Salesbricks: How a Failed Go-to-Market Strategy Sparked a Breakthrough [444]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Jonathan, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Jonathan: Thanks. Happy to be here.

[00:00:03] Omer: Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?

[00:00:06] Jonathan: I do. It's quick. It's success starts with failure. I think my whole life I always wanted to start a company and, reading books, listening to people's stories, watching interviews, you always hear the good stuff.

[00:00:20] Jonathan: You never really hear about all the struggles and near, near death experiences. But those are the things that actually make a company, make a founder or make an entrepreneur. And we need to celebrate more of that stuff. It's one of the quotes that I would share with my. My team and my friends and my kids.

[00:00:35] Jonathan: And it really helps position people to understand what they're getting into.

[00:00:40] Omer: Yeah, I love that. I don't know if it was, whether it was Sarah Blakely or somebody else, maybe I got this wrong who said, back in their childhood they had this thing where at dinner her dad would always ask what did you fail at today?

[00:00:55] Omer: And they would celebrate that and it ingrained this thing into her mind that it was okay to fail. And it was almost encouraged because hopefully, there's some upside as well as you go through that process, but yeah, that's a good one. Okay tell us about Salesbricks.

[00:01:11] Omer: What does the product do? Who's it for and what's the main problem you are helping to solve? I.

[00:01:16] Jonathan: So Salesbricks is a deal closing platform. We help B2B saaS founders and AI founders monetize their product. So there's a lot of jobs to be done from commercialization of their, your product. So pricing your packaging, quoting, deal shaping with your customers and prospects to executing the deal, getting paid, and then understanding.

[00:01:36] Jonathan: What your revenue is. We handle all that within our platform, and we're really focusing on companies that are early. So anywhere from half a million dollars to $2 million in ARR, they're starting to feel the pain and suffering around orchestrating all these jobs to be done. And we make it easy with just a few clicks.

[00:01:53] Omer: And so is this primarily for sales led motions?

[00:01:57] Jonathan: It's a good question. We are first targeting companies that are sales led. That's typically where a lot of those jobs to be done is painful and it takes a lot of time. So we're starting to realize that is. The problem space we wanna focus on.

[00:02:11] Jonathan: But as companies start to grow they activate more go to market motions. They need to have two motions. So PLG sales, led sales assist we help them jug juggle that and we're building product to, to help serve them in as they start to grow in those those go to market requirements.

[00:02:27] Omer: Great. Give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers size of team?

[00:02:33] Jonathan: So we are about a million dollars in ARR. We have over a hundred customers today. And we're processing millions of dollars of SaaS and AI transactions on a weekly basis. Fun fact about Salesbricks majority of transactions actually happen at night.

[00:02:46] Jonathan: So when founders are selling to other founders after their day job, they start to do all the back office stuff and buying software is one of 'em. Our peak time for closing deals is around eight to nine o'clock at night.

[00:02:58] Omer: The magic hour.

[00:02:59] Jonathan: That's where the, all the transactions and contracts get signed.

[00:03:02] Omer: Great. And then size of team, I think you told me earlier, is 2020 or so people?

[00:03:08] Jonathan: Yeah. We're about 22 people right now. And we're global, so we have a few folks in Asia as well as the United States.

[00:03:15] Omer: And you've raised about 11 million. That's right. Okay, great. So the business was founded in 2021 four years ago. Where did the idea come from and what were you doing at the time?

[00:03:31] Jonathan: Yeah, so I, I was running rev ops and finance for a lot of early stage startups. My whole career after college, I. And it, I realized a lot of companies had the same exact problem over and over again. I worked for four basic A16Z backed companies.

[00:03:47] Jonathan: I always hire number one to go solve the revenue problem. How do you build a process? How do you actually build a customer? How do you. Sign a cost customer and everybody had the same problem. The founders were inventing their own process and by the time the company grew up to over a million bucks, it becomes a painful inefficient process.

[00:04:06] Jonathan: And so I come on board to go build all the infrastructure for the business, and I. About in 2018 I had my first kid and I still live the 14, 15 hour days of working in the office. And there was a moment where I felt really stupid. I was my, my kids' first Halloween. Trick or treat and I was in my big dinosaur costume.

[00:04:31] Jonathan: And while I was, while my kid was going through the trick or treating experience, I was sending out DocuSign within my costume and my wife was like, I. You're supposed to be here right now, and yes, you're here, but you're not here. And I had 15, 17, a bunch of people texting me like, Hey, when's the DocuSign out?

[00:04:52] Jonathan: Oh, I need to make a revision. Oh, we need to send out the invoice to this customer, otherwise we're not gonna get paid this month. And all this stuff was happening because I was a choke hold for the process, and I realized like, Hey, I don't want to get fired by my wife. I need to be a father, but I also need to help run the business.

[00:05:08] Jonathan: And I said there, there must be a better way to do things. And it really planted the seed in my mind to go build a company. I'll go ahead and work my ass off, but I could, if I could protect a bunch of parents from this experience and they could actually live a work-life balance, but also still run the business that'd be great to start a company that will impact and provide.

[00:05:30] Jonathan: That type of technology for folks. And fast forward to 2021 was really the idea of Hey, why can't I have and build a rev ops in a box for companies to go close deals but not have to do 90% of the busy work for men.

[00:05:42] Omer: Yeah, that sounds like a, a great mission to focus on and solve.

[00:05:49] Omer: I guess one question I'd have for you is most people wouldn't say, I'm working these really long hours and I'm going to get more balance, I'm gonna go and launch a startup. That just sounds like you are, let's say out of the cold into the fire or whatever that quote is. So was it more about that was when you had that kind of seed planted, but you didn't act on that until?

[00:06:15] Omer: Things changed a bit.

[00:06:16] Jonathan: I always wanted to start a company my whole life, right? I invented a lot of things. I tried to do a startup in my college years. I just love building things that add value. So I don't think I ever thought my life would be, filled with careers that, was six, seven hours a day.

[00:06:33] Jonathan: So I think there's a little bit of me saying, Hey, I wanna actually build something for myself. I actually want to be proud of something that, the impact I have in. In an industry or the world. And so a mix of that plus Hey I really understand this problem space was the reason why I started Salesbricks.

[00:06:51] Jonathan: And I, even though I work, longer than eight hours a day, which is a requirement for founders. When I come home, I feel energized. I feel like I've, IM, I've impacted I've added value to. To companies and to other founders. And when I see my kids, I'm like, Hey I could pause for a little bit and hang out with you.

[00:07:07] Jonathan: Knowing that I've helped a bunch of founders close millions of dollars today.

[00:07:11] Omer: Okay. Let's take a quick breather here. Are you struggling to bring your SaaS idea to life without a technical co-founder? Gearheart is here to help. They're a product development studio founded by serial entrepreneurs acting as your fractional CTO.

[00:07:23] Omer: They've built over 70 successful products, including Smart Suite, which was named 2024 SaaS Startup of the year After selling his last company for $200 million. Smart Suite's founded Turn to Gearheart to build his next big idea. Their Ukrainian born team combines world class expertise with Silicon Valley connections.

[00:07:41] Omer: Helping you scale your product faster and smarter. Gearheart's leadership team even works directly with founders offering deep insight into startup success. Book your free one hour strategy session with their leadership team before the end of May @gearheart.io. That's gearheart.io.

[00:07:59] Omer: Your co-founder is John. How did you guys meet and what were the first initial steps you took to. Turn this idea into something real.

[00:08:09] Jonathan: John was a husband of a of a guy I used to work with at two companies. One of 'em was Lithium Technologies and the other one was Signal Effects, which got acquired by Splunk.

[00:08:19] Jonathan: She ran deal desk with me. She was in the fire on the ground floor running 24 7 generating contracts and negotiating renewals with our customers. And so she, she understood the problem. So one day I actually said, Hey I'm thinking about starting a company. It automates our jobs out and what do you think about it?

[00:08:38] Jonathan: And she's she saw the PowerPoint. She's my husband's gonna go build it for you. He's an engineer. And so we, I met John many times before that actual event, but we formally had these conversations when we went to Santana Row one, one weekend, and we just talked about the problem and he was all game for it.

[00:08:57] Jonathan: So that kind of really started the whole process of of ideating the official business.

[00:09:01] Omer: And so once you had him on board with this idea. Was it still a. Part time thing for a while, like how long did it take for you guys to jump in with both feet?

[00:09:13] Jonathan: Yeah, I think we were thinking about what we were going gonna do and how we're gonna build the business for about two months.

[00:09:18] Jonathan: Obviously we were just ideating, but I think two months after we both quit our jobs we foregoed a lot. Like I was I got a lot of promotions in my previous. Careers, and it got me to a very pretty comfortable salary. And you forego that when you start a company but you're so excited about the opportunity, the upside that for six months we weren't taking any revenue.

[00:09:40] Jonathan: We weren't taking a salary. We got some funding from some folks that I worked with in the past. God bless 'em. They took a huge bet on me in the early days without even a product. To me that felt like that's a lot of responsibility. I'm gonna save that money for buying computers and, for incorporating the company.

[00:09:59] Jonathan: But we didn't take salary for about six months.

[00:10:01] Omer: And how much did you raise was was it just a friends and family round?

[00:10:06] Jonathan: It was a friends and family, I think it was about 250,000 amongst, top sales leaders in, in the. In the SaaS space. Travis Patterson, who I used to work with, he was the head of sales at a few companies that I worked at.

[00:10:19] Jonathan: Mark Cranny, who is one of the early partners at Andreessen Horowitz. I worked for him for about two years. I've learned so much in the process of working under Mark. He was the first guy that ever dragged me to a fundraising, powwow with a bunch of top tier VCs in, Silicon Valley.

[00:10:36] Jonathan: I, I grew up real fast working with Mark, and having him to put some money in the company was amazing. I, his friends put money in my company. One of the CROs, the founding CROs of Okta, who had the opportunity to ring the bell there at when they went public. Put a bunch of money in our company.

[00:10:52] Jonathan: And so that started the friends and family round. And after that we, we raised about 750 from a company called Surface Ventures. A seed wing in RTP Global Who, who invested in Datadog in the early days.

[00:11:05] Omer: That initial raise, you didn't even have a product at the time, right?

[00:11:09] Omer: 'cause you spend about. 18 months building the right product before you really focused on go to market and seriously in, in terms of customer acquisition. What did you use to raise money? Was it, were you just going around and showing a slide deck or was it like more like social proof because one, one person had put some money in based on knowing you and that was added a bunch of credibility?

[00:11:35] Jonathan: Yeah, so for us it was really talking about the problem space because these founder these investors. Sales leaders, they knew that there was a huge problem in the quote to cash and deal negotiation phase of the sales process. They understood what we were building. Like I didn't have to do a slide deck.

[00:11:52] Jonathan: They just, they've worked with me for years and they're like, I trust you. This problem is definitely a problem. I face it today. My peers face it, and usually that's, they're excited to go and put some money in the early days. I think obviously they're coin operated, so 20 5K ch check here.

[00:12:10] Jonathan: Hopefully in five years, five to 10 years becomes millions of dollars. And as founders like that's my job is to make these guys. And gal is super rich, like they're capitalists and we love capitalists. That's what moves that's what helps us businesses grow. But yeah, that was, everyone was very excited about solving this problem with me.

[00:12:30] Omer: So tell me about the decision and why it took you almost two years to get to the point where you could have a product that you felt comfortable enough to. Go and sell seriously?

[00:12:43] Jonathan: Yeah, I think because we're in the FinTech space, because we touch revenue, we touch transactions, we had to build a very stable product in the early days.

[00:12:52] Jonathan: Otherwise, one small issue. You lose your trust with your prospects and your customers. So we spent a lot of time really focusing on building and architecting the right product. Even Salesforce today. Like they, they struggled to, to perfect CPQ, which is, in, in the old term that's effectively what we're building here is a configure price quote.

[00:13:14] Jonathan: And they gave up on it, like about it six months ago. They said, Hey, we're gonna stop. We're gonna deprecate this product. It's a very mission critical product. Like sitting on people's pricing and packaging and product catalog is no, joke. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of serving various.

[00:13:32] Jonathan: Businesses and whether it be AI software, hardware companies sitting on empowering people's price book is very mission critical. And we had to go invent and architect that CPQ, the complete opposite way of what Salesforce did they do. They have architected so that as you make changes to your pricing, your packaging, it generates an exhaust thousands of rows of permutations that gets queried for your order builder that gets queried for a, an entitlement check for sales banks.

[00:14:03] Jonathan: We had to undo every one of those. Architectural decisions that they made and said, Hey, how do we shrink this and how do we make this very lightweight? One day people are gonna be buying software with a few clicks of a button. That information needs to pass to the vendor. Quickly so that they can design and power that user experience within milliseconds.

[00:14:25] Jonathan: If they bought only 10 licenses, they should only have access to invite 10 people. That check has to happen within milliseconds. You can't do that with Salesforce CPQ. What Salesbricks is building is to build that architecture so that experience, that customer experience when buying software, when buying ai.

[00:14:42] Jonathan: Is very fast. And so we had to spend a lot of time really thinking about this properly. And then I have no regrets around how much time we've spent on really building the core product.

[00:14:52] Omer: Devil's advocate, you say you have no regrets, but I know one of the things you also told me earlier was we, in hindsight, we overbuilt.

[00:15:04] Omer: We try to do this all encompassing product for everybody and had to dial that back and get very focused on a specific ICP. So totally understand in terms of getting the product right and having trust when you're touching people's. Anything to do with revenue, right? Is like super sensitive.

[00:15:30] Omer: High kind of trust thing. But tell me about what happened with the overbuilding.

[00:15:35] Jonathan: I think there's no doubt that almost every B2B SaaS company has a problem around quota to cash. So that actually became a, the first problem that we had, it was just a very big market. We thought that we would build our product initially for enterprise companies.

[00:15:53] Jonathan: And so I came from Enterprise. I felt very. Comfortable building enterprise features. It just naturally what pushed me to build Salesbricks in the early days and in, in reality, like we, we realized that they're not the right ICP for us. These enterprise companies, though, they have that problem. My, the analogy I like to use is hey.

[00:16:15] Jonathan: The house I live in is way too small or the house I live in has is really breaking and falling apart. But people tend to not move because the cost of moving both financially and also in terms of time and effort is just way too high. And although they might live in a house that has this asbestos on the ceiling, they're like, I'd rather not move and die of a asbestos.

[00:16:39] Jonathan: I'd rather die of asbestos than. The die of like the efforts of moving the, my family out of the house. In many ways, like we realized like these enterprise companies don't wanna change their system. They don't wanna change their ways. And we built for those companies early. We didn't do enough interviews and research with kind of the market.

[00:16:58] Jonathan: I, I realized the enterprise had a problem because I lived in that space. What we really should have been serving was actually the early stage companies. They're the ones who actually start to form a habit in the early days of doing quotate cash a different way. It's very monotonous and medial.

[00:17:17] Jonathan: There's just so many things to be done. It's very manual in that regard. Those are the ones that we shouldn't be serving. And so we went the opposite direction. And I think for that reason our messaging was a little bit weird. It wasn't, we weren't fast at acquiring logos, and so what we've done is we've stripped away a lot of that product complexion, and we're really focusing on these companies that are anywhere from half a million dollars to 2 million.

[00:17:42] Jonathan: Those are the ones where it's like, Hey, Stripe is starting to become a pain in the ass for me from a billing perspective. I'm starting to hack it. I'm starting to build my entire infrastructure on top of Stripe when they realize they're actually becoming a sales led motion. So those are the companies we should really be going after, and we've been making some changes to really support and justify that move going down market was best for us.

[00:18:04] Omer: Originally when you were targeting enterprise how long did you do that? How many times did you have to hear No before. You decided to focus on a different ICP?

[00:18:19] Jonathan: I think the first year of going to market was probably a good like how long we've been focusing on that. I think the key area in the situation that made us realize we're going after the wrong ones was when our sales cycle started to take, three months.

[00:18:35] Jonathan: And though we had a lot of champions within the go to market team. The finance person was like, Hey, all of our revenue is on this process or this incumbent solution that we've been using for three years, four years. We just couldn't get a yes from the people who actually signed the contracts. And and we never had access to the CEOs and these type of sales cycles.

[00:18:57] Jonathan: But now as we start to go down market, like we, we talk directly to the founders and the CEOs of the company. Who actually are doing and feeling this pain and getting access to them leads to we've had a sales cycle where it took five days and we got a pretty decent, five figure deal.

[00:19:14] Jonathan: And those are signals that say, Hey, yes, this bet is starting to pay off. Selling to the CEOs and founders we're actually the right way to go about this.

[00:19:21] Omer: Now that's not an uncommon situation. A lot of founders are in the same place where. They think they know their ICP until they realize it's the wrong ICP.

[00:19:33] Omer: Can you tell me a little bit about the process you went through to figure out who to focus on instead?

[00:19:42] Jonathan: Yeah, I think it's just a matter of those sales conversations that you've been having. So what is the pattern that you're seeing as you start to get yeses and even no, like nos and even yeses.

[00:19:53] Jonathan: I think for us, like we didn't have a particular exercise or process of it. It was just a lot of founders coming back and, in our sales team, like coming back to these internal calls and saying, Hey, like we're getting people to say, Hey, this actually makes a lot of sense, they just don't wanna make the change right now and they're gonna continue to hack their processes today.

[00:20:13] Jonathan: It was just a lot of internal conversations amongst us team, within Salesbricks to understand like. What does our gut tell us about and how we should focus on these companies? And many times it's also feature requests. These companies, though they are giving you their money, they're asking you to go build things that really only represent a feature that only 20% of your customer base needs.

[00:20:37] Jonathan: And until this day, like some companies, some prospects of ours are saying, Hey, we need to go build up this integration or this particular feature. And those are red flags for us to say, Hey we might not be the right fit for you at this moment.

[00:20:48] Omer: Yeah. Okay. So tell me about how. You identified.

[00:20:53] Omer: Okay. There's a new ICP. We're making a new bet, right? We have this hypothesis based on everything we've learned and discovered so far that enterprise is the wrong way to go Early. Stage startups are probably a better ICP for us. What happened once you made some changes to the product?

[00:21:16] Omer: You started reaching out to these customers or potential customers what was different? What did you sense was going on? Did closing a sale immediately become easier? Did you initial, initially see, so okay, there's some signs of success here, but we're not, we haven't quite nailed our messaging or whatever.

[00:21:36] Omer: How did that transition happen?

[00:21:38] Jonathan: Yeah, I think some of the signs that we started to play in the right ICP was, again, faster sales cycles. So people were starting to feel this pain. They were willing and able and very excited to meet with us, right? There, there's no. Let's push this meeting out to next week.

[00:21:54] Jonathan: Let's push this meeting out to next month. None of that happened, right? There's genuinely a pain in suffering and they're excited. They're the first ones to show up on the sales call. They're like, I'm ready to tell you about my problems. In fact, they would prep us. They're like, Hey we're meeting next week.

[00:22:08] Jonathan: But I just wanted to list out the problems that we're having. So that we can make our 30 minutes next week as productive as possible. That is a good sign that, that to me is these guys have a pain and problem, and the CEO is spending 30 minutes, 20 minutes writing this up so that when we do meet face to face, like we're as productive and we're chipping away at the valuation as much as possible.

[00:22:31] Jonathan: And I started to use that and if people are not giving me their. Their list of problems before the actual meeting, I start to figure out like, is this a high intent prospect or are they just, in the window shopping phase? So for us, we started to go down market. Those are the types of things we saw.

[00:22:49] Jonathan: Faster sales cycles, I. More engaged folks within their team. The other problem that we're starting to encounter is like these people, when we acquire them as a customer, they're asking us to go build all these things in our product, but they actually make a lot of sense.

[00:23:05] Jonathan: And for me, like I would've never thought that we would need to go build this stuff out. And when we ask other customers within our base Hey, would this. Feature make a lot of sense. They're like, I was just about to ask you if you could build this out. And they're build, helping you actually formulate your roadmap.

[00:23:21] Jonathan: And the roadmap. When you take a step back from it, it's this is actually not what I've intended to go build. But actually when we build, if we build this, it makes a lot of sense. So for me, like that was the aha moments. Like I'm not. Telling my EPD team to go build stuff. That's the, I went too high up market problem.

[00:23:40] Jonathan: When you go and you hit your ICP, it's hey, the customers are actually telling you to go build out these cool things. And for us, like we're energized. We're like, oh, paying customers asking us to go build this. And when we build it, it's like we get thumbs up. We start to see more GMV process through.

[00:23:56] Jonathan: Through our platform, within their org specifically. And they go ask us to go build the next best feature as well. So as a next step. In, in many ways, like I'm no longer an inventor. My, my customers are, but that's really very healthy for our business and. In many regards. But as a founder as we start to define who our ICP is and we start to evolve and grow with them, there's a little bit of inventing that still needs to happen from the founding team.

[00:24:20] Omer: Love that. Okay, so the first 20 or 30 customers that you got. You said to me where, like from the founder Rolodex I think it's funny 'cause if I told my kids Rolodex, they'd be like, what is that? But we all know what that means. And then all startups, you tried outbound cold calling, didn't have a huge amount of success with that, and you were getting a lot of low quality leads coming through.

[00:24:50] Omer: So I'd love for you just to talk about some of the challenges you faced there, and then tell us a little bit about what did work with referrals. What exactly did you. Did you figure out and get working as a growth channel?

[00:25:05] Jonathan: Yeah so I had a big that worked in terms of sales leaders who I used to work with.

[00:25:09] Jonathan: They leave the company, they become the first sales leader in, in startups. And I'd say about 30 per 30 of our first customers were Rolodex from my, from my network. And then as. They started to buy our product, they would, share that with their peers.

[00:25:24] Jonathan: And we eventually we're having like referrals from within the Rolodex, but I. Don't get me wrong, like we did do a lot of outbounding and we still do at Salesbricks in, in some regard, but the outbounding motion is, in my opinion, very much dead. It's like you're reaching out to somebody at the wrong time, but they somehow are nice to you to go take a 32nd pitch.

[00:25:47] Jonathan: And then they are intrigued and they like have a meeting with you, but then there's really no pain or they don't understand the pain yet. And so even though we have 10, 15 meetings booked per week on an outbound motion, like the conversion rate of those companies, finding Salesbricks is a solution to go solve a problem.

[00:26:07] Jonathan: Is very low. So we're not gonna fight that anymore. And I think we're starting to see a lot of inbound from our customers. So just a little bit of TLD, TLDR about our product. Like we, our customers are using Salesbricks to send out digital contracts. Those digital con digital contracts are powered by A URL.

[00:26:27] Jonathan: And they look like a checkout flow. I would compare it to maybe like buying a pair of shoes on, on, on Nike, for example. There's a product section on the left and there's a cost table on the right. We've designed Salesbricks to look and feel exactly like buying something in the B2C world. When you see and ha experience how easy it's to buy software using Salesbricks, a lot of our customer's customers, it resonates with them.

[00:26:52] Jonathan: They actually often compare their. Their DocuSign or manual signing process and say, Hey. This was really cool experience. How does that compare to my experience of selling my software? And I'd say about five, four to five meetings per week are actually inbound through that flow, that actual experience.

[00:27:14] Jonathan: And we're starting to capitalize off of that in many ways. And our customers are very nice enough to say, Hey, yeah, you should go check out Salesbricks. Every one of our transactions are powered through it. And that's actually a very high intent and high. Probability lead for us, because they're founders.

[00:27:30] Jonathan: They're the ones who actually have the purse strings and they understand how things work in their business, and they're the ones who actually make the decisions. And they typically convert faster than if they were an ic IC type lead.

[00:27:42] Omer: So is it a, is it the kind of, the word of mouth referral or is it the.

[00:27:48] Omer: The integration in the product that like the link back or whatever, like what is it that you think is. Is driving those referrals.

[00:27:57] Jonathan: The, it's basically a powered by button from Salesbricks on that. And I'd say about it gets clicked maybe for every 10 contracts that our customers send out I think about four of 'em actually clicked that button.

[00:28:09] Omer: Interesting.

[00:28:10] Jonathan: That's actually something we've designed purposely and it's been really much a, it's been paying off for us at Salesbricks.

[00:28:16] Omer: Let's we're gonna have to wrap up soon, but let's quickly talk about hiring. So you and John started this business 2021. You've grown to a team of, I think you said 22 people right now, but it wasn't all smooth sailing.

[00:28:35] Omer: You, you had some challenges along the way. Looking back you felt like you hired too quickly hired. Many of the wrong people and it wasn't just we hire the wrong people. It actually led to you having to make a bunch of cuts not so long ago. Just tell me a little bit about what happened there.

[00:28:54] Jonathan: Yeah, so we we made some hires in the past at Salesbricks where at. I wouldn't say it's like we were hiring for warm bodies, but we needed people to fill the role. Back in two, two and two and a half years ago, it was really hard to hire an engineer. And we let our guard down in terms of the experience and the quality of skill sets, and we hired very junior people as well.

[00:29:16] Jonathan: And when you hire a lot of junior people, you might say, Hey the costs make sense. It's a third of. A full, of a well experienced engineer, we're gonna get effectively, half the productivity. But if we add, hire three of 'em, it's like the same productivity.

[00:29:31] Omer: In theory, right?

[00:29:32] Omer: Yeah.

[00:29:33] Jonathan: You're onboarding you're teaching, you're actually enabling on the actual problem space that you're trying to solve. It you're solving and requires a lot of management. And the managers at Salesbricks are also ics, like they're actually coding. They're the fastest coders at Salesbricks.

[00:29:49] Jonathan: And so we realized they wasn't. Effectively the math formula that, that we're laughing about today. And in fact, it's actually negative return. And so although they're gonna be one day very powerful, life changing engineers in the world we just don't have the infrastructure from a management perspective to do that and to see them successful here.

[00:30:10] Jonathan: So about a year and a half ago, we had to let go of those folks. I think it was good for them as equally, it was good for us. And we're, we've been investing a lot in enablement on folks and engineers that we've been hiring that, that are, have a lot of potential and they're not junior, but they're understanding the space that we're building in.

[00:30:30] Jonathan: And we're starting to use AI in, in our development these days. But I think hiring for us, like we, it really taught us like we need to start hiring people that. Have a lot of experience. They can be self-sustaining, they can be productive on their own and actually teach the founders sometimes how to do things the right way.

[00:30:48] Jonathan: We made a lot of hires since then and very experienced folks and we, it's been paying off ever since.

[00:30:54] Omer: And was this something specific you did to raise the bar in terms of who was. Yes. Higher.

[00:31:01] Jonathan: Yeah. I think one, one thing that we thought about is Salesbricks needs to be a place where a players thrive.

[00:31:07] Jonathan: And so people who go above and beyond people who are very curious about what we're building and, go above, above their, their, their punching weight and for us, if you have this concept of like your company is for a players you really set the stage around who should actually continue to be at the company and who should, we should say goodbye to.

[00:31:29] Jonathan: And when you think about there's C players and there's air players. If you keep the a, the C players on for too long. A players get burnt out and it's not fair for them and they eventually leave and then you lose a players a lot of productivity. If you. If you fire quickly, and we had to do something like this about a month ago, it wasn't easy, but we had to rip the bandaid from it.

[00:31:52] Jonathan: They were only at the company for about three weeks and we had to let them go because we are starting to live and we are very we wanna stay true to it. It's Salesbricks. This company is for A players and we wanted to protect the A players by not putting in and or keeping the C players.

[00:32:07] Jonathan: So that's one of the things that's been really helpful for me as we hire. And also, unfortunately, we have to hire fire sometimes as well.

[00:32:14] Omer: Okay. On that note, let's let's wrap up and get onto. The lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Sure. Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:32:27] Jonathan: Hire people who are smarter than you. As a founder, you're not the smartest person in the room. And you should know that, and you should embrace that. Hiring people who are really good at their particular industry or the job that they perform is gonna help you be the smartest person in the room as well.

[00:32:45] Jonathan: So hiring people who are better elevate you, elevate the company, elevate your customers, elevate the product.

[00:32:51] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:32:54] Jonathan: I would say Amp It Up by Frank Slootman from Snowflake accountability. Relentlessness execution and accountability.

[00:33:02] Jonathan: Those are the things that will help a company move leaps and bounds.

[00:33:06] Omer: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:33:11] Jonathan: Humility. I think knowing when you could, when you should say you're wrong celebrate that and embrace people being wrong many times. And I. And often, but learning from it as well is important.

[00:33:24] Jonathan: But being somebody who's balanced and people can approach you someone who's not in the ivory tower, that's that's one thing I'm, I've been hopefully staying true to.

[00:33:33] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:33:37] Jonathan: My favorite productivity habit is to spend the very first 30 minutes of your day making sure you set some tasks and two bds at a list, and making sure that at the end of the day you see what progress you made.

[00:33:51] Jonathan: You can rank yourself on how well you did.

[00:33:53] Omer: What's a new crazy business idea I'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:33:57] Jonathan: I wanna build an AI agent that can protect people's inbox from AI agents selling to them.

[00:34:04] Omer: Oh my gosh. I was just thinking about that the other day. It's like we seriously need more of those types of.

[00:34:12] Omer: Products. So if you ever do that I'll sign up for it.

[00:34:18] Jonathan: As AI gets more powerful, I get more and more inboxes. I'm like, I can't, I don't even have time to unsubscribe to these things.

[00:34:25] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:34:29] Jonathan: About four years ago I took a lot of acquisition money and bought in cash three subway restaurants.

[00:34:35] Omer: Oh, really?

[00:34:36] Jonathan: Yes.

[00:34:36] Omer: Wow. So you still, you're running those now?

[00:34:39] Jonathan: I had to sell them during Covid no longer have them, but they were teachable moments for me around picking yourself up when you fall and having the opportunity to pick yourself up is a blessing, especially in this country.

[00:34:51] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:34:56] Jonathan: I love hanging out with my kids. My kid just started to play soccer. I'm into it more than he is, which is weird, but I love just spending time with my family.

[00:35:05] Omer: Awesome. Jonathan, thank you for joining me.

[00:35:07] Omer: It's been a pleasure talking about the story of Salesbricks and. Where you are today or how you got here. More importantly if people want to check out Salesbricks, they can go to Salesbricks.com and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:35:24] Jonathan: You could LinkedIn me.

[00:35:25] Jonathan: I'm always available.

[00:35:26] Omer: Awesome. We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes. Awesome. Thank you. It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:35:35] Jonathan: Thanks all, Omer.

[00:35:36] Omer: My pleasure. Cheers.