How to Know If Your Startup Idea Is Worth Pursuing

0:00I also think one of the things that I was pleasantly surprised by is nobody wants to call your baby ugly and nobody wants to give you tough answers or tough feedback. But it's so important. It's actually more important to have somebody give you bad news or for somebody to redirect you and say that they don't really see the world the same way. You want that, right? Because at the end of the day, the truth is the truth. and the longer you wait to get to the truth, you know you're kind of wasting your time.

0:32Pete Martin: If you have a startup idea, how do you know whether you're on to something or just really good at convincing yourself? Pete Martin has spent his career finding out. He's worked at six cybersecurity startups and today he's CEO and co-founder of Realm. In this episode, we get tactical about finding the right early adopters, running customer discovery that produces actual signal, recognizing patterns in the feedback, and knowing when someone's interest is strong enough to ask the question that makes a lot of founders uncomfortable. Would you pay for this? And if you have an idea, but aren't ready to quit your day job, Pete lays out a seven-day experiment you can run to start finding out whether there's really something there.

1:10Pete Martin: I'm Walter Thompson. This is Fund, Build, Scale. Are you building something that's hard to explain? It can be a sign you're working on something interesting, but it also raises the risk that you're missing out on fundraising, sales, hiring, and media opportunities. I help early stage founders sharpen the narrative. What matters? Why now? Who needs to care? And why they're the right team to make it happen. If you're preparing for a raise, a product launch, an important customer meeting, a panel discussion, or even a hiring push, I can help you pressure test your story before the stakes get higher.

1:45Pete Martin: Visit the Fund Build Scale website to learn more or email fundbuildscale at gmail.com. Pete, thanks very much for joining me today. I really appreciate the time. I appreciate the chance to be here. Thank you. So let's start simple. What does Realm do today and who's buying it? Yeah, so Realm is in the security data pipeline space. The simple way to think about it, we help security teams collect all their very, very, very valuable data and make best use of it, leveraging data science. So I think you've been on a ton of early stage sales teams that kind of went on to successful exits. How many are we talking about and what was your role in those companies?

2:23So this is my sixth cybersecurity company. Joined most of them in the early days, you know, pre-revenue, pre-product in most situations. Yeah, and super fortunate. I've been a part of two IPOs and a handful of, you know, over$100 million exits and, you know, kind of fell backward into cybersecurity and very, very thankful to have done so.

2:46Pete Martin: Other than cybersecurity, like at a really high level, what do you think is like the thread that connects those experiences? Oh, man, I think the simplest way to put it is curiosity. Even from a very young age, I was always just kind of drawn toward understanding how things work, why things work. And for me, that kind of represents a lot of what entrepreneurialism is. Because by definition, when you're building something, you're venturing into the unknown. And if you want to be able to venture through the unknown in the most successful way possible, you really got to be thirsty to learn and grow and just try to talk to as many people as possible.

3:22And so I think that that's like the highest level theme for me from just an early stage startup perspective.

3:28Pete Martin: So how long ago did Realm launch? So Realm's been around for about two and a half years. We got started, you know, raised some initial seed funding, but we only had a PowerPoint slide deck. So we spent more or less nine, 10 months in stealth. And, you know, we brought the platform to market a little over a year ago. So still, still very early. And I was asked, like, how much time passed between like day zero and your first customer? Day zero to first customer, it was it was about nine months, 10 months. So, you know, we were very fortunate throughout the building journey, you know, you have an idea, and you have assumptions, and you have some some idea of where you want to go and what you want to build.

4:07But we were really, really, really focused on having customers plugged in throughout the design process. And I'm talking wireframes, Figma, and not really having like an MVP, for example. And so to get back to your question, what we really did is we just had as many customers as possible around the ideation phase. And then that enabled us to more or less immediately sign full-time paid customers.

4:31Pete Martin: When we did the prep call, you mentioned that you thought early customers have a kind of a specific DNA. Let's break that down. Are there a couple of just traits, not like behaviors, but actually traits that signal this person is going to buy early? Yeah, I think obviously you need to be somewhat grounded in the ICP because if you find an early adopter who's outside of that, it might take you in a path that you never intended to go. With that said, you generally don't have a perfect understanding of ICP from the beginning, and so there's a little bit of room in the margins for error. But what I typically focus on is honestly like personality types and the culture of the individual.

5:11I think in general, everybody is extremely empathetic to the entrepreneurial journey. And everybody in some way, shape, or form has a little bit of that founder in their heart. But it really is about finding those individuals who want to be a part of something and want to get their thumbprint on something. And they see the benefit in having a small team be dedicated to them. And that's not everybody. And that's totally cool. Some people don't really want to be involved in early stage development of software. And there's great reasons for that. But there are individuals who have realized you get a little bit more of an intimate relationship.

5:47You end up getting a solution that more closely resembles what you need. And they enjoy getting their thumbprint on the product and they like being a part of the journey. And so we can talk we can probably talk a little bit about like how do you determine that? And like what are some tactics and techniques for trying to identify who those people might be? But I figured it was worth worth a pause. Yeah. Yeah.

6:05Pete Martin: I think a lot of people, they probably want to think of themselves as early adopters, but when push comes to shove, they are more risk averse. Is that a factor? Is that something you come across a lot? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the best questions that we typically were trying to ask people is, hey, what's your journey been like adopting early stage technology? Have you been a part of design partner programs? Have you been one of the first dozen customers to use a product? And how is that experience for you, good or bad? And so I think a lot of times it's easy to overthink it. And you often feel as if you're asking something of somebody that is only for your benefit.

6:45And therefore, it's harder to be direct about what you want. But when you realize that there's really a lot of good things in that relationship with the customer as well, it gives you a little bit more conviction in having those conversations.

7:00Pete Martin: I mean, you've done this several times. At this point, you always want to get to a yes, but would you want to work with someone who'd never done a proof of concept or a pilot program with an early stage startup before? I think that that would be a data point. And I think it would lead to a really good conversation of what to expect, right? Because at the end of the day, the last thing you want to do is venture into a relationship and get halfway up the mountain and have the customer be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this isn't what I was expecting. And I think starting with that question gives you a point of reference on their expectation.

7:33And then depending how they respond, I think it's super healthy to be transparent on what it is you're building, the timing and when you anticipate releasing it and, you know, what you anticipate the level of involvement being, because, you know, at the end of the day, we all have jobs and a lot of times those jobs don't include being a design partner. Right. And so, um, you know, just trying to be thoughtful of, of level of, level of expectations and time and commitment and all that stuff. But yeah, it's really just having kind of like an open, transparent conversation, as simple as that sounds.

8:01Pete Martin: So starting off from zero, where are you actually going to find those people? Are you making a spreadsheet of like, okay, here are the companies we might want to sell to. Here are people who are CEOs of, there's got to be a million different ways to kind of vector into this. So what's worked in practice for you? Yeah. And I mean, I think like this is kind of like the classic thing you'd learn in like business school, right? But like you get your ICP, typically there's some determining factor on size of organization or technographics. And so you kind of need to have some firm understanding of like what's inside the barriers here.

8:35The next thing that often is a really good indicator of an early adopter is folks that are involved with like venture capital communities, people who are advisors of venture capital firms, people who do a lot in the community within your industry. And like individuals who you can tell are looking to build a personal brand and they're looking to elevate their status and their visibility in the industry you're in, that kind of speaks a little bit about how somebody views their role within the community and the ecosystem. And I've seen that having a high propensity of leading to somebody wanting to be a design partner or somebody who fancies themselves an early adopter.

9:12Pete Martin: So if I'm starting from zero next week, what would be the lowest friction place to start? kind of just kind of I'm trying to think of like a sector exactly but like I want to sell dental insurance to people who have labradoodles so so where do I start there do I start with like looking at for dentists on LinkedIn who do like you know high-end stuff do I try to find labradoodle affinity groups on Facebook where people are you know loving on their dogs like where would you where would you start this one yeah I mean those are great examples I think I think at the end of the day it's really about like finding where that community interacts engages, shares perspectives, and there's a bunch of things.

9:52There's, you know, there's different CISO groups that could be regionally based, they could be nationally based. There's a lot of online forums where people interact and share feedback, you know, in different aspects of different industries. I think the other thing too, is a lot of times if you go and look at like really mainstream conferences, and you look at the people that are speaking at those conferences, those individuals have already given you some indication that they're very involved in the industry and they're very interested in being able to learn and share and be a part of the innovation loop.

10:22And so that actually, that was something that worked quite well was, you know, you basically look at, hey, the past couple of months, what are all the industry events and conferences that have occurred? And then you see the individuals who have spoke there and, you know, you listen to their talks that they're recorded and, you know, it kind of gives you more of like a personalized way to reach out and maybe you find some topics within their speeches that are relevant based on what you are doing with your solution. And so, you know, I think the hardest thing is like we're all very very well versed in like ai slop and the ability for people to be inundated with messages that are just kind of general spam but i think the key when you're trying to find those early adopters is you need to have some reason that their unique perspective or their unique experience is a perfect fit for the journey and the vision of what you want to build and and how it's in their their best interest to get their thumbprint on the journey and so everything you mentioned as far as Labradoodles and dentists is totally, totally within scope.

11:15And it's, you know, it's really just figuring out where that community goes to come together and share information.

11:20Pete Martin: Got it. It's interesting, the whole conference thing, because I've seen people, you know, like the panel wraps up and people coming out of the green room and there's a swarm of people like swarming all the panel attendees to try to like pitch them and talk to them and so on and so forth. And I always thought to myself, that seems like a driftnet fishing kind of technique. That can't possibly be the most effective. What do you think? Would you rather go to a conference and try to buttonhole someone in a hallway or just try to watch five videos from panels and just do your research that way? You know, I think the hallways are great places to meet people in relation to specifically like the speakers and people who are kind of like increasing their visibility at the conferences, like they're bombarded with people because, you know, everyone goes to see their talk.

11:59And so, you know, I think from a tact perspective, you know, for that situation, maybe listening and taking notes and, you know, getting some anecdotes of how you can reference their their perspective with what you're building i think that's probably done you know better after via linkedin or email or other forums but i love the i love the i love the conference room hallways like there's you just bump into people and i think it's it's hard right because like you gotta gotta get out of your shell and like you like you gotta have a little bit of a level of vulnerability uh because you don't have all the answers and that's part of the reason you want to have a design partner and so i think I think there's a refreshing aspect of that genuineness of being vulnerable when you are talking to people you don't know or strangers or, you know, just trying to walk the halls and meet new people.

12:41I think understanding ahead of that, how do you tell your story and how do you tell where you're at in your journey? And I think people would see that that results in greater outcomes as far as follow on conversations.

12:54Pete Martin: I want to shift a bit. I want to talk about, I guess the reality of early stage selling. You mentioned you did more than 100 meetings over nine months. Walk me through that. But first off, what counts as a meeting? A meeting could be anything from a five-minute cell phone conversation to a two-hour design process. And you know often the sequencing of it is a pattern, right? Like you have an initial conversation and you're just trying to discover if there's a mutually beneficial situation to be had And, you know, and you typically you don't want to like try and jam too much into that conversation.

13:30It's meant to be casual. It's meant to be friendly and kind of just sharing perspectives. And, you know, once you get a feeling that somebody has a problem that, you know, you are trying to solve in a new, different, better, faster, cheaper way, you know, then you can kind of continue the conversation and prepare for another discussion that's a little bit deeper as far as the problem you're solving and the outcomes. But yeah, I'd say, you know, 100 meetings, I'd say those 100 meetings resulted in seven, you know, six or seven design partners. And so it does show you like it's a, you know, it's a lot like you got to talk to a lot of people and the likelihood of having 10 combos and immediately finding your design partners is zero.

14:07So you really got to be ready to, you know, continually do it and, you know, and keep trying to push and find new people. And yeah, it's definitely it's definitely a journey.

14:17Pete Martin: What was your process or what tools did you use to decant that knowledge you're getting from all those customer discovery interviews and distill that into something you can actually share with a product team or somebody else inside the group? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what I did in the beginning, which you kind of iterate and grow and learn. I definitely made some mistakes. And so I love sharing those because if you can save others from making similar mistakes, that's the best thing you can do. I think one of the things that I could have done better was having consistency in the questions and consistency in the conversation.

14:48Because if you take 20 conversations and you ask 20 different questions, and then you try to look at all the responses and come to some meaningful conclusion, you're not going to have enough pattern. So I think one of the things that I tried to iterate and do better is consistency and really preparing, like preparing for the discussions and asking the same questions in the same ways and really in taking thorough notes and then being able to compare, you know, answers to all the same questions. That was a huge part of it. Um, I also think one of the things that I was, I was, you know, it was, I was pleasantly surprised by is nobody wants to call your baby ugly and nobody wants to give you, you know, tough, tough answers or, you know, tough feedback.

15:30Um, but it's so important. Like it's, it's actually more important to have somebody give you bad news or for somebody to redirect you and say that they don't really think see the world the same way like you want that right because like at the end of the day the truth the truth is the truth yeah and longer you wait to get to the truth you're you know you're kind of wasting your time and so one of the things we had to do at the beginning of each design partner convo was like hey really appreciate the support always love positive feedback but please please please give us the hard answers ask the hard questions and give us the hard truths because that's why you're doing it um and so those were those were a couple things that I think, you know, not necessarily learned the hard way because that would make it sound like it was a bad situation.

16:10But that was just like a little bit of an opportunity to optimize and iterate and just get a little bit tighter on how we did our discovery process.

16:18Pete Martin: And what was that cadence like? I mean, over nine months, 100 meetings, like what were your, like in a week? I mean, I'm sure it's all over the map, but like. Yeah, you know, like you kind of, it ebbs and flows, right? So like in the beginning, like you're all activity trying to set up meetings and then, you know, maybe for the the next two, three weeks, you're going through the meetings and gathering feedback and trying to identify who could be a long-term partner. And then, you know, maybe you get one or two, and then, you know, you got to go back and get a whole new batch. And so it kind of comes in waves and it ebbs and flows.

16:45But, you know, what we ended up doing that was actually quite helpful is two things. One, for streamlining communication, we set up Slack channels. And it sounds super simple, but the ability to like document things, share documents, share Google Docs, and just kind communicate back and forth in real time a lot easier than email and text the other aspect of it too is just like setting the expectation that you want to do reoccurring meetings and have a 30-minute bi-weekly reoccurring and it typically people often appreciate that because trying to coordinate meetings every single week or every other week everyone's busy everyone's calendars are crazy and so getting get something on the calendar ahead of time that is reoccurring it it helped a lot.

17:25Pete Martin: What, if anything, changed between meeting number 10 and meeting 80? Like, were there patterns that only became visible after there was like a volume of the same kind of sentiment or feedback? Or were you able to assess things that, like, if three people say this, we probably are, you know, it probably is a strong signal. Yeah, you know, and it's like those 100 conversations, you know, maybe the first quarter of the conversations had a really ambiguous point of view. But then the second quarter of those conversations had more of a refined and opinionated point of view, but still still a little vague and still early.

18:02But then the third one, you start to really see the pattern. And at that point in time, you're almost you're almost trying to have a conversation on this is what I've heard. And I'd love to know if you feel differently versus what are you hearing what are you seeing what are your problems more in that like ideation discussion so it really changes for those hundred combos i'd say 25 super high level theoretical directional conversations second you kind of tailor it in and you have you have a thesis and you don't have conviction in it being right but then you're testing the thesis that third quarter is okay we have belief in this thesis now let's refine it and then the fourth one is hopefully you know you have the design partners, they're locked in, they're in it with you, they're trying to get their thumbprint on the product.

18:46And, you know, you kind of align that with when you ideally want to start delivering product. And so it definitely, there's a lot of sequencing to it, I think, I think to your point.

18:54Pete Martin: I also want to better understand, like, I guess kind of like, the kind of messaging, and I'm not asking for like a specific, like, a couple of lines of copy, but like, a framework for messaging that is more likely to engender, you know, a reply, like an engagement, not a, not a yes necessarily, but it's kind of like, let's talk about it. Let's give me more, give me more information. And so like, was there a kind of a framework or a vibe you had as far as trying to, in your first outbound, your first kind of cold message, what earned a reply and what just always got ignored? If you have a sense of that.

19:24Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's something near and dear to my heart. Cause I'm a, I'm a go to market. I'm a salesperson. And so a lot of times it's really thinking hard about like, how do you communicate and how do you do outreach? So it does stick out and it doesn't just fall into the noise. And so a couple, a couple, a couple of tips and tricks, first of which do not start with anything about you. It's not about you. It's all about them. Um, the less words you use, the better, because the second somebody sees a big chunk of copy, they're immediately like, Oh, I don't want to read that.

19:55And so getting really, really clean and tight on what it is you're saying. And the first part of it needs to be tailored to them. Uh, and it needs to be grounded in something that is relatable to your world. And so, you know, an example would be, hey, in our market, the economic decision maker is the CISO, the chief information security officer, right? And so an anecdote would be, hey, you know, Mr. CISO, I had the opportunity to listen to the talk you gave at the Secure World event. You hit on these couple points and just a couple bullets, one, two bullets. I am really interested in learning more from you.

20:30Would you be open to spending 10 minutes with me for me to tell you why. The thing is, is you can't, you know, you want, you want to basically make it really logical for them on why you're reaching out, but you just can't, you can't relay that information in a consumable way in one communication. And so don't try to cover everything in a message. Just try to cover in the simplest terms. Why would it make sense for them to talk to you? And why would it be an enjoyable conversation? And I know that That sounds easy, but keep the message short and make it all about them. And I think that'll increase your hit rate.

21:05Pete Martin: Something you flagged in our prep, which is saying no and staying focused. And I think that's, which is tough for, you know, I think especially like first time technical founders, they're just looking for, it's kind of funny, I was going to say they're looking for approval. They're looking for, I mean, they are, they're thirsty for approval and because customers giving you money is the most sincere form of approval I can think of. and so but think saying no is something probably you're not inclined to do when someone's offering to pay you for something so let's let's talk about that that whole I think you said that being aggressively candid was uh the phrase you used um can you describe a moment or you know when a prospect was like you realized they just were not the right fit yeah I mean totally yeah and I'll give an anecdote in a moment I you know I think one of the things, right?

21:52Like when you're, when you're going out on the tree limb and you're going to be an entrepreneur and you want to go build something, you have a ton of passion, but at the same point, it's nerve wracking. You're insecure. And you're like, what am I doing? Am I making a bad choice? You know, maybe you're taking a massive pay cut, maybe you're making nothing, and you're spending your time. And so there's this vested interest to try and get continually, you know, validated that you're doing something that's worthwhile. And so that can, that can predispose you to try and move toward problems that people want solved.

22:21But that doesn't necessarily mean it's a problem worth solving. And so to give you an anecdote, you know, we were talking to, you know, plenty of plenty of CISOs and plenty of the economic decision makers. And, you know, we were oriented on a specific problem. And we had some, you know, a thesis and some assumptions. But we kept hearing some like, tense gentle use cases and additional systems that would be helpful to include in our offering. And it wasn't necessarily about saying no in the moment, but it was really about looking at the feedback holistically and looking at the patterns and looking for the highest concentration of consistency.

23:00And so what you really need to do is be thoughtful and digest and compare and make sure that you're direct with people of saying, hey, totally get why you'd need a solution for that. And I totally would love to explore that more in the near term uh but i don't i don't want to mislead you and i don't want to make you know poor use of your time we're really focused on this and um regardless i'd love to keep you in the loop and i'd love to stay in touch over time and um i think the thing that i realized is people people love that they're very used to people building solutions and selling software just trying to say oh you have a problem i can solve it um so it's actually quite refreshing when somebody's sharing a problem and you're just honest you're just like at this point in time like i don't i don't know if I'm the best person to help you with that, but I can try and help introduce you to someone who couldn't.

23:44And I think you'll have a long-term relationship if you approach things that way. I wanted to talk about a little bit kind of selling outcomes versus features.

23:53Pete Martin: I think people really want, you know, people want the solution. And so the feature, I think people, founders and startup teams get really wrapped up in features, not that kind of holistic outcome thing. for you I guess like give me a real example as far as like where outcome framing really closed the deal yeah absolutely so the the there's like an old saying and uh people have probably heard it but like if Henry Ford asked the general population what would they want before he invented the car they would just say a faster horse um as opposed to I want an automobile right so it's you know there's there's a big difference between having pain and knowing how to how to how how to remedy it or how to treat it.

24:36And so one of the things that's so important is listen to understand, don't listen to respond. And anytime somebody starts to give you some information around like a deep problem or a pain that they need to solve, nine times out of 10, the best question to follow up with is tell me more about that. Why? What is the impact of that? Because at the end of the day when you're selling solutions, it's all about changing habits and behaviors. And there's habits and behaviors that exist, which are inefficient. They create friction. They cost money. They're not as effective. And so understanding the business impact really helps you quantify what the TAM is.

25:18Because if you can say with certainty that this section of the market, let's say these 1 ,500 companies all have this problem and it manifests as this business impact, A, you can position why what you do actually matters across a wide spectrum of potential customers. B, it really helps you quantify your TAM, which comes into play in a variety of different ways, whether it be fundraising or trying to attract top talent and hire people. It just helps you understand the nature of the market that you're going after.

25:48Pete Martin: Something else you said, ultimately you're trying to sell into someone's career incentives. What are some of the questions you asked to kind of help pin them down and triangulate that? I mean, you know, I always try and just like level set a situation based on who we are as humans. Right. And so it's like, you know, in many situations, it's like, hey, we're both here as individuals representing our company. But at the end of the day, what we do here is likely going to impact your career, impact my career, or have some impact on your day to day life. Like, how, how, let's say we could solve this problem.

26:20What would that do for your career? How would that change your working environment? And so I think part of that, and that's a really good question to ask, because part of that is really understanding how much motivation does this person have to really dig in with me and really get their thumbprint on what we're building. And it's not like, you know, somebody would be disingenuous in representing how much they care, but just understanding what the potential impact is and how you could change somebody's career is a huge part of relationship selling. And it's a huge part of, you know, building a partnership over time.

26:52Pete Martin: So in that first discovery call with a prospective customer, what are the most important things you want to get out of that discovery call? Yeah, that's a good clarifying question. You kind of got to earn the right to ask that question because if you should meet somebody for the first time and you're like, hey, how can I change your group? They're going to be like, man, I regret answering that LinkedIn. So, you know, totally good framing there. Yeah, on the first question, I mean, I think there's something you always got to do, which is in the beginning, you got to establish some credibility. Right.

27:22And like, as I said before, it's all about them. But at some point in time, you do need to establish yourself as like, why am I the right person to try and attack and solve this problem for you? And so you kind of got to start with a little bit of credibility. I think the next question that often people are hesitant to ask on the first call, but I think it's a really healthy conversation, is once you've quantified some type of problem or some type of perspective, you can ask people, is this something you'd pay for? which is weird right because like your first call you're like am I going to ask somebody about money and it's it's it's not bad it's not about the money it's not about them paying you it's about is this problem at the level where it's worth talking about paying for a solution to solve it and I don't and you can it's all about tact right so you need to preface it with hey the reason I'm asking this question isn't based on the question it's based on trying to quantify how important solving the problem is.

28:21And so I think that's something that it's a little uncomfortable, right? Like if you're not used to talking about money or talking about contracts, it's kind of, you can be gun shy, but it's one of the most important questions to ask when you're talking about solution selling.

28:33Pete Martin: I want to wrap up with a tactical experiment that listeners could run. And again, like someone who has no customers yet, a seven day experiment that they could do without actually departing from like, you know, that they already have a day job or what they're doing now something that's not going to break their routine not going to break their bank but it's a manageable experiment sustainable they can run in parallel with the their everyday life yeah yeah yeah so you know to try and be specific i think you know like day one i think the first exercise is is what in sales people call sourcing like you got to go source you got to figure out who if i could get to anybody and i could talk to somebody who i think is going to give me really meaningful feedback who is it and i think a lot of times geography matters and so picking you know maybe you know you're using linkedin right you have the icp you have the size of the company you have the persona what's their title and then if you can focus on the geography where you live even better and so get a list and i'm talking a big list i'm talking 150 200 people do it once don't do the thing where you find a couple reach out to them then go find a couple more like do all of the research and all the sourcing at once because it's once you get in that flow state just get it.

29:39Day two, build your copy. Don't write one by one. Don't do single off, one off messages. Try to create a document that just has the copy written. And now you need to go and look at their profile and come up with a couple personalized reasons on why it's relevant to meet. And then get those 100, 200 messages out. Work on your concept, work on your talk track, prepare for assuming that they're going to respond and meet with you and just make sure you're getting ready for it. And then you're going to get some responses. If you do 150, 200 of them, I guarantee you're going to have 10 combos. The rule of thumb is for every 100 outreaches, you can usually get 10 connects or 10 potential conversations.

30:22And so, you know, that's week one, right? So maybe on day three, day four, you start getting some responses. You have your content ready. And I'm not talking anything crazy. I'm talking one slide, two slides. Get your practice, take your notes, write them down and then put them all together, review them and then triangulate. Okay. Was my, was my ICP, right? Do I feel like I'm reaching the right persona where the individuals that ended up being really powerful conversations? If so, how can I find more of those people? And so it's really about having a plan and staying disciplined and consistent, uh, but iterating quickly.

30:55So do that for two, three days, see what results you get. It's not going to be perfect and you're going to iterate and then do it again. Um, and to, to your point, like it's, you know, I've got a lot of empathy for people who want to kind of get out of the day-to-day job where they're working at a company and they want to go build something for themselves. Like these are the types of things you could do at nine o 'clock at night. I mean, there's actually some awesome LinkedIn automation solutions as well, which can be quite helpful at doing this outreach at scale.

31:20Pete Martin: You mentioned personas just now in passing, and it's something we didn't touch on that I'm very familiar with it from the SaaS perspective, but I do wonder, I'm hearing from other founders that they're less attached to personas now that they can with ai since you can build things quickly easily and faster and cheaply um they're less concerned with like developing like you know a couple of personas that act like a north star um what's your sense of that well i think it's all based on intended use um so you know i think like i think personas can mean different things depending the type of conversation and so when you think about like ux ui design and you think about um level of complexity or simplicity of the product, like the product, like personas are super valuable because you need to think about what's the level of sophistication of the user.

32:06How much time do they have to spend in the product? What types of solutions do they already use that we need to either integrate with or interact? And so, so I think the personas are helpful for product development. I totally agree on as far as like go to market outbound and communicating. I don't, cause like one title could be one thing at one company and it could be the same type of person at a different company with a different title. And so what I actually end up seeing with personas is you have like a concept and it could be an end user, but then you have like a really wide group of titles that represent that one concept.

32:40And so it isn't so much about having titles because titles are just words, but what you're really trying to do is you're trying to find people who have the same habits and behaviors so that, you know, you can reach across the spectrum and maybe it's XYZ title here and maybe it's XYZ title over there. But it's really more about like the individual and the day-to-day activities versus just the persona to your point.

33:01Pete Martin: Great, great. I mean, also, I guess my other question would be for the technical founder who is, let's say like they've got a go-to-market motion that like is working in some sense that they're getting more confident. Maybe they're just starting to see repeatability. When is too soon to actually hire an actual like person? Like the founder-led thing is great, but are you seeing people who jump the gun and bring in the full-time person to hand it off to or a marketing person to start telling their story for them? What's your sense of things? I mean, I've made that mistake once or twice. I mean, you know, the intentions are always good.

33:41But you're never as ready as you think you are to go to market and establish repeatability and product-market fit. It's not binary. It's a spectrum. And so you can have like a 1.1 level product market fit, or you can have a 100.0 product market fit, but it's a spectrum. And so one of the reasons that you don't want to try to go too quickly before you find product market fit is you're not going to be able to communicate directly to the customer exactly how you fit into their world. And then additionally, you need to figure out like, what's the customer journey? Because at the end of the day, salespeople are great.

34:16Salespeople are professional relationship builders and they're professional communicators. But in a lot of situations, they need to be inside of a box, right? Here's this process. Here's our content. Here's how we take a customer from an initial presentation to a technical deep dive, to a proof of concept, to pricing negotiation. And they kind of need, they need to have an understanding of like how, based on how you built the technology or the market you're in, how are we going to engage with the customer and have a smooth experience? And I've made the mistake in my life where you get, you know, your first two, three, four, five salespeople, and it's a hot mess.

34:50You know, they're getting you opportunities and it's great. It feels good, but it's chaos because every single conversation you have with a prospect at that stage is so valuable that you don't want to mess anything up. And so I'd say spend a lot of time just role playing, talking through and thinking through how do you want to support customers throughout the go-to-market process, and then go and talk to some go-to-market people before you hire anyone to say, hey, does this feel right? Does this feel like a mature process? And you know it's wrong, and you know whatever you think it is, it's not going to be that.

35:19But you just got to try to get as close to what you think your customer journey is before you start investing in sales and go to market, in my opinion. And I've made the hard decision of trying to go too fast and overinvesting. So it's a good topic. Cool.

35:37Pete Martin: Pete, this has been a fantastic conversation. Super expansive, super tactical. I really appreciate your time and experience today. Thank you. I've enjoyed this a lot, and I appreciate you, Walter. The Fund Build Scale theme was written by Michael Tritter and performed by Michael and Carlos Chárez. Michael also composed Ocean, the track he heard at the top. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and leave a rating. It helps more people find the show. You can get the Fund Build Scale newsletter on Beehive, follow along on Instagram, and if you have a guest suggestion or a question, reach me at fundbuildscale at gmail.com.

36:11Pete Martin: Thanks for listening. Fun Build Scale is a production of Truth and Soul Media, LLC.