- TruPMF
SPEAKERS
Alex Lugosch, Ilya Druzhnikov, Will Bachman
Will Bachman 00:02
Will Hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted today to be here with two guests, Alex Lugosch and Ilya Druzhnikov, and they run a firm called True PMF. Now you can go to this firm, truepmf.com but I’ll warn you in advance, the website, the only thing it says is, by referral only. That’s it. So if you want to actually engage them as a, as a, engage their help, you’re going to do a little bit more work and ask for an introduction. I guess you could ask me, because I know them, but you have to find your way to them, because it’s an interesting approach. We can talk about that. So Alex and Ilya, thank you guys for coming. Welcome to the show.
Alex Lugosch 00:50
Thanks for having us. Thanks.
Will Bachman 00:53
So Alex, why don’t I just call on you first sure walk us through the service that your firm provides. Why don’t we just start there? Yeah,
Alex Lugosch 01:02
so true. PMF is a rapid prototyping and discovery service for companies who are emerging in markets. So startups, companies who are more established, who want to release a new product or test in a new market, and they don’t have six to eight months to try new experiments for for product market fit or or the tooling to handle that. And I’m actually going to turn that over to Ilya, because he he really has a concise way of of explaining
Ilya Druzhnikov 01:41
that I actually, I actually have a story that all of us can identify with as entrepreneurs. So both Alex and I are our background is purely entrepreneurial. We’ve been founders of several companies, Alex and fintech myself and both AI and sales acceleration. And one thing that we’ve both experienced and seen again and again and again is you have an idea of what is going to sell because you’ve made some network deals, you’ve convinced a couple of your friends to buy it. And maybe you’ve even pitched it as product market fit to your VC, but it ain’t. And when you really start going after it, you you believe it. So you hire, you hire a sales rep, you tell them. You tell them, This is who you are. You’re going after this is kind of your script. And for just about six months, you hear wave after wave of stories, excuses, exceptions, promises, etc. And then in six months, you scrap the experiment. You realize that this wasn’t a product market fit, fire the fire, the ramp, and you’re back to the drawing board. And most emerging companies have time for one or two experiments like that, because each one takes six months, and if you don’t hit the jackpot, you’re out of business. So what we do in the simplest possible work is we shrink the time from guessing that something might be a product market fit to actually knowing whether it is or is not, from six months to a couple of days For any given audience.
Will Bachman 03:41
Now, if someone asked me to explain what you guys do, I’m going to share my understanding that you guys can correct it in terms of what it means in practice, right? So my understanding is the two of you will work with a founder, typically with the founder of the company, and you will say, okay, who’s your target audience? You’ll use Zoom info, or various other sort of Con, uh, content info, sort of things like Apollo, perhaps, to get a list of people that fit that profile. And then using a cold calling tool, you, I think you have several that you’ve used, you’ll start actually dialing those folks, and one of the two of you will initially, will take that call, and, you know, it rings, rings, rings. Someone picks up. And you’ll just start in with a pitch and see how the person responds directly to, you know, potential buyers. And then you’ll test out different ideas, iterate different you know, pitches to potential clients. You mainly doing cold calling. We’re not talking about emails, we’re not talking about in person workshops, right? The main way you’re testing these is by cold calling, getting people’s reactions, and you’re also training that founder to do cold calls herself or himself, right? So that’s kind of my. Understanding of helping them both get the skills, but also vary the pitch to see what is resonating with with potential buyers.
Alex Lugosch 05:08
That’s broadly, right? I mean, in Yes. So we often will stack rank lists. We’ll say, Hey, here’s, you know, 20 audiences we think we’re going to test in the next 20 days. Tell us which ones you think are going to prioritize? Well, we do start pitching them. We’ll figure it out. And basically each experiment takes about two sessions of an hour each. At a certain point, we do turnover, we call it the ball, so we’ll, well, somebody will say, I call the ball, and that’s when you’re going to pick up the next call. We will turn it over to the founder. That’s just so that they can they understand how to do this, but they’re going to hard fail a few times, until we teach them and they get a little bit of a feel of it. And yeah, we we use several list building services, several data validation services. We do have a couple different dialers. We’re always trying to build extremely tight lists, and that’s how we’re able to access lots of people at the C suite that most of these founders can only dream of contacting. And then they find out, you know, within one or two calls, that those people are picking right up, and they’re talking to like, you know, the people they wish they’d could have gotten hold of for months. That’s right.
Will Bachman 06:22
Okay. So let’s get, like, super practical and specific. Let’s say that you’re, you know, explaining to a founder how this is going to work. Walk us through the steps, you know, you know. So step one, figuring out what the what the sort of profile is that you want to call and then, but let’s get into sort of walking us through what it’s actually going to look like when we have this one hour dialing session, and what the person is going to do. So, Ilia, you want to walk
Ilya Druzhnikov 06:52
us through? Yeah, I’ll give it. I’ll give it a whirl. Alright, so first of all, in the initial in the initial session, when, when we get together, we sit down with a founder and we say, hey, there’s absolutely no point in us telling you what we do. And this is the funny thing about doing this conversation, because normally we would be showing it. Imagine you will you have a company, and would be like, hey, well, so who do you think you sell to? And they would define it. And in real time, we would go to zoom in for one the other, one of the other databases, and we’ll, we’d build a list. We’d find direct phone numbers, and we’d go, we’d have a little bit of back and forth, find direct phone numbers for 80 to 100 of these people and load them up into a massively parallel dialer. So when I say we built a pretty good tech stack around that we’ve developed a lot of expertise with the tools that are out there. Our stack is enterprise grade, something that no, very few startups can afford. And then, and then, and then the session begins. And then we’re all looking at a shared screen, and we’re all on a zoom call like this, and we’re talking, but all of a sudden there’s a beep, and all of us fall silent. And one of us, whether Alex or myself, and usually we alternate in the beginning we’ll say, Hi, this is Joe Blow calling from company X. Do you have a second to talk, or are you in the middle of putting out fires? Yeah, and they’ll giggle. Sometimes they’ll say, I’m always putting out fires. What’s this about? Yeah. Look, I’m going to try to make it as relevant to you as possible. Company x solves this problem for you, and if I said that, we could deploy it in the next two weeks and save you a bunch of time and a bunch of money, but most importantly, it’s totally intractable, and it has impact on the bottom line. Would that be interesting? They’ll say, maybe, or they’ll say, bugger off. I’m absolutely not interested. And then we’ll move on, if we’ll move on to another call. By that time, we have a model that is well trained on the customer’s business. So by the time the conversation is finished, the pitch is finished, the transcript goes directly into the model, into the AI model, and the model produces an analysis of the conversation. This is what worked. This is what didn’t work. These are the things that resonate. And this is a follow up email that you should send to them. And we move on. Yeah,
Will Bachman 09:40
let’s say that you are running this dialer for an hour right typically, in an hour, how many pickups will you get? And of those, how many people just sort of hang up right away? How many, like short conversations do you get? And then, how many meetings might you schedule? Or. Is that, in fact, the next step of saying, you know, like, what, what’s sort of the outcome of this cold call? What’s the
Alex Lugosch 10:07
outcome? Yeah, so, in a typical calling session nowadays, we’re getting sometimes upwards of 14, maybe 15 connects, sometimes more, yeah, it’s it’s gotten, it’s increased. Lately, we’ve changed some of our tech stack. So that said, the the deeper you’re going to go in different conversations, depends a little bit on our skill, because we do this every single day, and we have, we’ve honed a craft around keeping people on the phone, having them, you know, stay and give us information, but if we’re off target, which is to say we’re not pitching the right thing, you know, there’s something where founders will be like, Oh, If you see it, you’ll believe it. Or if we’re vague, or we really haven’t narrowed in on the feature sets that are relevant, we’ll get a lot more. We’ll get more quick hang ups. I’m not interested. I’m the wrong person. Take me off this list, whatever, when you start getting closer to the target, the conversations become richer. There’s a lot more follow up emails, there’s a lot of scheduled demos, there’s let me refer you to the right person. I’m not exactly the right person, but I could see how this will impact our business positively. It’s not binary, necessarily, but the difference between quick hang ups and tell me more is stark, and then we do feed these things, like Ilya said, into our model, because one of the things that we often like a signal, for example, in this would be, we’ll be calling CEOs of E commerce. This happened a week ago. We were calling CEOs of top tier, direct to consumer e commerce, companies online e commerce. We’re reaching the CEOs. We’re pitching. They’re giving us the six seconds, 10 seconds to open. They’re going, I’m not interested, and they’re hanging up, which means, like, they kind of know what we’re talking about, but we’re not nailing the feature sets and we’re not making it relevant to their business. CEOs have certain things they care about. CTOs have things they care about. Chief Revenue officers have things they care about, and they’re not always universally the same, depending on the product, whatnot. And those are just examples. So you can tell when somebody wants to listen, but you’re not making it relevant. And that’s a really good signal that you maybe have the wrong audience, for example. So, so it’s, it’s iterative, until you start landing on the audience that’s like, Tell me more. I care about this. This is something I’m interested in. I’m not exactly the right person. I know exactly who the right person is. I’ll refer you. Those things happen all the time, but that’s when you start to to narrow in on the bullseye.
Ilya Druzhnikov 13:04
And then that specific case, it’s often a single word Yeah. In that case, Alex came up with the word tariffs, yeah. And the moment you talk to CEOs of E commerce companies today in the next week, and this is maybe useful for some of your listeners. And you say tariffs, and you say, you got to be able to turn on a dime. Then all of a sudden, their ears perk up,
Alex Lugosch 13:31
and they and they told us, in this case, for this client, they go, I’m not exactly the right person. I do care about the tariffs, but this specific implementation is a CTO thing, right? So then we shift gears. We we took the exact Ilya, built the exact same list of companies, but only dragged up their CTOs. We pitched it to them, and all of a sudden we’re getting I’m interested. I care about this. Tell me more. I want to see a demo. And that’s when you know you’re on target.
Will Bachman 14:01
Now, one thing that you told me before, which I thought was very interesting, which I’d never heard anything like this ever before, where the way that you two partner, and when you’re doing these, you’ll partner one of you will take one, and then you’ll alternate, and you don’t say anything, you don’t give the person feedback, say a little bit about
Ilya Druzhnikov 14:22
that. That’s a actually, we would highly recommend it to anyone who is learning to pitch their product is go one after the other. Make sure that there’s no option you have to go next. And then all that you do is you grab whatever ideas and thoughts that you like from the previous person’s pitch, but you don’t give them an Attaboy. You don’t say this was great. You don’t say anything positive or negative, because pitching in general is really friggin hard. It’s emotionally draining. And. It’s not only emotionally draining on us, it’s emotionally draining on people who are listening to us as well, like our customers come out and they’re like, I’m covered in sweat. I don’t understand how you do this. I’ve not heard our sales reps have been pitching this for years, and they wouldn’t be able to do a cold pitch. But it’s hard, and so the trick to getting better is getting no feedback whatsoever. It’s weirdly enough, it was
Alex Lugosch 15:28
just like you’ll hear the elements that are working in the last person’s pitch, and you’ll hear the ones that aren’t. On rare occasion, we’ll say something to each other just because we have, we have done enough of this, but it’s only around like technique, like this morning, I said to Ilya, I think on his he did a couple in a row because I I was listening, and I said, I told him, I said, sharpen your pencil, right. And his next pitch got there quicker, and they were listening right? So, just little cues, like you’re so but we do go back and forth on it and it you learn very quickly that way, because you’re watching somebody else hard fail, or hard succeed or something, and you’re like, Well, I can take that. They like that. They don’t like that. I’ll go now, and you get better fast.
Will Bachman 16:18
Yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting kind of general principle, almost, that applies to other situations, of listening to each other, but not giving feedback, but then alternating so you can kind of incorporate it. And it’s a, it’s an interesting approach, okay, you’re
Ilya Druzhnikov 16:33
all, you’re all, and it’s you’re also listening to each other’s tone of voice, yeah, so I’ll watch, I may hear Alex go from, hey, this is Alex lugos. I’m calling from company. A, yeah. And then people are people. This particular audience has a specific dislike of enthusiasm. I mean, if you’re calling CTOs, or if you’re calling VCs, sounding enthusiastic is the kiss of death. The way you want to really talk to them is like, Hi, this is such and such calling from such and such company. And
Alex Lugosch 17:12
know that these techniques are not because cold calling is not usually a way you’re going to scale your sales, but these are just techniques to get them, to give you the in the pertinent information, um, around the messaging and product features and whatnot that you’ll be able to put in outbound campaigns that are actually scalable, right? Because maybe you’d inform like your emails or your LinkedIn messages or whatever, your conference, something collateral a little bit, but we’re trying, we use the pitch techniques just to get to the place where we go, okay, these are the things they really care about, right? So that if I do, you know, find a market where I know it’s going to hit, I could say it in any number of ways, and they’re going to respond,
Ilya Druzhnikov 18:04
in fact, in fact, none of, I mean, almost none of our clients, when we find product market fit, what happens next is, is the interesting part, right? Because somewhere midway through the process, we’ll say, Hey, this is the first audience. This is the first PMF audience we’ve discovered. You should engage a LinkedIn professional LinkedIn marketing team, and you should use the exact bullet points that we’ve discovered and advertise the living bejesus out of those people. And all of a sudden they’re seeing eight or 10 or 15 meetings a month where they can’t keep up, whereas before, their campaigns didn’t work.
Will Bachman 18:43
Alright, I’m going to put you guys on the spot because I know that
Ilya Druzhnikov 18:46
you already we would love to be put on the spot
Will Bachman 18:49
you do all the time. So just to give me and listeners like an example of what you’re doing, so let’s, let’s turn back the clock to something like 2018 or 19. And let’s say that you are serving zoom. You know that the tool that we’re using right now for this video conference that everybody now is familiar with, and let’s say that you’ve gotten through your quick opener. Hi, I’m Alex la Gosh, from zoom. You know, are you working on something right now? Or do you have a minute? Or, you know, or you know, are you fighting fires? And they say, go ahead. So then what I’d like to hear is a few different iterations of how you’re testing the different product features and ways of explaining it. So after I say, okay, yeah, go ahead. Try. So Ill, you start, yeah, of course. What Zoom is, I’m like the CEO, or I’m whoever you want me to be. Tell me who you. Who am I, Chief Technology Officer, whoever. And how are you going to what are you going to say? What’s the sentence? I mean, no, tell
Ilya Druzhnikov 19:52
- Tell me who you are. I don’t need to tell you. Tell me if you’re putting me on the spot, put me on the spot. All right.
Will Bachman 19:58
I’m the CEO of a mid. Size company. Let’s say you’ve said you’ve decided to sell to, you know, mid market private equity owned portfolio companies. And you know, so
Ilya Druzhnikov 20:11
look done. Talent is the Oil of the 21st Century and the oil of the and like regular oil, it doesn’t spring from the place that’s nearest to you. You have to go out and look for it. And when you look for talent, you’re going to find it all over the world. And if you want to get those people to work with you, they’re going to need a way to interact with the rest of your team, and we have a solution for that. Does the idea of having the best team in the world that’s working together as if they were in the same office sound appealing? That would be my first pass,
Alex Lugosch 20:54
yeah. And then I would pick it up and say something like, John, you know, there are lots. You’ve heard of Skype, there’s Google, you know, meet. There’s a zillion different video conferencing systems. But, you know, do you have one that scales and is easy to use, like those, but can have 30 people on a meeting in different time zones, and I don’t know you know, a collection of backgrounds and features that you know, make it better than whatever, right? Doesn’t time out, pick your features right, and then we would pitch it that way. And if that didn’t work, we would try something else.
Ilya Druzhnikov 21:29
And then I would say, I would pick it up on Alex says. And if none of these things worked, I would say, look, you’re really tired of hearing excuses from your CRO you’re not hitting numbers, and the reason you’re not hitting numbers, they say, is because they have to fly people all over the place to have meetings. Is this true? I don’t know. You suspect it isn’t. What if you implemented the system like ours on a small part of your team and have them have their pitches over zoom and just over the course of a couple of months, compared the efficiency of a sales team that’s running remote pitches versus the sales team that’s flying all over the place. Just give us a chance. Doesn’t cost very much. And if
Alex Lugosch 22:15
that didn’t work, we would say something like we would call a CTO and we’d say, Hey, Steve, look, your customer support is all over the phone, but in 2018 people really want to see face to face. They want to see really good screen sharing with high quality markup tools, you know, so that they can actually guide people through customer success. We have a tool that does that. Is that something? It’s interesting. In fact, you know, client A, B and C has seen, you know, a 30% reduction in return support calls something to that effect, right? And we would go back and forth until we find something that resonates,
Will Bachman 22:50
yeah. So then you’re, you’re hearing the feedback of what the whoever that target is that you’re saying, and maybe they’re saying, well, that’s really the chief technology officer who owns all our video conferencing tools or or maybe not. Maybe it’s yeah that would be good for my or you’re hearing as not really that. So then you’re testing different focusing on different features or different aspects of the product, or different ways of explaining it, until you find something that resonates with people, and then you kind of double on down. And that’s
Ilya Druzhnikov 23:24
the interesting part. Yeah. Alex said it’s not binary, but this is where it is, completely binary. Yeah, when you hit when, when you strike gold, when you hit that product market fit resonance. You can hear it as clearly as you can hear a bell. It’s just amazing. And it’s like one of the most satisfying things about our business, and it’s also one of the most depressing things about our business, because just as we when we say, when it’s clear that this is not working. We stop the experiment the moment we know it is working. We also stop the experiment because our job is not to produce leads free, right? Our job is to find as many of these specific concrete pairings of audience and pitch and product features that resonate as product market Fitch, Product Market Fit Yeah? And if we find them, if we find one, it’s great. If we find two or three for you in the course of a 20 day sprint, then you really feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth. Yeah?
Alex Lugosch 24:39
And it’s not uncommon, you know, once we’ve once we’re over the target, it’s not uncommon for our clients to, you know, make back Well, what they paid us just in a few meetings, because, you know, we happen to have booked them a few demos and a few meetings and some follow ups that that turn into revenue. But that is not the goal. Cool that is a that is a side effect of of a successful process.
Will Bachman 25:05
Now, out of this process, you’re just helping to get them to the right product market fit. Do you find your clients find that continuing to do this cold calling is an effective business development strategy.
Alex Lugosch 25:23
A lot of people do maintain a continuing relationship with us and Ilya. Ilya can sort of elaborate more on that, though.
Ilya Druzhnikov 25:38
So after the sprint again, almost nobody decides that cold calling is their golden ticket to prosperity, because it ain’t. You’re not going to find you are not going to find sales reps that can pitch as a level, that we can engage them, not for any not for any reasonable amount of money. So I’d say it’s almost never going to happen. We’ve seen it maybe once or twice, yeah. What does happen, however, is that everything that we’ve done turns into a marketing strategy, and it also turns into a design of a sales team. And then they will typically maintain a relationship with us, because there’s we do a sprint for for a month, right? Every day for 20 days, but afterwards, they’ll typically work with us for an hour a week indefinitely to test new ideas. Because as a CEO, you’re always coming up with new things, and you’re like, hey, is this going to work? Is this going to work? And that’s how the relationship often continues. So
Will Bachman 27:00
you’re finding that most clients, even though this cold calling will, you know, get you up to 14, you know, pickups per hour, and once you land on the right language, some of those will convert into meetings you typically saying you don’t find the founders continuing to just do that, you know, on an arm basis.
Ilya Druzhnikov 27:22
Some do some do it themselves. With the very few that pick up the skill. Yeah, they will pick it up, and they will do it like clockwork a couple of times a week themselves. However, there’s no way on God’s green earth there. So let’s go. Let’s go through the numbers. Let’s say we get, we get 10 connects, yeah, when we’re on and we’re good, out of those 10 connects, four are going to turn into conversations, maybe five, five, if we’re other, others are going to be busy, so we call them engagements, and the and two will turn into meetings. Best case scenario, one or two will turn into meetings and follow ups, right? If you put even a very skilled set, we’re not sales people, right? And neither one of us has background in sales, however we’re but we’re founders. We’re sales first founders, and we have this experience. If you put a sales guys, do it on doing this, I would, from my experience, and I’ve trained sales people, maybe they will convert out of those 10 connects. They will connect one into some sort of an engagement or conversation, and it will take them five or six to actually get to a meeting, and that’s crap, and they’re burning through leads. That’s not the way you want to handle yourselves. Ultimately, you want to create inbound you want to figure out but, but just the fact that we’ve done this, we’ve just limited your marketing focus from this entire world of possibilities to sometimes laser focused, 2000 people that you can advertise to directly on LinkedIn or on take their take their names and advertise to them on Facebook, whatever you want. Yeah,
Alex Lugosch 29:27
or create an experience at a conference that they’re going to care about that will resonate, stuff they can take back, you name it. You can make ads that matter, finally, right?
Will Bachman 29:38
So this is really a way to help your clients might have multiple different ideas about the persona. Well, maybe the CEO, maybe the Chief Technology Officer, maybe the head of marketing, and you’re helping them narrow in to say, No, this is the right role at the right kind of company, the right size of company. And here’s the message. Resonates with that person, so that they can then go off and do other types of marketing approaches to,
Alex Lugosch 30:08
yeah, when, when we when we have clients who call us back, it’s usually, hey guys, I want to test this audience. In this audience, can we do three days, right? Or, you know, three hours, or, you know, whatever it is, right there, there they’ve, they’ve gotten some tidbit or feedback or something that gives them an idea, like, maybe this, and we’ll test it. And if it works, it works. And if not, you know, we’ve, we’ve saved them going down a rabbit hole, so that those are, those are usually what re engagements look
Will Bachman 30:39
like. Interesting, okay, and you’re not super optimistic about the ability of a sales development representative making outbound calls, or, you know, talk, talk to me about what, what you see companies like, is that big waste of money? Is that typically really tough to make work?
Alex Lugosch 31:00
So if you don’t know your messaging exactly, and let like, I’ll back up, if you don’t know your messaging exactly, you’re just doing spray and pray in and that’s true with email. That’s true with LinkedIn campaigns, that’s true with anything. You’re just putting out lots of things hoping you get feedback if you put a relatively unskilled SDR on cold calling to decision makers, unless it’s a really basic thing, you’re going to be spending a lot of money on that. There are obviously companies with outbound sales teams that cold call. That is a thing. But in our experience, you know, we have a company right now, actually a company that’s raised, they have 400 clients across Europe. They’ve raised probably over $50 million they’re, big in their space, a name brand that people recognize. The CEO goes, Look, my sales, my regular SDRs can’t even do this. What you guys do, right? They’re just not that effective, right? Maybe they get one here or there or whatever. And he’s like, you know, there’s six of them, and none of them are not good. Because especially in complicated B to B to B product spaces, even like a cold pitch where they’re repeating the same thing, not that relevant if you’re using a different tool, email, LinkedIn, whatever, whatever it happens to be, and you’ve packaged it right and it has all the trimmings with the right messaging that can be much more effective for the dollars and time you’re going to spend on it. The people we see who are effective at this, aside from us, and this is where I was going to draw, the connection. Their chief revenue officer shows has showed up to every single call we’ve done. I think we’ve even said, hey, you know, call the ball. He calls the ball. He can pitch it. Their low level sales people cannot. They’re not adaptable enough. But you can’t have six Chief Revenue Officer caliber people at a multinational, you know, tech startup that does B to B sales, run your sales team. You can’t afford it, and they won’t do it. You know, they’re not going to be paid on on poor commission to do this, so finding the kind of talented people you’d need to do it, and then, you know, Ilya likes to call this like, it’s the lowest of the low, right? It’s the thing that people hate the most. They’re like, Oh my god, cold calling. People are the worst, which is why it’s a good prototyping tool, because you have an audience that immediately hates you, right? So that’s exactly right.
Ilya Druzhnikov 33:53
Absolutely loathe the very idea
Alex Lugosch 33:56
they are there. They are predestined to dislike the idea that you even cold called them, they get 20 cold calls a day. They’re furious, and if you can get them to actually respond, you know you’ve got something good, do not give that to a 22 year old who just graduated from Vassar or whatever. Like, don’t. Don’t give it to that person, right? I don’t care how competitive they are.
Will Bachman 34:23
Can you, in a sanitized way, give any examples of your clients that you’ve served and how you helped shape what they initially thought was their product?
Alex Lugosch 34:35
I’ve got a great a great example from last week. So one of the things that our clients often do is they say we’re really interested in this audience, and in this case, it was high growth econ, emerging, e com brands. Well, we did, I think, three days or two days of calling them. And we were just getting our teeth kicked in hard. And, you know, we’re people are picking up and CEOs are picking up, and we’re getting and we don’t do this often, but Ilya and I sort of had to hit the pause button, and we did this offline in our sessions. If you said, What? What is going wrong here? And at first we were like, it’s us. Our pitching is wrong and this and that. And then finally, real is no, of course, they want high growth e com brands. That’s great. All of their early clients were high growth e com brands, and they’d go, oh, we started with them when they were 30 people. Well, that’s different than going after companies that are 200 or 250 people, that are still high growth. They don’t need your tool that reduces costs and does things more efficiently because they’re growing right? They don’t care about that at all. The people that need efficiency and to remove software stack and have better you know, analytics, or whatever it happens to be, in this case, are established e com brands that are looking for margin expansion, not market expansion, right? So we fired up a new list of established e commerce brands that we know are looking for Mark margin expansion in the space, and immediately it’s relevant, right? You’re not going to usually think your way out of it. We tested it like we considered the why, of course, that’s why we came up with the new audience. But as soon as we tested it, it hit. Then those CEOs told us go talk to my CTO. This is going to be even more relevant for them. For them, we took the exact same list. Ilya built it with CTOs. We tested with them. It worked much better now
Ilya Druzhnikov 36:50
and then we tested it. I mean, here’s the here’s the sweet part. And I’m not even sure that we should be talking about it, but it’s really interesting because next thing we did, we called a whole bunch of private equity partners who are operating partners, specifically in in the tech stack. And it turned out that that was the actual gold mine. And all of a sudden, instead of selling to one company at a time, we are potentially selling to people who are in the position to implement the solution across the board in 10 or 15 brands that they own. Suddenly, this gets fairly interesting. Another example, a little bit a little bit different and at a at a slightly different scale, so a much more imagine a much smaller company. They’ve got 20 clients that they’ve accumulated over the last over the last 10 years, and those 20 clients are all big enterprise clients, and now they are looking potentially at selling to private equity, and there’s significant amount of interest among PE firms and buying them. The CEO is claiming that there’s a new product that’s coming out, and that new product is going to bump revenue from X to Y in one year, and everybody’s super excited about it. So the founder of the company, who has a controlling interest, needs to make a decision, trust the CEO and wait or not trust the CEO and pull the trigger on the on the acquisition now. So he desperately needs to find out, is this product that’s being promised to him and it’s coming out in a month, it’s true. Is it going to be the kind of seller, or is it better to sell on the promise of this product? And so we hop on the phone and we talk to a bunch of potential clients, and forgive my language. Lo and behold, they don’t give a shit. Highly relevant information for him. Yeah,
Will Bachman 39:02
do you work with I mean, do you ever do these calls before the company even builds the product?
Ilya Druzhnikov 39:10
Like, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yes. We’re doing it right now. It’s, it’s, it’s called, sell it, then build it and customers, customers who try it on other things, they’re like, wait a second, why the hell would we build it until we actually figure out the exact audience of the exact features that, and the exact everything, yeah.
Will Bachman 39:34
And how do those conversations go? Hey, you know, I’m with XYZ company. We have this product that does this. Oh, sounds good. Oh, can you send me? Send me a link, yeah.
Ilya Druzhnikov 39:44
And we send them the information, because you can build you again these days. You can build the information of the features at one pager really quickly. And if there’s interest in moving forward, then you say, We will arrange to do a demo whenever, whenever we’re ready to. Of a demo. That’s the reality. All right, we never lie. One of the things actually that’s absolutely critical to this process is you have to figure out a way of doing this so that every single word that comes out of your mouth is actually literal truth. The impression that people get from that literal truth is not necessarily our responsibility, but we cannot lie.
Will Bachman 40:30
Yeah, all right, both of you have alluded to it, but I did want to get into the conversation here, at least briefly, a little bit about your background before, before true. PMF, so Alex, you want to go first. Just give us a little bit of a background of what you’ve what you’ve done before this.
Alex Lugosch 40:47
I was a FinTech founder. Before that, I worked in B to B wholesale, e commerce. I sold the company in that space, and then I was a FinTech founder. Then I was an executive at a company in the B to B credit space, and I was, you know, we reached a fundraising milestone, and I felt like that was a decent time to start looking around. And Ilya had been a client of mine when I had a Fintech startup, and I we’d stayed in touch over the years, and I called him and I said, Hey, you know I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m ready to do something else. I’m looking around. And he said, Well, I’ve been, I’ve been messing around with this idea and this thing. He said, I could refer you to some friends of mine if you want to keep doing strategy at the executive level. And I was like, you know, I think I’d rather do something more interesting. I said, Why don’t we try doing this thing together, and I’ll bring my talents to it, and you bring yours, and let’s see if we can really level it up. And that was four months ago, three months Yeah, four months ago, months ago, four months ago. And about six weeks after that, we started booking, like a significant amount of new business. And, yeah, it’s, it’s been great. We’ve been very, very fortunate. So that’s, that’s sort of the short, the CliffsNotes version.
Will Bachman 42:23
And how about you, Ilya, what’s, what’s your backstory?
Ilya Druzhnikov 42:29
I’m just, I’m just a serial founder, right? And because I’m probably, I’m probably profoundly unemployable in every, every way, shape and form. Started my first company right out of grad school, a bunch of friends and I built a very early one of the first product recommenders that was out there. Sold that, and then, then we were bombs, otherwise known as angel investors for a while. Then by some random coincidence, I ended up investing and starting a company that then ended up being the first sales acceleration, like true sale acceleration tool called Connect and sell. And that’s kind of where I I got super interested in where the rubber hits the road, which is like, what does Product Market Fit look like? And then, and then I was an angel investor for another chunk of years, and realized that that the thing that it seems both Alex and I truly love doing is working with the founders and CEOs and helping figure out this exact piece of the problem. We don’t enjoy hiring a lot of people. We don’t enjoy managing a lot of people, but really getting in there and figuring shit out is amazingly fun, and the fact that we get to do this day in and day out, is like it’s kind of magic, and both of us have done this a bunch for free, so kind of fun to do it for money. All right, so at
Will Bachman 44:11
the top of the show you gave your website, I’ll mention it again, true. Pmf.com, but it does say not much of a website. I mean, it says by referral only. So do you want to share anything more about like, if someone does want to work with you guys to know Sam knows you,
Ilya Druzhnikov 44:30
or you’re listening, you’re listening to him. He knows he’ll put you guys in touch.
Alex Lugosch 44:34
There’s a little bit of method to that madness. I do want to express this. And we have a bias for working with really serious people, and what that means is they’re really serious about their business. They really care about it. We have a client right now this we require that founders show up. In this case, the CEO shows up to every single call, whether he’s on his phone or not. Chief Revenue shows up at. A chief revenue officer shows up to every single call. Head of Sales shows up to call. He brings sales people to the call. They rotate in and out like people are engaged. They are constantly sending us material. They came extremely well prepared every single call. They do not they’re a company that has sold their product to 400 companies across Europe. They’re coming to United States. They’re a global brand. They were referred to us by by another friend of their, somebody that I knew through various channels. The reason we want this through referrals is if you’re willing to take the effort to reach out to somebody and say, I really want to talk to those guys. That’s our little screen for, you know, the taking out the Green M, M’s, right? You, you, you’re serious enough about this that you’re going to try, and you’re going to and you’re going to make the effort. And we don’t just have an email, because otherwise we’ll get a bunch of emails. Oh, can you help me sell can you do this? Can you do that? Right? You get put in the work, and we will put in great work for you.
Will Bachman 46:05
Amazing. Yeah. Alex Ilya, thank you guys so much for joining today.
Ilya Druzhnikov 46:10
Thank you. Thanks. Will really appreciate it.
Will Bachman 46:13
All right, true. Pmf.com, check them out, and you’ll need to find a referral, someone to refer you. You’re
Alex Lugosch 46:20
going to be busy. Will you?
