In episode 701, Rob Walling interviews Matt Wensing, founder of Summit, a SaaS platform for lead scoring and qualification. Matt shares insights on finding product-market fit, the importance of following customer workflows to get there, and the challenges of marketing and positioning. Rob asks about his choice to raise venture capital, and how keeping a lean team maximizes that opportunity.
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Topics we cover:
- 2:27 – “Traveling many H1’s”, refining a target market
- 5:44 – Moving back to a self-serve model
- 10:52 – Niching down to achieve stronger product-market fit
- 12:53 – Tactics that Matt used to achieve traction
- 16:54 – Lead scoring by behavior and persona-fit
- 19:20 – Scoring as a whole product vs. as only a feature
- 23:31 – Pursuing VC with a lean team
- 29:09 – Who is your ideal customer profile?
Links from the Show:
- Apply for Tinyseed Feb 12th through Feb 25th
- MicroConf Remote – Early Stage Saas Strategies
- Matt Wensing (@mattwensing) | X
- Summit
- Episode 696 | The Truth about Product-Market Fit + Doing Sales as an Introvert (With Ruben Gamez)
- Out of Beta
- Episode 633 | Building SaaS Plus a Two-Sided Marketplace
- The SaaS Playbook
- “How I Sold My SaaS in An 8-Figure Exit” with Matt Wensing
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you!
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Another week, another episode of Startups of the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I talk with Matt Wensing, the founder of Summit, about his long journey, multi-year journey, finding product market fit. While I’m not recording a series of podcast episodes about product market fit, this does remind me of Ruben Gomez’s episode maybe, what, four or five ago, where he talked about the long journey to finding it and then finding it with a certain subset of customers and certain features and then realizing, oh, the API is a completely different product I now have to find product market fit for. And in this episode, Matt Wensing and I just talk about his journey with Summit over the past. I think we talk about it in the episode. It’s took four years, four plus years of building, talking to customers, launching, finding out he kind of hit the mark, made some revenue, found out that wasn’t the right tool.
So then he went back to zero basically and started again building new features. You might know Matt from Twitter or from his podcast that wrapped up just a few months ago called Out Of Beta. Before we dive into that, applications for TinySeed are opening on February 12th and close on February 25th. If you’re not familiar with TinySeed, it’s the accelerator I run for ambitious, mostly bootstrapped B2B SaaS founders. Even if you’re interested in applying outside of the window of February 12th to February 25th, you can join our mailing list to be notified when applications open again, visit TinySeed.com/apply to get on the mailing list or to apply. I want to invite you to MicroComp Remote Early Stage SaaS Sales Strategies. It’s an online event we’re hosting March 12th and 13th of 2024.
It runs from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM Eastern Time on those two days. And there will be sessions all focused on early stage SaaS sales led by Rachel Leow, Craig Hewitt, Daniel Ebert, Sam Howard, I’ll be MCing. And we’re going to cover strategies to boost your close rate, build a sustainable sales process, and figure out how to overcome the challenges of selling as a technical founder. We’ll also have daily founder mixer sessions where you’ll get to meet other attendees to network and chat about what you’re working on. Tickets are inexpensive and they are available at microcompremote.com. So with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Matt. Matt Wensing, welcome back to the show.
Matt Wensing:
Thanks, Rob.
Rob Walling:
It’s great to have you, man. So last time, I think you’ve been on the show two or three times, but last time was in November of 2022, episode 633 titled Building SaaS Plus A Two-Sided Marketplace. And in that episode we talked through how you started Summit was originally Sim SaaS and it was SaaS simulation and forecasting tool. You renamed it to Summit, which is a really good call by the way, usesummit.com if folks want to check it out. Then you pivoted or narrowed focus or whatever you want to call it into low-code calculators, simulations, forecasts. Then you were calculators for sales and marketing I believe. And today your H one is everything you need to start scoring leads and you have just, it’s been like what, three years, four years? And you’ve traveled a lot of H ones, sir. So that’s what I want to talk about today is how you’re feeling about where you are, how it’s working, how it’s been, how it’s going. Yeah,
Matt Wensing:
That’s great. I love that Traveled H ones. Yeah, I’d like to think that the way back machine would be an honest way to look at everyone’s H ones through that light. It’s a favorite thing of mine, but it’s been a while. And during the last, I guess call it 14, 15 months since we last talked on this show, we have really done two things. First of all, we added sales and marketing as our target market. Sales and marketing are gigantic. I mean each of those words contains millions of people and hundreds of job titles I would say we’re even more focused in marketing now. And what we learned in 2023 was shortly after we talked, I started doing sales and selling really to those teams that we had found in the sort of early days of figuring out sales and marketing as a use case or a target market, and working with them just realizing that what we were doing was relatively high touch.
It was working with some pretty strong brands, et cetera, that have pretty robust marketing teams. And when they do things, it’s a project and they take it on as a project, and that just means that there’s a lot of collaboration needed, a lot of conversation, et cetera. And so in that sense, what we had was a good fit because it was this broad platform for sales and marketing. As I said, calculators that are low code, no code, you can build them without an engineering deployment or degree. And that was a really great fit for that sales motion. But what we decided at the end of the year, and this was just a short three months ago now, was we look back at 2023 and said, okay, we’ve done this work for these clients. We want more customers and we want to acquire more customers more quickly. How do we do that? And that meant we wanted to reopen self-serve.
And what we found was just this broadly appealing, broadly positioned and broadly expressed platform. It was perfect for those sales again and those conversations. But when you come to a website and it says that if you go through self-service, it’s not really clear what you’re getting. It’s not really clear what’s on the other side. So we really needed to really pick a lane to run in for self-serve to be viable.
Rob Walling:
So that was just a few months ago. And I guess how is it because everything’s an experiment until it’s not, right, and so how’s it going today? How do you feel about the H one? How do you feel about the move back to self-serve in terms of growth, in terms of your confidence in that decision?
Matt Wensing:
Yeah, so what we were trying to fix, maybe we’ll talk about that. What we were trying to fix ultimately was a top of funnel challenge, I would say. And what that meant was, and there’s a lot of ways to solve that. So in some sense we just said, “Hey, we can just tweet more buy ads, LinkedIn, whatever it is, we can get the name out there and we can send people to the site.”
But then it was sort of then what? And so we didn’t have a lot of confidence that if we invested in those grow the funnel activities, that people would come to the site and they would have this eureka moment around, I know what this is, I know what it’s for. And in fact, I was kind of thinking about wanting one of these. It wasn’t an existing product category. That’s how some people would put it.
And so by choosing an existing product category, which is lead scoring now, we solved a bunch of problems that really I think would’ve wrecked the ship if we had opened up self-service without doing that. And that means that what we’re seeing now is okay, people come to the site, they comment on our posts on LinkedIn saying, I know what this is sort of thing, and this is really cool and I like this. And they tag their sales team member in on it and say, “Hey, we were just talking about this. That’s really exciting.” And we’ve had enough people go through the onboarding, at least in the first, we just announced this, I think January, let’s call it 15th or so ish. We waited for Christmas. So we launched it literally three or four days before Christmas. We didn’t tell anybody because it’s not when you want anybody either filing a support ticket or struggling to onboard themselves.
But we also didn’t want to come back to, I mean, you know the feeling. Coming back the first week of January to an unfinished project is just a terrible feeling. So we got it out there and it’s been live, it’s been announced for about a week. We’ve had a few dozen people I’ll share go through the onboarding and we are learning where they stop, where they continue, et cetera. Now we also have a seven-day trial, so very early in terms of data, but so far the data is this, people come to the site, they click the try it free button, they start going through the onboarding, and that’s awesome because that wasn’t happening before. So now it’s like, okay, great, we have some volume coming in now it’s an optimization game or a what’s broken game or a leaky bucket problem, whatever you want to use to say let’s get them all the way through now.
And now I’m kind of in a world, it’s funny, we’ve known each other for a while, TinySeed batch one. And so in a lot of ways now that we have this existing product category and people are coming and they’re coming through our funnel in some sense, a lot of the advice that I was hearing my batch mates get in the first batch, TinySeed, where they’re like, oh, got this many people signing up, but this many people are completing whatever, what do I do? That’s all very relevant for us now in sunset.
Rob Walling:
And that’s the perfect time for people to join TinySeed is once they have a little bit of traction. You were in batch one and we took some flyers, we backed people. You were one of the early, you didn’t even have a product in market, I don’t think.
Matt Wensing:
No.
Rob Walling:
And what we realized pretty quickly is, A, it takes a lot longer than we all think. You thought you’d have product market fit in six months and it’s a few years later. And then as TinySeed, the advice I can give, give someone an early stage advice, but it’s like what’s the advice? It’s like go learn stuff until you figure it out. And once you figure it out and you’re at five grand a month, maybe six, seven, eight grand a month, TinySeed I think is really designed for that stage, which is why we do that. The SaaS playbook is 100% written for that as well.
It’s like you have some customers, you have a loose, loose product market fit and you’re trying to strengthen it. And that is the more I can be really prescriptive at that point stuff before that, I have this whole book, it’s like 30,000 words written. It’s called Idea to Launch or Idea Attraction, something like that. But it’s a lot of like, and then you have to go with your gut feel and there’s a founder vision that you then have all this noisy noise coming at you and you’re trying to figure out which of these do I listen to? And it’s hard decisions with incomplete information, really incomplete.
Matt Wensing:
So that’s the data side. Empirically, I don’t have results that I’m going to be doing flips about. It’s not sales zero. We have some trials going on, which is great. But the bigger thing is as a team, and maybe this is more of founder CEO hat on, for the team to have that clarity around this is the initial sort of killer app or use case that we’re bringing to market. We can run that prescriptive playbook, if you will. We can look at problems and we don’t have to question, well, maybe no one in the world needs this. Right? That’s a very sick thought to have or makes you sick sort of thought to have in the early days. So you’re like, I just don’t know if people even want this thing.
So to have that in the rear-view I would say is the biggest benefit. And honestly, now the only thing that comes up is people, past customers or people who’ve heard this story before will go, “Wait, wait, I thought you were way broader. I thought you did way more than that.” And I have to just tell them, and I’ll use this podcast as an opportunity to say, we still have all that. But we just realized that if that was the front door, people were just going to stand there and go, “Wow, I don’t even know where to begin.” And that’s not good.
Rob Walling:
Right. And niching down to either roles, like you said, marketing or sales or niching down to use cases is because the paradox of choice or even the paradox of understanding of how do I come to the website, I read the H one and I’m like, that’s not a category. I don’t … What is this? And then I have to read your H two and then I have to read your, and that is not, that’s like death because people aren’t going to spend the time to understand it.
Matt Wensing:
Exactly. And I think what you get is when you’re very broad, you get people who are just, I’m willing to try anything. So music is a fun category. It’s like imagine if you were like, we help you create awesome music. If that was your H one, you’re going to get some cool kids if you will, to try out whatever the heck it is because they’re musicians. But it’s not until you say like, oh, we improve the quality of your audio tracks specifically at this frequency or whatever. It’s like, okay, now the mainstream who uses Ableton Live and all these other things, GarageBand, they’re like, oh, I know where that fits in. And actually I need one of those and then go back to Wayback Machine.
And I love this. Look at WP Engine, great example. They’re like the experiential platform for blog hosting on the internet now or whatever. But back in the day, it was safe, fast and secure WordPress hosting, and I think they might’ve even gone back, but they had to be narrow to start. I think we all had to be narrow to start. We were broad to start to find our narrow, if you will, to find that use case. And then we had about four days of meetings in Q4 and said, you know what? This use case makes a lot of sense. Let’s go all in on that. And so far so good.
Rob Walling:
So there are definitely people listening to this right now who are where you were six, 12, 18 months ago, which is I’ve launched something and it’s not getting the traction that I want fast enough. And people don’t quite get it. And there’s 100 different paths you could go down. There’s 20 different things you could try. You have customers telling you stuff, you have advisors telling you stuff, you have your own gut, you have team members, you have all, I said it earlier, noisy noise, which is a dumb phrase, but you just got a bunch of noise and a bunch of coming at you that you have to filter and then make decisions. So how did you do that? Because I’ve done a couple talks about this, about it’s very fuzzy and I like to hear different people’s takes on it because much product market fit, everyone seems to have a different definition of it. Everyone seems to have a different approach for what you’ve been doing for the past couple years. So what was your process like and who did you listen to and how did you know who to listen to?
Matt Wensing:
Yeah, we started out the year, I would say customers obviously number one. And that came from, I would say there are actually times to not listen to your current customers. And I say current, underlining current because those customers are not the ones that are going to get you to your dreams or where you’re trying to go. Forget dreams, the next milestone. It’s like, oh shoot, we’ve got to change customer base. We didn’t have to do that. So we got to say, great, whatever we’re hearing from customers, obviously they’re humans. We have to deal with the fact of their current priorities are not tomorrows and it’s all changing, but we got to read between the lines, do a good job of interviewing them, really understand how they work. And being in Slack channels with a dozen or more customers all year last year, I learned a ton about how marketing is being done in 2023 and now 2024.
So that helped. And then I would say the other thing we did, and I’m just going to add, there’s a wide variety of frameworks and ways you can think about this. The one that really helped us here was follow the workflow. So what we found was it was, okay, we’re building lead magnets for people in a high touch way. They’re using our platform to build these magnets. We’re helping them. It’s a mix. It’s high touch. What we really said after that is like, okay, we know we want to launch self-service. We know we want this to be turnkey. Let’s follow the workflow. And what happens after a lead gets captured by a lead magnet? What’s the very next thing that people want to do with it? And we say, oh, well, they have to triage, they qualify it, right? Is this a good lead? Is this a bad lead, et cetera.
So for us it was sort of like it’s just the next step in the workflow for us is where we found this. And then we started to look at that. Okay, okay, is that universal? Is there an app there? Is there a use case? Oh yeah, lead qualification. Oh, is there a mathematical component to that? We’re all these calculator … Oh yeah, scoring. Well shoot. It’s kind of like right there. And then the more we ask, we’re like, okay, existing category, it’s kind of sleepy, meaning I like to say it’s the Baltic Avenue of the monopoly board. It’s not the boardwalk or the park place where there’s just obviously it’s super fancy and everybody’s in on it and it’s super competitive. It’s kind of like, okay, yeah, it’s a category, but it’s not super competitive. So it felt like also a step in the workflow where we could bring a better product to market and stand up well in any kind of comparison with other products that are out there, differentiation, all that.
So I would say the three things really, customers understand their workflows following those to a step in the journey that was adjacent to us and then saying, can we compete at this step? And once we said, we were like, okay, that’s really cool because that step is actually very narrow by comparison to build a lead magnet from scratch, which is like a no-code exercise of a blank canvas. This is, hey, I’ve got an email address and I need to turn it into a score from zero to 100. And everybody basically needs to do the same thing. And the only difference is you have a different definition of a ideal customer than I do. So you’re like, okay, that has a nice scalability to it. So in this case, it was following the workflow. In other cases, it’s a different tool. That’s why these things are fun. It’s like just have a toolbox full of these ways of looking at it.
Rob Walling:
And so lead scoring, if folks aren’t familiar with that, can you tell who uses that and what the purpose of it is?
Matt Wensing:
Yes. This was another interesting thing. There’s actually two things people think about when it comes to lead scoring. First is the traditional definition. If you have HubSpot or something and you look at an article that says how to do lead scoring or close partner of ours, you’ll see an article that says, hey, somebody came to your website, they sign up for a webinar that’s 10 points. They downloaded an ebook, that’s five points, et cetera. And you build a score based on the behaviors of visitor or prospect, and that score just grows over time. The other one is what we just hinted at. Hey, Rob comes to my website. I need to know if Rob is a qualified prospect, should I even reach out to Rob? Is he worth my time? Just based on what data is in Clearbit or what data the world knows about Rob.
And so Summit offers both. So we can both take an email address and you define your ideal custom profile. We match them up and we say, Hey, Rob is a great fit based on what you’re looking for. Actually Rob is not who you’re looking for because it’s a Gmail address. Or he works works at a massive company and you’re selling to SMBs, whatever it is. So I like to put those on two axes. One is behavior scoring. Is Rob acting like he has the intent to purchase something? And the other one is just persona fit scoring is Rob the shape of person we’re looking for? And obviously the best case is high intent, high fit. And then you can kind of think from there of low intent, low fit.
Rob Walling:
And I’m familiar with lead scoring because we built it into Drip. It was a feature for us, but it wasn’t like this. So you actually go out to Clearbit and you augment the leads and then you get job titles, this and that. Since we were an email marketing platform, we basically did it based on folks interactions with your website. We had JavaScript on your site, how many emails they opened and clicked. And you could define, we had predefined lead scoring of like, hey, for every open, it’s one point added and for every click it’s three or whatever. But you could then go in and change that.
So it’s pretty configurable, but that’s different. That’s activity based lead scoring. It said nothing about your ICP, it’s just their really into what you’re writing. That’s what we had and we had planned to go out and augment and we never got there. It wasn’t important enough for us. But the reason I bring that up is it was a feature of Drip, and I’d imagine it’s a feature of CRMs or HubSpots or Salesforce. I don’t know. I’ve never used it, but I’m sure it’s in them. So how are you thinking about that as this is your whole product as lead scoring, but it can be a feature of other. Is there danger there?
Matt Wensing:
Yeah, there is danger there. And I’ll say that if our company, if we didn’t still have that broad platform in the background, this would be a risk. And the risk is, I raised venture money, we raised venture money, we’re going big. I don’t think you can build the kind of scale company that I want to build based on just this product category, which as you said, is for many people as a feature. Now there are companies that are out there, competitors, you can look them up if you type in lead scoring, you see a lot of their ads where they’re charging 500 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, $3,000 a month for lead scoring. And frankly, we’re doing kind of the same thing for a lot less and more scalably. We have that benefit of releasing something recently and all the modern tech that you get to bring to bear on the problem.
So it is a category, it’s not just a feature, but it’s pretty small. It in terms of it is not a venture scale category. So if somebody came to you and said, “Hey, I want to build an entire company, the lead scoring, I want to raise five million bucks.” That doesn’t make sense. It’s not big enough. But given our goals as a company right now, the way I talk about it internally is, Hey guys, we want to be, we are a platform, but what good is a platform without a killer app or game or use case? I said up until now, we’ve basically been the, hey, here’s a PlayStation and we also include this ability to build your own PlayStation game. And you’re like, very few people-
Rob Walling:
[inaudible 00:20:51] this is not fun at all.
Matt Wensing:
And some people think it sounds extremely fun, and that’s like the 0.0001% and then 99% repeating of people go, I was looking for a game I could just play. I’m just looking for fun. So I said, look, we’re selling our first game. We hope this is a killer game. It’s bundled into the platform. It’s like the cartridge that comes included, and that’s enough. We think we can sell enough of that game, if you will, to drive enough console sales to extend the metaphor to get ourselves to the revenue milestone we have next. And that means that, hey, when we get to that milestone, it’s sort of like, Hey, what game do we want to create next? Do we want to create something completely different? Probably related, but then we can branch out. But the risk would be, yeah, hey, this is the whole platform is about this.
And fortunately we didn’t have to do that. Believe it or not, the lead scoring product, if you will, is literally just an app that we built using our own platform and technology. So when you get a license or a subscription, you’ll see that app suddenly show up in your own library of things. And it’d be like having a file included with Figma or a song included with iTunes or whatever it just comes with. And that means that we really, the product itself to build probably took two or three weeks using our own platform. What took a lot longer was a lot more work was the marketing and the messaging and the positioning to narrow that focus.
Rob Walling:
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Matt Wensing:
Three.
Rob Walling:
Okay, so you’re pretty small and lean then. And you’ve mentioned that you’ve raised venture and you want to go venture scale. I want to call that out. I don’t know, 80 plus percent of the listeners are folks who want to bootstrap and probably about 80, 75% and 20, 25% are open to raising some kind of funding, at least according, I think it’s a state of independent SaaS where we ask that. But even most of those would do more of a TinySeed round or an angel round and don’t want to go venture scale, but there’s that 1% or 3% folks who want to go venture.
I want to call that out because if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking about bootstrapping, this is a tough path to go down to build a big platform. And you have different goals than someone who maybe wants to exit for 10 million. And so you want to go, like you say, venture scale and it means like, no, this is 100 million, this is a billion. No, whatever. It is a huge number. What brought you to that decision? Because you bootstrapped your first company. We’ve talked about that here on the show. You had an eight figure exit. Congratulations, sir. And so why in this new one, you took TinySeed funding in the very first batch and then you’ve raised one or two rounds, I believe from venture. What was the impetus for you to make that decision?
Matt Wensing:
I think I practically swore off the idea of venture when I first left my last business. I think a lot of people do because they go through it and they go, wow, it wasn’t a short journey. A lot of stuff happens downstream of it. I think with certain investors like yourself with Bryce Roberts who have more of a revenue focused mindset, fortunately you can actually leave a lot of that thinking, let’s say behind, but for me it was, okay, I’m just going to build this thing. And the more I investigated the market and the more I built to address what I found, I sort of found that gap and I realized this gap is actually really, really big and it’s very horizontal. And so now actually when I look at it, I go, okay, we’re solving lead scoring, which is a mathematical problem in the marketing space, if you will, but the need for math in the marketing space is kind of endless.
And so it’s this really thin layer that just goes out forever, if you will. And I really spent the first several years of this, well, I say I spent the first six to 12 months of this going, I’m not doing that, I’m not doing that again. I’m just going to have my little nice little shoe store in the corner. Or as others say, my nice little Italian restaurant, there’s a coffee shop, that’s what we’re going to do. But then I found this thing and it was really broad and horizontal, but then it took raising venture capital and it took years of market discovery to figure out, okay, how big is it? No, really, how big is it? Who needs it? Where do they need it now? And really to deliver something to the market that can create revenue today but still holds onto that big vision.
I think that’s the challenge of going the venture path in 2024 even is, unless you’re going to be the raised gobs of money and [inaudible 00:26:40] this doesn’t matter, I think that’s gone. I think the real challenge even the venture folks have now is how do I have a gigantic vision but then ship something quickly that gets to revenue quickly? And that’s a whole different muscle right? Now we know how challenging that is. Doing both is, it’s very hard. It’s very hard.
Rob Walling:
And I want to call out that you have raised venture, and when people hear that, usually they think scale up, hire a bunch of employees. That’s usually the path for it. You have not done that. And in fact, if you had, you probably would’ve run out of money. I mean, the odds are pretty, if you’d scaled up to 10, 15, 20 employees too early, that’s the problem with, so some people say, well, don’t raise funding too early. And I say, but you can raise it early. Just don’t scale up too early. Because if you’re still trying to find product market fit and you’re still kind of narrowing or pivoting or whatever term we want to use for it, and you’re at 15 or 20 people and you have to just reorient the Titanic every six months, it’s not even that many people, but 15 versus three-
Matt Wensing:
Way different.
Rob Walling:
Worlds apart, right?
Matt Wensing:
Yeah, I agree. We stayed small. I mean, the most we’ve ever had is four people, which was contractors and a couple employees working on it. And that has allowed us to explore this market opportunity for years. It’s allowed us to build a technology, a no-code platform from scratch, which just takes time. It’s not even just that it takes time to write the lines of code. It’s knowing what lines of code to write based on the market, and there is no one source of information out there that you can just go to get all the answers and then build the thing to spec in three months. And so the bigger the opportunity, you kind of need more time to steep in market and in those conversations and ideas to figure out where is it really? Because when we go in, we want to go in, we want to go all in, but we’ve got to be really sure.
And I think the going all in part is just like you said, you hire enough people, you’ve basically created this complex system of scaling that back is super hard. Imagine you have 10 or 15 people and you’re like, I don’t even know if we can reduce this to two or three people at this point because I don’t know how to do seven of the things that are being done by other people. You’ve created, unfortunately, this thing where you remove one or a large enough chunk and the whole thing just kind of implodes. And that’s where these companies get, it’s not like when you have 1,000 employees, you can suddenly scale it back to 100 and still keep going. You can very easily set off a spiral.
Rob Walling:
And so we’ve talked a little bit about ICP, you use that phrase ideal customer profile. Who is yours today? If someone’s listening to this, we have marketers who listen to this, sales folks, we got developers, we got whatever. But if someone’s thinking like, well, is something I could use, whether it’s your day job or in their own company, who do you think it’s ideal for?
Matt Wensing:
Yeah, this is ideal for a company that is investing already pretty heavily in customer acquisition. So if you’re still not really doing that or you’re founder-led sales, I think when you’re doing founder-led sales, you’re sort of just, I’ll talk to anybody, right, at that stage. Beyond that, you get to the point of saying, we’re acquiring leads. And I’ll give you an example. Ideal customer who is a customer of ours already that I was talking to yesterday, they’re spending a good amount on paid acquisition. And they’re essentially, if you want to look at buying leads, buying email addresses to not have a quick and easy way to qualify those at scale. So you’re getting hundreds a month, thousands a month, you are going to waste resources in outreach, phone calls, discovery calls, et cetera. And you might be like, oh, what does an email cost you?
Well, even emailing an unqualified lead cost you something because it’s not just the penny cost to send it or whatever, the micro pennies, it’s the, this is spam, this is irrelevant. I am not interested in this. Or even just somebody wasting your time with the call. So it’s companies that are, I would say, acquiring customers pretty aggressively in terms of paid acquisition or they have a lot of inbound organic and they want to give VIP treatment to customers that are just phenomenal opportunities, but they no longer have time to, you get a trial sign up and you’re at that stage, you get a trial sign up and you’re like, ooh, I’m going to go type in that web address. I’m going to look them up on LinkedIn. You kind of this manual little grunt work to figure out who this is. And you’re like, pop in champagne.
It’s somebody that’s actually a big logo. You can’t do that anymore. When that doesn’t scale, then you’re a good fit for this. When you get to the point where you’re like, I have more email addresses than I can do that lookup for, I wish I had a way to just start to, again, sift through these and figure out which ones are worth my time, worth a personal touch. And I think these days with automation and AI and all the, it’s even more valuable then to give that personal touch to people who are really great fit and that’s who we’re a great fit for. So I would say put it on numbers perspective, scaling up. So million plus AR, probably sales hires have been there for a while. You kind of know what you’re doing and now you’re investing in SDRs or customer acquisition lead gen to get more people in the door.
Rob Walling:
Matt Wensing, thanks for joining me on the show, man. People want to keep up with you. You are on Twitter, x.com/mattwensing. I don’t call it XI, I’m going to call it Twitter until, because they still redirect.
Matt Wensing:
They do.
Rob Walling:
I just want [inaudible 00:31:57] x.com and it goes to twitter.com. So I’m like, no, it’s still Twitter. I’m not changing this thing, the icon. You know what tripped me out is on my iPhone to get to Twitter, you pull it down and now if you search for T-W-I-T-T-E-R, it doesn’t show up. You have to type in X. So they’ve done it on the iPhone already and I’m waiting for the internet to catch up.
Matt Wensing:
Out of my cold dead hands.
Rob Walling:
I know, that’s how I feel. Anyways, man, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Matt Wensing:
Thanks for having me,
Rob Walling:
Rob. And once again, usesummit.com if folks want to check out Summit. Thanks to Matt for joining me again this week, and thanks to you for coming back this and every week. As a reminder, I published a book middle of last year called The SaaS Playbook. It is selling really well. It’s about to hit 20,000 copies. I’m pretty stoked about that. If you haven’t bought The SaaS Playbook, you can buy it directly from me, SaaSplaybook.com or head to Amazon. And if you have bought it and you’ve read it and you think it’s worth a five star review on Amazon or Audible, I would really appreciate it. It helps more people find the book. It helps me continue to drive my mission forward of multiplying the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups, and it helps keep me motivated to keep writing books and keep producing the show. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 701.