SPOTLIGHT: Surviving the Inbox Apocalypse | with Evan Huck, CEO & Co-Founder @ UserEvidence

0:06Welcome to Topline, the podcast for the best founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman, and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market.

0:24Evan Huck: Are you ready to level up your go-to-market strategy for 2026? Then don't miss GTM 2025, the only B2B tech conference exclusively for go-to-market executives. Join a thousand other revenue leaders this September 23rd to 25th in Washington, D.C. for an exclusive executive-only experience. This three-day event is hyper-focused on connection, strategy, and execution. expectation expect hands-on workshops in-depth strategy sessions and curated opportunities to build relationships with vps cxos and founders facing the same challenges you are you'll stress test your gtm approach align your team and leave it real actionable insights from top performing leaders don't miss the must attend conference designed to help you boost go-to-market results in 2026.

1:10Evan Huck: Visit attendgtm.com. That is A-T-T-E-N-D-G-T-M.com to secure your spot today. And don't forget to use the code TOPLINE for 10 % off your GA ticket. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Topline Spotlight. You know Topline Spotlight. It's your favorite segment where we interview founders, entrepreneurs about their journey and some of the challenges. and today I am joined with Evan Huck. Evan is the CEO co-founder of User Evidence, the customer evidence platform used by B2B top GTM teams. A startup junkie with deep roots in enterprise sales and demand gen, Evan knows how to build scalable systems that actually drive results.

1:56Before starting User Evidence, he led GTM teams at SurveyMonkey and TechValidate. Now he's channeling that experience into helping companies turn verified customers' stories into a competitive edge. Welcome, Evan. Evan, first and foremost, for anyone that's listening on Spotify.

2:17Hey, everyone. Welcome to Topline Spotlight. You know Topline Spotlight. It's your favorite segment where we interview founders, entrepreneurs about their journey and some of the challenges. And today I am joined with Evan Huck. Evan is the CEO co-founder of User Evidence, the customer evidence platform used by B2B top GTM teams. A startup junkie with deep roots in enterprise sales and demand gen, Evan knows how to build scalable systems that actually drive results. Before starting User Evidence, he led GTM teams at SurveyMonkey and TechValidate. Now he's channeling that experience into helping companies turn verified customers' stories into a competitive edge.

2:58Welcome, Evan. Hey, Jay. How's it going? Evan, first and foremost, for anyone that's listening on Spotify or Apple or anything else and not seeing this on YouTube, Evan has an awesome poster behind him. And I'm sure this is the first thing that everyone always brings up, Evan. Like, how often are you out on that mountain during the winter? Or even, I actually question, because you're in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Is there snow on the mountain still right now? There's like a tiny bit. Like there's like glaciers up there and the kind of definition of the glaciers that hang around, but yeah, the winter.

3:33Oh yeah. When it's good snow, I'm, I'm out there a decent amount. I haven't wanted a four year old. So it's like not as much as I was like five years ago. Yeah. But, uh, but yeah, it's pretty fun. Are you, uh, are you hiking up any of those glaciers and just doing it? Yeah, we did. Uh, we did the grand Teton last summer, which was pretty cool. Um, which is, uh, like it's some pretty intense, like multi-pitch climbing, which was super fun. so yeah yeah we're in the mountains in the summer as well what's the elevation where you are it's like 62 at the valley floor and then the grand is 13 something so it's uh yeah i can do it i a lot of the listeners know this maybe they don't but i actually only have one working lung and so yeah uh so whenever i get above 12 000 feet like the back bowl of breckenridge i can't i can't do i can't handle i get altitude sickness and like so i'm like very careful about like anything above 10 000 feet so unfortunately i'm not going to probably make it out there anytime soon but um as as much as it'd be fun to keep talking about uh the slopes i want to talk a little bit about your your journey and user evidence i know i just gave the bio but like i think in your own words like the last let's talk about the last year um how are things going and your your journey so far um in the in the last 12 months yeah i mean i mean i don't you as a founder appreciate this like when you're in it always feels like just a sloppy mess.

4:58Um, but I guess objectively, like it's, it's, it's gone relatively well. Um, you know, we're trying to go from like 4 million to 11 this year is kind of the goal. Uh, so, and we're, we're on a decent track there, but yeah, my journey is interesting. So yeah, I started my career as an SDR. Um, that was my first job out of college. Um, and then ironically, my, my co-founder also started as, as an SDR. So it's company founded by two sale people which you know has its pros and cons uh but uh which by the way i also started my career but not the thing is in 2007 sdr wasn't a concept and yeah i was in a it was like full sales cycle so i was doing 60 call uh cold calls a day and then like the having to handle the clothes as well like i wish i started my career in like the sdr world because it just it was just overwhelmingly amount of information so you i mean from an sdr standpoint you learned from a specialization the importance of top of the funnel like really early right yeah totally i mean i thought it was a very useful just introduction to tack period um you know back then like it was different to like since i was the first sdr as the first salesperson you know in addition to all the normal sdr stuff and you know cold calls and all that there was also kind of basically a rev ops element where you're you know i remember at first i was like doing mail merges through microsoft entourage and like word and excel to try to accomplish marketing automation but back then i think there's a lot of people out there that don't even know what a mail merge is uh yeah exactly that's not a thing that's old school old school marketo right and old school outreach um but yeah i started in 2010 so and back in the day it was awesome that you'd like send like 400 emails and schedule like 20 more meetings from that one son those yeah the back in the day where people read emails yeah fixer didn't just automatically reply to all your emails and you have no idea and you just have bots talking to bots right now exactly yeah uh so from sdr then uh and you i mean you eventually took that to becoming a full sales cycle seller i assume yeah and then sales leader yeah yeah i think my biggest team at survey monkey was like 120 people globally so I ended up leading sales teams and then became an enterprise when I moved to Jackson and just, you know, skied most of the day.

7:17And that was fun too. Is that when you were like, I have to be a founder because I can't be leading 120 % teams right now while I'm out here? Yeah. I shed the team before I moved to Jackson. Then I was just an AE for like three years, or maybe not even now, like two years. And I was the top rep in the company by like a long shot. It took me like 20 % of my day. So it was great. um i love how honest you are because it's true like people i mean the reality is and i learned this from a friend who was a enterprise uh ae at snowflake yeah and he was like i would i was telling him one time i saw him on the train i was like man you must put in like 120 hours and he goes aj i got a secret for you i maybe work 10 hours a week and he was getting million dollar commission checks i was like i hate you yeah so it was fun for a while it wasn't the most intellectually stimulating and then yeah obviously this journey so we've been at user evidence for uh five years now um and yeah it's just been super fun i love building early stage companies it's you know again messy but like just it's super engaging i cannot imagine a crazier journey than someone saying yeah i started a startup in 2020 like the last five years have been nothing else to do we're just like you know chilling like the you couldn't really do much and so you know might as well sit at a computer and you know hack out some wireframes so yeah so the thing that we were talking a little bit about before uh was this idea of brand and i know for a quotopath we've been we invested very heavily in brand um that was one learning that i had from my previous startup and uh it takes a lot it's a lot of work and a lot of time and effort and And as a founder, you really, I mean, you care so much.

9:06So every pixel on the screen, on the site, positioning, the copy and the messaging, you just like think about endlessly. And it seems like that's something that you at User Evidence and the team have thought a lot about. And so when I was going back to saying like the last 12 months, it seems like a brand is something that you're putting a lot of effort into. Yeah. And that wasn't necessarily like a natural inclination for me. again like i'm it was used to outbound driven i got tech valley before we got acquired by survey monkey we had 27 bdrs and zero marketing just ripping outbound outreach and so i was used to i'm very good at that and i have this giant hammer that is outbound outreach that i tried initially tried to apply to everything so the first couple years of user evidence was very much that program but then you know the world changed right and emails just got so much more noisy and just outbound so much less effective that we kind of had to think about how to diversify our pipeline generation.

10:00We hired a great VP of marketing, Mark Huber, a few years in. And he did a great job of just convincing us basically to take a long-term bet on brand. But the tricky part about brand is that you don't see, there's no immediate gratification, right? And brand, I'm using brand beyond just the creative presentation of the brand to include content and community and social voice and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, I posted this on LinkedIn and that took off a couple days ago but like we had eight quarters in a row where it was just like 150 ops per quarter 150 ops per quarter despite like increased investment in brand and content and just like it wouldn't go anywhere and it was so frustrating and i wanted to like go to more like quick hit stuff like you know events and ads or whatever um but we just stuck with the plan and then finally like last quarter like it just blew up and now it's like it went to 300 and now like 450 like in the matter of two quarters but it took eight quarters of like no progress to just you know test our patience on how much we're willing to keep just shoving chips at that brand you know i i mean i totally get it i heard a really great talk by kelly walkins she was the um vp of marketing at slack in the early days and you know she helped inform me in this way too because i had the same experience where at trend kite it was 150 sellers and just but we didn't have a CMO until we were at like 10, 15 million in revenue.

11:26And for Quotapath, it was also like, oh man, the world's changing a little bit. And so Kelly talked a lot about, you know, you brand product marketing and demand gen and how each of those feed to, but foundationally you have to have brands set up and everyone from sales leaders to investors, the board, they're really about the quick hits in terms of pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, but don't truly understand that that eight quarters that you're talking about is like setting up for what they actually want at the end of the day. Yeah. So it's a lot of work. Yeah. And you have to be good at yet to, you know, reinforce that story to the investors, right.

12:03And build some trust around that and show some incremental progress. Even if it's anecdotal, I remember like a lot of Mark's board decks, you know, just be like screenshots of people's comments on LinkedIn being like, this content's awesome. Right. Or, you know, an inbound opportunity. It's like, yeah, I heard about your CEO posting on LinkedIn. So So sometimes just the anecdotal stuff gives people enough confidence to continue the investment, even though you weren't seeing like a dramatic, you know, HubSpot dashboard impact quite yet at the board level. So tell me a little bit about how Ideal Customer Profile and ICP helped focus this team and helped like inform some of these brand bets that you were making.

12:39Yeah, that's an interesting one. You know, our strategy that we honed in on, I'd say in the early years, we, you know, like any startup, a lot of our customers were other startups and kind of, you know, more growing companies. You know, the churn on those and the product market fit for that smaller segment, which wasn't as good as, you know, when we started to close mid-market and larger companies, it was clear that those was better fit. You know, obviously much higher net retention. You know, we've had several enterprise customers that have gone from, you know, 25K initial pilots to 300K plus in AR in less than nine months.

13:10So we wanted to hone in on this mid-market to enterprise segment and we sell to marketers. So the good news about selling to marketers is like, you know, you get the license to be creative and have more of a personality, which was fun for us. Cause like, we wanted to just like, that was our natural selves. We got to just be ourselves and kind of like let that creativity and personal personality shine with just a more interesting, fun, you know, kind of brand image. But like, they don't always have the budget. They don't always have the budget. But also, LinkedIn is obviously a big channel for us.

13:42And all this brand stuff has done a really good job of saturating the down market influencer crew. But it's a little bit tougher to reach those bigger, larger, older enterprise buyers. And so in addition to this LinkedIn content and that sort of community, I think a lot of our more recent brand investments have been targeted towards the enterprise. So a good example of this, you know, next month we're doing this, um, big bet in-person event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I remember one of our advisors was like, this is not going to work. You're not going to get a hundred marketing executives to come to frigging Wyoming.

14:17I was like, he had never been to Jackson, so I don't think he understood. Uh, I was like, respectfully or wrong. Anyway, we just, we just booked, we just filled our last seat. It was also just hilarious and, uh, ironic because I feel like the, the Venn diagram of investors who haven't been to Jackson Hole is very, very low. Exactly, yeah. When I was first raising our seed round, I was talking to investors like, oh yeah, my third home is in Jackson Hole. It's pretty funny. But on this Highline event, it's going to be a high-end cool event with higher level executives from larger enterprises. And obviously there'll be direct pipeline generation from engaging with that audience, but it's also a huge content play, right?

14:59So we're, you know, we're bringing a professional film crew because Daxson just filmed really well. And like a lot of our events and speakers are going to be like outdoors under the mountains and stuff like that. So, yeah, you have to find just more creative ways to break through that enterprise audience. But, you know, it's a pretty diverse mix of channels. Did you use the communities you had? I totally understand we're saying enterprise and these LinkedIn communities, how to find them. But did you use those communities to really get in touch and use it from a demand gen perspective to get them into considering the event?

15:37Yeah, it's a good question. So yeah, I mean, in regards to Highline the event, yeah, it hit it through all channels. The most effective by far was just me. I posted this morning, I was like, and this is true, like, got a freaking 18 month year old was up like twice last night. And so I was just up from like three to five. And like, there's one night, you know, a couple months ago where I just ripped off, you know, 150 invites over LinkedIn to senior executives. And that by far, that one to one outreach from the CEO, like drove the most registrations by a long shot. But we also did email and ads and stuff like that.

16:08But on the community piece, what was a really interesting strategy that worked super well initially, especially, and it's still working is like these specialized Slack communities. Obviously, like Pavilion is a good example of this, right? But like in our space, there are specialized communities for customer marketers, which is a big audience for us, for product marketers. And I just spent a lot of time in that community early on just answering people's questions, right? Not like selling at all. Just people would have challenges that are adjacent to what we do. And I would just, I had a ton of experience on these things.

16:38So I would just share wisdom for two years. And that actually did drive a decent amount of inbound. I remember one of our first like fortune 500 deals was the VP of customer marketing there. It reached out to me on Slack and was like, Hey, I know you're from your influence in the space, which was kind of funny to me because we were a two person startup at the time. But I had been in that space so much and just putting out valuable advice to people that that just created this kind of brand image as a helpful person, which paid off for sure. Yeah. The power of those communities and being able to really listen and learn from your customer firsthand, that's where I get the most value.

17:19You just literally direct connect, can send a Slack, a direct Slack, like, hey, I want to get your feedback or I'm thinking about this thing and use it as a sounding board. And most executives are super open to that. They like that. That's that's the easy opportunity from a founder standpoint. But then the other thing that I've had and it sounds like maybe you've had similar experiences is like actually finding great people to come work with you as well. So it sounds like you have a great team and you mentioned your CMO. And I'd love to hear like just from a people's perspective and how you think how you think about building a team today.

17:55And four to 11 million is a big jump. So like, how are you thinking about scale? and as that team grows what you're looking for? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, on the team building front, I've gotten a lot better at this over the years. And one thing that we've gotten really good at now is just not compromising on the vibe and quality of the person. Obviously, they're going to be talented, hardworking, have great experience or whatever. But it's so critical to have people that you just enjoy working with and are fun and are kind of bounced off your energy, particularly in marketing, right?

18:29Like, because we're selling to marketers, we need to have these creative leaps and take risks and stuff like that. Like you want a group that's gonna kind of feed that energy and, and have that, the kind of like confluent creative energy. And so, yeah, I think like having a team that just enjoys working together and is like smart and sharp, but also like humble listens. Well, has a good sense of humor because startups are such a long journey. Like I can't underestimate whatever, or sorry, overstate whatever it is, the value of that part of just like enjoying the team that you're working with. Because like when work doesn't seem like work, you know, people will work however long, right?

19:10Because it's just like, it's fun and it's interesting. So that's been like kind of the guidepost to it in terms of like the go-to-market creation of the team. Again, initially we leaned into our strengths as SDR leaders. So we started very SDR heavy. Um, but then, yeah, after we got Mark, our first hire was a product marketing person. I think that was a good decision. Just like, like you have to nail your messaging and positioning in the market before you start turning on, you know, demand gen and content. Um, because like, those are just amplification levers. And if you have the wrong, you know, kernel of initial messaging, then you're just amplifying the wrong thing.

19:46So like getting that right first. And then like when you nail that, then turning on your amplification levers through demand gen through content um you know is is i think the right mix there the next hire that you know will eventually make that i'm super excited about uh is customer marketing which is you know not only exciting because it's the function that we sell to but honestly like you know now that we have you know 160 customers or something like that like customers are by far in a way like the most important resource that we have for all kinds of reasons obviously for informing product roadmap and figuring out what to do but also like even just from a raw demand gen, like opportunity generation perspective, like we had, I think 40 % of our customers, our biggest quarter last quarter were former customers that just are moving to a new company and bringing us in.

20:30So nailing that customer marketing engine, especially once you get to decent scale above, you know, 150, 200 customers, um, yeah, I think it was just a critical growth engine for, you know, a growth stage company. It's going to be a really hard hire for you all, given they're like, they're going to just have to be a super super user of user evidence right like there's going to be someone that actually knows the product they're going to be the product thought partner yeah and they have to run a really important part of the organization yeah well the cool part is you know we have direct experience with hundreds of them right so we've seen them all work you'll hire one yeah so it's like we know who's we know who's good yeah but you're i mean you're the general thought of just having the right thought partner someone when shit hits the fan that you can just give a call to and like bounce bounce things off of and know that it won't they won't get super anxious and that's what i i find the most value with uh within my management team if something's not working well that i have a i have someone else in the room that is hearing it objectively and is able to give me feedback that i'll listen to as well and it sounds like you have some of that too yeah i like that like we call it like you know chill humble this is like the kind of like way we just like you you described like this calm energy which i think like i've i've been criticized of like being sometimes like low energy right or like seeming like i don't care but a lot of times what it's actually a really useful skill set which is this like just calm stable like just because i've seen so much stuff like when stuff goes wrong it's not like we're freaking out it's like yeah you know that that's gonna happen all the time this is like what we do is like analyze these things and figure it out right so it's like i think that just that kind of low-key vibe uh can be you know if that there's a good chunk of that on the team i think that just like it brings a nice like peace and stability um to like what is inherently a very like chaotic thing so i cannot uh empathize with the situation i have the opposite opposite problem but i i know appreciate any founder ceo that's really good about uh that chill humble taking well you probably you've probably experienced like the the negative end of the opposite of that is like when you get like these leaders that like over rotate on stuff like let's say they're in board meeting they come out of it like now here's the thing that you're just gonna like really tilt towards that uh so i think just like like consistency is really important i think that to develop that like you know in a child psychology sense, right?

22:56Like consistency and safety is what allows a child to then feel comfortable taking risks and grow. And I think that's actually very same true in a startup, right? Like the consistency and safety and dependability is what allows you to feel comfortable, like reaching out and taking risks, which I think is like, you know, exactly what you want people doing in a startup. Yeah, I agree. Well, Evan, we're coming up on time here, but I've got a couple just questions. One of the things we like to leave our audience with is, you know, favorite books and movies, but maybe something that you've read or seen recently that's sticking with you and that you're like really into that the audience might appreciate.

23:35Well, I have my favorite leadership book that I read recently is Yvonne Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, Let My People Go Surfing. I don't know if you read that one, but it's like, you know, again, as you can tell, I think a lot about like the long-term culture as a way to support business success. And I think that's just like a really good book for like perspective on how work can kind of interface with life in a very like compatible way to increase the viability of both. I mean, Patagonia has like the craziest founding story. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. Those guys are rad. Yeah. Well, great.

24:13Well, Evan, thanks for joining us on Topline Spotlight. And listeners, stay tuned. We release these episodes almost every Thursday and, of course, our new episodes on Sundays. Thanks, Evan. Awesome. Thanks, AJ. Appreciate you having me. Thank you.

24:56Thanks again for listening. You