He wrote the book on Account Based Marketing. Here are his GTM secrets for enterprise. | Bassem Hamdy, Founder of Briq

Bassem Hamdy (00:00:00) :
But the other understanding is how to translate problems into actual solutions. That's a skill that I think every founder needs to know how to do and I think some founders have the audacity to believe that they are the only solution. You know, I always say natural curiosity wins the day. We're raised not to talk about money. It's a sin, it's like embarrassing, you don't talk about money. Talk about money, you got to go and say, who has the money? Can you write the check? I have no problem being that bold. I'm like, who's going to write this check? Whose name is on the check? If you're meeting people at a trade show that's for your event and you didn't know who they were before the event. You're really bad at this. I never feel like I have to product work, what are you talking about it. Only the paranoid survive. You don't want to change things too much. It's like staying in shape. You got to work out every day. product market fit is a daily workout. You don't run those five miles, you're going to get big.

Previous Guests (00:00:53) :
That's Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I called it the Product Market Fit question. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:05) :
Do you think the Product Market Fit Show, has product market fit? Cause if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Bassem, welcome to the show, man.

Bassem Hamdy (00:01:21) :
Thank you, Pablo.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:22) :
You started Briq, what? Maybe six, seven years ago or so. So we're going to jump into all that and really. I mean, focus mainly now your Series B stage company raised over $50 million, but really jump into that first part of it. The first inning, so to speak, when you really found Product Market Fit. Tell me a bit more about this first version of the product. It's not, immediately clear to me exactly what you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do?

Bassem Hamdy (00:01:43) :
In construction, there is so much cross party execution and risk. Think about I don't know how familiar you are with that supply chain or value chain. Think about it you have an owner let's say it's Amazon they own the site. They want to build something, so they hire an architect and engineer anywhere up to three companies. They design things the engineer hires a bunch of specialists, maybe a mechanical plumbing engineer. Say up to five companies they go out and they put out a big package let's say, a general contractor bids on it. The general contractor needs sixteen subcontractors, so now we're up to twenty one companies and add on to that the material suppliers. Which could be in the hundreds, now nobody owns the single version of the truth it's not like any other industry. I know people say construction is slow to pick up technology or dumber. These hard hats don't get tech, no that's not true. We are in the most complex full contact sport out there. Twenty one cross parties data in all twenty one systems needs to be some of it needs to be in sync and when you think about that complexity of oh let's just create a portal for all twenty one companies to log in, that's Fugazi. Nobody's logging into your portals construction owner system. Nobody wants to do that and that's not realistic.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:03) :
They each kind of have their own tools for their own workflows sort of thing?

Bassem Hamdy (00:03:06) :
Exactly, everybody has it. Everybody has their own hammer. Because that's what they do for a living, right? So you need to understand that they're going to use their hammer and if their hammer happens to be Autodesk Construction Cloud, and your hammer happens to be Procore. Somebody else's is CMiC or Computer Ease or whatever. Now you have so many different versions of the truth. Where you look at what the original and where we end up, it's an evolution but I would say that the original version was all data, there was no front end. The idea was how do we collect the pieces of information without giving humans any extra work. Collect the pieces of information to sew together a tapestry of what the real story is. What is the real story of this project? Why did it cost this? Why did it fail? Why was it successful? Why was it delivered late? All of that information exists in so many different places, and the idea was to create essentially a protocol in order for that to happen. Now, I can tell you once we get into it a little bit more how difficult that is.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:08) :
I was going to say like, and especially in 2018. That sounds very, I mean, it sounds very valuable but it sounds very hard.

Bassem Hamdy (00:04:14) :
It was crazy. We got in there and we said, this is what we're raising on and you know. I know how to pitch and we got a little bit of seed funding.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:23) :
How much did you raise?

Bassem Hamdy (00:04:25) :
Well, we raised maybe $2.5 million on our seed round. Maybe a little less, not a big number. We had enough to operate for a couple of years though, because we were lean, very lean at the time. But the thing is, Pablo, the stark reality of entrepreneurship kicked me in the teeth in the first six months. We're like, we're going to be that protocol data layer and then you're like, OK, ComputerEase. You're a thirty year old accounting system. Where's your API? And then we're like, there are no APIs. And then you try to understand their database structure. You're like, I don't know what's happening and so very, very quickly we realized this was not the industry for a data protocol. And that was our first major pivot.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:06) :
How long did it take from the time you raised your seed round to that realization?

Bassem Hamdy (00:05:11) :
Faster than I'd hoped. You know, when they say fail, fail fast. Probably three months. I had a great network, so we had clients that were willing to lean in and help co develop and when you got into it, really underneath the hood. Forgetting about all the platitudes that we talked about as I came up in the industry, talking about APIs and interoperability and everybody being friendly and cooperative, it just didn't exist. So you're now, I was in a situation like, what are we going to do? I guess I'll go back to work. Luckily, one of our engineers that I was lucky enough to find, who's employee number three at Briq. Raised their hand, and at the time in 2018, Pablo, it was called RPA. Raised their hand, said why bother going to the back end, why bother asking for an API, why don't we just build bots that will operate and extract the data. That was our only dream, it was like okay we're going to extract data. What we found very quickly, and one of our first projects was confidentially. I can't say the names, but one of the largest contractors in the US and one of the largest social networks in the world. They were building a data center, and the idea was that the data center was going to have Briq, as its data backbone. And so, we're going into the social media company's systems and pulling data out, running reports using our bots, doing the same thing on the contractor side. Consolidating the report once a week and then the contractor goes, do you think you could do data entry too? And we're like, you know, you're a startup, you're not going to say no.  It's like, yeah, probably and so the bot then went in and entered data into the social media site, and that was crazy. And they saw this happening, it looked like a player piano in the old west. People couldn't comprehend what it was doing. It was a very deterministic bot though. It was like, had to have really, really early days as very detailed instructions. You know, navigation instructions, data compliance instructions, data entry instructions. It was deterministic, but once it had the instructions, it did the same thing every time. Didn't fail and that was really exciting, and that was my aha moment. It's like, wow, automation and I didn't know anything about UiPath or automation anywhere at the time. Automation is going to be the way companies that work in industries like ours, where many of the software packages they still use today and buy, by the way. This isn't, they actually procure them. We're built before you were born probably, Pablo. This is crazy software that isn't going anywhere. It's a hammer that just works for that and so the bot moment was that really like that one aha moment was like, hey, these bots are kind of cool. And that's kind of how we exploded from there. 

Pablo Srugo (00:07:49) :
When was that moment in the timeline? 

Bassem Hamdy (00:07:51) :
I would say that was 2019.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:53) :
Okay, so it wasn't that much longer after the RPA realization, three months in. How did you get, for example, in the middle of these two massive players? How did you get this pilot?

Bassem Hamdy (00:08:03) :
You know, I'm lucky enough to be a go to market CEO. I think there's different types of CEOs. I just happen to go to market. I'm a big fish in a very small pond. I know everybody in the industry. You know, you work in this industry for twenty six years. It's like, holy cow, you have connections. You can drop a quarter, I like to say, and get something going. The other thing is I know the problem and you know what, you know, I was chief marketing officer through my career. My original career, said, you know, I ran product for a long time and running product, you learn this muscle memory of what problem are you trying to solve is one part of it. I know people love talking about that as a product manager, but the other understanding is how to translate problems into actual solutions. That's a skill that I think every founder needs to know how to do, and I think some founders have the audacity to believe that they are the only solution. Which is great and I think having that kind of attitude is awesome, but I think. I always say natural curiosity wins out the day, and with that natural curiosity you can talk to clients. Get confidence from them and get to those POCs. Because the buck stops with you as CEO. So I use my network, I use my understanding of the industry and the problem set. And I also use the idea of, let's align on a solution that provides value. Let's align on our vision of peace and harmony for this industry. So yeah, I was like, you know, good to be lucky. Lucky to be good, I guess.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:25) :
Well, I mean, the network obviously helps, and being in the industry helps also just to understand what UICP is, how they think, and what's valuable to them. But maybe tell me a bit more about what was the pitch then, to that first pilot? Because once you've got pilots, once you've got customers, things get easier and easier. But when you talk about getting maybe the first big one, what did you actually sell to them? What was the ROI that you pitched?

Bassem Hamdy (00:09:46) :
One hundred percent like that first big client was, let's coordinate data between two big players, your client and the general contractor. What ended up happening though during that pilot, because they had this problem where they, you know, if you're the general contractor, you're being forced to use your client systems. There's a huge problem. The data is lost, right? So the idea here was, hey, let's use these bots to extract data very quickly. I would say within the first two weeks, they were like, can we also enter data?

Pablo Srugo (00:10:16) :
So I get that, but is the ROI then. Is it a time saved ROI or is it data management ROI? What's the reason that they care about this?

Bassem Hamdy (00:10:24) :
The drive for show, one hundred percent, is time saving. The big theory is that the drive for show, yeah, you're going to save thirty person hours a week, twenty person hours a week, fifty person hours a week. That's easy, quantifiable. They don't need to hire another project engineer. They don't need to go to the Philippines and hire data entry clerks or even hire folks in the Midwest, like three or four people. That they would have otherwise, by the way. pure cut. This takes time to do. Data coordination takes time to do with humans. The other side of it, I like to say, the putt for dough, where is the real return? It's on the latency of data. What is the cost if data is late? What is the cost of a mistake? If you make a mistake, fat finger something. What is the cost of that? What's the opportunity cost that you have a high end project manager head down on a computer trying to get things done that he shouldn't or she shouldn't be doing? Now AI orchestration and automation, how many hours am I going to return? And our current clients, you know, one to two man years or person years in the first twelve months of running Briq, is an average return on time. But the return on one mistake could be millions. If I screw up how to analyze a certificate of insurance or I miss an invoice or billing, you could be losing anywhere from half a million to $10 million a year. I'm on that and it's great. Great construction companies have disappeared because of mistakes like that.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:47) :
Do you find it's easier to sell on the time saved or you find it's easier to sell on this potential mistake you won't make?

Bassem Hamdy (00:11:52) :
Oh, it's always easier to sell on the time saved. I think it's because, you know, we live in tech and we understand the nuances of that putt for dough moment. If you make a mistake, it's going to cost you your company. It's a high risk business, but when they go in to justify it to a CEO or write the check. It's really easy to justify. Well, I was going to hire Jenny or Johnny, but this is one fourth the cost of Jenny or Johnny and so that becomes just a very obvious thing to them. It also creates a ceiling, and we can talk about pricing strategies. When you return on time, it creates a ceiling at the max price of your average sales price.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:29) :
That's right, because when you can charge me fifty percent of what you otherwise would have paid, something like that is probably your ceiling. Hire a human for $100k or pay me $50k, there's no.

Bassem Hamdy (00:12:37) :
I think with AI pricing, we could run a seminar on this. AI pricing is hard and I think it's different. It's not perceived. I think it's different than other pricing models. Like as I get, we'll speed through like where Briq is today, but the idea around how to price things like this. We have never been priced before and as a market guy, it's really exciting to see that experimentation making pricing better. But it's also scary as an entrepreneur because the market is shifting so fast on how to sell this.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:08) :
Because you're a go to market CEO, I wanted to talk about a few go to market things and then we're going to shift. Because I'm sure the post Gen AI moment is a new inflection point. When you're talking there, would you say you have different buyers, like the buyer who's going to use your product and the economic buyer that's going to, approve and sign? Is that true in terms of the setup for you?

Bassem Hamdy (00:13:27) :
Yeah, let's talk about our go to market. We're highly account based. I actually wrote a book called The Book on Account Based Marketing. The first thing is everybody's a niche marketer, only great companies know it. So know thyself and know your ICP, but know your ICP at a layer, not “I sell construction companies.” Understand the psychographic, the firmographic, that is going to be the fastest closing rate.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:49) :
What does that look like for you? How specific is that, for example?

Bassem Hamdy (00:13:52) :
Oh my goodness, is there a new CFO? Did the CFO just get hired? I mean, we were doing this before anybody was tracking signals. Did they just win a new project? Are they multi office? And then we score them. All this information was available by scraping way back playback. This is not a new thing, that required AI, it requires hard work. I read my first ADM program in Excel. I don't know why everybody is so focused on spending more money in marketing tech, but the idea here is you got to get very specific. So you start with industry, start with firmographic, and yes, that's your list. Let's say that's a hundred thousand companies. They will all eventually buy from you. You have to believe that because they're your ICP and you're building the product for them. It's who's at the top of the list that month, that quarter, that does something psychographically that will pop you to the beginning. So if it's a new CFO, boom. Is it a new office? Boom. Is it a new whatever? Is it a new CEO? Is it a new CIO? Is it the CIO? You know, if the CFO is outside of the industry, that actually gives them more points in our company. Because that means, hey, they've heard of stuff like Briq. You know, maybe if they're from another construction company, they may still not know about Briq, so.


Pablo Srugo (00:15:01) :
And the new CEO or new person in of its own is because it just brings change? Like, new people bring change? Is that kind of the thinking?

Bassem Hamdy (00:15:08) :
Yeah, that is thinking. The number one signal for us though is growth, financial growth. So, eighty five it was not a great, like, very scientific survey, but we did a survey within our client base and over eighty five percent of the people responded. We're growing over twenty percent year on year, which is a lot for a kind of traditional industry. Growth brings waste. Growth brings the need for more heads. Growth brings exposure of how bad your processes are today. So that's probably our number one psychographic signal and we track growth in a couple of different ways. Permits pulled, because they're construction. We track growth on employee hires on LinkedIn, which lots of folks do. Just to understand, what is their book of business? Once we understand their book of business is growing, they become a target. Now, below that is the persona and I think, Pablo, you nailed it. I call it the door opener, the champion, the economic buyer, the person writing the check. But you always have to know your challenger, who's going to cut your legs out from under you and I think, you know, happy year of salespeople always forget, how do I identify the person using experience, muscle memory, what have you, that's going to kibosh this thing.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:16) :
We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be a part of the group. You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. It's very rare. I must admit, you know, I obviously talk to founders all the time. The champion is like a key thing that most founders have in mind. Who's going to be my champion? That's something they've learned already. They understand, the economic buyer is probably the second one that they tend to learn. But the challenger is a very rare thing that comes up for, the ones that you didn't get. Why was it? And rarely is this idea of a challenger mentioned.

Bassem Hamdy (00:16:47) :
And you know, I love, I love go to market vcing, I light up. I'll say, isolated ridicule, that's one way of doing it but you got it. You have to put that person, you have to expose that person quickly. We can get into, the inside baseball.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:00) :
I'd love to, actually. I think this is great stuff and frankly, every founder wants to know more about go to market. So I'm more than happy to jump into this.

Bassem Hamdy (00:17:06) :
Oh yeah, no, I. So persona identification, like, let's say you go in there. You have to have this muscle memory. Let's say a lot of startups are founder led sales, right? In a lot of cases and by the way, I think that's the number one mistake of a founder. Even if you're not a great salesperson, you got to learn to sell because hiring, you know, I've seen it all. We just hired the salesperson and they'll take care of it. Look, no, you can't outsource revenue. So you have to do it yourself at the beginning and I think when you get in front of clients, maybe you get nervous or what have you. If you're not a natural salesperson, fine. You'll learn how to do that, who cares? But when you get into that room, it's all about people. It has nothing to do with you. You could throw out the ICP stuff. You could throw out all the scientific, forget about Salesforce, Marketo, all the tech we buy. It's about people and when you get into that room, you need to have some muscle memory of who is going to be your friend and who's going to be your enemy. Who's going to be the one that really gets excited. So let's say hypothetically, and it's true for Briq, mainly the young person that is doing all this bad work, maybe our door opener. Meaning I'm a project manager and I'm being told to do all this double data entry into accounting, order mandated systems, whatever. Let me find tech that orchestrates this and that's our door opener. So hypothetically, our door opener is usually under the age of thirty five, has a decent education, wants to grow their career using technology as a backbone for that. You see that because they have different certifications that they might show up on their LinkedIn. They're a great door opener. Door opener comes in, they can't be my champion. How can they be my champion? They're thirty years old, they're brand new to the company, what have you. Then you identify in that role who's the champion. Who has the biggest thing to gain from this? In our case, it's usually the CFO, right? Responsible for P&L. Anybody that's responsible for P&L has the biggest thing to gain. So I'm like, okay, P&L, find that P&L person. Now, you then talk to the P&L person and you really get a rapport, they're your champion. If you're lucky enough that the P&L person is also an economic buyer, you're in, right? Sometimes generally it's not the case. Generally, there's either a group that's the economic buyer. That's the scariest thing right now. It's kind of group fake consensus or it's the CEO or somebody else, COO, somebody else. So let's say I find the person that has the most to gain. Now I need to identify who can write the check and I think people. This is the number one thing that people fail on is, you know, we're raised maybe in Canada, it's true more than the U.S. We're raised not to talk about money. I remember my parents are like, you would, like, it's a sin. It's embarrassing, you don't talk about money. Talk about money. You kind of go, it's like, who has the money. Can you write the check? I have no problem being that bold. I'm like, who's going to write this check? Whose name is on the check? And you have to find that out. And then you find out who has the most to lose from this deal. That's the one thing people always have happy years. They don't want to talk about that. They're like, I'm so good. My software is so great. My product is so great. Everybody can win, every digital transformation. There will be a loser, there will be. I'm sorry and to pretend that there's not is, foolhardy. Find out who's losing. I'll give you a great example, we have this great opportunity and I learned this the hard way. But this is two companies back, this is not Briq. We go through this whole process. We're amazing, we're in, we have the economic buyer identified. What we didn't realize was the CIO was trying to develop software that we were trying to sell them. The CIO had built a fiefdom, had a great budget, felt like he was a, you know, software executive from within a construction company and we were taking that away. We're stealing that from him, we were taking that away from him and he, at the last minute. Kiboshed a deal we had worked on and this is the old days. This is my first, the first gig. You know, this was probably an eight figure deal for us because he sold big ERP, right? And he just, like, right at the end, swiped it and that.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:09) :
Deadly.

Bassem Hamdy (00:21:10) :
Only happens to you once.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:11) :
Yes, yes, yes.

Bassem Hamdy (00:21:12) :
And you're like, this is my year. This is my whole year. It's gone because this guy wanted to build a software company. That person is still employed by the company and has four hundred engineers working for him.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:22) :
And is that still, like when you think about for Briq now. Who is that challenger typically?
Is it still a CIO?

Bassem Hamdy (00:21:29) :
Less so since Gen AI pivoted in 2023, that's less so. Before it was, yeah, a hundred percent. Once software became productized and the CIO lost the ability to build. Which was very common in our industry, build versus buy. Once the cloud came out and eventually AI, that was the only refuge they really had. Which is, if I don't want to just be the network printer guy, I've got to build software. I also don't want to just manage somebody else's software package, right? So, AI orchestration is what we call it now, and it's a combination of, you know, an MCP server, set of servers, and robots that are fully articulated. Artificial intelligence to think and have instinct and all of this stuff. It's exciting to them to want to build that and it feels like it's buildable because of Rapplid and Lovable, and all these other solutions. So you want to be careful now. There's two CIOs, one that says, this is something I can build internally and give myself some job security. Because that's what it boils down to, right? So they're still a little bit the enemy, the challenger, but it's getting better now. Because I think you go, I think everybody thinks, you know, with a dollar and a dream and a login to Replant, I can build a company. And then they find out after a month, it's like, oh, it's not really true. And they need people like us to come in. So they're more of the friend, but yeah, definitely IT was the Walker for many years.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:59) :
Let's go deep on another part of go to market then, which is kind of this top of funnel piece of ABM, right? Account based marketing, you have the roles now. My presumption is you're basically trying to find door openers and maybe champions as well. You've talked about prioritization because you've got your list, but now how do you go after them? How do you get them to open the email or take the call or the meeting or whatever it might be?

Bassem Hamdy (00:23:22) :
You know, believe it or not, email is still our number one channel. I'll talk a little bit about that. With the new tools, you can hyper personalize an email chain, right? So the idea that you can not just, like, there's a line, nobody wants your newsletter, right? The information needs to be so specific to them, it seems eerie and before, we used to have to handcraft that. Like before AI, generative AI, we'd handcraft that. And, you know, I had a hundred new marketers at Procore. We would be typing, okay, we need hyper specific to these hundred A level accounts. Now you can do that at scale. So I think email being our number one channel, it's gonna be true for a while. Having that message be tailored, even if it's just to title. Having that subject line being tailored, being very specific on the FOMO effect, saying things like, so and so is using us. Which is competitor, playing into that little bit of fear, or fear of missing out. So you get email going, I think that's a big part of it. I think that's the carpet bombing approach. Think about it before the allies come in on the Normandy Beach carpet bomb. But there's other sides of it now, like the concept of, we used to call it webinars for one. You need content. It can't just be emails. You need an offer and so the offer can be a generative e-book or what have you. That's eerily like what they need, or a webinar and it's interesting for folks. It doesn't take more than twenty minutes to get out a webinar. But if you could get the one account, you know, we used to do webinars like airport projects in the Southeast. Have you won one? You should join this webinar if you have. We're going after one account. That's who we're going after. They just want an airport project. So, I call a webinar, I don't need a thousand people at my webinar, I need one person that's going to buy it from me.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:09) :
Are you literally doing webinars? I assume you don't show how many participants there are, where there's just one participant there?

Bassem Hamdy (00:25:13) :
Yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:14) :
Crazy. That's called a demo, by the way, in other words.

Bassem Hamdy (00:25:18) :
Yeah, it's basically a demo. Exactly, you've just got a low cost demo. So, you get this, you use everything you can. Now, live events pre COVID were like a huge channel for us as well. I'm proud to say, I think we've been to one trade show this year. I hate trade shows and I think what trade shows have become is a way, like a boondoggle for people to go and show up. And then you feel like you have to be there.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:39) :
Well, it's interesting you say that because I've been noticing many people going to events, and at least they're saying they're closing deals at events. So I'm actually surprised that you're saying it's not something you're investing much into.

Bassem Hamdy (00:25:48) :
It's not that you're not going to close a deal. The question is, could you have closed it through another means or method?

Pablo Srugo (00:25:54) :
Correct.

Bassem Hamdy (00:25:55) :
I love Affinity events. Affinity events are events you own, right? You know, independent event activation. Are they cheaper? I think they are. I mean, even if I spent twenty, if I got a box of the Chargers game and invited ten people to come for twenty grand. And I had to go to World of Concrete. Believe it or not,

Pablo Srugo (00:26:12) :
Right.

Bassem Hamdy (00:26:13) :
That's a cool trade show. It cost me $50 and I got that deal at a higher ASP than on the floor of World of Concrete. I mean, it's simple ROI math. Affinity events are so much better than trade shows. There's so much better than trade shows. Now there are shows people go to, that's fine. I think if you have a booth and you pop it up and it's a low cost employee or BDR or AE in territory, great. But I think the days of shipping six executives to go to like

Pablo Srugo (00:26:39) :
Right.

Bassem Hamdy (00:26:40) :
Whatever and, you know, take everybody out of pocket for a week. Do massive construction of booths.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:45) :
It's a huge lift, it is a huge lift, it's true.

Bassem Hamdy (00:26:47) :
Unless you're a multinational company with money to burn. Look, the world has also changed. Growth at all costs is not what people are looking for. They're looking for cash efficiency and I just don't see trade shows as cash efficient, especially for top funnel. If you're meeting people at a trade show that's for your event, and you didn't know who they were before the event, you're really bad at this. You shouldn't be in there. You should know who they are, that's ridiculous. Top of funnel discovery is not for trade shows. It should be mid funnel. Anyway, so we go back in and we track an engagement score. We track everything. How long do they look at our videos? Did they show up in the webinar? Did they sign up? What have you. Something crosses an engagement level. We still have BDRs. We actually have half as many BDRs and sales are up sixty percent this year. So we're getting more and more efficient. BDRs go in, knock down the meeting and then we pass it on to an AE, traditional kind of funnel after that. Our close rates from time to closing is forty five days. So we have an extremely strong time to closing. I tell people that it's an Affinity stat because eighty percent of the sales process already happened before the first meeting sat. If they're coming in cold, cold, it's a really long process.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:58) :
What's the conversion rate? What's the SQL to demo, demo to close kind of rates?

Bassem Hamdy (00:28:02) :
I would say from, I have to look at this last quarter. But from first meeting sat, it's ten percent. So one in ten will sign something after first meeting sat. So that's pretty decent. When I say meeting sat though, I'm careful on this thing. Are these sales qualified? Are they sales accepted?

Pablo Srugo (00:28:17) :
Yes, exactly.

Bassem Hamdy (00:28:18) :
It's in a demo. I kind of don't love that model. I'm more marketing qualified, sales qualified account. If I give a salesperson a marketing qualified account, meaning it's in TAM. It's not just TAM, it's serviceable in ICP and I hand them a meeting with a persona that should be a door opener or a champion or an economic buyer. You best believe that person better sign the item. That's why I hate SQL. You know, is it, so do they have budget now? Nobody has budget now, you go find the budget, it's your job. That's the whole point. You're on your order taker, find the deal. That's a sensitive subject for me.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:57) :
I like it though, I like it.

Bassem Hamdy (00:28:59) :
Yeah, POKE's first demo sat, it's ten percent.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:01) :
Gotcha.

Bassem Hamdy (00:29:02) :
Or meeting sat, I'll call it meeting.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:03) :
That was a great tangent into go to market. Appreciate you for taking me down that rabbit hole. Let's maybe jump through the story a little bit and go to kind of the, let's call it 2023, right? So, ChatGPT comes out end of 2022, Gen AI is happening. What's happening at Briq, you know, over the last two years. 

Bassem Hamdy (00:29:19) :
You know, it's so, so funny. So, you know, from '21 to '23, we added a new product. So we were an RPA company fundamentally in 2018, say 2019 to 2021. Then we did our Series B, and our Series B was in the roaring twenties and they said, you know, you got to use this RPA technology to do something fintech related. That's where everybody is, that's what we want, that's what our investors wanted. So we created, for a short window, a fintech product that basically was more or less FP&A. I would call it Forecast to Pay, meaning your forecasting spend and then you're paying for it. What I realized in fintech over those sixteen to eighteen months is it's a very hard, high churn product. Fintech products are extremely high churn, they’re not sticky because in some ways they're experimental. They're like, going in, and they're like, oh, is this good? Maybe I could just do it in Excel, you know, my bank has a service and so it was a very high churn product. And good to be lucky, like, to be good. I say that again, we could discontinue that product. It was high growth, high churn. It felt like a revolving door. Money would come in, money would go out. It was extremely frustrating and we went back to our RPA roots at the same intersection as AI was coming up. And so you go back to the social media companies, not that I mentioned the company earlier. But we grabbed a copy of Llama from our friends at Meta and we said, how do we take Llama and create a model for us? And that was kind of the beginning. It was more or less a Skunk Works project and then, how do you make Llama? How do you make generative the brain for the robot? How do you make generative the robot writer? How does a robot write a robot?

Pablo Srugo (00:31:07) :
This is kind of this agentic AI kind of wave.

Bassem Hamdy (00:31:09) :
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, you probably know that I have opinions. Right now I hate the term agent, because I think agent means everything and nothing at all at the same time. I'm huge into the term AI orchestration. I can't stress enough, it's like, you know, Briq is AI orchestration. We have our own agents, we have our own digital workers, robots, whatever you want to call them. But we also live in reality. Some solutions are going to be better than, like, I'm not going to recreate Gamma. Gamma's great app for those that don't know, it's like a generative PowerPoint builder. I want to use Gamma. I want to use the best. I want to use MidJourney as part of my AI orchestration. You know, so I have an orchestration that's lead to quote for physical industry companies, like construction companies. Lead to quote needs a proposal. I don't want to write a proposal generator that prints to PDF. So AI orchestration is Switzerland. We are going to use the best nodes to execute. But at its core, the engine, the brain, the graph, the thinking language is what is at the core of Briq and so, you know, coming out of 2023, we had an ontology that was second to none. We gave real meaning to data because we were so focused on this industry, and we needed that ontology for robots to work. So now we have an ontology. Great, so we have basic language. We have the arms. We have the action bots that can now be controlled. We then invented a thinking program, a thought process and that was really kind of the big moment. I don't know if I want to bore your people, but problems in construction, just a basic problem. You get an invoice, it comes into email, AP clerk opens it up. There's no job number, right? A human can think, how do I find out? Oh, Jimmy, oh, he ordered that. Oh, he's on job one, two, three. That's thinking, there's so many signals in this piece of paper that you can figure out. Robots initially were very deterministic. We couldn't think. So we raise a hand, I don't have a job number, which is annoying. So now, for instance, we created this idea, hey, identify that it's an invoice, look at things like the person that bought it, the job site address. Where was it delivered, you know, when was it delivered, look at the P.O. system, was there a P.O., do things that make you think like you're dealing with a human. That’s the beginning of intelligence, with thinking. That was a big part of what we released and then most recently, the instinct, which is real intelligence, educated guessing. It all was obviously telling the human that it's an educated guess, but the idea here is that that's how we build these fully articulated digital workers.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:44) :
So walk me through numbers a little bit. In the first iteration, 2019, how quickly did you get to like a million in revenue?

Bassem Hamdy (00:33:50) :
Yeah, we did it within twelve months.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:53) :
And then from that period till, you know, the 2020s, then you got the fintech piece. All that, what was happening? Was revenue still growing very fast, or was there kind of a stalling for that period?

Bassem Hamdy (00:34:04) :
Yeah, it was definitely a stall. Because the money was going in as fast as it was going out and we luckily still had the RPA product selling in the background. Because that really was the lifeblood and you got to also remember 2023. Nuclear winter, SVB goes out of business. It's no more free money. Interest rates are up. Economy is contracting. We went down, let's say, I think we riffed over fifty percent. We went from maybe three hundred employees to one hundred fifty, something in that range. That was a big moment. Then all of a sudden, you've got the plane. Now you're at turbulence. Now you're leveling this plane up. Part of the reason, once you hit turbulence, it's like you got that bigger guy on the plane you want to push out of the plane. Start delivering luggage. That's where you got to get rid of the fintech product. That was one thing. That's how we could cut so much and then you start looking at it, we're now eight figures or touching on eight figures. We don't give exact revenue numbers on these things, but you know where that lands, right? 

Pablo Srugo (00:34:57) :
How fast was that? That was my final question. How fast was that inflection point, post gen AI?

Bassem Hamdy (00:35:02) :
Oh, post gen AI. Yeah, three years, 2023, 2026.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:05) :
Maybe two, yeah.

Bassem Hamdy (00:35:08) :
Yeah, two and a half, three years.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:09) :
But you felt, I guess the question to you is, did you feel like the new stuff with data orchestration and what you can do now with Gen AI was a real inflection point in terms of the demand? The demand pool?

Bassem Hamdy (00:35:19) :
It's amazing, for those that aren't here yet. I will tell you, get on board quickly, not just with Briq, but with other things. You ain't seen nothing yet. Remember I talked about the PC? Like, I went to companies, I literally went to construction companies in 1999. When I started my career as an implementations consultant or whatever. That didn't embrace the PC at that time. They're definitely gone and at Procore, not having embraced iPads or the cloud, like distributing software to the source. Those companies are gone. Now you don't embrace AI, you are gone. You are not a company in 2026. They have to understand this is not, this is not, you know, people talk about an AI bubble and they talk about, is this Fugazi? It's like, no, this is, this is something and this is bigger than the cloud, much bigger than the cloud. I'll tell you that and almost as large, or if not larger, than the PC revolution, right? So 2026, will be an interesting year but an exciting one.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:20) :
Perfect. Well, listen, let's stop it there. I'll ask the three questions we always end on. The first one is, when did you personally feel like you'd found true product market fit?

Bassem Hamdy (00:36:28) :
I never feel like I have true product market fit. What are you talking about? Only the paranoid survive.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:32) :
That's right.

Bassem Hamdy (00:36:33) :
I keep on refining. I mean, you don't want to change things too much. It's like staying in shape. You got to work out every day. Product market fit is a daily workout. You don't run those five miles, you're going to get big. You got it, like, to ever say you've arrived at product market fit, in my mind is crazy.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:52) :
Was there ever a time where you thought things might just completely fail?

Bassem Hamdy (00:36:56) :
Same question every day. What do you mean? I don't sleep. I thought I already started with only the paranoids survive. Every day I feel like a failure, what are you talking about? I have fear of failure, intense fear and it haunts you. One day I'll retire and not worry about that. Maybe I'll think of a problem and fear failure. Yeah, no, every day it's a new adventure. I think that there is a balance health wise. That's why I think for CEOs and CEO entrepreneurs, self care is so important. Self care is real, I run, self care is real. You're going to feel like you're failing. If you're at zero to one, one to one hundred, whatever, you're always going to feel like you're failing. You're always feeling like you missed an opportunity, you made a mistake. There's always a competitor coming to eat your lunch, right? The idea here is you take care of yourself. Yeah, I feel good, but not that great.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:49) :
And what would be like your number one piece of advice for an early stage founder looking for product market fit?

Bassem Hamdy (00:37:55) :
It's a great question. I think you find your passion, you find your purpose. I think that it's interesting. It's really, if you don't love the industries you're going to serve and you don't love the problem you're going to solve, it's going to be really, really hard to find product market fit. Because it's not going to be in your soul. I think getting to product market fit is an essence of your being, a completion of you as a person in the world of your work life. It's like finding your wife, it's finding your significant other. It's that important, it's that meaningful, you feel it in your heart. You know, find your passion, find your purpose. If you're trying to find product market fit in an industry you don't care about or a problem you don't really care about, you just think there's money in it, you're pooched. Find a new one, I say, find your passion, find your purpose.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:48) :
Awesome. Well, Bassem, it's been great having you on the show, man. Thanks for taking the time.

Bassem Hamdy (00:38:51) :
Thank you, have a great one. Cheers, stay warm.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:53) :
Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.