are having conversations.
Intent was generated on people talking about in a blog or a social network.
That's where intent was generated.
And there was no easy way to fulfill that intent.
People would go to Google to fulfill it by typing in result.
But there was no one who was capturing that intent on these platforms back then.
So that's what we found out actually.
Omer (13:33.110)
Okay, and so how did you guys get started in terms of building building the product and were you still sort of at the stage of let's just play around and see where this goes or when you sort of came up with that idea, you, you were kind of, you know, you already had the intent.
You know, let's kind of figure out how to make this into a business.
Tukan Das (13:55.030)
Yeah, so we really didn't have an idea of building it into a business.
What we did was in Halifax there is this thing event that happens every year.
It's called a demo camp where we're basically local startups, once a year go up and get a five minute pitch.
The only thing is you have to have a real working demo.
You cannot just go with a PowerPoint.
So we hacked something together where we were Showing how we could help local businesses in Halifax sell more pizza or more cars or something based on conversations or signals we are picking up within Halifax from people looking to buy a car or a new phone or asking for pizza for example.
So we did the demo there and then just to show off what we had built without thinking of the future too much of building a business.
But then what happened after the demo cam was there were a few people that actually came up and said, is this functional?
Because I have a search engine optimization company and I can use some leads of people looking for needing an SEO consultancy or something like that.
So that's when we thought, you know, what we built for a fun hack project actually has real implications to businesses.
That's when we started thinking about it.
Then what we did was we were all working at that time at other jobs.
We were doing it on the evening and weekend part time sort of.
We went through an accelerated program here in Atlantic Canada where basically they help.
It's not like y Com minute or anything.
There's no funding, there's no equity.
Basically go through it.
It helps you become investor ready.
So once we went through it, we did a lot of customer discovery, customer development, market research and things like that.
And we started to form up the idea.
We came up with the name and all those things and that's when we thought there might be something there.
It might be actually a big business.
And then in 2012, I believe around August, we quit our jobs.
We didn't have any funding or anything.
We just said, I think we should go for it.
I think there's interest and I think there's a big market.
And because any business that you talk to, the number one thing that they need is as leads.
So if you can solve that in a meaningful and scalable way, you have something powerful.
So that's how we started the business.
And fortunately right around that time we secured some venture capital financing and that's how we got started.
Omer (16:16.460)
So I assume there weren't any issues with building the product.
Right.
So that, that was one area of strength for you guys, having all technical co founders.
Tukan Das (16:26.360)
Yes, that's correct.
Yeah.
Omer (16:27.800)
But what about in terms of going out and finding customers?
Like who.
Who was doing that?
Tukan Das (16:33.800)
Yeah, no, definitely.
So this is something that I found is product is again, this is my take on it.
Building a product is more than, you know, building a technology.
I think product needs to have a technology which needs to work, but product is more, more than that.
It a simple way to access and use the technology, positioning it marketing it all of that involves a product.
So we were very good at building the technology.
We didn't have any problem in writing those machine learning algorithms to pick up on intense signals, hosting another web server, putting an interface and everything.
But I think we struggled with product which included actually getting customers feedback and iterating on it.
So the way we decided to go to market was right after we raised capital.
One of the first things that we told our investors were we now need a salesperson.
And the reason being while we have this idea, an mvp, a salesperson can go sell it and while we go back and write code back to our comfort zone.
So that's how we decided.
We said we didn't really understand too much of the marketing funnel, the sales funnel, the whole sales process.
We said let's get a salesperson, senior experienced salesperson who just go sell it.
So that's how we decided to go about selling the product.
We thought the Sales Hindsight is 20 20, but we thought salespersons typically have a Rolodex and they can sell to them or they can reach out to people or people will come know of us and it'll just work like one of the big things product people or tech people always think is, you know, if you build, they will come.
That's, that's so not true.
And that's that I think we, we suffered from that problem.
We thought, you know, we built it and now they're going to come.
Omer (18:35.420)
So, so did you hire a salesperson?
Tukan Das (18:38.060)
Yes, we did.
Omer (18:38.740)
And how did that work out?
Tukan Das (18:41.100)
That, that didn't work out very well.
And the reason that that didn't work out very well was is this our product was not what mature hell.
I mean there wasn't a very well defined product was a glorified MVP.
And where we wanted or expected the salesperson to just go sell it and sell to and even that you are selling to large enterprises.
So we are going after the Fortune 500, Fortune Thousand companies and the big agencies with this half baked product which is just an iteration on an idea and without really testing the market.
And you know when you hire a salesperson you would have traditional compensation model and all those things but it just, that doesn't work because you're, you forget product market fit.
You don't even have a proper product.
You have an idea that you're built on.
So that, that, that did not work out very well and that that created some challenges because, and no, no discredit to the salesperson.
I think even the best salesperson cannot sell it.
Because the product is not there, sellable.
What we needed to do rather was we should have done a more closed loop iteration where we would.
One of us, myself being the CEO probably should have done more.
Customer discovery had a very bare bone product with smaller customers, not like a Ford, but a local dealership.
And iterated on that and then from there on expanded on it.
But we just went straight after these giants and that was a challenge.
Omer (20:12.930)
Yeah, I was going to ask you that.
How did you go from helping to sell more pizza in Halifax to a Fortune 500?
Tukan Das (20:21.090)
So we did some customer discovery.
What we found out was we initially arrived at the demo cam days.
We thought it would be helpful for local businesses.
So we went and spoke to dozens of local businesses and around Nova Scotia.
And what we found out was, well, A, they were not savvy enough.
They didn't, they were not on social networks.
They were not doing, you know, social selling or anything like that.
And so that was a challenge.
So they didn't know how to nurture or do any of those things.
B, they said they would not be able to pay more than $19 a month.
Some would say 19 is even too much.
999 is something that I'll pay nine bucks.
And we quickly realized that's not the market that we could build and scale out.
We would, it would be a completely different value proposition.
So we said, all right, if, if we cannot sell to a local car dealership or a local, you know, pizza store, for example, how about we go to the, to the brands themselves.
So rather than going to a local dealership, let's go to Chrysler for example, or Ford or a Jaguar or whoever and sell to them to the direct VPs of marketing, director of social or brands and these organizations.
And that's what we try to do.
Omer (21:32.920)
Okay, so what did, in terms of the first year of having the product out there, having this salesperson where you're not really kind of getting the results you hope for.
Where were you by the end of the first year in terms of customers and sort of evolution of the product?
Tukan Das (21:54.360)
So end of the first year we had about five customers, one of them being one of the largest electronic manufacturer.
They were using us for selling their new phone, engaging with people and they were very happy.
But obviously five customers in a year is not a lot.
And the sales cycle was brutal because we would go to these large brands and what we found out was 95% of these brands used to move us, direct us over to their agency of record who we would work with and that was a very lengthy process.
So we struggled with that.
And that's when we were like, what can we do to change that?
And these large, like a Ford, for example, would go to Ford and say, hey, we know that there are 20,000 people in North America that are looking to buy a new car today.
We know who they are on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and we can give you those users.
You can then follow up with them on Twitter, for example, or Facebook or Instagram and talk to them and sell the product.
And when we were talking to these large brands, they're like, we don't do these kind of proactive selling on social channels.
We do customer support, but we will never proactively sell out to these people.
Sell to these people.
It'd be very much.
Our whole strategy is ads driven.
We'd put an ad in front of them, build brand awareness or direct response, and then get them to come to our dealership or fill out a request to test drive and stuff like that.
That's the process we go through.
We don't reach out to individually to people and sell a car.
That just never happens.
So that was one of the challenge.
That was one of the big learnings we learned end of the first year.
Omer (23:53.850)
Yeah, it would be interesting if you ever kind of, you know, ended up getting an email from Ford saying, hey, you know, we saw you on Twitter.
Yeah, you want to buy a car?
Tukan Das (24:04.970)
Yep, yep.
So that never works.
And they would never do it.
But to be honest with you, there were few companies that were actually doing it that were using our data to sell.
Sell it that way, do not send you an email.
But they would reach out to you on the platform and engage with you.
And in a very funny and humorous way, like they would say someone was posted, buying a BMW or Audi, and one of their competitors was a client of ours, reached out to them and said, may we suggest you change up the options a little bit?
And that was a very funny way of saying it.
And that guy actually ended up buying from the partner from the third company that reached out to them.
But it was great.
It works.
But the problem, it's not scalable.
If there's 20,000 people talking about buying a new car, there is no way you can have a team of people that are sitting down and just reaching out to them one by one.
That's not the model they operate right.
So that was the big challenge that we faced.
Omer (25:11.410)
Okay, so just kind of recap.
So you're all technical co founders.
You don't have any sales Experience hiring a salesperson didn't really work out like you expected.
And at the end of the first year you had about five customers.
Tukan Das (25:34.050)
That's correct.
Omer (25:34.770)
So things, things weren't looking great at that point.
Tukan Das (25:41.340)
I agree.
Omer (25:42.940)
And so, so eventually you guys ended up pivoting and making, you know, some, some major changes to the, the product and the direction you were going in.
So how long did you continue down this path before you decided to pivot?
Tukan Das (26:01.580)
We continued for two more years and we actually did a mini pivot in there where I guess I used the other word repositioning.
And basically what we did was.
So we figured out when working with these large brands, they would not do one to one sales on any platform.
That's not how their model is very much brand driven.
So we said, all right, how about we do this?
How about rather than changing our pitch and building technology that goes and says, you know, not only do we know there are 20,000 people looking to buy a new car today, we actually know that 11% of them are actually parents that are looking to buy an SUV or a minivan and they love watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix, for example.
So we try to profile that buying audience using technology that we built.
So that's how we sort of repositioned.
And then the play was, why don't you use this data for ad targeting rather than following up with them individually.
So for example, if you have a new smartphone launch and you're targeting the tech audience, so you can say this is the audience that is interested in a smartphone and they're the, what you call the techie Toms or something like that.
So you go after that audience, put an ad in front of them versus if you think, if you are launching a new truck, rather than putting an ad in front of your truck for everybody, why don't you put this truck ad to people who are likely in the market to buy a car and more likely to be interested in truck.
So you put an ad in front of them.
So that's where we pivoted.
So we basically went from one to one social sales to basically market intelligence and highly targeted ad campaigns.
That's where we pivoted to and that we did that for a couple years and it was good our business.
So the number of customers increased, revenue increased a lot.
We got a strategic investment from Salesforce.
So that was good.
And we did that till end of 2015.
So 2014 to 2015, we focused on that.
But even with that, one of the big things that we learned was two Things A, even still, when we were trying to sell into the brands, they would move us to the agency to work with them because that's the model, so we could never directly work with the customer.
And B, the bigger challenge was whenever we worked with agencies or in this space, whenever it's an ad play, it's very campaign driven in the sense they would have a big car launch or a new phone launch or something.
They would leverage our data, run the ad, target ad campaigns, and then they would go away, they'd come back six months later for another event or a campaign to run.
So they would not have a record, we would not have a recurring revenue from these guys.
They would not sign up for an annual contract because they don't know how many campaigns they're going to run.
So they would not pay for it.
So even though we worked with pretty much all the big names out there, household names in North America, it was not a recurring sticky model.
So that, that's what we continued for two years.
Okay, came to this product, what we're doing.
Omer (29:21.830)
Okay, so.
And then what drove the, this, this pivot to where you are today?
Yeah, so you explain, I mean, the recurring revenue, was that really the biggest driver that you were just like, hey, you know, we need to kind of, yeah, we need to have predictable revenue coming in and we need to provide something that is going to solve a continuous problem that people have rather than, you know, yeah, I might have a big campaign next fall and so I'll come back and use you guys then.
Tukan Das (29:55.740)
And that's about it, to be honest with you.
The combination of that and the second thing that you mentioned is that having the same recurring problem, solving it for customers.
So I'll tell you the story, what triggered this for us to pivot.
So Q4 of 2015, we had one of our strongest quarters.
We booked a lot of revenue.
We had like three major companies signed and we had the board meeting and I was super happy and presenting.
At the end of the, at the end of this presentation, I said, you know, this is all great.
You know, this is our growth forecast and all those things.
But one thing that I wonder is my engineering team or my product team not very happy.
They're not motivated and I don't know, what should I do?
And that's when our board chairman, Damian Steele from Omers, he said something very interesting and he said, you know, the problem is not that your team's engineering team is not happy and motivated.
The problem is why are they demotivated?
And it is because you do not have one specific use case for your customers that you're serving.
They all have different requests of data that your engineering team is building.
So you're sort of becoming like a services business where you provide data in an ad hoc fashion.
If you're an engineer, as a software company, you'd like to be working on product that is serving, solving the same problem or similar problem for dozens of customers in a repeated manner.
Not just have ad hoc requests and say, hey, let's build this, let's try that, let's do this.
And that's when sort of the penny dropped for us.
And we are like, oh, shit, this actually makes sense.
That is a problem.
And we looked at our customer base and we looked at the use cases.
They were all over the place.
There was very little overlap in the use case and the data of our intelligence.
So that's when we sort of said, all right, I think at that point, there were three options for us.
To be honest with you, we did not want to be a zombie startup.
We didn't want to just continue be growing like that or be a services business.
That was something that was clear in our mind.
So we said, there are three options.
One is whatever money we have in the bank left, let's give it back to our investors and call it quits.
The second option was there were a couple companies that were interested in acquiring us.
I would say it would be more of an equal hire.
There'd be a nice press, but it's not an outcome that we would be happy with.
And the third option was basically figuring it out, figuring something out with the money left in bank and give it a go.
Omer (32:41.020)
How much money did you have left in the bank?
Tukan Das (32:42.860)
We had one year's worth of Runway.
Omer (32:44.660)
Okay.
Tukan Das (32:45.640)
Yeah, that was early 2016 or end of.
So that's what we had.
So we had money till December 2016.
And we basically said, you know, we are going to go with the third option.
That's what I.
We basically told internally and we agreed that, you know, we have one fight left, so let's go for it.
We asked the investors, and thankfully all our investors unanimously said, don't worry about it, go for it.
Let's figure, let's see, you know, so that's what we did.
And then we went about doing building the business the right way.
Meaning what we did was rather than building a product first and hoping people would come to us, what we did was we took the mentality is like, we're not going to build anything.
We're going to first do discovery, figure out if there's a need for it, if they will pay for it.
And only then we will build incrementally.
So what we did was we interviewed 80 marketers, brand marketers that we were working with, and said, hey, this is what we are thinking of building because around the same space, would you use it?
And what we gathered from the data was that whatever solution we came up with or suggested it was a nice to have.
They were like, yeah, this is good.
You know, it's not, it's not really a pain point.
That's what they were screaming out at us indirectly.
And so we were sort of lost at that point.
We didn't know because we were only thinking of the consumer facing world, right?
We were always thinking, how can I help the brand manager at Pepsi or head of social at Chrysler, stuff like that.
We're not thinking it from anywhere else because that's the world we were living in.
But then fortunately, in end of December, January, we had a BDR person as an intern whose job was to do outbound prospecting for us.
He was basically building a list, reaching out to people to book meetings for myself and our salesperson.
And I was just chatting with him one afternoon and I said, man, what are some of the challenges you are facing?
Is there something that you, what does your day look like?
Then he went to the board and he drew this big pie chart where he said these are his jobs that he does.
These are the pains he has with doing those jobs and these are the gains he can potentially have.
And that's when the light bulb went off on for us and we were like, huh, so this guy has this problem.
What if we solve that problem for him first with our technology?
So rather than finding people who are looking to buy a car, if he could find out people that are looking to buy a specific software, B2B software, that would be helpful.
So that was our hypothesis.
And then what we did was we did it in a very data driven way this time.
So we said we'll interview 40 or 50 people, I forgot the number.
And if 80% of them say that this is a pain point for them only, then we'll go to the next step.
So we interviewed 50 people and definitely 80% of them said yes, getting relevant targeted leads every day for them is the number one pain point for them.
So that was the first check.
Then what we did was, all right, now we have gotten cleared of the first thing.
Let's go back to some of those people and let's get three of them to sign a contract to pay a certain value for our services if we did it for them.
So we went back to them and said, we have an early prototype we have built and we'd like you to pay a fee to try it out and pay a very nominal fee.
It was just really like, just to show that they have skin in the game.
The dollar value was not important.
So we got actually three people saying, yeah, we'll try it out and we'll pay you X amount of dollars.
But the scary thing is we actually haven't had built in anything at that point.
But the thesis was we have a solution that would give them every day 10 leads up.
Up to 10 leads.
I remember up to 10 leads in a spreadsheet emailed to them every day and they pay and they signed up.
So that's, that's when we said, you know, this is, this is looking interesting.
We didn't know if this was it, but it was more promising than what we had before.
So we signed up three customers, but the problem was we didn't have a product.
So we basically did it manually.
Six, seven people.
And all of us spent all day, all the time manually going through blogs, forums, social networks, groups, job posting sites.
I don't even remember to pick up on signals and manually give them these clients the leads delivered to them every day via a spreadsheet for a few months.
Omer (37:11.010)
This must be a very counterintuitive thing for any developer to do or even want to do.
Tukan Das (37:18.250)
Hundred percent, 100%.
But here's the crazy thing though.
All our developers were happy doing this then they were building things on a whim.
So one of the challenges that we had faced before is, and I'm pretty sure we are not the only company, I'm pretty sure other companies have had the same problem.
When you have a bunch of good, smart, smart engineers and data scientists, I would go on a sales call in our last product or our head of sales would go on a product and say, this customer or prospect said if we only added this source or if we added this comparative graph, they would buy it and we would hype up the engineering team and they would spend two months building that, adding this new source and all that fancy widget.
And then after two months when we went back to the customer, the customer like, yeah, that's great, thanks for building it, but we don't have the budget, let's talk next year.
So that was soul crushing for our engineering team.
So they were happier doing something manually even though it sucked for them.
But they Were happier doing manually, knowing that we are learning how customers are going to use it.
Because if you knew how they would use it, we can always automate that manual step.
And that's exactly what we did.
That's exactly the process we went through.
Where in March when we first started selling this product, 2016, it was 100% manual.
By June it was probably 70% manual, 30% automated.
And by November it was 100% automated.
So they were happy, even though it was a tough thing for them to do, but they were happier doing this in an incremental manner, knowing they would anything that they built would be directly used by customers.
Not.
Not just something I thought would be cool.
So, so that was, that was the journey.
Omer (39:08.530)
What was, what was different about this product that you built this time around?
Because from what you're describing, it doesn't sound that different from the product that you were building in year one, which was really about okay, let's mine social media data and help generate leads for people.
So how was the product different?
And also was it a different set of customers that you were focusing on that helped you to make this shift?
Tukan Das (39:38.300)
Yeah, 100%.
So the big difference with this product was we built this new product, the B2B Sales Intelligence.
As with us being the number one customer, we were the first customer and till date we are the biggest customer of this, this product.
So we would depend on this every day.
Because this was a pain point we had in the last product where we were providing marketing intelligence and audience, buyer audience for large brands.
We were so disconnected from it.
Right.
Like I didn't really care about the higher consumer trends who are in market to buy a new car or something like that.
So that was the big single biggest difference.
This was solving a pain point that we had every single day.
Secondly, the beauty of it is, and that's why we kept the name, kept the name of the company, the same lead sift was we were sifting through data, vast amounts of unstructured data to find out signals of intent.
The big difference being previously it was more for consumer facing products versus this time it was more for software products.
And there's two interesting key differences here.
First is people talking about a consumer facing product, whether they need a new phone or a car or a house or even a pizza, they explicitly talk about it.
Or there were more direct signals of intent.
So they would say, no, I'm going car shopping.
So that is a great signal saying, all right, this person is definitely the market.
And from different attributes we could figure out what Kind of car and all that, those things.
But in a B2B setting, the challenge was clients never say, oh, I need a new marketing automation software ever.
No one talks like that.
Right.
So the way to pick up on these signals were very, very interesting.
And that's when we looked at competitors.
So we had to change the technology.
The thesis was the same.
It's still mining for intent, but it's how you mine for intent that's different.
And B, what we found out was in a B2C setting, there is no nurturing.
Pizza stores don't nurture your leads, or a car dealership, they don't.
That model doesn't happen.
They will not send you nurture campaigns or stuff like that.
But in a B2B, specifically B2B software, lead nurturing is very well known, and there are very sophisticated methods of doing it through marketing automation and all those things.
So they were already doing nurturing.
Whenever you talk about lead nurturing, it's always B2B.
So it was way better fit for them than a car dealership or even Jaguar, for example, or a Ford.
So that was a big difference of this product, both the technology and the market that we were going after.
Omer (42:24.010)
Okay, great.
So it was like three years of basically learning how to build the business the right way and the product the right way.
Tukan Das (42:31.940)
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Omer (42:33.540)
Okay, so this time, you know, you're doing the customer development, you're getting good feedback from people.
You've got some people to, you know, pay you and put some.
Get some skin in the game as you described, and then you guys start building the product and transition from being 100% manual to gradually 100% automated.
Tukan Das (43:01.030)
Yep.
Omer (43:01.510)
And more importantly, as you said, you are now using the product yourself because this was a, you know, obviously a powerful way for you to generate leads.
So.
So when you, when you, for yourself, you generated these leads, what were you doing to go and acquire more customers for lead sift?
Tukan Das (43:23.350)
Yeah, so it was a pretty straightforward process, our process.
What we realized was we didn't have a lot of branding and awareness, so there wasn't a lot of inbound.
And we didn't have a lot of budget to be buying ad campaigns or anything like that.
So we had to rely on the outbound process ourselves because we were sort of starting from scratch.
And the process was pretty straightforward.
I was the only sales guy.
And basically every day at 9am Eastern in my inbox came a list of target accounts that our system collected from the past 24 hours.
By looking at people that were talking to our Competitors or talking about account based marketing, lead generation, appointment booking and outbound and all those things.
There are a few keywords and things that we were tracking.
So basically I got that list.
What I did was I cleaned that list a little bit, make sure that everything looks good, uploaded them into a tool called Outreach IO, had a personalized outbound email sequence where we basically crafted the message to be super relevant with the customer.
We basically send out these emails and our sales process is we send out these emails, we book meetings from there, from the meetings, we do demos and from the demos, typically within one or two calls, we close the deals.
Obviously we don't close every one, but most of them close within three to four weeks of us having the first touch.
Omer (44:50.910)
Okay, got a, got a very important question for you here.
Tukan Das (44:53.710)
Sure.
Omer (44:54.270)
Most technical people, most developers, myself included, would much rather prefer to do inbound marketing.
Just let's, let's figure out how to do content marketing, let's build a blog, let's do all of these things so we don't have to go and have a sales conversation with anybody.
Tukan Das (45:13.230)
Yeah, yeah.
Omer (45:14.350)
So why were you willing to do that?
Tukan Das (45:20.410)
Yeah, well, one thing though, Omar, I fundamentally believe is you find greatness when you're out of your comfort zone, when you're uncomfortable.
So that's one thing I think that's kind of cliched, but that's true.
Right.
So I had to get out of my comfort zone of doing sales, doing demos, getting rejected, and then going back again and focused on following up and all those.
So that's one.
The second most important thing is, and I believe in inbound and I think HubSpot and those guys are great.
But the reality is if you are an early stage startup without a lot of name or branding behind it, you can keep writing quality content till the cows come home.
You're not gonna get that kind of lift in your inbound traffic.
It just doesn't happen unless you're spending money on distributing it.
You can create all the content you want and you will get inbound, don't get me wrong, but not at the level that you want to get to this customer discovery and fast iteration.
So you still need to create content for customer education and all that, but you still need to find a way to get in front of a lot more customers, having chats with them.
So that's why for us, and I think for a lot of B2B SaaS companies in the early stage, they definitely rely on outbound prospecting.
Mind you, there are some companies where the price point is like $5 a month, right?
It's a self serve option.
In that case, yes, you don't need the sales.
I mean, obviously you will never have a sales process.
People will come in, fill out a form and go.
But in our case or in any cases where you have a salesperson doing a demo, Right.
You cannot just rely on inbound, especially in the early stages when you're as well known as a HubSpot or a marketo or whoever.
I mean, at that point, yeah, sure, you have so much traffic, so much brand awareness, events, PR and all that inbound is going to happen.
But early on I think you'd have to do targeted outbound prospecting.
Omer (47:19.360)
Okay, so tell me a little bit about where the business is today in terms of any numbers that you can show.
Share with us.
Tukan Das (47:25.770)
Yeah, so the business is going really good.
So it's been about 17 months that we've been working on this new product.
So we started from scratch.
We are at about 105 customers.
Some of the fastest growing SaaS businesses are customers of ours.
So starting from Looker, Vidyard, Mulesoft, Yext, some of the big names, they're all customer of our being successful.
We are growing the business.
I would say last I saw was about 13% month over month.
We are growing the business.
We have one salesperson.
We are growing the sales team.
We want to increase.
So we have sort of figured out a repeatable scalable model for our sales.
So we want to grow that.
We are growing that.
We are very close to reaching the, I guess, elusive 1 million annual revenue mark.
And because our team has been pretty lean, we are actually very close to profitability, which is also a great point.
So yeah, that's what the business is.
Omer (48:28.620)
Awesome.
Tukan Das (48:29.980)
Thank you.
Omer (48:30.780)
Yeah, no, that's really.
I love the story that, especially the fact that you went through a process for three years to get to the right business and the right product.
Tukan Das (48:44.240)
Product.
Omer (48:44.480)
And it's, it's so often so easy to, you know, kind of give up when things aren't kind of going the way you want them to go.
And I think it's, it's kind of why when I ask people about, you know, one of the kind of most important attributes of a entrepreneur, people will talk about, you know, persistence or grit or the ability to kind of push through these times.
Because as someone once said to me, I said that a lot of the times when you're about to give up, you're just around the corner from getting to where you need to.
But most of us Will will give up before we get there.
Tukan Das (49:28.060)
I 100% agree and I've been fortunate that I have had great co founders and team members that have, that have sort of believed in the vision and stuck around and supportive investors.
So I still think there's a long, long way to go.
But like the way we are building the business, I am proud of the way we are building the business.
We are building sort of like a brick by brick and we are setting one customer after another, learning from it, changing the product, iterating on it, taking it to the customers and it feels like we are building a real business, not a fluke.
Omer (50:04.200)
One quick question on that is how much does somebody need to be selling their SaaS software for it to make sense for them to use somebody like Lead Sift?
Tukan Das (50:17.160)
So what we have seen is, so our sweet spot is companies that have their annual contract value between $5,000 to $60,000.
Like that's a sweet spot.
If your deal size is that much, it makes sense for them to do outbound prospecting.
Like dedicated team of people that are reaching out, booking meetings and then doing demos and all that.
And as a result to optimize that process and automate that process, they should use leadset.
So that's the way we look at it.
And yeah, so any, basically if anybody is doing any form of outbound process prospecting means their deal size is not like $10, it's around 3 to $5,000 annually.
We can definitely help them.
Omer (51:05.410)
Okay, great.
All right, let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Tukan Das (51:13.570)
I'll try.
Omer (51:14.290)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Tukan Das (51:18.690)
It was very early on I received an advice from one of her investors and advisor.
He said, you know, you will get a lot of advice from a lot of people, but end of the day it's your call.
So don't let anyone run the business.
You make the right call.
Take all the advice.
You know, you take it and soak it in.
But make the call final call yours.
Don't listen to anyone else.
You have to make the right call.
Omer (51:43.790)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Tukan Das (51:47.390)
I would highly recommend the Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
I think it has a lot of real life advice and examples from how difficult running a business is and from the front row seat.
I think it's one of the best books I've read actually.
Omer (52:07.530)
Yeah.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Tukan Das (52:13.530)
I think there's two.
One is persistence.
Second is empathy.
I think you need both of them.
You need to be ruthlessly persistent about what you want to achieve and not give up.
And at the same time, you need to be empathetic towards your team members and every other stakeholder.
So I think those are the two things I would say.
Omer (52:34.810)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Tukan Das (52:40.010)
So I use Slack.
That's a good tool.
And I was using sticky notes really to do what I needed to do.
I've switched now to Trello to keep track of things that I have to get done in a day.
Omer (52:55.350)
Great.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Tukan Das (53:02.470)
I always come up with ideas, but because I am doing leads, all my ideas are related to my field and what we are doing.
There are a few interesting things.
One of them particularly that we are looking at very closely is so right now we help companies identify target accounts to go after.
But let's say I'm selling to Pepsi for example, and I'm selling into marketing within Pepsi.
What if there is a way to score the people within the marketing department of Pepsi and saying this is the person that you should reach out first within Pepsi compared to the other person based on some, some, some attributes.
So people do lead scoring.
Lead scoring is very much at the level of an account.
What if you could do lead scoring at the level of a person?
And that's what we are looking at actually.
Omer (53:51.170)
That's interesting.
All right, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Tukan Das (53:59.250)
I don't, I don't know.
What, what would be a fun fact?
Interesting fact is I am originally from, from India.
I don't know if that's interesting.
I'm a you huge fan.
I probably.
I'm the biggest fan of Jon Stewart and that's, that's an interesting fact.
Jon Stewart fan.
Omer (54:15.850)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Tukan Das (54:19.450)
Lately it has been hiking.
So I've been.
Because the weather's nice and Nova Scotia has so many beautiful trails and hikes.
I've been, I've been doing that a lot.
Omer (54:29.690)
Awesome.
Tukant, thank you for, for joining me today.
I enjoyed the conversation and I loved hearing your stories story on how you guys kind of started from one day playing around with the Four Square and Twitter APIs to where you are today and the sort of the roller coaster ride that you've had.
Now, if people want to find out more about Lead Sift, they can go to lead sift.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Tukan Das (54:58.950)
They can send me an email@tdos.com that's tdaseadsev.com My Twitter handle is tdas on Twitter and on LinkedIn.
Just search for Tukan Das T U K A N D A s Happy to chat with you guys.
If there is any advice or feedback that I can give to you guys around sales process or outbound prospecting in an early stage or even in a mid stage, I'm always there to help.
Omer (55:29.750)
Awesome.
That's great.
Thanks man.
It's been a pleasure.
Tukan Das (55:32.950)
Thank you.
Thank you, Omar.
Omer (55:34.230)
Cheers.
