Episode 852 | Getting Big Name Customer Case Studies and More Listener Questions (with Ruben Gamez)

0:00Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I'm joined by Ruben Gamez as we talk through a few listener questions. Topics range from getting case studies from much larger customers and how to sell during the day when you're at a full-time job. Before we dive into the episode, I'm running a premium small group retreat called Tiny Summit. It's for founders doing a million or more in ARR and it's for December 5th through the 7th. This isn't so much a conference as it is a working retreat where you're going to put dedicated time into solving your hardest problems while being surrounded by other founders at your level and folks like me.

0:42To apply to attend, head to tinyc.com slash tinysummit. Prices are going up next week, so if you're thinking about applying, now is the time. And you heard that right. We take applications and we are not letting everyone into this event because the quality of the attendees is imperative to making this an incredible event. We will sell this event out. So tinyc.com slash tiny summit if you're interested in joining me and a handful of other seven and eight figure SaaS founders. And with that, let's dive into listener questions with Ruben.

1:24Ruben Gommas, welcome back to the show. Good to be here. Yeah, we're going to answer some listener questions today. Our first one, all four of them are audio or video. And so the first one comes from Xavier. It's about speaking to folks in your space that potentially work at companies that are selling to your same ICP but are not competitors, and about speaking to them in the early days as you're trying to find customers and learn how to market. So we'll roll that here.

1:59Hi Rob, this is Xavier. I was watching your video, how to find your 10 first SaaS customers. And the second advice you give is to reach out to other SaaS founders that are more advanced than I am and in the same space as I am. Let's say I do that if my first features are clearly differentiating, but not technically hard to implement. And I'm still in the early phase without a finished product, just validating the idea. If the idea turns out to be good, isn't there a real risk that they move faster than me and outpace me, especially if it's a small, agile team rather than a huge company? I know this is an early question and that you don't reply that much anymore to this kind of question.

2:47Still, I try my luck. Thanks again for your great and helping content. And in order to help you as a listener know what he's talking about, I'm going to pull the audio from that YouTube video, just that one minute snippet and put it right here. So the first is, talk to other founders who have sold into the same space, who have sold to the same ideal customer profiles. People who both succeeded and failed and get their perspectives. You can talk to sales and marketing specialists from slightly larger companies, not huge companies, but let's say you're just starting out and you know there's a SaaS company doing 50 grand a month in the same space or selling to the same customer type.

3:24Look someone up on LinkedIn, reach out to them, say, hey, trying to do this, need some advice. See who you can talk to to learn more about the space. So Ruben, what do you think about this concern he has about talking to people and maybe they steal the idea and they execute on it faster. Because he said he was still in the validation phase, right? And if they have the resources, that they can outbuild him and he's basically going to lose the race, lose his idea. Yeah, no one's going to do that. I think we've talked about this multiple times in the past. It's so much work. It's just so much work to, you know, even if somebody thinks like, oh, this is a good idea, I'm going to do it.

4:06nobody actually does that. But if they were to do that, then they might have a burst of energy for what? For a day, for a few days, for a week, but to actually build it out and do all that work. Yeah. People don't do that. The other, the other thought that I had was that he was talking about in terms of validation. And I think of it more in terms of you're not validating the product. You're trying to find out how people buy, what the best channels are, things like that. So I did that with with Signwall. I talked to several people that had done e-signature startups either as founders or growth people part of the team for certain products and I was trying to learn a few things.

4:44I was trying to learn in those cases they didn't work so I was trying to learn why it didn't work and their opinions of it what they thought went well what they found was working well for them channels all this stuff and less about like will people pay like it's so people are already paying for it. In their cases, they failed, so I also wanted to learn a little bit about that. And then the validation part is a different thing in my mind. Yeah, because validation is more, is this something people will pay for? What shape does it have to take? Does it solve a problem? All that stuff, right? Versus the idea here.

5:23And look, it was a YouTube video from two years ago, and I've recorded like 400 YouTube videos, and it was a 60-second snippet out of one YouTube video. So let's take it for what it's worth. Meaning, I think reaching out to people on LinkedIn, I could do a whole video on just reaching out to people on LinkedIn at every stage. When you're validating, I could see reaching out to people on LinkedIn. But that is a different conversation than finding your first 10 customers. And then I remember reaching out based on your advice, and this is still advice I give to Tiny Seed founders today, is once Drip was doing, we were probably doing 20 or 30 grand a month and we were growing, we'd hit decent product market fit.

6:02And you said, find some ex-employees of competitors, people who didn't work there anymore, right? So for us, it was like Infusionsoft and Entreport. And I went and hit them up on LinkedIn and man, salespeople, they want to talk to you. I was like, I'll pay a consulting rate. And they're like, nope, nope. And then almost all of them, I did it four times, I got four people to talk to me. I think two of them asked me for jobs. Yeah, because Drip was like a better product. It was like a better version of what they had been selling and they were impressed with it. So it was super helpful though. I always say, I'm not going to ask you anything that's going to violate an NDA, but I'm curious about your experience there and I'm the founder of this company.

6:40But these are each different things you do at different stages, right? Yeah, I've talked to at least six salespeople in the e-signature space, just salespeople. founders, marketing. Mostly, you're not going to learn a ton from every single person, but you do learn some good stuff from most of the people, I would say. And to your point earlier, you said people just aren't going to do that, especially if you're reaching out. In the video, I think I say specifically, you can reach out to people in sales and marketing at a complementary business, a non-competitive business that's still operating. Especially, do you think someone in sales or marketing is going to go try to be a startup founder on the side because they hear my idea for something?

7:22No. That's especially unlike, even with VibeCode, I can just hear people saying, but they can VibeCode it in an hour, right? It's like, no, they can't. And they won't. Now, if you're talking to the founder of that and it's a five-person company that's doing 20 grand a month, is that founder going to do it? I mean, don't they have their own ideas? They have a business. You're supposed to be talking to people who are already successful. I mean, dude, if someone had reached out to me when Drip was, whatever, doing 50 grand a month, like I say in the YouTube video, I had so much stuff on my plate.

7:51We had 100 good ideas that we couldn't build. So to hear 101st idea, what was I going to do with that? It's so unlikely. I never want to say never because someone, there's 150 ,000 people total in the broader microcom tiny seed ecosystem audience. Someone somewhere has had this happen. So I know there's going to be an exception, but can we just look at the law of large numbers and say eventually something like that will happen? The odds of it happening and the benefits versus the chance that it can go wrong, it so far outweighs it. The asymmetric upside is outrageous. And if they're needing you for the idea, then their execution on the idea is not going to be very good.

8:31It just isn't. And then after they're done with that, it's never 100 % accurate and good and perfect the first time. Where are their other ideas going to come from? There's always going to be a step behind. I think this question often comes from a developer who thinks that the idea is the real value or it comes from kind of the indie hackers who are just kind of ripping each other off all the time. If you do talk to an indie hacker who can't come up, because I do see that, I can't come up with any good ideas. Yeah, they are probably going to steal your idea and you and I have seen it. People just clone and clone and clone because they don't have their own creativity.

9:05Do those people usually succeed though? I don't think so. Those are the ones that usually don't execute very well. Not just that, but once you have something out in the open, it's public, everyone can see what your idea is and you will, if it's any good, and you better hope it's good, people will copy it, it will get copied, that's it. So you can't want to compete on the thought that no one will ever be able to copy this because if it's good, it will be copied a lot. Everything that I've ever built, every company of any size, including Hittail, which wasn't that big, Drip, MicroConf, TinySeed have all been copied.

9:47Sometimes it's just a photocopy of it where you're like, wait a minute, I might be able to sue you for copyright. And other times it's just, it's really close. They pay a lot of homage to what I'm doing. I know Bidsketch had multiple people basically clone it. Can't have to imagine sign was it. Oh, 100%. There's still stuff in that space that people are doing that is based off of what I did in the earliest days. but some of this stuff, there was no good reason for why I did it. And it's funny to see other people doing it and be like, well, that's not doing anything, that's not there for anything.

10:21Cargo culting is the term for that, where you ascribe the success to something and it just was a random decision they made. I say this about Basecamp quite a bit, actually. People will say, well, since Basecamp didn't do marketing, doesn't do analytics, said no to all the feature requests, Whatever Basecamp has said about them getting big, people are like, that's why they're successful, so therefore I can also not do marketing, not do analytics, da-da-da. And I will say often, I think Basecamp was successful in spite of those things. Because they were, as Jason Fried said on MicroConf Stage, he said, we executed really well and we got a little lucky.

10:59And he said, luck and timing were one and two, but we also executed. I think that's a great assessment of Basecamp's success. And I think they didn't need to market it to analytics because they were the first and only for a very long time. But if they did, they would have had much more success anyway. Yeah, they would have. And I'm sure they would say, well, we have all the success we want, and that's great. Yeah, we don't need to, that's cool. That's cool too. But unequivocally, I think if they marketed and sold. I just think it's always the same thing. When you use Steve Jobs or Basecamp as an example in your bootstrap startup to like, I'm not going to do market research because Steve Jobs never did.

11:38And it's like, mother, are you Steve Jobs? And in addition, he actually did. He used to go to Apple stores all the time and just talk to customers and see what they were using. Like he said these things, but he was also the guy that said they were never, what, never going to build a phone, never going to build a music player, never going to build, and then they would come out with it, right? So like, let's settle down. Did he say they were never going to build a phone? I didn't know that. I thought it was a phone. He would say we were never going to build X It happened multiple times. I don't know if a music player was one or not.

12:11All right, that's a good question. Thanks for sending that in. Hope it's helpful. Our next question comes from TinySeed's own Colin Bartlett. Status Gator, have you met Colin before? I don't think so. He's in TinySeed. I was going to try to remember his batch. We've done 17 or 18 batches. There's no way I could remember. But yeah, Status Gator's H1 is early outage alerts for every app you rely on. and they have this incredible network effect. You can check the site out. But basically you can get a status page like if you are at a school district or let's say you're at a big company or you have any type of system and you rely on a bunch of other cloud systems and your users are going to come to you and say, ah, we're down.

12:54And it's like, well, we're not down but the Slack API is down or the Facebook API is down or whatever. You can set up a status gator page internally for your people such that they don't keep hitting you But all your users, you send them to the status gator page and it says that service is down, therefore that's why these things are down. But not only do they have that, they have a big, and Colin's talked about this, I think on this very show, about how they get early alerts, they crowdsource early alerts of they can tell if Slack or Google or whatever is down before the notifications go out. Because so many people are hitting their long tail SEO.

13:31So it's a really, really great business. and Colin is asking for advice on how to get well-known companies to do a case study with them.

13:44Hi Rob, do you have any advice on how to get well-known companies to give us permission to do a case study for them? This is a real problem for us. We're a tiny company, we have a few people yet we have huge brands many of which you would recognize that use our product, yet they all request that we don't include their name on our site. We can't do any kind of mention of them. And when we ask for things like case studies, they all say no, they're not allowed to do that. Obviously, there's got to be a way to get permission to do this. People are probably just not willing or interested in going through all the headaches that is required to make that happen.

14:25Legal review and getting their boss involved and all of that. How do you convince people to do this? do we have to pay them or give them a discount or something? We would just love to get some of these very well-known companies to agree to do case studies for us. And I know that we can do that part, we can do the interview. You've talked about that before on the podcast on how to actually do the mechanics of that. But how do we even get them to agree to do it? At the time they're signing the MSA, they have no idea whether a SATS is going to work for them. So it's really difficult to get them to agree then, but how do we get them to agree later on?

14:59Any advice on this? Appreciate it, thanks. So what do you think about this, Ruben? How would you go about it? So the thing that we're doing now, and we didn't do this before, mainly probably because I was doing most of the sales, and then I did get some advice from a salesperson who worked for a competitor, funny enough, we're talking about that, the last question, to basically just ask for it when you're selling them. That's when you have the most leverage. And it was just giving them a discount and then if they do a case study for you. And that's how it was sort of framed. And yeah, that's worked.

15:37Like we're doing that more and more now. You know, he had an objection to that already where he said, if they haven't really used this yet and they're just signing, they may not want to agree to it because it might not work for them. And I would say then offer them a 90 day out clause just on the case study. Be like, we're going to sign this contract with this discount if you do a case study and you're agreeing to do it now but you can basically say no between now and the first 90 days. I'm making up time here. But I understand that. We actually at Tiny Seed MicroConf recently signed a deal like this and someone gave us a really good deal with a good price reduction with the thought that our case study, if it is viable, if it becomes a thing, is worth a lot to them.

16:27But we did say, hey, we are only going to agree to do it if it works. I think that's the way to do it. There's another good example, and you brought this up when we were chatting about this before the episode, is Ben Orenstein's Tuple, tuple.app, which is pair programming. Ben and Derek Reimer used to record Art of Product podcasts. I remember Ben talking about this. Tuple has basically a case study on the Stripe website. I just Googled Tuple Stripe case study. It's stripe.com slash customers slash Tuple Ben Ornstein. And it's a big deal, Tuple, on how pair programming can make people feel less lonely.

17:01Talk about a really nice promotion. And if I recall correctly, and my memory may be wrong, because this is eight years ago maybe, on the podcast Ben had talked about baking that into the sales process. And I'm guessing they gave him a discount. I don't know for sure, I don't know all the details. But that's kind of the only way I've ever heard of doing this. Because if you go back after the deal, people don't want to fight for that. Yeah, you need leverage. We've gone back and we've gotten case studies afterwards. Once Sam, new CEO for Signwell, got in, he did a bunch of that. And some said yes, some just didn't reply or anything like that.

17:44But if you're dealing with a bigger company to where they have a policy or something, you really need somebody to fight for that in some way, shape, or form. And once they're already using the product, if you can't find any leverage, then it's going to be really tough. So thanks for that question, Colin. Hope it was helpful. Our next question comes from Mitch.

18:11Hey Rob, long time listener here, second time caller. I would love your take on my situation. I've been building Shopify apps for about a year and a half now following the stair-step approach, and I'm making around$4K a month from that now. It's not enough to cover all my expenses yet, but it felt like I found something that was working. The problem is that the Shopify app ecosystem has gone on pretty bad pretty quickly. Competition has exploded, which I can deal with, but fake reviews and review extortion has become a pretty serious issue. So me and a lot of other Shopify app developers are now getting emails saying something along the lines of pay me or I'll leave fake one-star reviews.

18:53And when you ignore them, they follow through. This is unfortunately something that Shopify doesn't really seem to be doing a whole lot about. And a lot of these people, including myself, still get left with these one-star reviews while other people are buying multiple fake positive reviews as well. So because of this, it's left me pretty dispirited. I'm now kind of questioning my overall plan. I originally wanted to keep growing Shopify apps until I was able to fund making a standalone SaaS, but I feel like I can no longer rely on that income I already have and it makes me worried about continuing to build income in the Shopify app direction as well.

19:30So yeah, just wanted your opinion. Would you keep on pushing forward on different marketplaces, different to Shopify or double down on Shopify with the hope that eventually they'll fix their problem? Or should I just take it as a sign to start moving forward with a standalone SaaS anyway? Thanks for the podcast. So Mitch is talking about having step one, step two business, and he's doing a few thousand a month, not enough to live on. But it sounds like the Shopify app store is kind of a disaster. They hold you hostage and then people are paying for fake reviews, which, look, that happens everywhere, unfortunately.

20:11That's Amazon too. What do you think about his question here? Should he stick around and continue to invest in this ecosystem or should he kind of look to move elsewhere? So I do have a couple of thoughts on this. I think it kind of sounds like he's ready to move on. A lot of it has to do with you, how you're feeling about things and where you are in your growth as well. So he talked about using the stair-step approach and that means you go up a step. It doesn't mean that you continuously just stay at the same level. This is a thing, one of the issues that I've had with people going into platforms sometimes as a starting point is that sometimes they just stay there.

20:54Their next app and their next product just continues to be there. And they don't do what you say, which is like get to the next level. It's really easy to do that because then you know that platform better and then you feel more comfortable and all that. But to grow, you'd need to be a little bit more uncomfortable and put yourself in uncomfortable situations. And it just sounds like he's ready for that, especially if it's that crazy. I don't know the details of how crazy it's gotten at the Shopify marketplace or anything like this. There are always games and shady things going on. And if he really felt strongly about staying there because, I don't know, his next idea or whatever, I would not let that stop me.

21:35I would focus less on any of that noise and I would focus more on what I want to do. Just get so much traction, so many good reviews, so much love from customers and growth that all that stuff's irrelevant. I think you're 100 % on. If I were in it and I still wanted to do it or was motivated, I would scratch, claw, grind and do whatever it took. Just like you said, you would just ignore the noise and you execute. but if I was me if I was tired of it I'd bail I just would and it's for it's like a quality of life thing you know I think if if I could keep doing it I mean if I do know the ecosystem like look you don't have to follow the stair step at all and you don't have to follow it to the letter either right step one is you get one business and it does a few thousand dollars sometimes you get one business and it does 10 grand you quit your job your step one business is your way out but But other times you have a little thing doing two grand and it's like, well, I can't really grow this, can't really grow it, it's plateaued because it's just this little plugin that helps weighing seeds for some random thing.

22:38You know, it's just this tiny, tiny niche. So you stack a few, that's step two. And this is all hypothetical made up stuff. Real people do it, but there's no pay by numbers. If you get to four or five K, you can't quit your day job and the ecosystem's like, I don't know, maybe at that point you do a standalone SaaS. Now the disadvantage there is now you have a day job, probably. You have a couple plugins, it sounds like, doing X amount. Again, four or five thousand. And now I'm trying to launch a standalone SaaS. That's a lot. And that's where the stair step's a little prescriptive of like, try to quit your day job before doing the standalone SaaS because that then buys you all that time.

23:18That's the easier, I think more clean path. But you don't have to do that. if you can hire out the execution or put them on autopilot there's no such thing as autopilot over the long term but could I have a Shopify plugin that does okay for 12 months doesn't get tanked? Probably with a little bit of maintenance here and then you're going to get sideswiped by a competitor that's usually what happens every 12 to 18 months so that's how I would think about it I like the way you said it in this case it's motivation and desire and willingness to put up with the BS whether it's to go gray hat on it and do a little gaming of your own or whether to keep on the straight and narrow and just deal with everything that's going on around you.

23:59Yeah, there's so much opportunity nowadays, especially with AI, that it would be really hard for me to ignore all of that and sort of stay in the Shopify platform and kind of just do the same thing the way that I would be thinking about it. But that's just me, you know, depends on your goals and what you're thinking, what you're ready for. What you have time for too. Yeah, yes. Your motivation would be to get out and do standalone SaaS just because AI opens up so many new worlds. Is that right? Yeah, and generally I would see those as bigger opportunities and like a next step. Yeah, I like that.

24:40I'd probably do the same thing, but of course, Mitch, don't consider that career advice. Ruben and I are not lawyers, nor are we career consultants. We're just two guys on the internet with opinions. Thanks for that question. Our last question of the day comes from Jay about selling to governments.

25:06Hi Rob, this is Jay, and I'm building a B2G SaaS selling to county governments while working a full-time job. The part that I can't solve is the calendar. I can write code at night, but I can't demo at night. These are three to six month sales cycles for the prospect as a county official who's only available during business hours. And a lot of government sales work is in person. Board meetings, site visits, long lunches, and so on. Then once they sign, year one is support heavy with training and data migration, and that's during business hours too. Nobody wants to angel invest in GovTech, so quitting to go find out isn't really on the table.

25:39How have other founders handled a sales cycle that runs only during the exact hours they're already employed? Do you burn PTO on it? Do you find a partner who can be the daytime face? Or is this just the point where you have to jump? Thank you for your thoughts and for bringing us startups to the rest of us. It's been such a help on my startup journey. All right, Ruben. So he's got a nine to five. He can code at night, but he can't demo at night. And then support would need to be during business hours.

26:09that I just disagree with. Nobody wants to angel invest in GovTech. That's just not true. But let's put that aside and maybe address it after this. I wanted to know more as a founder how you would think about what he's dealing with. It really sounds like what he's doing is at odds with his schedule. I did the day job and then do, you know, bid sketches, what I did, nights and weekends. And yeah, there was stuff that came up during the middle of the day to where I would take lunch and then go and handle the stuff that I could handle during those times. And then after, you know, after work, before work, handle what I could, after work, in between, like during lunch.

26:51But that was self-serve. So if this is like a business that you, people just work nine to five in the US, same hours that you work, and you have to constantly be talking to them and scheduling demos and all this stuff during those hours. It's tough unless you have some money to either outsource some of that, which is tough when you're talking about a business that's just getting started. And you're the one that usually has to establish how to sell and all that learning. So I would not really go in that direction generally. The other thing is like, can you negotiate three days a week or are you ready for that?

27:32Just something because if it just comes down to no, you have to work 40 hours a week and you have to do them during the same time that everyone else needs to have their demos and the support and the onboarding calls and all that stuff, then it's tough for a non-self-serve sort of business. That's what I was thinking too. I thought of both of those things. Once I had some revenue coming in from products, I moved my W-2 full-time day job down to four days a week. And that was in office, it was not remote. So I moved down to four days a week and then I moved down to three days a week and they were pissed.

28:05They did not want to do it, but they didn't want to lose me either. So they just kept working with me on it. But yeah, the basic fundamental thing is what you brought up at the start, which is you're starting a business that is at odds with your life. And all the stuff I started when I was working a full-time job were nights and weekends. I never started something like this because it's just not compatible. There's no silver bullet to getting around this obvious thing. The only ways to get around it are to raise some money such that you can go full-time. People will invest in GovTech, but if you have zero traction, zero revenue, odds are very low.

28:40That's not just a GovTech thing. Nobody invests in ideas, basically, because they don't need to. Unless it's friends or family or someone, or you're a second-time entrepreneur, there's exceptions to this, but as an unproven entrepreneur with just an idea or even a code base or something and no sales, the odds of you getting money from anyone are just extremely, extremely low. Even accelerators don't usually invest pre-revenue. TinySeed does not. And one of the earliest stages of investment is TinySeed and we don't do pre-revenue. So my advice would be, and maybe it's not my advice, what I would do in your shoes is I would try to start a business that's not in GovTech.

29:17I would try to figure out if I have this idea, is there any way to pivot it to either self-serve or just a different mode, businesses that aren't going to need such intense support during the nine to five? And if the answer is no, I can't, then I go back to the drawing board and look for another idea. Or I find a co-founder, not an employee, a co-founder who takes a chunk of the business, whether it's half or some other number you get to decide, but who is available. And either they have their own situation where either they have money in the bank, they have a supportive spouse or significant other, they have very low cost of living, maybe they live with their parents maybe they're in school maybe they're in grad school and they have flexibility during the day or they work as a bartender I had a friend of mine who was starting day job stuff because they worked nights and that was tough but that's what you do to me there's no easy answer here other than bootstrapping SAS is doing it on hard mode already raising funding makes a lot of things easier but now you're going to try to bootstrap a SAS nights and weekends, which makes it even harder, which you and I have both done multiple times.

30:25And then you're going to do it in an industry that really is not conducive to the nights and weekends model. I just don't really see a path ahead for that. Yeah, the co-founder thing is, I like the idea, if you really want to do this, the problem is it's hard already to just find co-founders that have that type of alignment, they have to be free during those hours, and then they have to have that skill set too. And if you're really, really, really intent on doing this startup, it's either because you know something about the space and you have some sort of advantage, then maybe you try to make that angle work more or raise some funding or something like that.

31:10So thanks for that question, Jay. I hope it was helpful. Ruben Gomez, you are talking trash and trolling people on xTwitter, at EarthlingWorks. They can follow you there. Yeah, I wasn't going to mention a specific troll, but you taught me everything I know about both podcasting and coding, I've heard. Or was it the other way around? The other way around, but like I said, that's why I have no podcast and I no longer code. Because I taught you. That's great. Well, thanks for coming on the show, man. If folks want to use the best electronic signature link and API on the internet, they can go to signwell.com.

31:51Thanks again for joining me. Thanks. Thanks again to Ruben for coming on the show and thanks to you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 852.