Omer (00:11.840)
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.
This episode is a story about a guy who wrote down an idea for a product in Evernote with no plan on what he was going to do about it.
What he didn't realize at the time was that he just planted a seed for a new business that he was going to build.
And for the next few months, he played around with the idea, hacked together a prototype over a weekend, but didn't really see it any more than a side project.
Today, five years later, that idea that he wrote in Evernote has grown into a business that's generating several million dollars in revenue and has over 70 employees.
It's a great story and we'll share what my guest did to turn that idea into a product and business.
We'll look at one thing that he wished he'd done differently, which I think will be great advice for anyone in the early days of building their product and business.
And we talk about what he still struggles with today, despite the success he's had.
So I think you'll like this.
All right, today's guest is the co founder and CEO of Contactuly, a CRM tool which helps you turn relationships into results.
My guest is a software developer and entrepreneur who founded Contactually in 2011, and he's grown it into a multimillion dollar business with over 70 employees.
The company's based in Washington, D.C. and to date has raised over $12 million in funding.
So today I'd like to welcome SVI Band to the show.
Zvi.
Zvi Band (02:09.920)
Welcome Omer.
Thanks so much for having me.
And more importantly, we're off to the right start.
You have pronounced my name correctly.
This is going to be great.
I can tell it.
Omer (02:21.120)
That's a relief all.
Let's start by talking a little bit about you and what drives you.
Some people like to share favorite quotes, some people just like to sort of just share a little bit about their mindset.
So what drives you to do what you do?
Zvi Band (02:40.220)
The core driving belief that I approach everything in life and this is something I've really developed over the past 10 years, is you go condense down to two words, no regrets that everything I do and you know, you can obviously read more like about Jeff Bezos Regret Minimization framework, et cetera.
For me, I want to make sure and I guide my life by making sure that I have no regrets in what I do or what I don't do.
And that's really guided all the key decisions in my life.
Omer (03:14.790)
Give me an example of that.
Because obviously there's, there's kind of like the big decisions, like saying I'm going to go and take this idea and launch a startup because I don't want to be 80 years old looking back and thinking I wish I had done that, or I regret not having done that.
But what about on a day to day basis?
Do you find that there are daily decisions that you make based on the no regret principle?
Zvi Band (03:41.860)
Oh, absolutely.
I think one of the core things for an entrepreneur to embrace is the acceptance of failure or the welcoming of failure.
But it's actually really hard on a day by day basis to actually practice that.
And so for me, you know, as we look towards major strategic decisions which come up every day or initiatives that we want to try, there's always this push to like, obviously that push kind of push back against, you know, well, let's just kind of, you know, let's kind of maintain the status quo, let's do what we're doing.
And I always have to catch myself in my head going, if we don't do this, I'm always going to regret not trying it.
And so even like minute tasks like that every single day or at the same time, you know, as an entrepreneur, there's so many distractions.
You know, I used to go to tons of like different random events and I'd get invited to all these like cool social things and I stopped going to a lot of them because I realized I would go to them and I'd walk in the door, I'm like, I regret this.
I'd rather be building my business right now.
And so now that you know, that even defines how I structure my day and my calendar, I love it, love it.
Omer (04:57.510)
I want to sort of get into talking about how you came up with the idea for this business.
But before we get into that, can you, in your own words, help the audience understand a little bit more about contactually who are your target customers, what problem are you trying to help them solve?
And CRM.
There's no shortage of CRM products out there.
So I'm curious to know, what is it that makes contactually different from other products?
Zvi Band (05:36.310)
Absolutely.
Well, let's start the high level.
Let's start with the why.
Right?
Because I'm sure that you've seen, you've read some Simon Sinek's talks and if you haven't, there's A an amazing TED Talk about kind of the start with why.
The why of Contactually is we believe that the best businesses in the world are built upon personal and authentic relationships with clients and partners.
And as a business owner, one of the things that I very quickly realize is that the relationships I had in my life were a critical component of my business and my life in general.
And maintaining those is a big challenge.
So what kontaxually offers is we're a relationship marketing platform that helps professionals in relationship driven companies stay engaged with key relationships.
So for example, I use it to make sure that I'm staying engaged with my clients, my investors, our key influencers.
A real estate agent gets 85% of their business from people in their network already.
So they're able to nurture those relationships to gain repeat and referral business.
The applications of contaction are endless.
The core thing is we know that relationships are an incredibly important asset and you absolutely have to do something every single day to maintain those.
To address the second part of your question, yes, CRMs are a dime a dozen.
What we saw though, and this is kind of going to the classic entrepreneurial issue, going back to my story, I saw that my business issue should have been solved by using a CRM.
But at the end of the day, the CRMs that are out on the market, while they're incredibly powerful, they're built for managing a sales pipeline, managing a transaction, and they require a lot of work and a lot of manual data entry.
What I needed and what I saw others needed was something that was really built from the ground up, not only just to help the user, but to help the user nurture those key relationships.
And so everything we've built in Contactually, from the automatic email and calendar ingestion, to the really strong contact database automatically built for you, to the follow up reminders.
When a relationship is starting to go cold is all about helping you figure out who you need to talk to, when you need to talk to them, and what you need to say.
Omer (08:04.700)
Give me one example of some of the things you described there in terms of how Contactually would help me with managing my relationships.
Zvi Band (08:13.340)
Absolutely.
Let's actually go back to maybe my story before this.
I was CTO of an enterprise software startup that was acquired back in 2009, but then I was consulting for about four years as a consultant.
Most of my business came via my reputation and my network.
But what I saw is that I would meet someone for coffee and then two weeks later completely forget who they were or I would be, or I was so focused on the next client project or the top 1% of my inbox that I wouldn't realize that it had been three months since I spoke to one of my past clients.
And so what Kontakti does on a daily, on a daily basis is we're looking at all of your email conversations, calendar appointments, social media posts, Excel spreadsheets, etc.
And we can say, well, all right, well, Omer here, he is a potential client of mine, every potential client I want to stay in touch with every six months.
And it's been six months and three days since we, we last had any kind of communication.
So that triggers contactually his brain and says, wait a second, this is a relationship that's starting to go cold.
I will get a notification in the morning saying, all right, you should talk to Omer today.
Here's what you last spoke about.
Here's an email template that you can use, here's what he's talking about on social media.
And then contextually assist with doing the most important thing, reaching back out and adding value.
So Omer thinks of me the next time he needs a software developer.
That makes sense.
Omer (09:58.420)
Totally.
So you take out a lot of the complexity because it's, because even if I have a some kind of product, which reminds me about re engaging with somebody, there's still a lot to do.
Right.
I mean, the biggest question is, okay, you've given me the reminder, but what do I actually talk to them about?
And so I love the way that you kind of describe kind of bringing all to get this, all this information together and giving it to me in almost this sort of little crisp digest.
And then from that I can kind of figure out very easily where it makes sense to continue that conversation.
That sounds great.
Zvi Band (10:37.390)
Exactly.
Yeah.
Who, who do I need to talk to?
When do I need to talk to them and what do I need to
Omer (10:42.710)
say now, when I, when I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, I read something there.
So let me just read that out.
Have bought, have brought contactually from idea in my Evernote to 60 employees and counting.
Well, it's 70 and counting now.
Millions in revenue, 12 million plus in venture backing, numerous awards and thousands of paying customers in SMB and mid market.
The thing that struck me about that was what you wrote about from my idea in my Evernote.
Do you remember what you wrote down in Evernote when you were thinking of this idea?
Zvi Band (11:27.450)
Oh, absolutely.
I still have that exact note in my Evernote when we.
And actually it's funny, you know, funny that we're talking about this at this point in time, because it was actually about five days ago, five years and five days ago, that I wrote down.
May 15, 2011, that I wrote down the idea for what I called a proactive CRM.
And so we have a strong sense of history in contact sleeve and serves a number of important purposes.
So, yeah, absolutely.
And I sent an email to the team, and I kind of.
I sent them out that exact Evernote.
So they see, wow.
Like, they see that initial idea being written down, and then they can, of course, see and connect that initial idea with what we are now, which is this massive, massive opportunity.
Omer (12:19.930)
But when you wrote that down in Evernote, you didn't have a team.
It was just you in those days, right?
Zvi Band (12:26.170)
Oh, absolutely.
I still have a practice of anytime I come up with a random idea for a company, I'll just quickly jot it down in Evernote.
When I first wrote that down, I was still.
I was still running my own consulting firm.
I had no idea when I was jotting that down that here we would be today talking about 12 million capital, millions in revenue, 70 employees, spending all day long doing something that I initially wrote down just as I was walking to work one day.
Omer (13:03.720)
I just have this vision of people going out there and writing that stuff down in Evernote right now to start building those businesses.
Okay, so let's kind of.
I want to explore that a little further.
So you've got.
You've written this down.
Did you?
Was it just kind of like I'm just capturing an idea, or was it immediately like, this is something I need to start doing something about?
Zvi Band (13:30.030)
Oh, absolutely not.
This was just.
This was just an idea.
But it was an idea that we never kind of had any, like, went from idea to, like, lightning moment.
Oh, my God, this is going to be a multi billion dollar company.
It was a very slow burn initially.
So, for example, I wrote down the idea.
Then a couple weeks later, one of my engineers who's working for me at the time, he had some extra bandwidth, and I said, you know what?
I wrote down this idea.
Why don't you build a little prototype this weekend, right?
Just go hack it out.
And sure enough, he came back on Monday morning with the prototype for what would become contractually.
I was like, all right, it looks cool.
Let me talk to some friends and talk to some people I know and cfo.
The whole idea of relationships and a CRM and something that helps them proactively build relationships, if that's important.
Okay, great.
Awesome.
Sounds good.
Hey, Jeff, you're working for Me, Why don't you work with me?
And as a co founder on this?
And he said, yeah, sure, why not?
And then we said, all right, well, you know, neither of us are probably going to be that good at sales and marketing.
Well, you know, I met this guy Tony, who was just kind of trying to get more involved in startups.
He had a good job, you know, had just left Microsoft as a pm.
Why doesn't he help doing.
Do customer development?
And it kind of just again, you know, then all of a sudden, three of us just kind of playing around with the idea a little bit here and there until all of a sudden, you know, an accelerator came by and said, hey, well, we'll fund this idea and we want you to take it very seriously.
And all of a sudden that was like a. Oh, whoa, you mean this is.
This can be a real thing?
And that's.
And the rest is history.
So, yeah, but we actually kind of threw that point like we've been doing.
We built the prototype, we'd started doing following kind of the lean startup principles.
We'd done a lot of customer development.
So I don't want to discredit anything we're doing, but it's not like we kind of said, woke up one day and said, okay, cool, let's start a company.
What do we want to start a company about?
Oh, there's this idea over here.
Let's do that.
It was just kind of this slow, kind of slow building of momentum, and it's kind of continue up until now.
Again, it's 70 people running as hard as they can.
Omer (15:52.230)
How long did it take from the time you wrote down the idea to the point where you got approached by this accelerator?
Zvi Band (16:02.230)
Four months.
Four months.
Okay.
Omer (16:04.150)
Well, that's still not bad going.
Zvi Band (16:05.910)
Absolutely.
No, I'm very thankful.
Omer (16:07.670)
So what were you doing in those four months?
Did you have any users or customers during that time?
Zvi Band (16:15.030)
We didn't have customers, but we started to get users again.
It started being kind of friendly.
So they had people I know and people I was familiar with and then brought on some other people.
And then we were doing a lot of customer development, kind of reaching out to people who were talking about relationships or CRM or sales kind of stuff and brought those people on.
So we didn't have that many, but we had like, probably around maybe 150 users.
But at the time, that was enough to kind of prove that, like, oh, there's something here.
This isn't just like a junky little prototype.
Omer (16:49.500)
Okay, so you've got the accelerator involved how much money did you guys get to start working with?
And when they said you need to start taking this seriously, what did that mean?
What changed for you guys?
Zvi Band (17:07.100)
Yeah, absolutely.
So I'll address that second point first because that's the most important thing.
It really was a burn the boats moment before this being bootstrapped out of my previous company, which meant that three quarters of my time was going to towards my quote day job, you know, running my consulting firm and a quarter of my time here and there was going to doing customer development and a little bit of software development for contactually and that was the case for everyone else.
But I kind of knew from previous experience that just kind of having for me, like having a little side hustle and a side project, I would never be able to get anything real off the ground because I was always too distracted by my main job.
And so I was kind of in the back of my mind looking for some mechanism, some way of being able to again to use kind of this line to burn the boats and kind of force ourselves to say, all right, we are all in on this.
And it happened to be had happened to come in the form of an accelerator deal.
Omer (18:16.950)
Okay, and how much money did you guys raise with them?
Zvi Band (18:20.470)
50k.
Omer (18:21.190)
Okay, so that gave you.
So what did that mean?
Did you stop working on the consulting completely and start working on this full time, this idea?
Zvi Band (18:31.750)
Yeah, absolutely.
We kind of got the offer to join 500 startups back in, I would say like the first week of October in 2011.
We made the decision, shut down my company, basically handed off all my clients to other people.
Tony, our third co founder, quit his job and the company was officially incorporated October 11, 2011.
Omer (19:03.730)
Okay, great.
Okay, so you are now full time on this business.
You've got about 150 users.
How did you use the 50K?
What were you.
Was that mostly focused on trying to acquire more customers?
Zvi Band (19:22.230)
Yeah, absolutely.
Initially we weren't using it.
We were kind of letting it sit in the bank because we frankly didn't necessarily necessarily need it.
We knew that we would want to eventually pay ourselves salary, eventually pay, hire a couple employees and start paying them.
So it was really, we were just laser focused on, on basically doing the three things a company needs to do in its early days.
One, acquire customers, which is what Tony was doing.
He was doing a lot of customer research and initial marketing, build a product.
So Jeff, my co founder and cto, he was building the product and then myself, who took the CEO title, I was focused on fundraising.
I knew we would need to Raise a few hundred K initially to start, kind of really kind of again hiring the team and getting the business off the ground.
And so I threw myself into fundraising, having never done it before.
Omer (20:20.460)
Okay, let's.
Let's talk a little bit more about what you were doing to acquire customers.
Do you remember the first customer that you got?
Zvi Band (20:31.820)
Well, the first customer that, like, wasn't, you know, myself or my mom's credit card.
Right, Absolutely.
Well, I think the magic of, to me, the magic of Lean Startup is you can phase into it, which meant that there wasn't, like, at one point, we went kind of from zero to having 500 customers.
What we initially started doing is we first were just doing customer development calls, right?
Just talking to people, trying to figure out what they're interested in.
Through those conversations, they would sign up for a trial.
My friends would sign up for a trial.
We got a little bit of press here and there.
We had people signing up for our free product.
And then we said, well, let's kind of start to see if there can be a business here.
So we're not going to charge customers yet, but we're going to show them the pricing page.
Let's just kind of come up with a pricing page and have them pick a plan.
Now, we're not going to charge, but we'll at least see what people are willing to pay.
And if people are willing to pay, we can see the number of people who, even though we say it's free for now, they would still choose the free plan versus the premium plan.
So we started doing that, and then we said, all right, great.
Well, we have people doing this.
Why don't we let them optionally pay us?
Right, meaning that you don't have to pay us, but we're going to add a credit card page in.
And then, of course, we had a couple of people kind of say, like, oh, well, okay, looks like contactually is charging me money.
Let me, like, let me, you know, let me throw down my credit card.
And we kind of got again, the initial kind of couple thousand people that way.
And then we then forced all people who, once their trial was over to pay us, pay us with a credit card, and kind of went from there.
And again, it's not like kind of, you know, an overnight flip.
We just slowly rolled in.
And as we were learning and learning, we went from learning if people wanted a product like this to learning how much people are willing to pay, to learning if people were going to pay, to learning, okay, we're now actually going to force people to Pay.
Will they pay?
And then the rest history.
Now, we still iterate.
We still test.
Okay, well, people are.
Are people going to be willing to pay us more money?
So we've raised our prices from $15 a month to $60 a month, because we're always iterating on that core.
On those core principles.
Omer (22:56.010)
That's really interesting.
So, going back to the first point you made about checking, just testing to see if people would pay.
And so I just want to kind of understand that experience a little bit.
So when people came to sign up, they would see a pricing page, they would see a free plan, and there was some paid plans, and they could select which plan they wanted.
But you were kind of telling them, you're not going to have to pay anything right now because we're in beta or whatever, but eventually this is how much the plan is going to be.
Zvi Band (23:32.960)
Exactly.
Omer (23:33.680)
Okay.
Zvi Band (23:35.520)
And that was really helpful, right?
Because at the end of the day, our belief and some people in Silicon Valley kind of push back against this or have pushed back.
If you're a fan of the freemium model, for example, I wanted to make sure that we were building a business.
And what does a business need?
Well, it needs people that will pay for the product, which means that you need to ensure that you're building the right features that people will pay for and that you're going after the types of customers or potential customers that would pay for the product.
So by having a pricing page, for example, we were able to see the people who, even though it was a free product, the moment they saw the pricing page, they had bounced off.
Okay, great.
We learned those are not the type of people we want.
And by testing out what features we list on the pricing page and then doing customer interviews after that, we're able to figure out, well, what features do people need that they'll pay for?
Omer (24:39.100)
That's really interesting.
So you mentioned you were getting several thousand people coming in through this way.
I'm curious what you were doing to reach those people, because initially it sounds like you could just go to your own network and reach out to friends and people that way.
But beyond that, how did you start reaching out to people that you didn't know?
Zvi Band (25:03.840)
Yeah, it's a great question.
So initially, what we were doing is we obviously, we had friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends.
That kind of stuff that happens.
We did both through the accelerator and then just through hard work, we got a little bit of press.
So which means when we raised our first couple rounds of capital, we were able to get in TechCrunch and others that of course sends people to your site.
We also started finding bloggers who would be willing to write about us.
So we started doing that.
We were big users of Quora early on.
So one of the cool things about Quora is if you're building a CRM product, great, go on Quora and find anyone talking about CRM and message them and say, hey, I'm building a CRM.
We did a little bit of experimentation with SEO and that's probably one of the bigger failings, that we didn't take it more seriously early on.
But that brought in some customers and a little bit of experimentation here and there, but is really making sure that the, the influencers knew about us.
And then we were doing everything we could to.
Once we kind of had someone visiting our site that we did everything we could to try and convert them into a customer.
Omer (26:21.990)
Okay, got it.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the product now.
One of the things that I think is quite interesting is that a lot of the times you'll see a founder come up with an idea on how to solve a problem, a specific problem, and then they go and build the product.
But once you have real people starting to use it and you start to, especially if you're doing customer development type interviews and getting feedback, you often get a lot of surprises in terms of what you thought people wanted and what they actually want.
Were there any surprises for you that sort of came out from talking to customers or potential customers?
Zvi Band (27:11.650)
Oh, absolutely.
The initial product we built, people hate it.
Like, truly, truly hate it.
I mean, and now, even as I kind of think back to it, the product that we had built was so terrible in terms of like the feature concept, but I'm thankful.
And people kind of still, once people who know about the history will still laugh at me once a while, kind of say like, oh my God, that's such a terrible idea.
And I will throw it back in their face and say, you know what, I don't care.
Because that allowed us to learn what we should build.
So, for example, the very first version of the product, the main thing it did is that whenever it detected you emailing someone, that it didn't know, it would send you an email saying, hey, tell us more about this person.
And you respond via email to that email saying, hey, here are some more details about that person.
Then we would save it.
People hated that they found so annoying, but what they said is, well, I really like that you're actually capturing all of the people I'm communicating with via email, there are also people I'm communicating with via social media.
And you know, the most important thing that I want is I want to make sure I'm staying in touch with these people.
I'm not just capturing these people, I'm staying in touch.
And we said, okay, cool, we can do something like that.
We kind of built again, built out something that would, you know, if we noticed, you know, if we noticed you hadn't emailed someone in three weeks, we would send you a notification saying, hey, talk to this person.
And people hated that.
They hated because we were reminding them to follow up with people that they didn't care about.
And then we kind of did some more customer development.
And then there were a couple potential customers early on who said, you know what, the thing that you're missing out is that not all of the people that I'm communicating with I want to stay in touch with.
I have certain groups of people, certain buckets of people that are important for me.
And that now is a core driving part of our product.
And we wouldn't have gotten there without being open minded to the fact that our idea that our initial concept could suck and maintain an open mind to what else may work and what else we may learn from customers.
I credit 100% of our company's success or product market fit to, to our users.
Omer (29:38.890)
Oh, I see.
So, so in the early days, if, if I had, I don't know, a thousand contacts, you were reminding me about all of them at some point to say okay, and then you sort of filtered it down and said, okay, maybe there's just the top 5 or 20% of my contacts that I need to probably stay in touch with and kind of became more sophisticated that way.
Zvi Band (30:03.680)
Exactly.
Like we really learned that people are comfortable and willing to kind of segment their relationships on their own and then from there then make sure that you're staying in touch with the right people, not everyone.
And that was a key learning that we had not thought of otherwise.
Omer (30:21.280)
So I'm curious what the reaction was when you told people that we have this product.
You know, earlier we talked about
Zvi Band (30:30.780)
sort
Omer (30:30.940)
of a very crowded CRM market,
Zvi Band (30:36.380)
but
Omer (30:36.740)
from what I understand, although from what I understand from some of the numbers that I've come across, it's, it's, there's still huge potential and growth in, in this space.
But I'm just curious, when you con, when you approach people about this, weren't there people just saying thanks, but I'm already using something else?
Zvi Band (30:58.630)
They would not that often, oftentimes.
And I think one of the biggest, bigger opportunities we have is that CRM, while it's one of the largest overall IT expenditures, it's still a fraction of the size that it could be.
So a lot of the people that are using Kataction now, their previous CRM was an Excel spreadsheet or a stack of business cards on their desk.
So we haven't really had the same kind of product competition.
From a market perspective, like when talking to investors or talking to press or talking to influencers, distinguishing ourselves from every other CRM on the market, that's actually something that we struggled so much with early on.
And honestly, it's still a struggle today.
It's still something that we're working on figuring out.
How do we, we know we're different, Our users know our different, we're different.
But how do we, like, almost on a one liner basis, make sure that we're completely distinguished from every other CRM on the market or almost figure out a way where we can bypass that conversation together?
The moment they learned about contractually, they see it's a completely different product.
Omer (32:15.760)
Okay, so that's interesting because it sounds like if you can sit with somebody, give them a demo of the product or show them what it does, they get it instantly in terms of how the product is different and how it can help them.
But it's not always that easy, as you said, to sort of just explain that in a few words.
Zvi Band (32:41.830)
Exactly, yeah.
So the one thing that if I were to go back in time, I would have done a lot more work very early on, is to really work on our messaging and positioning.
That's one of the things, like we always kind of said, yeah, we know we need to, and we never did.
Omer (32:58.290)
Tell me a little bit more about that, like, is that you seem to have a great success story.
Zvi Band (33:04.770)
Right.
Omer (33:05.130)
Going from an idea you wrote down in Evernote just over five years ago to a multimillion dollar business, it sounds like you didn't really need to do any of that stuff.
So why do you feel that that was something that you look back and feel you should have done a better job at?
Zvi Band (33:21.200)
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, one of the jokes is we're doing incredibly well in spite of ourselves, or that we're making just the right amount of mistakes to get us to where we are today?
Yeah, I mean, listen, don't get me wrong, we have a lot to be thankful for.
And as you kind of see, one of our core values is transparency.
And so we care a lot about Company culture.
And so that's kind of one of the things being exhibited here.
I would say that, yeah, I mean, we definitely had issues in the past where we.
If you were to go around to let's say that 20 employees I had at the time or 30 employees I had at the time and asked them what is contactually?
You would get 30 different responses.
And I think it even kind of it.
And I think the reason is because top down, I didn't even have a clear definition of what contactually was.
I would kind of keep rephrasing it every single time someone spoke to me or people go to our website and they don't really get what it is that we do, but it's enough to get them interested.
And they would kind of see our demo, see our products, start using it, and go, oh my God, wow.
Why didn't you explain this on your website?
Why didn't you tell us what this is?
And that's honestly still messaging, still something we struggle with.
We still look at our website and I think we're better than ever, but we still know there's so much opportunity to better explain what on earth contractually is and what is the value it provides to people.
Omer (34:53.490)
So we've talked about multimillion dollar revenue.
Can you give us a better idea of.
Of kind of where you guys are?
What's the size of the business?
Zvi Band (35:03.090)
Yeah, absolutely.
So I can give rough, as transparent as we are, I can give rough Numbers.
We're well above 2 million revenue and we're well on the way to 10 million in revenue.
So we're in that kind of.
If you read anything by Jason Lemkin, we're on the long, slow climb to 10 million.
ARR.
Omer (35:24.560)
That's a nice chunk of change.
Zvi Band (35:27.200)
Yeah, we have lot to be thankful for.
Omer (35:29.359)
Yeah, totally.
So we talked about the messaging and the positioning and if it's something that you're struggling with or right now as well, then I'm not sure that maybe it would have been as any easier to solve in the early days.
But is there anything else that you sort of think about and just say if I wish I had done this back in the first year of building this business because it would have just avoided some pain down the road?
Zvi Band (36:03.290)
Oh, absolutely.
I think one of the core things is focus.
Start off with meaning that entrepreneurs, because of the way that we're built, we're always attracted kind of the next shiny object.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I think it's good to always keep your eyes open.
But if you're not actively maintaining things and really focusing on what you think will work and then committing to it and following through, you have a big problem.
So, for example, we know that SEO is or could have been a large growth opportunity for us, and it's again, something only now we're taking very seriously.
But we'd started to, because we had heard so much that SEO was an important thing.
We started to do all this SEO stuff five years ago, but we just kind of dropped it because we said, oh, well, let's try something else instead.
And if we had committed to, we probably would be in a much better place now.
So that's one example.
I think the thing that I hope I'm able to provide to every software entrepreneur listening is obviously, I'm assuming, Omer, you've talked to everything, you've talked multiple times about MVPs on this podcast, right?
Omer (37:15.470)
Sure.
Zvi Band (37:16.590)
An MVP.
The key lesson for me that I wish I were able to go back to 2011's V ban and slap him in the head and educate him about is an MVP doesn't necessarily mean it has to be buggy software.
It has to be a minimal version of what you want to build.
Which meant that instead of, let's say, building out one feature of our eventual platform, but doing it really, really well, we built 15 things, but we built them all kind of well.
Meaning that they, you know, it's kind of like almost like, you know, build buying, like building a car, but only building them, building it with three wheels.
And those three wheels actually happen to be squares.
You know, that's kind of like what we ended up doing.
So it kind of like we had, yes, it proved that people wanted something like this, but it didn't really work that well.
And that kind of issue that, like, plagued us for years.
And it's only kind of now, you know, over the past couple years that we've started now, like regularly producing a high quality product because in our thirst to learn, we had this.
You know, you've probably heard the Facebook mantra of move fast and break things.
That actually is a bad idea.
I'll be completely honest, because what you're doing is you're kind of teaching yourself to go and build junky software.
That may prove that, yes, okay, people want something like this, but it won't work.
And so I would say you should really focus on not trying to build everything, building a few things, but making sure those few things work and work really, really well.
Omer (38:59.520)
So I think that's really, really good advice.
And I think probably People have heard that or kind of know that to some degree, but it's still not easy to do.
And I think the.
The fear is that if I go to my potential customers and I show them a product with one feature, they're not going to be interested.
And if I can put in 15 features, which show them a whole bunch of things that this product can do, they're more likely to want to buy my product.
And I think that sounds like the kind of the same dilemma that you guys got into when you were building your mvp.
So what advice would you give to somebody who's maybe struggling right now to pick that one feature?
Zvi Band (39:50.350)
Absolutely.
I would probably argue it can always be distilled down.
It may not be one feature, maybe it's two or three.
Maybe it is something that you can't really follow the lean starter principles, and it really has to be 15 features.
But for heaven's sake, do not repeat the same mistake we did.
Make sure that what you're doing works and works really well.
You know, you could probably simplify it down and, you know, you'll want to add every other option and bells and whistles later on down the line, but so you can still, you know, even if it's a larger number of features, you can still boil it down to the core, you know, the core functionality you want, you want to get across in those features, but make sure they work really well.
You know, don't build a car with square wheels.
Omer (40:38.790)
Excellent advice.
All right, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I'd like you to answer them just as quickly as you can.
Ready?
Zvi Band (40:46.950)
Let's do it.
Omer (40:47.510)
All right, what's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Zvi Band (40:52.310)
You will receive tons and tons of data points and pieces of advice throughout your entrepreneurial journey.
And the core thing a CEO needs to do is sort through all those pieces of advice and figure out what.
Which ones they follow and which ones they don't.
Omer (41:07.400)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Zvi Band (41:10.520)
Most recently, the book that's really inspired me is Bill Walsh's the Score Takes Care of Itself.
It really teaches about excellence in leadership.
Omer (41:20.760)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Zvi Band (41:26.040)
I believe it's the ability that to no matter what, no matter if they're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, to always have a bias for action.
Omer (41:34.870)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Zvi Band (41:38.310)
Every day I start off my day with a blank piece of paper upon which I write every single thing I'm supposed to do that day.
And I do just that.
Omer (41:49.670)
Going back to your Evernote, what's another business idea that you wrote down that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Zvi Band (41:55.750)
Oh, man.
I really like the whole.
It's kind of a consumer idea.
I really like the whole idea of, you know, with digital cameras, we're taking so many pictures, but as we know, you know, doing post production and cleaning them up is important.
So I would do post production and photo curation as a service.
Omer (42:17.170)
Nice.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Zvi Band (42:23.250)
I was in the San Diego County Spelling Bee and I got kicked.
I got kicked out in one of the final rounds because the judge mistook sorbet for sherbert and I spelled the wrong word.
Omer (42:40.550)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Zvi Band (42:44.870)
So, beyond my obnoxious cocker spaniel and my lovely wife, I am a big proponent of the local D.C. tech community.
I actually run one of the largest tech meetups in the country right here in dc.
Omer (42:58.570)
Nice.
Zvi, I want to thank you for joining me today.
It's been awesome.
I know, I know you've been traveling.
You were on a red eye recently.
We were exchanging mails at 2:00am well, it was 2:00am in the morning for you.
It was only 11:00pm for me.
So I appreciate you making the time and sort of turning up here with so much energy and enthusiasm and sharing the story of contactually.
If folks want to find out more more about the product, they can go to contactuly.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Zvi Band (43:33.090)
They can follow me on Twitter S K E E V I S. So that's skeevis.
Or they can visit my blog, Zvi Band.
Omer (43:43.170)
Wonderful.
Thank you again.
It's been a pleasure and I wish you all the best.
Zvi Band (43:48.290)
Omer.
Thanks so much for having me.
Omer (43:49.890)
Cheers.
