Omer (00:09.920)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talked to Roman Dardur, co founder and CEO of Hull, a SaaS product that collects, unifies, and enriches your product marketing and sales data and synchronizes it to all of your tools.
In 2011, Roman was running a marketing agency in Paris.
He was working with movie studios that wanted him to rebuild online communities from scratch to for every new movie launch.
He realized that there was a more efficient way to solve that problem and decided to build a product.
And for the next four years, he and his co founders struggled to find product market fit.
In 2016, after trying to bootstrap the business unsuccessfully for four years, they decided that the market just wasn't there and it was time to move on.
So they made the decision to shut down the company.
Around the same time, Roman had lunch with a growth marketer friend who wasn't interested in the product, but liked how they were collecting and segmenting data.
He thought that would be something a lot of companies would be interested in.
So in the next five days, Roman and his co founders built a prototype and started getting feedback.
And that's how the idea for their new product was born.
They went from being a month away from shutting down their company to finding a new opportunity, which they pounced on and and pivoted the business.
Today, they charge at least $1,000 a month for their product and have around 100 customers.
They've raised $5 million in funding and have pretty much found product market fit.
In this interview, we talk about how they struggled in the first few years, how they turned a lunch meeting into a new product idea, and how they've grown the business.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Romain, welcome to the show.
Romain Dardour (02:20.030)
Thank you.
Happy to be here.
Omer (02:22.350)
So do you have a quote, something that inspires or motivates you or gets you out of bed every day?
Romain Dardour (02:27.070)
Actually, I have a lot.
Maybe the one that a lot of people know about that is the one that gets me the most often is no plan survives contact with the enemy, which was actually said by a kind of a Eastern Europe general.
And I mean, it's something you just see on a daily basis.
Omer (02:45.870)
Awesome.
Okay, so for people who aren't familiar with Hull, can you tell us what does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve.
Romain Dardour (02:55.630)
Sure.
So I mean, the problem with solving is that when you're a company and you have sales, marketing, customer success, all working together or trying to work together, the data you need to work in one tool is usually somewhere else.
And that problem takes the form of having a, a lot of different silos in the company.
It slows down, adds friction, add inconsistency in the communication with customers.
And so what we did is we built what is called today a customer data platform, which has the role of collecting all of the customer data from all the places where it's stored and building a unified profile that has the definite source of truth for all the customer data in your company and then allow to transform, to clean up, to enrich, to build segments, audiences in real time on that data.
And as a last step, send that data cleaned up, enriched back to the tools that every team uses.
So the marketer has all of the customer data he needs, including data that would come from the CRM originally.
The salesperson can be pinged whenever something happens on the product side that should trigger him to actually reach out to the prospect.
So by doing that, you align all the teams and you make them efficient on an ongoing basis and, and in real time.
So the people who get the most benefit from that.
We focus today mainly on the SaaS industry.
So B2B, B2C.
Companies that have some soft online software component, they really have today at least a dozen, if not more different tools that don't really talk well to each other.
The persons in those companies are mainly today.
I mean, that's actually an interesting thing.
The name changes a lot.
The role is the same.
The role is the person who owns the data in the company, in the go to market teams.
And the name is either growth engineer, Marketing ops, Sales ops, data operations.
It actually changes a lot, but in the end it's always the same person, the person who is responsible for bringing the right data to the right people in the company at the right time.
Omer (05:05.380)
So give me an example of that.
I know you have a number of integrations and is this something that they would use, this data cleansing enrichment, does that happen in real time?
Romain Dardour (05:19.620)
Yeah, it does, yeah.
And that's actually the entire value of the thing.
One of the clearest example that I can think of today is when you have a product that has either a free trial or that has a freemium plan and you have maybe thousands of people trying your product and you don't really know who you should be calling as a salesperson.
It is really hard because you have much more people to call than the ones you should be calling, and you don't really know who to focus on.
What HUL does, for instance, for a very dear customer of ours, what it does is that it collects all of the product data.
So whenever someone creates a new flow in the tool or sets up a new integration or invites a teammate, and it takes that aggregates it into valuable signals and actually funnels that to the CRM and even to Slack in real time.
And the end result is that the salesperson receives a Slack message saying, hey, this team just added one new collaborator.
You should offer to train the new collaborator, or you should offer them to upsell.
That's really just in time.
Next best action recommendation that they're doing.
And they obviously need to do that in real time.
You don't want to reach out, like a week later, it's too late.
So, yeah, that's a simple example.
Omer (06:41.340)
And so if somebody isn't using HUL or a solution like this, either they're just guessing or they're downloading a lot of data, spreadsheets and trying to connect the dots.
Romain Dardour (06:52.940)
Exactly.
They usually do a lot of Google Sheet shit.
Omer (06:57.110)
Sorry.
Yeah, okay.
So you launched the business 2012, 2013.
You've raised over $5 million.
Most of that was in the last three years.
So for the first four or five years, you guys were bootstrapped.
Let's go back to those early days.
Like, where did the idea for this business come from?
Romain Dardour (07:18.630)
So it's actually a pretty interesting story.
We didn't do that until late 2016.
What we started with was, in a way similar and in a way very, very different.
We started with me selling my ownership in the agency, marketing agency that I created and trying to work on a product, realizing that movie studios had 10 different movies, 50 different movies coming out every year.
And what they were asking me to do as an agency is to kind of rebuild an entire community from scratch and using Facebook games and quizzes and contests and all of that.
And in the end, what they got was basically an Excel file full of emails that they used once or twice and then threw away.
And I was thinking that there was a better way to do that.
All the companies that I was looking at online were actually doing a really good job at collecting customer data and leveraging it.
So you should be able to talk about the next horror movie to a horror movie fan.
And that was not the case.
We started with something that, in retrospect, was way too big and very naive.
I started with the idea of building a product that would own the entire pipeline for that problem.
So we started with gamification APIs that you could use in the browser to build clones of Instagram and contests and comments and likes and ratings.
Almost off the shelf blocks for building apps.
Then that data would come in a structured way into a unified database.
And then that database, you could actually build audiences and you could use those audiences to do retargeting via emails.
And actually at the time, Facebook notifications, we had everything.
We had identity management, identity resolution, gamification APIs, activity streams, transactional emails, quizzes, chats, comments.
Way too much.
Ironically, we actually started building something that kind of was existing and had a real end to end use case.
But we realized that the market was not there for that.
So if I could go back in time, I would just look at myself, slap myself in the face and tell me to do way less, but do it better.
Omer (09:43.980)
So you worked on that business or that product idea for what, two or three years?
Romain Dardour (09:48.940)
Yeah, from 2013, where we joined Techstars.
Again, we were originally in France, but when we looked at the market, we just realized that there was basically no one in France who would even understand what we were doing at the time.
So we kind of tried to join a US accelerator.
We went to techstars in Boulder and we had some customers.
We had some pretty, you know, reasonable growth, enough at least to pay ourselves and to have a small team.
But we didn't see where we could go next.
And that lasted until 2016, I think.
Yeah, end of 2016.
Omer (10:24.550)
And then at what point did you guys like, what happened for you guys to be able to sort of sit down and say, okay, we need to change, we need to pivot, this is kind of okay, but this is not that business that we imagined.
Romain Dardour (10:41.420)
Yeah, well, I mean, the realization was we were always trying to, you know, find out how we could create a big company, something that really solved a big problem for a lot of people.
And I mean, the mindset was that we actually were building a pretty complex product technologically, and it didn't really make sense to do it for like 20 customers and do it in a kind of a consulting style business.
I did that previously.
I really wanted to build a product that was solving one problem for a lot of people.
And so we were trying to find ideas to get there.
And we were kind of running around in circles saying, oh, we would need a ton of money to build all of this and build even more and build even more.
And then we have that vision for the world, but we don't really know if the world wants that vision.
So it was kind of like either we made that really big bet and raised a ton of money to try to force a vision on the world, which, I mean, in retrospect is probably the most ridiculous way to build a company, or we should kind of have the five stages of grief and move on.
And we were almost ready to move on.
We were actually, you know, discussing how do we actually, you know, wrap up the company?
What are we going to do?
I mean, we were never really worried for our own personal income, but we were like, how do we end this?
How do we avoid having a bitter aftertaste?
And at the very last minute, I mean, it was one month away from making a decision.
And I had a pretty interesting lunch with a friend called Guillaume Caban, who since went on to be the VP of Growth at Segment and Drift and a bunch of other really cool companies.
And he looked at what we were doing.
He kind of bluntly told me, you know what, the gamification, the comments, the likes, the rating, I really don't give a shit.
But the audience building here, all the data you're collecting and all the segmentation that you're doing rule.
It is something that I would need and that I would use heavily.
I mean, at that time, it's taking me 24 hours to build an audience in my, I won't name it, but marketing automation suite, because I have 3 million people in there.
You're showing that to me in real time as I'm typing the name of the role that I want to filter on.
So that's really something that I would use.
And so we actually did a prototype in a matter of, like, you know, five days.
I came back to him, I showed it to him.
He said, oh, that's really cool.
But now I'm leaving for San Francisco.
I'm going to be VP of Growth at Segment.
And so I met his replacement at the company that he was living, which is called Mention.
They ended up being our first customer.
Guillaume and Segment actually being ended up being a customer too.
And we started having a ton of discussions with people who had really, really deep data integration problems.
And so that's kind of how we actually discovered the need instead of tried to push it.
Omer (13:56.200)
Tell me about that prototype.
Like, what were you able to build in five days?
Romain Dardour (13:59.800)
So what we built in five days was actually not really five days.
It's like shoulder of giants kind of thing.
We had the data collection and segmentation engine that we built over the course of three years.
And what we did in five days is just plug it to segment so that we could get customer data and then send updated profiles.
So that was done in five days.
And then we realized, obviously that was kind of just a proof of concept and we needed to build our own connectors and so on and so on.
But in five days, we just connected that engine to B2B SaaS services instead of gamification APIs.
Omer (14:41.790)
Got it.
And as you said, mention was your first customer.
Romain Dardour (14:45.550)
Yes, and they still are our customer.
Omer (14:48.350)
That's awesome.
Tell me about that.
What was that process like when you have this prototype?
How did it go from prototype to signing on the dotted line and closing that deal?
Romain Dardour (15:02.210)
So, actually, pretty interesting story.
That was a strategy, but maybe we can talk about it later when we talk about some things that I think we did right over time.
But the general idea was we had this vague idea that customer data was in silos and that the data they needed in customer IO at the time was not there and that it was painful.
So we kind of put together something really dirty just to see if during the conversation they were leaning in and if they were asking us, when can I get that?
Because that was the thing that I was trying to unlock.
I have had the chance to have a good amount of conversations with Adam Wiggins, the CTO at Heroku, and his analogy for a product that has a fit was amazing.
He said, build a feature and then take it away, and if people come to your door with pictures and forks and flammable items to ask for it, then you have something.
My way of going there was, I'm going to build something that is obviously incomplete, obviously flawed, but I want to know if people still ask me, when can I get it?
When can I get a better version of that?
When can I get it?
Because I really need it.
And so that's actually how we proceeded.
And we basically kind of solved their problem in consulting.
We said, the feature is ready, and then we scrambled to get it ready as fast as possible.
They were really, really, really helpful.
They knew we were kind of really just starting out, but they had that need to first migrate their CRM to Salesforce and also build their audiences in real time, as opposed to once a day, and.
And also to bring their customer data in the right place.
So they were ready to suffer through the early stages for this to happen, and we made it happen.
And they became a customer and their founder became an investor.
Omer (17:02.150)
How did you figure out what to charge when you started out?
Romain Dardour (17:05.830)
I think the Initial bet is we had the kind of the common wisdom of knowing that we don't want to charge on cost, but charge on value.
So we just tried a price and it worked.
And we realized after that that we could actually double it for the next customer and it still worked.
And then we tried to double it and it still worked.
And we tried to only offer annual agreements because we had, I mean, we actually had good reasons to get there and it also worked.
So lesson is, you're always undercharging.
Omer (17:42.630)
Yeah.
Is that what you do today?
Is it sort of an annual contract you sign up for or people can.
Romain Dardour (17:49.270)
Yeah, yeah.
We realized something very important in our specific business is that most of the customer data platforms are enterprise products that come with a very, very high price.
It's always six figures at least.
And I mean there's a large portion of it which is dedicated to professional services and solution engineering.
And for us we wanted a product that was almost ready out of the box, really.
Something built for mid market companies, as in like 5 to 250 million in revenue.
So lean agile companies that really want to go fast don't want a six month implementation time.
So we wanted something that you could adopt fast.
But still we're integrating with the core data pipelines of those customers and they have, let's put it politely, very often, very messy data sets.
And so they don't have the knowledge in house of not only what their data sets look like, but also what the services that they want to integrate with can accept and cannot accept.
And we can smooth a ton of that.
We can do a lot of optimizations and batching and error handling and retries and we actually kind of make that seamless.
But there are still some things that we just cannot do.
We cannot put an account in mailchimp, for instance.
So if you have the concept of an account, you have to at least think about how you want that account data to be flattened into the user data when it goes to mailchimp.
And so for this there is some not coding, but expertise that we bring with people who have seen like literally hundreds of data pipelines and who can actually point out this to our customers to help them going to the right direction and not hit walls.
So this actually takes some time at the very beginning.
So if you have a month, two months customer, we can spend one month and two months working with them, helping them.
And in the end we realize that what they described is not actually what they wanted and frustration ensues and we are left with a very big time Sink that.
You know, the customer just got fed up with what's going on before we actually managed to get to the end of their project.
So we have a very cool and very relaxed process to actually make sure that we define what value means for the customer and that we bring them all the way there, which to me is very important.
Omer (20:46.490)
When you say you bring them all the way there, is that.
Does that happen through onboarding?
Is there sort of almost like a services component to this?
Or does the product handle all of this?
Because the one thing that I look at this and say, great, this sounds like an awesome product and I can see how this could help.
So the value prop is pretty clear.
But then when you start thinking about implementation and you're thinking, crap, I got data there, I got there.
I don't know whether that's reliable.
I don't know whether that's crap or that's high quality data.
And I got to bring it all together.
It sort of feels like I need somebody there to help me through that.
Romain Dardour (21:21.200)
That is exactly what we do basically, when we onboard a customer and even if they ask to be alone, we really strongly recommend them, even if they have technical skills and they are.
Even a CTO would say, yeah, I know data, I know what I can do.
We say, okay, here's what we're going to do.
First, we're going to define what value means to you, what you want to solve with this product.
We're not going to let you just play around and kind of wonder because you're going to put yourself in trouble if you do that, because you're going to fill your CRM with the wrong data and then you're going to regret it in some ways.
We walk you through highlighting what value means in terms of building or beefing up your data pipeline.
Then we review the tools you have, the data you have, and we give you the right pointers.
And if you actually need to choose a tool, we can recommend the email outreach tool that we know is going to fit your specific use case, or the Data Enrichment tool, which is going to have the results you're looking for based on your specific industry.
We're going to do that with you.
We're going to help you build your own setup on hul.
So the difference with professional services is that we won't be deploying lambda functions and new servers left and right.
We will be writing code for you.
We will be advising you and be the expert that helps you get value out of that.
Omer (22:51.960)
Got it?
Okay.
So, you know, I want to Talk about how you've, you've grown the business over the last few years.
Before we do that, let's talk about the stuff we were talking about before we started recording here.
Let's cover some of the things that didn't work.
Romain Dardour (23:09.500)
Oh, the, I mean, the biggest one is that we basically spent two and a half, if not three years not having the courage to pivot.
And we did that because of the sunk cost fallacy.
We actually invested a lot of time and energy into, you know, making a vision true.
And it takes a lot of courage to try to explore something new.
Your brain is always trying to convince you that you're on the right path.
And then one more push is going to be what's required to make things work.
The Prime Minister of Japan at some point said, success is not the only option.
And that's actually very, very true for companies.
If you have the wrong product, sometimes, no matter the amount of work and energy and love and care that you put, it's just not going to work.
We should have seen that way earlier.
So it's only when we actually run out of ideas in 2016, by a brand of chance, that we really started to have good things happening to us.
Omer (24:14.730)
So in hindsight, we're all geniuses, right?
We can look back and say, oh, if I had done this, whatever, I would have whatever.
But if someone is in that situation right now where part of them is saying to themselves, I just need to have that one big push, this one breakthrough, and I can make this happen, and then the other side of them is saying, I'm not sure if this is the right business.
What advice would you give them?
Romain Dardour (24:41.800)
Read one book, very short one.
You actually read it in maybe one hour, or if you're a slow reader, and I mean, maybe even faster.
It's called the Mom Test.
It's going to explain the way everyone is going to give you some pointers of the reasons why you are on the right path and that this is just because people are nice, they don't want to hurt you, and even more, they don't want to hurt you for free.
So you actually need to remove that veil of, you know, that bias, that confirmation bias which makes you listen to the nice things people say and this means the bad things.
So in retrospect, one of the guys who had the most brutally honest conversations with me was so right.
His name is Michael Baldwin.
He's now working at aws.
He's just like this, no bullshit guy who's gonna hit you with a hundred pound hammer.
With one very simple truth.
And you cannot avoid it because he didn't sugarcoat it.
He didn't give you the nice shit sandwich where there is something nice that you can cling onto.
He.
You just put it right there.
And so, I mean, listen to the bad things that people are saying more than the good things, and maybe that's going to make you realize that there are some problems, some elephants in your room.
Omer (26:07.430)
Yeah, well, I've had Rob Fitzpatrick, the author of the mump test, on the show.
And so if people want to check that out, they can go to.
It's episode 206, where we talk about basically the premise of the book and how to tell if people are lying to you, which is.
Happens quite a lot because people want to tell you what they.
What they think you want to hear.
Romain Dardour (26:29.300)
Exactly.
Omer (26:29.980)
Okay, so the other thing was you also spent a bit of time and money trying to make advertising work on LinkedIn and Facebook, and that didn't go anywhere either.
But, but tell me about the sort of, the process and what you learned from that.
Romain Dardour (26:45.380)
That didn't go anywhere, probably because we've been doing it badly.
I'm quite, quite happy that it didn't work because one thing that I'm always pretty cautious about is the models that power a ton of money into advertising.
I'm always kind of a bit reluctant, maybe because I kind of spent so much money in advertising for my customers 10 years ago, and I saw what was actually going on.
But probably in our case, we were just not doing it the right way.
We were having meetings, meeting books and demos as our success metric.
And the thing is, we were kind of general in our messaging, pretty broad in the targeting.
The initial calls didn't really, you know, resonate, so there was kind of a lot of noise in that thing.
So, I mean, in the end, it was not really a good experience.
It was.
Everything that could go wrong went wrong.
We had bad targeting too wide, too expensive.
We.
We were generating demos that we actually thought were not qualified and we were generating too few of them.
So, yeah, advertising didn't go that well.
Probably you need an expert to do that, or we're just not at the stage where we have something precise enough so that we can just go all in on it.
I don't know.
Omer (28:08.760)
Did you also have problems with positioning the product?
I mean, I know you talk about Hull being a customer data platform, but back when you're starting to have these conversations In, I guess, 2016, 17, was there something comparable out there?
Was this a completely new category no, there was nothing.
Romain Dardour (28:33.410)
I mean, yeah, the term just started to exist.
But the thing is, no customer, no one really kind of had the idea about this.
The interesting thing is that for us it was always an obvious way to handle things.
I mean, everyone talks about the analogy of like the, you know, local butcher in a small town who knows everything about their customers and then that we love this when we came to the Internet and yada, yada, yada.
I am a self taught person and have never actually been into a large company where there is a sales department and a marketing department, a larger amin.
And so it always seemed to me very artificial that we're talking about a lead and then a prospect and then a newsletter subscriber as different people and then a user and then a churn customer as a different people.
To me it was always the same person.
And it was pretty counterintuitive that we were kind of building these silos in the first place.
So that thing was pretty obvious.
But the kind of this is how we've always done it mindset is pretty deep into a lot of companies.
It's changing, but it's changing really slow.
And in 2016, I can tell you there was maybe 20 companies that I could name that would be kind of mature enough in their understanding to go that way today.
That has changed a lot, thankfully.
Omer (30:01.920)
So tell me a little bit more about that because you said about thinking about people in sort of these silos and as a lead or a prospect.
But if you don't do that, how else do you segment customer opportunities, the pipeline, et cetera.
Romain Dardour (30:17.280)
A person is a person.
So you're going to have an anonymous visitor which is someone who comes to your website and doesn't leave any identifiable information, maybe apart from their IP which actually allows you to know which company they work for.
But then, you know, they maybe later visit you on a booth in a conference and you get their email and maybe you have actually two entries in your entire set of data.
One which is like the traffic of the anonymous visitor and one which is is the email of the person and some notes about the discussion.
But this is actually the same person.
One of them is going to be worked on by sales and the other one is going to receive retargeting from advertising, which doesn't really make sense.
Now let's say that that person actually comes in and subscribes to the newsletter.
Would it be a good idea to actually take the data you had in the conference to personalize the ads that they're seeing?
And the opposite way around take the web traffic that they have been managing and send them in an aggregated way to the CRM so that the salesperson knows that he's mainly been checking these types of pages and maybe mostly the technical pages on your website.
So your salesperson knows that he mostly should be having a technical conversation and this is what the person is interested in.
Omer (31:49.710)
Yeah, but most companies don't have data that well organized.
Right.
Maybe they need a product.
Right.
You know of any.
I've lost track of the number of times that I've been paying for a product for months or even years.
And yet when I visit a website, I get some sort of retargeting ad telling me that I should buy this product and it's just not really an efficient way to use money they have.
Romain Dardour (32:15.690)
Yeah, well, how do you destroy a mountain?
You just do it one small rock at a time.
I mean, what I described is kind of the end goal.
We saw companies, actually younger companies who are kind of bigger right now, but they kind of built that from scratch, that understanding and that vision from scratch.
And it's actually not much more complicated.
Others have a lot of things in place and.
And the work is about connecting the dots and linking the different services together.
It's not that hard.
We've done it literally 100 times for our customers.
But to me it just seems obvious.
It just seems like the right way to handle things.
It shouldn't be kind of a competitive advantage compared to the others.
It should be the way people are doing things.
Omer (33:07.440)
Yeah, I agree with you.
Okay, so I mean, when we look on the site, Hull IO, you've got a number of SaaS companies there featured like we talked about.
Mention Drift Pusher.
There's other things like CXL Institute.
Let's talk about how you've landed some of these customers and what in terms of growth has worked for you guys.
Romain Dardour (33:34.850)
Word of mouth has been an incredible driver of new customers.
Especially also when people change jobs and they bring your product into their new company.
That is really a testament to the fact that you are really solving a problem for them.
That has been a really big thing.
The second thing is, I think very early on we put on a lot of energy onto the brand.
And by brand, I don't just mean the logos and the colors.
I mean what we stand for and where we want to be seen and how we want to appear.
And so brand is obviously, I mean the logo, the, you know, typography and everything.
If you look at our blog, it kind of looks like a magazine.
We didn't want to be that, you know, kind of a run of the mill, you know, very flashy colors, illustrations, company.
Not that there is anything bad, but we want it to be something else.
We wanted to stand for quality and expertise and at the same time we didn't want to be kind of that nerdy technical angle technical company.
So what we did is we said, okay, we need first to be present and we need to represent what high quality data, what really pushing the envelope stands for into kind of doing great work.
We didn't want to kind of promote like, hey, triple your leads in two days, because that's not really what we stand for.
What we stand for is hard work and effort, which yields great results.
So hard work on our end to actually solve things that might not even appear as a bullet point on a marketing sheet, but actually make a really big difference when you're actually using the product.
We have a ton of layers of features that actually work to be invisible from the customer standpoint, but end up allowing them to do what they expect is done instead of having an approach where we just do what they ask.
And then whenever you go deeper, there is something lacking.
So, I mean, it's been really hard work, but it's, I mean, the culture maybe comes from French roots and you know, three star Michelin restaurant where everything needs to be perfect from the ground up.
And you're always going to have work to get there, but you're going to try and you're going to tell people that you try.
So brand is thought leadership.
It's providing our experts for free as part of the product usage.
It's, it is making sure that you prioritize what you know, your customer really need above everything else.
Yeah, it's a lot of that kind of things.
Omer (36:30.920)
Yeah.
I mean, it's just the overall perception that the customer gets.
Romain Dardour (36:36.600)
Yes.
Omer (36:37.320)
I mean, I spent almost eight years working for the Walt Disney Company and you know, we were sort of, it was drummed into us.
You know, if people can touch it, feel it, smell it, see it, it's perception.
And every bit of that counts as part of the customer experience.
Romain Dardour (36:51.510)
Exactly.
I mean, if you look at Star wars, one of, I mean, maybe the number one thing that made it so big is that they don't tell you it's a fantasy.
They tell you it is real, but it was only a long time ago and somewhere far, but it is real.
And that makes the entire universe have to stand on its own.
Yeah, Marvel has the same thing.
They have one guy who is, you know, the one guy that is the warrant of the coherence of the entire Marvel universe.
He has to know everything better than even the most hardcore fans so that everything is coherent.
That is really what a brand needs.
Omer (37:30.720)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good example.
Okay, now, one of the other things you did was kind of a interesting, I guess, growth hack in terms of how you would follow up with prospects and do sort of cold slash warmish outreach.
Tell us about that.
Romain Dardour (37:48.840)
You're talking about something that is called the reveal loop.
It's a pretty smart trick that we didn't come up with it.
Guillaume.
Actually, Caban came up with it, implemented it with our product for the companies he was working with.
And so basically the general idea is that someone comes to your website, you don't know who they are, but you have their IP address.
And it turns out that there is one of the APIs from the service from Clearbit, which is a service, a company we love.
Thank you, Alex, for building that company.
It gives you the company name that this IP address belongs to.
So as a result, you have an anonymous visitor, but you know their company name.
We do that reveal section automatically, but it's not enough.
From that, we actually hit a second clear bid API.
Only if we see that the company is not a current customer or is not an active discussion.
We hit a second clear bid API which gives us 5 to 10 marketing, sales and growth operations people in the company and gives us their address, their email address, their role, all the thermographic and sociographic data you can think of, and we take that and we then.
So obviously, as I already said, we cross it with the existing customer base because you don't want to do that to your existing customers and prospects.
And as a last result, we send this to a cold outreach email listing tool such as Outreach or salesloft.
The end result is that we send an email to someone who probably was on the website a day before.
And usually what ends up happening is that we have an incredible open rate because there was interest from the company, and we have a really, really, really compelling reply rate, which often contains, hey, it's funny, we were on your website yesterday, we were talking about you guys.
Well, the answer is, yeah, we kind of know about that.
So that actually is a really cool growth hack which ends up scaling pretty well and working pretty well for us.
Omer (40:01.670)
But when you send out the email, you don't tell them, hey, we know you were looking at a website.
That's a bit creepy, I think.
Romain Dardour (40:08.230)
No, that's a bit creepy, actually, Guillaume was doing that at some point, he was kind of faking double replies from internal emails saying, hey, I built this quick hack.
I'd like to know if it works.
Forwarding this to another internal person who then reaches out to the customer and say, you know, maybe it's wrong, but we tried that.
Do you think it works?
We just.
We're just, you know, being kind of pretty honest about.
We're reaching out to explain what we can do for you.
Omer (40:39.570)
So was it just Clearbit that you were using to figure this out?
What was sort of the tools involved in putting this together?
Romain Dardour (40:46.050)
So, I mean, if I just do some name dropping.
We are using Hull to orchestrate Clearbit, customer IO, Salesforce and Datanize, which since then has been acquired by ZoomInfo.
That's kind of about it for this specific part.
Omer (41:04.520)
Does that happen now on, like, autodrive?
Romain Dardour (41:06.560)
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And we have a bunch of other things on AutoDrive.
Yeah, that's actually the nice thing is once you get it right and it's fully kind of described, I mean, if you go down all the way to computer science, it.
We're kind of describing everything as data.
So the entire configuration of your company is written down in the form of data inside of hul, and everything runs on Autopilot.
So that's really cool.
Omer (41:34.410)
And what percentage of your revenue has come from taking this approach with this cold outreach?
Romain Dardour (41:41.690)
I couldn't give you an exact number, but it would be almost 50%, probably.
Omer (41:47.010)
And it's not true to say it's cold outreach, because that's very different.
Romain Dardour (41:52.210)
Yeah, it's cold, but it's not that cold.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty unique.
Omer (41:59.410)
All right.
You've been on this journey for the last seven or eight years now.
Other than the pivot, if you could go back and give yourself any advice, what would it be?
Romain Dardour (42:13.840)
I'm thinking about one thing that we did right, actually, and I would probably even do it earlier.
I think we might have played 3D chess while fundraising because we kind of flipped the process.
One thing that I really didn't want to do is go to tour all the VCs on the market.
So we kind of started by looking at the VCs we wanted to have have working with us that were really smart money, you know, that we thought had the right vision.
And then we reached out to the companies that they invested in and tried to close them.
And when we had several of them in the portfolio, we actually reached out to the VC and told them that we were kind of only talking to Them.
The discussion became pretty interesting pretty fast.
I mean, obviously the discussion is a lot easier when 5 or 10 of the companies that you have invested in already say that they like the product.
So we kind of ABM the fundraising process for that.
Omer (43:20.310)
That's really interesting.
And I guess somebody could apply the same thing.
Yeah, I was thinking as well, it's like it was an ABM approach for VCs, but you could.
Even if your customers aren't the type of companies that these VCs are investing in, you could still take that approach in terms of these are, you know, a handful of VCs, ideally I'd like to be working with in, in a year or two years time.
What could I be doing now to.
To get on their radar, to start building some kind of relationship without necessarily going and asking that for money, which maybe, you know, now is not the right time.
Romain Dardour (43:55.670)
You never want to ask for money.
You want them to ask you to invest.
And that's really the crux of it because we failed at fundraising for like two years in the beginning because we didn't really have either a product or traction and we were trying to ask for money for that.
So obviously when you do have moderate success, it changes the entire equation.
But still, if you kind of go to a VC with a cold intro or something like that, you've got to have a lot of work to convince them that you're not fluff.
If they already can just reach out to 5 of their internal companies and ask about this, you kind of don't even have to touch about whether you are for real or not.
Omer (44:39.860)
Yeah.
All right.
And on that note, I think we should wrap up and move on to the lightning round.
So I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Ready?
Romain Dardour (44:51.700)
Yeah.
Let's go.
Omer (44:52.900)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Romain Dardour (44:56.660)
It was in 2013 when we.
2012, actually, when we just started.
And I was talking to an investor called Soltlan from Index at the time, I think, and he asked whether what we were building, I could sell a thousand of those tomorrow.
And the answer was no.
There's some consulting, there's some this and that, and we need to customize.
So he interrupted me and said, you know what?
You have a service, not a product.
Come back when you have a product.
So that was really, you know, the core of all the DNA of what we were trying to build since then.
Omer (45:29.150)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Romain Dardour (45:32.360)
So my favorite book has been taken by Jalet Rosay.
From Mutiny, it's really thinking fast and slow, which is a mind blowing approach to understanding the human bias.
So I would say the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
It's really a classic about how you should be approaching designing products.
Omer (45:53.400)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Romain Dardour (45:57.970)
I would definitely say persistence and resilience.
The ability to just take any hard blow and keep pushing.
The cockroach approach, I would call it just survive long enough because cockroaches are the only animals that would survive a nuclear attack.
Omer (46:13.810)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Romain Dardour (46:17.170)
I have a thing for making lists.
I'm an information addict.
I collect everything.
And so Notion has been my favorite system for a while.
I have a personal one that is basically overflowing with collected content, very curated.
So if you want to know the best restaurants in Dublin, I have a list for that.
I can share it.
Omer (46:35.870)
That's sweet.
Yeah, I like Notion too as well.
I've actually started using drafts as well.
Romain Dardour (46:41.550)
Oh, nice.
I need to check this one out.
Omer (46:44.030)
Yeah, I mean, I really didn't understand what you could do with it until I got into it recently and it's a great way to capture things super fast.
And then the integrations that it has really makes it easy for you to move that into somewhere else.
So they sort of think about it as it's the place where the ideas start, but you may move it into, you know, Notion or Ulysses, diffuse your writing or whatever.
Romain Dardour (47:08.890)
So yeah, this is always the frustrating part online.
Where can I go quickly to capture something?
Omer (47:15.130)
Yeah, exactly.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time.
Romain Dardour (47:20.200)
To be honest, I don't really know.
I've grown very skeptical of the genius ideas that I get in the shower.
I would probably, to be serious for a second, something that aims to combat fake news intolerance and more generally the normalization of deviants that we can see these days.
Omer (47:41.080)
Yeah, that's a worthwhile thing if anyone is ever able to solve that.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Romain Dardour (47:49.890)
I am an INTP T. If you know the Meyer Briggs test, which is probably a very big issue for me and my entourage in terms of relationships, that makes it really hard for people to bear with me.
Omer (48:06.370)
So you are an intp.
Romain Dardour (48:08.770)
Yeah.
Omer (48:09.570)
So just.
Just for people who aren't familiar with Myers Briggs.
Romain Dardour (48:12.740)
Yeah.
Omer (48:12.980)
Just explain what that is.
And before you do that, I'll tell you, I did this long time ago.
And I'm also an intp.
Romain Dardour (48:20.900)
Yeah, poor people around us.
Myer Briggs is a test that helps you, after understanding a bunch of questions, understand what drives you, the way you see the world, what's your worldview.
And all in all, INTPs are one of the 16 types of personalities.
INTP, more specifically, is called a logician.
It's introverted, intuitive thinking and prospecting personality traits.
And so the general idea is being right is more important than being friends.
So logic trumps everything else.
You can see where that could bring.
Omer (49:00.200)
Reminds me a little bit of Mr. Spock on Star Trek.
Romain Dardour (49:03.160)
Exactly.
Exactly.
Omer (49:05.400)
All right, finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Romain Dardour (49:08.670)
Definitely cooking and food.
Like every single French citizen, I think we talk about restaurants that we should try out when we are dining at a restaurant, or what new trendy grocery stores we should try when we are cooking.
So, yeah, that's one thing.
And the second thing is movies.
I met my wife, I have a past in the movie industry.
I met my wife, she owns a marketing agency in the movie industry.
We share that passion.
More specifically, I like the movies from the 50s to 70s American era.
But I mean, all in all, I think I have.
I own and have watched several thousand movies.
Omer (49:47.430)
Wow.
Awesome.
All right, this has been a pleasure.
Thank you for making the time to do this and staying up in your evening.
What is it like 9:00pm past 9 for you in Paris?
Romain Dardour (50:01.830)
It is 9:00pm yeah.
Evening is just starting.
Thank you very much for having me.
It's been a pleasure.
Omer (50:07.430)
It has been for me as well.
Now, if people want to find out more about Hull, they can go to hull.IO, which is h u l l IO.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Romain Dardour (50:18.950)
Roman.
R O M A I null IO I'm happy to answer.
Omer (50:24.390)
Perfect.
Roman, thank you again and I wish you and the team the best of success.
It's been a pleasure.
Romain Dardour (50:30.680)
Thank you.
Best wishes to you too.
Omer (50:32.680)
Thank you.
Cheers.
