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 talked to Amos Schwartz Farb, a serial entrepreneur, managing Director of techstars in Austin, Texas, and the author of Sell More Faster, the Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups.
Sell More Faster is a guide for founders seeking product market fit, building their sales team, developing a growth strategy, and chasing accelerated sustained sales selling success.
In this interview, Amos and I discuss some of the key ideas in his book, including building a foundation with a W3 or who, what and why Framework, creating your ideal customer profile and finding your first customers, defining, creating and testing your sales process and how to figure out your ideal pricing when you're starting out.
By the end of this interview, you'll have some practical tips you can use to sell More faster with your SaaS business, so I hope you enjoy it.
Amos, welcome to the show.
Amos Schwartzfarb (01:28.650)
Hey, thanks for having me on.
Really excited to be here.
Omer (01:30.930)
So do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you or gets you out of bed that you can share with us?
Amos Schwartzfarb (01:37.050)
Yeah, I thought about that a lot, you know, when you sent it over.
And I have two things to share, maybe if I'm allowed to share too.
Omer (01:44.010)
Sure.
Amos Schwartzfarb (01:44.410)
One is a really quick quote, which I just.
I've always loved.
And then one is actually a Robert Frost poem, which means a lot to me and has for a long time.
And I have it tattooed on my body.
And so I thought I'd share them both.
Wow.
So the quote was, there was a clothing company in the 90s called no Fear.
I don't think they're around anymore.
And they had this awesome quote which was don't let your fears get in the way of your dreams.
And that always resonated with me.
In business, out of business.
So that's a favorite quote.
But I thought, like I said, I would share the Robert Frost poem also, because that has meant a lot to me for even many more years than that.
My mom read this to me when I was a little kid and it always meant a lot to me.
So the poem is called the Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.
And it goes like this.
It's short.
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and sorry, I could not travel both and be one traveler long.
I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent beneath the undergrowth, Then took The other as just as fair and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted where though as for the passing there had worn them really about the same.
And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.
Though I kept the first for another day.
Yet knowing how way leads to way, I doubted if I shall ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere Ages and ages hence Two roads diverged in a wood and I I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.
Omer (03:12.830)
There's a lot to unpack there.
Amos Schwartzfarb (03:14.190)
There's a lot to unpack there.
Yeah.
Omer (03:16.350)
Why is that important for you?
Amos Schwartzfarb (03:17.950)
That's been important to me because I feel like at many, many different junctions in my life, and not always consciously.
In fact, until the last probably decade, not consciously at all.
I didn't take the road that I was expected to take.
I sort of followed my heart and my passion, more so than what conventional wisdom would have led me to.
And I don't know, who knows what kind of person I would have been otherwise.
But I'm very happy with where I've landed in life, and I attribute it to some of those choices along the way.
Omer (03:49.170)
Yeah, I love it.
And I mean, obviously we're recording this in video, and you've got a bunch of stuff there which I wouldn't have expected to see.
You got a cool guitar hanging up there on the wall, some funky amp or something.
I don't know, like, what else is going on back there?
Amos Schwartzfarb (04:10.140)
Yeah, so I'm actually in the office of the company I'm on the board of called Do Stuff Media.
It's a really cool company.
Depending on what city you're in there, they're in about 20 cities, and they basically are a local event guide for music and entertainment.
So in Austin, for example, it's Do512, which is our area code.
In San Francisco, it's called do the Bay.
And every city is a little bit different.
I think Chicago's either do 312 or do Chicago.
And so they're all about music and entertainment.
I'm in one of their offices.
And so, yeah, it's an old bass, it's an old receiver.
There's like a board track, recording reel to reel up there.
There's some really neat stuff out here.
Omer (04:45.900)
Yeah, that's really cool.
All right, let's talk about your book.
So the book is called Sell More Faster, the Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups.
Before we actually get into the book, I guess it's good to sort of set a little bit of context for this, both what you're doing today, these days at techstars and then also a little bit about your background because that's really important to how you ended up writing this book.
So can you tell the audience just a little bit about like what you're doing at techstars today and then a little bit more about your background?
Amos Schwartzfarb (05:23.970)
Sure.
So I've been at techstars for four and a half years as the managing director of techstars in Austin for three years.
Prior to that I was a mentor, which basically meant I would go in and work with companies that were accepted into the techstars program.
But I was running another company at the time.
And as managing director what I do is I invest in 10 companies a year via Austin accelerator and then 10 companies a year come to Austin for 90 days and we work really hands on with them to help them figure out lots and lots of things.
But predominantly can they get themselves on a path to product market fit and how do they know when they found it and what do they do once they've found it?
That's what I do day in and day out.
Now I'm up to 50 companies in my portfolio directly, another 30 indirectly through inheriting them.
And so I work with a lot of early stage companies and it's predominantly pre series A companies.
Occasionally they're post series A, but predominantly pre series A.
And prior to this, Starting in the mid-90s, I've been either a founder or a founding member of six different companies over the course of that time.
Going back to the poem that I read, I didn't graduate college thinking like, oh I want to go start a company or oh, I want to be an entrepreneur.
Actually I was on a much different path.
I graduated college and decided to go travel around the country and rock climb for a few years and, and figured when I settled down I might be a teacher or something, which funny kind of am that today in a different context and stumbled into, really into.
The first couple of startups that I was in were all accidents.
The first one is I was doing some odd jobs and packing boxes in a mail order company that sold rock climbing gear and they didn't have a website.
It was sort of in the early, early days of the Internet.
In that time we ended up putting that company online and having a really early e commerce site and that was sort of my launch into the startup world.
Omer (07:19.720)
Yeah.
And then you spent some time@business.com as well.
Amos Schwartzfarb (07:23.160)
That's right, yeah.
So before Business.
There was a Couple things before business.com when I left Shoreline Mountain Products, I was doing this temp job at a producing TV commercials or system producing TV commercials.
And we had wrapped the commercial and I was out one night after we wrapped and met one of the founders of a company called Hot Jobs.
This is in the earlier days of Hot Jobs.
They ended up bringing me on in a sales capacity and that we were growing really fast.
We ipoed in the first nine months that I was there.
I ended up opening up an office in Los Angeles for them and doing a whole bunch of things there.
And then when I left, we still ended up selling that company to Yahoo.
And when I left Hot Jobs, Yahoo, I started a company called work.com that got acquired by business.com and that's when I ended up at business.com for about two years basically to come on and scale the sales organization.
And we ended up selling that company as well.
Omer (08:14.510)
So you've done a lot of stuff.
And I remember going through your LinkedIn profile and, you know, like, it shows you like a few, and then it says, click to see more.
And then yours was like, click to see more again.
And then click to see more again.
There's like a whole bunch of stuff that you've done.
And it's also because, you know, you're on the board of a bunch of companies and advising and so on, but you're involved in a lot of different things.
Amos Schwartzfarb (08:38.190)
Yeah, I definitely keep myself occupied with fun and interesting things.
I have this funny.
Well, I think it's funny.
I don't know if you'll think it's funny.
When I first moved to Austin, I was taking a little bit of time off.
I got to town and people were introducing me to people.
And so someone introduced me to this company at the time.
I think they're pretty well known now.
They're called Bazaar Boys.
They went public several years back, but at the time they were still a smaller company.
And someone introduced me to them as a place to potentially work.
And I wasn't really looking for a job, but I was meeting people.
So I went in and I'm talking to the recruiter, and the recruiter looks at my resume and she says, gosh, you really jumped around quite a bit.
And she started naming soft.
I'm like, yeah, that's two companies.
I've just had a lot of different roles in those companies.
And I had explained to her, and she's a good friend of mine now, and we sort of joke about that.
Omer (09:26.459)
That's funny.
All Right, let's talk about the book.
How did this come about?
Why did you decide that you were going to write this book?
Amos Schwartzfarb (09:33.420)
So, originally I didn't decide to write a book.
In fact, I was very specifically not looking to write a book.
It all came about because I found myself with a little bit of extra time about a year and a half ago because I was injured and I really couldn't.
I couldn't exercise, I couldn't get out much.
And so I was sitting around trying to occupy myself, you know, and I do like to keep myself very occupied.
And so I decided that of my peers at techstars, you know, I work with some really wonderful, incredible smart people, very talented people.
Very few of them have a background similar to mine in terms of starting and figuring out and growing sales organizations.
You know, got great technology people and product people and marketers and people that are much better CEOs and leaders than I could ever hope to be.
But not a lot of people had that specific background.
And so it was a gap that I filled for a lot of my peers, which is helping their companies when it came to these things around early stage sales and figuring things out.
And so I had this extra time on my hand and decided to just write up a bunch of blog posts that I would.
Maybe they would get published, maybe they wouldn't, but maybe more just as resources for my peers and the companies that were in their portfolios.
A few people, as I was circulating around and actually said, hey, have you thought about writing a book?
And my answer was always, no, I don't know how to do that.
I don't really want to go down that path.
I don't have the time to even figure out how to do it, much less sit down and write it.
And someone that I know that was in the publishing industry got their hands on what I had written and reached out to me and said, hey, I think there's actually, there's a book here that hasn't been written yet.
And we talked about it a little bit.
I'm giving you the abridged version, but we talked about it a little bit, and she basically convinced me that, you know, that there was a book here, that she would be happy to be the editor of it, and that Wiley Publishing would.
Would love to publish it.
And so that happened a little more than a year ago, probably about 13 or 14 months ago.
We, we came to an agreement and sat down and over the next couple months turned the blog post.
Basically, I filled out the gaps in the blog post and turned it into the book that you have today?
Omer (11:37.750)
Yeah, I mean, so that's the book.
You've probably seen that before.
Right.
And one of the things I liked about it was that a lot of the times you read books and they tend to over complicate things even more and you sort of finish like feeling overwhelmed and not sure where to go.
And what I liked about this was that you actually took a lot of stuff and boiled it down into a very digestible framework that's easy to think about and act on and remember.
Right.
So that was like the big takeaway for me in terms of a lot of founders don't want to become sales experts.
They just want to learn enough to be able to do a decent job with finding customers, selling their product, and hopefully being able to scale that at some point.
And I think the book does a really good job at laying that out and giving them a blueprint.
So I thought it would be fun for us to sort of go through it and maybe talk about sort of the different parts and.
And hopefully people will give them a few nuggets and, you know, bits of advice that they can take away and start thinking about in their businesses and hopefully whet their appetites enough that they'd also want to get the book.
Because I think it is worth getting and hopefully we'll achieve both those goals with this.
Does that sound good?
Amos Schwartzfarb (13:02.430)
Yeah.
Omer (13:02.830)
Yeah.
Amos Schwartzfarb (13:03.110)
And thank you very much for saying that.
That was my biggest fear.
Probably my biggest fear in writing the book and putting it out there was the opposite of what you just described, is that people would read it and either say, this is not useful or I don't understand how to use it.
And I've gotten feedback like yours a lot which has put me at ease that okay, I actually, you know, I did create something that people could use and I'm.
I'm like that.
Like I can take complex things and just for me, I need to simplify them.
If I can't simplify them, it's harder for me to understand.
My brain just doesn't work that way.
So thank you for saying that.
It really means a lot.
Omer (13:38.490)
Yeah, sure.
So why don't we start with the.
The book starts with the W3 framework.
The WHO, what, why?
And so we can talk about that.
And then you sort of have a five step framework which is made up of identify, prove, repeat, scale, and retain.
And so we'll dig into each one of those.
But let's start with this W3 framework.
Like the who, what, why, what is that?
And why is that important?
Amos Schwartzfarb (14:05.780)
So the way that I think about at any stage of your business, but especially in the early days, the W3 framework, to me, is the foundation for your business, period.
Like, you can have the most wonderful technology in the world, the most innovative technology in the world, the most elegant built product that you've ever seen, but if you can't figure out who your customer really is, what they're really buying from you, and why they buy it, right, the three W's, who, what, and why, all of that doesn't matter.
You can have the most elegant product that has the most sophisticated technology that's ever been created, but if you don't know who is actually going to use it, what the thing is that they care about and why they care about it, it doesn't matter.
And if it doesn't matter, that means that you're not making sales, which means that your thing won't exist in the future.
And so, to me, that's just the foundation of everything, right?
There could be other ways that people want to approach it, and that's totally fine.
This has worked for me over and over and over again.
And so now, having used it and put it into place so many times, you know, for me, it's a framework that works really, really well.
And just getting into a little more detail there.
The who.
When I talk about the who, oftentimes founders will say, yeah, but I know who my customer is.
Well, you know who your customer is at a high level.
And my challenge is always, how specific can you be in defining your who so that it feels so narrow that you feel uncomfortable that your TAM has been shrunk to virtually almost nothing, relatively speaking, that's the who you want to start with.
Because when you can define that who and you can make a sale 100% of the time, and I mean that not 99%, 100% of the time, you now can create a list of attributes and that you can play with to figure out how to expand your TAM over time.
And you take one attribute out, mess with one a little bit.
And so the way that I think about who is, you know, an example I'll give is, okay, we sell the companies.
In the healthcare space, it's typically hospitals between 1,000 and 5,000 people.
They're always private hospitals.
They always use one of these three legacy softwares.
There's a director of IT who's been with the company for under five years.
That person is typically in this age range, et cetera, et cetera, and as many different ways that you can slice it and make it narrow so that you know they're going to say yes and then start to expand from there.
So that's the who.
To me, that's really, really important when you know that who really, really well, it does become a lot easier to start going wider so that you eventually one day, if you're right, you'll get to your entire town.
Omer (16:35.330)
Yeah.
And I would just, I would just say one thing there.
A lot of founders will say, you know, I don't know why my product isn't resonating with customers or they kind of, you know, we'll talk a little bit more about this later.
But maybe they see the demo or.
But then there's not really a lot of follow up or whatever.
And I think a lot of the times it's, if you're being so broad with who you're trying to target, you don't really.
No one's, no one is going to kind of res.
That product isn't going to resonate with anybody.
Amos Schwartzfarb (17:04.310)
Right.
Omer (17:04.590)
And it reminded me of a founder who initially what they'd been doing was their target market had been like anybody, right?
Anybody who wants like E signatures on contracts or something like that.
And it was only when they eventually, like after sort of some years of pain, they narrowed down and they segmented into a.
There was a market of about 300 potential customers for them and that felt so small, but it was very, very precise and they knew exactly who to go after.
That's when things really started to happen for them.
And that's what they attribute growing to over, you know, becoming a 10 million plus year business.
And they haven't expanded beyond those 300 potential customers yet.
So that for me was like a really good lesson that it's so counterintuitive.
We don't want to do it because we feel like we're going to make life harder for ourselves by restricting who we focus on.
But it's actually the opposite.
Amos Schwartzfarb (18:03.940)
Yeah, that's right.
And you know, a follow up question I'll often get from founders is yeah, but how do I describe my potential TAM to potential investors who are looking for a bigger outcome?
Totally fair question.
And the simple version of the answer is the TAM is all of this.
We are starting here because we believe it's the right place to start.
And here is the data that we have that suggests we're right.
Here are the things we still need to prove and if we're wrong, then here's the next couple of customer types we're going to start with so that we can expand.
The ancillary benefit to that is now your investors are saying, oh, you're data driven, you're thinking really tactically and have a vision at the same time.
And it gives them more confidence in your ability to actually execute.
Omer (18:47.730)
Yeah.
The second thing was about what is your customer buying?
And the interesting insight for me from the book was when you made the distinction between what you think you're selling and what your customer thinks they're buying, that was a really important takeaway there because tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that.
Amos Schwartzfarb (19:07.300)
Yeah, it's such a subtle difference most of the time.
But that subtle difference is for the customer, is the difference between what you do and what you do for them.
They don't really care what you do.
Right.
They're busy, they care how it's going to help them.
And so the example, I think I use this example in the book, but the example that I like to use is Google sells many products.
Right.
One of the products they sell is they sell search advertising.
As a customer of Google's, you are not buying search advertising.
You are buying sales, you are buying leads, you are buying research.
You're buying these things that help you in your job and in your business grow.
And that subtle difference is the thing that will suddenly make the customer say, oh, this is going to help me do X.
So I do think it's really, really important.
And when you can nail that, you're really getting really the who or why is you're ess elevator pitch.
That what is the thing that makes them typically say, okay, I get that who I am.
I now know what it's going to do for me.
And then oftentimes the why, they'll connect the why.
Even if you don't know what it is or you think you know what it is and it might not be what it is, but then they'll be able to help you understand what the why is.
And the why is why do they care?
And there's two different whys.
There's the why does it matter for the business.
Increased profit, increased revenue, time efficiency, like what is the thing?
And then why does the individual actually care about it?
If they're hitting all their goals, is there a motivation for the individual?
Omer (20:31.610)
Yeah, again, really good distinction.
It's very easy to focus on the first why.
Well, this will get you more leads or this will help you do this.
But that second layer, and also thinking about it personally, in terms of the person you're talking to, the decision maker, there's a why.
For them.
And it might not be as explicit.
Maybe it's just so life is easier when I have to go in front of the board and tell them what the hell we're doing for the next 12 months.
Right.
I don't know whatever that is.
But having that sort of.
And that only comes from being able to go back to understanding, like, who are you selling to?
And if you're clearing about who that person is, you can start to get deeper understanding of that person.
Amos Schwartzfarb (21:13.690)
You just nailed it.
And so I was going to.
I'm so glad you said it because I was going to circle it back there, which is you, especially in an earlier stage company, you will encounter the right who, the right what, the right business.
Why.
But perhaps the buyer.
Maybe it doesn't matter to them because they're hitting their goals, they're not going to get promoted like everything else is in place.
And so bringing another tool on isn't actually a benefit to them personally.
Which means you either don't have the right buyer in that company or that company isn't in your current profile of your who, whether.
Even though you know they should be, they're not today because they're not buying.
Right.
So you need to find the people that are then motivated.
You know, they have motivation incentives in the company to say, okay, I need to be looking for new and innovative things all the time as well.
And it does.
It narrows your who even more.
But it's an important aspect of that.
Omer (22:07.210)
Now, the next step of this framework, so we've talked about the identify as sort of the next piece and finding your first customers and you go through some detail in terms of how people can do that.
But if somebody is listening to this and saying today, okay, I'm not sure where to find my customers or I've kind of narrowed this market down or what should I be doing?
Should I put up a landing page and just hope, you know, drive traffic there and get people to sign up, put their email address in for product that's coming soon, or should I go and do outreach?
What's your advice?
What's a good way for people to get started with this?
Amos Schwartzfarb (22:46.360)
My approach and you know, I sometimes get pushed back on this approach because it's a lot of hard work, but also so starting a company, welcome to it.
My approach is, you know, once you have a theory of your who, what, why, you then are enabled to go and make a list of the kind of customers and the customers who should actually fall in that maybe you can't create a fully exhaustive list, but you can come up with 20 or 30 or 40 customers that you believe match your who, what and why.
Once you have that list of companies, the next stage is to go and figure out who are the people that you want to talk to in those companies.
And you know, for me, LinkedIn is a great tool for that.
You know, I think it has stood the test of time in terms of being able to identify for the most part people inside of a company.
Most people are keeping their LinkedIn up to date, you know, and again, if they're not, that might not actually be a company in your who, even though you think it should be.
So using LinkedIn to find those people and then going and figuring out how to have conversations with them, Right.
If you now have a list of, you know, 30 companies and you know, somewhere between maybe 30 and 100 people based on the number of people at each company that you believe you want to try to talk to, figuring out how to leverage LinkedIn and your own personal networks and cold outreach and all these things just to get in front of them.
And it might take a lot of work to actually get in front of them.
And then, you know, honing your conversation points so that when you get in front of them and it's a good use of everyone's time and you know, one of those things is not stepping in front of them, thinking you're going to sell them.
That's a benefit of actually being right about your who, what and why, but going into those conversations with a strong conviction that you're trying to tease out whether or not you're right.
So asking lots of questions and trying to actually have a conversation with them.
Omer (24:30.100)
So it's more about a customer development type interview than even though this is a book about sales, it's not about find a list of people and sell the crap out as soon as you start talking to them.
Amos Schwartzfarb (24:43.440)
Yeah, one of the things that I love and hate about the title of the book, it is very much about how to sell more faster.
It is not a book to teach you how to sell.
You're not going to get that from the book.
You're going to get the tools and frameworks to figure out how do you set a foundation so that you can actually get to repeatability and scalability so that you as quickly as possible so that you can sell to many, many customers.
Omer (25:08.620)
So the next step you talk about is building a sales process.
And I guess if somebody is at the early stages, probably the last thing most people, I'm not sure most people A lot of people want to do is to start thinking about a sales process.
It's like, hey, I'm still figuring this stuff out.
I don't know what works and what doesn't work.
And so am I just kind of creating a whole bunch of bureaucracy by having a sales process too early on.
So what's your advice again?
Like when does it make sense for people to be thinking about this and how will it help founders?
By having a good sales process in place?
Amos Schwartzfarb (25:51.400)
Yeah.
So whether they like it or not, they have a sales process in place from day one.
Even if they're not calling it that and acting by it, it's happening through the process itself.
And you know, I would say that when it comes to a sales process, it's one of the few areas where I like to start by over engineering versus under engineering.
Most of the time I like to under engineer.
And I strongly believe it needs to start on day one, not to put it in place, but to start to try to understand what it will be in the future so that you have a basis for learning.
And it's all around learning.
So you know, you go and have three, four or five conversations, go back and record what were all of the steps.
And again over engineering it, what were all of the steps I had to go to to get the meeting?
What were all the steps that happened in the meeting?
Maybe they all happened in one meeting.
But there's, there's signposts along the way that will say I'm headed in the right direction.
And the reason why I think that's important is because it starts to set you up to be a very metrics driven sales organization.
By putting all of these signposts along the way, some of won't matter, some of which you'll condense and combine together, some of which you'll throw away, and some of which will become really, really important signposts.
As you build it out, it becomes more mature.
It might take two, three, four years before or longer even before you have a matured sales process.
But by starting that on day one, you're starting to be a metrics driven sales organization which ultimately will allow you to much more quickly understand what works, what doesn't work, where you need to be spending your time and effort versus where you don't need to.
And early on and you just have a handful of conversations.
It's easy to use your intuition on that stuff.
But if you get into the 20, 30, 40, 50 conversations, it can easily get lost and combined together in a way that doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
Omer (27:36.400)
And then beyond the sales process, you talk about getting to repeatability or the stage called repeat.
And one of the things that, I mean, you know, I'd love to kind of go and talk about everything you've written in the book, but that ain't going to happen unless we got the whole day to talk about it.
But one of the things from there was pricing and how founders should think about pricing.
And this is.
This is something I see over and over again when people are starting out.
How much do I charge for my product?
And you also make a really good point in there, which I'd love for you to talk about, is that I often see founders starting to think about optimizing their pricing way too early.
So, again, what's the approach that you advise and how should people think about once setting the price and when does it make sense to optimize?
Amos Schwartzfarb (28:31.290)
Yeah, I see it all the time at techstars too, where founders come in and they're probably underpriced and mentors are telling them to raise their prices right away.
I'm like, hold on a second.
So my belief is that your price doesn't matter early on.
It matters that there's money exchanging hands because you want your customer to have skin in the game.
You want them to say, okay, I put something out there.
But from my experience, you're much better off underpricing your early customers and pushing price up over time versus overpricing them.
And then they will go away because they're not seeing value.
And they'll either not give you a good reason or they'll say it doesn't work, or they'll just say it's too expensive.
And now you're caught in a price negotiation when early on, what you should be doing is learning what is the value to them and how are they measuring that value.
Because if you understand those things, then you will, in the longer term and even in the midterm, have a better comprehension of how you should be thinking about price.
You may believe that you're going to create better gross margins for a company, but in reality, you don't.
But you create a great time efficiency.
If you're focused on one area and the way that you think about pricing and you're actually affecting a different area, all of a sudden, they're going to be thinking about it and measuring it different, the value is going to be quite different.
So I don't believe in free pilots.
I think you always have to charge something.
It doesn't have to be a lot but something.
But I am an advocate for underpricing early on and understanding what are the things you're trying to learn aside from price.
Once you've learned all of those things, and most importantly, what is the value and how are they measuring that value, that's when you can start to push on price.
Omer (30:08.000)
Yeah, I think that's good advice.
And I would just say one thing that maybe is also worth calling out is when you say price low, it's relative to what they would expect to pay in the market.
So you wouldn't necessarily go and say, okay, I'm going to an enterprise customer and I'm going to offer them a product for 25 bucks a month.
Because that might create a whole bunch of different issues.
So.
Amos Schwartzfarb (30:33.220)
That's right.
Omer (30:33.740)
I need to understand generally what they would pay and then based on that, come up with what I feel is a low price in the ballpark.
Amos Schwartzfarb (30:41.800)
Yeah.
And I think maybe a different way of saying it than low prices.
Don't get caught up on trying to get every penny out of your early customers.
It's more important that you have early customers that you're getting feedback from.
And I think I actually talk about this in the book in the section on negotiating, which is I say jokingly, I don't negotiate, which isn't really a fully true statement.
But what I don't do is I don't negotiate on the.
The most important points ever.
And this is a true statement.
So if price is not something that is important to me, I make that clear up front.
Like, look, it's got to be in this range because you want us to be in business, but it's not where we end up there isn't important today when price is important.
I also make that clear.
This is what it's going to cost, or if I'm on the other side, this is what I'm willing to pay.
I'm not willing to move on that.
But here are the other things that we can talk about because I get that this has to work for everybody.
Omer (31:32.040)
Yeah, that's good.
And then the final two stages is really about scale.
Like when is it time to hit the gas and start accelerating your sales effort?
And then beyond that, you also make a good point with the next stage around.
Retain that the chapter says big businesses are built after the sale is closed in terms of thinking about the customer onboarding, all of those kinds of things.
Just some quick thoughts from you on those.
And then I want to move on because I have some other questions that I'd like to ask You?
Amos Schwartzfarb (32:02.080)
Yeah.
So I think I'll frame it up like this.
The sections that you called out are exactly how I think about it, which is collect data.
Have an idea.
Collect data, figure out if it could be repeatable, and then once you find repeatability, scale.
And one of the biggest mistakes that I see founders do is they collect data, and once they start collecting data, they jump right to scale and they skip over repeatability.
And so what ends up happening is they hit a cap early on or they're not successful.
Successful.
So that data collection part is really important when you're not talking to customers.
Once you get to the point where you can anticipate what the conversations are going to go like every single time.
And this is happening time and time again, all you've done there is hit repeatability.
That's the point in my mind where you can say, okay, now that I've hit repeatability, now I have to figure out what is the right way to scale for my business versus saying I've collected a bunch of data.
I'm sure I'm right.
I'm going to go hire 15 salespeople.
You're gonna hire two or three salespeople and prove that your repeatability is actually accurate, and then learn how to hire those two or three salespeople so that you can replicate what you're hiring and actually get to repeatability on hiring so that you can scale.
Omer (33:07.090)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's good.
Amos Schwartzfarb (33:08.850)
Great.
Omer (33:09.250)
Okay, so I have some questions from members of our SaaS club plus community who wrote in, and we're pretty excited to ask you some questions.
So I'm gonna go through those and would love to get some advice that, you know, hopefully will help them think about how they can get to the next level or solve the problem that they're currently having.
Okay, so the first one is from Kenton.
So this next segment was recorded exclusively for my SaaS club plus members.
Several SaaS founders asked questions about challenges they're currently facing, and Amos provided some expert advice and guidance for them.
If you'd like to get access to the full version of this interview with the Q and A session and a video version of the interview, you can do so by becoming a member of SAS Club Plus.
So you can find out more about that@saasclubplus.com yeah, great.
Okay, we should wrap up.
I'm going to move on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just answer them as quickly as you can.
So you ready?
Amos Schwartzfarb (34:15.540)
Yes.
Omer (34:16.020)
Okay, what's the best piece of business advice you've ever received.
Amos Schwartzfarb (34:19.770)
Focus on delivering the most incredible product experience that you can first and foremost.
Omer (34:25.690)
What book other than yours would you
Amos Schwartzfarb (34:27.810)
recommend to our audience and why other than mine?
I love venture deals, especially if you are or want to be a venture backed business.
I read it every year before my program starts.
Omer (34:38.170)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Amos Schwartzfarb (34:43.770)
Hustle.
Omer (34:45.300)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Amos Schwartzfarb (34:48.660)
Gosh.
Wunderlist or not accepting calendar invites because I get so many.
Omer (34:54.420)
I love Wunderlist, by the way.
It's a shame that they're not doing much more development on that, but that's a different conversation.
Amos Schwartzfarb (35:01.460)
Yeah.
Omer (35:02.020)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Amos Schwartzfarb (35:06.260)
I would say I don't have one.
I would go do it if I had it.
Not the answer you're looking for, but I could.
I work with so many incredible entrepreneurs.
I'm working on the stuff that I want to work on at the moment.
Omer (35:15.450)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Amos Schwartzfarb (35:19.130)
Coming out of college, I was on and off homeless for a couple of years by choice, but lived in my car and climbed rocks.
Omer (35:26.250)
Wow.
Yeah.
The less trodden path.
Amos Schwartzfarb (35:29.530)
Yeah.
Omer (35:31.370)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Amos Schwartzfarb (35:34.330)
A combination of my family and being on my bike.
Omer (35:37.410)
Awesome.
Love it.
Amos Schwartzfarb (35:38.610)
Great.
Omer (35:39.010)
Well, Amos, thank you for joining me today.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for answering all my questions and the Questions from the SaaS club, plus community members as well.
The book is called Sell More Faster the Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups.
It's on Amazon.
I noticed there's an audible version available now as well, which is pretty cool.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Amos Schwartzfarb (36:06.040)
My email address is in the book actually, and it's just amosellmorefasterbook.com great.
Omer (36:11.720)
And we'll include a link to that sellmorefaster.com the website as well in the show notes.
Amos Schwartzfarb (36:17.080)
Great.
Omer (36:17.560)
So thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
I wish you all the best of success with what you're doing.
Techstars and your portfolio of businesses and the book.
And yeah, I would love to hook up with you when I get down to Austin.
I've got a number of friends who keep telling me what a great place it is and I still haven't been, so got to do that one day.
Amos Schwartzfarb (36:38.170)
Oh yeah.
Come on down.
And thank you so much for having me.
This is really fun conversation.
Omer (36:41.370)
It was my pleasure.
All the best.
Cheers.
Amos Schwartzfarb (36:43.610)
All right, take care.
Bye.
