He turned off a product with 20M users and went from 70 people to 7—then raised a $47M Series A. | with Keith Peiris, Co-Founder & CEO of Lightfield

0:00I don't want to say this in a cold way. We took it very seriously. We needed to cut burn really aggressively. We spoke to our board and we're like, we're going to turn off the old product. We are going to dramatically cut burn. You did this before knowing what you were going to build? Yeah, yeah. We're like, we're going to go down to like seven people. You went from 70 to seven? Yeah. Wow. It's a huge build out. You're working on a small ICP, super churny. And then for you to hold on the best ones, you need to run as fast as you can. And actually that difficulty made us excited because we were like, we'd rather tackle a difficult problem than tackle an easy problem and have like a thousand competitors.

0:34I'll give a hot take here, which is that, you know, I think everyone says keep talking to customers, keep finding what your users care about. I think a startup is a deeply personal thing. You have to build a company, a product and service that you love, that moves you emotionally so that you can work on it every single waking hour. And if you are that obsessed about something, it turns out that there will be customers in the world that are as obsessed as you. That's Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I called it the Product Market Fit question. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit.

1:08Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit.

1:11Keith Peiris: 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. Pete, welcome to the show, man. Excited to be here. Dude, this is going to be an exciting one. I mean, man, you just went through a big shift, which we're going to go into here. Company changed names from Tome to Lightfield, and you're focused on something different. I mean, today, you're an AI-first, AI-native CRM, right?

1:43In a way, you look at the earnings calls like HubSpot, Salesforce, like you're what they're scared of, right? You're coming for them amongst other things. So we're going to talk about what you build, how you're building it, why it's different, and all these sort of pieces. but let's start with the product market fit moment and i'm sure you have multiple because you had the old journey which you know you went and you raised a series b like a 43 million dollar series b only kind of old product and then since pivoting you've now closed a 45 million dollar series a so multiple pmf moments but tell me about when after you launched lightfield when was the moment when you felt like this is worth pivoting into because it's working so well there's so much man?

2:24So it was actually, I would say, the moment before scale, which is to say with our previous company, we got lots of users. I mean, another 20 million users. But the thing that was missing was that it wasn't like an indispensable part of anyone's life. If I asked our customers, what would happen if we took this away? I think they would be like, yeah, be a little sad. I'd go back to Google Slides. With Lightfields, the thing that got us excited was a CRM is a lot of We're nowhere near done. We're like a year, two and a half, and we're still missing a lot of stuff. We're catching up. But we built the earliest version of Lightfield in three months.

2:59And we started asking customers to use it. At the time, it was friends. It was extended network. And even though it was missing like 99 % of the features that Salesforce and HubSpot had, we had customers in it every day. And on the flip side, they had a lot of feedback. Just to compare with Tome, we had lots and lots of users, and none of them cared enough about the product to give us feedback. Whereas with Lightfield, our slacks were lit up 24-7, 30-65, about stuff that could be better, stuff we need to fix, stuff that could be different. And we were like, oh, this means that someone cares about this problem.

3:41Our customers are using this all the time. They're hopping mad at us. about the things that we got wrong. There's enough care here that maybe there's something here. What makes you decide to go into, to just even launch this product? I mean, you've got this other product that has pretty serious growth. Like how do you even start thinking about launching something so different? Yeah, it's so funny. I could talk to you about like the 20 metrics that I looked at that made me believe that Tome wasn't working. But honestly, the thing that like we really wrestled with is, hey, this is a presentations product and it's never going to be capable of making amazing presentations.

4:19It was just missing the context. It was missing the data structure. It was missing so much that we were like, this thing will never grow up and be used by the people that are incredible at making Dex. Was this like a gamma competitor? Like, is that a fair way to think about it? Yeah, yeah. We were actually on sort of similar trajectories and more power to them. They did great work and executed, but we just didn't like where it was going. And I think deep down at a human level, you're like, we want to make pro tools used by sophisticated users and we want them to rely on it every day. And we just couldn't see a path for Tome to turn into that.

4:57What was funny about the pivot to Lightfield was that we went on this journey with Tome being like, all right, how do we turn this into a serious work tool? And we just followed the journey of who makes a lot of decks, who's in the product the most. It turned out it was sales and marketing folks. So we sort of followed them in. We asked them, hey, could we do a pilot? Can we do some discovery with you? And we found our way into probably 10 companies where they were like, okay, you guys are good at making product. Tome is cool. Let's do a pilot. Maybe you can build Dext for us. And when we got there, it was so funny.

5:35With all 10 of them, within a few weeks, everyone lost interest in us making Dext. They were like, this isn't that big of a problem. them. We all use templates. We just fill them out. We don't know if we care. Maybe you can do some other things. So we sort of got pulled in doing things like account research, building proposals, responding to RFPs, writing emails. We just got pulled out of the slide space instantly. And that was the first sign of, wait a minute, maybe we can't sell this presentation product into companies. And then when we were there, we started to ask like, okay, to do all of these things well, like proposals and account research, whatever, what do we need?

6:17And at that time, I was like, oh, I assume I just connect to Salesforce, and we'll have everything we need, and we'll be able to do this work. And it turns out that what you need is not in the traditional CRM to do great generative AI work. It's sort of spread everywhere. It's in your call recorder, it's in your email, it's in your Slack, it's in your data warehouse. We found that it was such a struggle to combine these different types of data. Because it's super inconsistent, right? Like what the sales rep wrote in Salesforce doesn't match what's in the meeting, or what's in the email, or what's in the data warehouse.

6:55And they're all using different entities, they're all using different paths. We're like, wait a minute, this actually seems like a more important problem. Creating a single source of truth on a customer inside of a company. And really, this seems really important because you're going to have agents all over the place. And if they're a little misaligned, they're going to create bad work. And also companies are getting a little smaller and a little flatter. So it makes sense to build a system where everyone can be aligned and connected to truth. So I think those feelings made us believe, hey, maybe this is a bigger opportunity.

7:33Pivots happen all the time, but you'd raise the series B with the old product, which makes me assumed that it was like at a certain level in terms of, you know, number of customers, revenue, et cetera. Like, what can you tell me about just how far was that business when this was happening? Yeah, I mean, it was like, it was around 20 million users. It was single digit millions of ARR. And the CAC was super low because there was so much organic demand or like any AI productivity tool was because it was all over the place. The cost of goods sold was through the roof because inference was really high.

8:08and the repeat usage was low and the revenue retention was very low. Were you still growing top line or was top line also because of those things starting to plateau? So top line was still growing because you're like not really paying for growth. It's all like organic. So it's still growing. Like doubling like that, like solid growth or kind of like starting to tail? I feel like the user growth was still growing. The revenue was like starting to soften because the net retention was so low. And there are companies like this. I won't mention all of them, but it's like a consumer productivity company.

8:46It's like 20 % NDR, but the whole company works because you don't pay for acquisition. And we've thought about it. We're like, look, there's so much demand. The way to build this is you build out all your SEO, your AEO, you keep burn low, and it turns into something. But honestly, deep down, None of us were just excited about that company. None of us wanted to build a presentation product that people use once a quarter, that we could not sell B2B, that no one who's amazing at making decks would ever use. It was just like wrestling with us morally every day coming to work of like, did we really quit our jobs to build this thing?

9:27So here's something that I see all the time on the VC side working with founders. It's similar to what you experienced, It's a little different in terms of the numbers and the type of business, but it's very common to have a product, a business that starts to work. You get to a million, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million, even 20 million, right? Maybe 15, maybe at some point, but you get to a good amount of error and you start to see that kind of, that's why I was asking about growth, right? You went like one to two or one to three, but then three to five and then five to seven. And then you're like, okay, this year we're going to do seven to 10.

10:04It's a struggle, right? Because I'm talking to these founders and I'm like, I don't have the answer. Like I don't have, hey, if you do this, you're going to double. I don't have the answer of, hey, you should throw it all away and pivot. It's always, okay, here's what we're going to do different this year on the sales. Here's what we're going to do different on the marketing. The net effect is always plus minus 5%, 10%. Like it's not going to change the whole thing. And I'm being more and more prescriptive with them or at least clear. Like if you do this, like just so you know, if you get to 10 million and you're going 20%, you're worth like 30 million.

10:35What's the point almost? But I guess the question to you is because you went through it and you had something real, 20 million users, tens of millions of dollars raised, many millions in ARR. What would you say to a founder like that? that comes to you and says, Keith, I got a business, it's working, but I don't see how I can get it back to inflection. What do I do? Just keep going, keep hustling, whatever. Do I do something abrupt? What are my choices? What do I do? How do I even think about it? Yeah, I mean, it's very personal, which is to say that if you're in that state, if you've got distribution, you could think about the next product.

11:12And I know many founders that were like, our first product didn't really work, but we got some distribution. So we made the second and the third and then things started to work. Because you have a relationship with customers. Like that's when you think distribution is what you're saying. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It could be that you've got the right platform, you know, with the data, you know, with the infrastructure and you can build something else. Or maybe you just got a great team, right? And that's your asset and you can figure out what to build next. But I think it really depends on like what you want out of it.

11:42Because at that time, you know, when we were adding a million users a month or two million users a month, there probably was a way to get a soft landing for the team, you know, where investors make a little bit of money, the team does okay. We all go work at some big corporation for a couple years and then come out and do the next thing. And that was like top of mind for me. But the thing that actually really pushed me, it was one of my board members, Dan, who's on the board of Lightfield now, because of this advice, he was like, these technology super cycles, they don't happen every day, right?

12:16You know, this is the sort of thing that happens like once a decade or once every two decades. And he's like, you're so early. You know, at the time, we were like two years in and he was like, you have a lot of capital. You've got an incredible team. You know, if you go and take the like, the soft landing, you're going to be stuck there for two to four years. You're going to come out and this thing will be over. It's over, yeah. All the great companies, what we made. He was like, dude, why not just burn the boats and go build the thing that you have conviction in? Was there a third path of just keep optimizing your business until you kind of cracked it and NDR went from 20 to 40 and you just kind of kept growing that or whatever?

12:53I think there was that path. My strong view on this is that you can't take the same product and take NDR from 20 to 40. I think you almost like inherit retention based off of the core product. and then you can make it a little better, but like it's not going from 20 to 80 ever, you know, with this kind of product. So I was almost taking for granted that like retention would be about the same, but I could play with acquisition. I could play with selling the next thing. I think that's true of most metrics, by the way. I don't know if I want to go extreme and say that's always true of all metrics, but like if your demo to close, making it up, right, is 25%, could you optimize to 30?

13:33Yes. Could you optimize to 50? probably not unless maybe you materially change the ACV or something like that and you go after a completely different set of customer but like you're probably not that bad you know at showing a demo and it goes with the same like if you only get so many demos booked in a week at a certain like I'm sure you've tried the low-hanging fruit for almost all the metrics that matter as a smart founder that's been in market for two years let's say I'm making it up you've tried all the obvious stuff so the odds that somebody's going to come in and make such a big change on a metric that it's going to take, you know, reinflect your business, it can happen.

14:07But it's a lot of it is kind of false hope, right? I'm with you on that. Yeah, that was one of the realizations I had. I agree for a lot of metrics. I have so many friends who are founders and they're like, my CAC has not changed. No, in eight years, it's like maybe gone up or down 20, 10, 20 percent, but it's not changed. I can make ACVs go up. You know, I can build more product. I can make my sales process a little more optimized, but it's sort of like what you have in year one is probably roughly what you'll have in year five, you know, and you have to decide, is this the game you want to play?

14:40It's the nature of the beast. Like it's the nature of the business that you're in. The metrics are a fallout of that for the most part. Yeah, exactly. Now, one thing that you said that I want to dive into, and I'm going on this point because the pivot ultimately is the problem for you said, you have distribution, which is, I think, taken for granted. Like if you think about it, you're starting from zero, You're starting with scratch in a new industry, unless you're a domain expert or whatever, even if you are, but especially if you're not, you've got to go and get people's attention. You've got to go and get people to know that you exist, be willing to give you a shot, give you a chance, which is spending on ads, going to conferences, doing all this stuff.

15:13And it takes a long time. If you've got a business that's doing two, three, five, 10 million in revenue, you've got hundreds of customers that you actually have a real relationship with. And you have whatever team and cash that you have, right? But that's a big edge. like trying to leverage that to find, like in your case, you found a completely different problem to solve, if I understand correctly, for the customers that you had. So I'd love to go deeper on how you did that because I feel like that's a playbook or a path or whatever you want to call it that's open to anybody. I mean, anybody in this situation could say, okay, you know what?

15:42It's true. I have these relationships with these customers rather than thinking from the product, what more feature could I add? What else could I do? Or limit myself to saying, we're a company that does X, so we can only do X. You did something different. Let's go deep on what you did there. Yeah. And I think, you know, hindsight's 20-20. To be honest, we had way more consumers than businesses. And I think it actually would have been a more direct path to build a second consumer product. You know, we could have built like a, you know, one of these code generating tools or something. And I think that would have been a shorter path.

16:14I think deep down, you know, Henry and I wanted to build a B2B product. We wanted to build something that like people used every day and cared about. And that's probably what steered us. I'd argue it actually steered us initially in a much darker place because it steered us towards sales and marketing. As you know, like GTM tech is so crowded. It's brutal, right? It's super crowded because I would say most sales teams are willing to try something new, see if it helps them be more successful. But the sort of pilot conversion rate is super low. You know, most of these companies don't have proprietary data, right?

16:49So it's just a race to the bottom, right? You have got like 30 tools in every company, and they're all trying to offer roughly the same thing because they don't have the data, they don't have the model, right? And it just turns into a commodity game. And that was kind of the, I think, the dark thing that we were trying to navigate in the, call it like mid pivot, where we're like, all right, we're here. We've got these customers where we're building these tools. This also isn't going to lead to a very good business, you know, because we're just this layer that sits on top of Salesforce and Snowflake.

17:20and we're not an LLM company, so we're also just paying Anthropic or OpenAI. We've found some problems to solve, but at the time we were like, this is probably a worse setup than Tome. I think that that took some distance from the problem. We started to sit back and be like, did any of us really wake up to build this point solution, GTM piece of tech that's hard to sell, hard to convert? I think we actually just needed some space from the problem to think about like, well, how's the world going to change? What's going to be different? And what do we actually want to do? How do you do this as somebody who's running an existing business?

17:58This is the problem I have with, like, I'm thinking of a founder that I'm having this discussion with. And I'm like, you need to find a way to just, we're talking about next quarter. And like, are we going to be plus minus 10? And I'm like, man, next quarter, like, even if you're, if you hit your low, like, if you hit your high, it's not that good. And if you hit your low, it's not that bad. Like it just, we're not talking about things that because you're in this situation of plateauing. And I'm trying to get them like, just you need time to pull away almost. Let somebody else worry about that.

18:20How do you do that? How do you give yourself time to think the way that you're thinking? Like it's easy to do when you have no business. When you have a business happening, it's hard to not to worry about the fires. The honest truth is that we needed to, I don't want to say this in a cold way. We took it very seriously. We needed to cut burn really aggressively. You know, we spoke to our board and we're like, we're going to turn off the old product. We are going to dramatically cut burn. You did this before knowing what you were going to build? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. That's true, Burn the Boats.

18:49I mean, that's like, holy shit. Like, I got 20 million users. I'm putting that to zero. That's a big move. Yeah, yeah. We're like, we're going to go down to like seven people. From how many? I mean, Tome had 70 people. You went from 70 to seven? Yeah. Wow. And our board was great. They were supportive. They were like, look, if this is what you guys want to do, I think everyone was like, don't be half in. Like, they're like, you're not going to find product market fit again by this being a side project with Tome. like you have to burn the boats you have to cut burn you have to go down to like pre-seed company again so you can figure it out how much did you have in the bank when you did that after you did that I don't remember exactly but I would say we had like a solid series A worth of capital in the bank sure yeah yeah so you're like money was not an issue like with seven people you've got infinite runway you can just like like that's not going to be the thing that kills you at this point it's going to be do you find something worth going after or not yeah exactly And that was kind of uncomfortable, right?

19:46You like throw away something that was sort of working. Dude, it's crazy. I've heard of many people pivoting and even pivoting late, but almost always when they have something else, it's like taking off. Like I almost never heard it like this. So aggressive. Yeah, yeah. To be honest, it was the right move because you just have so much noise in a company that's half working. Your team, it's not their fault. It's your fault, right? It's the CEO. It's my fault. But the team's like, we got to find something to work on. Otherwise, what are we doing? right there's sort of like a like a toxic quality in the air of like you know do these guys even know what they're doing and the truth is we you know we we didn't and you know you still have customer tickets and you still have you know marketing campaigns and you know you still have your like in for a bill so at that point my view is i have to kill the noise right so we got to cut burn we got to get everyone out of the room that doesn't want to build the new thing and uh But unfortunately, we couldn't get rid of this office.

20:42We had this giant office and it was kind of awkward for seven people to show up. Dude, we had that. It's funny. My company different. But when I had my startup, we had a decent space, let's say, for maybe 40 people, not 70. And then we had to go through layoffs and all this stuff and different situation. But the net was we ended up with seven people. And it's so, it's sad, man. Like, it's hard to get out of that. You know, you're looking at it. You're like, can we not? You know what I mean? I'd rather be in the garage, man. Oh, you're such a selfish person. I actually can't believe how selfish you are because like you've been listening to the show.

21:14You listen to this episode. You loved it. You've listened to a bunch of other episodes and you haven't told anyone about it. You haven't told any of the many founder friends that you have about it. Think about how many founders have helped you out when you're building your startup. So don't be selfish. Tell your friends about this episode. Tell them about the show and help me help them. It's so funny. When you're in that state, you get all of this feedback about stuff that matters. You know, there are definitely people that were like, hey, can we get a new office? You know, or, hey, should we pay everyone more to stay?

21:45Or, you know, various things. And the truth is that those are symptoms of the bigger problem. The bigger problem is you don't have direction, you know, and you don't have traction. We just ignored all of that. We were like, look, we need to figure this out. You know, and I think to the team's credit, we all sort of realized together, hey, the only play in this space that we would all be excited to spend the next 10 years of our lives on would be to go and reinvent the system of record. Where does that come from? How do you get to that conclusion? Yeah. One, I think we wanted to build a business with leverage in the future.

22:18So we felt like if we're going to be in this space, we have to... When you say this space, what space do you mean? I just mean being in go-to-market in general. Okay. We're like, we need to own and index proprietary data. No question. Second, we're like, look, we're productivity tool people. And I think we all got excited about the technical challenge of building an agentic system of record. We're like, this sounds super hard. Even though there's people talking about vibe coding a CRM, to build an automatic agentic CRM that works for like a thousand people in terms of API data model, we're like, we would enjoy doing this.

22:57And then I would say that it feels like one of those strange go-to markets where it's sort of hard to pull off. Let me explain it. Ripping out systems of record, it's incredibly hard historically. A little easier now. We're starting to do it now. But the first couple of years of the company, you have to go Greenfield, right? You have to go be new companies for CRM. And then many have to build fast enough so that when their company works, they don't go to Salesforce, right? We're like, that seems like almost crazy enough of a company that there aren't going to be that many people that try. You know, which is to say it's a huge build out.

23:36You're working on a small ICP, super churny. And then for you to hold on the best ones, you need to run as fast as you can. And actually, that difficulty made us excited because we were like, we'd rather tackle a difficult problem than tackle an easy problem and have like a thousand competitors. So that sort of got us excited. And then I think maybe the last part is that it felt like a company-wide problem. And I think that that got the founding team really excited. They're like, look, if you imagine how a system of record works in the future, people that work with customers fill it, everyone benefits from it.

24:10Engineers should use it, finance should use it, forward-to-play engineers should use that. And we're like, we're actually excited about that, to have a small hand in shaping how future companies get built. And we're like, we could all work 14 hours a day on that. So it actually felt like a very personal decision. I'm curious to just go a bit deeper on how you end up with this, because you mentioned before the story of you going in and trying to help people build decks, and you play with Salesforce. Is that what started this idea of the AI native CRM? Yeah, exactly. It was realizing that we didn't have the data inside of Salesforce or Snowflake or Gong required to get agents to do great work.

24:50That's sort of what started this thread. And we were like, oh, what happens if we actually solve that problem? Well, if we built a system of record design for this, oh, that means that we could go do all of these other things too. And the problem, the way it presented itself for those potential customers is they want to build agents. They want more AI agents doing more work for them, but they're prevented from doing so by this sort of stack that they're kind of working on top of. Yeah, exactly. That was the thinking. And then we just kept pulling the thread, you know, because obviously when we were speaking to, you know, we had some mid-market customers early on in the pivot.

25:23They were like, that sounds cool. We can't possibly change our system of record. So then we needed to go, honestly, a little earlier. You know, we started speaking to YC companies. You know, we started speaking to seed stage companies, speed run companies. And they were like, if you like solve this problem correctly on day one, that's awesome. One, I would pay you way more than I pay for like a HubSpot or an Adio. And two, you know, we would be inclined to stay on this thing as long as you can keep up with our demands. I think that was the first time we were like, oh, interesting. There's actually like a new kind of wedge to solve the problem we want to solve.

26:00I mean, the fundamental of any company, except for a few, few, few, few exceptions, but almost every company is a problem that is top of mind today, right now. And understanding, kind of like meeting the market where it's at. So you've got a lot of people who know fundamentally that HubSpot, Salesforce, force, like they're kind of the old school CRM and they're, you know, they're trying to move into this AI world, but they're not quite there. So I can imagine, you know, 25 year old, 22 year old, whatever, like YC founder, there's a mismatch between their expectations and the way that, you know, HubSpot works and feels.

26:34So they're kind of like there. And then you've got the enterprises that maybe are not Greenfield, but they want to deploy as many agents inside and automate as many workflows as they can. And they're seeing kind of how they might get handcuffed in different places because some tools don't play nice with the others. And it just breaks somewhere kind of along that funnel of kind of getting an end to end workflow done. And you're coming in at that time saying, we can solve that problem. Like we can make this magic happen for you. Yeah, exactly. In all honesty, we had that level of fidelity when we jumped into it.

27:06And we found the true wedges six months in, which is to say that now when we sell to a YC company, we're like, look, we're going to build out this whole system of record for you. And the first problem we're going to solve for you that you care about is that we're going to help you do great pipeline generations by understanding the customers you have and helping you build relevant lists and helping you send compelling outreach to them. That's the first problem we're going to solve for you because you don't actually need a system of record right now. And then And with our larger companies, we realize we solve different problems.

27:40It is the AI agents, or in many cases, they're like, look, a big part of our company now is delivery, right, of implementation. And we need perfect handoff between sales and implementation. And Salesforce was never designed for FTEs. So I think now we've got that fidelity of what pain do we attach to? But we didn't quite have that at the moment of pivot. Walk me through, I assume, did you start with YC Founders? Like, is that the group you deployed to? How did you, because that wedge that you just talked about, I mean, high level sounds like, you know, many of the kind of go-to-market tools that build pipeline and clay and whatever, like all that world.

28:16What did you find that was still missing that you guys solved? Yeah, it was sort of funny. I mean, we're in such a saturated world, right? If you sell to tech companies, those tech companies are getting assaulted with outbound, right? We sort of had this realization of cold should be your last resort. Like your first resort should be go find everyone you've spoken to in the past two years, you know, and try to reactivate them, you know, and get time with them. Then we're like, second, you should go like mine your network and your VC's networks, ask for intros. Then we're like, third, you should go find people talking about the problem you're going to solve on social, you know.

28:55And then you sort of keep going through that and you realize, wait a minute, to do that, I can't just buy clay. I actually need a sort of complete network system of record to approach the problem in this way. And I think that sort of tied the pain and the approach to what we were doing. So it's a bit of a different view of Clay and all these tools, these modern things, they're very set up for a cold outbound. There's like run the absolute best cold outbound campaign. Your idea was run a different outbound campaign, not necessarily run a hot outbound if you can or a warm, and we'll help you do that.

29:27And that's kind of where that's maybe a little bit of the difference. Yeah, exactly. Like I think building a startup, you know, it's a momentum game, right? We always tell folks, hey, if your company just raised a seed, you know, build momentum using every tool you have imaginable before you're relying on cold emails. You know, cold emails are something that works when you've got like a brand or if you're, you know, attacking a niche where other people aren't attacking. But we just sort of came up with this different approach while building out the system. So maybe it's a good point because we've got two kind of tactical areas we want to dive into.

30:02One of them is specifically how to sell into YC or Bay Area founders. And it probably works for any kind of founder geography that you find yourself in. How to sell to founders. They're obviously a great set of early adopters for many different AI products. This is a strategy that could work for a lot of founders that are starting off. But how did you do it? What did you do special when it came to selling to these YC founders? We did a couple of things. And the first thing I would say is as a founder, you should have good taste on how you want to be bothered, right? Because you're super busy. You're trying to make your company work.

30:34And you're probably not going to respond to cold email. So the first thing I did was I reached out to folks over LinkedIn instead of email. This is something Lightfield does natively too. So we sort of learned. And second, I never led with buy my product. I led with, hey, this is my background. I'm hosting a dinner. Do you want to come to this dinner? or I led with, you're probably struggling getting go-to-market up and running. Most founders are not go-to-market founders, they're technical. And like, we invited the CRO of HubSpot to come speak at our office. You can come hang out. We're not going to try to sell you anything.

31:06Or, you know, we brought the guy that wrote Predictable Revenue. You know, how did we get those people to our office? We found a list of great authors who are speakers and we're like, look, we'll buy your book for everyone that comes to this talk. We just need you to show up and hang out. And a lot of them are like, great, sure. if you buy 100 copies of my book, I'll show up. So we started doing that. So this is like a selling through events strategy. And the LinkedIn thing is interesting. Like, on the one hand, I'm like, is that just a new channel that's going to get crowded, like every other channel, which it might.

31:35But the second piece of it is because I think of myself, the nice thing about LinkedIn, which will always be true is you're one click away from the profile. And so if you have some credibility, that's always going to be at least marginally better than something like email where you're just harder to know. Like, you're not going to take that long. Somebody messages you, you kind of like ignore. That's it, right? So on LinkedIn, somebody messages you, you might click on the profile maybe. And then you're like, oh, this person is actually legit. Let's see what they said. You know what I mean? The fact is it's probably less crowded.

32:06So that's part of it. But maybe that's the other side of that equation, which is if you have credibility, you can exploit it a little bit better on LinkedIn. Yeah, yeah, that's totally right. The other thing that I did, I think if you sell complex software, it's very hard to get anyone to understand why your complex software is better than someone else's. So I think the short form that people use, they look for references. They look for customers they know to understand whether this is legit. And it turns out the easiest way to get good reference customers is to give your software away for free to a couple of people in that network and work hard until they're happy.

32:42So I would say our first 10 YC customers were not even customers. We're like, please use our software. Here's a Slack with us. We're going to make it better with you. And we're not going to stop until you're happy. And who did you go? Did you go after like some really hot YC companies or just any like what kind of logos did you get through that strategy? We did a mix. We got a couple of hot ones. We got a couple of ones that were emerging. And we're like, we're just going to earnestly work towards making you happy. When they were happy, it turns out it's a highly networked group of people. they started posting in Telegram chats and Bookface and others.

33:16And then we started to get referrals. And it was around that time that then we started to charge a little. And we were able to sort of build out organically from there. Now going back to the event strategy, use LinkedIn to reach out, use these kind of credible names to say, hey, we work with XYZ, whatever. And then you get them into an event. So now, okay, fine, they're at an event. How does that translate into you getting more customers for your product? How did you do that final link? Yeah, we were pretty honest about it. We're like, look, we brought the speaker here to talk about go-to-market.

33:49Just so you know, we're building an Agentex CRM. Let me show it to you for two minutes. And if you're interested in learning more, I've got a computer in the back, and I can give you a demo after. And it turned out the product demoed well. We build good software. at the end of the night, you know, we always had 10, 20, 30 people that were like, show me what you're building. I'm interested. And that's sort of how it turned into something. And that's where you found the wedge of like, it's not just, oh, a new system of record that looks and works better. It's like, I'll help you land more customers through this new, like exploiting your existing network.

34:24Yeah, exactly. It goes back to kind of the other points, but you know, the nature of the beast and all these things, any strategy, take this event strategy, you could run it for, you not really any vertical. And you can probably for sure get a lot of that. In other words, you could do the email stuff as just a matter of time or whatever. If you have credibility, you might get the same or similar response rate. If you have good speakers, you might get the events. But if you don't solve a top of mind problem, you won't get them to use the product at the end of the day, right? Like you'll get the whole thing except the piece that matters.

34:55So you still, this is why the growth tactics are just tactics and they need to be put on top of something that at the core is really working frankly changing the core is just so hard i don't know that they're like they don't see it or wherever it's just like you've got a core you've built the core you want it to just work you're hoping you add a little thing like this and it's just going to take off and if you're not solving top top my problem like it's gonna fail at some point in that funnel yeah this is so true it's funny now i have some some friends that are building different kinds of systems of record like an hris or uh you know a crm vertical it's so hard I found to struggle when you have a platform.

35:32Because when you're building a platform, you sort of need to build horizontal capability first. And then you very quickly have to figure out how to package the capability to find pain and solve pain. And it's just like a little bit of a different style of thinking than building the wedge first. And I feel like you have to go back and forth over and over and over again to make sure you don't overbuild the platform, underbuild the platform, overbuild for the wedge. and you know I feel like we we change our mindset on that like every few months. So the other tactical kind of deep dive I want to do is launch videos.

36:07So how to make a launch video hit a million views every time you've had at least four I believe launch videos that have hit over a million views these days I think since the Cluelay era everybody wants to make a great launch video. I saw one for like the Whisperflow notetaker go crazy viral recently but they already They have a massive following, so it's probably easier for them than the average person. What have you learned doing these videos? Put it this way. I'm a founder. I'm like, yeah, I've got this product. It's a solid product. Believe me. I want to have the absolute best odds that when I make this video, it hits a million views.

36:42Step by step, what should I do? It's kind of a product of the company. What do I mean by that? It's very hard to make a video that goes viral for everyone. I mean, you can, and there's plenty of cases for it. But I find that what we were looking for, we actually weren't optimizing for a million views. We were optimizing for the people in our ICP feel something when they watch this. And we're like, we need to define this so narrowly so that we can validate if this is true. And in our case at the time, a year ago, our ICP is different now. We were like, we have to hit a B2B pre-seed founder who is on the cusp of finding product market fit.

37:23and we need to write a story that emotionally resonates with this person. And we don't care if a late-stage CRO takes this seriously or not. We are going to go very, very narrow and make sure it works. That's sort of the first step. The second is, in our case, this is our taste. We wanted to make it more about the story and the hero's journey than just a product demo. Because at this point, everyone's got product demos and they all have agents and they all kind of look the same. So it's really about the hero's arc. And then third, I think the bar to do a video is very high now in terms of production.

38:01So we spent a lot of time, the creative at our company, he's interviewed a lot of directors, looked at lots of styles, looked at lots of videographers. It was a full-time project. What's the budget, realistically, time and dollars, if you want to make a video like this? We spent two months on it, and it's low six figures. For like a minute video, I assume? Yeah, I think it was like a minute, probably like a minute 30, two minutes. And honestly, the first 10 takes were not great. You sort of have to like grind and grind and grind until it looks good. And great to who? Like this is you guys watching it and being like, it's not good enough?

38:38Or is there some way to kind of test it? Yeah, I mean, for us, we just we showed it to people who we want to sell to. We're like, what do you think of this? You know, do you like this? And people are honest. I mean, most people will be like, oh, yeah, it's good. It's nice. Yeah, I like it. Like, no? You can start to push. You're like, you know, would you share this on launch day? You know, do you want to buy this product? What do you like about it? No. And you can start to sort of tease it out. It was like a full-time effort to drive this thing. And then when we started to like it, and it took a lot of iterations, then you have to come up with a distribution plan, right?

39:12For us, it was, you know, find all of our angel investors, find all of our customers, ask our friends, our spouses, is like, look, we're going to put this thing out, you know, on Thursday morning. I'm going to send you a calendar invite. We're going to send you a post. I need you to like it, comment it, reshare all at the same time. And you just go hard as far as you can. It's like it's one of the three favors that you're going to ask your entire network to get your company up and running. And you have to do it all at once to sort of hit the algorithm. How many people realistically do you need to have actually engage with or reach out to?

39:50for this to make a dent? You know, we probably reached out to like 500 or so people asking for this favor. Of which obviously some percentage actually do, but let's say 200 people or so engage with the post as soon as it goes live. Yeah, exactly. And you do it all at once. You have to be as coordinated as possible. You have to send everyone reminders. If you do all of the above, you have a chance. It doesn't mean that you'll get it. It might be a day that Anthropic puts out something or there's like a big world event, but you sort of have a chance. Tell me a bit more about, because it goes back to this kind of marketing product thing.

40:24That's the marketing side, but the product, the video, what makes a great video? Like, you know, tell me a bit more about that. So if I'm thinking about making one and I just haven't done it, I mean, obviously I'm going to watch some videos and stuff, but what should I be thinking about? I think you just have to have a really detailed sense of the aha moment in your product. And it's funny, it's the same problem with activation, right? You know, if someone goes through your product, like how do you get them to the aha moment quickly? I think it's the same thing with a video. You're like, okay, unless I'm making like a, you know, like a world model or a video product, you know, I'm building a productivity tool.

40:59You know, it isn't going to be as exciting necessarily, you know, the best stuff on X today. But what is that moment of emotional resonance? What is that moment of, oh, this is neat? You know, and you have to talk to your customers. They probably won't be able to tell you exactly what it is, you know, and you're going to have to like, take it and think about it and figure out like, how do I do a cut scene of this product such that I can get it to shine for the five seconds that someone stares at this thing? Maybe what did you end up with, for example, for your product? Like what out of one of the videos, like tell me just a little bit more just to make it tangible.

41:36For our ICP at the time, we were like, you just made a product that people love. You haven't figured out how to sell it. That was sort of the angle we wanted to go at, And I think these things all fit together. Our video was actually about a founder. He was building a piece of software to sell the construction companies. We went through the emotional arc of his first sales call. The guy ignores him. His second sales call gets told to come back next quarter. He just hasn't figured out how to sell this thing yet, even though he knows that his customers love it. And we were like, how can Lightfield tap into this and help him solve this problem?

42:15So in the journey of the story, he's like sitting there with his co-founder querying Lightfield. Eventually, Lightfield is like, have you thought about framing the problem this way in your discovery calls? It's funny. It's just a chat interaction. There's like nothing flashy about it, right? But if you're a founder going through that, you're like, wait a minute. That is the revelatory moment that I've been waiting for for the past few months. and we found like showing the product as a friend or a tool that you can use to figure out that unlock. It's funny, we showed it to a founder in the office one day and sort of tears came into his eyes.

42:54And we were like, oh, this is it. You know, this is the sort of thing that we have to like build the video around. How much do you worry about the first five seconds, the first 10 seconds just to get somebody even giving you a chance to watch the whole video and get to that moment? Honestly, we didn't worry about him that much. we were like we just need to make a compelling story that goes somewhere and a post that makes people curious it's not the classic like if you listen to people do like you know youtube short form type videos like they'll tell you like if you don't hook somebody in the first two seconds you know nobody cares about you know second three nobody's watching so it's a different kind of viewpoint on it yeah and it was funny i i think you know part of it is we try my co-founder and we was really instrumental in this.

43:37We tried doing the version where you, it became like sizzly at five, 10 seconds. And then it just like wasn't a compelling story. And we were like, actually, we should just focus on making this a compelling story. You know, whatever happens, happens. Which is kind of a funny mindset, right? And I think in many ways, it's sort of how you can run a startup. All you can do is build the best product you can, work as hard as you can, right? You know, whatever happens, happens with the market. And I think that was sort of our view with the video as well. Keith, well, that's a great point to end. Let me ask the question we tend to end on, which is, what's the top piece of advice you would give an early stage founder that is looking for a product market fit still?

44:18I would give a hot take, which is that I think everyone says, keep talking to customers, keep finding what your users care about. I think a startup is a deeply personal thing. And I think the most valuable thing I've learned in the past few years is you have to build a company, a product and service that you love and that moves you emotionally so that you can work on it every single waking hour. And if you are that obsessed about something, it turns out that there will be customers in the world that are as obsessed as you. So I was thinking like really connect it to, is this what you want to do?

44:52Perfect. Well, Keith, appreciate having you on the show, man. It's been great. Thank you. Great, great being here. Listen, when you go to like a restaurant, you eat a nice, you know, meal, maybe a fancy one, maybe not. Do you leave a tip? I assume you probably leave a tip. You probably leave a tip 100 % of the time. Well, guess what? A review is just like a tip. And I know you haven't been leaving one. So just like the waiter that doesn't get a tip after hours of great service, I'm getting a little frustrated. So take your phone out and leave a review. It helps the show move up rankings. It helps us get better guests.

45:26It doesn't just help me. It helps way more founders. Thank you.