Jan. 28, 2024

How a Viral Ad drove Millions in Revenue and $55M In Funding w/ Walnut CEO Yoav Vilner

4K likes, 365 re-shares and over 1M views, without any marketing spend. For an ad promoting your product, that sounds too good to be true-- and yet that's exactly what Yoav did. He leveraged it to get tons of press, more customers than he could manage, and raise a $15M Series A in under a year after incorporating.

Here's the story of how Yoav got started with Walnut and how he ultimately found product-market fit. Yoav goes deep on tactics you can use to drive inbound traffic, generate leads and fundraise.

Viral video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yoav-vilner_weareprospects-weareprospects-activity-6960959679111778304-nOrW?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Viral video 2: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yoav-vilner_weareprospects-weareprospects-activity-7006660780150427648-P4vD?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

00:59 - Before Walnut

03:07 - Origin Story

06:03 - The first value prop

07:00 - The Customer Interview Process

15:03 - Going viral

18:56 - Second Tactic to the Waitlist

21:38 - Finding the Right Customers and Prices

27:20 - The Seed Round

30:48 - Putting Out Fires vs Staying Ahead

32:14 - True PMF

33:49 - One Piece of Advice

WEBVTT

00:00:00.354 --> 00:00:01.524
Yoav, welcome to the show.

00:00:01.524 --> 00:00:02.524
Thanks for having me.

00:00:03.345 --> 00:00:59.804
Look, just looking through the profile of Walnut, I mean, you started right after the pandemic started in August 2020, if I'm not mistaken. Then about a year later, mid-2021, you'd raised a $50 million series A, which is spectacularly fast. I think most founders dream of getting from zero to one that quickly. That's really what I want to do here is just dive in as deep as possible. We're all about zero to one here. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders, like you, find product market fit. I want to dive in to right as you started and then everything that you did until you really had product market fit. Maybe with that said, I know before Walnut, you had another startup, I think it was called Ranky. Maybe we can start there. If you could, just tell us a little bit about what that was about and then what happened in the years between that and Walnut.

00:01:06.575 --> 00:02:41.634
First of all, it was a series B, not a series A, but who remembers, right? It's been a while. Yeah, so I had a couple of companies in the past. One of them was one of the first companies globally to help startups with anything growth, anything marketing, anything go to market. It was a long time ago. Started off in Tel Aviv, but grew to places like London and New York and other locations where most of it started as raise a seed bound, ended up using our services for doing something with their initial funding and helping them go zero to one. Some of them are unicorn companies today and we were the first team that helped them scale. That was probably 12 or 13 years ago. Then I also was building a startup right before this one that was using AI and that was before it was cool. It was around 2017. It was building out AI models for trying to help spot the bad guys online, people that stalk children, people that are bullying kids, people that are trying to meet kids via all kinds of social networks. We had a pretty sophisticated data science ability to do that. We raised about a $15 million seed round it was. All in all, it was a great experience. With all that, I have to say, Walnut was the fastest company I've built to date.

00:02:48.974 --> 00:03:01.324
Maybe just walk us through the origin story of Walnut. People have been doing demos for as long as I can remember. For you to try, and let's say, crack that market with something that's quite different, where does that idea even come from?

00:03:07.425 --> 00:03:56.504
What's cool about this idea is, if it wasn't me, it would've come to anyone, right? You try to show a product when you work for a B2B company, everything breaks. There's always a problem to customize the experience. The buyer will end up getting screwed with a really, really generic sales experience and they end up not wanting to buy. You mentioned the wait list in the call we had before the recording. It's just interviewing our target audience and grow a wait list of VP of sales that wanted to let their salespeople own demos, create their own demos, not needing to talk to anyone from RND product or design to create sales demos. Then we just interviewed VP of sales, CROs from global companies. The response was insane and they started piling up in our waiting list, and only then I felt comfortable enough to go out and raise the seed round.

00:04:05.814 --> 00:04:14.085
Where did the idea even come from in the first place? Was this a frustration that you had personally with demos or was it more a market analysis thing? How did you even get there to even start doing, let's say, customer discovery?

00:04:15.745 --> 00:05:41.925
The initial – well, personally, for me, the first time that I encountered how crappy sales demo was when I had that marketing company just told you about where I saw tech startups spending millions just to get all kinds of [unclear] to schedule the demo or to see what it's about or try and win them over the competition. Then whenever they tried showing the product, something ended up breaking. It was a really long time ago. I just carried that thought. My co-founder was a tech leader on the side of that was selling software to enterprise companies or on the side of enterprise companies buying software from small startups, and every demo that he has experienced has been completely broken. We just took that thought in mind. We interviewed the proper target audience. Honestly, when you just start turning a VP of sales or a chief revenue officer, your salespeople will not have to rely on anyone from the back-end. It was just a shut up and take my money type of moment. We built a very unappealing MVP where you could just take one screen off your entire SaaS platform, customize it in a drag and drop way, a little bit a week’s editor, just customize data and it's of course not connected to your back-end anymore, so it's not going to break or it's not going to freeze even if you have a major demo in an hour. That was the MVP also that we build out.

00:05:47.274 --> 00:06:00.884
Is that the main value prop at the beginning was just something that you could rely on or was it – because today you have different value props around the number of demos that you can do, the speed of getting a demo done and where you can maybe embed demos and these things. What was the original main value prop really at the beginning?

00:06:03.105 --> 00:06:41.064
It was actually twofold. I know most of the online material would say you need to have one when you're at MVP, but we had two value props for the same MVP. One of them was, it's not connected to your back-end anymore. It's not going to crash, which happens a lot during demos. The second thing is you can drag and drop your way into something customizable that contains your client's data. We still didn't raise money at that point. I think it was still pre-seed. We didn't spend a lot of time to build out a sophisticated MVP that can carry a lot of value props. It was just all derived from the same feature.

00:06:45.725 --> 00:06:57.785
How did you go about, I mean, maybe just walk me through the customer interview process because I always find that’s really important. How many of those did you do and how did you go about getting people to even give you the time when you didn't even really have a product ready to sell?

00:07:00.345 --> 00:07:53.654
I think what played out for our benefit was timing. It was the first or second lockdown of COVID worldwide and salespeople had to adjust to a new reality where they cannot fly out and meet someone face to face. Then if you just have to open your laptop and show a demo, even if it breaks, you're going to make a joke or talk about the weather and there's all ways to go around that. If everything went remote on the same day globally, then you have to have a new set of tools and products to help you walk through it. There were a lot of challenges for sales leaders in 2020. This was a major one, showcasing a product, making sure it doesn't break. Some of the enterprise clients that were design partners for us at first, they had to spend millions on salaries of pre-sale engineers and salespeople just to create mock-up demos, make sure things don't break when they go on a live call, but everything broke for everyone, so there was an immediate need.

00:08:06.985 --> 00:08:11.444
Were these relationships you already had or did you run a cold email campaign to just get in front of people?

00:08:12.504 --> 00:08:40.095
We used – yeah, it was not the first run for me and my co-founders. There was a couple of sales leaders we had in our network that we could interview. I tried to focus on the US market and go up market as much as I could, but the first couple of calls we had were, of course, relying on our own network. The following calls we had were because there started to be a word out about this new animal called interactive demos, and some set leaders just agreed to take a call and what it's going to be about.

00:08:42.085 --> 00:08:51.654
Were those original calls, did you structure them as discovery, asking questions, or was it you were more sales mode by that point, pretty confident that this was a solid idea and it was just about trying to get people to sign?

00:08:54.115 --> 00:09:17.933
We were super confident about our idea, but we positioned it, of course, what I think every founder should do, first of all, you start by asking about the challenges and the problems and what's missing in your sales stack, and then you get some solid answers that could lead you to your own idea. Our instinct was that they're going to benefit from the specific idea we had, but we started the call with just hearing their general set of problems.

00:09:22.375 --> 00:09:32.774
You ended up building a wait list of 700 people. Was this all hand-to-hand combat 700 interviews or did you at some point find things, different tactics to maybe scale that wait list a bit faster?

00:09:36.144 --> 00:09:58.125
Let's say we interviewed 60 or 70 sales leaders and that was one-on-one meetings that we got from our network and other people. Afterwards, we raised an initial seed round. It was the first batch of our seed round. It was $2.5 million. At that moment I felt that I should go to market as fast as I can.

00:09:59.904 --> 00:10:11.725
At that point, did you just – was it really based on the team? You had a track record. Was that mainly why you think you raised that seed round when you did or was there a thesis that I think it was NFX, right, that led it, that maybe they had at the time?

00:10:12.674 --> 00:11:19.504
Yeah, NFX, which of course is an amazing fund for SaaS product, they were the first believers. They were accompanied by angel investors like the CEO of Wix and Liquid2 in San Francisco and some other investors. The way that we saw it, my initial investors, they were like, “The website isn't clear yet. The value prop isn't clear yet. If you launch it now and go above the radar, then you might burn some bridges.” I saw a lot of different startups in my life and I felt that this one could spark a whole landscape if we do it fast and we do it loud. That was the strategy. We put marketing in mind and brand in mind and all that and positioning it in mind since Day 1. I took it to places like Product Hunt and LinkedIn and all kinds of platforms where I felt salespeople are going to be curious to hear what it's about. It was, according to some publications, the most viral product launch of 2020. As you know, it was a troubling year to be doing anything. That helped the wait list grow to 700 people and that also helped us extend our seed round from 2.5 to, I think, it was 6 or 7.

00:11:33.195 --> 00:11:58.803
How do you – so let me go on that tangent for a second. I think being the stealth startup is cool these days, right? I think the general advice you would get from VCs is stay quiet until you're ready, art of war stuff. Obviously, you did the opposite and it works for you. What's your advice to founders on what should they think about? I'm sure it's case by case. What should they think about whether they consider going out early, product hunt, blasting it out, PR, all this stuff, or staying quiet until they're doing $10 million ARR and then they get noticed?

00:12:06.524 --> 00:13:33.605
Yeah, like you said, it's case by case. Cybersecurity companies, if they spark competition, they can be in trouble. You have to have a very specific marketing where you reach out, you do ABM for specific CISOs and your tone of voice has to be spooky, right? You're going to get hacked and every – that's a whole other set of going to market. I feel that in sales enablement, B2B sales kind of thing, there was room for a playbook to go wild. We've done things that just amazed us with the exposure they had and the response we got from the market. That was a hunch that I had. If we speak about pros and cons, obviously pros, it built out the landscape, which is now pretty popular and a lot of people are aware of it. Cons, it generates a lot of companies that are inspired by our idea and some of them can raise a lot of money. Overall, that also helps you educate the market. The only tip that I can give founders is they have to decide if they're building something where market education will help them and they don't mind having 15 or 20 follow-up teams that will be inspired by their idea. That's fine. You can go crazy. If you think you're building in a landscape where even two competitors will be problematic for you, then you should definitely be heads down and build for a while.

00:13:42.803 --> 00:13:59.284
This is a stupid question, but just for the audience who maybe not all in on sales enablement tech, when you take something like InVision, which is really just mockups for product or whatever, and you compare it to what you built at Walnut, what are some of the key differences? Is that even an analogy that even makes sense or is this totally different worlds?

00:14:02.004 --> 00:14:37.985
It's totally different because people use mockup tools to create something that doesn't exist yet mostly and illustrate how that would play out. Whereas we work with companies, like Adobe, or Dell, or Equifax, or Medallia, or companies where everything is all set up, to say the least, but they have to turn that into something that will actually be able to tell a story and in a way that you don't need to borrow any resources from RND product or design. You've got to have your platform all set. You can just customize the data and make it amazing, but it's not – you cannot make up some feature that doesn't exist as you would with graphic design.

00:14:44.065 --> 00:15:00.205
Let's go back to this wait list. You do decide the strategy of going out there and just making as much noise as possible. What were some of the tactics that worked the best? Any stories you can share from there where even maybe you were surprised as to just how well they really ended up working and what were they and how did you structure them?

00:15:03.294 --> 00:15:58.095
Yeah, so I would talk about two anecdotes that I think some of the people listening might know. One of them is a video that we released that was a low budget film. We tried to say – we were still a pretty small team. We wrote the script and we acted in it as to the best of our abilities, but it was me thinking we are all someone else's prospects. Even people that have or run software companies, they are also buying software from other people. Eventually, the prospects are going through terrible processes. I came up with this hashtag called We are Prospect and we filmed a video of a nice lady trying to buy a shirt and the salesperson is giving her hell and it's the metaphor was buying software, of course. We just published it on LinkedIn. In retrospect, the message really resonates and the way we told the story really resonates with the audience and we woke up to seeing millions and millions of organic views on LinkedIn.

00:16:09.414 --> 00:16:14.095
Did you sponsor it or literally you just put it out on LinkedIn as a video on your profile and it just took off?

00:16:14.504 --> 00:17:01.304
Completely organic. The most significant companies in our space reached out wanting to be part of the movement. Some of them are public companies, people from Fortune 500, executives from Fortune companies were sharing it on LinkedIn saying this is insane. Some of our competition was starting to do low, even lower budget versions of that film. It just broke LinkedIn for a little while, but this was really early on and this was really low budget, and it was our way to say, what's the change we want to bring? It's not just a product we're building. Then we had an episode two of that and that also had the same outcome. We chose building a movement as some tactic that I know every founder says they want to build a category and every founder says they want to build a movement and all kinds of stuff. For us, it played out nice. The second tactic we used…

00:17:09.515 --> 00:17:27.434
Maybe just on that, by the way, and we'll share the link to that video in the footnotes, but just from your perspective, what do you think you got so right? For people to actually share a company's video, you’ve got to really resonate with something inside, and then you did it again, right? What do you think is the nugget that you really got right there?

00:17:30.315 --> 00:18:11.964
I think the emotions that people had at the time were, and especially people on LinkedIn, which are professionals, right? Most of them are salespeople, marketing people, CS people. I think everybody was suffering from the same thing. They just didn't know to put their fingers on it and say, this part of the entire process is a shit show prospect or suffering processes. There's an infographic that Galata published. It looks like a meme. It's so complicated. They take you through what a sales process is in B2B, but it's a million lines going crazy in circles and people knew what's pissing them off. They didn't know to describe it. Then we just did a video where this lady trying to buy a shirt was the heart of the suffering of everyone that were exposed to our video and they just engaged with it like crazy.

00:18:18.805 --> 00:18:33.224
Was it mainly focused on the problem side or did it – or how much was the solution even part of that video? I find, generally speaking, the problem is actually what resonates more. As long as you're like, “Yeah, that pisses me off,” you hit that like, you hit that share, was that how you structured it?

00:18:34.934 --> 00:18:50.174
Yeah, we didn't even talk about Walnut in that video. We had very successful ads, but this one was completely a problem. We just put a Walnut logo on it. The call to action was not even trial product. The call to action was sign up for more content.

00:18:53.154 --> 00:18:54.375
You're moving on to the second tactic.

00:18:56.365 --> 00:20:30.404
The second tactic that we did early on and really low budget was we went to LinkedIn with a set of ads that – and I know we're talking about startups still being scrappy and not having a lot of budgets. We published on LinkedIn a set of ads that show a cat and a lion and the excess that before Walnut your product demo is a cat and after it's a lion. Now you're wondering what difference does that make? Everybody makes funny ads, but essentially, we were the first ones to use that format. Then today you see the top companies, the top enterprise companies, hundreds and hundreds of them just borrowing the same format. It was an annual conference. The CMO of LinkedIn went on live stage about, I think it was last year or two years ago. The first thing he showed on the screen, I think it was some pastry, like Walnut saying, before it's uncooked and after it's a cooked pastry. It got to all kinds of festivals on the main screen and people, and I heard from people that are students in some college that a professor was analyzing why Walnut did what they did with that ad. Honestly, I have to say we didn't do a lot. We thought it's going to be cool. We didn't know it's going to get there. What I'm trying to say is you don't need a lot of budgets when you're just going to market. At first you can be pretty good at just sensing what your audience is looking to see and are they trying – are they wanting to buy tools that are down to earth that are boring and professional? How are they going to react to humor and jokes? To us, it played out pretty early on.

00:20:41.535 --> 00:20:55.325
Then maybe moving on. You're building this wait list. You're creating content and I assume just spending a lot of time heads down building the product. How do you shift from there to actually putting the product in people's hands? When did that start happening and what did that look like?

00:20:58.154 --> 00:21:33.105
We worked with Design Partners and we started onboarding companies that were part of the wait list. We had a couple of hundreds of, like I said, of contacts on the wait list and we tried choosing companies where we thought it's going to be a fit and use cases where we thought it's going to be a fit. Because our way to a fast market fit is not going all in with everything that – with everything possible. You’ve got to try and make something valuable for the clients. Otherwise, you're the one that's starting off. They have nothing to lose and you can lose a lot of money and precious time.

00:21:37.855 --> 00:21:51.505
What did you think about, when you thought about, because I think that's critically important. Product market fit is partially about the product. It's also about the market and specifically the market you choose to start with. What were some of the elements you thought through when you decided, these customers are a fit, but these ones maybe not yet?

00:21:53.845 --> 00:22:05.325
First of all, the persona that reached out and signed up for the wait list, if we saw it as someone that can make an impact and help us drive success within the organization, that's one thing. The size of the company, of course, we tried to go enterprise and…

00:22:07.105 --> 00:22:11.404
You wanted bigger. You didn't want big market or SMB. You'd rather large enterprise to start.

00:22:13.315 --> 00:22:42.483
Yeah, which, overall, I think that we had a couple where – we actually had a mix. We had a couple of startup companies where the founders were making demos all day long. We had Fortune 100 companies. I think that this problem of showcasing the product is a cross vertical problem and a cross size problem. I tried to prove it by showing that we can drive value to initial companies in various stages. It played out completely. It's really not about the size of the company today. It's really a global problem, you might say.

00:22:48.483 --> 00:23:13.605
One of the things with enterprises, I find, is there's so much upside because the contract sizes can be so big when you get there, but one of the things that I've seen at least is this mismatch between speed. As a startup, every day matters, every week matters. As an enterprise, you're thinking in quarters maybe, but probably years. Did you find some of that or did you, for whatever reason at that time, find there was actually enough pull from these enterprise customers and they were moving at your speed?

00:23:18.505 --> 00:23:55.894
They were moving fast. We were obviously – you're starting at a price point where it's not too much of a complicated procurement process with enterprise companies, right? You never stop with a – you never start with a $200,000 ACV if you're a startup company. You always find the right – if you find the right guy within the company, then obviously you can decide together what's a financial agreement that he can move fast with, he can see value, then he can finally expand within the organization and try to go for everything that could get us traction and not scare off their CFOs. We grow our prices from there. I think you have to lose some dollars the first place in order to get those logos.

00:24:03.684 --> 00:24:24.424
Maybe just the other thing, I don't know if this came up in conversations, I just am thinking in the back of my head, oftentimes startups are pitching this time saving ROI, whereas with you, I would assume that for a lot of these salespeople who are implementing it, it affected their own KPIs, close rate, and things like that. Is that accurate? Is that how they looked at, well, the demos don't crash, I'll close more deals and that's why it's so important to me?

00:24:28.394 --> 00:25:12.555
It was a little easier to quantify, I would say, because if you don't have to spend millions of dollars on teams that just build out demo environments, if you don't have to spend theoretical millions of dollars on people communicating inside the organization, can you add a feature? Can you remove a feature? We all know what happens when a salesperson in a B2B company goes to anyone at RND and asks them to illustrate a new feature, right? They're going to kick his ass. It was really hard to – it was really easy to quantify. At first, I think I wouldn't be as ambitious to say we doubled everyone's sales or everyone met their quotas just because they used Walnut. You cannot attach us such a success to any of your tools, not even the most successful one, but we were definitely proud of a set of improvements that they saw within the org.

00:25:17.835 --> 00:25:37.414
Then that's the design partners, I guess, you're going back and forth. Did you end up picking – you had, as you said, from startup founders all the way to enterprise as you started off in this design phase. Did you end up deciding to at least from a go-to-market perspective, hone in on one of those company size types or did you scale from there to a million plus growing across the board?

00:25:42.875 --> 00:27:00.224
The upside of seeing a landscape that you created become clouded and competitive is the market education is on steroids and the inbound leads that you get are also on steroids. You get a lot of leads coming in. The more other vendors are helping to educate the market, the more leads you get coming in from the top company because they see one of the vendors do something nice and then they say, “Oh, interactive demos, that sounds cool.” They research and they see who was the pioneer of the market and then they reach out. It was really fast. Everything happened really fast here. Gardner recognizing it. People raising series A, B, lots of companies in YC in it, and enterprise champions have a demos budget, which it was not a thing before we launched. They were using Loom videos to show product. They were using PowerPoint presentations and they were using just IT oriented demo environments. From the moment everything happens so fast, if things are playing out for you, you get a lot of leads from companies and really tough logos. Then it's just about the value of the product, right? Nothing's going to help you if the product is not valuable. Lucky for us, the first set of clients and design partners we had were that they saw positive arrive from everything.

00:27:05.505 --> 00:27:12.424
Was most of your road from zero to one or $2 million ARR really just inbound led or did you do an outbound motion as well at that point?

00:27:15.424 --> 00:27:18.865
Between zero and two. I would say it was mostly inbound for sure.

00:27:19.644 --> 00:27:28.904
Got it. Then what about the series – so I believe when you raised $15 million, I think it was mid-2021, is that correct? That was a series A or B?

00:27:28.786 --> 00:27:28.904
A.

00:27:28.786 --> 00:27:28.904
A, okay. Where were you at that point? Maybe just walk us through how that fundraise even happened. Was that also inbound or did you run a process? How did you do that?

00:27:40.983 --> 00:28:42.335
Right, so we extended our seed round, like I said, from two to a six. That extension happened with some pretty amazing investors, mostly from SF, A Capital, and SV Angel, and a couple of others. A couple of months later we did raise our series A was pretty preemptive. It was by a VC based out of London called Eight Roads. Then a few months later we had our series B done. Like you said, everything happened pretty fast within our funding for some of the competition, it was the same. It was going from zero to series B in 12 or 18 months. I think there was a lot of excitement around the problem everyone was trying to solve. I think every VC made their bet on initial traction that teams had. Also, the technology approach is a bit different from team to team. There was also looking at the market and thinking which technology and which product approach can scale the fastest.

00:28:48.515 --> 00:29:05.134
Can you describe maybe just what it felt like for things to move that fast, both in terms of just getting all this money into your company within 12 to 18 months, and then the hiring and the servicing that you need to do to react quickly? What was that experience like?

00:29:08.894 --> 00:29:59.775
It's a pretty intense experience, I think. You need a strong initial leadership and management team as your first team, otherwise, it's not going to work. You don't have to grow to a hundred people for things not to work. You can grow to 40 people or 30 people and get it wrong. The first thing I made sure that the leadership was super strong. We tried to put our culture in mind, even though it's distributed across so many time zones. There was some, of course, growing pains with going from zero to whatever that was super fast. You spend a lot of time taking care of situations where people were not mid management, but then they are mid management and then they want to manage two people, but maybe, and then things are going back to normal and there's a lot of lesson learned here, but I would say it all falls on how strong your initial leadership team that surrounds you.

00:30:09.835 --> 00:30:41.355
One of the problems I see, and especially when, actually, this is when things are working and you're getting market pull, is CEOs getting caught up putting out fires, right? Because especially as you start growing, just things go wrong and sometimes you do need to react as a CEO, but then you can also get to the point where you're just constantly putting out fires. Any thoughts around that? Especially having been through it a few times, I would think you manage to get your head above it all. How do you do that? How do you manage being reactive and putting out fires versus staying on top of it and being able to really just move your company forward?

00:30:48.315 --> 00:31:59.134
I don't think – if I think of friends of mine that have 1,000 people on their team or 5,000 or 10,000, I think everybody has fires all the time, and also, when it's just two co-founders to start with, right? There's always a fire. Then also it goes to your first team helping you out to your board, to your investors, people, advisors, whatever that is, you shouldn't expect your employees to help you fix the daily fires and for good reason because what they have in mind is their path, their progression within the company, and if it's good for their career and if it's good for the company, and you as a CEO, you have to be providing, the most successful paths to all of your employees while you are putting out files that could be anything, something in production, a huge customer is on a conference now showing a demo and something and they don't have Wi-Fi and whatever, right? Someone is to fly over – it never stops. You just need to have the world's best people on your management team to make sure that you're able to succeed.

00:32:03.144 --> 00:32:12.434
Perfect. Well, listen, we'll stop it there and maybe just end on the two questions we always end on. The first one, when did you feel you had true product market fit?

00:32:14.684 --> 00:33:14.365
That's a good question because when I was in SF a few months ago, I went to Dreamforce and it was just – I was meeting one of our investors and it was going for the last two hours of the entire week. I walked in and then I noticed that a big – I wouldn't say half of the companies, but a huge portion of companies were actually using Walnut to show their demos inside the Dreamforce Hall. Some of them also recognized me from that video that we did. It was a pretty – when you build a B2B SaaS product, you don't really see it in the hands of real-life people in the real world, right? It's not a B2C app or something, but that was a moment where I saw people just using it and showing me how they use it, show me if they're using it on a huge screen or a tablet or just a laptop. That was an amazing moment. I left that conference hall and I felt that we did something that actually gets to people on their day to day.

00:33:23.265 --> 00:33:43.724
That's a great story. Yeah, I admit, I think as a founder, seeing the value truly delivered and appreciated by our customers is really what it's all about. Then the last question. Taking everything you've learned over the last, I guess, three and a half or so years running Walnut, if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice when you were just starting this company, what would that be?

00:33:49.055 --> 00:34:06.664
When we started the company, the tech market seemed as difficult as it is now because the first lockdown of COVID seemed like tech is never going to come back. Everybody was let go. Nobody was raising money. I remember people telling me when I told them I'm going to start raising a seed round, they were like, “You're crazy. It's the worst time ever. Find a job. Stop ,” but I was sold on the problem that we wanted to solve and it really reward us because people really appreciate founders that are trying to raise at all costs and even when times are difficult. Now I think this is a different type of crisis and I think VCs definitely appreciate pre-seed teams or seed teams that are just going all in and saying tech has taken a hit and multiples have taken a hit, but we're still – we believe in the problem we want to solve, so not to let other people's opinions of if it's a good time now to be doing it, if it's a bad time, if you should wait six months, or those tips that I sometimes hear founders get from investors. I think there's no right timing. You’ve just got to go all in and it's going to be fine.

00:35:02.485 --> 00:36:45.244
I love that because I think, if you are starting a startup today, you are doing it because you genuinely believe that you have to solve this problem. You're certainly not doing it for the hype. Two years ago, who knows? Some people were doing it for that reason, and some people were doing it because of the Tech Crunch headline that they raised $10 million, right? Yeah, when the tide goes down, it really washes down a lot of people that are in for the wrong reasons. To all the founders that are fighting it right now, that's the plus side. Anyways, with that said, Yoav, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Yeah, I think founders learn a lot from what you did, especially on the raising awareness, right? Just using content to propel yourself forward, to make yourself a category leader and all the good that comes from that. Thank you for sharing all that. If you've listened to this episode and the show and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. Well, it's actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact. Whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to Product Market Fit Show and leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me, to be clear. It's going to help other founders discover this show because the algorithms, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews. The reality is, if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. Please take literally a minute, even if you're just writing, “great podcast,” or “I love this podcast,” whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously the longer the better, the more detailed the better, but write anything, leave five stars, and you'll be helping me, but most importantly, many other founders, just like you, discover the show. Thank you.