200 Buyers Said No. His AI SaaS Still Hit $1M ARR in 6 Months.

David Zhu [00:00:00]:
And we're saying, hey, please replace your entire Salesforce stack, the entire thing that powers your revenue motion. Just throw it aside and we'll take care of it. You know, the first two, 300 people, they're like, David, are you batshit crazy? Like, why do we do that? We say for like, 12 months, it was just darkness.

David Zhu [00:00:23]:
It was absolute darkness. You gotta figure out a way as a founder to win by not playing the game that others play and are afraid to lose.

Omer Khan [00:00:31]:
Hey, welcome to The SaaS Podcast. I'm Omer Khan, and this is a show where I sit down with real founders and dig into how they actually built their SaaS and AI companies. I've had more than 500 of these conversations now, and I put out a new one every week to help you build and grow your startup.

Omer Khan [00:00:47]:
If that sounds useful, hit subscribe or check out saasclub.io to learn more. My guest today is David Zhu, co founder and CEO of Reevo, an AI platform that replaces most of the tools a sales team uses. David's an engineer and an introvert, and by his own account, he was terrible at sales.

Omer Khan [00:01:06]:
But Reevo still hit a million in ARR about six months after its first paying customer without spending a dollar on paid marketing. In this interview, David breaks down why he kept building the all in one product but still stopped selling it that way.

Omer Khan [00:01:22]:
How deals got closed when he wasn't the closer, and why the startups that happily signed up were false validation, plus his warning about paying a vendor to find customers for you. He says it's like having a baby and not raising the kid. So I hope you enjoy it. All right, David, welcome to the show.

David Zhu [00:01:42]:
Thanks for having me.

Omer Khan [00:01:44]:
My pleasure. So tell us about Reevo. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the big problem you're hoping to solve?

David Zhu [00:01:51]:
Reevo stands for revenue evolution. And our mission is to help elevate Salescraft. And that's our first mission. But over multiple missions, we'll look to elevate marketing, craft, customer success craft. But really, it's the collective that we call go to market or value distribution.

David Zhu [00:02:10]:
And so in the olden days, when a company has to go do distribution, they usually procure a tech stack like a cp, CRM, a call, recording, prospecting, database, et cetera. And you stitch together a dozen different tools to try to do the job. And I was a culprit, and I was a victim to that advice as well.

David Zhu [00:02:30]:
And it was really freaking hard. The point Solutions created data silos that don't really talk to each other. CRM that's supposed to have the source of truth doesn't actually have the insight that you can trust. And so two and a half years ago I decided to set out to build this thing the right way.

David Zhu [00:02:46]:
And given my engineering background and having run go to market prior for two years, I think it was a perfect, you know, it was a perfect product founder fit moment with the tailwind of AI that enables all of this to be true.

David Zhu [00:02:59]:
And so in tldr, Reevo is a AI native, vertically integrated go to market platform that replaces everything you need in your sales journey. Whether it's pipeline generation, deal closing, deal progression in the middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, deal upsells and managerial coaching and forecasting reporting everything you need in one platform.

Omer Khan [00:03:29]:
So you're going in and saying to customers, use Reevo instead of these four or five products that you're using right now and probably other products that you don't even have today that you probably should be using.

David Zhu [00:03:46]:
Well, yeah, so kinda the sort of pitch and the positioning depends on the maturity of the customer. Right? As with any ICP or any segment that anybody wants to sell to, there's a spectrum of willingness to adopt new technologies.

David Zhu [00:04:03]:
Some are going to be a lot more AI native and have the appetite to be on the bleeding edge. Others are a little bit more hesitant to adopt a new thing.

David Zhu [00:04:10]:
And so you know, for, for us when, when I set out to build this compound startup called Reevo vertically integrated, I was very dogmatic about the architectural approach, having to build and, and building for the system record the platform layer, then the workflow layer, then the agentic layer in that specific order. We've built it all now.

David Zhu [00:04:30]:
And while I'm super dogmatic on that architectural approach, I was equally flexible on the commercial side and being able to meet the customer where they are, whether it's a full rip in place and you're just tired of your entire stack or you say, you know what, like for example, Snapchat's one of our customers, there's no way they're going to move off hubs, you know, HubSpot, Salesforce, they don't feel comfortable it's a publicly traded company, but they might be interested and they were to leverage our top of the funnel prospecting to be the number one primary provider for enablement or for, for enrichment.

David Zhu [00:05:09]:
And so you got to meet the customer where they are. Or if you're like a hot AI native startup with a 26 seats like Saris AI, their CRO is very AI forward. And they said, you know what, we're going to decide to rip the salesforce outreach, Apollo and a bunch of a dozen of other solutions.

David Zhu [00:05:26]:
And we're just going to onboard onto you because you're technology enables us to be onboarded in a matter of five, six, seven business days instead of historically. Usually onboarding takes about five, six, seven weeks.

David Zhu [00:05:39]:
And so the time to value is only feasible to be this short if you invest in architecturally the right pattern upfront like we did.

Omer Khan [00:05:49]:
Give us a sense of the size of the business, where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team.

David Zhu [00:05:55]:
Yeah, so we started a little bit contrarian thing to do, but most companies will start with one or two founders and then they sort of build their way up. We started with a founding team of 14.

Omer Khan [00:06:07]:
What?

David Zhu [00:06:08]:
Yeah, founding team of 14 with 12 engineers staff, senior staff level engineers. And this is only feasible because we have had multiple exits prior and we built this talent dense network of entrepreneurs that want to go and swing for the fences. And so that was already a very contrarian start.

David Zhu [00:06:29]:
And since then, two and a half years later, we've been very intentional about preserving that talent density. And we've expanded to 105 employees, 110 employees, 70% of which are still engineering product design. And we are, we haven't come, we haven't GA'd yet.

David Zhu [00:06:45]:
We're aiming for GA next year, Q1, but we've come out of stealth earlier this year and since then we're serving hundreds of customers doing millions of revenue and customers love us. They stay on the platform, they retain, they expand and they're, it's all pretty much organic. And they're introducing, referring us to their friends.

David Zhu [00:07:07]:
We've spent zero dollars on marketing, branding and so everything is very organic right now.

Omer Khan [00:07:15]:
And I think you've raised what, like 90 million so far?

David Zhu [00:07:19]:
I think publicly? Yeah. I don't remember off the top of my head what publicly reported, but whatever the public figure you see is what we publicly announced. I think publicly we announced 80 million total at a public 500 post valuation is what I recall.

Omer Khan [00:07:44]:
Okay, okay. So your background is engineering. All right. And we were talking earlier about, you know, our personality styles and you said, hey, I'm an introvert and you don't strike me as the kind of guy who would then say, oh, I'm going to go and build out a sales platform,.

David Zhu [00:08:04]:
Sure.

Omer Khan [00:08:04]:
And I'm going to go and sell this thing. So just tell me a little bit about your background and what was the aha moment for this idea.

David Zhu [00:08:12]:
Yeah, well, I think these things, a lot of who we are, you have to give credit to the genetics and to our parents and to the environment, nature and nurture in a sense. I've always been a builder and entrepreneur, even before I realized it. And my parents were entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur.

David Zhu [00:08:32]:
He was a founder of companies. He was on a founding team of large companies that is, that are very well known as well.

David Zhu [00:08:39]:
And so that was just sort of always in my DNA, even, you know, as early as 2 years old, like I had no idea what the hell, you know, he and his co founders were doing. But it wasn't until later on that I realized it's called entrepreneurship. The energy level, right?

David Zhu [00:08:52]:
The ability to be in the same room with people, turn left, turn right and start jamming and sort of, you know, riff on ideas and build upon it via osmosis. That energy is infectious. And so I think that was really what sort of got me to do what I do. Right.

David Zhu [00:09:09]:
I'm a Bay Area native, grew up here elementary, middle school, high school, College, and then 16 years in entrepreneurship here with a two year stint in Miami. But yeah, to your point, I'm, I think academically, by training, I'm an engineer. But I think mindset matters more than what you learn in school.

David Zhu [00:09:29]:
I think my mindset is one of being a value creator. And I think that all of us have this font of ideas. You have ideas, I have ideas. Your listeners are all founders who have ideas and their friends have ideas. And I think in the age of AI, how do we help elevate human agency?

David Zhu [00:09:48]:
What is human agency? I think human agency to me is the ability to bring ideas to life. And so that was sort of the backbone of my entire career. Reevo is my fifth startup, but my previous four startups are all in different spaces.

David Zhu [00:10:05]:
So it's not like I accumulated the domain knowledge of one sector or one space and then built upon it subsequently. I wanted to innovate. I wanted to do intentionally things that I haven't done before because I wanted to innovate. And innovation, by definition goes hand in hand in failure.

David Zhu [00:10:20]:
If you know something's going to work, it's not innovation, it's repetition. And I'm simply not in the business of doing repetition. Maybe others are, but I'm not. And so Reevo is go to market for the first act. And the reason for that was simple.

David Zhu [00:10:34]:
Right before Reevo, I was in Miami with our KB colleague Keith Raboy, running this company called Open Store. And I rent the tech side of things. Obviously. But you know, shortly after joining, Keith was like, hey, why don't you run growth as well? Which encapsulated our B2B side of marketing, sales, pricing. Basically go to market.

David Zhu [00:10:57]:
And you know, being the engineer it was, I was like, you know, how hard can go to market be right? It's like just sales. If I can do engineering, if I can, you know, build platforms of that support tens of millions of customers and doordash, for example, you know, go to market. Must be simple.

David Zhu [00:11:12]:
But it wasn't simple. I had to procure a Salesforce for CRM, HubSpot for marketing prospect and databases, a dozen of them to try to stitch together insights. And at the end of the day, you know, he would be asking on Sunday afternoon, how's our sales doing? Who's our highest sale? Who's. Who's your highest performing seller?

David Zhu [00:11:31]:
I'm like, I know I can't answer that question because my system doesn't tell me. And I ended up procuring, you know, Prof. Services HubSpot consultant to try to thread all this together. And nine months in you still couldn't make it work. And so what did I end up doing being an engineer?

David Zhu [00:11:47]:
Well, I deployed my engineering team to go solve the problem and so we built in house systems to try to thread it together. And towards the end it was like why am I doing this when everyone else, when every other company is suffering the same problem I have?

David Zhu [00:12:03]:
And so I set out along with folks at KB to build the platform that we all wanted, that no one had, which is, which require the perfect timing of having something like the AI revolution as tailwind.

David Zhu [00:12:20]:
Someone who has a technical and platform depth that I have and my team has and the paying of running go to market firsthand. So it's a, it's a practical paying and practical domain knowledge instead of a theoretical one that you just read in the books.

David Zhu [00:12:37]:
So it was sort of a perfect composition of everything coming together that caused Reevo to exist.

Omer Khan [00:12:44]:
Tell me about the decision to go stealth for the first couple of years. Why did you decide to do that?

David Zhu [00:12:51]:
Yeah, well, so like I mentioned earlier, Reevo is a compound company. It's a vertically integrated play in effect since inception the company. It was very intentional that I wanted to build. What's the best analogy here? I wanted to build a gigafactory of Tesla that produces any model versus build a specific model.

David Zhu [00:13:14]:
And so I wanted to build the infrastructure that produces outcome here. Right, so that's sort of a crude analogy here. And when you build for something that is a vertically integrated platform. It is a requires massive breadth to cover.

David Zhu [00:13:28]:
Because when you claim yourself as all in one and you're missing the capability, you can't claim you're all in one. You're a fake. All in one, right? And then when you don't have the depth to back up each of the components that you offer, what are you? You're just the jack of all trades, master of none.

David Zhu [00:13:43]:
And nobody wants to work on a platform that's jack of all trades, master of none. And so you gotta actually build for the breadth of the workflows that customers want.

David Zhu [00:13:52]:
So whether it's pipeline generate, deal progression, or bom funnel and renewal, you, you got to have all that covered and you got to figure out how you can build the delightful, the most delightful capabilities across each one. And so that's a very wide build. So it's a compound startup.

David Zhu [00:14:09]:
In reality, it's literally building like 20 companies in one. Now the benefit of doing so is that you can build it on a shared data architecture, data model, semantic layer, and memory layer that allows users to compound. And because it's so wide, it takes more time to build versus a point solution route.

David Zhu [00:14:28]:
You identify, you know, one pain point. You build for one thing over the course of, you know, you vibe code a thing over three, three weeks. You build a botless recorder, for example, and you say, hey, look at me, I have a botless recorder. Go ahead and use it.

David Zhu [00:14:41]:
And you spend material amount of money on marketing to make it fly. But there's no durability. There was no product, there's no product mode, there's no, you know, there's nothing there. Excite for a little temporary arbitrage of capability that the market doesn't have that people want. You still need that moat later on.

David Zhu [00:15:02]:
So that's why we built heads down for two years in absence of market validation and then came out. And in the last three quarters, we sold to learn because you don't want to just build in isolation because that becomes a theoretical exercise. We're not a lab or not a research lab. Right. Or a vertical AI company applied.

David Zhu [00:15:24]:
And so that's why we came out nine months ago, onboarded hundreds of customers. And while we could have done so in a design partnership route or beta customer route, we wanted to make sure that the feedback we're getting were actually the most credible.

David Zhu [00:15:39]:
And the best way to do that is if the customer that is providing feedback is paying you for the service you're providing. So that's that. And we're continuing to compound our execution machine internally to accelerate faster and to cover marketing. All of marketing has to be covered.

David Zhu [00:15:59]:
All of customer success and support has to be built into Reevo as well. And so we'll need to build that over the next 12 months.

Omer Khan [00:16:06]:
So when did you land your first customer?

David Zhu [00:16:10]:
I think first customer, paying customer was January, mid January this year.

Omer Khan [00:16:16]:
Okay, so prior to that you said you want to get feedback from somebody who's paying you. How are you making decisions for the two years prior to that when you didn't have paying customers about what to build or what to invest in?

David Zhu [00:16:33]:
For sure, for sure. I would say for the first year and three quarters, we built in isolation, piggybacking on our domain knowledge of the space. And so this is where once again, everything goes back to talent density.

David Zhu [00:16:48]:
You know, you can have the most amazing engineering team, but if they don't have the domain knowledge of the space of rev Ops, specifically of the pain that Rev Ops go through, of the pain that VPs of revenue and CROs and AES and BDRs and STRs go through on a day in, day out basis.

David Zhu [00:17:04]:
You can't really build a thing in opinionated manner to solve for the future world. And so how we solved for that initially was we brought in the best operators, the best rev Ops leaders, the best sellers, the best SDRs. And we really leveraged their domain knowledge as product managers, not go to market, but as product managers.

David Zhu [00:17:28]:
Because ultimately we're here to build a sales platform for sellers to sell. Right. And so the sort of notion of revoir being efficient and effective on Reevo itself has to be the first order bit. That's true.

David Zhu [00:17:42]:
And so you want the best operators in the industry to put in their brain to feel like Reevo is their brainchild and that the product is one that they want to shell from the rooftop to every single one of the friends. And that's what we did for the first seven quarters.

Omer Khan [00:18:02]:
And that first customer in January, how did you find them?

David Zhu [00:18:08]:
Well, it was a really interesting story. The first customer I actually met at a aws conference, Gen AI conference, I think it was Q4 last year in Seattle. And we've now grown to be friends. And his name is Dan and he runs a really dope startup called Maritech.

David Zhu [00:18:32]:
And they're like a 25 or 30 seater on our platform now. But the story goes, every year AWS Gen AI invites or accepts 40 of the hottest Gen AI companies into the program out of thousands of applicants. And so we were two that were accepted. And during our Summit time together.

David Zhu [00:18:56]:
We were pitching to each other the, the thing, our thing. And he comes to me, you know, at the end of one day at the elevator and he's like, hey David, love your pitch of consolidating all in one.

David Zhu [00:19:09]:
We're about to invest in a go to market motion and we love to build invest our go to market future on your platform. I was like, really? You, you haven't seen anything yet. It's like it doesn't matter. Believe the vision and I believe in you. And you know, and that's that. That was it.

David Zhu [00:19:29]:
We onboarded them in January, gave a very steep discount and I was just. And they've been happily expanding usage. They actually flew over last week and this week to be in our office to continue collaborating, share feedback and those are the best types of partnerships where we grow together. We give more than we take.

David Zhu [00:19:52]:
So that was a beautiful story.

Omer Khan [00:19:55]:
That is. And it seems almost too easy. Tell me what.

David Zhu [00:20:02]:
That's a successful story. There are many. Look, the size of the aspiration doesn't change the difficulty of it and so might as well swing for the fences. But that said, it's difficult, right? And often in Silicon Valley, bi coastal there's so much echo chamber of folks only showing their successes and not enough their vulnerability and blemishes.

David Zhu [00:20:25]:
And you know, the hard reality is that I had to take this approach of being heads down because you know, I'm not one of this, I'm not one of those founders that's an ex CRO where you know, I come out and be like I'm doing the startup and then use my product and you know, everyone will say great, sign me up even though there's no product.

David Zhu [00:20:46]:
Right. I don't have that type of pull. What I do have is the tech poll. I can assemble the best engineers, the best team and the best technical minds to bring together the best product. But I don't have that distribution advantage and I know it. And it's okay. We play towards our strengths.

David Zhu [00:21:01]:
You got to figure out a way as a founder to win by not playing the game that others play and are afraid to lose. Because if you do the same shit other people are doing and it's not an area where you super spike on on, you're going to lose.

David Zhu [00:21:13]:
And so you know, having a go to market brand myself is not my spike area. Right. And I imagine a lot of first time founders don't have the brand to piggyback on. And frankly this is my time being a first, you know, founder, CEO. I don't have a brand. Right. Especially in the go to market space.

David Zhu [00:21:31]:
And so I tried to find paying customers early and I tried, you know, know doing the code outbound thing and asking nearbound friends like, hey, I'm building this thing. Would you give feedback, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

David Zhu [00:21:45]:
But then what ends up happening is the mom's test fallacy happens for those, you know, it's the mom's test is this sort of. It's this. It's really nice book I. I suggest, I recommend to all founders is it's teaches you how to ask discovery questions in a manner that's non leading and so you can get valuable feedback.

David Zhu [00:22:04]:
But I didn't know that early on I was just going in with excitement. I was like, I'm building this thing. What do you think? And they're like, oh yeah, I like it. I was like, great, will you pay.

Omer Khan [00:22:17]:
At least you asked, will you pay? It's like sometimes you don't even want to ask that question. Right. It's like it's nicer just to leave just feeling positive and high and just to fear that they're going to say no when you do ask them that question.

David Zhu [00:22:32]:
Yeah. So nobody wants to hear that their baby's ugly. But the hard reality is the thing that we're building early on, our baby was pretty ugly and I had to learn it the hard way that you just kind of have to keep your head down and build and mistakes helps you learn.

David Zhu [00:22:50]:
And we made plenty of mistakes along the way architecturally go to market, commercial motion perspective, fundraising as well. Sure, we raise a lot of money, come out the gates, but man, there was a lot of challenges along the way. There's just a lot of.

Omer Khan [00:23:05]:
Challenges.

David Zhu [00:23:06]:
In general.

Omer Khan [00:23:07]:
Yeah, of course. So you said, you know, don't play the rules, that you know, don't play the game by the same rules. But with you, you were the guy going out and doing most of the selling right? In the early days.

David Zhu [00:23:24]:
Well, it's founder, let's say in the absence of a product that sells by itself and a brand, a company brand that is recognizable, you have to do founder led sales. But I wasn't good at it. I was actually terrible at it. I'm introverted, I don't like to. I get drained by the end of the day.

David Zhu [00:23:44]:
In the absence of talking to customers or people I don't know. And so you can imagine if I had to talk to folks I don't know and basically knowing that this product that I was. We're building was still janky.

David Zhu [00:23:55]:
It was kind of like, you know, we knew that we're going to be a beautiful swan one day, but not that day, right? That day we were ugly duckling and we're trying to sell the beautiful swan vision while still being ugly duckling with ugly feathers that has the shed again. And everybody can see that.

David Zhu [00:24:12]:
And so as an introvert and a truth speaker it just makes me awkward. Like I, I've never gotten comfortable and even today, honestly I still, I struggle to sell forward. I like to sell what is factual and, and it's just one of my values which is to, to just keep it real.

David Zhu [00:24:36]:
And it sucks if a customer buys in on a thing that is marketed but then they try the thing and it's like, well, it doesn't do what you say it does. Like I'm going to lose credibility. And I think trust matters a lot to me because trust equals consistency over time.

David Zhu [00:24:51]:
You can't elongate or shorten time, but you can consistently do what you say you'll do such that there's no discount coefficient of what you say and what you do to earn that trust. And when that trust compounds then you have brand and your brand is known one of trust.

David Zhu [00:25:08]:
Your brand doesn't have to be one that's like, oh, Dave was an ex CEO, Dave is an ex VP of sales. That's a, that's a, that's a backwards looking brand on what has been done and past success is not indicative future. But trust is one that is a character thing.

David Zhu [00:25:22]:
And if we can build upon a brand of trust, Reevo is the most trusted AI native go to market platform that will meet your needs at blazing speed. If that continues to compound, I think that's going to be exceptional.

Omer Khan [00:25:38]:
So you hit the first million in AR in like five, six months. That was probably 20, 30 customers. I think he told me earlier, if you're the guy who's doing the selling and you admit yourself you weren't good at it and you enjoy doing it.

David Zhu [00:25:59]:
We had a team,.

Omer Khan [00:26:00]:
So who was right? Okay, that's what I want to say. How is this operating? How were you closing those deals?

David Zhu [00:26:06]:
Sure. So I don't like to do founder led sales. I do it and I could do it and I could get better. But there are those who do it way better than I can.

David Zhu [00:26:18]:
And the benefit of having a founding team of 14, by the way, we started with a very contrarian org structure where most companies will start with a handful of employees or founders. I started with 14 and so it was A very wide build.

David Zhu [00:26:36]:
It was, you know, 10 or 11 cracked engineers, staff, senior staff level engineers and two business co founders. And we had a founding sales leader as well, ex HubSpot sales leader, who actually was the product who helped build the HubSpot CRM product.

David Zhu [00:26:58]:
And so we leveraged his domain knowledge, his gravitas, his charisma obviously on the product side to inform what to build. But occasionally he's the deal maker, he's the rain man.

David Zhu [00:27:13]:
And so I might be the first call, I might be the email that gets the prospect to talk to us for the intro call, but he's the guy that closes a deal. And so, and over time we just started, we just tried to replicate the best behaviors that he exemplified.

David Zhu [00:27:32]:
And now he runs enablement for us, helping up level our team of 12, 15 AES with the best talk track, how do we deliver the best customer value. So I'm constantly learning from others who are way better than I am at how to sell.

David Zhu [00:27:49]:
Fortunately, we have a platform called Revill that I can do that sales coaching and, and I'm the beneficiary of that sales coaching.

Omer Khan [00:28:00]:
You know, the common sort of conventional wisdom, the advice would be this idea of like a point solution, focus on something small, get your foot in the door and then kind of land and expand that kind of thing. And you took a very contrarian approach.

Omer Khan [00:28:19]:
And in many ways it seems like remarkable that it actually has paid off because while the product makes so much sense, it's like it makes your life incredibly harder to try and sell something like that. Right?

David Zhu [00:28:33]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it's a broader thesis I have which is at least within go to market. I strongly believe that the company that's going to win the AI go to market war is going to be the company that uses AI to build the broadest and the deepest solution most efficiently. And I believe that's Reevo.

David Zhu [00:28:56]:
And so there's some cool stuff that we have in the cooks I'm not ready to share yet.

David Zhu [00:29:03]:
But once again the analogy to the gigafactory is if you refine the gigafactory, if you built the gigafactory to be so efficient that you can take a model as an input and you replicate that on steroids, then what you get is this software building factory in the AI in the go to market space that can build the most flexible custom workflows in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks, the most bespoke and complicated data model semantic layer that customers might ask for in a matter of hours.

David Zhu [00:29:41]:
And more importantly, as customers want bespoke things done historically, they would need to work with a team that is doing this thing called, I think the cool kids call it for deploy engineer now. Right.

David Zhu [00:29:54]:
Which is really just a rebranded Prof. Services thing where you have humans, business generalists, plus an army of engineers embedded within a company and then they're constantly getting voiced, the feedback loop and informing how to build the thing for that customer. Right? That's like the classic motion today that everybody does.

David Zhu [00:30:16]:
I, I don't believe that is the path for the future. I believe what needs to be true is that as the voice the customer comes in, it should be absorbed organically by the platform that you sell and the platform should self elevate and self improve against the needs of the customer.

David Zhu [00:30:38]:
Whether it's a customer that says, you know, I need a bespoke, you know, forecast, right. And that forecast is predicated on a bunch of reports that requires computed fields and rolled fields, that requires custom objects or custom parameters and et cetera. Well, why does that, why, why would that need to go through humans and a product roadmap?

David Zhu [00:30:59]:
Why can't the product just update itself? I think it should. And that's what the platform we built. And so there is a lot of secret IP behind the scenes that actually powers the speed of iteration.

David Zhu [00:31:13]:
And going back to your opening question, which is it is a contrarian route, but we built it intentionally knowing that our superpower is on the engineering side. And so we're going to build the best engineering factory that happens to produce the best product the most efficient way in a go to market space.

David Zhu [00:31:31]:
As you can imagine, a customer might want a CPQ product, right? And while they can bytecode it themselves, one can argue is like, well, we can bycode our, you know, CRM ourselves. The thing that they're not considering is like, well what about the total cost of ownership to maintain it and who's going to iterate upon it, right?

David Zhu [00:31:50]:
And so why would you even want to bother by coding yourself when you could just stipulate to Reevo in a natural language declarative manner that I will, you know, there's this workflow I need and in a matter of hours Reva would just have that upon. When you refresh your web website like isn't that magical?

Omer Khan [00:32:08]:
I want to go back just for a second to that, that first sale was also magical because you didn't have to sell. You just whatever you were doing. You did a great job and convinced that that person, that this was the product that they Wanted that they should be using.

Omer Khan [00:32:25]:
But I'm curious, when you went to then customers, the next 10 customers, what kind of pushback did you get from them?

David Zhu [00:32:37]:
Yeah, so we solved it now, but the first sets of sales, it was most challenging. So this is actually a grave mistake I made and I'm happy to share. And hopefully others who take the similar approach doesn't run into the same traps. But I was being an engineer, I'm very stubborn as well, and I know it.

David Zhu [00:32:58]:
And I was quite dogmatic about obviously the technical route, building the vertically integrated system. But the thing I didn't know was that. And because I was super dogmatic about how we built the vertically integrated system from the get go, I was also equally dogmatic about having to sell it that way as well. Right.

David Zhu [00:33:19]:
And so the commercial route was mirrored with the technical route. And honestly, the first like 200 sales or the 200, you know, prospects, the win rate was abysmal because, you know, we had no brand. We didn't, we, we had barely a semblance of website.

David Zhu [00:33:38]:
We were, you know, outsiders coming in to the go to market, engineers coming into the go to market space. And so we had effectively zero credibility, zero brand, zero traction, zero customer testimonials, zero anything to really lean on.

David Zhu [00:33:55]:
And we're saying, hey, please rip and replace your entire salesforce stack and everything else, the entire thing that powers your revenue motion, just throw it aside and we'll take care of it. You know, the first two, 300 people, they're like, David, are you batshit crazy?

Omer Khan [00:34:17]:
Like,.

David Zhu [00:34:18]:
Why do we do that? Right? And there were a lot of dark nights where I'm like, oh my gosh, we're going to end up building the best thing that nobody wants because it's impossible for them to onboard.

David Zhu [00:34:31]:
And the aha moment came actually not too long ago where it's like you can actually be dogmatic on the architectural route, but be hyper flexible and exhibit a different commercial motion.

David Zhu [00:34:46]:
And so we realized even though we build a vertically integrated system, you can actually a la carte, sell any of these by itself and land in effectively dozens of permutations to meet the needs of the customer. Some people will say, I'm ready to replace my power dialer, or parallel dialer for that matter. Great.

David Zhu [00:35:07]:
Onboard onto our parallel dialer. Right? We are faster, we are cheaper, and we integrate with your system better. Right. Others will say, hey, you know, I'm ready to replace my sequencing capability because, you know, the sequencing capability I'm using today doesn't do things like, you know deliverability, right Mailbox warm up domain warmup, procurements, etc.

David Zhu [00:35:30]:
And yours does and others will say, hey, I'm ready to move off my legacy CRM and onboard onto new AI native CRM.

David Zhu [00:35:39]:
Because your CRM has all the bells and whistles of the flexible data model semantic layer and it's able to be hyper flexible around generating reports, forecasts that are actually accurate because all the data is grounded in one data source. And so being flexible on the commercial side was really the aha moment.

David Zhu [00:35:57]:
A couple, you know, I would say even like a couple months ago, so this is a, is a recent realization but man, I would say for like 12 months it was just darkness. It was absolute darkness.

Omer Khan [00:36:13]:
Because of the kind of the constant pushback you were getting every time.

David Zhu [00:36:16]:
You talk to them. No company in the mid market. So our ICP is the mid market, right? We want to serve the mid market and that's our icp. It doesn't mean that we don't play in the down market as well.

David Zhu [00:36:26]:
The founder segment, the S and B, it's just very training segment, the revenue durability is not there, et cetera. But for the mid market because these companies are you know, 2, 3, 400 seats in size and highly entrenched in their most time. It's CR, it's the Salesforce CRM or HubSpot CRM for some of the smaller players.

David Zhu [00:36:51]:
There's no freaking way that they're going to disrupt everything. And so I just kept on banging my head against one wall after another. Every single prospect I talked to, every single person I talked to. Look David, love your vision but there was no way for us to onboard.

David Zhu [00:37:04]:
And so implementation and time to value was effectively like we couldn't even show it because nobody would even give us a chance. So that was the hardest part. And obviously we had a lot of success with down segment because down segment, the founders, the yc, the.

David Zhu [00:37:25]:
Hot flying startups, they don't have a go to market motion, they don't have a rev ops leader, they don't have a VP of Sales or CRO, they don't have a head of it that is asking about things like do you have ZDR, do you have SoC2, do you have all the bells and whistles around access controls, permissioning, throttling all the enterprise with the E capabilities that you know, larger segments want.

David Zhu [00:37:51]:
And so the down segment didn't have that. So the down segment were very willing to say yeah sure David will adopt you for the whole thing, but that's not really, once again, that's like false validation.

Omer Khan [00:38:05]:
Tell me about the, the, the, how the, how the pitch evolved when you had that sort of alicart solution. Because we, we talked about the point solution and why most founders take that path. We talked about this platform and why it makes complete sense. But it becomes incredibly difficult to sell, especially in those early days.

Omer Khan [00:38:25]:
But then also if you're offering a la carte, isn't that hard to sell, what does the pitch look like?

David Zhu [00:38:32]:
Look, I don't want to steal our marketing team's thunder because they spend a lot of time working on this positioning, this new positioning messaging thing and we're going to come out very soon with our new website and all that.

David Zhu [00:38:49]:
So I would say that what I can say is just because you can do all, we have 1300 plus integrations as well, which is more than any other out there on the market.

David Zhu [00:39:04]:
And just because you can have this highly flexible a la carte menu doesn't mean that you want to give that to your customer and inundate them, right? I'm not here to present, you know like a Chinese diner menu where you, you go in there, it's like oh my gosh, there's 1500 optionalities planned, right.

David Zhu [00:39:24]:
And so we're actually hyper specific about a certain workflow or certain sets of workflows, what we call golden workflows that encapsulate the most high value outputs that top the funnel needs and middle funnel needs.

David Zhu [00:39:41]:
So ultimately look, every single customer, every company is screaming for leads they can close and they're screaming for help closing it and they're screaming for help to up level their team. Right? Those are really the three. And so it's quite simple. Top of the funnel is like generating your pipeline that actually converts, right?

David Zhu [00:39:58]:
It's not just like dollar amounts, it's like oh, pipeline generate dollar amounts, dollar amounts. It's actually qualified things with backings. Social selling is a thing across omnichannel, across LinkedIn, automation, SMS, iMessage, text, all the omnichannels that actually encapsulate. So that's top of the funnel is one bucket. And this is for usually for companies are doing outbound, right?

David Zhu [00:40:19]:
And then there are companies that don't really do outbound because they already have an upsell motion or enrichment or, or a farming motion. And then the cost of a deal progression is very important for us. Like how do we, we already have enough pipe. Just help me convert the pipe, right?

David Zhu [00:40:38]:
And usually you know, converting the pipe requires a multi threaded motion. There's different abm. There's relationship once again relationship with selling. There's seller execution. That's it really important thing to, to, to do. Right. And so there is a bucket of that. And then obviously last but not least, it's for the managers, it's for the Revox leaders.

David Zhu [00:41:00]:
How do you ensure that you're able to run your wbrs or mbrs out of Reevo when you're generating your board update on a quarterly basis? How do you use, how do you, you know, what is a trusted source? Do you need to thread it together on Google sheets across, you know, infinite sources?

David Zhu [00:41:18]:
Or you can just ask Reevo to generate you your next or meeting content. I think there's a lot of power to just giving them three large bucket of land motions for them to say which one is my biggest pinpoint. And then if they want to drill deeper score, you can, you can do the a la carte.

Omer Khan [00:41:38]:
Right. So your a la carte is there when you get the pushback and they tell you are you batshit crazy? And I don't, you know, okay, there's a, there's a path to get to where they need to.

David Zhu [00:41:48]:
Sure, yeah, yeah.

Omer Khan [00:41:51]:
So when you go into these companies and you're,.

David Zhu [00:41:56]:
By the way, we're still using it and so, you know, I don't know if it's going to work. Like I said earlier, we're in a spirit of trying new things and sometimes, you know, a tactic that works this month might be outdated next month. And it's okay. We'll learn and we'll adapt.

Omer Khan [00:42:12]:
Yeah, you talked a little bit about this earlier. I just want to follow up on that. How much is this whole concept of vibe coding becoming kind of an obstacle for you to close a deal?

Omer Khan [00:42:32]:
I'm guessing that a lot of GTM teams are pretty active with doing a whole bunch of vibe coded stuff that they maybe have been forced to do in the past to operate the way that they want.

Omer Khan [00:42:44]:
But how much of an obstacle is that to you going in there and persuading them that they don't need to do that?

David Zhu [00:42:52]:
Yeah, so there's a couple of dimensions I look at this through. One dimension is the sort of flat dimension is just if we cut it by SMB mid market enterprise, what are the behaviors that I'm seeing right within the SMB cohort?

David Zhu [00:43:07]:
There's, you know, generally speaking, those teams are still trying to figure out their own messaging, positioning, their own icp, their own PMF. They haven't found PMF yet.

David Zhu [00:43:17]:
They're sort of in that PMF discovery phase and the those founders who are doing founder led sales to an effort to do to discover PMF, they usually are looking to defer to outside tools. That's that promise them the moon.

David Zhu [00:43:38]:
So some companies that are amazing technologists, they don't know how to go do go to market and so they'll just pay other vendors, you know, $50,000 be like hey, just come be my forward deploy SDR, be my forward deploy AE, help me generate, help me craft the different facets and the prospecting module to then on a skilled loop so that you can send me prospects every single night.

David Zhu [00:44:07]:
But I would argue that motion should really be done by the founder themselves so they could discover and get a feel for the accuracy of it. It's like having a baby but you decide to not raise the kid. Kind of weird, but we're seeing that quite often. And it's not, I wouldn't attribute that to the founder's fault.

David Zhu [00:44:30]:
It's actually there's a lot of vendors, there's a lot of AI native startups out there that are just promising everything and really doing a disjustice to that segment.

David Zhu [00:44:39]:
And what ends up happening is that Those segment the SMBs and I think a lot of your list audience are founders who are doing 1 to 10 mil or 0 to 10 million ARR. And so it's very much in that sort of prepmf phase.

David Zhu [00:44:54]:
My advice is don't get suckered into procuring a tool and offloading the job of doing discovery on your ICP yourself. That is too critical of a thing to just give to some other forward deploy AE or SDR motion. You gotta learn that craft yourself.

David Zhu [00:45:14]:
Otherwise what ends up happening is that in the SMB space which is very churny, that's self fulfilling prophecy, you might be able to raise a 5, $10 million seed to give you enough Runway to build the thing.

David Zhu [00:45:24]:
But unless you really develop and have high affinity towards your icp, you're going to really struggle because then you'll have a false start. And once that revenue clock starts, you can't really get off that revenue clock. So it's very challenging.

David Zhu [00:45:40]:
On the enterprise side what we're seeing is that there's really sort of bimodal their enterprise with an E that are more tech sophisticated and the others are not.

David Zhu [00:45:51]:
And so for the more tech sophisticated what we're seeing is that they have a huge appetite to do these bake offs with AI native startups, but really with intent to brain drain those ideas and build Internally and they're not going to name names because a lot of those founders are friends.

David Zhu [00:46:11]:
But which is also why we're this, you know, this insight comes from. But it's not, it's, it's just not right for us because our revenue is not durable.

David Zhu [00:46:23]:
Sure it's going to be there for the next 18 months or so but you know, you're going in with the FDE motion to build something custom where the IP is part of the parent companies and then 18 months later they say sorry, you know, we decided to invest in house and because we have the data, we have the contacts with the models and we have the IP that we co built with you.

David Zhu [00:46:43]:
Thank you very much for your time. Right now the win is that that startup gets to use the enterprise logo to hopefully you know, secure more capital, secure more talent to then build something bigger. But that's a very big risk.

David Zhu [00:46:57]:
And now there's on the other side which is a sweet spot which are enterprise with e that are not tech sophisticated where this motion is more durable.

David Zhu [00:47:06]:
And so when you look at, I don't know, like successful startups, very successful hyper growth startup like what Scott Wu has done at COG in doing this forward deploy motion of embedding Devon into enterprises that are not that sophisticated to show value. It's like amazing, brilliant. It's super durable and it's super, it's super brilliant.

David Zhu [00:47:26]:
And once you're in there and you have a brilliant team like they have, you're just always going to be able to be a step ahead in showing value. So that's a durable approach.

David Zhu [00:47:34]:
Now the mid market is sort of the best of both worlds, which is where we pay, where we play and they're sort of stuck in this world where they're hoping to go from 500 mil ARR to 5 bill. Right.

David Zhu [00:47:48]:
And there's already enough innovation that they have to invest in internally for the main thing that they don't want to go and invest in the Vibe code team in parallel.

Omer Khan [00:48:00]:
Yeah. All right, we should wrap up so. So let's get onto the lightning round. I've got five quick fire questions for you.

David Zhu [00:48:08]:
Sure.

Omer Khan [00:48:09]:
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

David Zhu [00:48:13]:
Well, I would say the best founder CEO advice I've received was that the title CEO doesn't stand for Chief Executive Officer, it stands for current Executive Officer. No, I'm serious. It's actually the best advice because it really grounds you into. It's like until your thing is a real thing, don't get too high on anything, right?

David Zhu [00:48:41]:
You're only the current executive officer trying to bring this thing to life. And that really changes the dynamics of how you make decisions. It grounds you to be more emotionally mature and ego suppressed.

Omer Khan [00:48:52]:
Love it. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

David Zhu [00:48:57]:
Man's Search for meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl. Highly recommended. Why is, you know, I think we're all intrinsic. We're all feeling animals that think, not think, animals that feel. And what that basically means is that we're driven by emotions and we're driven by our intrinsic desires.

David Zhu [00:49:18]:
And I think the earlier you figure out what intrinsically motivates you to exist on Earth, the more you can be authentic to yourself and you can find the greatest intersection of how you derive your sense of meaning and how you derive your sense of pleasure and cherry pick environments that allow you to operate an intersection of both.

David Zhu [00:49:39]:
And I think that book is amazing for that.

Omer Khan [00:49:42]:
I agree. What's some of the best money you've spent on your business so far?

David Zhu [00:49:48]:
Well, I bio, I, I, I biohack and I think that's the best roi. And so, so look, the, the, the, the economics on that actually makes a lot of sense. So biohack as in longevity. So I invest in longevity and I'll give sort of my take on that and I'll tell you why it's like the best thing.

David Zhu [00:50:07]:
Longevity is one of those things where each human being has, you know, certain sets of 100 plus biomarkers that the normal medical system will say whether you're in the range of A to B.

David Zhu [00:50:20]:
But the hard reality is that that range, even if you're in it, it doesn't mean that that specific number that you have, let's say your A1C, which measures your, you know, glucose, insulin, et cetera. Like, it doesn't mean that you are at your individual NF1 optimal peak.

David Zhu [00:50:36]:
And when you stack that across 127 biomarkers, then even, even if you are within what's considered healthy for all the biomarkers, you're actually not healthy to your maximum potential.

David Zhu [00:50:48]:
And so if you're a founder, well, what's the best way to de risk the business is to make sure that the person that has the most economic stance in the company, which is usually the founder, CEO, is always at their maximum or highest cognitive and physical peak.

David Zhu [00:51:07]:
So they can be given their best and you know, how many hours are there in the week? 24 Hours times 24 times seven, 168 hours minus 50 hours of sleep. That's a, that's roughly, you know, 118 hours of working. And so, you know, subtract another 10 hours with your partner. So 108 hours of working.

David Zhu [00:51:24]:
Round up to 110. If you're going to be grinding for 110 hours a week, you better be grinding efficiently. Otherwise it's inefficient grind. So how do you make sure that you're efficient? You're at your cognitive and physical peak, which means you got a longevity hack.

Omer Khan [00:51:39]:
If somebody's interested in getting into that, where would be a good place for them to start?

David Zhu [00:51:45]:
A good place to start is to start doing some research on it first and then seeing if there's, you know, you have access to an endocrinologist. Usually you don't want to, you don't want to just go to a doctor and say draw my blood and analyze my thing. Your thing, your biomarkers.

David Zhu [00:52:04]:
And then you go, then try to self figure out the pills and supplements and the peptides that you want to give yourself. Like don't do that. That's equivalent to vite coding your CRM poor vibes. The total cost of ownership is terrible. And so you usually want to work with a professional that does this for a living.

Omer Khan [00:52:26]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

David Zhu [00:52:31]:
I'm really bad at multitasking and unfortunately there's a lot of multitasking in my day. And so my favorite productivity tool is actually reducing or canceling. I haven't had a one on one recurrent one on one for years. And so even when I ran large parts of doordash engineering from their scaling days of 700 mil valuation to 76.

David Zhu [00:52:55]:
Bill, I don't believe in one on ones. I don't believe in recurring one on ones for that matter. And these recurring one on one blocks show up as like half an hour blocks. That gives you cognitive overhead. And you might be in the middle of doing something, problem solving.

David Zhu [00:53:09]:
And then you know, it's like, okay, I gotta context switch to this one on one thing. And if you remove it, it eliminates the drag of having to show up to this thing in weeks where you don't actually have any substance to talk about.

David Zhu [00:53:24]:
And so it doesn't mean don't have one on ones with your managers, with your reports, with your coaches or whatnot. It just means that do it organically. There might be weeks where you'll talk to your superiors like five times a day do it.

David Zhu [00:53:37]:
And there might be weeks, there might be three, four weeks where you don't need to say anything to each other. Don't force it. Right. And so that's how I gained a lot of focus, time for myself. Now I understand there are leaders who like to do the kumbaya stuff. That's just not for me.

Omer Khan [00:53:53]:
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

David Zhu [00:53:58]:
Well, I don't have work. I don't have interest outside of work. Reevo is interest and work. And so first thing I wake up in the morning, I think about Reevo. Last thing I go to bed dreaming about is Reevo. Seven days a week when I'm with my friends, I'm thinking about Reevo.

David Zhu [00:54:14]:
When I'm at this JP Morgan summit, I'm thinking about Revoir talking to you. I'm thinking about Reevo. This is all.

Omer Khan [00:54:21]:
Thinking about Reevo. Yeah. Of course.

David Zhu [00:54:24]:
I can't. It's also just part of my personality. I'm just, I have insane focus and once I'm latched onto one thing, that's the one thing that I don't stop thinking about.

Omer Khan [00:54:35]:
Love it. So if people want to check out Reevo, they can go to Reevo. A.I.

David Zhu [00:54:41]:
Yeah. It is not Ta. You can check it out, you can talk to our sales rep and we can get you onboarded. Our ICP are mid market customers companies but if you, you know, I think your audience is on the. On the earlier side sub 10 million ARR. That's fine too.

David Zhu [00:54:56]:
Happy to support you on your scaling journey wherever we can.

Omer Khan [00:55:03]:
Awesome. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Where do you hang out?

David Zhu [00:55:08]:
I do not. I don't. I'm not on social media at all. Our marketing team handles our. Yeah, I, I don't. I like to keep my brain clean. I think one of the biggest.

David Zhu [00:55:18]:
This is another productivity advice is too many folks buy Coastal are on Twitter on social media and they say the same other people are saying and I think it's very destructive to original thinking and first principle thinking. So I stay off it completely.

Omer Khan [00:55:35]:
You know, I would love to do that and maybe I'll get to that point one day. But I've definitely been dialing back and spending less and less time there and I completely agree. It's a healthy thing that I think everybody should try to make an effort to do.

David Zhu [00:55:53]:
I think email is good. David at reevo.ai and that's probably the best way to contact me.

Omer Khan [00:56:03]:
Awesome. Well David, thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. I appreciate you making the time to do this, especially from your hotel room right now. And, you know, thanks. Thanks for sharing the lessons that you've learned along the way. And, you know where you're taking this business. And I wish you and the team the best of success.

David Zhu [00:56:25]:
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Cheers.

Omer Khan [00:56:27]:
My pleasure. Cheers.