He hit $1M ARR by sending 500,000 cold emails—then raised a $25M Series A in 6 days. | Mark Hughes, Co-Founder of Solidroad

Mark Hughes (00:00:00) : The moment we found true product market fit, there were four of us. Up until then, we hadn't had much usage, no usage in the product at all and we onboarded a new customer. So we had left work at whatever time in Ireland. The company is based in America, and we came into work the next day, and we checked the post hoc metrics. And we were running around the room celebrating. When you see the graph flat for so long and then a massive spike where we had thousands of simulations, as we call them, and then hundreds of users in the platform. I remember my co founder and CTO, Patrick, being very emotional, tears in his eyes. All the work he put in, and that someone was eventually using something that he'd built. How we actually scaled our first $1 million ARR came from cold outbound. So we were sending like five hundred thousand emails. We got five thousand replies and two hundred and fifty meetings booked. And then like a twenty percent conversion off those meetings booked, which was forty customers and an ACV of $25K to get to $1 million ARR. Pablo Srugo (00:00:56) : You raised a $25 million Series A last month. How many people were you when you raised that? Mark Hughes (00:01:01) : Twelve. Honestly, I was lucky and fortunate that we got a term sheet within six days. For that first week, the process was actually quite quick. Had the calendar completely stacked. I'm a big believer in, rather fundraising or not fundraising. There's a lot of, like, "Oh, I'm doing these coffee chats and, hopefully we'll get preempted from this coffee chat," and all these. It's like, if you're fundraising, you're fundraising. So the calendar was probably blocked with, you know, twelve meetings a day. Previous Guests (00:01:25) : 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 (00:01:37) : Do you think the Product Market Fit show, has product market fit? Because 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. Mark, welcome to the show, man. Mark Hughes (00:01:53) : Thank you very much for having me. Pablo Srugo (00:01:54) : Let's start with the thing that really matters. Let's start with product market fit, and then we'll work our way backwards from there. Tell us, for you, when was the moment when you felt you'd found true product market fit, and why? Mark Hughes (00:02:06) : Yeah, I think the moment we found true product market fit, there were four of us. So it was myself, my co-founder, and the two early employees. We were in our very small annex office of a building in Dublin, Ireland. Up until then, we hadn't had much usage. No usage in the product at all, and we onboarded a new customer called PartnerHero. Their BPO, outsource call center, they had a lot of conversation value. They were using it in their PartnerHero Academy for onboarding new agents into the business. So we left work at whatever time in Ireland, the company is based in America, and we came into work the next day and we checked the post hoc metrics and the usage metrics in the tool. And we were running around the room celebrating because it was definitely a pinch me moment. Where, when you see the graph flat for so long, and then a massive spike where we had thousands of simulations, as we call them. Used overnight and hundreds of users in the platform, lots of errors and the tool breaking. But they still pushed through and used it. And yeah, I remember my co-founder and CTO, Patrick, being very emotional. Tears in his eyes, all the work he put in, and that someone was eventually using something that he'd built. Pablo Srugo (00:03:19) : Well, that's the moment when, you know, the thing that you've thought about and you thought people get value a certain way. And then you see people actually, in reality, get that value. It can be transformative, a very zero to one event. Maybe tell us a bit more, now that we understand that moment. What it is that your company does and what your company did for that customer. Mark Hughes (00:03:36) : So Solidroad is an AI-first training and quality assurance platform for enterprise CX teams, customer experience teams. There's two components to the product. We have a conversation simulator, which allows agents to practice realistic conversations in a risk free environment and get coaching, and feedback. So that's across all modalities, live chat, email, video call, et cetera. And then, we have our production environment where we give coaching and feedback on live interactions. So we connect to your help desk software, like Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, and then we close the feedback loop. So we will find issues in production and then automatically create these trainings to close those skill gaps. We also score your human agents and your AI agents so you can benchmark them against each other. So if you're using a Sierra or a Decagon or a Fin, we can see where you should actually deploy your conversation volume. The easy analogy I always give is when you ring a call center and you hear, "This call is being recorded for training and quality purposes." Historically, that was very laborious. It would be humans auditing transcripts with a rubric, only getting to one percent of that conversation volume, and then doing follow up classroom based learning. We build AI agents that completely automate that process. So, a hundred percent coverage of all your conversations, so you have full visibility and then, as I mentioned, closing that improvement loop for your human and AI agents. Pablo Srugo (00:04:57) : And this customer that you were just talking about, when was that deployment? Mark Hughes (00:05:00) : That would have been early 2024. So I think it was about March 2024. Pablo Srugo (00:05:04) : So that's two years ago. What part of the product were they most using back then? Mark Hughes (00:05:08) : That was just the simulation tool for, so actually practicing conversations, like AI role play for customer support and they were using it in interview loops for new hires. And then they were using it for onboarding. And that was really the kind of pinch me moment. That it was being used so heavily during this PartnerHero Academy, which was for just new hires. So to reduce that amount of time, time to proficiency or time to competency, as it's often used in the contact center world. They were ramping agents, in fifty percent of the time and using half the people. And we're like, OK, this is super valuable stuff. Pablo Srugo (00:05:41) : And you mentioned that before, I mean, you started what a year before that. Like, 2023? Mark Hughes (00:05:45) : Yeah, incorporated the company, I think it was January 2023. Pablo Srugo (00:05:49) : So it's been like a year or so, and you mentioned before that it was flat. Was it just that you were building or did you change something to have that click, you know, product market fit moment? Mark Hughes (00:05:58) : For a big portion of that, it was building. So it was my co founder Patrick building the tool and this was very early GPT three point five. First version of ChatGPT, building our own speech to text. Before we could use tools like Vapi and ElevenLabs. Even though we were very early to even using ElevenLabs. So a lot of this stuff was like, yeah, it wasn't fit for purpose. We have some funny examples of people on pilots screaming at the recording because the AI kept interrupting them, so lots of swear words in there. So we have them in the archives to look back on. But the product really wasn't there yet, so that was probably the first six to nine months and then we went after the sales vertical. Because my background was sales. I was an early sales hire at Intercom, and we applied the tool for like AI role play for sales. Got some early customers there, then ended up actually firing those customers because what we found was, even in the customers we did close. They were like startups that really didn't have the problem and then when we went more upmarket to larger companies, it was actually the support org that was using it more than the sales org. Our background being ex-Intercom, and that's where I met my co founder Patrick, kind of had domain expertise in customer support and CX, kind of ran hard and fast there after that PartnerHero moment. Pablo Srugo (00:07:11) : That was a big change, that going from a sales role playing, which there's been companies that have, you know, Hyperbound or whatever that have traction there. But you moved from sales role playing to customer success role playing, and that's where you saw things really hit off. Mark Hughes (00:07:22) : Yeah, exactly. Pablo Srugo (00:07:23) : So let's go through. I mean, you just went through the story, but can you kind of give us a two minute version? Now that we understand kind of where things started to work, let's kind of work backwards. As you said, 2023. Give me a little bit of your background before that and the genesis, origin story. Why did you start this company in the first place? Mark Hughes (00:07:43) : Yeah, I suppose a bit of background on myself. I would have met my co founder actually first in university. We both studied in Trinity College in Dublin. I studied business and economics, he studied computer science. We were both part of the Trinity Entrepreneurship Society, as it was called. So we would kind of tinker on ideas together in university. Both happened to start our careers at Intercom at the same time, so that's when I would have got to know him a good bit better. He started as a product engineer, and I was a BD or entry level sales position. Interesting, Patrick was working on the sales use case team at Intercom. That was when Intercom was building everything from marketing, sales, and support, and not just customer support. So he would build things, and I'd be his guinea pig where I'd test new features and stuff like that before kind of getting them out on the roadmap. Pablo Srugo (00:08:29) : This was when, by the way? What year are we talking about? Mark Hughes (00:08:32) : 2017, yeah. So both kind of worked there for a couple of years. He then had his own start, his first startup. Which was a Y Combinator company in summer 2019, and I had my first business. Which was a company called GradGuide, which I took full time and raised $2 million against that business and that was a kind of graduate recruitment platform. Where we connect students and grads with a mentor a few years ahead of them on the career ladder to help them find their first role. So it was more a mentorship platform, particularly focused on sales support roles to help people land those kind of entry level jobs. After that then, I sold that business in late 2022, and Patrick left his Y Combinator company. We'd always stayed in touch and one thing I realized was that I didn't have a technical co founder. He didn't have a sales co founder, someone to focus on distribution. So we always wanted to work together. So to be perfectly honest, the origin story, we have a memo about this that I can share called Mark and Patrick Inc. But it was really like Mark and Patrick wanted to work together and build a business. And then ideation kind of came after. Pablo Srugo (00:09:31) : But it was the perfect time. I mean, late 2022, is probably out of all the times where you could just be like, me and you are going to do something. We don't know what. That's the best time for that to happen. Mark Hughes (00:09:40) : Yeah, it was funny. I sold the business in November 2022. When ChatGPT just launched, and I had to do a month handover basically to the new owners. And we were kind of just working out of a working space in Dublin. We got free access to it at a place called Dogpatch Labs. They gave us a free desk and we were just tinkering on ideas. Taking long walks around Dublin in the cold winter, and eventually then kind of landed on the first version of Solidroad and took it full time in January 2023, like I said. Pablo Srugo (00:10:10) : What was the first idea of what you decided you wanted to build together? Mark Hughes (00:10:13) : There was lots of them. I think the first one was going to be a Gong competitor. Again, meeting bots but yeah, there are so many of those. Quite a commoditized software. So we built the first version of that, and then we'd send the transcript to ChatGPT, and it would summarize the call. And even back then, it was hilarious that people were amazed by this. Because this was before the likes of Gong and Chorus.ai had even implemented any AI into their product. And so people were like, oh, this is amazing. I can get a summarized version of my sales call and we built that on top of, I remember it was another kind of YC company. That was kind of the first version and then that brought us into the kind of role play training when the kind of speech to text got slightly better. Pablo Srugo (00:10:52) : It's funny the thing you're mentioning about sending it to ChatGPT and that kind of being V1 of some product. That's why GPT wrappers got such a bad name, because that was the original GPT wrapper. You just do something like incredibly simple, take it to ChatGPT, bring it back, and, this is a product. And then obviously a lot of those got killed by either an incumbent like Gong or ChatGPT. The thing became, oh, you don't want to be a wrapper and still people are saying, you don't want to. And the reality is, if you think about every vertical AI app, for the most part, they are wrappers. They are wrappers. They're just really good, and they embed the workflow and all this stuff. But it's funny to have that in your origin story, just because the time aligns so well. Mark Hughes (00:11:32) : Yeah, we knew early on when we started using ChatGPT for the first time, we're like, this is going to be massive. There's going to be so many opportunities on the application layer. So yeah, just kind of started from there. But it's funny, if you can remember January 2023, was a terrible time to raise money. So we were like, oh, Mark and Patrick, both second time founders, somewhat successful. This will be easy enough. Let's go raise some venture money. Pablo Srugo (00:11:56) : And it should have been the best time to raise money. But yeah, we had the macro winter of '22 and the AI stuff was just kind of starting off. Mark Hughes (00:12:03) : Yeah, so yeah, didn't have success there. So we were fortunate that we got, like, we shook the bushes and got some Irish angels who invested enough to pay ourselves a bit of a salary that I could cover my mortgage and go full time at the business. So even we have a rejection wall of all the VC rejections we have in our office in San Francisco now, and like a quote that says chips on shoulders puts chips in pockets. But yeah, it's been a motivation for us because although, yeah, we've since raised venture rounds and got through Y Combinator. The start was a bit too far to get off the ground. Pablo Srugo (00:12:34) : You've raised over $30 million so far. Mark Hughes (00:12:36) : Yeah. Pablo Srugo (00:12:37) : So things have changed. Tell me how you get from what you were first doing, which is kind of this Gong like, AI version of Gong. To the first version of a product, which sounds like it was the Hyperbound, right? The AI role playing. Was Hyperbound around? Was it a fast follow? Or was it just you were coming at the same time, or different times? Mark Hughes (00:12:54) : To be honest, I think we might have been actually before Hyperbound. Because then we saw the hype when they went somewhat viral on LinkedIn and were like, we were doing this. Yeah, we were doing this. I think honestly it was a really good moment for us though because I realized that we had to move our lives to San Francisco to build a very big business and you can see my background now. I've got Coit Tower in the background. But that really became a forcing function. So we started with the Gong competitor. As we said, that was getting commoditized. We knew that they would just bring these AI features on. But then when we had conversations, because if you look at startups. Obviously they're connected graphs, so looking backwards it all makes sense, at the time maybe not. But then it was, we really, we built these kind of coaching and feedback from the recorded calls and people were like, I really value this coaching and feedback. That's actually very interesting. The scorecards in Gong are really crap, and I have no way to actually improve. So then we built the role play tool, and we had the coaching and feedback. And people were like, oh, this is really strong. The sales leaders, or startup sales in particular, didn't really care as much, went into support. That's what we knew better. We scaled support orgs using it. Again, really liked the coaching feedback enough to say, if I actually was to say one thing, the flywheel we built from the get go was the scorecard and the scoring system. The evaluations that we built. Because then it was, I love this for training, but I'd love this in our production environment as well, because QA is still super manual right now, and we don't have visibility into our conversations. We used the same scoring system, basically, somewhat evolved all the way throughout, and to answer your question about the Hyperbound piece, as Patrick had built all this stuff himself. He wasn't using the likes of Vapi, for example, to build the role-play tool. We went out to San Francisco. There's actually an interesting tweet I can try to surface of me demoing Solidroad to people at this YC event. Because Patrick had done YC before, and they're like, oh my god, that's so cool. Super early days, really long latency, et cetera, and then we came back a few weeks, and then Hyperbound launches, they built on top of Daily.co and Vapi and all these tools that we didn't even know existed. When we were out in San Francisco a few weeks before, or maybe they weren't even around yet. Because I think we were quite early customer to Vapi in the end. We were like, OK, well, that's so much better than what we built. We need to move on to these third party softwares. But then also, everything's happening in San Francisco. That could have been us having this viral moment had we been in San Francisco, but we're in Dublin in the middle of nowhere. So that really became like, OK, we need to get over to San Francisco. So we would even, with very little money, be doing these low budget trips to SF. Patrick moved over to San Francisco first because all the kind of tech stuff, the labs being there, et cetera. Moved over on, I don't know how he survived now living here for six months. I don't know how he survived on, the salary he was there. Pablo Srugo (00:15:29) : It's expensive, man. Mark Hughes (00:15:30) : Oh, a low Irish salary in San Francisco. So I'll be forever indebted and grateful for him for the months that he put in there. So he would have moved over September 2024, and then we got accepted into YC in November '24, and then did the YC Winter '25. So in January there were four of us. We all moved over, then two more guys joined. Pablo Srugo (00:15:50) : I think this is a really interesting thread to pull on a little bit. Obviously, you came from a secondary city and you go to the Bay Area where almost all this stuff is happening. That story about Vapi specifically, Jordan was on the show. So I know how that happened and it's very interesting how finding out about something a couple of weeks before can have such a big impact. But you have the before and after. You weren't there, you were building, doing stuff, and now you are there. Maybe speak a little bit, you know, imagine you're a founder. You're talking to yourself, you know, before you move. You're talking to a founder who's like thinking, should I, shouldn't I? How important is it now that you've done it, right? How much benefit did you really get from it? Mark Hughes (00:16:26) : Yeah, I could not be a bigger advocate for San Francisco and I think it's really down to the surface area for luck. Just being here, being in the room with people, how connected the ecosystem is over here, it's all very serendipitous. So that example I gave already about giving the demo, but there's so many other examples of being over here, of meeting our Series A investor while we're doing YC at an Irish meetup event in San Francisco. It's really hard to quantify, but how I'd say it is it increases your surface area for luck, and I always think back when we graduated from Y Combinator on the last day, they just put up all the data behind companies who stay in SF and companies that leave SF. Even if you go to New York, the chances of success are just so much higher if you stay here in person in SF and yeah, startups are really hard. So being able to increase the surface area of your luck and increase the chances of success when you're trying to build a multi-billion dollar business. We always talk about even why we picked this office, because we want to build Salesforce Tower that usurps. Solidroad Tower that usurps Salesforce Tower in the skyline in SF. So you also think bigger by being out here. There's a bit of Catholic guilt working, living in Ireland where it's like, oh, I mean tall poppy syndrome kicks in, but you come over here and like, I was like, oh yeah, like I'm a billion dollar business. Like, OK, what revenue are you doing? Zero, we're only starting. We're building a billion dollar business, great. Pablo Srugo (00:17:53) : It's way more accepted, it's true. A lot less skeptics. Mark Hughes (00:17:56) : Yeah, one hundred percent. Pablo Srugo (00:17:57) : Let's go a little deeper on the moment where you switched from sales role playing to customer success role playing. Tell me more about how that came about. It happened for you in the way that it happened for you, but I mean, the idea that you have a product kind of works. It could work, maybe, and then somehow you see just enough things that you put it somewhere else and it really explodes. That's common, right? So I'm curious how it really happened for you. Mark Hughes (00:18:19) : As I mentioned, kind of the earlier customers gave us the reassurance that this is the right ICP to go after. We really then narrowed in on that. So went after heads of customer support, VP of operations, rather than targeting. Pablo Srugo (00:18:31) : But did you sell sales and they just pulled you to customer success, or did you just like luck into it? Or just start trying customer success just because? How do you even make that transition? How does that start? Mark Hughes (00:18:42) : Yeah, it was kind of looked in through that contact center where we initially kind of pitched them on the sales piece, and they're like, oh no, more of our volumes customer support. So we looked at it in that regard and then we were able to kind of narrow ICP. And then, I think another kind of big moment was later that year. Because how we actually scaled our first $1 million ARR came from cold outbound. So we would set up hundreds of email inboxes using Lemlist. Pulled the list from Apollo. Once we knew the kind of ICP, once we knew the persona in the company, and were having success with enterprise B2C companies. And VP of operations in those companies was where we were having most success. So built out messaging around that, pulled lists in Apollo, set up hundreds of email variations in Lemlist, warmed up those email domains. So it'd be like try solidroad.com, getsolidroad.com, so we weren't burning our primary domain and I was looking at the stats before this, when we were sending like five hundred thousand emails. I was looking for that first million ARR where we sent five hundred thousand emails, we got five thousand replies and two hundred and fifty meetings booked, and then like a twenty percent conversion off those meetings booked. Which was forty customers and an ACV of $25K to get to $1 million ARR. That's how we worked for them, and I think one somewhat outlier deal with a higher ACV that we got late in 2024. Which was like great for, because I'm a big believer, I come from a sales background. As I said, it's all about case studies, testimonials, and social proof. So we closed Crypto.com, and we were an enterprise customer. They're also financial services. So even back then, selling an internal training tool using AI, people were very security conscious and now you look at all the stuff that AI is doing. Automating tasks and even being customer facing. It wasn't like that even in 2024. Getting through security and procurement at Crypto and then having them as a reference customer made it a lot easier to close the next deals coming in because it's like, OK, they're a financial services company. If they've gone through their procurement process, you know they have SOC 2 Type II, they've ISO 27001, like they're obviously in a good security posture to work with. Pablo Srugo (00:20:54) : Did they come outbound from that five hundred thousand email campaign? Mark Hughes (00:20:57) : That was one that came from an investor intro. Pablo Srugo (00:21:00) : 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. So let's walk through, for that $1 million ARR. I want to go deep on the outbound. You just kind of, you went through the surface level stuff. So I think it's just something that, in theory, anybody can implement and it comes down to just, you know, execution, right? And doing it right. And you've got to have enough of a TAM that you can send half a million emails. But we'll go through that in a second. Just first, when you're talking about that first $1 million ARR. Where the product that you had, which was role playing around customer success. Where was it mainly used? Was it a training use case? What was the main ROI of the product at that time? Mark Hughes (00:21:39) : Onboarding, reducing ramp time. Pablo Srugo (00:21:41) : So this is you hire a new customer service rep and you just need to get them trained up. You do the role playing to do that. Mark Hughes (00:21:46) : Yeah, because managed attrition is so high in contact centers in particular where they're seeing a hundred percent turnover year over year. They're hiring in batches of one hundred agents at a time. So getting the agent proficient and saving labor costs for every support org, scaled support org. You probably have one trainer for every thirty support agents, and one QA analyst for every fifteen to twenty agents. So we were kind of focused on that. The ROI was reduced time to proficiency, basically cutting that in half so people were ramped a lot quicker and then trainer costs, So you wouldn't need as many trainers because this is automating a lot of the role of the trainer. So headcount savings was very easy from our ROI calculations to show during a POC or a pilot in a couple of weeks, and they were the kind of two things that hit home the most. Pablo Srugo (00:22:34) : So let's do it like this. Let's talk about this, getting a million in ARR through outbound. Imagine I'm a founder, I come to you, I'm like, Mark, I got this product. I'm telling you the ROI's clear, I've spoken to some customers, they love it. Whatever, I'm ready to go. Take me step by step of the things that you would do to get me to a place where I'm booking hundreds of demos. Mark Hughes (00:22:53) : Yeah, I think you have to do the manual stuff at the start to kind of, to tinker the messaging. So, what I would be telling founders to do is start with social selling on LinkedIn and be as personalized as you possibly can from voice notes to video messages. Pablo Srugo (00:23:09) : Like true manual, like do this. The stuff that doesn't scale, right? Mark Hughes (00:23:12) : Do stuff that doesn’t scale, yeah and I’d go really deep there to find out what messaging is resonating. Who’s the persona. Do a lot of work on finding out who your ICP is. Because as I said, now I can tell you our ICP is B2C enterprise companies scaling past ten thousand support tickets a month that use an outsourced BPO and have an AI agent live. nd to your point, we still have a massive TAM. It’s like, get really firm on your ICP. Pablo Srugo (00:23:42) : How did you, tell me about that. Because I think that's critical. You can send half a million emails to the wrong type and you're going to have your conversion going to be worse. How did you do that at the beginning? How broad did you, because you have an idea, you always have an idea. You're like, no, no, I know my ICP is this, right? How much did you just focus on that versus just go, well. Let's assume I know nothing, blank slate, and you just kind of hit up a bunch of different people. Where did you find that middle ground? Mark Hughes (00:24:02) : I spoke to lots of customers basically, or prospective customers. Anyone who would speak to me, I would speak to from my own network. I would say like, hey, would you introduce me to this person, that person. So while Patrick was building the product, I was on lots of discovery calls, essentially. Trying to find design partners, trying to find people that would actually test the tool. So there was a lot of that. I would get lots of learnings from those calls and then take that messaging to find similar people who I had better conversations with, to then try to find. Because it's very easy to talk about the mom test and you can find people in your network who are going to be like, yeah, this is great, but I actually needed to verify it with people I didn't know. So then I'd take the best conversations, their roles in those companies, then go after similar people, completely outbound on LinkedIn, get super personalized with it. The messaging that would lead to higher conversion rates from first calls booked, I'd be like, OK, put that in a Google Doc. I know that's a good message. I got to build up a bank that way and then when that became somewhat repeatable. I scaled it. Pablo Srugo (00:25:01) : So that's really helpful. Do you remember people that you thought should work but actually didn't work? Do you know what I mean? On the ICP finding side, things that you ultimately only found through these reps? Mark Hughes (00:25:12) : I spent a lot of time selling to other B2B SaaS companies, coming from a B2B SaaS background, and it was just a complete waste of time. The big eye opener for me, and it seems obvious in hindsight. Was B2C companies that actually have so much conversation volume, they have so much support, they have so many conversations coming in. So that was the kind of big eye opener for me. That's, OK, that kind of changes everything. Pablo Srugo (00:25:34) : So I like that and then on the messaging front. You mentioned, as things worked, you'd kind of put them in a bank. Do you remember some of the subtleties in the messages that you found started working versus maybe the ones that seemed to work less? Mark Hughes (00:25:45) : Yeah, this is kind of the advice I give to salespeople as well, or like people who are doing founder-led sales. It's like you kind of need to remember what is the purpose of the message. Because a lot of people, it's like if you actually take the mindset of like, this message is to close this customer. Because I need my first customer, it's like it's never going to work. So I felt like it was almost like putting too much detail in why we're amazing, whereas the goal of the message is to get a call or get a reply. Because even if you take a step back, it's like the goal of the message is to get a reply, and then when you get a reply it's to get the first call, and then you can work from there. So it was really just simple stuff and leaning on the fact of, hey, I'm kind of building this startup in this space. I'd love to get your thoughts and your feedback on version one of the product. A lot of people are happy to help startups, and those initial conversations where it is really just feedback. You're not trying to hard sell them. Oftentimes they then turn into like, hey, you should talk to John on our team. I think he actually might be able to test this out with a small cohort of users and give you some better feedback than me. So I went really high to CEO, COO, and played ignorance of like, I'm a startup founder, please give me feedback. Then they push it down the chain and then funnily enough. When we actually look back at some of the deals we closed, you look at how the first meeting got booked. That its like from the CEO or co founder of the company, and by the time it actually gets the person who procures the software. They probably think they've been told to buy this tool because it's coming from their CEO. So I think that is something that's quite helpful. If you can get in at the highest level and work down the chain, that's a good starting point. Pablo Srugo (00:27:18) : The part about figuring out what you're trying to accomplish with the message and breaking it down in steps is often lost, I would say. Because you need to have something simple and sharp. Obviously, everybody's busy scrolling, whatever, and if your goal is to get a sale. How can you accomplish that in one line? But if your goal is just to stop the scroll, get a reply, then it changes how you're going to say it. OK, so that's phase one. You've done that. You're like, OK, I know that my ICP is not B2B SaaS. I know that my ICP is B2C. It's this, that, that. I know that these kind of messages work. So that was step one. What's step two? Mark Hughes (00:27:51) : Step two is then scale-less. I, as I said, we set up that kind of outbound engine with the email domains and we tried to do like multi touch as well. So I would try cold calling as well. Quite difficult to get numbers, especially in Europe. I would use like HeyReach as well as Lemlist. So HeyReach would do a LinkedIn connection as well. So I was trying to still do multi touch, but honestly, all the replies came via email. Pablo Srugo (00:28:18) : What tools did you use? Did you use Clay? You said you mentioned Apollo. Did you try a bunch of different things and you chose one for a reason? Mark Hughes (00:28:24) : Yeah, I kind of tested probably every sales tool known to man at this point from HubSpot sequencing tools to Sales Loft, to you name it. So I really just went with the cheapest tooling possible at the time. Pablo Srugo (00:28:38) : There you go. Price wins. Mark Hughes (00:28:40) : Yeah, we used Apollo to get the contact information and then push that into Lemlist. Set up multiple union boxes. It was a single union box with multiple different variations of the email, and started with one email address, and then five email addresses, and then ten, and then twenty. And yeah, we just put fuel on the fire because I think there's a good book. I forget who wrote it, called Traction, and it's all about the various different traction channels you can use. But when one works, you should double down on that. So when it was working, we're like, OK, how do we send more volume? And I know sometimes this can kind of go against the grain where people are like, oh, you're burning your TAM. But people get so many emails now, they're not even going to remember if you emailed them six months ago. So I think people can overthink that to a degree. Pablo Srugo (00:29:23) : That's a good point. I mean, it's true. Like of the emails they don't reply to, how many do you remember three months later? And the answer is probably like none. That's the reality. Yeah. Mark Hughes (00:29:32) : Zero and with outbound, I'm a big believer. It's like, the right message, the right person, the right time. So a lot of it is luck anyway. So you need to have the volume to get the luck. Pablo Srugo (00:29:40) : Does that mean, by the way, like TAM. It seems to me if you're going to run a cold email campaign, you have to have insane TAM. If you're in a market where there's even ten thousand customers, it's like you can't really do this. Mark Hughes (00:29:51) : Yeah, I agree with that. Customer support is one percent of global GDP. It's the same market size as advertising. So there is a massive TAM there and I think I started kind of far and wide with the personas. So like VP of operations, head of support and then again, when I saw success with certain verticals like e-commerce and financial services, for example. I then would put all the email volume I had into those verticals and not just keep it general. I'd run specific campaigns in specific areas if they were having more success. We do campaigns specifically to BPOs because they could resell the tool and thirty percent of our revenue now comes from BPO partners who are, for people who don't know, business process outsourcers, which are outsourced call centers, contact centers, your Tech Mahindras, Telus Digitals, Teleperformance, Concentrix. So we work with these companies that kind of resell our tool into enterprise companies because they've got the keys to the castle already. That became a distribution angle in itself. We are here as I said, we're a BPO because more BPOs through cold email signed MSAs with them, the likes of Concentrix. Which are a fifty thousand person company. Pablo Srugo (00:31:03) : First of all, in those emails, are you trying to get them on a call? What was the goal of most of those emails? Mark Hughes (00:31:08) : To get them on a call, just try to get them on a demo, basically and I’d do discovery and demo on the same call. And that would be the main goal. That was the CTA, it was just like, are you free for a quick call? And back to the point of when we actually had the messaging down and we had some case studies, it was easier to scale it. So it was like, hey, we are helping Crypto.com do this. We are helping PartnerHero do this. Pablo Srugo (00:31:28) : I was going to ask, are those the best emails where you can just name drop a customer that they'll know and then you just get social status that way? Mark Hughes (00:31:35) : A hundred percent. Pablo Srugo (00:31:36) : When you have a Crypto.com, of course, you should milk it, right? But what was working best before that? What were the sort of things that, and maybe tell me more about the email, right? Everybody gets so many emails these days. How crazy did you go on personalization, on length versus just being short and to the point, or being alarmist? You see some stuff on LinkedIn these days. I saw one the other day, it was, the headline was like, your mother's dead. No, just kidding. But it's like, obviously it's crazy rage bait, but you get what I'm saying, right? Mark Hughes (00:32:02) : No, I absolutely hate that. They're the worst of the worst, so I hate that stuff. But I think my email copy is like, hey, first name, I'm Mark, building Solidroad. Solidroad is this, and we're helping companies like XYZ do this. Any interested in learning more? We'd love to show you a personalized demo of how we can help your company. Let me know. That simple. Pablo Srugo (00:32:24) : Simple, basic, Ok. Mark Hughes (00:32:25) : It's like really like, basically why I'm contacting you, clear ROI, case studies, testimonials, social proofs, call to action. Pablo Srugo (00:32:32) : And so that's where you're really going after volume in a sense of, you need the person to be the right place, right time to be like, oh wow, I actually was thinking about this kind of thing. Yeah, sure, let's talk. Mark Hughes (00:32:41) : Yeah, and I think that's how we got these customers. And then how we grew those customers is probably another thing that I have a strong opinion on. And our net revenue retention last year was one hundred and eighty-six percent. So what we did then was we would go meet these people in person. So day one, first office hours, we got into YC. Sat with our group partner, Bras, and we're talking about customers. And we were saying we have this customer, Podium. They're really using the tool heavily across different teams, but don't know them that well. And he's like, yeah. Podium are a YC company, and they're based in Utah. Go book a flight and just try to get a meeting with them. So we're like, OK, cool and then we were messaging them, saying, "Oh, we'd love to meet in person." And obviously people are busy, they're kind of ignoring us. So then we just, doorstep, and basically we're like, "Oh, we're actually meeting these other customers, potential customers, in Utah. We'd love to come in." And then they were the most hospitable people ever. Ireland gets a good name for good hospitality. I've never seen anything like it in Utah. So they kind of brought us into their office. We walked in, we were introduced as the Solidroad guys, and one of their teams got up and started clapping. Again, Patrick was getting emotional in that regard. Don't know if it was being endearing or just joking, but either way, we appreciated it and we kind of parked ourselves in one of their meeting rooms for three days and, met with every single person who's using the tool, got feedback and then we just, again, when we saw how impactful that was on usage and, building relationships with people. That it wasn't just, like, a Slack Connect channel and didn't know anyone, we'd, like, scale that. Pablo Srugo (00:34:06) : What does that do? Yeah, tell me a bit more about. Because obviously the time investment in going to visit a customer is massive between the flight and the hotel and this and that or whatever. The reason that you get more is what exactly? People see you and they're just more willing to jump into a room and chat with you for thirty minutes. Your onboarding is better. What improves as a result of spending that time? Mark Hughes (00:34:26) : Yeah, I think, onboarding activation, it's like there could be small bottlenecks in the product that you don't realize because we're not a self-serve product. We're a sales-led motion, and there's things in our product that, maybe we just become blind to that become a bottleneck to, adding new users or someone getting fully activated in the tool. So it was really being able to see that firsthand and, like, click buttons side by side. So I think activation is a big one and then, yeah, just, like, the actual relationship. Pablo Srugo (00:34:50) : It's literally hand-to-hand combat. At scale, you're going to have to figure something out, but it's like, OK. This is pissing you off? Cool, let's fix it. Let's find a way, whether it's software or just me telling you or whatever it takes. Let's just get to the point where you're almost forcing. We always talk about that aha moment, that value moment where it's seven friends on Facebook, whatever it is. How do you get people to that fast? And you know what? Just show up at their office and handhold them all the way till they get there. And then you're like, "Hey, cool. Now who's next?" You know what I mean? Now you're good to go. Mark Hughes (00:35:18) : Yeah, a hundred percent. Obviously you need to have ACVs to justify our ACV are sitting at just below like 100k now. Pablo Srugo (00:35:25) : But even back then, was that a 100k customer or was that more like 20k? Mark Hughes (00:35:29) : No like, 20k, 25k. Pablo Srugo (00:35:29) : Yeah, at the beginning, it's like, whatever. As long as they can grow into that. Mark Hughes (00:35:32) : A hundred percent, a hundred percent and I think the one good thing that really came from the first batch of onsite visits. Because, I have a note in my phone of all the flights I took last year for customers. I took fifty-six flights, and based on, half my time was in Dublin, and then I moved to San Francisco full time in September. So taking transatlantic flights as well to Nashville and Connecticut and all these interesting places. Pablo Srugo (00:35:56) : What percent of your time. Total time, would you say is then invested in just, you know, being with customers? Mark Hughes (00:36:01) : Then, I actually don't have the honest figures. It was like a big proportion, like. Pablo Srugo (00:36:04) : Must have been like seventy, eighty percent. I mean, fifty-six flights, it's just you in between that. Mark Hughes (00:36:09) : Yeah and, you look at. Because, we would have been five people when we finished YC and closed our seed round from First Round Capital. And then even when we closed our Series A in January of this year. Signed the term sheet, officially closed in March, we were still only twelve people. So we're now at, twenty-eight people. So, yeah, it was like I was doing founder-led sales for a long time. We have a stood-up sales team now and, a sales leader. But yeah, it was like, yeah, the majority of my time, and I still do everything I can to fly to meet customers. We have two people onsite in Madrid today with Fever. One of our customers who do, alternative ticketing. Kind of a Ticketmaster competitor, and Ryanair, who have one of their large contact centers out in Madrid. So we have an engineer and a sales rep in Madrid right now. Although the ACVs didn't necessarily justify it at the start. What it enabled us to do is everyone was signed up on a month to month Stripe billing plan, and we were able to convert all those people to annual contracts or multi year contracts, which is obviously very important. Pablo Srugo (00:37:04) : My next question was around the NRR. You mentioned NRR over one hundred and eighty percent. You talked about going into the office as a great way of onboarding and activation. Which is obviously the foundation. That's what you need for people to use it and then, therefore, to at least renew. But how do you go from a $20k ACV to a $100k ACV? Is this in-person motion a key part of that? Mark Hughes (00:37:25) : We added more features to the product, which also helps. So I think that was one big component, and then we charge based on volume. So, more volume through the system leads to higher ACVs. So it was really, getting more usage across the board from different teams. But I think as well, adding more features and functionality to the product that we could upsell. Pablo Srugo (00:37:44) : It's interesting, right? You think about, I mean, adding more features is something that, you know, who's not doing that? Everybody's doing that. But if most founders, I mean, at least when we look at retention. We look at whether it's gross or net, it doesn't matter. Failed onboarding is always top of the list. Top of the list in terms of the ones that churned fully, the ones that aren't really growing. It's always, oh yeah, we just didn't onboard them. We didn't, you know, within a week or a month or whatever that threshold is for you. So there's something where you're saying it's like if you invest the time upfront to make sure you get the activation and the onboarding. You're obviously going to build more features. Everybody's going to do that. It's table stakes. But if you've got ninety percent of the people that should be using it. Actually using it and using it often, your odds of them then growing into the rest of those features and lift, not just renewing, but then lifting the ACV. It's like, you think about it at the time of renewal, you know, how can you grow this account? But really a lot of that is preset at the time of the sale and the onboarding and how much success you got at that stage. Mark Hughes (00:38:38) : Yeah, a hundred percent and if you look at. I mentioned, we signed annual contracts, but we had so many instances of renewing those contracts early, mid-cycle, based on the usage going up. We had overages, and then people were like, "Hey, can we just lock in this volume now?" We're like, "Yeah, cool." So we'll just renew the contract early, and now it expires in October next year, not January next year. So there was a lot of that. But yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying. It was like, because we were working with large companies. It makes sense to onboard them properly, activate them, and then we're going to obviously build more features, stay close to them, find out more pain points, more tools in the stack that we can actually replace and grow from there. Pablo Srugo (00:39:17) : You raised a $25 million Series A last month. How many people were you when you raised that? Mark Hughes (00:39:23) : Twelve. Pablo Srugo (00:39:24) : This is something else that I find is a challenge. It's, you know, people talk about and I don't know how your raise went. We'll get into that. A lot of people talk about you wanna raise, you want to have a process. You want to meet a lot of VCs so you can run a process, get the best terms, find the best partner, et cetera. When you're ten people, twelve people, fifteen people, which is normal for Series A, and especially when you're so sales-focused and you're meeting customers. How did you give it the time to fundraise without, you know, you pull out and all of a sudden your sales and your growth starts falling right as you want it to go up? You know what I mean? How did you find that? How do you make that happen? Mark Hughes (00:39:59) : Yeah, I think, like, honestly, I was lucky and fortunate that we got a term sheet within six days. So the process was actually quite quick. But I had done the prep upfront, kind of did the prep over the Christmas break a bit when I had a bit of downtime, and then we went out to raise the first week of January. And just ensured, leaned on First Round Capital to make intros, YC to make intros, had the calendar completely stacked. Like, I'm a big believer in, you're either fundraising or you're not fundraising. There's a lot of, like, "Oh, I'm doing these coffee chats and, hopefully we'll get preempted from this coffee chat," and all these. It's like, you're fundraising, you're fundraising. So made sure it was, very time boxed, done the prep, deck ready to go. Spoke to customers ahead of time, because at our stage it's all going to be down to customer referrals and how happy customers are using the product. So called them all over the Christmas break, being like, "Hey, do you mind if I put you down as a reference? I'm going to go out and try to raise our Series A." They were all more than happy to do so. So I just had the data room ready in DocSend. Our head of operations and finance, he's a wizard with Excel, something that I'm not the best at. So, he was building out all the models, getting the data room ready. We kind of, like, war-gamed that piece, worked with First Round's team to get the deck in a good place. They have an amazing team that support there and then, ran customers over the break and then it was ready to go. Calendar was probably blocked with twelve meetings a day for that first week. Pablo Srugo (00:41:22) : So you still did probably what? Thirty, forty, fifty meetings sort of thing? Mark Hughes (00:41:26) : Yeah, and considering follow on meetings and stuff like that. I think it was about forty meetings. Pablo Srugo (00:41:29) : And just remind me, we talked about the million ARR. When did you hit a million ARR? Mark Hughes (00:41:34) : The night before our demo day at YC. Pablo Srugo (00:41:36) : Which was? Mark Hughes (00:41:36) : That would have been March '25. Pablo Srugo (00:41:40) : OK, so that's the other thing. Because the Series A bar is only getting higher. I think median Series A these days is like $3.5 million ARR. So that's the other thing. Probably by if you hit a million a year before, you're probably doing in that mid seven-figure range or so when you go out to raise Series A. Perfect, man. Well, listen, I think we'll stop it there, dude. We got a lot of meat. Mark Hughes (00:41:59) : Nice. Pablo Srugo (00:42:00) : I think if you're a founder listening, there's a lot of things you could take from here and implement tomorrow. So, thanks so much, Mark, for sharing your story and walking us through the details. Because the details are the things that everybody knows high level what you're supposed to do and when it comes down to executing, it's really all about the details. So thank you for sharing that with us. Mark Hughes (00:42:18) : No worries. Thank you very much for having me qnd then, of course, if there's any founders that are listening, you can reach me directly on LinkedIn. Always happy to help. Pablo Srugo (00:42:25) : You remember, the first person who told you about Bitcoin? The first person who told you about Uber? You want to be that person because being first is cool. So be a cool person and tell your founder friends. Send it to them on WhatsApp. Put it in a WhatsApp group. Put it on a Slack channel. Let people know about the show. Let people know about this episode. Don't let somebody else beat you to the punch and share it with your founder friends first. Remember what Ricky Bobby said: "If you ain't first, you're last."