He introduced his buyers to VCs instead of pitching them—then closed 20 deals in a row and a $20M Series A | with Jonathan Awad, Co-Founder & CEO of Baselayer

0:00When I felt true product market fit, it was this moment upon reflection, like we just won another deal and we're going through the pipeline, we're going through HubSpot, and we realized that we had just won the last 20 deals in a row. People in the beginning are buying the founder. They're buying you. So if you're just only talking about your product, they're like, well, I don't know you that well. I don't trust you. You're going to be there for me. You're going to respond in two minutes. Is something going wrong? Is your SLA 20 minutes? Are you going to duck and dive and cover? I don't know you.

0:26So all I ever did when I really kind of realized this reciprocity in humans was I was like, well, if I become as close as possible to as many buyers as possible and I'm valuable to them and I give them something outside of just our product, they'll give us a chance. And that's what we did, which is basically get introduced to tons of investors for the first time and plan out all the meetings like a month in advance and then segment them out week, week, week, week. And that's what we did. What I didn't know, which is why the story is crazy. Week one, SVB crashed. Oh, God. That's product market fit.

1:00Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit. Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. John, welcome to the show, dude. Hey, good seeing you, Pablo. Excited to have you here, man. I mean, just raised a$20 million Series A.

1:33Started this about three years ago, which used to be like insane speed. And now it's like it's three years, the new decade. It's just crazy, man, the speed of some of these things, dude. But in my books, three years to an A is already on a huge, fast trajectory. Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. Especially when you look on Twitter. And some people live on Twitter, some people live on LinkedIn. in, it seems like people are doing 40, 50,$60 million raises in six months. But this is like a very small percentage of companies. The rest of the companies right now are like every day grinding it out. And it's been super fun at Baselayer.

2:06I mean, I had this recently, I sent a deal to a friend of mine for a series A and I think the company started like, I think it's like 22, right? So it's like four years old. And he's like, dude, like they've been around for a long time. Like what happened? I'm like, man, like, really? Like, you know, the first year and a half, you It might just be like in discovery mode, not doing anything, right? It's wild. The expectations change like crazy. They definitely do. And the best and worst part about it is because we're just so in it, you feel the expectations changing year over year over year. What made a lot of sense in 2023 is so different in 24 and 25 and 26, especially on things like team sizes.

2:42Back before, you know, it's like, oh, so how big are you guys now? And you never really knew what they were getting at. And I was like, well, you mean revenue? Do you mean valuation? Do you mean team size? Like, what are you getting at? Very often, they mean team size. And team size was this weird kind of like badge of honor. Oh, you have 100 people. You have 200 people. Whoa. And now... The opposite. The badge of honor is like, whoa, you have 20 people and you're doing all this? And so we're super proud of our team size, personally. How many are you guys? We're 30 people. We cost eight figures in revenue with 20 people.

3:16Love it. We're going to get into all that. We have like two tactical deep dives we want to go into. Actually, we're going to talk about, because you saw you still selling five-figure deals, then moving up to six-figure deals. And you've got this like hack to deliver value to champions and get credibility with enterprise buyers. We're going to go deep into that. We're going to go deep into what you've done to generate kind of insane top of funnel and something that everybody could do. So we're going to talk about that at the end. But the first question, which we always start with, is tell me about the moment when you felt like you'd found true product market fit.

3:46Yeah, I love this question. I actually just wrote a post on the best questions to ask founders in interviews. Like when you're actually trying to interview for the company, not just like something like this. But I love when employees and future employees ask me this particular question because it's so fun. When I felt true product market fit was this moment upon reflection, like we just won another deal and we're going through the pipeline, we're going through HubSpot. And we realized that we had just won the last 20 deals in a row. Like no matter who the competitor was, no matter the situation, the ICP, you know, the different products that we're selling, we just won back to back to back to back.

4:25No lost deals, no no's in 20. 20 in a row. And it was one of those moments where I was just like, wait a second, I think we're on to something. I think now I'm feeling like this makes a ton of sense. And because there's a lot of things where in the early days, you can think of it as some people have a very hard time getting the first few customers. and some people have actually decently easy time getting the first few customers. What do I mean by easy time? Like you kind of go to your friends, you go to people you already really know and they kind of just help you out basically. Like, yeah, sure, like we'll try it out.

4:56Yeah, we'll pay for it. Yeah, sure, I could figure out some budget for this. We'll give you some feedback, I got you. Especially like the YC world, right? It's like YC buys from YC, it's very normal. It's actually a huge perk of going to YC, quite frankly. It's something I would love to do second time around, third time around. It's a crazy, I mean, it really is a crazy hack. Just to go on a tangent, it's like you get crazy momentum on sales because you sell to the batch. And then you get crazy momentum on fundraising because like the supply demand is so off because they throw like a thousand investors at you.

5:23So it's a nice little head start for sure. Yeah. And that head start can fade though. And so, you know, when you do 20 in a row, this was like after the first like 20, 30 deals. Like, all right, cool. Like a bunch of the early ones and we'll get into the early ones where, you know, maybe not as replicable. and then just back to back to back to back. And these are big companies too. We went from five-figure to six-figure. One of our first 50 deals was a seven-figure deal. Shout out to FIS, global public company, one of the largest fintechs in America, one of the largest fintechs in the world. And it was one of our first 50 customers.

5:58So it was awesome. And that's the moment I was just like, we are here and we figured it out. Tim, our co-founder, CTO, him and the engineering team, they really built something super durable. enterprise ready. And, you know, we've had really no turn. I think one customer has turned all time at Basel. Crazy. I normally ask follow up questions about like, why is that PMF? But it's like 25 figure plus deals in a row, not a single one lost. It's pretty in your face. I mean, it's kind of hard to deny that point. When was this, by the way, timeline wise? So we went live April 2024, a production live first API customer.

6:33It's like early 25, which feels like an eternity ago. The world changes fast, man. It's crazy. But it was like in the beginning, you know, you get a few customers here, you get a few customers there. There were a lot of deals that were kind of like pending, if that makes sense. A lot of kinks that we had to iron out and shout out to our first, you know, real few customers. Super patient with us, giving us tons of feedback, saw how fast we moved. And something that I always say is one of the reasons people love to work with us is I have an internal SLA of we need to get back to customers on Slack and email in under 20 minutes.

7:07Wow. Aggressive. When you put that tone, I mean, I'm, if I, I go for two minutes, one minute. Yeah, sure, sure. Like, I love to, it's just delight. It's this, whoa, did the CEO, did the CTO, did the engineer, one of the engineers just respond to me in a few minutes? But the 20 minutes is super doable. And it's all about the act. I saw this on Twitter yesterday. Somebody brought it up. Someone from A16Z brought it up of like, act. Are they saying, acknowledge, acknowledged, or act like in disgust? but the act is a classic engineering thing. Like act, acknowledge, I hear you, I'll get back to you.

7:41And there's just so much delight there. And so in our first few customers, it was all about just get back to them so fast. Yes, yes, I hear you. We see it, we're going to work on it. And then as fast as you can turn around as possible. And I think that's where we got so much good feedback in the beginning from all those customers. And then we were able to hit this product market fit probably like just within the year, like early the following year. I don't think you can really justifiably feel product market fit until there's this overwhelming volume of evidence. Some people get there even faster.

8:15But for us, it's financial services, right? So financial services are not going to make a one-month, two-month decision, two-week decision, snap decision of changing their whole compliance program, their whole risk program. The funny thing about customer success, you're talking about getting back to people quickly. I find it's the most, out of all the things you need to do to get customers, win customers, retention, referrals, all that stuff, right? Think about sales, marketing. Customer success is like the most in your control. Like everybody could have this SLA. Everybody could reply under 20 minutes if they just did it.

8:47You know what I mean? And the impact that that has on retention and referrals is massive, right? You tell people about the fact that you love this company because whenever you have a problem, they just get back to you right away. You're never going to churn from that. If you're getting any value from the product, you're not going anywhere. The delta between expectation and reality is the happiness delta. I've always thought of it like that. They expect this, you give them this, and it could just be as simple as, I remember frustrated Slack. I hear you. Thank you so much for calling that out. We're going to get on it right away.

9:21And you respond right away. and you don't shy away from it. You don't duck, you don't cover. You're just like, yes, I see you. I hear you. Thank you so much. We're on it. And you take that punch in the face with a smile because feedback is a gift. It's really just up to you and how you handle it. And you know, the other thing, this is something I've noticed is like, the faster you reply, the more you can get away with what you just said. In other words, if I reply in a minute, I could tell you, hey, we're on it. We'll get back to you. Cause it's like, okay, you just got it. If you wait a day, now you're kind of stuck cause you kind of have to resolve it.

9:51You can't get back a day later and be like, we'll be on it. It's like, what do you mean? You just saw it? What's wrong with you? It's just so human. I love that. You're so right, by the way. The faster you respond to an email, the faster you respond to a Slack, the less it can say, and the less you can do in that moment, and the more you get away with. And so I love that SLA, like onboarding at base layer employees. And I'm like, hey, look, we can get into the product. We can get into the industry. We'll get into all that stuff. Here's how we operate, because this is excellent. And this is what excellence is.

10:20And I've seen it before. We have an investment banking background. Investment banking, it's so normal. SLA 20 minutes, SLA two minutes. Yeah, right. What else are you doing? That's the attitude. What, are you sleeping? Yeah, exactly. Who said you were allowed to sleep? Like literally, that was the energy. No matter what time of night, no matter if it's in the weekend. Weekend? What do you mean? It's just Saturday. And so I brought that energy plus, you know, the tech side of things. Like a little bit more fun side of things. I'm not trying to bring like this militant investment banking thing to the company.

10:53It's an expression of, it was so good how reliable they were, how consistent they were, how on top of things they were. You knew you were going to get an answer. I loved that. And I admired it so much. And it was just so excellent the way to operate that I totally agree of like, you can like act, we'll get back to you. And then you have like way more time and way more grace. Totally agree. So let's go back to the beginning. I mean, obviously 20 deals closed, all straight means not only did you have something people wanted, which led them to a demo, but you'd build the right enough solution that you beat whatever other competitors, whatever else they might have been considering.

11:26So tell me a little bit like 2023 or 2022, whenever it was that the idea kind of came, what was happening? What were you doing? And what was kind of the origin for Baselayer? You know, it's really interesting. I've been in financial services, fintech, et cetera, Jason for the last 15 years. So I did investment banking, you know, JP Morgan, UBS, Lazard, and that was M &A. So banks buying banks, bank buying lenders. You knew a little bit about it. You don't really understand what's going on, but like generally how they operate. And then I started a fintech and that's a whole story. We can get into that.

11:57It's real estate, stock exchange, et cetera. And then just went to a series of smaller startups. So I went to one underwriting automation, did something cool, went to an even smaller one. Did it fail or work? What was the end outcome just of that startup? The first one, the fintech one. TLDR, we were very early to fractionalizing real estate. A lot of people in 2016 was like, is this on the chain? Is this on chain? I was like, no, it's not on chain. We went way more difficult. Not difficult, that's not true. There's no juxtaposition. It was just not on chain. We filed a brand new security, Reg D security, SEC, FINRA registered.

12:31We're a licensed broker dealer, and we were trading app. So it was like we were JP Morgan, Robinhood, NASDAQ, and won, basically. And we created a brand new security. And it was a license, like an ATS. That's for Alternate Trading System. Instead of NASDAQ, which is a stock exchange, we did an ATS. There's only 12 licensed ATSs in the world. And we tried to just IPO buildings. When I say try, we IPO at four buildings, raised about 30 million bucks. And you could buy a piece of a building the way you can buy a piece of a company. It's just then COVID came and destroyed commercial update. And it was very difficult to raise that in the wake of COVID.

13:05And we were up for a series B and then we ended up selling the company. I was chief investment officer. I wasn't the CEO. So I didn't really get that experience. I didn't have as much management experience. I didn't have as much like, how do we make money experience? And yeah, so I'm a first time CEO, second time founder. For anybody that's in that like close but not CEO, how big of a difference is the load, you know, like the pressure of CEO founder and founder and anything else, any other title? What a good question. What a difference. The amount of small, random, or big random things that just fall on your plate.

13:41Elon Musk has this amazing quote. He's like, the CEO's job is to deal with all of the problems. If something's going well, you don't really want to focus on it as much. You want to hire amazing people to go and make it even better. You need to focus on just the problems. So all the problems come to you. And so when I was chief investment officer, I had like a domain of things I would focus on and handle, but I didn't have to deal with some other team's personality issues. I didn't have to deal with some other team's filing of a license or the marketing thing or what do we do here? Hey, are competitors pricing like this?

14:18Or hey, what should the website look like? Website copy is one of the most interestingly, doesn't look hard, but it's so hard of a challenge. And you have to be so creative and you have to be so thoughtful. There's so many things that are hard or go wrong. and the CEO deals with it and every single other person doesn't. The reason why my CTO, our CTO, Tim, Timothy Hyde, shout out, my best friend, incredible person, literally genius. The reason why we work so well together is that we just completely divide the company into engineering and all of that, product execution and all that, design execution and all that, him and I stay out of it.

14:57I literally don't have access to our GitHub. I think that's a hilarious thing to say as a CEO. I always find that very funny. It's kind of like an inside joke at this point because I don't need access, but I'm not pushing to prod and they don't want me to. And then I deal with literally everything else. And that's why I work so well. Even when I chime in on things, high level, but like not really. And it's just so different. The difference is it's this coach player thing. Like at the end of the day, there is no line. As much as he owns all of that, if let's just say that stuff stops working, now it's back to being your problem.

15:28You can't escape that fact, right? And I think that's just a crazy idea is like every single problem is your problem if you're a CEO, which means you're always waking up with that heart, like beating out of your chest because inevitably something's not working. Yeah, I love that. It's funny you said that line. I always say I love that line. Every problem is my problem. I totally agree. And that's the best kind of acceptance to just hold on because then you're kind of relaxed about it. You're like something's going to go wrong. And ultimately it's a reflection of me. And that's OK. I'm like, I'll improve and we'll get better and the next day and the next day.

16:04It is what it is. I totally agree. Banger line, by the way. So back to, I took you off the storyline. So that, you know, you did the startup, then you did a few small startups. When do you get to this kind of base layer idea? Where does it come from? Yeah, so I was working in kind of identity broadly, fraud broadly. And that company was my most sales experience. Signed like 95 deals in eight months or something. And it was on a tear. COVID had just hit. It was 2021. And there was this massive transformation in financial services where folks, when I say folks, I mean banks, lenders, payments, companies, folks.

16:42Financial services before could rely on face-to-face, coming to my branch, coming to my company. I know you. I see you. I can onboard you. In COVID, 2020, they didn't do that. PPP, so many hundreds of billions of dollars was handed out in the Paycheck Protection Program. So all these businesses were applying online for the first time. All these banks were decisioning for the first real time. And no matter what any financial services company says to you, very few, even the really big ones, were doing that much digitally. And for the most part, it was really just like the top 10, not even the top 10.

17:19Some scattering, smattering of the top 10 had a bunch of digital. very little, actually half the top 10 didn't. I say top 10 banks, lenders, payments companies, and then most of the rest just weren't relying on digital as much. And then they had to. And so that was this humongous moment, basically, of massive transformation in the industry. And I was at a company that was doing pretty well. And I learned a lot really fast. And there's just so many ideas that were constantly coming because they kept asking. You have that many signed deals. I'm talking to hundreds and hundreds more, obviously, right?

17:57Like even at a 40 % win rate over time, you're still dealing and juggling. I probably juggled 400 or 500 deals over the course of those 12 months, which sounds crazy. And it is. It was the most I ever worked besides base layer. It was like that and then base layer. And they just gave me so many ideas and they asked so many questions. And they literally like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And so I took a bunch of them and I brought it internal. And I was like, hey, I wrote up PRDs. I have all these customers who want it. Like this is how we'd source the data and the product, et cetera.

18:25And I got a lot of no's. Hey, you're in sales, they in sales. And I was like, okay, that's kind of not good enough for me. And then I met Tim. And I love the way I met Tim. We literally met out via mutual friend. Tim went to Columbia undergrad and he was math econ. One of our mutual best friends. I met him in high school. Went to Bronx High School of Science in New York. Shout out to Bronx Science. And he went to Columbia as well. Our friend Andrew, so Tim's a co-founder, Andrew. Andrew was a CS engineer. And then after was an engineer for a bit, became a DJ. Like a really good one too. He's pretty popular.

18:59And we met out one night, myself, Tim, and we were just with Andrew. And then I was just like ranting and raving about some startup ideas I had in 2022. And Tim, we're in the back of a yellow cab. And Tim's just asking a question, question, question. So I was like, who are you? These are amazing questions. And Tim's just this awesome, super cool, like very tall, awesome guy. and he was like, oh, CTO of a machine learning company. He just sold to Snapchat two years ago and I'm getting kind of bored. I'm getting antsy. Like I want to do something. I'm like, amazing. Let's start a company. And he looks at me.

19:31He's like, we just met. So what? Who cares? Let's do it. And a year later of chasing, I was like, hey, like we hung out here. We met this VC. We talked to these prospects. We didn't have an idea necessarily, but I was like, in financial services, we're going to do something. I have all these prospects that I know will give me a shot. Like all these customers, all these relationships. He's like, no. And then I quit my job early 2023. Still with no clear idea. You had many ideas, but not the one yet. Literally no idea. Quit in a huff. Said, no, I have to. Let's enter the void. Let's figure it out.

20:08I'll be honest. The first two to three weeks, I was like, oh, no. What did I do? I had a pretty sweet gig. It's kind of killing it. I mean, every year of sales and partnerships, I was 600 % my quota, 800 % my quota. Like, I was crushing it. But I just was, it wasn't enough. And I call him and I will never forget. He's in the Cayman Islands with his family, with his parents. And it's like a trip with his parents. And I call him like, hey, I just quit my job. Like, let's do it. Quit your job too? Like, let's go. He's like, what are we doing? No idea. What? Let's go. And he's like, no, no, let me talk to my parents.

20:42I'll let you know later. We'll talk to you later. I talked to his mom. and his dad both. And then his mom was like, absolutely not. Don't do this. You barely know the guy. And then he comes back. He's like, look, no, but if you raise at least$3 million, I'll join. And I was like, wait a second. Will you join the meetings at least? Like, are you going to be involved? Like, is your CTO? Like, we'll figure it out. He's like, I'll join the meetings. I'm CTO. Like, let's do it. But you got to raise$3 million for it. And then the story of our fundraiser is also a whole other story. I don't know if I should get into that.

21:11I think, yeah, let's do it because you don't have at that point. I mean, you were a founder, you've got pedigree for sure, but it's not like super clear, easy. I mean, I'm curious to hear actually how you raise. It's not like, plus 22 is a funny time, man. 22 was not a great time, man. Second half of 22 is deadly. No, it was horrible, by the way. My estimation, because I was still, I was at a company that raised at 150X in early 2022, right before it left, right? Right. So right before the boat left. And then by my estimation, about a month later, so they closed in April. My take in sales, you can feel it.

21:51OK, I'll explain how you can feel it. In May of 2022, everything dropped. Everything dropped. And the way you could really feel it in sales, particularly in my seat, was people before in like 2021 and like 2020, 2021, early 2022, they were buying like crazy. They were making things fast. Every meeting, the follow ups were easy. The decision-making, all the decision-makers joined. They're excited. They're eager. I know the summer was coming, but then all of a sudden, I mean, I did a lot summer of 21. I did a ton of sales in summer of 21. And then all of a sudden, summer of 2022, people were really slow to respond.

22:27Everything, it was like, oh, cuts, cuts, cuts. Employees being fired. Sales are dropping. Volumes dropping. You really felt the difference. I totally felt the difference. And I write a, I never publicize it, but if someone wants to find it, I write a sub stack on sales. And I wrote a lot about that time of like 2022, 2023 and what it felt like and how you have to overcome it because it's and especially the one I wrote recently, it's like now we're in SaaSpocalypse. There's way too much SaaS at this point. And that's confusing. But 2022 is really tough. We ended up raising in 2023. Essentially, like the TLDR was Tim and I, we just hung out a bunch and we just jammed.

23:03And then we called a bunch of my friends and prospects and customers and managing director at a very large credit card company, a partner, executive director at a big bank. And then just like the list goes on, we talked about like 70, 80 of just my friends, my past deals. And I was like, hey, what do you need? Just help me out. And there's this common thread of, well, here's this extremely difficult thing that I don't think you can do. But if you did, I'm down. And that was a fraud consortium. And a fraud consortium is very simple. You go to 100 of the top lenders, payments companies, banks, whatever.

23:36You get all of their list of fraud, which they could share if they felt like it, because it doesn't have to be PII. It doesn't have to be actually personally identifiable information. Basically, like their, like imagine Scale.ai. You go and get their labeled data across all of them that they never would share with each other. You go and label a bunch of businesses is what the idea was versus people or attributes. And then each one could benefit from that. because what's currently happening in financial services and lending and payments, especially now with the fraud grown rampant with agents, is you go and onboard somewhere, some bank, some lender, go to Brex.

24:10Brex shuts you down because like, oh, this is a fraud. And then you just go to ramp. Right. And Brex doesn't tell them, yeah. And Brex doesn't report it to the, no offense to Brex, they're not. They're not reporting to the government. And if the government, even if when they do get a report, it's called like a SARS, a suspicious activity report. There was 5 million SARS filed last year. Guess how many, percent-wise, were enforced of the 5 million. Just pick a percent. 20%. I mean, I would hope just because you're saying it's getting low, okay. 4 % were enforced. So 20 would have been really high.

24:38And so in a very simple way, they're like, hey, here's some impossible thing. Go do it. I was like, Tim, I do have a really good network. We probably could put together a consortium. If I give you labeled data, would this be really interesting? He's like, you give me labeled proprietary data. We'll build the best risk modeling, the best machine learning algorithm in the market. You just have to go do this impossible thing. And I was like, all right, cool. Sounds good. So we put together a deck. We incorporated a company. Shout out to Tim's wife, Vivian. She was at BCG at the time and she helped make the deck, quite frankly.

25:09I was at Lazard and I'm not bad at making decks, but BCG knows how to make a good deck. And she did 90 % of this deck. Thank you, Vivian. I'll give you a shout out. I always do give her a shout out. And then Zoe Newman, shout out Zoe, at Capital on Tap, was the first person to really tell me like, hey, Frock and Sword Gym, you should look into this. Go do it. Kept on Taps, this like$5 billion credit card company out of London and also a huge presence in New York. And then we came together, took this idea. And then I went to a bunch of my friends and investors. And I was like, hey, I'm going to raise.

25:39And then I got some advice of like plan out your meetings and like a process. I would say in terms of fundraising for any founders that listen to this, there's a few ways to fundraise. This is my take. The really ideal way is not what we did. Okay. It's not what we did. The real ideal, and I just gave this advice to a founder yesterday. The really ideal way is to have a bunch of friends who are investors who you'd want to work with. And then do something excellent. Do something incredible and be somebody important in the industry. Obviously, that'd be amazing. Next up from that, go work at somewhere incredible.

26:10Do something amazing at that company. Have a lot of really good references at this incredible company. And have a lot of amazing friends that are great VCs who want to back whatever you do. That is not what we did. That's not what we did at all. Going down the ladder. Yeah, going down the ladder. And then, okay. And then after that, YC, shout out YC, amazing. Definitely, I recommend doing that. And then, it's what we did, which is not the bottom. There is the bottom. I don't want to get into the bottom because it's mildly offensive. And then it's what we did, which is basically get introduced to tons of investors for the first time and plan out all the meetings like a month in advance, like a month in advance, and then segment them out week, week, week, week.

26:48And that's what we did. What I didn't know, which is why the story is crazy, is it was one week, you know, week one, week two, week three, a month in advance, right? Week one, SVB crashed. Oh, God. That's why the story is crazy, because I didn't realize that. And I was like, oh, we got this. 75 funds, tier ones, tier twos, tier threes. I've never raised before. So like, you know, like we got a lot of experience here now. We got this. SVB crashed on the Thursday of week one. Oh, my God. Shout out to our investors. I'll never forget. Anna Mitra, A4 Capital. The conviction that this man had to be like, my money's in SVV in First Republic, but I'm still in.

27:29Crazy. Don't want to leave your rap. Crazy. Plus, you're in fintech. This stuff is adjacent. It's like, hey, is any bank going to buy anything? All the FIs are going to be frozen? What's going on? And also, all the VC's money is in SVV. Yeah. All the portfolio company's money is in SVV. And then First Republic is the real kicker, by the way. I was even worse. Basically, day one, going so well, getting some commits. I was in a safe, whatever. Getting some commits. I'm like, oh, I'm feeling good. Day two, even more. And like, we're going through it. Day three is Wednesday. The rumblings, Reddit, Twitter.

28:06What's going on? People say to me, have you seen this? I'm like, oh, no, no, no. This would be the worst timing of all time. No way. Thursday morning, SVB, everyone's wiring out. Everyone's telling each other to get money out, out, out, out. Thursday night, all wires done, SVB. All done. Thursday night into Friday morning, so many meeting cancellations. I mean, 40 % of week two and week three canceled. And I was like, did I just use my entire network and tell everyone I'm raising? Dude, and fundraising is all about momentum. And you don't want to be the one that went to everyone and then failed.

28:40Just getting out of that is so hard. The only thing they remember is if you did it or not. It doesn't matter why. Were you trying to raise a seed like two months ago? What happened? Like, it's over, dude. It's just deadly. Untouchable. Crazy, man. It was crazy. And Shaitan Amitra, I'll never forget. Met him on Friday. Talked to him on Saturday. Talked to him on Sunday. Wednesday, he's like, no, we're leading this round. I don't care. We'll figure it out. And I was like, I'm going to be honest. I barely ever tell this story, so we'll record it. my first panic attack ever was that Saturday. My ever.

29:16I've never, I'm not an anxious person. I'm not a nervous person. I am exactly how I'm presenting on this call, basically like this podcast. I was like, did I just use my whole network on like the single, one of the only financial crises like in the last 20 years? Like there's 08? And there's now, yeah, 22. And I plan a month in advance. And I was like, huh, is this a sign? Fortunately, you know, a lot of great investors who had major conviction and we still ended up getting like 15 mil of interest and took like four of it. Oh, wow. And genuinely the most tumultuous, craziest emotional experience ever to like get just straight at cancels and then so many no's and still just like every meeting because I'm 75 and then I met a bunch of people and it ended up being like 100 meetings basically in three weeks and then we got, yeah, just so much emotional conviction and resilience that like, whoa, what a story.

30:10You love this show. You don't want to miss the next episode. Why would you? So hit that follow button. Trust me, it's in your own best engine. That's wild, dude. I want to make sure we have enough time for the tactics at the end, but I do want to understand. So now you've got some money, like you got three,$4 million. You've got your co-founder and you have the idea. The idea depends on getting like all these FIs to like agree to share data with you. That seems like the hard part of this equation. How do you start to make that happen? Yeah. You know, there's a lot of discourse on this, but not a lot of like the reality behind the scenes.

30:43The reality behind the scenes is that we made a bunch of Figma mock-up demos that we pretended were real. And I would play people through that and get their takes. And I hit up genuinely every single possible person that I had ever met in years of financial services who I thought was either at a company who could share data? Or was one to two degree separation away from someone who could share some data? And it was so many people. And I think people just totally underestimate what I mean by that. Like, I'm talking all day. You're LinkedIn-ing, you're texting. Like, I'm sending hundreds and hundreds of messages.

31:25Hundreds and hundreds a day. I think the scale of it is just super underestimated. And the only way to really do that, and I don't know if this is too much information, this is what worked for me, is I, it was so much caffeine. It was so much Adderall. I worked so much. Like I definitely worked 100 hour weeks. I think people say 100 hour weeks, 120 hour weeks. And a lot of it when you actually like watch them, like imagine like a movie or a video, they're kind of on their phone, like scrolling a bunch of time and like they're kind of watching on Twitter, they're like whatever. They're doing a bunch of nothing.

31:56I was like urgently frantically messaging people because I knew something that was very simple. You can't just ask for something. That's the problem. You have to catch up with them and be useful to them and be valuable to them. And then humans are so reciprocal in nature, then they'll just want to help you. But the reason that you have to start frantically, urgently doing that today is because there's a load period, though. That's months of time that you have to start today. The clock will have to start at some point. first touch, second touch, third touch, hang out, coffee, invite to an event, introduce them to somebody, hand them some sort of a resource.

32:40What I love them back in the day, that's really handy actually, is market maps. Either you make a market map or you go and grab somebody's market map. I had three or four market maps just at the ready, copy paste message, and I'd send it to people. And they'd be like, wow, this is super useful, actually. So just do like a ton of great research. There's been a bunch of great tweets, a bunch of great like LinkedIn posts that people do that's just really great resources. I always just leave people with that, if not introduce them to someone. But the amount of outreach I did. Well, let's start with that.

33:09Like this is one of the two deep dives I want to do is kind of generating top of funnel, right? And so I think it seems like this is going to be key. And then even the bottom of funnel stuff, the credibility piece, we'll probably do both of those because they seem to tie into ultimately getting everybody to cooperate and share data with you, which is how you even build a product. So let's go deep on that. Like maybe it's the same now, but let's go back then because this is what we're talking about. what is an average week for you? Like a hundred hour weeks, sometimes I do the math. Like I do not work a hundred hour weeks, right?

33:36But I'm not a founder, right? So it's just, it really is different. I've been a founder and it's funny. Like I think any VC that hasn't been a founder just really doesn't know. I mean, it's just so different. The workload is so different. The pressure is so different. But sometimes I think about a hundred hour weeks and I'm like, man, how does that even math out? So let's maybe start there. Then we can talk about the tactics, you know, what you're messaging, what you're reaching out on LinkedIn, et cetera. But I think detail is the key. so somebody can actually measure themselves against that and be like, what more could I be doing to just get more, more serendipity, more deal flow?

34:05Yeah, so I think the easiest way to think about it is there's your time in meetings and then there's your time outside of the meeting and then the prep and the follow-up and all of that. And then there's a time on like the weekends, right? So the time in me, like, I mean, I'll just share like my calendar. Like my calendar and I definitely look over here, 43 hours a week in meetings, 35, 38, 46, 43, 25 this week I was traveling a bunch, 33, 53, 40, 40, 51, 41, 63. That's just meetings. Yeah, exactly. So, but like for anyone listening, I mean, this is a calendar that's just stacked. Like full day and you're doing 40 hours, 50 hours in a meeting, which obviously doesn't count the prep time, doesn't count like all the other work that's going to come out of it.

34:50You know, this doesn't count any of the other stuff that you're doing. And it's just like you're in meetings. And that's the thing that makes like the difference is you have to be so, so, so urgent about trying to capture every single minute. It's just every single minute. And I think people kind of miss that of every you can always raise more money. You cannot raise more time. You don't have we don't have time. Another great Elon Musk quote. He's like, if we don't work with extreme urgency, we have zero chance of accomplishing X goal. He was talking about multi-planetary. Big, big goal, yeah.

35:29Big, big, big goal. But he's like, if you're not so, so, so, so, so urgent, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? Like, you're going up against people who've, I mean, I'm single, like, no kids. Like, I have nothing else that I care about more than Baselayer. And I have friends who work just as much, more than me. Your weekends are fully stacked. Like every single minute is totally dedicated to this. And I mentioned like Adderall, caffeine, like I sleep, I sleep six hours probably a night and I go to the gym five days a week. But besides those two things, essentially, I've cut out anything that doesn't help me grow, evolve, learn, get better at my craft and like get better and meet more people.

36:11It's that's who you're going up against. I mean, obviously, to bring up the easy examples, like the Corgi guy, it's a little ridiculous, this, but I kind of get what he's getting at. Seven days a week, he sleeps in office, whatever that is. Like it would help though, right? It definitely would push you further and faster. And obviously they raised three times this year. They went from like a bill to four bill valuation. It's clearly working no matter what anybody says. Like if your goal is to do X, there are ways to do it that are extremely uncomfortable, extremely painful, and extremely lonely, quite frankly, right?

36:41Like I obviously have tons of friends, but I don't see them very often. I have tons of work friends and like other types of friends. Yeah, this is I mean, it's not about, you know, recommending or not recommending at the end of day, it's like, if you want to build a multi billion dollar company, you're going to compete at a global scale. And if you have competitors who are deciding to work the way you're working, then somehow you're going to produce like two X or three X the output per hour for you to actually compete with them. Like you're either gonna have to figure that out, which is in theory possible.

37:08And I'm sure there's gonna be somebody that's like, hey, I built a big company and I never worked this hard but that that's what you're going up against that's just a reality and then you got to decide like how you want to kind of you know tweak your odds you know and and how much work you want to put in to still be able to perform you know relative to that yeah i think it's just so important because my i think like the success that we had was in a very specific type of method that just takes so much time and so much effort which is just really outreaching and being as valuable as possible. Yeah.

37:40So tell me about that. Like you're going on, like, let's start with outreach, right? Like back then, especially who are you reaching out to are getting intros? You're going cold. Like, what are you saying to them? What are you asking for? You know, all that stuff. There's a bunch of discourse on cold DMs work, cold tweets work, cold emails work. I hear you on that. I don't think I've done it that much. And I don't know if it's better than what I've done. And what I've done is really just put myself out there. I go to so many events. I go to so many conferences, I meet so many people, I like, I talked to so many people, I make great relationships with so many people, and then they introduced me to other people.

38:17It really does work so well that way. And if you do sheer number of volume, and you're so valuable to people, eventually they will reciprocate. And it is kind of that simple. It's just a sheer amount of volume required to do that is the difficult part. Like, I think people underestimate what I mean when I say reaching out to anyone you've ever met who's even adjacent. Like somebody, for example, would be like somebody you went to college with who's mutuals with someone at a bank. And you literally, you'll reach out as well. Like, hey man, I'm starting to tell you you would love to catch up. Or just like, hey, what do you say to that person?

38:52I mean, if you went to college with them, it's like, hey, what's going on? Like, been a while. I'd love to catch up with you. Seems like what you're up to is, you know, you're doing cool things. Like, it's been too long. Let's catch up. A lot of that, like, if you do a lot of that and you've made some friends before, and then you just become useful to them and you try to integrate them in your life so now. Like it really is just a lot of that. I think for people to think that they haven't met that many people is just like you're wrong. I think it's just people are shy and awkward about reaching out and like that might feel cold, but it's not cold at all actually.

39:24You just have to kind of constantly put yourself out there, go to a very... Well, I think part of it, at least if I'm thinking about it, like part of it is your bar for value or ROI. In other words, you look at somebody like that and you're like, I just don't really think, Like, I'm going to get anything out of it. I'm going to spend 30 minutes. It's worth my time. But if you just get rid of that, you're like, it could be useful. There's like a 1 % chance that's good enough. You're going to meet a lot of people. And a lot of them are going to be a waste of time. But like, some of them won't. Exactly.

39:48But that's kind of the issue. A lot of them could be a waste of time or seem like a waste of time in the moment. And then they change jobs. And then they make a friend. And then they go and do something different. Or they just get senior somewhere. And then they're useful because they have a bunch of useful, cool friends. So when you look at people like dollar signs, it really just doesn't go very well. But you look at people like, hey, you seem cool. You seem great. You seem like you're doing something interesting. I'm doing something interesting. There's no reason why we shouldn't be friendlier.

40:16There's so much serendipity that comes out of it. And I think people just totally underestimate that. And it's worked so well for me. It's just an immense amount of work because what you said, like a bunch of things. Are you a waste of time in the moment? Well, you've got to do basically 12-hour days, seven days a week. because you got to do eight hours times five for the meetings, another four to just like figure the shit out. And then you probably got to do another 20, 25 hours on the weekends just to like get work done and move the ball forward. And I did a lot of all-nighters. If you're not doing any all-nighters, you don't have enough on your plate.

40:46You're not loading yourself up with enough people to get back to, things to respond to, things to build. Your timelines for when you think it's acceptable to do a task is too long. I'm all about like, what do you mean today? like we could just do that today it'll take two minutes just do it today and if you do enough it'll take 10 minutes to do it today well you could think of probably a hundred things and that's a thousand minutes so a thousand minutes it's like we can think of a lot of things that take 10 minutes and i'm all about do it today and so there's so many things like you end up doing just an all-nighter and we did so many all-nighters tim and i shout out to tim as always we've done multiple all-nighters two all-nighters back to back we just put super aggressive timelines we promise it.

41:28We're like, well, if we did all nighter, could we finish it? And we're like, well, yeah, we could. Well, why aren't we? What are we waiting for? I really always tell people the SLA of 20 minutes is so important. The reaching out to a few hundred more people, 200 more people, that first message, that first touch, do it today. If you do it today, the clock starts from now. I'm all about that, and I think people just miss that, because it's hard. I think the analogy that comes to mind, and I've always thought this about startups, and the amount of work required to get things going is like, imagine like a truck, like a big, big truck, right?

42:00That's your startup. You go and you try and push that truck, it's not moving. It's not going to go anywhere. And default is it's not going to move. If you give it a little push one day and then you come back the next day, give it another push, it's still not going to move. It's not going anywhere. You got to push it. And then as soon as it starts rolling, you got to go more and more and more. And it's just like, if you stop, it's going to stop. And that's the thing about a startup, unlike a company that has legs, default is nothing happens. Like nothing will happen because nobody knows you. You are nothing.

42:25You have nothing. You've got to put in so much effort to get the ball rolling. And at some point, you're going to feel like momentum. And like, even if you let go, like things are going to still go forward. But for a long time, the second you let go, the second you stop, it all just dies off. It's just, it's painful that way. Great Sam Allman quote on that exact thing. CEO's job is to build and sustain momentum. I totally agree. And if I'm messaging so many people, My calendar is so stacked. We're talking to everyone. We're going here. We're going there. We're posting on LinkedIn. We're going on Twitter.

42:57We're doing an event. We're doing that. It just feels like, whoa, so much is going on. Whoa. Oh, my God. Jonathan's is tornado. And then people get excited. And then the excitement breeds excitement. It inspires more work. And when I'm grinding and they see me late nights, they see me doing so much. Then when I say, hey, like, can we do it today? Then they're like, all right, we'll do it today. Like, fine, we'll do it today. there's so many people on our team and you know i gotta credit so many people juan on our team solutions engineer lead and one of our core products focus people i'm telling you this man had so hard for so long on our team shout out to juan and you don't have to tell him probably have to do a late night on this one like you kind of have to it's like hey like here's a bunch of things do you think we can get it all by wednesday and it's like way too many things from of those people.

43:48And he's like, yeah, let's do it. And then he, on his own, chat up. That's why I'm giving him chat up. And we've given him many raises and we love Juan. He's just, he sometimes does a very late 4 or 5 a.m. nighter and all nighter on his own. I never have to ask him to do it. He just knows that urgency is everything. Time is everything. If you get more done now, we're going to win. If we all put in the effort, if we all really care, and I think for top of funnel for early stage founders, whatever you think you're doing, if you 10x it, Wouldn't that be much better? Yes, yes, yes, yes. It's like kind of the mentality.

44:20I'm like, well, if you add like tons more people on LinkedIn and you try to engage with them in the comments, engage them in the posts, and you try to see like, oh, you're mutual with that person, you're mutual with that person, you ask that person, you teach it to that person. And, you know, like if you kind of just keep doing more and more and more and more, wouldn't that be way better? Of course it is. There's no answer besides obviously yes. And I think that people just have to face reality, like face yourself in the mirror. Do you want this or not? Like, that's it. That's definitely the advice that I always give people.

44:49And most people just don't do it. It's like, what do you mean? That sounds really difficult. So that's top of funnel. The other thing we want to dive into, because you've got some pretty crazy hacks there, is the bottom of funnel. This is, now you've met people, you figured out who might be able to help, who might not be able to help. And now you've got some people that like genuinely, you know, could be buyers or could influence like a real buying decision. You're a startup, you have no trust, you're selling to pretty big companies and credibility is like the thing. How did you manage to really win over these champions to win their trust and have them kind of do that work for you?

45:23What I realized very early on, it actually touches a little bit on the top of funnel method is there's so much power in your network. There's so much power there that you can have so many assets to play with and to use and to be valuable. And at the end of the day, buyers don't typically, and I'm going to throw up a random stat, like this is a fake stat, but it's directionally correct. 80 % of the time, 90 % of the time, they're not going to get paid to buy your thing. If they buy your thing, they don't make more money. You don't always get promoted. And very frequently, such as a early stage startup, they could get fired.

45:54So they're taking this huge risk on you, this huge bet on you. And maybe you move an OKR for them. And maybe that's tied to their comp. And maybe it's valuable. But likely, this is what happens. They try your thing. They have to convince a ton of people. They're nervous half the time. And if anything goes wrong, immediately they're like, who did this? If anything goes catastrophically wrong, they could get fired especially if it's more than like a thousand dollar two thousand dollar ten figure you know five figure thing six figure thing like yeah think about it hey we spent 50k on this we spent like four months implementing it it's completely useless like wait what get out of here have a look did you just make us through this why just make us through this what's wrong with you so that type of thing how do you overcome that you connect you get you get them to actually trust you people in the beginning are buying the founder they're buying you so if you're just only talking about your product.

46:43You only spend time talking about their product. They're like, well, I don't know you that well. I don't trust you. You're going to be there for me. You're going to respond in two minutes. Is something that was wrong? Is your SLA 20 minutes? Are you going to duck and dive and cover? I don't know you. So all I ever did when I really kind of realized this reciprocity in humans was I was like, well, if I become as close as possible to as many buyers as possible, and I'm valuable to them, and I give them something outside of just our product, they'll give us a chance. And then you kind of look around, you're like, all right, what do I have?

47:12What can I give you? And I think humans are all the same. It's money, powerful. That's kind of it. And you can't just hand people money. But you can give things that are super valuable. Your network is super valuable. Your connections are super powerful. And so I saw this thing where I was like, well, a lot of people really love talking to me. And it was a little different when I was an AE, you know, a salesperson versus founder. They seemed like they were just like, there's something fun about talking to a founder. Something fun about, you know, going to these events and meeting VCs and, you know, feeling like, ooh, maybe I could be a founder too.

47:40Maybe I could see myself in Jonathan C. And I kind of hit. That's why the great thing about doing the approach of just meeting as many people as possible is you could do events, bring a lot of people together, and then you could bring the VC, you could bring the partner at Goldman, who isn't a buyer for you necessarily, but is just like a cool person to know. You could bring the person who's an exec at LVMH. I know a lot of people in fashion and modeling randomly, right? You could bring all these cool people together, and that's really interesting. But a hack I did, and I haven't done it recently, and I call it the last six months because I think you have to scale past it.

48:11So I don't mind sharing this. One of the easiest methods I've found is just getting really deep with someone very quickly. I'm just saying like, hey, have you ever thought about being a founder? Are you having any ideas? And these are the buyers, like the person who could sign and the person who influences, et cetera. And so many of them are like, actually, yeah, I totally have. I have the dream. I have the vision. There's always been this little itch I always wanted to scratch. And really easily, I was like, well, we have a lot of VCs. I have a lot of friend VCs. Do you want to meet any? And I'm telling you, whenever they say yes, it's 100 % of the time we work together.

48:45It's never failed. Not one time. I've done it, call it like 40 times or something. Wow. Like 40 times. And you give like one VC intro or like a bunch. Like what's the approach usually? It depends. It basically is like I hit up, call it 20 VCs and 10 of them are investors in base layer. And like, hey, here's this person. Here's their profile. Here's their vague interest of an idea. And we'd love for you guys to meet them. Just hear it out. See what's going on. Make the connection. See what happens. And I ended up scouting for a couple funds as a result of this method, funny enough. Because I actually kind of prefer it.

49:22And I've invested in a bunch of them, funny enough. And there's a bunch of angel investments on my LinkedIn. So you can see that. But a bunch of them are always like, wait, yeah, cool. Because these buyers are like senior people. Yeah, they're legit. These are legit people. And it's so interesting. It's such a simple hack. Like founders have VCs and really cool other founder friends and, you know, things like that, that buyers totally would love to meet and be interested in exploring. And like, they'd be super valuable to them. I mean, I've done a lot of things. I've done like crazy events. Like I'll bring a ton of people to my events.

49:53And I've definitely introduced some people to their spouses. Like straight off, like, hey, girlfriend, boyfriend, here you go. Like, you know what's funny about the VC thing? I don't know if you watched Always Sun. You ever watched that Always Sun in Philadelphia? Remember the implications, right? It's like you make the intro and you're in the middle of that until that person gets funded, which they're not getting funded anytime soon because they're an exec somewhere. They're not like quitting tomorrow. And so it's not just that you did a favor for them, which on its own is already valid. There's no quit pro quo.

50:24Like you're just doing it to do it. Then later on. So they're like, oh, John, I like Johnny. You know, he introduced me like three VCs. Awesome. The other thing is like, man, and whether they think this explicitly or not, it's like if John doesn't think highly of me, like I need John to think highly of me, you know, because he's the reason I met these five VCs. So if ever I want to like get money from these five VCs, like, you know, they might ask John, like, hey, what do you think about this person? He's the one that made the intro. And if I'm like, oh, if John's like, yeah, this person, you know, they told me they could buy and like actually they had no power and they couldn't do anything and like ultimately didn't buy, waste my time.

50:54Not great, right? I'd rather impress John and keep him on my, you know what I mean? So like that's also playing into this psychologically, I think. A little bit too. And it's funny because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of like enough people are like, wait a second, that's really cool. Fine, I'll look into your product. Wait, your product's pretty good. They try the product. Wait, the product's really good. They buy it. And then they're like, oh, like maybe I do want to be a founder one day. All right, I got to be a cool job. And then we get more and more customers. And then we get bigger and bigger.

51:20And we raise more and more money. And then now I'm an even more valuable person. So you can create your own reality basically like that. This is self-fulfilling prophecy of success. Like if you just keep introing, you get all these customers. You raise more money. you're even more valuable, then the implication is, well, now I'm a very valuable founder reference for this person who knows a ton of VCs. And as you know, we've raised a ton of money at this point. So it's like it's a very good loop. And because Startup World moves so fast, it's a loop that works really quickly. And for some reason, no one has ever recommended this to me.

51:49I've never heard this on a podcast. I've never started anyone writing it down. Like no one's ever said it. I think it's because it feels like maybe a little dirty. But I would love for anyone to listen to to realize like you just have to do it in a really chill way and know tons of people and be super valuable to them because there's a lot of other things hey want to be on you know at this conference want to be on a panel with me hey i know a bunch of like much bigger companies than us and we're going to do an event together want to be on this panel want to be on a webinar yeah the hack is is like figure out what the person wants for like you said friends vcs you know fame panels whatever deliver that ahead of the of the product and then see what happens and in many cases something's going to happen as a result you have to do it ahead of the product you have to just give and expect nothing and that's the hack if that makes sense you just keep giving giving giving giving giving the more you give the more you get the best way to get something out of somebody is to give them 10x more than what you want they're like wow this person's awesome i'll give it a shot but it takes a lot of time a lot of effort um that's really what it is but it worked super well and And I feel great about it.

52:53I've helped tons of people get new jobs. Buyers of mine have moved around, gone to huge marketplaces, different banks, different lenders. I've gotten tons of people new jobs. And then they go to a place and they're like, wait, Jonathan just helped me get here. He's been so good to me. Sure, we'll look at your product. And all I've done is help you get a new job. I'm not even asking. You don't have to ask though. You don't have to ask if you're that valuable and you work that hard and you do that much. It just comes back. It's the volume. it. So then tying all this back, right? Because the key question I have for you on the product is the nature of it is you got to get all these people to share data with you for it to even be valued.

53:29And it's one of these things like if everybody did it, it'd be awesome. But then for any given person, they're like, yeah, but not everybody is doing it. So why would I? Right? How do you get over? That's my key question on kind of go to market. Like you're doing all this stuff, creating serendipity, adding value. Great. But how do you get over that fact of why would I be first? Why would I share my data first? Yeah. So why would they share their data first is a really good question. And a lot of it was gathering the interest from a large group where no one is actually first. And then along the way of the conversation, you're like, well, what else would you like as well once you do share this?

54:05What score, what calculation, what other data? And then we picked up so many other products that by the time we really launched, we launched with a compound complex product suite. We launched with five products at once. And we launched with like, call it 15 customers at once, basically. And that's when it really worked. You just have to, you know, strategy is so difficult for most people because we don't actually know what it is. It's a word. It means nothing. And that's a really fun part about it. The fact that most people don't know what the word strategy means. They don't actually have a strategy.

54:37One of my favorite books of all time on strategy, I think there's like one really excellent book. It's Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rommel. It's the best book. any founder listening to this, listen to that book. You listen to that book. And like, because I did the audio, you can read it. But the audio books, I think better. 20 minutes in, you're like, I don't have a strategy at all. Dang it. Like, it's just one of those moments punches you in the face of like, because it just it starts with this is all of the bad ways to think about strategy. This is if you don't have a strategy, this is what you think.

55:08This is what you do. And it gives all these examples of all the times there was no strategy. Bad, bad, bad, bad about and then you're like wait it sounded like me and then you just boom punch in the face and you get through the whole thing it then tells you how to do a good strategy obviously and now it's even better you could put it into claw and that's what we did out of strategy off-site throw it in the claw and do a whole like off-site with this exercise and it was awesome um we did it multiple we've done it multiple times now like this most recent one in and may with claw basically and i have this really good guide if anyone wants to hit me up and it worked really well so in the beginning of like we talk talk talk talk and realize no one wants to go first let's get like 15 20 of you at once and then what other products do you want at the same time because you don't want to implement just for like this thing because it would be kind of empty of a thing that's only 15 or 20 institutions it's not as valuable but like what else do you want it was a moment to get all these other pieces of information and did you refer like hey these guys are doing it so like you'll be part of it like that's cool yeah okay that's the key it's kind of like when you're throwing an event right and they're like why would i go like well this person that person is going and you don't know that person's not but you just tell them all like hey all these people are going and ultimately you deliver the truth because they're all going because they're all going and they all show up you know the truth of the matter is and it is what it is and we're past this point so i'm happy to say it the truth of the matter is if you're not willing if you're a product like this like a network product or hey who's using i'll say who's using your product who else use it if you're not willing to massage the truth a little you will never succeed just that's it i'm gonna say it a lot of people said it in private i'll say it in public you will never succeed because your product could be amazing, but a lot of people make a decision of whether to use it based off other people who have used it.

56:46So if the answer is a catch-22 circular loop, you will never get out of the loop. So you have to massage the truth a little bit, but it's because you've had so many conversations. A lot of people are interested. Do that for customer stuff. I don't think you should do it for investor stuff. I think a lot of founders get caught up lying about the investor side of things. I think that's a huge mistake because all these investors talk so easily. Never name drop an investor who's not actually in your round when you're trying to raise your round because it will come back so fast and you're able to bite you in the ass.

57:19Definitely never, ever do that. First off, never name drop an investor you're talking to ever anyway. But very different, in my opinion, on the customer side because these institutions are so big. You're like, yeah, we're talking to Stripe. Who are you talking to Stripe? Who knows? It kind of doesn't matter, right? So that's the type of thing. There's ways to massage it. There's ways that it's super useful and it works. Who is, are you talking to Stripe? Yeah, you could imply that they're working with you. And it's like, oh, it's fine. It's kind of like a simple thing to do. And it works super, super, super well.

57:47And it has never bitten me in the ass. I'm going to say it. It is what it is. On the investor side, never do it. I learned the hard way from my friends. A bunch of my friends did it. It totally backfired. And I heard it through other investors. Never do that huge faux pas. Well, I think on the customer side, like you obviously have to know what the line is. But the way I think about it is if you're selling to a big company, there's so many layers behind the person you're talking to that you have to somehow enable them to go win for you. And if you're just like, hey, we're like, we just were born yesterday and like we have zero customers, like, you know, then now they have to relay that information.

58:21They can't, because they'm keeping themselves, they're doing something wrong now. So you have to give them enough where they, you know, when they get asked that question, hey, like, are they talking to anybody else? They can be like, yeah, well, they told me they were talking to a lot of people. I haven't looked at it, but they told me, okay, good enough. Let's move on, right? It is what it is. Some of our customers or prospects see this like, I it's fine. It is what it is. We have hundreds of customers now. It is what it is for the founders, for the people that matters. If you're not massaging it a bit, you're not trying.

58:48Your product is not magic. 99.99999 % of the time. It's not that easy to use. It's not that easy to understand. I'm telling you, you're not, you're not the exception. You have to inspire confidence. You have to get someone something to work with. And if you're just like, uh, yeah, no idea what we're doing. No one else has tried it. Please waste your, not waste your time, but like, please give us your super valuable time to improve our product for free. We're not giving you advisor equity. We're not. Try it out. And then tell all your friends, why would they do that? Like genuinely, why would they do that?

59:24That's stupid. Don't do that. Any last piece of advice, like top piece of advice. I mean, we mentioned a lot of things. I think we've delivered a lot of value, but anything else top of mind for founders, early stage founders looking for product market fit? Things that I do that help me are very simple and nobody does it. I have little post-it notes everywhere around my apartment, on the mirrors, on anywhere like on my desk. And they're very happy as for inspirational, affirmative things. They're such a useful thing to do. If you don't have super positive self-talk, you're not going to make it.

59:56If you can't overcome anxiety of any little thing that's giving you anxiety, it's really going to be uphill, really difficult. You should understand that, especially if you've raised any money at all, you're in the top 1 % of people in the world. This is amazing. You're so lucky. Like, just be grateful. It's painful, but so what? You need that perspective to manage and to survive. Like, you gotta get out of your head, have a few friends that you talk to and just like vent it out, and then keep it happy and remember all the wins. Like, everything's a win. Anything's a win. You gotta just stay super, super positive because it's a long journey, and there's gonna be crap.

1:00:33Like, crap is not a bug. It's a feature. Bad things happen normally. So if you just, like, get over it really fast and take it as a gift, then you're going to crush. And you have to do that to crush, especially in sales, especially if you've never done it before. It's like, don't worry about it. It's fine. You know, I came up with this concept called swag selling, which is sell without acting greedy, S-W-A-G, but with swag and with confidence. So without acting greedy is like, look, we've made something amazing. If you want it, great. If you don't, I don't care. Let's just be friends and like, we'll figure it out.

1:01:04Everyone else wants it. Tons of other people are using it. We're so busy. It's fine if you don't want the thing your competitor has. If you don't want the thing that's going to get you promoted or make you look amazing at work, that's fine. I don't care because other people are using it. I'm so busy and I don't care. But like we can be friends and like this is going to be great. And that energy and that confidence is what's necessary to get through the day, get through sales. And if you're not doing that, it's tough. you really have to just like avoid anxiety by all means necessary and like do the thing be grateful and have fun love it dude it's been amazing thanks for uh jumping on the show heck yeah thanks man you remember like the first person who told you about bitcoin the first person who told you about uber you want to be that person because being first is cool so be a cool person and tell your founder friends send it to them on whatsapp put it in a whatsapp group put it on a Slack channel.

1:01:55Let people know about the show. Let people know about this episode. Don't let somebody else beat you to the punch and share it with your founder friends first. Remember what Ricky Bobby said, if you ain't first, you're last.