The AI-Native GTM Playbook | Sam Blond, Monaco

21:34Turner Novak:so easy to build things to build as you should be building more like this whole argument of you need to build all this stuff to make a full fully fledged feature suite everything they need like that's not that big of a deal because you can just build it really quick it's just don't you want to

21:49Sam Blond:partner with one vendor and have everything that you can get from the same place. And then there are so many, by being sort of end to end with a customer life cycle, you don't have the issue of like data in different silos that you do, historically speaking, if you have the like hub and then a bunch of spokes surrounding that or a bunch of point solutions surrounding that. And then you can also, you can leverage complex workflows that if you, We talked about if you're an outbound-only product, you don't have insight into ACVs, what's converting, how customers are performing over time, who did we just close, how should we leverage that data point back at the top of the funnel.

22:31Sam Blond:And by having one data plane and one suite of feature functionality all coming from the same product, they're just real tailwinds that you can do things that you can't with the point solution and hub model.

22:46Turner Novak:Yeah, I feel like because what you could do is you could – certain messaging is converting best certain – I mean I'm assuming you can like plug this stuff back into – I mean I think this is a different product at this point. You can plug it back into like the customer service piece of it. Like what kind of feedback are you getting from customers in the analytics? Like what product is being used the most on like the first 30 minutes in the product? Like what's the heaviest use case? Like maybe you need to like emphasize that more in outbound or in onboarding or something. I'm not sure. But I feel like the more you can touch that stuff and incorporate that, it'll just improve.

23:29Turner Novak:I feel like you've mentioned this before, the two pieces of sales is like increasing demand gen and then like conversion. It's like anything you do to increase those, that's the whole point of all this.

23:40Sam Blond:You nailed it. It's a math equation, right?

23:41Turner Novak:Yeah.

23:42Sam Blond:Revenue, there are three variables. It is opportunities or like number of leads times conversion rates times ACV. What is the price? If you want just like customer count, you can remove the price. It's just how many opportunities are we getting? What is our conversion rate? So that's the math equation. And then I think like, you know, tying it back to this, like, why go broad from the start concept? There are a couple of things, these two things, this concept of like generating opportunities and increasing conversion rates, they can play off of one another.

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27:18Sam Blond:I'll give two examples that were like, historically speaking, these RevOps insights that required really, and I always benefited immensely from having incredible RevOps counterparts, but like, you didn't get this level of insight until you had this sort of like BCG or McKinsey analyst that came in that was like, you know, spending a lot of time running reports on data and different cuts of data and then trying to extrapolate, like, is this, does the data match the anecdotes? And if yes, like, how do we apply that back? You know, this is pretty sophisticated. Workflows are pretty sophisticated outcomes that companies that certainly weren't the customer bases that we were going after would not realize until there was called a couple hundred employees, historically speaking.

28:08Sam Blond:Okay.

28:09Turner Novak:Why, like, why was it so hard? Like, was it just because the data was in all these different places and it just wasn't intuitive of like thinking how they all link together or?

28:16Sam Blond:The way that this starts is you have a founder and they start going after some companies and closing some deals. Then they hire a few salespeople and then they do that same thing and there are some learnings. And then you hire a sales leader and that sales leader comes in and they start hiring more salespeople. And it's not in the DNA of any of the people that I just mentioned to be as thoughtful about things like cutting data in a bunch of different ways and trying to identify trends. And so I'll give like two very specific examples, one from the days of Zenefits and then one from the days of Rex that we can now learn in near real time.

28:59Sam Blond:And then it's like one of my favorite parts of our product. And as I said to you earlier, certainly don't want to make this like a Monaco commercial, but I do think that this is like, how can we leverage AI, whether monaco or not um in this like brave new world um that there were things that historically speaking required these um really incredible and expensive uh mckenzie analysts to come in and figure this stuff out well um it it benefits uh we were doing health insurance and it was like regulated by the state and you just um you asked a question like why doesn't this exist earlier uh nobody really you had a bunch of demos that would come on your calendar and nobody was paying attention to like this demo is in the state of Florida.

29:40Sam Blond:And like, what does that mean for the outcome of this demo? Because like my next demo is in the state of, I think you grew up in Michigan and I grew up in Missouri or California.

29:50Turner Novak:So you just like might not be able to legally sell in Missouri. So like you cannot even do the demo.

29:56Sam Blond:Well, it was, it was less about that. It was more, it was, it was more about like, you just never stopped to think like, is the location of where this company is influencing whether or not they sign up. And what we found was the thing that actually influenced conversion rates more than anything is where, where's the company headquartered because of like the dynamics of the insurance space and like a bunch of other variables that went into this. And so then I'll give another example and then I'll talk about sort of like, how can AI do this? And what's, what's the major takeaway? Because this really is a massive acceleration.

30:33Sam Blond:We are, we are able to bring down things that historically speaking, much larger companies were able to get the insights into and then take action onto like much, much smaller companies today because AI can look at this stuff far sooner. At Brex, the equivalent of this was we could sell both to finance and accounting, like controllers. And kind of the same idea, you would show up for a call, a finance person would be on the other end of the phone, sales rep like wouldn't take note that I'm talking to a CFO or a VP of finance or an FP &A person, or it could be like a controller or chief accounting officer, whatever the accounting profiles might be.

31:13Sam Blond:But what we found is like finance people converted at like a 4X rate to controllers. And like when you, when we figured that out and understood it, it made perfect sense because like the controllers wanted to go really deep on like, how do you map to the expenses and have these like almost technical conversations at an accounting level that sales reps weren't equipped to have, the finance people were like, what's our rebate? And so, uh, or like, what's our credit limit? What's our rebate? What's our float? And like, those are the types of things that salespeople are like quite good at and actually really lean into.

31:48Sam Blond:Um, and so then, uh, uh, the point of all of this is that we can find these things out because agents today are actually like we have an insights agent and it is trained on just like cut data in every possible way based off of buyer, based off of location, based off of vertical and sub vertical, based off of segment and sub segment. See when you start to get to statistically significant information that we may want to surface to a customer about the way that their business is performing. And if like that learning maps to something that like either know this seems like sort of arbitrary or like, yeah, this actually does seem right.

32:26Sam Blond:You can then apply that back to the very top of the funnel. And of course, like the next step is very logical here. We oriented all of our sales resources around the states that had the highest conversion rates. We oriented all of our first touches into companies, into finance personas. And so then everything else stays consistent and you've just influenced conversion rates pretty materially by changing the sort of like top of the funnel action based off of the insight. And again, really difficult to accomplish this like full workflow if you are just doing the outbound or if you are just the system of record, but you need to go to a third party to orchestrate the outbound.

33:09Sam Blond:I mean, that's an advantage that being very broad has from day one.

33:12Turner Novak:Yeah, because you might just be, I don't know, a great outbounder. Like as you're rolling the team, you're doing outbound, you might be really good at it. And there's just so many things that are outside of your influence that you'll just never be as successful as you could because of like one tweak earlier or later or whatever in the system that you just like don't get to touch and you don't even know is there.

33:32Sam Blond:There's this age old debate that I think most people were on the other side of than me, which is you have a lot of sales resources that are dedicated towards demand gen. Historically speaking, SDRs, they generate demand, they schedule meetings. and there is this sort of like age-old debate. Do you compensate an SDR based off of the meetings that they are booking, which is something that they have full control over? Or do you compensate them based off of the revenue that those meetings generate? And I land on the side of the revenue that those meetings generate. And maybe it's not one size fits all.

34:10Sam Blond:And maybe there's like nuance that like, you know, you can have some mix of the two and those sorts of things. We certainly shouldn't spend too much time on that specific topic here. That said, I do think that the era of AI, it allows us to only orient around the outcome that we are driving towards, which is revenue. What are the characteristics of the companies that are closing that we should then apply back to the companies that we are targeting and not what are the characteristics of the companies that we can get a meeting with regardless of what happens from there?

34:40Turner Novak:Yeah, because then you can at least use that downstream data to tailor what goes into the meeting, right? Like who's actually closing book meetings that are more likely to close.

34:49Sam Blond:There are really fun things that we can do with this that are like, and I can think of specific examples where there we had reps that just sold far better to founders than they did like finance people as an example.

35:05Turner Novak:Like you're saying that they were just like maybe they hit it off more. They related better. They knew the problems and could hit on them better.

35:12Sam Blond:You know, maybe in certain instances, like they were sort of like networky and like hosted events and knew a bunch of founders and like name drop founders. And like they were sort of like in the founder community type thing. And so then these insights, they aren't necessarily in addition to insights at the sort of like customer business type level or the persona level. you can get insights at the rep level, which are things like you have reps that are converting certain types of opportunities. A very common one here is the size of the company. And like when you should start segmenting, who should be in which segment.

35:55Sam Blond:And you can start to get like pretty interesting feedback and insights about like, did you know that this rep is performing incredibly well here, performing less well here? And then AI can sort of orient, who do we assign this meeting to based off of who has the highest probability of closing it?

36:14Turner Novak:Interesting, huh? So yes, you can just start to like dynamically shift your sales team. It's almost like, you know, it's like dynamic pricing and like Ubers or airline tickets, like dynamic allocation of the staff, like of the team.

36:26Sam Blond:You can gamify everything. It's all oriented around outcomes. How can we close the most customers and how can we close the most revenue? And we do it in a way that is like totally objective. It's not the sales leader, like favoring someone and giving them more opportunities. It's like, this is all AI.

36:47Turner Novak:Interesting. Are there any other things that have changed over the past couple of years? And or are there any major things that have like stayed the same?

36:56Sam Blond:The things that have stayed the same. And there's interesting, there's something that's a little bit dangerous about the introduction of AI into go-to-market, I think probably more so with founders than there is with sales organizations. We speak with a lot of folks and have to reiterate and remind folks, AI is not the silver bullet for go-to-market broadly. Whether it's Monaco, any tool out there, Um, it is, it is not like you are automating away, go to market so that you can then spend your time. You know, most founders are not like me. They're either like, um, product visionary, um, highly technical, that sort of thing.

37:42Sam Blond:So, so like, um, AI is not this silver bullet. And so then there's like, you know, maybe a risk that you, um, start to leverage AI too much and you then remove yourself from the like incredibly high ROI things that you have to do as a founder. And so then tying this back to your original question was like, what has stayed the same? There is no higher ROI use of my time. And I would maybe argue founders that are post product market fit, but pre sort of like scaling a sales organization, like that phase of company building, I would argue there is no higher ROI use of my time or founder time more broadly than spending time with customers, being customer facing.

38:33Sam Blond:And so then like AI doesn't, you know, automate away having to spend time meeting with either prospective customers or current customers. In fact, the inverse is true. Maybe this is like slightly contrarian. AI enables you to spend more time customer facing. Zoom is great. When you have the opportunity, meet a customer face-to-face, especially if your deal size is warranted. We sell to startups in San Francisco. And so oftentimes I, or we will default when it's convenient to a meeting, we're not getting on a plane to go to meet with a New York founder for a$25 ,000 ACV deal. It just like doesn't support it.

39:22Sam Blond:But if you are a founder selling into mid-market or mid-market plus into the enterprise, you should err, especially when you're meeting with, you know, like a marquee account, just get on the plane, like go meet the customer that has not changed. Uh, and I think like the, um, ROI and that is, is, is incredibly high. And then, um, here's the other thing that I touched on earlier. We do, um, a lot of investment in, I think what would be categorized as marketing, uh, like brand, yeah, brand marketing, even demand gen marketing. And I that there's something, uh, uh, there, there's something that like is less intuitive about that spend.

40:06Sam Blond:Um, and, and people try and get too, um, not cute. They try and get too, too scientific with measuring the impact of these sorts of things at an early stage. And so I'll give some, some specific examples, but then I'll talk about like, um, the actual impact that a company like Monaco realizes it. And this is all through the lens of like, what is true today that, uh, uh, was true historically also. And I think that was the original question. Um, so these marketing campaigns, we have billboards going up. We have the launch videos when we do, uh, the fundraise announcements or the, uh, product launches.

40:43Sam Blond:Um, we do gifting campaigns where we send people, um, poker sets that are like these kinds of cool poker sets that, uh, you know, I think for us, We maybe pay a hundred bucks or something like that for them. We throw these poker tournaments that we call the Monaco Invitational. Really fun event. Founders love poker tournaments. We give away cash to the winners and we throw a party. And like the sort of like the obvious outcome of this is something like how many customers did you sign up that attended your poker event? And like what did you spend on the poker event? and like, what is the ROI there?

41:21Sam Blond:And is that a channel that you should continue investing in? How much did you pay for the poker sets that you sent to a bunch of founders? How many of those founders signed up? And like, should you continue doing that stuff? Billboards, like it's a little harder to do the attribution on the billboard stuff. The thing that I think is less sort of understood and why we lean into this stuff so much. and I'll revisit maybe like one important nuance or qualification here. When we now do outbound to the founders that we're reaching out to, our reply rates today, same company, same product, same message.

42:03Sam Blond:This is at Monaco. This is at Monaco today. They are exponentially higher than they were before we launched into our public beta. And so like we were a unknown company, the way that definitionally all startups are unknown when they first get started. The reason or a big part of why our reply rates are so high is because of these brand campaigns that we are doing where there is now like name and brand recognition. And so then there's like two things that are far more difficult to quantify when doing something like a gifting campaign, a billboard campaign, an event. what is the impact of that both on the efficacy of outbound reply rates and meeting rates from people who receive your message oh i see your billboards everywhere oh i heard about your event i'd love to come to the next one be happy to like take a look but then also conversion rates because you have almost like inherent credibility where if if you have brand recognition people are talking about you, those sorts of things, there is a higher likelihood that somebody feels comfortable and confident moving forward with someone that has a brand that exists out there.

43:18Turner Novak:And it's even just like a, hey, it's in like the group jazz. Like, hey, we just signed up for Monaco or we're thinking about it. I got a demo. Anyone else use it? And if like six other people like, oh, I've seen their billboards or like I use it or I went to the poker tournament, that's like multiple touch points that you didn't, you can't measure that really. Like you don't even know those are happening.

43:37Sam Blond:You nailed it. And so then there's maybe like one takeaway. And then one thing that I said I would qualify and revisit at the beginning, because I think it's important for me to touch on the final aspect. I get asked the question all the time. How do you measure? How do you measure the impact of the Monaco Invitational Poker Tournament? How do you measure the impact of the billboards? How do you measure each of the different things that we're doing? The launch videos that cost money? The real answer is we don't. You don't even measure. We do not. And I think my perspective on this is something like you will spend more time and effort trying to measure and the outcome of that measurement won't be accurate because there's so much information that you don't have when you're trying to do the measurement of it, that your takeaways will actually guide you in the incorrect direction.

44:31Sam Blond:And the anecdotes here are actually more valuable than the data points themselves. And when I say anecdotes, what I mean by that is like the things that people are regularly bringing up to you that they are seeing, and like we have failed at some things that we have tried. And I won't go, let's see, here's an example, and I'm getting a bit rambly, but I'll go back to the, I think there's an important qualification. We did a lot of really incredible similar sort of like creative marketing campaigns at Brex. And a lot of my learnings that I've taken to Monica with me were things that we tried and were successful at Brex.

45:13Sam Blond:Me and others that were trying these different things. One of the things that we did that wasn't successful was we opened up a restaurant. We called it - Oh, it still comes up.

45:22Turner Novak:People still talk about that. Yeah.

45:24Sam Blond:We called it South Park Cafe. And it was like a co-working space. And it was like a real restaurant that served lunch and dinner. And I don't know exactly how many employees we were at the time, but let's call it like 50. And like the restaurant had like 20 or 30 employees. And so like running a restaurant is hard. The lesson isn't necessarily like don't open up the restaurant. But the lesson is like, you should be trying a bunch of stuff. Some of this stuff is not going to work. And that was an example where we just like could tell it wasn't driving the impact from a lot of the anecdotes. And again, Brex did billboards and Brex did a bunch of other things that we're also leveraging.

46:04Sam Blond:And you just like, you kind of know. Now over time, if you get into what today is a Brex size company, or probably even smaller, of course you want to start like measuring this stuff. But early on, like the phase of company growth that we are at, and we're about 50 employees today, I do think that you just got to try a bunch of stuff. And then you'll sort of like anecdotally understand what is working well, double and triple down on that stuff. The things that like don't work super well, um, uh, chalk it up as like a win that you were willing to try it. And there's like a learning that you can now like cross that one out and move on to another thing that you can try.

46:42Turner Novak:I feel like my, my personally, my, one of my best marketing stunts that I ever did, which I always forget about this. Cause like, I didn't really think about it that much, but I did this kind of fake VC pitch competition on Tik TOK. So there's a feature on TikTok where you could stitch a video or like duet a video, like you go side by side. And I made a video of me with a like filter messing up my face, a filter messing up my voice and making it really annoying. And I pretended to be a VC listening to your pitch. And my questions were like, what do you do again? Like who introduced us? Wait, what's your Tam?

47:14Turner Novak:I was like arguing with my gardener on the phone, I think. And it was like a terror. It was like the classic terrible experience that a founder gets when they're pitching an investor who just doesn't care. And there was like a hundred people that were like responded, making a, like a pitch of like pitching me while I was doing that in the video, a bunch of people posted on Twitter. And I don't know how many views I've never even checked, but it probably got a million views just over all the videos and channels. And I always forget that I did that, but that is probably the video that the most people mention like, like, Oh yeah, I know you do that one, like VC pitch video.

47:49Turner Novak:And I was like, oh yeah, I did do that. Um, and he's like, I don't know. I just kind of did it for fun randomly. Once it took me like half an hour to do. And they're like, I don't know what the ROI was, but like it is, I think it helped.

48:01Sam Blond:It's hard to measure, right?

48:02Turner Novak:Yeah.

48:02Sam Blond:Um, but there's like the objective, um, because that one's online, there's the objective, like how many likes did it get? How many views did it get? But then there's the anecdotes that are what you just described, which is the like, um, people, people mentioned to me all the time. Like I remember the like, you know, VC pitch video that you did. Uh, and so then like, it also sounds like it's lasting. So maybe it may, maybe there's a, um, what's the like 2.0 version of that that, uh, you could, you could bring back.

48:31Turner Novak:I should probably do another one. I mean, it was so effective. Um, the one thing I've been doing is I've been hosting comedy shows where we like hire really good comedians. Um, it's pretty hard to do, uh, but people seem to

48:43Sam Blond:like those. Um, that's really smart. One of the things that I do, um, when I hear something like that, I immediately think like, Oh, we could totally, like, if you like that idea, we should

48:55Turner Novak:do one. Cause it's, it's kind of expensive. I can't like pay for it myself. I have to be able to sponsor it. I'm down, but yeah, but it's interesting because most people, you know, you invite them to an event and it's like a dinner, maybe it's like a panel with some speakers and they're just talking about ai what whatever like it's you just kind of get and you're like ah do i really have to go to this so i think like the poker is interesting because you're like oh i love poker i'd play or comedy shows is like ah i haven't been to a comedy show in a while and the comedians are like netflix special comedians you're like oh this would probably be fun like bring my girlfriend or like bring someone on the team or something or so it's like you actually want to go to it and like you remember it what you just described it or a version of what you

49:41Sam Blond:just described. You have to like do things that are different. You said the dinners, look at some scale, it probably matters to host dinners and you can have like a special guest speaker and those sorts of things. It's certainly not like that creative. Like lots of companies are having dinners. I think the bar for a dinner, like it's just, it has to be like some really cool restaurant. Like, I don't know why people are going to show up otherwise. Um, but I do think that, um, that, and that's why I took note of the comedy thing. I was like, Oh, that's actually a really good idea because like people have to laugh and like, it is different.

50:19Sam Blond:You, you don't see a lot of, uh, startups or VCs or, or anyone that are hosting the, uh, like a comedy show. That would be pretty fun. Um, could even do like maybe an iteration on this and man, we'd have fun planning something like this. We do like a roast, like, like a roast of sort of like a, um, a prominent, uh, figure that's like up for getting made fun of that I suspect, like, uh, a lot of people might find entertaining. Um, so that's an idea. And then, uh, I'll come up for Aaron. You can control the show. Um, uh, there was one thing that I wanted to come back to that sometimes I sort of like forget because I have, I said to you earlier, I don't do a lot of like the podcasts anymore, but one-on-one I'll have similar conversations to folks that are sort of in line with the one that we're having right now.

51:11Sam Blond:There is something about like, yeah, but you've raised a bunch of money and everything that you're talking about is really expensive, or many of the things that you're talking about are really expensive. There's certainly some truth to that. Here is maybe like in a world where you are bootstrapped or you have sort of like seed stage capital available to you that you're not going to be spending six figures on billboard campaigns and more. I think there's like a bit of a process to follow, but also like certain things can be incredibly effective and not that expensive. So the process of all is like just every single month, force yourself to do like, what is our creative idea for the month?

51:58Sam Blond:Like, you know, you meet with a group, you put stuff up on a whiteboard. You maybe vote on like, what is the best idea here? Comedy show is a great one. And I suspect that like comedy show, you could probably do it in office. You could probably get like a couple between amateur and professional level comedy folks to come in and do it for like not that much money yeah i'm trying

52:20Turner Novak:to think of what did we pay i think we used um merge's office i don't know if you know merge in in new york city okay merge.dev is the website they're actually they may actually be sponsoring this episode of the podcast but they're our sponsor uh and then we had my friend alexis gay i don't know if you know her she's kind of like a professional corporate comedian yes she

52:39Sam Blond:does like b2b comedy i i see her um i see her on twitter i think a lot funny stuff she's really

52:45Turner Novak:funny impersonations i think a lot right yeah and so um she helped me plan and run it and then helped me get some friends that were kind of amateur ish but pretty good we had people who worked at some tech companies that were kind of you know comedians on the side that kind of like volunteered i think i think we paid them a little bit but it wasn't a ton um and so yeah it's just generally the very first one we did, it was in an office. We basically just like paid for food and like a little bit for the comedians. It was like really, really reasonable. Like it was like maybe a couple grand total.

53:19Sam Blond:It's a perfect example of something that you can do is really fun. And maybe we should do a version of it. Um, we, um, we did the, uh, poker sets. Um, and, uh, I think the trade-off here is like, oftentimes the there's, there's maybe two, two things that you should orient around when you don't have, um, a huge budget on a campaign. The first is like really creative. And sometimes it's operationally complex, uh, because like the things that cost a lot of money, um, you know, like the, the third party advertiser stuff type stuff, paid ads, billboards, those sorts of things. It's pretty easy, pretty easy to like put up billboards, It's pretty easy to put up paid ads and like pay Google a lot to like surface this to somebody who maybe Googled something that you want to literally put in your credit card.

54:08Turner Novak:That's exactly right.

54:09Sam Blond:And it does. And that is why everybody is doing it. So force yourself to try and come up with these creative things. We did the we did the poker sets, you know, like maybe the retail on them was 180 bucks and we paid 100 bucks for them. But if you send those to a hundred different founders, um, you're at like$10 ,000 of spend, uh, on, and it's like very targeted and you're, you're giving something that's like kind of cool to somebody. Um, so it's not free, but like$10 ,000 to target a hundred of like the best potential customers that you can acquire. Um, gosh, like if you try and do that on LinkedIn or on Google, that money goes by like very, very fast.

54:53Sam Blond:And this stands out in such a way that like, imagine you as the recipient of that poker set. Would you rather have the person that's advertising to you pay Google to like track you and surface their ad? Or do you want the poker set? Like you want the poker set. So do things that stand out. It doesn't have to like totally break the bank. You can set budgets when you come up with these creative ideas. I think like the worst thing to do is nothing at all. Just like try stuff. Yeah.

55:21Turner Novak:And it's interesting too, like with, you know, physical thing versus the Google ads, like I'm sure I have gotten ads. I just don't remember. Like I just don't even remember seeing them in my feed necessarily or when I'm searching versus if I literally got a poker set, like a big package and I opened it up, whether I use it or not, I'll just remember that that happened. like I may throw it out I may be like I hate poker or whatever but I will always remember that I got shipped this thing like I have people that send me stuff now and like I have my wife joke on you there's just one guy who just keeps sending me stuff my wife is my wife is in on it now my wife knows about it because it's like so memorable and I don't I don't even remember what it could probably be a better thing that the person sends me but like like I talk about it to people.

56:09Yeah.

56:10Sam Blond:You just said something that was really insightful, which was the, the thing could be better. Um, I have like maybe a cliche saying, um, that is like, it's not the thought that counts. Like, like with the gift, do not send like a t-shirt with your like startup, you know, uh, uh, logo on the t-shirt to somebody that you want to sell to. um the gift actually does matter like the thing that you're sending to somebody um it in a way it could be like negative value if the thing is like some tchotchke that's like oh yeah you're super like it actually could have the opposite effect that you wanted so actually do be thoughtful about the thing that you are sending to somebody um and i think the bar is actually quite high where it's something like would you think that this is cool and like genuinely cool not like because you're the one doing it um and you're like inherently biased or something like that Um, and then, uh, the only other thing maybe is like a takeaway would be something like try and do a little bit of a thought exercise and you can actually do, you can measure this.

57:13Sam Blond:If you think about like all of the dollars that you're attributing to marketing spend,

57:17Turner Novak:um,

57:19Sam Blond:try and have like some meaningful percentage could be 50 % could be 30 % that you sort of label as, um, directly benefiting the target, uh, customer. versus like a third party advertiser. So this is gifting. This is the like poker tournament that we are hosting. That would definitely be in the category of like beneficial to prospective people that like they come, they have a great time. Like that's way better than the like, we're putting up a bunch of billboards, which we also do. But again, I think just like a bit of a thought exercise or framework, like how many of the dollars that we're spending on marketing directly benefit the people that we are marketing to versus benefiting the third-party advertisers that are marketing to them.

58:04Turner Novak:One of my favorites on this is it's a company called Greptile. It's like AI code review. What he did is he sent Greptile-branded energy drinks to engineers. It's like super tangible. Like, hey, you're up on my coding. Just drink some Greptile energy drink and then maybe check out the code review.

58:21Sam Blond:And they'll probably use it. Greptile is great. Dox is the CEO. They're Monaco customers.

58:27Turner Novak:Oh, amazing. That's cool. hopefully it's uh they have a good revenue engine that they've got going now on the monaco they seem to be crushing it yeah yeah um one thing i wanted to ask you even when you were like thinking about all this branding and general stuff like that like should you be doing this before you have a product and then even like should you be doing it before you have any customers like what's this order of like should you just like talk to customers first and then this informs all this stuff like what order should you kind of be doing all this?

58:58Sam Blond:So this is one where like, I will speak to the end of one experience of building Monaco. Yeah. Maybe that'd be interesting is like, yeah, what did you do? What we did. And let me qualify this with something like, unlike, I think a lot of the sales topics, customer acquisition, those sorts of things. I have less experience on the like, when, when do you start to, I don't know, do some brand spend And like, as you're developing your product, are you spending anything? So I'll just tell you what we did with that qualification. So we were building for maybe about a year. We deliberately built in stealth.

59:45Sam Blond:During that year, the one thing that we were doing that gave us like growing confidence and what we were building towards. It's just pretty regular customer interview, like feedback sessions. And we would schedule like a discovery call. We would pitch a little bit what we were building towards, get people's feedback. Could be founder, it could be salesperson. And just get feedback on like the concept and those sorts of things.

1:00:13Turner Novak:This was with existing customers or potential?

1:00:16Sam Blond:We didn't have a product to sell. So it was just like discovery with the potential customer base that... It was educational, but at a minimum, it reinforced and gave us more confidence that we were building in the right direction. I do think, you know, I went back to this, like we built a very broad sort of compound startup. We're replacing a bunch of different tools. And that is like one of the downsides of doing that is it takes a little bit longer to build, even in the world of AI and cogent tools and those sorts of things. Um, and so we, we didn't want to like sort of be building, um, in the dark for a year.

1:01:00Sam Blond:And so as we were building, we were just getting feedback from, uh, ultimately potential customers just doing through things like discovery calls. We then, um, we didn't charge. This is like a little bit contrarian, but during the, uh, uh, during the design customer phase, which was about six months of time where we picked, let's call it 15 ish design partners. We had a product that they could start using. It certainly wasn't like the quality bar to launch. And like the real value for our business during that design phase was improving the product. It wasn't like the ability to generate revenue.

1:01:38Sam Blond:So we onboarded these 15 design customers. We actually didn't want to charge because it would have been friction in getting the thing that we really wanted, which was a bunch of the feedback. We did though, we had to get people to commit that they actually would make this their platform of record. They wouldn't use this like alongside another tool or something like that. So we got sort of buy-in and commitment that we were going to build this together during the design customer phase.

1:02:02Turner Novak:Okay. So they weren't on it yet, but they've like promised you in three months when it's ready, they would switch over.

1:02:08Sam Blond:They switched over when it was ready for the design phase. So it was rough around the edges, But we also, you know, we had services that accompanied it and that sort of thing. But they agreed to partner with us. We didn't charge them. And up until our public beta launch, which was in February, we were operating in this like stealth mode, partnering with design partners, not charging them for using the product, getting a bunch of feedback, getting the product from like day one of where it was at the design customer phase to when we were going to launch. We spent zero dollars on marketing. we were doing outbound to test the product and maybe acquire some of those design customers.

1:02:50Sam Blond:All of the design customers were either through Monaco or through introductions. So investors, employees, just personal networks, that sort of thing. And then we really wanted to do the like coming out of stealth launch. And that is when we switched from zero investment on anything brand related and in fact invested in not having a brand, meaning all of our LinkedIn's said, you know, like company in stealth instead of what the company even was called. Our website said like coming soon. So you went to monaco.com. It was just like literally coming soon. And then we wanted to do the like zero to a hundred sort of like shotgun blast style, which was like on the day that we launched, which is February 11, all sorts of stuff happens.

1:03:43Sam Blond:It's like you get the delivery of your poker sets and billboards go up and we have the launch video and tons of outbounds going out. And so everything's sort of coming together all at the same time and going from like totally unknown to hopefully some level of brand recognition in our target market as fast as we possibly could. That was the sort of mindset shift.

1:04:10Turner Novak:Okay, so why do that zero to 100? Like, I feel like a lot of people, they'll post publicly of like, hey, we're not launched yet, looking for design customers, the website will be there, but they haven't really put much demand gen behind it. Maybe some investors have a list on their website, but again, they're like not a big launch. So why did you go from like literally stealth to the 100?

1:04:35Sam Blond:Yeah. Well, I'll tell you maybe a reason not to. And this is probably the wrong approach for most people in companies, meaning the like zero to 100, stay in stealth for as long as you can, and then do like a big bang with your launch. I think like something that enabled us to do that, and this was true both at Brex for different reasons and for us now at Monaco, which was like, we didn't need to be known to acquire the initial set of customers that we needed to to get the product to the level of sophistication to launch. At Brex, Brex was a YC company. Brex had like, you know, all of their, the reason Brex was Brex is because their batch mates couldn't get credit cards.

1:05:22Sam Blond:They were a lot of like international folks, younger people that didn't have, you know, a lot of credit history. And so in a lot of ways, Brex like built the initial product for their batch. Uh, and so then like, you don't need to be well known for that. And then like, you know, the, the, the next batch is, uh, kind of the same idea. It was like, you know, very early to market and those sorts of things. So Brex for let's call it six months was able to build in stealth because of the like word of mouth, um, that enabled them to acquire design customers before this like big public launch for us.

1:05:54Sam Blond:Um, I think that like the outbound was working. I had the ability to offer to be like a bit of a go-to-market advisor to some of the customers that signed up as design partners. That's something that's like a little bit unique to me and a complimentary skill set to the founders that we're working with that many founders don't have that capability. And so I think like if you don't have the ability to acquire a set of design customers through like network effects or some way that is different than actually being known, it's going to be very difficult for you to get to people to agree to use your service if like you don't have a website as an example.

1:06:34Sam Blond:And so that was a luxury that, um, we had a Brex and we have at, uh, Monaco. Also, I think the, the benefit of doing it is, um, you know, like maybe this isn't the perfect analogy, but like, um, there's like a, a frog, uh, in boiling water that like doesn't totally notice as like the temperature rises just a little bit. And then like, you know, maybe over the course of, and for context, Monaco launched about three months ago, you can imagine if we had sort of like spread this out over the preceding nine months when we were in like some of the design customer phase to today, you lose the sort of like, all of a sudden I'm seeing this thing everywhere.

1:07:19Sam Blond:Which again, the probably imperfect analogy that comes to mind is the like frog in potentially boiling water, that like there's some real benefit to, and I think maybe the outcome of that is you're able to just, and everything warrants around growth right now, you're able to go from zero to very fast growth versus if you had started in the sort of like design customer phase, you have a website, you start like posting on, you know, social, the like clock is ticking a little bit longer it's harder to make a big splash when you come out people have kind of already heard of you uh so i think like you know for us the real benefit was our growth trajectory went like this instead of like this or something like that and i think too

1:08:10Turner Novak:just speaking from my own personal experience there's probably quite a few products where like you see them when they first start working out they launch and you're like that's not that great honestly like you know you're just like it's kind of cool but whatever kind of skip past it and that's the perception you have. And it might be a year later and it's a great product and I just, I've never noticed because I just remember it for like that very first thing that like wasn't that good. And I just, you know, and maybe I wasn't the target customer or whatever, but I feel like that's also the other downside to this or the upside of, I remember when you launched, I remember seeing it and I remember thinking, oh, this is like pretty good.

1:08:46Turner Novak:Like that was my thinking when I saw the product, I was like, oh, this looks like really robust. Like to your point of, it kind of has a couple different features. I've seen people build AI native sales companies, products around all in one. And then of course, like all the other things that kind of went into the launch, but just seeing the product, I remember thinking like, huh, this is pretty good.

1:09:07Sam Blond:Well, thank you for the compliment. Yeah, I think it's so subjective. There's another topic that is this sort of like, how do you know when you're ready to launch? Yeah. And how did you know? There's another one of those where it was like the marketing example where it's like, we don't measure it. It was like, we just thought we were, it's, it's like, it's, it's, it's a sensation. Um, what we did and we think about like, um, company building in different phases. Uh, we did like the design customer phase. Um, we felt like we, we had sort of like reached a level of quality and impact, um, that, that we could go into a public beta.

1:09:43Sam Blond:So it was sort of like private beta when we were design customers. We're now in this like phase of public beta. What does public beta mean? It's sort of like we're metering who comes in. There's a wait list for companies that aren't like right in the strike zone of who we think we can be really successful partnering with. And then we will GA. And so then I think that this like public beta phase, it probably bought us some time and goodwill to like start to get brand recognition, but also have the folks that we're working with understand that like we're still pretty early. Like we are a public beta product and GA, which should come in July.

1:10:29Sam Blond:I think that then like that is what we should really earn our reputation around. We're in the fortunate position that like we have incredible customers that really love us. And I think actually most of our revenue today comes from referrals, which is maybe the data point that suggests that more than anything.

1:10:48Turner Novak:Can you kind of walk us through sort of the launch playbook? I know you posted about it. We'll throw a link in the description if people just want to read it. And maybe they can follow along while you're talking through it. But what was kind of the playbook that you used to launch?

1:11:03Sam Blond:Yeah, well, I think there's one sort of table stakes thing that everyone should do. And if you don't, like it's just a missed opportunity. And maybe even before I get there, you can launch a bunch of times.

1:11:19Turner Novak:Yeah, that's true. Yeah. That's actually one of my favorite things. Someone's like, we're launching again. I'm like, okay, cool.

1:11:24Sam Blond:You don't even have to say again. So like we did our public beta launch and we had like a very product centric video and we announced our series A funding that probably helped like amplify that and certainly earned us maybe like some of the media. I think TechCrunch did the A. We did like the series B announcement, which almost came off like a launch. It wasn't, It was just like a series B announcement. This was a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it was a few weeks ago. Yeah. And we are going to do like our GA launch. This is all within a span of, we're talking about like February 11 to mid July. And so this is in a span of like five months and we're like three launches in, in a way.

1:12:05Sam Blond:And so then like, maybe that's like the first qualification is launch, do like a product launch, do like a fundraise launch, like just keep taking advantage of these sort of like point in time opportunities that you can get, you know, sort of attention and the amplification around the company and what's happening. And then, so the like table stakes thing is, especially with the product launch, I like the video. So I like the format of a video. And then you want to have like a deliberate social media strategy around like doing the launch video. And then how are we getting the distribution? So first is on the content side, content side, like what is the post?

1:12:46Sam Blond:What is the video? That matters. What matters equally as much is the distribution. So the way that we do this is you get a spreadsheet. You have a few different tabs on the spreadsheet. You have employees, investors, like friends of the firm and customers. Those might be your four tabs. And then when you do your launch, you sort of like track and certainly have outreach to both the day before and then day of each of the different people in these categories. And so then, you know, one thing with employees is you probably want to ask people like, who are the three to five most influential people that you have in your network or that you used to work with or that have the largest followings and like add those to the like, you know, friends of the firm tab.

1:13:31Sam Blond:But you do want to be deliberate about this like distribution on top of just like, what is the launch thing? They're sort of equally important. That I think is like the table stakes thing to do. Um, and everyone should be doing that. I do like the launch campaigns. So, um, we did a few, we did, I've talked about a few times of the like poker sets that we delivered. We had trucks that were driving around San Francisco that, uh, had like the led sides and the led backs to the trucks.

1:13:58Turner Novak:Yeah. What's this, can you tell the story there real quick? I think it was like hangover from the super bowl kind of a thing.

1:14:03Sam Blond:It was, yeah, the story was, I was out for a run or probably more realistically a walk on like the Saturday before the Super Bowl. And there was just like as far as the eye could see these LED box trucks that I'd never seen in San Francisco before. Maybe they like exist for conferences or something, but I'd really never seen this.

1:14:23Turner Novak:This is like a truck that has like a screen, an LED screen that like both sides and the back.

1:14:27Sam Blond:Yeah. And it was all gambling stuff. It was all like, you know, whatever draft game, like, I don't know the, uh, uh, specific advertisers, but it makes sense. Like it's a Superbowl. And so then it was all these like, um, gaming companies that were advertising on these trucks. And we were launching, we launched on February 11. So I think that was the Wednesday following the Superbowl. And I went over like cross the street and just like met one of the truck drivers or whatever. And, and asked him like, are you guys, you know, here this week or whatever? He was like, here's like the card for the company.

1:14:55Sam Blond:So anyway, I started calling around to some of these companies and we took advantage of, uh, this like excess inventory that was already in San Francisco. And so I don't know what like the regular price of this stuff would have been, but, um, maybe it was just like, um, literally the, the Saturday before launch, we sort of fell into like even doing this campaign because I was walking around and like, I saw a bunch of these trucks and then we sort of benefited from, uh, I think financially from the, uh, inventory that was already here around the Superbowl. It was unused.

1:15:25Turner Novak:Like it wouldn't have been used anyway.

1:15:26Sam Blond:I think like, um, when, um, and maybe we'll do this again, but when, when you do it sort of organically, like how do we done this without the trucks being here for the Superbowl? They've got to like drive in from Vegas or LA or wherever. Like it's probably more common to have the trucks driving around. There's like expense associated with that. Uh, Lane, it makes sense. They have direct costs for the drivers and everything to get up here. So, um, you know, we got like crazy discount rate to have folks that were in the trucks that stayed here. Outside of that, the process, and I mentioned this, and I've done this with a few of our customers, but I mentioned this in like a different format.

1:16:03Sam Blond:But when you get ready for the launch, like 45 days before the launch, get the company together. Your company might be five people or just get like the five people in the company where this makes the most sense. Have that be the launch committee. Let's see, maybe you meet on a Friday afternoon for lunch or happy hour or whatever. And then like the weekend assignment is, all right, everybody come up with like two to three ideas for our launch. And like, in a lot of ways, the crazier, the better, like nothing is off limits. You may want to establish some budget constraints. Like you may be like, look, we can't like, we can't spend more than X amount of dollars on each individual campaign.

1:16:44Sam Blond:But then you got five people. Each person comes in, they like sort of whiteboard what the thing is that they're like creative idea to amplify the launch. And then you're all sitting around and you leave the room with maybe like three or four that you think are the best ideas that you can then do.

1:17:00Turner Novak:And these are usually offline or these are like non-related to the specific launch post or?

1:17:09Sam Blond:Yeah, generally separate from the launch post. There's this customer of ours who we love, and they're in some of our videos, and mutual customer, we also use their product, called Judgment Labs. And Judgment Labs had their launch, and they receive all of the credit, but we did a couple workshops where I came into their office. and they did like an ice cream truck that they like wrapped with like Judgment Labs, you know, branding or whatever. They named ice cream flavors after some of their customers. And it was like, you know, they had different locations and then they gave out free ice cream and they told a bunch and they had a bunch of posts about it.

1:17:46Sam Blond:That was like one of their ideas. I'll say one other thing that they did. And hopefully this is helpful to just like maybe pattern match to, you know, like I'm not suggesting you should that an ice cream truck is like the thing that all customers should do. You want to do things that are like new, creative, stand out, like take some risk. Another thing that they did that I thought was really clever, which was an iteration off of the, or a version of our poker sets, which were on brand for Monaco, literally branded Monaco because Monaco has a casino. And so we ordered sort of like prefab Monaco poker sets.

1:18:19Sam Blond:They did this really cool thing where they sent 3D picture frames with Legos that were built of the company. Like it was Monaco's logo in the like 3D picture frame built out of Legos. And like, we're hanging that in the front entrance to the office. Like you see it every single day. And I don't know exactly what they would have spent on it. My guess is not like totally different from the a hundred bucks that we spent on the poker sets. And so, you know, you do that, maybe do 50, maybe do a hundred. I don't know the exact number, But like, it's a reasonable marketing spend. Just like, try stuff like that.

1:18:56Sam Blond:Those are the types of ideas that you may come away with.

1:18:59Turner Novak:Yeah, that's what, there's a venture fund, it's called Shrug Capital, if you ever come across Neve, Neve Drawer.

1:19:05Sam Blond:Yeah. So they do, I wouldn't, they almost do like stunt marketing.

1:19:10Turner Novak:They almost did like meme marketing, but they do a lot of like physical products. And one of the things Neve told me that I've always kind of hung with is you want to gift something that they will stick somewhere and look at. So he would do like a keyboard mat that went under your keyboard. They did a calendar. So they did this really big thing. It was called like the shrug calendar. And I think every day, it was like one of those like little flip desk calendars every day. I think there was like a tweet from someone that was, it was either like something funny that happened on that day or like a stat of some kind.

1:19:43Turner Novak:I can't even remember exactly what he did. But the thing was you just like set it on your desk and like every day you see this calendar. So I feel like that's one thing I've always thought about is just like the physical, you put it up somewhere and you always look at it. I have like mugs that I use and I'll just always remember like who gave me the mug.

1:20:00Sam Blond:It's cool and it's smart.

1:20:05Sam Blond:Judgment Labs did a better version and some of the examples that you just gave are probably better versions of what we did. Our idea was like startups have poker nights. And so they're going to like break this out. and every time they break it out, it's going to be like the Monaco chips and there's going to be like, oh, Monaco, you know, the company gave us this thing. The Judgment Labs things, it's like you see it every day when you walk in. Similar to what you just described is like the, you know, the keyboard mat. Like that it's a good theme. I think the other theme, the thing that we did at Brex that was really effective in the same vein was we sent bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne, which is like$50 a bottle.

1:20:42Sam Blond:So, um, but it's like kind of fancy champagne, right? Certainly perceived as like, you know, very high end champagne that like, it's going to even, you know, there's, there's a lot of people that, um, uh, are drinking less in those sorts of things. You still know somebody who's going to drink this bottle of champagne. Like it will get used. Um, and so, uh, there's like two reasons why it was super effective. And this is one that like, you can kind of copy it. Like, like I think it can be reused. The reasons that I think it was effective, one, we oriented it around congratulations on a fundraise.

1:21:16Sam Blond:And so then there's like a reason it's like celebratory champagne. And it was like on brand for like this thing that like, you know, within the last months, they'd written six months, they'd raised funding. And so it's like, congratulations, like a heartfelt thing. And then the other thing is like, it's it is social. So I think in the card that was from Enrique probably, who is a co-founder and CEO at Brex. It was probably like, hope you're able to enjoy some nice champagne with the team as like to celebrate or something like that. So then like you bring the team around, it's like, you know, Brex sent us this champagne.

1:21:51Sam Blond:And so it's social and you're like telling other people about it. So that'll get consumed, which is different in one-time use, but something else that was effective.

1:22:02Turner Novak:So was there like a relation between poker and Monaco and maybe like why poker? Why'd you call it Monaco? Like, was there any thinking around this or did you just like the word? Do you like poker?

1:22:14Sam Blond:The poker is maybe secondary. Monaco, man, naming a company is hard and it's also like not a social activity. What I mean by that is like, don't get like four people in a room and try and come up with a name. It's so subjective. I know you have children. It's like naming kids. Like, Like you and your partner should come up with the best name for your children. Probably not like socialize that with a bunch of different people because they're going to have differing opinions. And I think names, company names.

1:22:44Turner Novak:There's literally apps where you can, it's almost like Tinder, but for baby names. Like you and your partner both get it and you like swipe yes or no. Like people go so intense on this stuff.

1:22:54Sam Blond:And it's hard and it's subjective. And so we were, or I was, I guess like I sort of took ownership of naming the company. I was thinking through sort of like things that people, words that people associated with some combination of like luxury, success, like these different categories. And then eventually got into maybe like geographic locations, thought of Monaco. I like the word Monaco. So just like it's a nice sounding word. And then one of the big things was the dot-com was available. It was available? It was a bit like someone had for sale. It was unused. So like we and after like very little diligence, we understood that there would be an opportunity eventually to acquire Monaco dot com.

1:23:42Sam Blond:And so then that was like a big part of the calculation. But the framework was sort of like success. The things that we wanted to be associated with as a brand was like success, wealth, those sorts of things. And I think Monaco ties nicely into that. Now, Monaco, there's a lot of things that we can do as sort of like French Riviera that are on brand with Monaco. And then I think that there's also, you know, there's like the casino that it's well known for, that sort of thing that we can do the poker tournament. So just a lot of things that we can do with the brand itself.

1:24:15Turner Novak:That's fair. I had a similar, I guess, naming, ideating the naming maze with Banana Capital. like it was i mean you try to come up with a company name every good idea you have it's taken like there's literally no options out there specifically with investment firms like not just venture but like real estate hedge funds every good name is taken like everything so um my wife was like it's probably after about a good eight hours literally all in of just coming up with names looking them up and be like man this is taken my wife was like well apple's the most valuable company in the world what if you name it after a fruit and i was like man that's so smart because with like the geographic location you're like nobody's naming things after geographic locations or fruits so then it was like okay well banana i kind of think it's kind of just a cool word banana capital i don't know it's kind of like you know it can be it can be very bold like benchmark sequoia banana i don't know if i'm quite in that level yet but it's like it's a word, but I'm also, it's a kind of funny too.

1:25:19Turner Novak:Like it's just banana capital. Like, is this, is this real? So it kind of is like hit kind of everything I was going for.

1:25:25Sam Blond:Uh, I, I, um, am not just saying, I wouldn't say this if it weren't true. Um, I, I would, let's see if I didn't like the name, I just wouldn't say anything. Um, I really like the name. Um, and, and, um, you actually, uh, took the words out of my mouth. It's a cool word. Like just saying banana is kind of like rolls off the tongue and like the A's. Anyway, I think it's and it definitely stands out. To your point, it's like, you know, a lot of times like last names, those sorts of things are the, I don't know, investor names. And so then it's memorable.

1:26:01Turner Novak:Yeah, I feel like maybe A16Z did a good job with like the last names. Like they kind of made it a little sexier. A16Z, you search that, it shows up. banana. I don't know if I'm ever going to win the SEO for banana, but Monaco, I think we were just talking about you guys have the first or second result. Now when you search Monaco, which is pretty crazy, you're being a country.

1:26:24Sam Blond:Uh, the, the.com is probably helpful. Um, I think that was not a consideration. Um, as you and I were saying before, like maybe it should have been.

1:26:35Turner Novak:Yeah.

1:26:35Sam Blond:Um, but I, I do think that like, if people want to find us, they can, regardless of where we sort of stack rank with the Monaco. But in, you know, we're sitting here less than four months after, you know, I talked about this phase of the company where we were like stealth to like public launch. And we're already like, you know, sort of up there. So I think maybe.

1:26:59Turner Novak:Also, like, does it really matter? Like if I'm, if I vaguely am familiar with Monaco, I like, I knew it's like software for sales and I'm Googling it. Like, oh fuck, I clicked the Wikipedia page for the country. Like, you know, you're not going to get tricked and like find the wrong thing. It's like one of them is like a country. It's like customs thing, literally the sales software. And then it's like another thing related to the country. Like you're going to find it if you're searching for it.

1:27:23Sam Blond:Especially if you add in another word. But I have heard zero times we had trouble finding you online. And I do think that we have a bunch of campaigns up right now where like you don't know what Monaco or monaco.com is. And so it just directs people to the website. And so then just like the traffic that we are getting right now is pretty crazy for a three month, four month old startup from public launch. Interesting.

1:27:55Turner Novak:And until we've talked quite a bit about outbound, actually, maybe not enough. We talked about a lot of like pre-launch outbound. Like, so how does outbound change after you launch? Have you guys made any, you said that like a lot of things became more effective after you'd kind of been out there publicly. So how do you think about outbound now?

1:28:14Sam Blond:Well, this is one where like the opinions that I will express here are sort of ingrained into the platform itself. But when you get started, there are a few things that matter. Who is sending the outbound is actually like something that's very important. And so at startups, even at startups that have early salespeople, you do want the origination of the outbound to come from the founder because founders are going to get higher reply rates than early salespeople because the recipients of that, they know they're going to get sold to if it's a salesperson. Here are a couple other things that matter, and then I'll talk about maybe where it starts to evolve a little bit.

1:28:59Sam Blond:The other things that matter are timing and also like the mediums that you're reaching out to people. You want to be multi-channel. You want to be at least LinkedIn and email, not just like spray the universe with cold outbound email through like, you know, domains that aren't actually your real domain and that sort of thing. You're going to have far better efficacy if you are multi-channel at the same time as part of the same sequence. And then the message and sequence structure really matter. So like how many touch points are there? How is the message structured itself? Those sorts of things are things that like, again, nothing that we are doing is necessarily earth shattering, but it is sort of like just already set up for you.

1:29:54Sam Blond:And then over time, what starts to happen is you can expand outside of the founders that are sending the outbound. You do want to be, I think, you potentially want to be targeted and certainly thoughtful about prioritizing companies that meet certain characteristics. So for us, we're primarily orienting around like San Francisco-based founders, as an example. And that plays into a lot of the campaigns that we have around San Francisco right now. How does it evolve? I think - Well, so why was having the founder send the message so important? It's because, well, if you think about it, you're multi-channel.

1:30:38Sam Blond:So if you're starting over LinkedIn or something like that, you can like click and see who is originating - that's reaching out. And, uh, I think that's, that's probably the, um, biggest thing. So it's, so the biggest reason the founder should do it is that they know that it's like the highest,

1:31:00Turner Novak:um, most trusted person at that company. It's maybe like a founder to founder type thing, not a, not necessarily I'm selling you something, even though it really is, but like maybe it's more of a trusted sale or something like that. Or, you know, maybe you'll learn something by talking to this other founder, like they'll kind of get you more.

1:31:19Sam Blond:You can also be more creative with messaging. Let's see. I, one of our customers is called Parley. They're a YC company that does AI for immigration law. And so they're selling into like immigration law firms. And so Phil, who's the CEO, the message structure says something like, I started Parley after watching my father for years. You know, could say something like, and I don't know if this is literal, but like missing a family event because he was like, you know, in docs that now like you can sort of see where I'm going with this.

1:32:09Turner Novak:That's super relatable versus it being like a salesperson could probably not say that.

1:32:13Sam Blond:That is exactly right. So you can orient the message coming from a founder about like the origination story of the company. So there's like this layer of credibility. But there's also the like, what do you put in the message itself? Like only a founder can kind of do and articulate that will lead to significantly higher reply rates.

1:32:34Turner Novak:and i think like a lot of people listening to this they're probably we probably can all sympathize with like the ai email inbound slop that that is out there uh how how should i be navigating that if i'm the one that's like sending the ai generated emails yeah like how do you get around just people immediately just not even opening your email and just deleting it for sure

1:32:57Sam Blond:um here's here's how i think about this is maybe like a um evolutionary um thing uh there's there's you know like sort of old movie i don't know probably 80s glengarry glenross and and they um were using like a uh yellow pages to uh cold call and there was like you know the the quality leads that like they always wanted to get to but they couldn't get to and so so anyway i'm maybe going too deep in the movie itself but uh um from like you know many many decades ago this concept of like identifying a potential buyer based off of their company or who they are, like the individual, and then like trying to target them to get them to buy your thing.

1:33:41Sam Blond:It has existed for many, many decades, certainly. And it has evolved from the like yellow pages of Glen Gary, Glen Ross, where people might make phone calls. Gosh, prior to that, I'm sure it was like, you know, door knocking, that sort of thing. And I won't go too far back. And then you've got like the innovation around email. So like email comes on market. When I joined EchoSign, it was pre, and I'll get to the point, by the way, it was pre sort of like SDR outreach type tools, you know, outreach and sales loft and some of those style tools that allowed SDRs to almost do like marketing automation the way that maybe like a Marketo enabled prior to that.

1:34:21Turner Novak:So every email you got was literally handwritten by someone most likely.

1:34:26Sam Blond:Most likely hand sent. Certainly the ones that I was doing in like 2007, 2008, it was like copy paste. It was like the body maybe stays the same. And then I'll like just plug in high Turner or something like that at the top. And then like copy it, I'll paste it. And then I could do it again over and over again. And then there were those sort of like outreach, I think was early or the first to do the sort of like marketing automation from an SDR. And so then gosh, I was able to send like 200 a day just by like throwing, you know, new contacts in the sequence. And I didn't have to do this like copy paste one off send thing.

1:35:01Sam Blond:And so the point of all of this is something like, I think this like concept of outbound and there was this like meme for a little while outbound is dead. Cold email might be dead, those sorts of things. It is not dead. I think that, you know, it is evolving. And I do think that if you just drop, um, thousands of email addresses in a, uh, like outbound email thing with the same templated copy, and that's like your outbound strategy and you have no brand, like you don't know who the person you're reaching out to doesn't know you personally, they've never heard of your company. Your website kind of sucks.

1:35:39Sam Blond:Like they're not going to reply to that email. Your reply rates are going to be like 0.0, whatever percent. Um, and so there is, there is an approach that is today effective. Let's see. I don't want to like talk my own book too much just in terms of Monica, like the reply rates that we are seeing are higher than I ever saw with a sort of like outreach style outbound. And it is leveraging AI. It is leveraging intent signals on why you reach out to somebody, what you say. It's a custom message, those sorts of things. It will be different in 2030. There'll be like something. So you just have to kind of like stay up with the uh times yeah i feel like the thing that i see that i see

1:36:23Turner Novak:a lot is i see like the quick question is the subject and then like i don't really read them all anymore but like i used to get me all the time lowercase in the subject just generally seems to like work pretty well re like it's like reply oh yeah yeah yeah those ones have kind of do well um anything where it doesn't seem like it's an ai generated email and i open them like, fuck, they got me again. Like, but, uh, yeah, I think the multi-channel thing really

1:36:53Sam Blond:matters.

1:36:54Turner Novak:Um, so multi-channel is like you message them on LinkedIn and you email them or, okay.

1:36:59Sam Blond:And maybe depending on the industry, you also either yourself call them or you can have a service or whatever also call them. So there can be a third channel. Um, gifting could be a fourth channel. You know, we've talked about like a lot of the, um, the, the, the key keyboard pads and those sorts of things. Um, and so the multi-channel really matters. And certainly like, I think the table sticks ones are LinkedIn and email. It's not one plus one equals two. Uh, it's, you know, one plus one equals four or whatever you, um, want to plug in there. But, but it's like, um, you can say something like following up from my message on LinkedIn.

1:37:36Sam Blond:And then they're kind of like, Oh, like I did see this person's message on LinkedIn. So you sort of like try and tie it all back together.

1:37:44Turner Novak:Yeah. I feel like one of the big mistakes too, is, you know, you just keep following up like on email and you're just like, Hey, just following up. Did you see this? Hey, just following up. Wondered if you wanted to chat. Like, I feel like like that, I could work, but I feel like the better one is like, Hey, we just launched a new feature. Check it out. Like you just don't even acknowledge that you're just following up. Like it's, you're just continuing to, I guess, like add value in some way, whatever way you've chosen to do it. any thoughts question mark is that a bad one or a good one oh i i was i was um piggybacking off

1:38:15Sam Blond:what you said which is like not a good one oh yeah um it's like uh now like sometimes that will work but i think it this stage of the game reaching diminishing returns like um it everyone knows that that is automated you don't feel the sort of like psychological impact of like oh this person keeps reaching out to me i should let them know like i'm not like you know it's it's it's not

1:38:40Turner Novak:real yeah i feel like usually i will respond to those if it's someone that i know in person and know i will probably talk to again in person in some way and i'm just like you know not interested but otherwise i'm never going to respond to you because like you could be fake you and like a lot of times you'll see like someone will make up like a fake i've seen this actually people be like bragging about this. Like their, their, their lead gen strategy is like on LinkedIn, attractive woman, your messaging founders, and the reply rate is a lot higher. Like, I just knew it was like a fake person. It's like, they don't even exist.

1:39:17Sam Blond:All of the AISDRs look the way they do for a specific reason. Yeah. There, there, there are things though, that, that really do work. And, and, and interestingly, Certainly, there's probably like some, I don't know, moral or some lesson in this, but they work because like they're actually relevant. What I mean by that is, let's see, here are a couple examples of intent signals that you might pick up on that actually benefit the recipient of the email. You know, there's a lot of like, I see you have a job posting for this role. um we actually automate what that role does here could be like an executive assistant like somebody may have a job posting for an executive assistant that would be a reasonable time for like an ai executive assistant company to reach out and be like hey saw this posting with maybe like a link hyperlink to the job posting um do you want to try us for one week for free uh and and if we don't work.

1:40:23Sam Blond:Like you just like, keep your job search. That actually is like, that will convert. It won't convert a hundred percent of the time, but it'll certainly convert more than just randomly blasting everybody to see if they want your AI EA. I'll give another example. And they're like a bunch of these. And maybe the takeaway is like, you should be leveraging these. If you're a founder or a company, we have, we have a customer called nowadays that does AI event planning. And one of the intent signals is something like, agent, crawl the internet and see if you can find a blog post about like a company kickoff or a recent offsite that they had.

1:41:07Sam Blond:And then it's like, hey, saw your blog post. Like we can help you plan to the next, plan the next one. So not only are you reaching out to like the right person at the company that planned the thing, Um, but you're also, it's like top of mind. They have a blog post. So, uh, it, uh, people read it. So those, those dramatically increase the likelihood of somebody replying relative to, I'm going to send 10 ,000 emails to everyone in my TAM with the same, uh, message. Yeah.

1:41:42Turner Novak:One thing that always, it always gets me. And I, I know that a lot of it, just like that, that tactic is you know people say that they like really like oh i listened to your podcast episode with sam it was really good i like the conversation about like intense signals and like timing when to reach out to people really like that part and then they jump in their thing and like you know they suck up to you that i compliment you you're like oh man i gotta respond to this at least

1:42:05Sam Blond:or at least acknowledge it this um i i i receive those um some also i i think um maybe better than a template, like depending on the thing, when it works is when the like personalization is relevant. So in other words, like, you know, I talked about like, hey, I see your job posting for an EA.

1:42:30Turner Novak:Yeah.

1:42:30Sam Blond:We are literally an AI EA. Yeah, we're literally solving the problem. That's right. The alternative would be something like, hey, saw that, and we've talked about where we're from a few times in the conversation. Saw you're from like Kansas City, go Chiefs. are you thinking about finance workflow automation? Like that one, I actually am like more averse to than the like, just tell me about the finance thing that you build. Yeah.

1:42:56Turner Novak:Like the random, like, Hey, I also have a brother who went to Alabama university. Like, you know, I love, I love watching Nick Saban interviews, whatever, like, and then you jump in. It's like, what's the relevance? Totally random thing. Yeah, exactly. So in terms of when you're kind of going from founder-led sales to like a system, right? Like you have other people on the team. I don't know if we're going to get a chance to really, and I don't know how relevant it is to talk about actually hiring other people right now specifically. Maybe this is the answer to the question, but where do you see founders most mess up?

1:43:31Turner Novak:Like the systematizing their just initial duct taping it all together. They're using Monaco. Maybe they're not. They start to have a team. Like it starts to go from like, you know, it's like startup to this is a company. We're building this machine. Where's the biggest mistake you see people do?

1:43:49Sam Blond:Let's do maybe in logical or sequential order, which is like we have zero customers. Um, I, I have seen, um, a handful of times founders struggling to acquire customer number one or like very early customer in assign attribution of that to, I don't know how to sell. Like I'm not a salesperson, so I'm going to go hire a salesperson. Uh, that is the wrong diagnosis and that is the wrong solution. And so there's no one better in the world at acquiring the first small handful of customers than the founder themselves. So if you're not acquiring customers, maybe you want to shift things a little bit in how you present the product or something like that.

1:44:56Sam Blond:But it is likely like a product market fit thing. And if you can't do it, then like, you know, sort of random third party salesperson isn't going to come in and be able to change that for you. So I think that is the earliest maybe mistake that someone might make. This is maybe true beyond the like next phase that I would just describe. But seemingly, I think the bottleneck for acquiring customers in, let's call it four out of five to nine out of 10 companies is demand gen. It's opportunity creation. Um, and my intuition is something like four out of five to nine out of 10, either founders or, um, early sales folks, sales leaders actually misdiagnosed the bottleneck to, um, effectively being conversion rates.

1:45:53Sam Blond:And I think a way to understand or like a symptom of this is something like, uh, when you talk to a founder and we're early in, um, a month. So last month, if you didn't quite get to the number of customers that you wanted, or if you didn't quite get to the amount of revenue that you wanted, two sides of the same coin, if you sort of attribute that to there was this deal that like the week, the week, the last week of the month, I thought it was going to close and it pushed. Like they decided not to use us. They went with a competitor. It pushed to this month, whatever it is. If we just could have converted that, we would have hit our numbers.

1:46:33Sam Blond:That's right.

1:46:34Turner Novak:Okay.

1:46:35Sam Blond:Or like there were just a couple deals that like they, they, they didn't convert. And so like, what we're really going to do is we're going to try and like, we, we think we know why those deals didn't convert. And so we're going to like start changing stuff based off of that. What you're effectively doing it, whether it's intentional or not, you're effectively diagnosing the like problem or the bottleneck to acquiring customers and growing revenue as a conversion rate. Like you didn't convert that customer. And, you know, back to like my diagnosis for, we'll just say 9 out of 10 to keep it consistent.

1:47:12Sam Blond:9 out of 10 startups is like the bottleneck is actually demand. And the problem isn't that you didn't convert that one customer. The problem is that you didn't have like five customers that you were talking to that last month. And if one of them had converted, you would have hit your number. And if two of them had converted, you would have beat your number. And so I think that there's like a disproportionate amount of emphasis placed on conversion rates relative to generating demand. And I think that like influencing conversion rates is far more difficult to do than influencing demand gen. and just like, you know, sort of thought exercise on this is something like if you convert 10 % of demos that you have, one out of 10 demo I get, it's going to convert.

1:48:05Sam Blond:Moving that to 15%, you might think of like, you're increasing your conversion rates by 5%. You're actually increasing your conversion rates by 50%. And that, especially at scale, that's like a hard thing to do. There's just like a lot that goes into it. if you think about like last month we had 10 demos going to 20 demos which is like effectively doubling the number of demos that you have in a month it's not one size fits all but like I suspected it's far easier to accomplish than that like 50 percent increase in conversion rates you

1:48:44Turner Novak:might need to build a new feature or you might need to like cut the price change the price you You might need to go after a different target customer.

1:48:51Sam Blond:This is on conversion rates.

1:48:52Turner Novak:Yeah, on conversion rates. Yeah.

1:48:53Sam Blond:You might need to like really learn how to sell, like do discovery quite well and like peel back the onion. Like there's a lot that goes into it. Or you can just spend some more of your focus and attention on the demand gen side of things. And you don't even have to improve conversion rates. Like they can just remain consistent. And if you're able to double the amount of leads that you're generating, you've just doubled sales effectively.

1:49:18Turner Novak:You could, in theory, I don't think you would agree with this, but you could just like pay more for Google ads and just fill up the email signup lists and get more demos.

1:49:27Sam Blond:Well, here's something that I wouldn't disagree with, which is a version of this. If you have a channel that is working for you in demand gen, just like double and triple down on that until you get to the point that this could be you as a founder or your team, until you can't take more demos, like until you're at the point where like, I now have too many opportunities that I am actively working. Until then,

1:49:56Sam Blond:focus and allocate resources towards demand gen. Until you sort of accomplish what I would describe, and we're in the fortunate position of having this today, I would just like define this as like a demand-rich environment. And until you have that, really focus on generating demand.

1:50:16Turner Novak:And I wanted to ask you this because I think it's kind of unique. I don't know of anyone who does this specifically. So there's a concept of a forward deployed engineer. You guys do the forward deployed sales executive. So what is that at Monaco?

1:50:30Sam Blond:So FDE is the, like, you know, maybe famous acronym at this point. And like we're FDAE. So account executive. So I think there, and FDE is more often than not, the application that I've seen for like true FDEs is sort of like relatively technical product and potentially a large enterprise. And so this is like the Accentures of the world. And now you have Open and Anthropic that are probably investing in or building in their own sort of like almost FDE arms of the businesses. If you think about Monaco's customer, which is a startup, Monaco itself, the agents are technical, but it isn't like a highly technical application in ways that like the most technical products are.

1:51:14Sam Blond:And these aren't enterprises. So they don't need the like BCG, historically speaking, Accenture could come in, like map everything out and do all this stuff for us. So what our FDA does is twofold. The first is they provide a complimentary skill set to many of the customers that we have that are in founder-led sales right now. And so then they can leverage this resource as like an extension of their team that is helping them with messaging. You and I talked about like the multi-channel and like what should the message say. That is somebody that all of our sales reps have a lot of experience doing, A-B testing this stuff.

1:51:54Sam Blond:And they're like, you know, in the trenches with the founders doing this stuff alongside, of course, the AI, which is maybe a natural segue to our FDAs also have like a deep understanding of how Monaco and Monaco agents operate. And so then that if you try and deploy an agent, a demand gen agent, let's just say, and you are maybe a founder or a sales leader, you have to manage that agent. It's work to manage the agent, to like set it up, to program it, to like make sure that the message, all that stuff, we just do that for you. And so then both the complementary skill set, but also the like making the platform effective through managing the agents in ways that are just definitely, definitely not possible for a founder or a sales leader or a salesperson.

1:52:47Sam Blond:They just can't understand how Monaco works the way that a full-time Monaco employee does. And so through that, it's like far more effective and efficient. So one thing you mentioned is like you guys kind of manage and run the agents for the customers.

1:53:01Turner Novak:Is that, does anyone else do that?

1:53:04Sam Blond:I'm not aware of anyone else that does that. It doesn't mean that anyone else is not doing it. It makes a lot of sense. I also do think that, you know, look, there are AISDRs. And I suspect that like if you're an AISDR company and you have some really large enterprise customer that you should be providing some FTE style service to a company that's super logical. I do think that in the category that we're selling into, one of the competitive advantages that we have is our ability to build out like a startup go-to-market organization. And if you think about most of the players in the space, their backgrounds are like more technical or product oriented.

1:53:48Sam Blond:that of course is like an advantage for us in terms of like understanding the customer and knowing what to build, understanding the outcomes, those sorts of things. But we also like, we have an incredible go-to-market organization in the same way that like one of the best engineering leaders or a very experienced engineering leader turned founder could build out a really great engineering organization. And so then our go-to-market function, like the sales org at Monaco is a competitive advantage that we like really want to lean into because of the dynamics that I just mentioned.

1:54:22Turner Novak:It's probably just like letting your customers leverage that too. Like if you think it's best in class, let your customers tap into it.

1:54:28Sam Blond:You nailed it. It's like, and this is one of the things that interestingly during the A, the biggest objection was like, how does this scale? It was like the margins and that sort of thing. Um, then like the FDE thing, unbeknownst to us, we were already calling it an FDA E. It started to like really take off. And in the B, it was like, we hear this is like the, the big competitive advantage that you have or something like that. Uh, and so it was a little bit coincidental, uh, in a short amount of time. Um, but yes, like we want to lean into, um, this thing that is a pretty big competitive advantage for us today.

1:55:07Sam Blond:And I think hard for, players in the space right now to either replicate or compete with.

1:55:15Turner Novak:Yeah, it almost sounds like the forward deploy employee, like the forward deployed specialist, the forward deployed expert is maybe in 18 months they'll be talking about it after Monaco makes it a huge thing.

1:55:28Sam Blond:Yeah, that would be great.

1:55:30Turner Novak:Yeah, well, that's been a lot of fun. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

1:55:32Sam Blond:Thank you so much for having me. So much fun and just had a blast.

1:55:37Turner Novak:And I hope you had a blast. Thanks again to this episode's sponsors. Flex, upgrade your business banking and credit with the link in the description. Numeral, put your sales tax on autopilot at numeral.com. Amplitude for AI analytics, just ask Amplitude. And Merge, secure AI access for every employee with Merge. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, comment, subscribe, and share in the group chat with friends who are trying to learn more about how to sell in the age of AI. Make sure to check out the back catalog of over 100 episodes with founders of companies like Robinhood, Sweetgreen, and Mercury, and investors like Gary Tan, Alad Gil, and Chathan and Erica Benchmark.

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