How to Get Your First SaaS Customers Without a Product (The Customer Development Framework Nobody Teaches)

My guests today went through that, 18 months, one customer, zero traction, and what he figured out on the other side became the framework he now uses to take SaaS founders from zero to their first real revenue before the product is even finished.

“His name is Colin Stewart. He helped build predictable revenue. He has done the zero to one journey more than once, and today he is breaking down the customer development process that most accelerators skip entirely.”

If you are building something right now, this conversation changes the sequence. Let's unlock it.

Colin, welcome to the show. Today I'm excited because I know you were behind and worked with the guys with predictable revenue, which was a phenomenal book I read back in 2018. I was handed that book, and today you've taken all the things you learned in that time, and you helped founders SaaS companies go from zero to one. You are the go-to-market strategy expert, and in marketing, after going to the market is all about that. Welcome to the show.

“Thanks, Ben. Appreciate you having me on.”

Welcome for being here. So tell us a little bit about your backgrounds. People understand who you are, why I can confidently say you're the go-to-market strategy expert, and what people can expect from listening today. I mean, spent 10 years as a sales guy. I had the opportunity to help two different entrepreneurs start either a company or a division within a company, and got to do like the zero to one journey a couple of times, which was really fun. And then I was going to start mounting, and so 14 years ago, I thought, hey, I'm that geeky kid who's always been who's good at sales who's got pulled into every CRM project. I think I'll build a CRM system, and you know, I'm a guy who knows I can close, and I probably when I started, I'm probably I'm definitely a much better salesperson now than I was when I started, but I thought when I started I was very good.

Turns out that wasn't necessarily an accurate assessment, but there's a whole other bunch of reasons there, but you know, I went 18 months and I had to only close one deal trying to see our M system that was like my idea.

“And that was that was hard because, you know, you go from like a million and a half dollar year 240% quota, like all that kind of stuff, like you're just used to performing and then to go from that to zero's you're like, hmm, this feels different.”

And so, you know, moralizing really, moralizing, and so I mean, honestly, it was my like start up founder education, you know, if I would have just headed off the, if that tool made it to any sort of revenue, I would be an unsufferable asshole right now. Okay. It was a humbling experience. I'm pretty sure, and I hate admitting this, but I'm pretty sure I said the words, the Steve Jobs of CRM, like more than months, at least I said it a bunch up here, and it was just the, it gives you an idea of like the cocky arrogant mindset that I had kind of coming into this and that 18 months of like not delivering anything of value really chips away at that, which I think was a valuable experience.

Yeah, I actually don't want to talk about that, because I know a lot of people start note, go, you have almost feel like you kind of have to go through that, you know, I don't want to get really lucky. You're going to go through the pain first before you get to the pleasure, but my question is why, why did you stay in it for 18 months if you weren't making, you know, we know in business the first thing to do is, you know, sell, right, like no sales, no business.

So I'm wondering, what, what kept you in the game for so long for 18 months, and then when was it when you're like, go, this is definitely not going to work.

Insanity, stubbornness, like, I refusal to quit. I'm like, I'm not very good at quitting anything, you know, whether it's, you know, giving up on a board game, taking a joke to far being like the last guy at the party, because people like, hey, it's like morning, you need to, you need to get out of here. Yeah, I call it the athlete DNA and it's one of the biggest factors, which is you hate to lose more than you love to win. A hundred percent, everybody, everybody hates to lose.

When it's fun temporarily, losing sucks, terrible. Yeah, a hundred percent.

And like, so it was part of that, and it was part of like, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I enjoy sales. I hated selling for somebody else. And like, just feeling that value creation, go to somebody else.

I also didn't enjoy that. I like, cake and grats, like, I had one good quarter, I closed a million and a half in a quarter,

and which was like, I've already hit like I'm already 150 percent or whatever it was, or I don't know. I was a hundred and something percent of quarter for the year in Q1. And like, Q3, they were going to fire me. I was like, guys, this is like long sales cycles. Yeah, I just happened to have everything lined up and a deal came in early. Otherwise, it would have been like half and half, and we'd be not stressed about anything.

I'm like, so you're punishing me because I got lucky and some client, like, instead of an 18 month sales cycle, it was a set of months sales cycle. Is that what we're talking about here? And so it just, I didn't enjoy that side of it. I like, really enjoyed the sales side. I really enjoyed the learning piece.

And then I just felt like I capped out. You know, you like, you get good. It was like snowboarding. I got good at it. And then I'm like, okay, this isn't as interesting anymore. Because I feel like I can go into around the mountain and like,

that's such a Canadian reference, but I can go anywhere on the mountain.

And I'm not really worried about it. And it just felt like I wasn't getting any better. And once I'm not getting any better anymore, then I just wasn't interesting. And so again, they wanted something harder. I wanted something where I wasn't resetting the clock back down to zero every year of, like, okay,

you know, good good job sales person. You were 140% last year. You know, now you're back to zero percent in January. And I just, I hated that, like, you work for the year and then it resets. Whereas like, I love the idea of you work your ass off and it's building something. And then the harder you work, the higher probability, it builds towards something that's sustainable.

And, and keeps going.

“And that's, I think, one of the things that that was probably the biggest driver of, like,”

what kept me going is like, I knew I could go back to sales. I, at the same time, I had my, my old boss. So I told, I'm not coming back, but he would still text me monthly. Like pictures of commission checks. I mean, like yours would be bigger.

Wow, yeah. So let me ask you this, what was the pivot? When, when you, you're, so you're 18 months in, you, yeah, at some point you got to realize you got to wave the white flag, right? You know, you don't want to, but you do.

And then you have this pivot. And then where does it go from there? So I was at this coworking space. And one of the mentors there sat me down and said, I can't wait until you're working on something where you have a chance of being successful.

I was like, oh, that hurts. And it kind of, it was kind of one of those moments where you just had to realize you pull your head, head out of your ass. I mean, like, okay, you know what, if everybody is saying this, that I'm doing it wrong, I'm probably doing it wrong.

And the results kind of point to, I'm doing it wrong. And so I was like, all right, the stubbornness approach isn't working. I need to do something different. And when I took the time to, like, because I, I'd gotten into this, like, you know, before nine, nine, six was the thing.

I was working, like, all the time. Like, if we was more than nine, nine, six, because I would get, I'd get to the office at like eight in the morning. I'd get home at 11 or 12 o'clock at night. And like, I would do that five days a week.

And then I'd work on the weekends from home, or sometimes I'd go into the office. It was really busy. So it was like, working all the time.

“And I think one of the things, like, there's an upside to having that kind of capacity”

to just like grind. But I think the downside is you get so, you get so worn down. You don't have your good brain to, like, really pull back and focus on, like, am I grinding towards the right thing? And I think I maybe got caught in that loop a little bit.

Someone Roger had that conversation with me. I pulled my head in my ass. I was like, okay, well, what is it that I'm doing wrong? Like, what is the fundamental thing? And reflecting, talking to customers, talking to the team,

it was that I was showing them what I'd built and said, hey, look at this cool thing. Isn't this a great cool thing that I built? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, cool. I did customer validation. I showed them the thing.

They went, yeah, validated. And I did that a lot. And I realized that that's not how you do customer validation or customer development.

“That's how you do look at my idea, isn't it cool?”

Thanks. And how you get, you know, interview 150 people in zero of them by from you.

And so the realization was, I needed to ask them questions and not share what I was working on first.

And because the crazy part is, like, in another piece of, like, why I kept going is I knew I was right. Fundamentally, the core insight I had was the transition from CRM being something you installed on your laptop, something that you accessed in the cloud. And keep in mind, this is 2012 when we were talking, the timeline we're talking about.

So CRM is Salesforce. Your Clouds, your MS Salesforce. And you're accessing it through Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or Google Chrome, which is like Chrome was good at the time. But most people in the enterprise were using IE7 or whoever it was Internet Explorer 678. And like, it was 28 clicks to create an account, create a contact and send them an email in Salesforce.

And it was my personal productivity tool.

It was my role at X. It was like my daily planner, my agenda, like my pen and paper. And suddenly they were gone. Now my boss kept them in his office and said, I'm going to tell you how to organize your agenda. I'm going to tell you how to organize all your things.

“And now you have to use this crappy web UI.”

And so it stopped being a personal productivity tool for us salespeople. And it started becoming a sales tool from my managers. And as somebody who identifies as salesperson, I took that personally. And I didn't like that. And so I think the insight was correct.

But I think I was like, I was also wrong at the same time. And so if we kind of, if I had to roughly guess, I was about 40% correct in like the whole vision of everything in 60% wrong. And so 40% right in that the insight was sales source is in a personal productivity tool. And then the 60% wrong was how I wanted to solve that problem.

Okay.

And the thing that I got wrong was like my idea of how to solve it was terrible.

I was like, hey, replay sales force with my new sassy around here. And we were like, no, make your tool work with our sales force. And I was like, no, that's the wrong model. Then I'd argue with them, like an idiot. And so when I realized, hey, stop arguing with them.

Start and listening to them. You might do a whole lot better. And turns out, I did. We started listening to people. We started interviewing them.

We were pretty stuffed at the time. And we made the call to stay bootstrapped. And because we had terrible metrics. We were going to raise nobody knew who we were. We were in Vancouver.

The VC game in Vancouver was they were here. But it was there were some pretty barbaric term sheets being handed out. Like, like, about a giveaway 60% of his company for 400k. Like, pretty not good stuff. And so it just wasn't worth our time to go out and try and raise.

And we figured we could bootstrapped it. And so I started asking people questions about, hey, I'm going to do this process manually for you. This thing that I did to book all those 150 customer development emails, was I'd write Aaron's book, a predictable revenue.

And I was cold emailing folks, cold emailing. I was hitting him up on LinkedIn. And then the hypothesis was, well,

“you know, who has this sales productivity problem the most?”

Who has to do the most clicks and sales force? And this was my CTO's question to me. I was like, oh, hands down at CSTR's, right? Like, it's such a crazy workflow. Outreach didn't exist. Sales left didn't exist.

Think about all the stuff those things do for you. They get updated in sales force. And people were like, man, you will be copying and pasting and logging emails. Sales force still does that. You know, I don't get me started on sales force.

We're going to not talk about sales force. Okay. Moving on. Yeah. And that's for stay away. And so once we had this focus of, hey, it sales development reps, right?

This is, they have the personal productivity problem the most. Let's start talking to people about solving this. And let's find a way of solving this manually. So I don't have to ask the engineering team, like Preston, Francesco, or my two co-founders.

Hey, can you build some shit that people might buy? Cause we did 18 months of like chasing features of like building shit for customers that might buy from us. And as embarrassed because like they bought zero of them. And I asked those guys to do a crap ton of work. And what it led to was nothing.

And so it was like, all right, here's the deal. We're going to try this pivot. I'm going to see if I can find five people to give me 500 bucks a month. And I'll do it Wizard of Oz style. Like fully manual paying attention to the man behind the curtain.

And like if I can find five, that's a strong enough signal that there's a, it's worth us building a tool around this. And I went and I sat down and interviewed five people. And two of those five people bullied me into letting their friend join the beta. And I was like, huh, we got to give you 1800 dollars in revenue.

“I think we were up to like 1800 bucks a month in revenue from the CRM product from our first customer.”

And now we got triple that in a month. For one month and it was all manual was like that. That sounds, that sounds interesting. And so we did that, we finished that pilot. And like, is hectic.

It was me twisting the knobs cranking that out. Like it was, it was nuts. And we finished up and it was like end in November. And my buddy James goes, I gave you 500 bucks for this. I was like, yeah, is like, what if I gave you 10 grand?

It's like a good, I couldn't handle it. It was a manual. Like manual, this building manual, sending manual. I can imagine, yeah. It was nuts.

I literally couldn't handle it. I think I talked to him down to 5k because I was like, I want to take your money because I like money. And I would like to afford to meet this month. But also, you know, it's producing value.

So let's do it. And so that was the like first indication that we were on something. And so we built that out as a service.

We ramped that zero to a million in ARR and like services revenue.

Yeah. In a year and along the way we built out the SaaS platform that was going to be the sales

Well, we didn't know sales loft outreach existed at the time.

“I think they might have had a year head start on us.”

And sales loft was working on there. Well, it's just called sales loft at the time. This is pre the pivot to cadence. And then outreach was a recruiting tool that was using outreach to send emails to candidates to like four on behalf of recruiters.

So they both kind of pivot into the space. I think around the time when we were running the service. I hit on the same idea around the same time. And then when we started like we got the business that bootstrap business up and running. And then when I started interviewing potential customers about the software tool.

Man, it was like people were trying to pull it out of me. They're like, this is this ready. Can I use it? I want to test it.

Like is the first people I asked about customer development interviews?

Or about like, hey, I want to pick your brain about X and Y. I think it was like SDR productivity or something like that or sales force automation. I think it was the term of the day back there. Yeah, it's like, I want to talk about your SFA and like how you're doing it. And people were like stopping me.

They're like, wait, are you building a tool to do this? I was like, can I ask, I don't want to, I don't want to skew the sample. Can I ask a couple questions first and like, no, tell me if you're building this. Interesting. And there was this like, they were like stopping me.

And they're like, are you working on this? Promise me you're working on this. And I was like, oh, that's a really good signal that like, I don't have to fight with them about you doing it wrong. You know, they're just telling me that build this thing.

I'll give you money. And so we had paying customers for like alpha, crappy product. Like very, very, very early. So there's a nuance here.

“For people listening, I think it's very important to hear this nuance.”

Because we're already talking about the go to strategy. Well, the go to strategy. And what I'm hearing, I want you to talk about this because I know we talked about this before, but I think it's super important is you're actually calling out to who you know has the problem that you want to solve.

And instead of calling and saying, hey, I got a pro, you know, I got a pro to solve your problem. You're totally flip it upside down and say, hey, I want to interview you. I want to understand what's going on. I'm thinking of maybe being able to solve this thing.

Can I have 10, 15 minutes your time? Yep. Yeah. And I would call that customer development. And this is like you can read about this in the mom test or any of Steve blanks books on like, how and where to focus.

The thing that I think that I think I got wrong was like, I'm tactically. I was thinking of it as customer validation, which is like, hey, this is the thing I built, you know. The, when I started getting it right, what I realized was with the books don't. Teach you is that you're talking to potential customers.

But all the books just kind of say, hey, go interview people. And then that's step one. And then step two is build a sales team and go sell it. And I was like, but what about all these people?

“And honestly, that thought didn't connect to before me until after the”

fact, when like the second time going around, everybody who I interviewed.

I shouldn't say everybody, but a high percentage of people that I had interviewed, turned into paying customers. And then the next time I was going through it, I was like, well, that seems like a pretty strong signal of like the people that go through this as a funnel. And like, you know, I had a couple way to couple clients in the services business that kind of

showed me that like product market fit is not binary. And like, it exists on a, I had this argument with founders all the time. They would hire us to do like, call the email for them. I'm like, I don't think this is going to be helpful because you don't know who you want to email.

If you don't know who you want to email. If you're, if you're, you're trying to sell like accounting software. And we're emailing farmers in Nebraska. It's not like it doesn't matter how good the messaging is. And so I kept fighting with founders of like you don't have product market fit.

And they are like, no, no, of course we have product market fit.

And I finally ate help the experience to help kind of sharpen that was when

Uber launched Uber eats their VP of sales. Their new VP of sales was one of our old customers. And Steve can't move. Like, hey, I need this. Can you, like, I need, I need the check, the checkmate.

Yeah, I need the checkmate deal. But I need it from my new company. I was like, oh, cool. Have it to help. Who's the new company?

Uber. I was like, oh, the shit. And they were launching Uber everything. Is what they initially called it. And when we, the cut-along story short in the first month,

we booked so many meetings that it broke everything. A typical account strategist for us would handle like five to ten customers and book like 60 meetings a month total across those like five to ten customers. And when Uber started, Uber booked 327 meetings in the first month. You know what?

I was like, okay, did Kristen magically get like six X better?

And more? Is there something special about Uber?

And like, Kristen's amazing.

She was definitely our best account strategist. That's why she got the Uber account.

“But like, like, how do you, who do you give the credit to?”

It was very clearly Uber. It was very, very clearly. The, all the stuff that they had done with the brand with the positioning with the offer. Everybody knew who they were. And the offer was, would you like to save money?

And could we make you some more money? Just like the best offer, right? You don't have to pay a delivery driver anymore. And we're going to bring you customers. Is the only offer I've seen that hits on like two of the three kind of core value drivers,

which would be like, make money, save costs reduce risk. Right? They had two of the three. And it's really hard to, it's very rare to see a real two out of three value driver. But anyway, so who gets the credit?

Kristen or Uber? We came to the conclusion that Uber gets the credit. And that was kind of the seed of the idea that product market fit has the strength. And it's not zero or one.

“It's like zero to one to Uber, which is like 150.”

And like, okay, so there was that idea. And then when you look at like Uber God from their investment, they got the same, roughly the same service that everybody else was getting. But they got, I don't know, 20x more results out of that same investment. And so that's where the second idea came from, which was that the stronger your,

your stronger your product market fit is the easier your go to market is going to be. Hands down. Yeah, every salesperson knows this, right? If everybody needs the product, if everybody wants the product, it's going to be easier to sell.

But it was not obvious to me at the time, especially in the CRM days, where I was like trying to sell this thing nobody wanted. And I was like, man, why is this nobody buying? Because nobody friggin wanted this thing that I was selling. Suddenly, you find an opportunity that a lot of people want.

It's very easy to sell. Product market fit is a multiplier of all your go to market efforts. Everything, marketing, sales, whatever. Any go to market channel, tactic, anything. And this, it's a multiplier.

And this is why you can't learn anything from LinkedIn, because just because it worked for somebody on LinkedIn, who's working at Snowflake, or any major company that you've heard of, rippling, do not copy tactics from rippling. The things that they are doing, I've seen some of their stuff.

I've talked to their CRO, know the benchmarks that they're hitting,

and they're doing like amazing work.

They've got incredible people. They've got a really strong tailwind because they're rippling, right? Like the reply rates they get are circa 2015.

“That's what they're getting like industry-standard benchmarks from 2015,”

which is incredible because, cool, they mill now is very, very hard. And like, yeah. So it's a multiplier of your go to market. And so if that is true, then for folks like, for any entrepreneur that's out there, I mean, I know you're building something.

I'm building a bunch of things. What's the best thing that we can do, right? Obviously, we have that conversation. Not for me, but for the audience as well. Like, what is the best thing?

Because it's funny when you say email marketing, because I know it works because it works for companies. I don't understand how it works because it doesn't work for me. I won't even go on LinkedIn because every message I have is a sale. So I don't even go on LinkedIn.

Yeah. I don't check my emails because I get bombarded probably 40, 50 emails a day. And wild emails. Like, people who've gone out of their way and like done looms on my website. People who've like given me scripts.

Like, they've written me scripts to use. And they've done like SEO search. Like the year, like, wow, like so much work goes into it. But you get it all day. How do you stand out of the crowd?

Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of relationship first prospecting and not trying to sell folks. And not trying to start off the relationship with a, hey, let's, let me sell you some shit. You know, like, if after this podcast, you told me you're like, hey, Colin, I've got something that's, I've got a tool that's perfect for go to market consultants.

You know, that help startups goes your own mind. I'd be like, oh, wow. Yeah, I'd have a look at that. And now I'm in your funnel, right? But we met through this podcast.

We've created the relationship first. Then we do business later. And to me, that's the thing that's working. You know, like, I help not crazy amount of clients, but like, I've got a bunch of clients right now.

And start up zero to million, help them do the thing.

And the relationship first prospecting thing is the thing that's working really well across the board. Can be done with a number different channels with a bunch of different mediums. It doesn't have to be a podcast. I can send a, for, I can send you a link for the show notes. I've got a blog post on my newsletter.

I think it's just called relationship first prospecting founders edition.co.

You'll find the, find it there. But that's the thing. And like, if you're super, super early,

“you know what a great way to start off our relationship is?”

Hey, can I pick a brain? I don't know what I'm going to build yet. But I think I'm going to build something in your space. Can I have some advice from you? And like, that's just the very, very, very, very tip of the spear.

It starts with customer development.

And then after you interview them for the first time,

you say, you know, when I figure out if I'm going to focus on this, would you be opening to give me some feedback on that next thing? You know, on the idea. And if it's a cashier, I really appreciate it. Then you go do the focus interview.

Say, hey, we decided to focus on this. Can I ask you some questions? Great. At the end, hey, when I got a rough sketch, would you give me some feedback on that?

They go, yeah, sure. I like this calling. When I show them the rough sketch, they're like, that's ugly as shit. I'm like, I know, but it's not built yet.

It'll get better.

“If I built this, would this be 10x better than what you currently have?”

Yes or no, if they say yes, great. I'm going to go build that.

When I build it, would you be open to giving me feedback on my crappy first version?

They say yes. I show them the crappy first version. Say, what features do I need to build in order for you to use this full time? And actually get that 10x value. I listen.

Great. Next interview. Built those features. What do I got to build to give you some money? Also, give me some money right now.

Yeah. And then I'll do this. I do this. Yeah. I've done this a bunch.

You got to curate. The biggest thing is curate in the list. I would say is making sure you're speaking to the right people. Yeah. Yes and no.

Okay. So the thing, there's one thing I do at the end. We'll come back to that. Where this came from is my training as a salesperson. Every salesperson knows at the end of the call.

You put the next step. And I was just doing this naturally and not even noticing it. And people in the, I remember being in launch Academy as this co-working space. And it was surrounded by engineers. It's like 2012.

There's like everybody's in engineers. They're rubbing on rails. So no JS and arguing about all these different things. No SQL databases. Yeah.

Okay. Came out on people. Like, oh, Mongo's crap. I'm just like, I don't know any of this meets. And I remember my buddy Matt asked me.

He's like, do what the hell are you doing all day? I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you're talking to people all day long. How do you get anything done? I was like, I'm talking to potential customers.

“That's like, that's what I'm talking to.”

I'm interviewing them. Then I booked the next step. And so one person, I keep interviewing.

But at the end of every conversation, I always book the next step.

And then if they seem into it. And asians, I if they seem, especially in the early days. I always ask for a referral. Hey, cave on who should I talk to next about this? Do you know anybody else who's struggling with this?

Yeah. And that was the biggest thing because you could start with the worst list in the world. You could start with your like, pick your parents. Pick like two people they know and then you ask them. And then you ask, you know, you interview those people and say, hey, do you know two people that I could interview about this?

And then every round you get closer and closer and closer to the target customer because you're just relying on people that know people. And so you're starting list can be like, you know, just a few people. And as long as you're asking for referrals and you're connecting with enough people that are connected enough. Like eventually you'll get the list has a self healing kind of quality to it. It gets better and better and better the deeper you get.

And so I at the end of every interview, I ask for the next step and then I ask for a referral. Yeah, I mean, you're giving all the good the good stuff right here. As you're going through that, I kept thinking I said, do I want to put them on the spot and so and go, well, hey, if you're this good. Right, and you're and I could tell you're so confident behind this. Why don't we do a live case study for our viewers and our listeners and say, we come back again.

And we actually do this and and use it as a case study for you and for people to see how when done right the effectiveness of it. Sure. Yeah, what do you want to do? Like how do you want to do that? Well, I think we'll tell you we'll have that call. I would say offline to disinsure the right fit, but I want to leave the the guests hanging here.

And I think it'd be interesting for them to say if they've been hang with us this long going, all right, we're going to go do this. The goal is we're going to do this and we're going to show you how we do this live on episodes. I, until it's successful and show you that with the right systems of place that tools in place, it can be easier than you think. For sure. You can also, yeah, I've got some some stuff I can share at the end, but yeah, I have to happily do that.

Well, as we are coming there, I was going to ask if for people that are saying they, you know, maybe they're thinking about they want to go to zero one right now, they can use this strategy. They don't want to wait. Where can they get some information?

So that's a good spot. Obviously the book terrifying art defining customers, you can I think it's terrifying art calm or terrifying art finding customers on Amazon.

“I can send you a deck that I've done in a couple of start up accelerators recently and it's slip skip to slide 15 and it lays out the customer development funnel.”

And so I found that I was kind of doing this naturally and then when I work with founders on like how to do this, they typically need to see it. And so I can share this deck with you. We can throw it in the show notes. Anybody can take a look and you can see my customer notes and my silly jokes and my all of that.

So happy to share that. Yeah, if that would be helpful.

I do want to add one thing to the customer development funnel because we didn't finish. I didn't finish that kind of idea. Absolutely. Please ask for money because what we're looking for here right like if we step back of like why do we think why do I think of this as a funnel right what we're looking at is the number of people we put into the top of the funnel. And how many people make it to the bottom right when you offer hey let's take let's take the next step are people like hell yeah let's do it or they say and know.

And if nobody is taking that next call it's a very strong indication that you're not working on a pain that's important enough to them.

“And so that would be that's why I think about it as a funnel is you want to look at the ratio of like once one level to the next.”

So you can see like what is the volume of people what is a conversion rate from one stage to the next and then how quickly what's the velocity how quickly do they move. I would say maybe keep going because I would say it's easier than ever with AI to actually have the real conversations of not actually having a progged developed but having idea and having your target market picked out. As they are literally telling you this you can start working on it like gone the days as you know waiting eight nine twelve months fifty thousand dollars to build a software you can build a software and overnight.

So I think it's important that people understand that like you can do this starting today you can curate the problem the person you want to help start having those conversations and start off with like which I here and from you is conversation one is hey can I pick your brain. Yeah yeah and that's the easiest way and if you do get to the end of the customer funnel and you get the get some money from them the next thing is what features do I need to build to get you to refer me to three of your friends.

The ask to the for the referral never ends because if you think about to my think back if I think back to my car experience we went zero to a million in a rr in three months selling five hundred dollar a month deals a lot it's not a crazy amount but it's still. That's good volume it was a lot in his fast and there's no way we generated that number of meetings like we had a very high close rate and so in and like I'm saying this not as like I'm the greatest salesperson in the world. The product did 95 percent I just showed up and didn't screw it up right that was my role as a salesperson you could have had an old loaf of bread on these sales calls and it's still what a close to 80 percent of the deals so.

“But I think in what you're saying is you didn't have that many calls a lot of those deals came through networks and a referral networks and asking the question who else in your network needs this product that's one of the biggest actually.”

I saw a study on that exact thing where there was a there was a sales team that and there was one guy that was just out selling everybody and the manager you know after a couple months like. I couldn't figure it out looking at the numbers couldn't figure it out and then start listening to calls and realize the one thing. That changed everything that no other salesman was doing at the end after they said yes yes that right who else in your network do you know. So use this double the sales of everybody else on the team with the cream about the bookings. Yeah, I mean one question you if you don't ask you never know. Yep, and I candidly I didn't even have to ask that very many times because.

We got to the point where we have a close customer and like three days later two people would reach out me like case Steve just told us about carb they bought and we went in. Like we were in technically in beta like the whole time and because and it just it exploded with growth. So how many quite how many meetings would you say I got and I get think the question is as many as you can get but like what would you say it's three four. How many meetings on average are you having with somebody from the moment you say hey, I pick your brain to them hoping that you continue to move that meeting forward. Yeah, I mean.

Let's say I'm currently doing this with I'm going very deep with three people right now.

I started the process about a just over a year and a half ago.

We're doing the customer development it's an email platform so it's taken some time to like you want to build it stable you can't you can't just like five code this like I could probably code something that would look exactly like our tool very quickly and it wouldn't work very well.

“I tried it didn't work at all so I'll put that there.”

I started the customer development process and like this November December of 2024 we spent all of 2025 interviewing folks and then about six months ago I had three people picked out and said okay these are going to be the three like design partners and we meet monthly they give me feedback on all these things I probably met with Lance and Sarah and AJ. Wow 25 times because we want to learn and we're getting deep in it's there's lots of work flow there's lots of stuff to learn and so for these folks for these first folks they're getting a very hands on like get to know call in approach.

“For you know other folks I've probably done two to three and we got to a point where I was like okay I think I've learned enough.”

I would have gotten farther but like the product isn't ready to sell yet and so I don't want to I don't want to create too much momentum that I can't capture on.

And so as we get closer and now that we're getting closer I've started to pick up and actually I've been doing a podcast as well and the folks from the podcast are folks that I've been reaching out to to get them to give me some feedback on what I'm working on.

“Yeah you might have to get I'll give you some feedback.”

Yeah. I'm your by well listen we're going to leave in the call show notes for people can get you again thanks for stopping by I'm looking forward to seeing how we can do maybe a possibly a case study together and get it out to the world for you.

For sure give on thanks for having me on man.

Thank you.