Are you spending enough time focusing on your go-to-market strategy?
Go-to-Market is one of the most underappreciated parts of building a business.
In this /Founders Focus episode, You Mon Tsang, founder and CEO of ChurnZero, shares his experience bringing four companies to market.
Get a crash course on how you should be thinking about your go-to-market strategy.
🎬 Rather watch? Catch the video recording: https://bit.ly/3rxJauQ
💡 Read key takeaways: https://bit.ly/3yd4rwb
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✈️ This episode is brought to you by Upside Business Travel. Upside offers a free platform that allows you and your team to book, manage, and track business travel in one place.
Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co-founder of Upside. And we created Founders Focus to share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by the awesome team at Upside.
Scott Case 0:20
I am delighted to have our co-host today, You Mon Tsang, who is the founder and CEO of ChurnZero. Every SaaS company on Earth would like to have churn zero. But You Mon, why don't you tell us a little bit about you, and a little bit about your background and we'll dive into your entrepreneurial story.
You Mon Tsang 0:41
Yeah, you bet. Thanks, Scott, for having me. I love love talking to other entrepreneurs. This is my fourth company, so I still love it and will talk about it all day long. So just a little bit about me. I'm a first generation immigrant, my parents were from China. And I have been a software entrepreneur for probably coming on three decades now. For companies all kinds B2B, B2C, selling enterprise, selling SMBs. I was bit by the entrepreneurial bug, and I still have it. So excited to really talk about any topics you want to today, Scott.
Scott Case 1:25
Awesome. Well, let's start by telling us a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. You talked about having started four different companies, so take us through them. And then tell us a little bit about ChurnZero and what you're up to now.
You Mon Tsang 1:39
Yeah. Growing up, a lot of people sort of say that you're born an entrepreneur. What I'll probably say is that once you are an entrepreneur and you really do enjoy it, it's hard to get out of it. But it wasn't obvious to me that I was going to be an entrepreneur when I was a teenager or even coming out of college. I worked hard, you know, so being a first generation immigrant, I worked at my dad's restaurant from when I was young. Every summer, my parents work, you know, six days a week, 12 hours a day. And, so that was baked into me as a person.
You Mon Tsang 2:21
I knew that I was going to be working hard. It was when I actually was getting my MBA from Cal Berkeley and I was really roped in right there by the tech internet boom. And the tech internet boom was happening and it felt like just the whole Wild West was just opened up. And so I started my first company with someone I had met at a software company. And we said, we got to do this, right, like, there's all this amazing stuff going on, you know, these old fogies that don't know what they're doing, they're missing out on all this and so let's go ahead and create a product.
You Mon Tsang 2:55
And Scott, I don't know if you remember, but back then, getting on the internet cost $3.95 an hour and you plugged in your phone, and it ate up your phone line. And so my first company was a utility that basically dialed up in the middle of the night, so it didn't actually take up your phone line and then downloaded all the news you were going to read for that day, you know, you just told us what news sites you were going to read and we would download it in the middle of night so when you're in the morning, first of all, it was cheaper, because we did all at once, so we probably spent half an hour downloading all your news sites rather than you spending $3.95 an hour downloading and reading the news. So we saved your money, we untied up your line and then when you were reading your news, it was super fast. And I love that product. It still my favorite product. I thought it was the best thing I've ever seen, the most innovative thing I've ever done. And that was sort of the beginning of decades of being an entrepreneur.
You Mon Tsang 4:01
I've done a lot since then. I've been in social media, you know, when Twitter first came around, I thought that was gonna be really interesting for businesses so I got into social media marketing. I was in marketing analytics. So when the internet continued I thought, you know, businesses really need to really understand what's going on. So I started a marketing and PR analytics company. And right now my current company, ChurnZero, we help b2b subscription businesses fight churn. And you know, so we basically get all the data about your customers, let you know if they're healthy or not, and make sure that they have the best customer experience they can so they renew with you and they expand and you know buy more with you. And so it's exciting company right now and as you know SaaS is very popular and really hot and so the company is growing quickly. We're just going to reach 100 employees on June 1, we'll be 100 employees, and we're doubling every year. So excited about that, you know, anyone who's interested in fighting churn should definitely reach out to me.
Scott Case 5:09
That's awesome. So, you started ChurnZero, what was the inspiration? What's the origin story? Like, what were you doing right before and what made you decide that that was the next company to start?
You Mon Tsang 5:23
Yeah, so, a tip for entrepreneurs is, you know, you always think what the other person is doing is more interesting, right? The grass is always greener on the other side. But the best companies are the ones where you're solving a pain that you really understand and know. And so before ChurnZero, I was at a company called Vocus. Vocus was a PR analytics company, actually here in DC. And they had bought my previous company, and we were seeing a churn problem among our SMB clients, and, we just didn't have a whole lot of technology to bring to bear on the problem, like marketers had all kinds of technologies, salespeople had all kinds of technology. But you know, customer facing people did not, right, they were, here's your email, here's a phone, go service to customers. And so, that was really inspiration for me, you know, having a real technology background, why can't we bring that level of sophistication, that level of technology to help our customers, right? If anything, we should bring the best technology to help our customers. It just turns out, we were bringing our best technology to land the customers, you know, for the prospects and potential customers. And then once we had customers, we didn't do it.
You Mon Tsang 6:41
So it was a real problem. The essence of ChurnZero, the concept of ChurnZero, we basically built it internally sort of cobbling together different systems, a little bit of technology, and we actually took a real big bite out of churn. And we thought, this is interesting, and when the company was bought out by a PE firm, the CTO and myself said what we just did there was really interesting, other SaaS companies are going to want it so let's go ahead and start a company. So the lesson there is, it was a real pain, we took a big shot at, you know, sort of cobbled together version to fight that pain, it made a difference, we felt like there was a market there. And so we started a company to solve that problem. And I find that that's a great way to solve, you know, to start companies is actually a problem that you know intimately and that you're fighting, it gives you a better shot at actually being successful.
Scott Case 7:43
I love that. I talk a lot about with entrepreneurs about falling in love with the problem, right, really deeply understanding it. But if you fall in love with the problem, you'll find a solution to it in most cases, you just work it hard enough. But if you fall in love with your solution and that fails, then you become disappointed. And, Upside Business Travel, part of the reason we started the company was myself and my co founders, we traveled for business our whole careers, we always worked in small companies, we never had anybody to help us, and it was always a terrible experience, because we were treated like leisure customers but yet we were business travelers, we have the same needs that an IBM salesperson did, but nobody gave a shit about us. So that place where you feel the pain for your customer is such a big place to start, doesn't have to be that way.
You Mon Tsang 8:29
But you felt it, it also felt like it was a deep pain too, Scott, like it really bothered you, so those are the best things to solve.
Scott Case 8:36
Yeah, they drive you nuts. Now, I'm also driven nuts by lots of things. So at some point, I'm going to reinvent the self checkout at the grocery store, because it makes me want to cry every time I do it.
Scott Case 8:48
So let's talk about something that I think a lot of entrepreneurs either misunderstand or don't understand or haven't thought about it this way. And the theme for today is generally go to market. And so while we've talked about churn, which is sort of after the customers, the go to market piece of the puzzle is largely misunderstood. And so I want to kind of unpack it, because some people think of it as is that your marketing plan? Is that advertising? Is it your sales organization? Even in the churn space, is that your part of your customer success team? So when you think of go to market, how do you define that for an entrepreneur?
You Mon Tsang 9:25
Yeah, and I think you're right, it is fairly misunderstood. And partially just because, well, I'll tell you what I think it is and then I'll tell you why I think it's been misunderstood, because I agree with your point.
You Mon Tsang 9:38
So go to market is really the business strategy and plan for your organization to market, sell, and deliver your product or service to not only your customers but to your prospective customers. So I'll say that again. That's really the strategy and plan for your organization to market, sell and deliver your product and service to customers and prospective customers. I mean, that's really big, right? I mean, and it's almost everything except building the product and service so development and product, and, G&A. Almost everything else is going to market.
You Mon Tsang 10:16
The reason why I think it's misunderstood, because it's really such a big problem and they're all interconnected. And it's different, whether you're b2b or b2c, it's different depending on a vertical you're in. So there's really a lot of just a tremendous amount of customization and nuance in each person's go to market. It is absolutely worth talking about with entrepreneurs, because go to market is the most under appreciated thing when you start a company. You think about the product, you focus on the product, you're focused on the solution, and you forget about the go to market. So, it's really important that we focus on this.
You Mon Tsang 10:57
And, by the way, it happened to me. You know that product that I told you about that dialed in the middle of night, such a great product, but guess what I've got a market was? Our go to market back then was to put it on a floppy disk, shove it into a box, and someone bought it for $39.95 at these computer software stores, okay, that was our go to market. Wasn't a bad go to market, but it was a go to market that was going extinct. The new go to market was you download it off the internet, you paid nothing for it, and then you showered ads on it. And so about three months after it, you know, I won all these awards for this product, right? innovate on a product, the product was genius. My go to market was just whipped by this other I'm just gonna say a terrible product, but was easy to get to, got to the customer over the Internet, and was free ad supported, rather than buying a shiny box with a floppy disk for $39.95. So I fell into that trap. And now I really focus a lot on go to market.
Scott Case 12:13
My very first startup that I joined, we fell into the same thing, we didn't really understand our go to market strategy. And we didn't understand all the pieces of the puzzle. So we thought running a quarter page black and white ad in the key trade magazine. And putting an 800 number on it. This was pre internet, putting a number on there and waiting for the phone to ring was our go to market strategy, which is we ended up figuring it out over time. But looking at it like to your point, looking at the entire strategy and looking at all the components of it.
Scott Case 12:45
So I'm curious, what do you think are the 1-2-3 sort of steps that are the most important things to start with as you're thinking about your go to market plan?
You Mon Tsang 12:58
Yeah, no doubt. So I'm going to focus on post product, right. A good product that means something for somebody allows you to birth your startup, alright, that gives you permission to get started. And so, it's far far more likely that the go to market is the reason your startup actually becomes an ongoing entity, right? And as I said earlier, go to market is just so different, everyone's going to do it a different way.
You Mon Tsang 13:31
I'm actually going to focus on four stages of a go to market. And I'm going to focus less on the actual tasks. Because once again, if you're starting a bakery, it's really different than if you're starting a b2b SaaS company. But I think these four steps, if you're an entrepreneur, you built your product or your service or your offering and now you're thinking, Okay, you know, what are the steps? And I'll break it into four steps.
You Mon Tsang 14:00
One is, are you servicing the people who really care? Okay, number one. And then are you servicing that next wave of interested parties around that? And then the third step is, are you doing true selling, and I'll get into this one at a time. And then the fourth step is, are you scaling? So let's focus on those four.
You Mon Tsang 14:26
The first one is the people who really care. So this could be people that you're solving a problem for, right? I built a product that fights churn, so I have to find those people who really care about that. And then ask myself the question, did that product do the job for them? The people who just really, really care are really going to go on a limb to solve that problem, right? If you have a gym that focuses on people, you know, some kind of new way of losing weight, like, do the people who want to lose weight do they really, really care - you got to focus on those people. And by the way care is not only care about the problem, also, you know, sometimes I as an entrepreneur, maybe do they care about you. Are they willing to do you a little favor, right? Either they love the problem, maybe they think the problem is okay, but you're going to pull it a favor. So Scott, I don't know if you've done this over your lifetime, right? You know, you always have to give, right, you always have to give to your career, give, give, give, because when you're an entrepreneur, you're going to be asking for a little while, right? The first six months, you're just going to be the people who love you, you're going to ask the people who owe you you're going to ask, because you just got to pull in those favors. These are the people who care about you, care about the problem. Step one, okay. And if you get those folks to say, Oh, this is interesting. They don't have to love it out the shoot, right? Because you probably have some kind of jerry rigged version of your product or your service. But if there's something interesting there, then you say, Okay, let me go focus on the next step, right, these are people who may or may not need to do me a favor but they're connected maybe to my network, they kind of trust me or whatnot, are they interested? So, maybe from the first five people to the first 20 people, but still in network, right? And then if they're interested, then this is the most important part, right?
You Mon Tsang 16:21
True selling, right, the first 10 20 100 strangers that will buy your product, you know, are you going to get through that step. And that's super important, right? Really the most important part is actually selling to people that don't owe you something, that don't love you. So the first 10 strangers.
You Mon Tsang 16:42
And then after that, I think, also super important after that is scaling. So, Scott, I'm sure when you started companies, you're doing all the selling, right? You're attending every single call, you you have so much passion in your product, you can convince anybody to buy anything. And scaling is after you stop hammering your friends to buy and then hammering their friends to buy it and then selling to the first 10 strangers – then you hire somebody to sell something and they're successful selling it, and then you're on a roll, right, then you go to market. Now all the things that go in that could be anything. But those are the stages that I think about when I think about putting together my go to market.
Scott Case 17:29
That's a great layout for it. And I'm glad you brought up the founder selling because I think that one of the things I run into a lot with founders, and they're like I'm at a stage where they skip, they ignore the first, well basically they'll do your first step, which is they'll sell to their friends, and then they think at that point, I'm gonna go hire somebody to be the salesperson. And my advice to them is, no one's going to sell better than you ever in the history of your company, so if you don't do the first, those first three steps as you lay them out, you're going to be disappointed. And not because you hired poorly, but because nobody can sell like you. Because you're not ready yet, you've got to figure out all this stuff, right? You're the ones who is gonna be listening for the things that are coming from the customer. And it's just super important. And like, if you have a co founder, at least one of you needs to be in that sales spot. And if you both can be, and I've run businesses where, in fact my co founders now any one of us could run the company and any one of us could be the head of sales, because we're all oriented in that way about getting after talking to customers. But that's such a huge point. And when I lay it out, I think zero to one is that first phase, one to 10 is sort of that next one, then you're getting 10 to 100, those are those strangers and then 100 and above, you're at the scale. It's those steps, and you might have to go backwards.
Scott Case 18:46
So I want to talk to you about that. In your experience in go to market, have you gotten stuck at any of those steps and had to revert back and reorient?
You Mon Tsang 18:56
Absolutely.
You Mon Tsang 18:59
By the way, a couple of things, depending on the kind of business you have, maybe you don't ever scale – you know, you have a nice small business that you're doing the selling always and it's a comfortable business that services a handful of customers and takes care of your family. I love those types of businesses, and so scaling isn't always a necessary thing.
You Mon Tsang 19:23
So a previous company I had, we sold probably our first 25 customers, doing quite well and raised a whole ton of money, Scott, okay, I'm going to share a story that I'm sure you've heard before. And you know, the VCs are super excited, like, Okay, let's go, okay. And so you hire all of a sudden 10 sales reps all at once. You hired a VP and they hired the sales rep. They hire people that used to work really well for them. And it turned out that Guess what, like, I sold the first 25 and we were not ready for these 10 people to get started right away. And so they just did not sell very well, right. And we didn't sell nothing, but they sold 1/10 of what I was able to sell. And so the math didn't work, you burn too much money, and whatnot.
You Mon Tsang 20:17
So, the best practices today, which I actually do believe is after you do the selling, hire two reps, right, let's say you do have direct selling so let's just really focus maybe on b2b, but if you have a store or retail, you can make the translation, but, best practice for say a ChurnZero today is, oh, well, you might can sell a few of these great, let's hire two sort of normal good sales reps, with a history of success, right? You don't want brand new people, and then get both of them to sell, I will be behind them right there, and if they're successful, then you know you've got something right, then you can hire the next two, and then you can hire the next four. And so I think those are, you know, call them metrics, but basically, you know, can these two folks drive good sales themselves? Can they get to 75 to 100% of what you expect them to sell? And if you can, you're ready to to hire another one, and then hire another one, and then you can scale.
Scott Case 20:38
That's awesome advice. You know, we're in the business travel space and whatever was true in 2019 isn't true anymore, right? People are making decisions differently, the behavior changed. And so our sales organization, we've gone back to first principles, and the part of the strategy was to have the sales leader back in the trenches, back on the demos, back doing the emails, because to your point, if your best person isn't going to be able to figure it out, then there's no point in trying to get everybody else on that page, you've really got to go through and get good at it. And so we put everybody back into, let's just go, including me, to just sort of understand, like, Where are people's heads at at this point and how are they thinking about the market? So the reason I asked the question of having to retreat sometimes as you did you hired too many people, you had to go back a step. You know, it's okay to retreat. Hey, look, you know what, we got it wrong. Like, don't just keep pressing ahead, because that was your plan. Right? Like, take the punch in the face, get yourself back off, and take another stab.
You Mon Tsang 22:36
Like there's lots of reasons why you have to be agile. One is sometimes you know, what you just did, whatever you were doing that great plan you had works up until a certain point. You know, I'm going to call every possible customer I can with talented people. And then all of a sudden, like, that product I built, there's only 10 people who actually want it or 100. Right? So you actually did really well until you hit that mark? And then, if you don't realize what's going on, you stall.
You Mon Tsang 23:19
You, Scott, had, you know, basically the world changed, right? I mean, like, if the world hadn't changed, you probably would have had a huge runway ahead of you - the plan that you had was going to work well. And sometimes, you know, like, for instance, on March, for me, it was March 12, so, March 12 2020, I think all of us had to just say, what's going to change for us and what are we going to do? I went through the .com bust, 911, the great recession. And so, you know, I would love to hear your story, but I wasn't freaked out on March 12, like okay I've seen this before, maybe not a pandemic, but you know, I'm going to run to A, B and C. Actually, about six weeks later, Scott, I was like, I've never seen this before. This, like, I don't know what's going on. And so, it was actually really interesting for me. I was super confident on March 12, but right around April 20 something that's when I was like, okay, I don't have a play for this. And you just have to be calm about it and create a new play. Anyway, what happened to you? I mean, you know, last year this time?
Scott Case 24:39
Yeah, it was a strange thing. You know, I think early on, like you, we thought, alright, this is bouncing around, let's see if it's actually as bad as it seems. And I actually have a little bit of a background in public health. I was the CEO of malaria no more. I worked in large global health systems, dealing with all kinds of epidemics and some pandemics, actually worked a little bit on Ebola. So I'm very familiar with the public health system. And so it took us about two weeks to figure out that okay, this is actually like, we're gonna have to replay. But I was thinking this was a six to nine month problem overall based on the way it was playing out at the time. And I was giving, if you go back and look at some of the earlier writing that I did at LinkedIn, or Founders Focus episodes, I said, Look, you got to have a plan where you assume your revenue goes to zero for 90 days, because that was my headspace at the time, it was like, Look, every entrepreneur ought to have a plan for that, because who knew right, it could collapse at any time and what was going to go on. And then we revised our setting to be through the end of the year. And then then coming out last year, we just assumed that 2021 was not going to be the watershed moment of things coming back, but that it was going to be bumpy and messy and we should plan for that, too. So our planning horizons got extended as we got more information and more confidence in sort of the spread between the downside case and the upside case, we said, okay, let's plan for and, frankly, sort of lower our floor and lower our expectations. But we did the obvious things that most companies did, which was we quickly shrunk our footprint as quickly as we could in terms of our expenses, we reduced everything down. But we made a decision that we were going to do everything we could to keep the entire team together. And so for a travel company when travel went down by I think 98% at one point, but we decided that we as a team, we're product people and we're engineers, and we said alright, let's figure out how to address this problem and solve it in that way, knowing what we thought we knew, which was this is going to take six to nine months. So that was kind of our approach to it. But I was wrong. I had the same thing you did. I've been through a bunch of stuff. But man, it was like this is a whole new curveball.
Scott Case 27:00
And what's been interesting is the recovery has played out very differently than I think a lot of people expected. There were companies that took off really fast, even during the pandemic, a lot of things got accelerated which I suspected was going to happen but you know, you're in the business in a SaaS environment, and we saw just the digital transformation that was supposed to be happening anyway got accelerated for everybody, because we all had to work from home. So if you were doing paper checks and routing stuff inside your office, all that shit had to get digitized like overnight. And then there are other outliers and then I'll come back to you. You know, I'm the chair of Network for Good on the nonprofit side of the organization, and we saw about a 40% increase in donations during the time period. It was completely unexpected at the beginning, when we were working in those first few weeks, I was like, as a board member, I was like, Look, we better assume things go bad. But it went the other direction. So this one has had so many twists and turns and things. And so the place that I've come from to date has been whatever you learned before the pandemic, you should really discount. Whatever you've learned during the pandemic, you use it to inform what you do next. But we're about to go through another phase change, because it's going to change again.
You Mon Tsang 28:21
That's right. That's right. It's interesting, you know, the way I think about go to market is, like, everyone has their bag of techniques and tricks and whatnot. So, for ChurnZero, we are a direct sales model, where we depend a lot on events, on SEO, on paid search, on conferencing, and then it drives leads into our direct sales model, then we close them, and then we service them. It doesn't matter, right, like, we just have our own, we have our thesis and it seems to work.
You Mon Tsang 29:00
So go to market is like 33% a plan, right? So, whatever happens to be your plan, I just gave you the bare minimum of my plan, then 67% whack a mole. Okay, so, 33% this is the way it should work and let me model it out, it could just be a piece of paper – and then 67% you're just like figuring it out and it all happens in real time, Scott, you know, yeah. So for instance, right now, like, okay, here's a theory I have in real time. So my theory in real time now in 2021 is that in b2b SaaS, the summers tend to be slower because it's harder to get decisions made because people go on vacation and it's hard to get signatures and buy ins from teams and all that, so it's gonna be slower. I think it's going to be an extended summer, right? Because everybody, as the vaccines happen, summers are going to start early because we're going to catch up and they're going to add late. And so there's going to be, you know, and this is a theory right, a longer summer, a longer lull, and then everybody's gonna come back and the economy's gonna be overheated, hopefully, and then everyone's gonna start buying at the end of the year. So, even though it's going to be a really good year for us, I actually now I'm thinking is the seasonality going to change, right? And I'm getting ready to whack that mole, how do I deal with an extended cycle where it's hard to get the signature? You know, anyway, so all we do every day is we have to kind of adjust your go to market.
Scott Case 30:27
I love that. I talk a lot about the fact that there's, you know, to play it a different way. 33% rules and 66% exceptions. It's the same thing, right?
Scott Case 30:38
So I've got three questions for you that we'll wrap up in the next six, seven minutes. So the first one is, from your experience, what was the biggest challenge you've had in any of your companies from a go to market standpoint and then how did you overcome it? So what was something that you just ran into headlong and then you had to kind of get around it?
You Mon Tsang 31:03
I mean, the number one problem at every company I've been to is how to effectively reach your customers, right? Because I felt like, you know, I'm a product person, I know that if you could see and hear about my product, you would love it. And I think most entrepreneurs believe that if I can only get you to see it, you're gonna love it. And so it's reaching those folks. And I mean, to be honest, in some companies, I never solved that problem. Just never never did it, you know, at least cost effectively. Usually you can do it, but it's mostly about being cost effective and efficient in doing it. And, others, it's really a combination of techniques to get the word out and whatnot. But nevertheless, I think as an entrepreneur, especially those most of us who are product focused solution focused, like, how do you get those people? Now there are some people, like, I'll tell you a common way of actually fixing that problem – getting a partner who knows how to do that, so just get the right partner, get the right VP of sales, VP of Marketing, who like that's just their instinct they know it really, really well. Sorry that's not a great solution, but just get partnered well. If you're an entrepreneur that's product focused, partner with someone who's sales and marketing focused.
Scott Case 32:25
That's great. All right, second question of the three. How have you identified the customers to target when you're first going to market? You talked a little bit about, hey, sell to your friends, those people may or may not be the ideal customer, you sell to your friend's friends, those might not be there. But when you start to sell to strangers, how do you know which of the customers you got are the ones that you want to get more of and which ones were just ones that were nice to you?
You Mon Tsang 32:56
Yeah, there's no doubt, I mean, oh, by the way, you know, I would say, even in the first two, they have to share the problem, right? Like you know, my cousin is not going to buy ChurnZero, just because they're my cousin, right, they still have to have a problem, it's just that they have the problem and they're my cousin, that sort of gets them over the top. You know, actually, I think today is actually easier than ever to do that, just with the technology that we can bring to bear on their problem, right? So. So for instance, when I started ChurnZero, I knew who my buyer was, I think that's most important thing as an entrepreneur is like, who has the money to give to me to solve this problem? And so if I can identify a buyer and identify a title, if you're a b2b then I can target them on LinkedIn. Now, if you've maybe got a b2c product, so Okay, a certain demographic is going to buy my product in a certain location, then you can use Facebook ad targeting to get to those people. So I think in many ways today to actually create a cohort of people that you can target is easier than it's ever been, right? You don't have to hit your network, you can actually use some pretty good targeting using the digital tools we have today. That is exactly what we did. You know, I found a lot of folks, we were going after the chief customer officer so we were lucky enough that that was a title that existed. By the way, if you're targeting someone that's like, I don't know who I'm going to sell to, you're in trouble, right? Like, you need to find that person you want to sell to and then you can target them that way.
Scott Case 34:38
Yeah, one of the challenges you have sometimes is, especially if you're a product that is sort of so new or category defining that it's not always clear where your entry point is to the company, and that might be different so sometimes it's the CEO, but sometimes if you think about products like Slack, it was a bunch of individual contributors suffering with email and it had nothing to do with anybody at the top making a decision it was finding your way into to say, why don't you as a team use this thing? Which again, it's a different thing but it's an all of a sudden, that's your entry point. Right? It's a bring your own tool.
You Mon Tsang 35:18
Yeah, I think if you're, and I've been, I've been there, I've been in Brave New, I call it those brave new world categories. Right? There's nobody who's asking for it. There's no one to target. Because, you know, no one's you know, and I think those are incredible journeys, that entrepreneurs fall in love with, that you better gird yourself for a very long journey to find those people. So whether it's just like spending time getting the money, Brave New World are just incredible dynamic journeys that are high risk, high reward. So we can spend time on that, because there's different ways, right? There's faster, better, you know, like, Hey, I'm just going to beat Salesforce because I'm going to create something as good. That's 1/10 the price, that very different journey.
Scott Case 36:08
Yeah, absolutely. All right. My last question for you is, I would be remiss not to ask you, we're in the business travel game. So how are you and your team thinking about traveling, they're getting together as a team or going out to customers, you obviously have a lot of customers that you might want to meet with in person. So how are you thinking about business travel between, let's say now and the end of the year into next year?
You Mon Tsang 36:37
We know the race is going to fully start in September. And we have all kinds of plans from September on – doing conferences, we have our own conference in person, we do happy hours, it's going to be normal September on. Between now and September, we're just looking at each other, and we're about to experiment. So we're going to do a happy hour in DC and we're going to see who shows up. So between now and September, I'm just ready to go, I just cannot wait. And we're just going to experiment, experiment now. But we're making the assumption that post Labor Day, it is full on like bum rush onto planes and into hotel rooms. And we're all going to not only go back to normal, but we're going to overcorrect for the next 12 months.
Scott Case 37:20
Awesome. Well, I've got a travel service for you and I'd like my invite to your happy hour when you have it so just let me know. That was awesome. Thank you for giving us a schooling us on go to market.
Scott Case 37:32
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Founders Focus. We love getting feedback. So if you've got a topic for us that you want us to discuss or you've got a founder you want to hear from, hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case or you can always grab one on one time with me at foundersfocus.com. Stay awesome.