Omer (00:10.000)
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 took to Santi Bibaloni, the co founder and CEO of Core, a SaaS product for creative and professional teams that intelligently suggests how to run their projects, finances and resources in order to improve profitability.
In 2015, Santi was running a successful E commerce agency in Argentina.
As the business grew, it became increasingly difficult to track the profitability of client projects.
At first, Santi and his partners assumed that larger agencies had already solved this problem.
But when they did their research, they learned that this was a very common problem and there wasn't a good solution out there.
So the founders decided to build the solution themselves.
Once they'd built an mvp, they managed to get two other agencies in Buenos Aires to try out their solution.
But those early users hated the product.
It had lots of bugs and a poorly designed user interface.
But even then they were willing to keep using the tool because it was helping to solve a real pain and that helped validate the idea and got the founders to be able to raise an angel round.
But they spent most of that money on paid media that didn't really work.
They tried running ads on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera but at the time they didn't have a robust solution and selling ads wasn't a good way to spend their money.
They were doing about 2k in MRR and growth was slow.
What helped them to find traction was to move up market and focus on enterprise businesses.
And some of them were the largest agencies in the world and they targeted those instead of selling to small and medium sized businesses and that helped them to get their revenue to multiple seven figures.
And they recently raised a Series A round.
In this interview we cover some great topics.
Santhi explains how they went from offering free trials and monthly payments as many SaaS businesses do, to having no free trials and selling multi year contracts instead.
We deep dive into how they use both cold email and inbound marketing to drive the majority of their growth and we share some lessons on how early stage startups can move up market and how you can sell to enterprise customers.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Santhi, welcome to the show.
Santi Bibiloni (02:47.410)
Thank you Omer, Happy to be here.
Omer (02:49.490)
So do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you or just gets you out of bed every day that you can share with Us?
Santi Bibiloni (02:56.050)
Sure.
Think big, take risks and be resilient.
Omer (03:01.250)
Nice and simple.
Like it?
Santi Bibiloni (03:02.690)
Yeah.
Omer (03:03.330)
So tell us about Core.
What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem?
Helping solve.
Santi Bibiloni (03:12.240)
Sure.
So Core is the project's profitability platform.
We are creating a new category.
We are not within project management and what we are doing is helping creative and professional teams understand projects profitability in real time.
And automatically everyone hates to do time tracking manually.
Not just because it's tedious.
I mean people have hard time doing time tracking.
But at the same time we have been educated that logging hours is for our control and it's nothing but that.
I mean managers need to understand where people are investing their time in order they can negotiate better fees with the clients.
I mean if you don't understand where your costs are, mostly in this B level world market, I mean we tackle the professional services firms.
So companies like agencies, consulting firms, software development shops, law firms, accounting firms, where 80 to 90% of the costs are the hours of the people.
So if you don't understand where your hours are or where your costs are, that it's the same, you cannot negotiate better fees with your clients.
And this can increase revenue of course as you negotiate better, but also you increase profitability.
And increasing profitability is the mainly point in this industry, in the blah blah, blah words industry.
Think omer that today $5 trillion are spent just in the US on this industry.
I mean if you take into account all the professional services here in the US like consulting groups, also you add private equity, all of this within this vertical, you're talking about almost 1/4 of the GDP.
Wow.
And if you don't have visibility on how these fees with clients, I mean an agency has a fee with a client, like Ogilvy has a fee with Coca Cola for example.
If you don't have visibility on how this fee is being operated, if you don't have visibility on the costs, it's very difficult for you to run a profitable project.
And then that you can increase your people's salaries, you can hire more people.
I mean you're going to see a lot of people working in this industry, like on ad agencies for example, that are working a huge amount of hours and they are getting no extra pay.
And this is not because their managers are keeping the money, it's because it's impossible to increase a salary, to increase a cost if you're not increasing your prices.
Right.
So, so the first thing to do is understand where your costs are going in real time and automatically without requiring your people to do time tracking manually because they hate it and they feel controlled.
And so once you can understand those costs, you can negotiate and increase revenue and profitability.
Omer (06:38.130)
So tell me about the size of the company today.
Where are you guys in terms of revenue, size of team?
Santi Bibiloni (06:44.480)
So we are today between 1 million and $2 million in ARR.
We've been growing almost 9% month over month for the last six months and we have a net revenue retention of 114%.
We have a churn in terms of dollars of 4% for the last 12 months, 4.5% for the last 12 months.
And in terms of team size, we started the year 2021 being 35 people.
We have just closed our Series a.
We're now 65 people.
And we are, our goal is to continue growing at almost 180% year over year.
In terms of revenue.
That means like tripling revenue year over year.
And in terms of team size, our goal is to be 100 people for the end of the year.
Omer (07:40.640)
Nice.
Okay, so let's start talking about where the idea for this product and this business came from.
You had a couple of co founders that you worked with when you started this business.
How did you guys come up with the idea?
Santi Bibiloni (07:55.920)
So we were leading our previous company.
So we co founded Balloon Group.
It is still is an e commerce agency based in Latin America that it was named Argentina's fastest growing e Commerce agency in 2014.
And although our revenue was growing and our team was growing, when you are in the bilablaworks market, I mean when you're selling hours, it's not only about revenue and about team, it's about profits.
Right.
It's a different animal than building a product, building a SaaS company.
Right.
So it was impossible for us to know beforehand how much money in dividends we're going to have as co founders, as partners of the company.
Right.
And it was impossible to understand that because as clients who are requiring new changes on their services, we were adding more hours.
So once you start, if you're selling a fixed price project and you start putting more hours, more hours, more hours, it means more costs.
And then you're having a profitability problem.
And if you don't have visibility on that in real time, you end up delivering unprofitable projects for unprofitable clients.
So that's the way we felt the problem firsthand.
And we started asking to ourselves, okay, how are these other agencies or companies solving this problem?
And at first we thought, okay, maybe because we are 26 year old guys based in Argentina.
I mean, this is maybe a problem that is already solved in, I don't know, in the US by bigger companies.
And we did a huge market research and we understood that the largest agencies and the smaller agencies, they all were using horizontal project management tools such as Asana, Trello, Basecamp and more.
And don't get me wrong, they're excellent project management tools, but none of them solve this problem.
I mean, they're all horizontal project management tools.
And CORE is a vertical solution, end to end solution, that has everything that a professional services firm needs to operate.
And the best thing is that it's focused on understanding where people are spending their time and how much time a task a project service really takes.
So you can send estimates to your clients, an accurate way, you can estimate time internally on an accurate way, you can deliver a project in time and profitably.
And we understood that we were creating a new category and it was not about project management.
Project management is not a real problem.
I mean, it's great, you have to assign tasks and collaboration, but what is worse is to hire 50 people to do an app, mobile, for example.
A mobile app.
And to deliver that project unprofitable after working on it during six months or 12 months.
Omer (11:19.250)
Right.
And I think the problem, a lot of companies, maybe enterprise businesses who are running projects and using one of the tools that you mentioned, they may think about running a project efficiently, but when you have internal resources, from my experience, the profit margin is not really a big factor for those types of teams.
Right.
It's just about this is a business outcome, this is what we need to get done.
We bring in people internally and we do the job.
But when you're talking about a professional services firm, if you're not doing it profitably, then you're pretty much out of business very quickly, right?
Santi Bibiloni (12:03.440)
Yeah, a professional service firm.
I mean, I know your audience, Omer is mostly like tech founders.
So you need to think of a different animal.
Right.
Professional services firms are all about profitability.
I mean, you cannot lose money for months in a row.
I mean, it's not that you receive funding for your business to grow.
This is a business model that you, you win a client that pays you, I don't know, like 50% upfront.
So you hire the people, you do the job and you deliver the project and you receive the other like 50%, for example.
That's one case.
So it's all about profitability.
You grow as you are profitable.
Omer (12:54.090)
Okay, so you guys had experienced this problem yourself when, when you were running your previous business.
How did you get started?
You talked about doing a lot of market research and, and that showed you that there was a gap in, in the market.
Even though there were a lot of, a lot of these horizontal tools, there wasn't much in terms of a good vertical solution here.
Santi Bibiloni (13:18.730)
Yeah.
Omer (13:19.090)
So how did you guys get started?
Well, what, what did you start going and talking to customers, doing interviews?
Did you go and start building a product?
Santi Bibiloni (13:29.750)
So we started with our first of all, of course with the agency we built before and with two other agencies from Buenos Aires that we knew they had a problem.
So we asked if they were willing to try our solution.
And, and they were.
We were very glad that they did.
At first they hated it.
I mean, the tool was solving the problem.
I mean it was showing them like they were having visibility on their project's profitability in real time without requiring too much manual efforts to the users.
But I mean, UX was not good, UI was not good, we had a lot of bugs.
But we validated that it was a solution to a big problem and that this was helping these companies save a lot of money and to increase a lot of their revenue and their profits.
So that's when we decided to raise like an angel round with the founder, Mercado Libre.
Mercado Libre is like the Amazon for Latin America.
It's like an $80 billion company.
NASDAQ and the founder and CEO of Mercado river among with two other investors, they gave us 325K.
We used that money to move here to Silicon Valley and we enter into 500 startups.
We did a seed round and then we started growing the business and we have just recently closed our Series A.
Omer (15:07.290)
So what did your mvp, what did that do and how long did it take you guys to build it?
Santi Bibiloni (15:15.870)
So it took us like six to nine months.
But of course in the middle we were iterating it constantly with users.
At first users paid us like 1, 2, 3, $4 per user per month.
Today the regular licenses here in the US is $30 per user per month.
And this MVP was a vertical tool, I mean was a project management tool that also include sending estimates.
And it has some things to run overheads, although it was not pretty good at overheads and client dashboard.
So we had all of our tool was like different models, they were all different MVPs.
So the problem is that we were not great at nothing, right?
We had an MVP to sending estimates, we had an MVP to manage the project.
And at first we really asked ourselves if we were doing the right thing.
Because starting to build a robust solution at first is tough because it requires a lot of investment to build something that really will be better than everything among the industry.
Right.
And I think that the vision was, our vision was always very clear and I'm glad that we insisted and we've been very resilient and persistent.
So after we've been validating the different MVPs we had on our MVP on our product and yeah, today, I mean we have, as I was saying before, net revenue retention is pretty high, churn is pretty low.
We have a good month over month growth rate.
So at the end it paid off, but it was a hard beginning.
Omer (17:22.470)
So when you guys went through 500 startups, what were the main lessons or the insights that you had from that experience about where you were going with the product and business?
Santi Bibiloni (17:33.679)
That's a great question, omer.
I mean, 500 startups added a lot of value to us here in San Francisco.
So we entered into 500 with a business that was doing almost like $2,000 per month or something like that.
And we were offering free trials to our customers.
We were offering free trials, then monthly payments, no contracts.
And we were mostly serving SMBs, like small and medium businesses.
Once we went to 500 startups, so three, four months after we were offering no free trials, we were selling to enterprise customers.
And when I say enterprise customers is the largest agencies in the world.
Like we were in different offices, right?
Not on a global scale.
And we were having some ogilvy offices as clients, Y and R, like Rubicon, bbb, bbdo, Havas, Dentsu, Lornet, Sachin, Saatchi, Macan.
I mean the largest agencies were our clients and instead of serving on a monthly basis, we started to sell on a.
Like we were doing three year contracts, we end up doing after 500 startups, three year contracts, in some cases five year contracts with prices increases year over year.
So three year contracts normally and annual upfront payments, that was great because it helped us finance, like finance a lot ourselves with our clients instead of the needing to raise money.
I mean, of course we were willing to raise money for increasing our growth, but we didn't need the money to save the business.
It was a wish, it was not a need.
Right.
So that position ourselves pretty well in order to negotiate with investors.
Another good thing that we did is so I can think of a huge mistake and also a good thing is that people here in the Valley, at first they didn't think that having SDRs, sales development representatives in Argentina would help us to tackle international businesses here, like here in the US in Europe and more.
It was a great achievement to hire SDRs like pre sales people.
Not here in the US were and not here in the valley in the Bay area where prices are so high.
So that was pretty good.
And I would recommend that to a lot of entrepreneurs who might be hearing us.
And at the same time a huge mistake for us for our business is pay that we invested.
We didn't figure out at that time what our business best lead generation source was.
So we invested for the amount of money we have raised at the time, we invested a pretty big amount in paid media.
And that was a mistake mostly because we were a robust solution.
And the same thing as us offering free trials like getting people on paid ads and offering a free trial on a tool that people wouldn't see the value proposition from scratch.
And that is what was not 100% self service.
So that was a big mistake and I'm glad that we corrected with the help of 500 startups.
Omer (21:14.980)
Yeah, I think it's tempting in the early stages if you have the money to lean on paid ads as a way to reach customers faster.
But if you haven't figured out the value prop, you know, clearly, you know, your ICP or how you're going to kind of create that sales and marketing funnel, then yeah, it's very easy to blow a lot of money.
And you tried a bunch of different ad platforms, right?
Santi Bibiloni (21:43.380)
Yeah, we tried them mostly all, I mean we tried Facebook, we tried also all the Facebook suite, like Instagram, we tried LinkedIn, we tried Google search, we tried Google Display and of course some of them kind of like worked a little bit, but none of them work as good as content marketing and email marketing.
I mean today I can say that almost all our revenue came from like on the mid market to enterprise segment came through either cold emails from our SDRs or through email marketing.
Like on nurturing, we're constantly increasing the amount of contacts in our database that we do that with different scrapping tools.
So we scrap contacts information.
We, we have a huge database and we send a lot of email marketing in terms of lead nurturing.
And both from cold emails and lead nurturing, that's where we receive most of the deals.
Omer (22:59.020)
Okay, so when you talk about email marketing and lead nurturing, that's more of an inbound thing, right?
How does that work?
What are people signing up for?
Is it they're seeing some, some content and then what do they sign up for?
Santi Bibiloni (23:16.390)
Yeah, so we do some Papers.
We do a lot of co marketing with other institutions.
We do podcasts and webinars.
We create some documents for people to download as well.
We also build a lot of success stories with our customers.
So people normally leave their emails to receive those contents.
And at the same time we try to get a lot of like we defined very well.
I mean one of the if I would try to recommend one thing would be like you need to know like what's the target market, like your address hold market, what's your ICP in terms of what's the buyer Persona?
For us it was not just like professional services firms and every person on a C level position, we said, okay, from the professional services firms we're going to start with creative agencies and within creative agencies we're going to start with the CFO.
CFO from 50 employees to 200 employees.
Company like mid market.
And then if it's a smaller company, we're going to tackle the CEO that is almost the owner of the company.
If it's higher, if it's bigger, the company, we will go to smaller positions.
So define very well who your ideal customer profile is and once you know what's their specific pain points on each of these positions, I mean you are almost set up, ready for success.
I mean we said like agencies, CFO, 50 to 200 employees companies, their pain points are these two to three.
So we started sending them emails and we were receiving a lot of replies and our SDRs were and I'm talking about our sales process like our SDRs who are receiving those emails and starting their like doing discovery calls to validate budget of originism time and if they were qualified, they will schedule a demo with account executive.
Omer (25:38.520)
Got it.
Santi Bibiloni (25:39.160)
Yeah.
Omer (25:39.560)
I think getting that specific about who you're reaching out to can make a big difference.
If you're saying I'm going to create cold email or write cold email and I'm going to send it to a CFO of this type of company of this size who has these problems.
Your message is going to be a lot clearer than I'm going to send a cold email to anybody who works at this company.
And then you basically get nobody's attention.
Right.
Because you've just got a very watered down message that is like most of the cold emails that we see.
Santi Bibiloni (26:16.750)
Exactly.
I think that understanding who you're talking to and also talking on what they need to solve or not and not on what you do, I think that's key for everyone who's starting a business.
Omer (26:33.310)
Yeah, yeah.
It's very Nuanced.
But people don't care about how great your company is or how excited you are to tell them about something.
Right.
It's just like they have a problem.
That's all they care about.
Santi Bibiloni (26:46.230)
Yeah, I receive a lot of, as you have just said, like, we receive a lot of cold emails saying, hey, hi, how are you?
I am John Smith and my company does this and that.
And like, are you able for five minutes, five minutes conversation, like, who cares?
Right.
If you're going to the enterprise segment, it's also good to personalize the outreach and also talk about.
Ask.
Ask more than what you say.
Omer (27:16.560)
Yeah, yeah.
So give me an example of a typical outreach email.
Like what?
That you guys have found work.
Well, what would it say?
Santi Bibiloni (27:26.080)
So a sneaker is your, your, your prospect, your lead.
You personalize it more.
Right.
And something that would be like, hi, Omer, I realized that we both went to Stanford University and I'm here to ask you, how are you guys?
I will congratulate you on something you did and something that I read about you and mostly like an achievement that the business had.
And when I mentioned the business, I'll ask you, like, oh, but I will, I wonder, like, how profitable this project was for you.
For example, did the client require many changes?
How did you manage it?
Did you estimate the time?
Was the estimated time matching the real time on the project?
Something like that.
And then I will put like three success stories, like, because I like agencies like you, creative agencies like you, based on Seattle, where you, Omer, are.
I will mention agencies from the place this person is and the size of the business that this person has, and I will show them how they solve that problem.
Probably at first you start saying that these agents, that these success stories are from the place this person is, but they are not.
Once the business starts growing, you can do that.
I mean, you can, you have more customers and you will, you will find a way to be way more personalized.
And then of course, like, do you have five minutes for a conversation today or this week?
Yeah, that's the way we do it.
Omer (29:14.070)
Yeah, no, that's great.
And you know, I think for me, often, like a lot of people get a lot of cold email.
And my test always has been, is like, if I replaced Omer with somebody else's name, would this email work just as well for them?
Right.
And if it does, you're like, okay, this is not, you know, something I'm really going to pay attention to right now.
Santi Bibiloni (29:37.910)
Yeah, we never tell what we do.
Yeah, we never tell what we do on an email.
It's not about pitching our company, it's about knowing what the pains of the customer are.
Omer (29:50.640)
Yeah.
And so just by doing Those were the two main drivers for your growth and getting to over 7 figures in ARR.
This inbound email marketing, nurturing and then doing outbound emails.
Santi Bibiloni (30:08.400)
Yeah.
Omer (30:09.120)
Was there anything else that drove that growth?
Santi Bibiloni (30:11.440)
Yeah.
So of course we try a lot of things.
We traveled before the pandemic.
We used to travel a lot to go into the, to talk with like big CEOs and big CFOs, have in person meetings.
That was good for like creating trust.
But things changed and we closed the, we closed same figure contracts on Zoom.
Right.
So but yeah, having, having those conversations was.
And doing some networking was good.
I mean the higher you go in terms of if you're tackling like Fortune 100 companies, Fortune 500 companies.
So the higher you go, the more, the more personalized you need to be.
So either traveling or either like sending gifts or really thinking on the other person.
It's more like is more related to direct marketing and less massive.
Omer (31:16.810)
Yeah.
Santi Bibiloni (31:17.170)
Right.
Omer (31:18.290)
Okay.
I want to go back a little bit and talk about number one is like how did you figure out your icp, your ideal customer profile?
You guys had started working with SMBs and it would have been logical to say let's just keep going and focusing on that as a target market.
But you made the move to focus on enterprise.
What was the reason for that and how did you get to that conclusion?
Santi Bibiloni (31:58.720)
That's a great question.
And the reason for that is that we understood that bigger companies have the same problem.
And as bigger the company gets bigger like the bigger the problem.
Right.
It's not the same to manage a project.
So although if this is a, this is a huge problem for a 10 people business, but it's a way more important problem for 100, 200, 1,000, 10,000 employee business because the more employees you have, the more hours these people put and, and the more costs you have on projects and clients.
So we understood that this was a problem that as the company scales, the problem scales as well.
So that's.
We started with SMBs, like with 10, 15, 20 people, professional and creative teams like businesses.
And then we scaled it into the enterprise market and.
And then after the enterprise market, now we are tackling like mid market to enterprise.
We found a great sweet spot in both segments.
Omer (33:11.760)
Yeah, I noticed the free trial button was back on the homepage now.
So it sounds like you're trying that again or that's working for you with this sort of change in markets.
Santi Bibiloni (33:24.720)
Yeah.
So today, before the free trial was it directed you straight to the product and today it scales you a conversation with a person that will give you a trial, but understanding your pains before.
Omer (33:43.160)
Ah, got it, got it.
Okay.
So in, in whether people click the schedule a demo button or they click the free trial button, they're basically filling out, submitting a form where they'll talk to somebody who will kind of take them through the process.
Santi Bibiloni (33:59.040)
Yeah, got it.
Omer (34:01.200)
You know, I think often because you guys, it seems like you made the shift towards enterprise businesses pretty early on and I'm sure going through 500 startups and having some mentoring there maybe gave you more confidence to do that.
But a lot of times one of the things I see with founders or early stage SaaS companies is that they're reluctant to go and go for those enterprise type customers because they either feel that the product isn't mature enough.
How are we going to build credibility with a company of this size when there's just three of us working in this company?
And if there are any existing solutions in the market, then it sort of makes your product look even more immature because you've only been working on it for, you know, six to 12 months and there's a huge feature parity between somebody who maybe is in the market, maybe doesn't have the best solution, but they've been doing it for, you know, 10 years.
So did you experience any of those challenges as you started to move up market and focus on enterprises?
Santi Bibiloni (35:15.970)
100%, I felt all of those challenges.
All of those.
I mean, it's very difficult for a young startup to build trust and to give credibility to large enterprises.
Right.
So the more you can do on creating success stories, the more you can do on building champions.
I mean, I think that doing consulting, sales and creating champions on the other side, that's pretty critical.
If you show the other person how their growth is going to be impacted by choosing your solution, this person is going to sell within his company or her company better than the way you can do it.
Right?
Omer (36:15.690)
Yeah.
Santi Bibiloni (36:16.410)
So building champions is critical and it doesn't care if you are a startup or if you're a very big company.
As the quote says, no one gets fired for hiring IBM.
Everyone, they can be fired for hiring you for hiring a startup.
So this is because of the risk in the enterprise level.
Like no one wants to take a risk and you can mitigate those risks by different ways.
Of course, you need to be prepared for risk assessments and IT conversations and all of that, but building champions on the finance level, on the IT level, and showing all of them how their company and how themselves, their positions within, within their companies could be impacted.
And how can they grow by choosing you?
Well, that's what they care about.
I mean as we were talking, as we were saying a couple of minutes ago regarding cold emails, no one cares about how great your company is.
Everyone cares about how can they grow with you.
So selling is not about pitching your company.
Selling is about understanding where their pains are and how can they grow by choosing you.
Omer (37:41.370)
And what does that typical sales cycle look like for you guys?
From the point of first contact to getting a contract signed, what's the typical lead time on a deal?
Santi Bibiloni (37:54.970)
So our average sales cycle is 86 days for the mid market and some enterprise contracts.
86 days is a safe cycle.
Omer (38:09.100)
And typically what does that involve?
I think you alluded to this a little earlier.
It's more than just give them a demo and then they sign the contract.
There's a bunch of stakeholders and decisions and evaluations that need to be made.
Santi Bibiloni (38:23.020)
Yeah.
So the champion comes in, they see a demo, they require form material, they, they enter into an active evaluation process.
And that's also the way we call it on the CRM.
And so we open a deal, we open the deal on the CRM, we show the customer the tool, we understand the pains, we show them, we customize the demo.
So we don't customize our product but we customize our demo regarding the pains this person has and how can they be solved with us.
And once this person says, hey, I think this is the tool we need, we send them, we send this person a material and they normally come to a second conversation and they, they will add more people from their team, more buyers.
And we of course ask like who the ultimate decision, decision maker is and we try to bring him or her to a second conversation.
And if the company is very big, then you will go to it, then you go, then you will probably, you will sign an RFP and you negotiate in our case that we charge per user per month.
You will negotiate a pricing regarding the amount of users.
If you are talking about an enterprise customer, if it's a mid market customer, those things are easier, are shorter.
Omer (39:57.980)
Yeah, yeah.
All right, we should wrap up.
So let's get onto the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
All right?
Santi Bibiloni (40:09.620)
Sure.
Yep.
Omer (40:10.620)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Santi Bibiloni (40:15.100)
My Father once told me that if I wanted to start my own business that I should do it before I. I take a lot of responsibilities like family, like getting married, having kids.
So yeah, start the business as fast as you can and at the moment of your life where you can take risks.
Omer (40:38.820)
Yeah.
Good advice.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Santi Bibiloni (40:42.660)
I would recommend start with why because I think purpose and vision is key.
Then other books are for other stages.
But first of all, if you're starting and thinking of starting something, start with why.
From Simon Sinek.
It's good.
Omer (41:04.350)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Santi Bibiloni (41:08.350)
Resilience 100%.
Omer (41:10.350)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Santi Bibiloni (41:13.980)
Core, of course.
Omer (41:16.220)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Santi Bibiloni (41:20.700)
I would do social impact and I'll try to do it with undeveloped countries.
Omer (41:28.220)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Santi Bibiloni (41:32.300)
That I started my first business in a deposit that had no windows and.
Yeah, no windows and almost like.
No, there's no space for putting other things that are table and two chairs.
Omer (41:52.490)
Love it.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Santi Bibiloni (41:56.170)
Scuba diving.
Omer (41:57.370)
Scuba diving.
Nice.
That's the first.
I haven't heard that one before.
All right, great.
Well, Santi, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story.
If people want to find out more about Core, they can go to projectcore c o r.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Santi Bibiloni (42:15.540)
I would suggest LinkedIn.
Santi Bibulani.
Great.
Omer (42:19.300)
We'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes as well so folks can find that.
Santi Bibiloni (42:24.220)
Great.
Omer (42:24.500)
Well, thanks.
Thanks again, Sandhi.
I wish you and the team the best of success and thanks for joining me today.
Santi Bibiloni (42:29.380)
Thank you very much.
Omar.
Yes.
