Empower Your Business with a Full Sales Cycle for Businesses

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[Music] here's your life hey everybody Welcome to the startup growth podcast I'm Dan McDermott I'm the CMO here at Voris and I'm joined by my CEO Kyle Van Voris and today we are joined by Nick Telson the co-founder over at Trumpet hey Nick hey guys how you doing good yeah doing great over here so I thought the best uh place to start would to be is would you ask me directly uh Nick what does trumpet do yeah good question so let me just give you a bit of background I suppose so before Trump hit um I founded a company over in the UK called design my night um which we grew over 10 years um and it was a b2c platform at the start like a timeout where to go out but then we built three SAS tools as well for Hospitality um we exited that in 2019 which was great um but then you know covid hit and myself my co-founder were like oh you know let's go again um we love building businesses uh you know we're too young not to be doing anything so what we did was we thought back to the 10 years of design my night and thought okay what parts of the different Stacks in teams could do with upgrading and we looked at the the dev team who have like a tool every five minutes that they wanted us to buy for them so they're fine marketing obviously had like cam uh and all the collaboration tools and then we looked at sales um that you guys will know better than anyone a lot of the sales stacked seems to be CRM which you know has lots of great tools for that already and then your Outreach tools but obviously in sales you have that whole Gap in the middle of cold Outreach the actual Outreach itself um back and forward on the deal getting the deal done on boarding them you know all of that was actually done over like I think the average is 60 emails to get um a deal done and the deal cycle I think is about 100 days um and we just thought wow like that that's really archaic like there has to be a better way to do that so um we had a few ideas ourselves but we spoke to over 150 sales leaders um across the world and Founders as well who do sales and really dug into the problem and there definitely was a problem speaking to people you know when you're looking at Cold Outreach uh marketing or design might put your deck together and then they hand it over to the sales team who then get free reign to stuff it up totally um or marketing have to make all of these decks for sales and there's no visibility on these decks so we thought why don't we take inspiration from something like Shopify um and build a tool where sales people can easily create microsites um we call them Pods at Trumpet um automatically branded to your lead in seconds so you don't need design skills um and that pod is then the one link that you use for cold Outreach you then use it to add more data in in terms of like a proposal you then use that one link to add in all the documents you need for signing um you can then use that one link to add a mutual action plan for onboarding and the idea was really looking at not only speeding up the sales Journey but also the buyer enablement side how can we make it easier for the buyer to make that buying decision quicker um and yeah we landed on on this concept so it's sort of like um a Shopify a canva and a slack for sales people in like a no code tool that's awesome man you know I've seen a lot of um people trying to tackle this problem because the truth is the more complex the sale the more need there is for this type of tool and what a lot of people aren't talking about is that complexity of sales actually trickling down into uh some of the smaller mid-market companies and even some of the SMB um you know I know several companies that sell into the SMB that have what I would consider a more complex sale and their deal sizes are less but they still require an amount of organizational aptitude to be able to navigate those deal deal Cycles which is very bizarre to me the first time I've seen it but now it's happening more and more and more and I'm seeing people trying to tackle this problem and I'm a huge fan of it I think um having you know you guys call it pods having some kind of place for the potential customer to go where it's the single source of truth of all the information that they need and they can easily send it to other people is a huge huge ad value yeah I think you're totally right I think complexity is something you always thought was just in Enterprise deals um but you know we saw so you know in my pre-selling reservation software as a sort of like open table that you guys would probably know too to sort of British bars and restaurants it wasn't a big deal we're talking like a thousand a year ARR per deal but actually you then had the stakeholders of the restaurant manager the reservations manager the GM you then also maybe had to integrate with their till system or their HR System and suddenly this you know low price deal actually has really big complexity and I think that's happening across the sales stack as you say um I'm an investor as well so I invest in over 50 startups at the moment and I see the complexity of their deals from early early startup stage um and I think the other interesting thing is the the way the buyer is is should be approached now is different so as we know like buyers are doing a lot of research themselves before engaging with the tools so a lot of the time they know a lot about the tool already but maybe they don't know how you can then help them with that tool and what areas of their business you can also help with that all so creating like a personalized pod just for them with a personalized demo in a personalized video all done very quickly is just a much nicer experience on the Outreach side of things than you know an email with a heavy PDF in so it it it's changing on the one hand it's getting more complex but on the other hand you need to make it as simple as as possible for the buyer because they're a lot more knowledgeable about your product you don't want to teach them how to suck eggs as we say here interesting term I've never heard that all right just to just to sort of restate that a little bit I think uh one of the ways to sort of look at um at Simplicity or or I guess awareness of the various tools is I know of of many tools out there that might solve my problem around let's say scheduling right there's there's probably half a dozen I could name right now off the top of my head and there's probably three dozen that exist out there that are mainstream good businesses and I know of them but I don't know anything inside them or how to use them or what they might look like for me because I have never sat through the big demo and having that sort of that that lower barrier to entry is uh is interesting um and just one more Point real real quick here uh I was with Leo uh last week and we were at uh saster you know big software conference over here and it really struck me my background is in field sales basically outside sales right going around and selling uh in person whether it was government contracts whether it was solar energy whether it was beer and the difference between just being in person and being able to just you know say okay here's maybe a brochure I have maybe I have one pager in my hand but because I'm with in person with you I can answer everything immediately I can create the relationship it's just so much faster and more efficient and you would think that you know it's just me and not many Tools in in my hands uh I could call over Leo because he was with me physically I could say oh you know you got to talk to our CEO over here it's also sort of our CFO it was very easy for me to sort of communicate many things at the same time whereas in the digital space sometimes we almost have too many tools and in a sense and we kind of fill up space with you know okay I'm going to use this and then link this over here then I I feel obligated to send you now a deck and then another deck over here and then maybe there's another thing here so it very quickly gets overwhelming and it really struck me last week of how how much easier it was to sell in person just because it was you know that it's the transaction and the relationship ship is just immediate whereas digitally I know that at least on my side I can get bogged down very quickly in in I believe the term is document hell email hell um and I think that that's something that I definitely um yeah I was a little bit of breath refresher uh last week actually uh I think yeah I think there's a few points to that um so one uh we've actually seen with our tool which was awesome um someone was a Trade Fair in in the UK and they actually just created a general pod um and our pods also act a bit like um docsend so you can turn on capture email address you know who is exactly visiting your pod and when and we can actually ping you on slack and just be like hey this person's opened your pod which is great for sales people and they actually just had a big QR code at the front of their stand with a generic pod on and actually use that as their data capture tool um and they said they were closing deals and getting demos so much quicker than they ever did previously at a Trade Fair just because of that interact interactivity and then they were collecting email addresses after so I think that was very cool for us to see um and another thing we wanted to challenge which you you're correct in in bringing up is the back and forward so email email I need to send you this I need to send you this I need to send you this so we we the slack element that we wanted to bring into pod was actually bringing the buyer to your space as a salesperson you know with the likes of like figma and notion and Google Docs we're so much more used to collaboration in all of our different fields but sales still feels very like me and you so what we wanted to do is bring that collaboration into the pods as well so as a buyer I can leave comments I can annotate the Pod and ask questions and do that all within the Pod rather than over email um and then the great thing about that is they can then share that internally with their own team who can then ask questions so it streams lines streamlines the whole back and forward within these pods too and it makes it much easier for also the seller obviously to then keep all that communication within the Pod the final thing that struck me when you were talking about um you know the two dozen scheduling tools that was another thing we wanted to tackle we were like well we don't want to compete with these tools um you know the sales stack is very rich in terms of yeah all these different types of tools so what we wanted to do was actually integrate with everyone and we want to trump it to be the center Source where you can connect all of the different ways you might already do Outreach or Mutual action planning or whiteboarding um so yeah we we integrated I think with over 30 tools already uh you know like Loom calendly chili Piper um Miro all of these notion air table all of these tools um then rather than trying to beat them we were like that's just another page you whack into your pods to collaborate on with your buyer um so yeah we wanted to solve all of those problems basically by just centralizing everything into this one pod that's awesome I actually have a question here that's a little bit on a different path I'm curious how you approach um startup growth because you've had a you know you've had a successful exit you're starting another company you're investing in a lot I'm just curious from your perspective starting a new company very early stage do you have like an order of operations of how on how you plan to grow the customer base how do you approach growth at the early stage yeah it's a great question um so trumpet we're doing it very differently based on our experience of what we learned at design my night um so I think the first element of what we wanted to bring from a b to b side of things was actually a bit of b2c flare so we were like well let's not just build another B2B tool that's blue and white that says the same things that everyone's used to we were like let's build a brand that's got you know it's a strong identity it's got a strong voice it's quite cheeky um it speaks very direct to our target market um and we sort of came out of the gates quite early with that Vibe and that branding um and and started to build a wait list um you know fomo is is the best way to sort of come out of the gates running with a new product um so we started seeding a lot of stuff on LinkedIn we use LinkedIn a lot and that's where our buyers are essentially um and started teasing the product teasing what we're about obviously I was lucky because I had a bit of a brand before with my exit and built a wait list people join the waitlist we then added a viral Loops element to that wait list so you could move up the wait list you could get free trumpet if you shared your weight list and very quickly grew that wait list um it currently stands at about two and a half thousand people are on that wait list um around 20 25 of those are referrals from people who are already on the wait list which was really exciting for us to see because that was the first time I'd done a sort of viral campaign um and then from a sales aspect which might be interesting to to your listeners was we then put them on various sequences so you know we wanted to keep them engaged so you know if you've got these people on a waitlist for three months you want to keep them engaged we didn't just want to talk about trumpet so we we shared um podcasts we've listened to medium articles we love just interesting stuff about sales like we're here to help you sell better essentially um and then we seeded some stuff of the product as well and all of that kept them engaged and then what we did was we um sent out a type form as well and started to really understand that wait list so who do you work for how many sales people do you have in your team what's your stat currently and we had a really good view of who was on this wait list um all of those fed into HubSpot for us and then we split those people into three icps so medium high low um and those three then all go off on different sequences um and will be on boarded in different times and the high icps will get more of a white glove treatment from us and the low icps we want to self-serve um and we've sort of just opened the gates about three months ago with trumpets we've got about 200 companies 800 users on the platform now as I said we've got over two and a half thousand waiting um so we're filtering those three sequences out now which is really exciting to see I've got a I've got a quick question just follow up on that it reminds me of those uh those uh the viral kind of membership campaigns from back in the day with uh do you remember a small world uh you know these social social media um sort of uh communities I suppose from 2010 or so or 2000 even 2007 2008. um I saw a lot of that back then but I haven't seen it for a long time uh maybe Harry's is you know I'm thinking about the the DDC World um that was also an example of that but it's been a while since I saw something in the B2B world doing that sort of a wait list um do you does anything come to mind or where did you come up with that idea I think we've seen it like you know like superhuman um they did it really well um I think ones that have been you know are backed by serious venture or have um you know a sort of let's call them a an a-star celebrity in our world founder and they can bring that fomo like you know I've just done Shopify this is my next my next product sign up to the waitlist we've never seen it on like our level like we're not celebrity Founders um but our mission from the off was have a b2c element to what everything we're doing and that's not only employed important from a marketing point of view but what I said earlier about buyer enablement is if you want our users and buyers to love trumpet and interact with trumpet and get the deal done quicker they have to feel like it's a b2c platform so super easy to use works on mobile fun intuitive so we're sort of trying to take all the lessons of a b2c play um and put that in for the buyer enablement side while obviously building Kick-Ass tools for our users who are B2B that makes sense so then here's a follow-up question on that are you finding your users being individual sales reps who are paying for this themselves or are they actual businesses yeah good question um it's a bit of both and and that's been part of our strategy so um we we raised Venture recently and and you know they all ask what's your go to market um and it was very much uh bottom up and top down so on the one hand we're super inspired by all the product LED growth tools out there you know all the ones that you know canva figma's obviously just sold to Adobe you know all of our great Tools in our recent times a product LED great stuff so that's make the product awesome make it intuitive make them love it uh free to use to start with no credit card just get going get using get loving it um and great onboarding um so we're sort of playing with that on the one hand and yeah we've seen that we've got lots of just sales reps from big companies just signing on for free having a play um maybe sticking a credit card down to get one user license and then that filtering up they're like can I actually introduce you to our sales director um to discuss the rest of my team so that's obviously a great in the other side the top downside we're also doing which is more Outreach rather than our wait list which is going to marketing managers sales directors um of of the bigger companies and actually just saying look this is great for your your company but also with them it's not about okay let's sign up your 500 says reps it's like okay let's start with the team let's start with your bdr team uh or your SDR team and maybe pick two or three star people in that team that you you know you really want to get going with and let's just start with two or three licenses let's get them going um you know let's get them set up templates for your company in in trumpet um and then it starts to trickle down top down and so we've got that with quite a few customers as well at the moment where the potential of that account is huge um but you know at the moment it's only three or four licenses that they're paying for right yeah and that makes a lot of sense from a top-down perspective to have more of a land and expand approach I'm curious then about the um the actual the bottoms up because there's a lot of organization that we speak to that are very product LED with their go to market and there's a lot of a lot of Pros a lot of Pros I love product companies um I think you know more um maybe uh newer Founders feel like it's a replacement for sales and it never has been you know you look at everyone talks about slack being the Pinnacle of product-led growth they have 200 Sales people right now you know a Zen desk same way so like they always end up moving into sales because there's a conversion element that's obviously powerful but I'm curious for product LED because there's other people who listen to this that have organizations similar um you you get these users in uh now they're using the the solution for free what is the the process for converting either them to a paid user or their organization to a paid user is your specific order that you go through there is one marketing lead versus sales lead I just like to hear you unpack a little bit about the approach on the product LED Bottoms Up portion of your guys's growth strategy yeah for sure so well hey you're right sales is never replaced and will never be replaced um so I think you know that's fundamental I think we look at bottom up as a different type of selling so it's it's a soft sell and it's a product sale so um the product sale element is as I was alluding to before make the onboarding awesome make it engaging make them understand the product straight away you know the the con of being product LED growth is you need to invest in developers so we're a team of 10 and half of those are developers at the moment because product LED growth is all about not only building a kick-ass product but uh listening getting feedback getting people that love your product give you feedback you build what they want um we you know we actually did a uh a public roadmap which I I wanted to do but was also a bit skeptical I thought would anyone use it bearing in mind we've only got 200 companies using trumpet at the moment um we've had over 150 feature requests and over 250 upvotes in that community so super engaged um we hook that up so we use a product called canny we hook that up to our GitHub and as soon as that ticket closes all of those people that upvoted that feature will get an email um so that side of product like growth is like hey you're in this with us we're listening to you we're building quickly um your ideas are great keep them coming um so so that's the pro and con of that side of it the other side is as I like to call is soft selling so for me that falls more into customer success and account management okay so our customer success manager is a is on top of the data so if we've sent out a onboarding sequence to let's say 500 low icps that we want to self-serve we are then tracking a a are they creating accounts V are they creating pods see when was the last time they did create a pod and for us that's us tracking engagement um every user gets 23 pods with us without a credit card so for us we need to get them to those 23 pods as soon as possible um that's when the Soft Cell comes in so on the one hand if the engagement is low it's up to our customer success manager to drop them an email anything I can help with um do you want a quick 15-minute chat and so we can see how you could be using trumpet um have you just not got the time at the moment to play around with trumpet so really understanding why they're not engaging for me that's selling you're engaging with the customer one-on-one so that's very important the other side of that is when they're approaching the end of the 20. so we've obviously got product Flags so hey we're loving trumpet just to let you know you need to upgrade to carry on creating pods and they'll get an email but it's also about our customer success and account management team being on top of that and knowing okay I've got these 20 accounts that are approaching the limit let's keep an eye on them and if they're not converting less contact them and again for me that's selling um especially because a lot of these people haven't heard from us or a salesperson yet because they've self-served um so there's your product side of it and your soft selling side of it which should run hand in hand so another uh oh go ahead go ahead Dan I just just real quick I'll I'll kick it you to the question Kyle but I I just wanted to call out something that this reminded me of as you were speaking Nick um it's a lot like a lot of communities where you get people joining and then It's just tough to really know you know do they know what to do next do they do they know what to do to engage beyond the basics of okay I'll set up a profile I'll fill out my bio maybe but do I really know what to do at that point to make it a regular part of my life it's actually quite a big jump for a lot of people to do habitually um whether it's part of their job or personal life or whatever so it's really interesting that you're bringing that up with um and you clearly have some good structure around it I'm sure you have a superstar there kind of ready to you know engage with energy to make sure that they listen to what the people need and suggest what to do next uh but I see it all the time in in our own Community that's a challenge that we have faced and we are always looking to improve uh but it's also across the board in many many forums many many other internet sort of places out there so it's an interesting challenge I didn't really think of this applying to um to to I guess to business but uh yeah very interesting so Kyle go ahead yeah well I was actually jumping in on a similar vein here so we worked with a um a company a while back that was very product LED um and they were just starting to build their sales team which is typically when we work with them and um what they did which I thought was interesting is they had product Flags much like you mentioned and they also knew their conversion rate at a certain um at a certain product flag being true so for them they were a project management tool or they are a project management tool for Architects and they knew if a free user had created three projects within the system then the probability of them closing was over 80 percent so with that information then what you do is you go okay what do I have to do to get them to make three projects so I can just get them to make three projects in our average deal sizes X you can do the math and figure out exactly you know based on our LTV and on all of that I'm curious from your perspective you have that level of granularity in your data or is there another way that you kind of of determine when somebody's truly ready to be upgraded to Pro even before they get to um the 20 pods yeah I mean that's really interesting um the the level of data that we've got on our current users doesn't have enough granularity to to understand the triggers yet um obviously our model of 23 pods was us trying to guess that and it and it was a guess you know we were we were thinking okay look if two or three sales people or whoever in a team sign up and they create you know four or five pods each one pod will be one they're messing around with one might be then to actually send to a customer and they'll get that slap notification that the customers opened it and they'll be like whoa this works let's create another one um and then you're like okay well if that's three or four per per user within an organization that hits 20 um and that should be enough so that we're testing I think you know hands up at the moment it maybe it should be 10 free pods maybe it should be 53 pods but we we've gone with 20 and we're we're constantly analyzing that to get that exact flag that you're talking about um so that that's super important to us the other thing important was we read a ton about you know freemium versus uh the the the credit card gate um versus do you break up the product for pro and not pro for us the obvious one is um if you sign up to Pro you get more pods and then if you sign up to Pro Plus you get unlimited pods um we we took the idea and again we're early so we're playing around with this was we never wanted to charge users when they were paying for pods for us a big viral mechanism we hope and we're tracking that as well is their end users their buyer seeing the pods and at the bottom it is powered by trumpet and then signing up like um so our vision at least is as the more pots there are out there in the world the more users we're gonna sign up with a zero CAC um so again we're testing with that at the moment um and at the moment we've just got the one plan and that one plan is all Integrations unlimited pods unlimited users um and we are envisaging ourselves a bit like slack because as you mentioned land and expand for us we start with sales and marketing using having licenses we then move on to customer success and account management using it for onboarding and follow-ups um so then actually rather than just trying to assign them up to higher and higher license fees if we can land in a team of five and finish with a team of 50 in a company and really the only team we don't touch is probably Dev and finance um then that's a pretty powerful place to be yeah really powerful especially uh as you have product virality and your CAC is zero on some of those customers and of course it's you know an incredible uh situation and how has the um that been going so far are you finding that folks are um actually reaching out to you because they received a pod from a seller yes so I think we've had about last time I checked it was about 50 people sign up to the wait list having clicked um and that's bearing in mind we've probably got around a thousand fifteen hundred pods out there at the moment in the wild and you know 50 signing up is is a really positive sign for us um and look is is why you set up your business as well I think the exciting thing about sales is every company needs to know how to sell right you know right you don't just have to be a B2B SAS tool to no selling uh you know if you're d2c you're probably going to be looking at Partnerships that's selling you're probably going to be looking at trying to stock in bricks and mortar that's selling and you know we've got um recruiters using trumpet because they are selling their services to people we've got real estate uh using pods to sell real estate um you know there's just so many facets in the world of selling um which might not be you know traditional selling as we know it um but you know we almost look at it as engagement and selling is one form of Engagement what are the facets of communication could you do with better engagement um we actually you know a good example is we spoke to a head of comms in a big company actually and he was like God I want to send out pods to my business instead of intranet and emails like I can send a personalized pod to the company I can drop in a personalized Loom we can have interactive widgets I can track who's looking at it who's bothering to look at it um so from like an internal com's point of view which is not what we created trumpet for that's just another form of Engagement um and yes sales is just mastering the art of engaging better okay so I just want to quickly recap what you went through because I think it's helpful for people to understand some of the the mechanisms that you're using to grow your own startup because they might be able to apply the same thing especially if they have a product uh LED strategy so the initial one I think makes a lot of sense you have a wait list there's some fomo there fear of missing out people want to be a part of the wait list and that kind of Builds on itself because as the wait list gets bigger it's more desirable the product so you jump onto it I think this is why I have superhuman it's so many people signed up for the wait list and I was like oh I want a piece of this too and finally ended up uh purchasing it so the wait list I love and then when it comes to converting people on the waitlist get them in for free track their behavior and I think that's a part that people might not do early on because it can be a little tricky but I've seen a lot of success and sounds like you're doing this with you know the product flags that you've built out in your solution but I've seen a lot of success around understanding user Behavior within their solution and using that as a trigger to either do direct Outreach through customer success like you guys are doing or through sales depending on the the structure of the organization so I think that's amazing now you start getting more paid people the more people that you have that individual organizations well those organizations are now going to be interested because they already have people who are using the solution and when you have your boots on the ground reps using a solution that they're getting value from and it's increasing their close rates why wouldn't you end up paying for it for the entire team and the final thing I'm going to highlight here because I think it's important is the fact the the product of virality which everybody talks about they're outside oh virology we have a viral product and almost Nobody Does this very very well and one of the things that's really tempting at the early stage right or wrong people can debate this I have an opinion I think it's wrong but as you have higher plans removing branding you really need to think about what you charge to allow them to remove The Branding because what you highlighted here I think is really important is you have a thousand pods out there 50 people have come from those pods that's just wrong number I think especially considering that those 50 people are highly qualified because they received it as a buyer and were so motivated by it that they wanted to implement it themselves so I imagine that's going to be the highest converting channel for you so you have to think really critically about what you charge people to remove The Branding because what you're doing is you're actually pulling that channel out from you especially if they do a lot of sales you know you have a company that is has 10 sales people each one of them are doing 30 meetings every single month well you know that's a lot of potential um uh business that you're leaving on the table so I want to do a quick recap and Dan you can jump in with questions if I miss anything please call that out too but I wanted to make sure that I hammer this home for people who are listening so that they can Implement some of the things that maybe they're not doing yeah I thought that was a great recap uh that's that's uh and actually it reminded me of something where uh we often talk about Traction in terms of very it's it's very much oriented around around really sales and results in in a dollar term but there's also the idea of traction in terms of attention are we you know have you really gotten the audience uh maybe that's the best way to to frame it do you really have that you know uh in hand um one thing Nick I wanted to ask you about just to zoom out a little bit because you're both building you have built uh and you've been investing um I've seen a few tools in the last five years figma was one of them um where they've done something where they really understood their user really understood their user deeply I think canva has done this I think descript is currently doing this uh there are tools that I get very excited about because I feel as though they really understand exactly what their users need and how they operate and you know what what they do I'm curious do you have any specific uh tools that you get excited about or just general trends that you see that you're excited about in terms of this in terms of our space here yeah it's an interesting one I think um look I think in this space that we're operating um it's a it's a nascent space it's a bit of a new space um there's plenty of reports out there the I think it was something like seven in ten uh B2B sales interactions would be digital by 2024. um so you know the the digital selling let's call it um you know you'll hear the bigger Enterprise customers saying like seller enablement and all of that but in a digital selling at its core is going to be huge so I think it's going to be quite a hot space where you'll see quite quite a lot um at all the we use and I actually had no idea about its breath was intercom um you know it's obviously a huge business I I just thought it was a help desk um and a basic one at that that was just my preconception of intercom and you see it on a lot of more d2c sites as well so I thought it was just you know like a basic chat function but you know I really and I'm not paid by intercom but I you know anyone's starting out what we're able to do with them has been so yes the help and our knowledge base um we do our product onboarding in the products through intercom we do the product flags that we've talked about with intercom um and the other great thing about intercom is they're then tracking you because their little chat bot is on every page the actual analytics that intercom gives you on are they creating pods when was the last time they actually came into the product uh what pages are they visiting is really really powerful user data without needing a sophisticated sort of um you know data analytics platform and then you can do email sequencing based off user Behavior so we can start seeing okay well this user has created six pods but they haven't come back into the product for two weeks let's put them on a re-engage sequence um which you can actually set up in in intercom as well so I think they're uh they're a really really powerful tool um that I've been super super impressed with yeah I'm always curious to to know because I feel as though when we watch early stage companies do good things it's exciting right we watch from a distance we're sort of you know we don't know what's going on under the hood and if you um if you sort of take a step back and uh and you're able to connect with people and ask what what tools they actually use it's a big difference it makes a huge difference we were just talking you know before we started recording this uh you know a tool that we're using right now for example and it's a it's very different from Team to team and sometimes it can make or break an entire project and so it's I appreciate you sharing that that's that's very that's very useful I'm sure a lot of people get value out of that yeah I like intercom a lot the company we were talking about before uh that's exactly how they were tracking all their product Flags too and they were routing it just to get technical here for folks that are interested um what they were doing was they routed back the user Behavior into HubSpot and then they used HubSpot workflows to uh notify salespeople of certain Behavior so um you know they had one they had something called an activated account so when somebody was using the solution and they had created that third project then the account became activated which means it was ready for sales to uh to engage which I thought was really really smart because we knew the conversion on activated accounts and then everything became about how do we get as many people activated as possible so technically it was a um something they had built on an intercom they were writing back into HubSpot and then using HubSpot to notify the sales people wasn't in in complex at all and had a really really strong outcome so just something for people to keep top of mind yeah that's that's super cool um and the the question we always have is found is we've actually brought in a third founder uh called Rory into this project he was actually the head of Europe's sales for hot jar um another bootstrapped amazing company um so he's a bit of a sales ninja so that's why he's our third founder um and the discussion we always have he's a bit younger um so obviously knows all the tools that are out there but Andrew and I because we're a bit older and a bit more old school tend to be a bit more sort of gritty so it's that balance as a startup you know not having 16 tools on your p l at the end of the month versus actually what can we just do manually for now use Google Docs use raw data downloads and create our own charts and stuff um versus yeah which one's a business critical um and yeah our workflow yeah is HubSpot canny um intercom I like our main ones at the moment which you can't really recreate yeah that's that's fascinating I I really think that's interesting and you know to the point I mean software costs can go through the roof if you're just kind of buying every every tool for every uh every every need I suppose or every every want maybe yeah and they're all raising their prices now because you're getting cashier from their VCS and people are leaving these Solutions because they're nice to have so that what they're doing is they're doubling the product I've seen doubling of prices because there are some people that actually use the solution enough to justify that which is a really you know it ended becoming pretty expensive especially for startups with the burn rate and stuff like you have to be kind of conscious of this um we think often because oh it's a 30 thing a 40 thing what's the big deal yeah it might not be but you know at a certain point you have to ask yourself how business critical is this uh solution that I'm using and are there parts of another solution that um would be provided the same value great example of this for us is click up you know we use click up for a lot here and click up probably replaces five different tools that people would want to use and I always look to click up before I buy anything because odds are they have it like they do uh you know white what is it the Whiteboard thing you can create flow charts and click up uh they have you can create tables or you don't need air table if you if you put all that stuff in Click up uh they do forms too and not great for like forms on a website but maybe we don't use it for that but maybe we should um but forms for anything else we use uh click up for so there's so many things that you can replace with just one tool that makes that justifies the price of using it and that tool could double its price we'd probably still play or we would still pay because it's so critical to our business and it does replace other tools there's a handful of other tools that I think people feel the same way about Notions another one um anyway just kind of throwing things out there for people but I like um I like these solutions that are starting to integrate a lot more and we're seeing a lot of consolidation in the in the SAS space in general yeah and I think that's when you're talking about Trends I think that is going to be a trend so you know something like Trump is trying to do is yeah consolidate all these tools and you can sort of have a pick a mix of the tools you want that's all centralized within a tool or yeah multi-functional like you know canva have just released a whole new suite as well so it's um trying as you say trying to do the job of five tools so that purchasing decision is a lot easier when uh budgets are a bit squeezed at the moment I want to ask you a quick question here and maybe we're getting close to time so we'll wrap up soon but real quick question just because you you talked to a lot of startups you invest in a lot of startups one of the trends that I'm seeing is um I don't know the technical term people call it but I call it Niche SAS where there's these software platforms that are specific to a very Niche audience and uh the unit economics end up being really strong there because it is a solution that is designed specifically for that industry whether it be architecture or if it's a plumber's for example something like that and since there's such deep knowledge of that specific industry it justifies a 2X price where somebody will pay you can use Asana for 20 bucks a month or you could pay 40 bucks a month for this other tool but since it's so specific to you it ends up working a lot better which justifies the higher price I'm curious are you seeing the same Trend are you investing in any companies like this I just like to get a little nerd stash here people would think we plan this but if if some of my investment content that I put out I'm always talking about niches um I think people especially first-time Founders see the big Winners you know your slacks and all of those and I think okay I want to create the next slack I want to create the next Airbnb Etc um but look depending what the outcome is that you want from your startup um niches for me are exactly what you've said um so the The Specialist The Specialist nature of the software they're building just works for that customer um it's something we had in my previous startup so instead of building software for restaurants to go up against Open Table we built software for bars and no one was building reservation software for bars and bars are a lot more flexible in their reservations you know you push tables together you have standing you have guest lists you have pre-orders um you have VIP um which just doesn't really exist in restaurants so we were like well let's build an incredible system for this and then all the flexibility that we built restaurants will want to use as well so we sort of did that approach the other great thing about niches is it's much easier to build a community um you you know where to go to look for that Community whether it's subreddits or or trade press or whatever um but it's a lot easier to you know get feedback get people to love your product show them that you're really building something for them and not the masses um and I feel like it can go viral a lot quicker in a much smaller Niche versus yeah trying to build a communication tool for the whole world so yeah I I love that Niche um of trying to find software for niches within maybe a big space so as you say you know it's the Asana space but actually I'm building it four places um so not necessarily creating a whole new category but you know like twitch I mean twitch is a great example they didn't mean to but they landed on this niche of Gamers watching Gamers which you know is we it felt very Niche back in the day and now it's just a thing that everyone does if you're a gamer um but you know that was a really really small Niche at that time and that's how they built out that very strong community it started like how large is your Tam and can we get a small percentage of a large Tam and then grow that percentage over time and now it's like well what if we got a larger percentage of a smaller Tam which we probably could because strategically there's no one directly servicing this particular client group so what if we did and then we can actually instead of one percent of a tam of 500 000 companies what if we got 50 of a hundred thousand you know um anyway so just something I think is interesting and I appreciate the feedback uh and the insight there because uh I see the the same kind of trend and you know every founder probably has red crossing the chasm and it is very very clearly outlined like find your Beach head and then you can expand you know to adjacent Industries when it's time but even in the book and people often miss this piece they they talk about having a strong levels or high levels of saturation in the First Market before you start shifting to other ones but there's a lot of pressure I think grow really really quickly and try to capture as much market share of a broader total addressable Market before really you've had saturation in the initial one so anyway just some some insight there yeah I'm really glad you you asked that that's a that's a really good uh and I think a good place to close this off um I think it's it's a we could keep talking about this stuff for uh for hours I I literally just was listening to a podcast about the fishing industry doing the same sort of thing so um Nicks thank you so much for joining us it was really great to have you here uh could you tell us where people could find you yeah no thanks for having me it's good to talk sales um so yeah I'm I'm on LinkedIn so Nick Towson I do a lot of content on LinkedIn that's sort of the only social media I use um and yeah if you want to check out trumpet it's on sendtrumpit.com um and yeah we're really getting through that wait list now so pop yourself on there and you should get access really soon super well thanks again for joining us and uh Kyle thanks to YouTube so much thanks guys [Music] here's your life