How to do Customer Discovery | Hanif Joshaghani, Founder of Symend

Pablo: (00:00)
When, when was the first time that you felt like you had product market fit? Like when did that happen and what did it feel like? 

Hanif: (00:07)
First time I felt it I shouldn't have is, is first thing I'll tell you. It felt like product market fit, but really there was a long road before we had true product market fit.

Pablo: (00:18)
Welcome to the product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistrial, a seat 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.

Pablo: (00:33)
So today we have Hanif, the co-founder and CEO of Symend. Symend is a debt recovery and customer engagement platform for the enterprise. They use AI and behavioral science and best practices from customer success to help enterprises like telcos, afis, and, and even utilities to recover more of their overdue bills from their customers while increasing retention and customer satisfaction. For Context Symend is based in Calgary. They have raised over a hundred million dollars and have almost 300 employees. Um, and the, the topic of today's episode is how to do proper customer discovery. And Hanif it's a pleasure to have you on the show,

Hanif: (01:12)
Thank you. Thanks for having

Pablo: (01:14)
So, just for context, I mean, I think these days every founder knows and has been told time and time again that they have to do customer discovery before jumping in and building stuff and selling stuff and so on. But it's one thing to know you have to do it. It's another thing to know and understand the details cuz you can really screw it up. I mean, you and I've done it, right, and you could really do customer discovery the wrong way and come out of it feeling like, holy crap, everybody's gonna buy this thing and then you build it and they just don't come. And, uh, you know, honey, as I understand it, you, you went about it the right way and really took your time with it. So I'm looking forward to diving in and, and really getting out at some of the details and, and you sharing some of the stories of what you did early on that helped you position and understand your customers well enough to, to be the success that, that you've become. So maybe for starters, if you could start off at the beginning and, and without getting too, too into the weeds of it, but w would love to understand how you came up, what the context was like, like how you came up with Symend in the first place, where you were at at the time and so on.

Hanif: (02:16)
Sure. Um, I was actually, uh, between companies. So I had a, um, an exit of a bootstrap company and I was like hitting the tech circuit, really trying to get inspired about my, what I was gonna do next, um, and real with a real focus on trying to find something I I could be passionate about and make an impact. And honestly, the idea was more certain deputies than anything. I, um, I was at a tech conference, we were at dinner and we were just having a conversation, uh, with some colleagues around, uh, reminiscing about the old days. And, you know, my, uh, story, the, the source story for Symend is that I, uh, grew up as a refugee and when we first immigrated to Canada, uh, we grew up quite poor on welfare and stuff and, and, um, collectors that were pretty horrible, uh, to us.

Hanif: (03:06)
And we, we, I felt that as a kid and I carried that kind of the resonance of that experience for many, many years. And so in reflecting how far I come, I kind of went back and was kind of going back memory lane basically. And, uh, just was like, Wow, we've come so far. And in that moment I was like my friend actually. Then I was like, that's still a pretty big problem. Uh, if you're looking for a passion project, sounds like that would be something you'd get passionate about. And we kind of left it at there, but then I couldn't put it down. And, you know, for days and then weeks I was just doing web paper research on the problem with delinquency and how it's evolved and trying to learn it and understand and dissect it. Um, and I built enough of a thesis that I wanted to go test that I then went into like the first stage.

Hanif: (03:55)
So the first stage for me was from the time that I came up with the idea to the time that I'd done enough primary research and, and secondary research and, but not yet field research. And so I, a lot of what I did was a subset of a couple different areas. One was looking at both the i competency under building and model for the ecosystem. Like who are the players, how is the problem being solved today within various segments. And I segmented the market on three a axis, geography industry in size. And I really just went deep and I went deep in a couple different ways, both from the vantage point of the incumbents. And the incumbents weren't just technology companies, it was also BPOs and collection agencies and whole host in house solutions, custom solutions. Um, and so I looked at it from a technological and industry perspective, but then I also spent a huge amount of my time looking at it from a consumer perspective.

Hanif: (04:52)
And so consumer protection bureaus and credit counseling organizations and really trying to understand the recipient's position because, you know, my thesis was that, you know, the only way I'm willing to just start a company in this area is if I really understand the consumer and I understand what the problem is and how, whether technology there is a technology solution or not. And so, um, you know, I had my sample set of one, which is me and my childhood experience, but that's not enough to build a company. And so, uh, we spent a lot of time actually calling and talking to consumer protection bureaus and credit counseling agencies and things like that. Then we spent a lot of time talking to the vendors and, and, um, vendor research companies and things like that. And then the final part of it was gonna be, I'm gonna go talk to some companies, some enterprises.

Hanif: (05:46)
And that's kind of when it kicked into that second stage, which is okay, we need to go and actually talk to companies. And uh, there I actually made a deliberate decision, which is, you know, companies, you know, executives and stuff like that are really busy. And so what one of the things that I learned a long time ago, actually, I, I had a job, um, when I was a kid doing research, and this is one of the tricks my boss taught me. It's like the people will talk to you if you're not, if you're not ask if you don't need to sell them something you're not, there's no give, you know, people, like people especially would wanna tell you, especially if it's their job, how smart they are and what they do in their job and things like that. And so I kind of took more of a, hey, I'm just a kid learned trying to do some white paper research, who's really interested in this sector, who wants to buy you a coffee or a lunch or get on the phone and just have a conversation with you.

Hanif: (06:41)
And I didn't try to corporatize it. Um, and I just kind of leaned on, hey, I'm just the guy who's really passionate about this space, trying to learn incredibly. We reached out to, in the second stage, I wanna say 300, 400 companies with basic tactics like LinkedIn queries and stuff like that. Um, and, and, and we just kind of did these canned kind of personalized messages and just basically spent, and this last part took, so the first part, which is the field research and the white, white people research took like one or two months, but then talking to the companies that probably took three months and it was like, I had a goal every week, like, I'm gonna talk to 10 companies a week or something like that. And it just cranked, tried to cr like dialed for dollars almost like a, you're working in a call center.

Hanif: (07:29)
And I got through to maybe like 60, 70 companies, um, and cataloged did all ordered a free CRM recorded at all and with every, I recorded as much as I could and I had a model like kind of like a business canvas model of the ecosystem. And every time I did an interview, I would go back to the model and say, okay, what did I learn? What assumptions can I check off and what new assumptions do I need to now make? What new questions there is in? And I kind of went through that iterated process the whole thing before I felt like I had enough components to build a thesis around this business took probably six months.

Pablo: (08:05)
So you kind of laid this, this idea of two phases of research, right? Like you have your first phase where it's more white papers, it's more online, and then your second one where you actually go in and you talk to customers. And so on the first one, like, let's dive into that a little bit. What exactly are you trying to figure out at that point? What sort of things are you reading? Like is it just Gardner reports and high level, you know, markets size growth or how deep are you going at that point? It's

Hanif: (08:32)
A good question. So, uh, honestly like I, I was more thoughtful about this than I've been in companies in the past and I kind of broke it down into components. And so the first thing that I wanted to understand was the highest level, which is the kind of like a macro view of the problem. And so what I tried to do is really understand, okay, what is what, where is the state of, what is the state of delinquency and what's the trend line on the state of delinquency? What are the regulatory frameworks around delinquency? What are the types of delinquency? So healthcare, telco, fi, things like that, how is delinquency happening? And then I tried to find out what's causing delinquency. And so within those segments, what are the different causes and stuff like that and who are the biggest players? And then I went and started reading their financial reporting and stuff like that, trying to understand how do they speak about the problem of delinquency, what drives it to go up and down and so on, and what kind of internal, what kind of spend is, you know, so you're basically taking the problem with delinquency and building a workflow out of it.

Hanif: (09:43)
So delinquency happens here and here's their experience of a consumer and the stakeholders in the ecosystem as it moves through. So I understood that workflow and then I was studying all of those kind of players in stakeholders in the journey and understanding the size of it, you know, and then trying to break down that size by, uh, also by geo. So trying to understand, you know, how big is it in the us? How big is it in Canada? How big is it globally and what is the different, what is the nature of it in different markets? You know, things that I discovered, for example is the biggest source of delinquency in the US is healthcare, but that's almost in no other developed world is it number one, obviously because most of Europe and Canada have free healthcare. And so it, it just doesn't rate the same way even though it's the biggest problem in the us.

Hanif: (10:33)
And so part of what I was trying to figure out is, is all delinquency made the same and is there a swath of it or subset of it that has enough commonality and attributes that I can say this is my initial place where it's big enough and I can still make a meaningful impact and then eventually try to learn about the rest of it. Um, the, you know, other things I found out, for example are like telco, which is the first market we went into. The problem of delinquency is very different as you move from develop in economies with, um, deep and well developed credit markets to, for example, emerging markets where it's all prepay phones predominantly. So for example, Asian, Latin America, different problem. And, but, so it's like you really wanted to kind of break it down into its chunks and understand the key attributes of every component and how they're the same and how they're different, right?

Hanif: (11:30)
To really try to understand and how is the problem being solved in the various markets. And so that's, that was the next stage. So basically identifying who are the regulatory organizations by jurisdiction and by and by industry. Then looking at all their research and all the papers and the education portals that they have, and then who are the organizations that are designed to help consumers because they normally have a really good wealth of research as well, especially if you're trying to understand what causes delinquency and therefore what could be the solution for it. Is it lazy payer is, is it people that are down on their luck? Is it? And so I went in, looked at all the consumer protection bureau stuff, looking at they and consumer bureaus. They do studies on industries, especially the ones. And one of the things that was super interesting for example was the number one source of consumer protection bureau complaints.

Hanif: (12:26)
In most dev in most economies actually, but especially developed economies is collection agencies. The collection agency sector is, generates the most complaints. And then, then I went and I looked at university research and consumer protection research looking at, well, what is it that people are complaining about? And it's always about the tactics and the aggressiveness and the lack of transparency that trying to understand common threats, right? There's gonna be some edge cases, but what you really trying to understand is there's this big problem, I'm gonna make it much, but it's only big when you kind of zoom out. When you zoom in. It's actually not, it's like there is some commonality across the problem, but it's not all the same. Exactly. And so understanding the similarities and the differences, then zooming in one level each further and trying to understand the consumers, there's similarities and their differences.

Hanif: (13:17)
The final part of it is like, I actually went to the, to the industry last, which is, okay, how is this being solved? Who are the private enterprise, private public enterprise, um, participants trying to help solve these things? And so then I tried to understand them, they'll look at their reporting, look at their innovation, their corporate decks, whatever like that so I could understand all of the stuff that they're doing. I tried to find, uh, software demonstration videos and presentations. And so I basically built a bigger and bigger model and I was trying to like basically unpack patterns because I wanted to become an expert in the field right before I went. And I did discovery with potential buyers of whatever my solution was gonna end up being. I didn't even take that. I'm gonna build the business mindset. I took a, I want to become an expert. Like, and so I spent a lot of time trying to become an expert and then as the next step, and there was no specific thing that I was looking for other than having more than a high level understanding of the sec the, the ecosystem that I'm trying to disrupt, right? And I wanted to become a real expert at it and understand it all because I felt like whatever else I do in discovery and everything else, it will help. Like having that context is gonna be key.

Pablo: (14:40)
And I think this is, this is like one of the things that, that I talk about so much is like before startup mode, there is research mode. And if you look at like Lean startup and Eric Rees, like it really starts at startup mode. Oh, you have this idea like, here's how you go out and get feedback and MVP and all this good stuff, but before you do that, spending that time to go from this top line, oh, I think this is a problem to the depth of understanding. You really need to get the sort of things that we tend to call, you know, unique insight is you have to spend a lot of time getting

Hanif: (15:11)
Engross yourself in it. You got to engross yourself in it. I've never, I've rarely, uh, met a successful entrepreneur that's not an expert in their field, rarely, especially building it from scratch once you have a big company. And it's more about managing the enterprise and the organizational structure and it's the, it's the domain expertise is not around this the, the industry or disrupting, but how to run an organization itself. Different story, right? But like early on, like when you're building a company from scratch, you're gonna be selling it to experts. So like, and I, and I validated that like, you know, fast forward five years later, most of the customers that we sell to, like the ultimate buyer, even if you were selling a massive product, even even if you go and sell to the CEO of a massive company, let's say, and the guy, the guy loves it, he's not gonna make a yes decision that his, his excitement is permission to go talk to your real buyer who's an expert.

Hanif: (16:10)
So he'll hand it off to the guy, he says, I like what I'm hearing high level, let me introduce you to so andSo VP of something with the budget and the expertise to evaluate what you're doing and blah, blah, blah. And it's very difficult, especially when you're dealing with enterprise, um, to these guys know what they're doing. Like really, like they've spent 10, 20 year careers in this sector and doing their job, going to conferences, talking to other people that who are doing the same job jumping around from company to company. You gotta hold your own with these guys, otherwise you're gonna get, you're gonna get laughed out of the room really. And you're gonna run real risk of like building the wrong thing.

Pablo: (16:54)
That's right. Which is, which is the, which is the worst mistake you make cuz it takes so much time. I, you know, one thing I'll dive into quickly before we go to phase two is just on the competition. Like there's just so many thoughts around, around competition and how much it matters and how much it doesn't matter. And I would Google do it and what they do. What about this startup, that startup, how much time do you spend thinking about how all the other competitors and maybe specifically like startup competitors are positioning around this problem versus how you're approaching it? Because if you're in research mode, you're not committed yet, right? And, and was there a possibility you looked at this and said, actually you know what, this problem's being solved the right way hundred do anything?

Hanif: (17:26)
100%. I'm an investor in a, a lot of startups. One of the things that, and I'm also an investor in a, an adventure studio and one of the things that I've told, uh, everyone that I've ever met since for a while now is one of the things that I've really come to believe in is find a sponsor for your idea, which is you the founder, whoever, but then find someone on your team to take the opposite view and try to challenge the things that they're hearing. Um, entrepreneurs, I i, I run, I'm the biggest guilty party in this, have happy years, right? Like they wanna believe that this thing is gonna solve the thing and they, they, they, they connect the dots, they data mine the dots sometimes when there might not be any and they ignore and explain the away the issues as they come across them.

Hanif: (18:16)
And these are real risks. And it, it's, it's hard to be an entrepreneur without being an optimist, honestly. But you have to have at least if you can't do it on your own, objectively have someone that's working with you that is tasked with taking the opposite view, like a beat up session. Um, and is able to kind of challenge your thinking on things I, the competition thing, um, realistically like, uh, I, I would say I would look at building expertise before, Cuz at that time when I was doing the initial research that phase one, I didn't even know what my approach would be to this massive problem. Therefore how can I know what the competition is, right? It wasn't, I detached myself from the need to build a business and I think that gave me the objectivity to build expertise without really needing it to say yes and only arriving at yes, like much further in like I wasn't, I I wasn't, to your point what you're saying, I didn't say yes to moving forward with the business for months after I started to look into it.

Pablo: (19:19)
Perfect. So then let's, let's jump into the second second after this, which is probably the more interesting part. You're now actually going out and saying, I'm gonna talk to a bunch of companies. How did you think through this? So you said you, you, you went out to about 300, you spoke with about 60 or 70, those are pretty big numbers. Who did you focus on specific titles, specific industries? Did you go kind of a shotgun approach and say, I'm gonna talk to as many people across as many parts of the spectrum and then no,

Hanif: (19:45)
We, we, we, we, we curtailed it. And, and so this is, there's probably an intermediate step that I should mention, which is, at that time I wasn't thinking about them as competitors, but I was thinking about them as participants. I knew some of them, if I decided to build a business, sub subset of them would become competitors. But more like I did in that phase one, towards the end of phase one, as I went from macro down, uh, start to look at, you know, enterprise participants in the way the problem exists today and is being solved today. And so there I looked at everybody, I looked at BPOs software solutions in house, whatever. So it wasn't really about under identifying competitors at that point. It was like, once you've broken this problem down into its component, you try to understand how each of those components functions, including the solutions and the workflows and the softwares and the service providers that are participating in it.

Hanif: (20:41)
So I looked at everything from consulting firms to collection agencies to BPOs to software vendors, to analytics vendors. So I looked at the whole ecosystem and how they all fit inside of this thing. So I built a mental model for that. And then I meant into the next section, which is what you're talking about, which is, uh, starting to do discovery interviews. I, I did actually target a specific set of roles. I didn't think I would have the right role necessarily and people title differently, honestly, um, in different organizations. And I took a bit of research to really identify, um, and create at least a straw man of a, a ideal customer profile including a buyer persona, buyer, buyer personas and stuff. Um, so I created my first version of that and I knew it would be wrong, but then I started to canvas, do some interviews and then iterate. So I did the discovery in like, almost like cohorts, iterative cohorts. Um, but I did target try to target fairly methodically.

Pablo: (21:41)
And how, like when you went out to these people you mentioned you're going out with this idea of, hey, I I just want, I'm building white paper, I just left your your expertise on this topic. How long, how much time are you trying to get from them? And then how did you structure these calls? Were they pretty structured where you're taking them through something specific or just more broader conversations?

Hanif: (22:01)
Um, I, I tried to keep it to 15 minutes as the request understanding it's hopefully goes longer. My plan was always to make them go longer, you know, like charm them and become their friend. And you know, if anybody that said yes, I basically went and grouped them on LinkedIn, but also on other like Facebook and everything else to build a mental model for who I'm gonna be talking to, right? So I did my work really at the end of the day and most of the calls I, I'm happy to say the average call took an hour even though I was only asking for 15 minutes. Generally what we did is we had, here are the five things we wanna, like assumptions, we wanna unpack, we tried, didn't try to go too far, and then we tried to unpack those inside of a conversation and not to be so scripted.

Hanif: (22:48)
The good news was because I've become an expert, but three form is like living and breathing this stuff. I could have like a domain expert to domain expert conversation with these guys. We, I could talk their language. And that's really important in these conversations because then you can like, oh yeah, and you remember this and like you can, you're on the, it's like two pilots talking about flying. Like you want that kind of level of connection to their world. And that's why that research is important. You just take some Joe Blow researcher off the street who hasn't really engrossed himself in the subject matter. You're not gonna have the same rapport with these guys who, who've spent all their life doing this kind of thing, right? So, and so what I did, I basically had at that point, I I, I'd done a bunch of research, I downloaded some stuff from Strategizer, which is this online company for doing, uh, strategic research to give you templates and everything.

Hanif: (23:39)
So I'd had one of those templates built out. I was like, what are the big re assumptions that I need to validate? Again, I started with the size of the problem. I went macro to micro, um, how are you solving it today? What are your biggest pain points? You know, if there's anything you would do better today, uh, what would it be? Right? Who are your favorite vendors that you work with today? You know, where, where do you see the industry heading? Right? And so all of these kinds of kind of questions. And then I would go back to the drawing board and I would say, Okay, what did I learn? What else, what new questions do I have? So on. And so the the process of building what things I want to unpack, it was iterative. And I kept going back to like, what are the assumptions?

Hanif: (24:21)
What have I verified? And then I kind of tried to take my time between every interview to make sure that, that the interview was informing my mind map, you know, of the problem in the plant. 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5. I have five customers right now from those early interviews, I saved all their contacts. I stayed in touch with them, right? And I built a relationship over time where they came to trust me that I'm a sincere guy that's looking to kind of make a positive impact on this ecosystem. And then I didn't sell to them right away, but eventually over time we kept in touch.

Pablo: (24:56)
We'll get into how, how this, cuz I do clearly see how this becomes a funnel and, and how this might end up in, in your first sale. But one of the questions that comes up as to me is why so many, like a lot of people would say, Yeah, yeah, I'll do customer discovery, I'll talk to 10 people, I'll ask them if they have a problem and if they would pay for it. And that's customer discovery. Like you went a lot, but like a lot deeper. Like why so many? What are you getting after the 50th or 40th conversation?

Hanif: (25:20)
Uh, honestly, I was being part of it was because I, I felt like that would be a starting data bank for go to market down the line. And these are people I can stay in touch with. I was adding them on link LinkedIn, I was posting thought pieces, like there's all this other ways that I was planning to build around this, uh, network, you know, to connecting to the ecosystem. So that was part of it. The other part of it was, I just, I like being thorough, like the problem with enterprises. Um, the problem with building any product honestly is that you, you know, the chances that if you talk to 10 people, you're still gonna have huge blind spots. Isn't is significant, more significant. It might not be over 50%, but even if it's 25%, if I, if I had a 20 year career in collections, maybe I would've done less realistically, I, I didn't, right?

Hanif: (26:09)
And so I I this is, and it's an enterprise deal where once you start down the path of building a product, it's a very expensive frontend ended experience. It's not like a typical spar where you kind of, you know, you invest a little, you get a little, you invest more, you get more. We, we, we we're trying to sell enterprise grade software solution. It is like the equivalent of building Salesforce from scratch or workday from scratch. It's a really big upfront investment. And so we wanted to make sure that we understood this as much as possible. And to be honest, there were still like, there's a, there's mil for every one thing I learned during that first six months, there was still a million things that I learned along the way. So even then I probably could have done more. These problems are typically fairly complex.

Hanif: (26:53)
And so the other thing that happened over my journey, remember that iterated process, I wasn't asking the same thing with every conversation I was learning about one part of it. Like some, some, some guy would mention something around like, you know, the challenges of data flows and, you know, uh, business logic and being able to extract data out of their systems and I would double click on that now that would create a new threat and that threat I would incorporate into every other interview. So the nature of the interviews was evolving quite a bit over time.

Pablo: (27:22)
It's the classic like, announce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you think about the investment during research mode, like 10 more interviews really doesn't take that much time relative to building the wrong product for six months and having to go back and and rebuild. So I think that makes sense with

Hanif: (27:38)
Other people, people's money and I was the lead check in our first round and so it's like I, it wasn't just other people's money. The first round of money going into this company was my money and a lot of my friends money. I was gonna be thorough here, you know, So

Pablo: (27:50)
That makes sense. And so maybe like fast forwarding a little bit, you go through these 60 70, it's iterative, so by the end of it you're getting closer and closer to a negative a prom. When does that transform into, you know, your first customers, your, your first conversations around a pilot customer? Like when does it flip form pure discovery to, you know, maybe you were kind of starting to sell or having a conversation around someone who could adopt, you know, v one of a product?

Hanif: (28:16)
Um, I went away, uh, and I started to at least wire frame out uh, what the solution would look like. And then I went back to the same customers and I went through the recordings and I, and I'd been scoring the recordings against for future use, against what kind of person is this? So because there was so many of them, we wanted to kind of rank order the interviews based on likelihood to be a future customer. Um, and whether it would be a lagger customer or early adopter and stuff like that. So we scored all these people that we were talking to. Um, some people scored low, other people scored high, some people were very guarded and they were like, we've invested millions of dollars and we know everything and we can't tell you any of it cuz it's all proprietary. And so they were score lower scored than the guy that was like, you know, I've been to a million conferences, nobody's really solved this correctly and here's the problems that I see and if I have pattern of what he's saying needs to be done better was consistent with what I was hearing, like in a dozen other places that that score would go up, right?

Hanif: (29:16)
And so I just went to the top of that scorecard and I was looking for early adopters, value buyers, right? Like versus Proofpoint and precedent buyers, you know, on that kind of innovation curve, right? And so that stuff actually works. It's like, you know, I just scored them and I went to the top of the list and I was like, okay, that's, these are the top three companies I gotta go talk to. And of course all three of them were willing to buy a do a pilot. And my request for a pilot, I did that in person every single time. So I flew to where they are, I took 'em out for lunch or dinner, I built a relationship and I made sure we're at least one drink in before I made the, I asked the question smart. So I did it in person

Pablo: (29:55)
And these were paid pilots. Did you go for paid pilots? Did you care? No.

Hanif: (29:58)
Did not. Like not with enterprises? Uh, not at first. Once we had results with someone, the free pilots went away immediately. But when I had zero results with anyone, I viewed that first batch of people as like early adopters, but also almost like co-developers. And so I was looking for two things. Early adopters who had the right values and the way they were describing what they need was like ResSem representative of the broader market, right? Like, so I was trying to kind of map to those two things cuz I didn't wanna end up with the custom product. And so I found the right set of companies and I basically went to their two companies in particular. I went had in hand at that point. And at that point they need to trust you. It's, it's a, if they believe in the value, the next thing is do I believe this guy is gonna deliver or is he gonna be an incompetent guy and it's gonna am am I putting my career at risk?

Hanif: (30:52)
You, their desire to innovate with you needs to exceed their risk aversion at that point. And these guys are career corporate blue collar guys, like risk aversion is a big part of it, right? These guys, they have families and they have jobs and you know, the bigger the organization, the more politics it, the more it becomes about career advancement and value creation, right? Especially in middle management. And so politics plays a bigger role often time in these org. It's rare that politics doesn't play a bigger role than value creation and merit in the way some of these companies operate. And so, and it's not that they're bad companies, it's just the nature of a company as it gets bigger, um, nobody's, uh, immune from it, not even tech companies and startups. And so as once you understand those things about the nature of large organizations and the nature of people, what you understand is that they have to trust you.

Hanif: (31:47)
They have to trust that they're gonna do the right thing for their company and if they do the right thing for their company, it's gonna be good for their career. And that the likelihood that you will succeed, die or succeed one or the other, and that you're gonna be the guy that's gonna like, you know, come back with his shield or on it type of thing. You need to convince them of that. And so I find doing that in person is far more manageable. Like it's harder to build rapport on a zoom call in my opinion. That's right.

Pablo: (32:16)
No, that's right.

Hanif: (32:16)
That's totally true. And being an old school guy, I, I flew down and I met with everyone.

Pablo: (32:20)
Well I think for enterprise sales it does really come down to the champion so much. So, and building rapport obviously is, is better in person. So that makes total sense. So that that's, that's the pilot and, and then, you know, after that you kind of use that to, to probably move into your, your first enterprise sale. Let me finish on on this, this question which we'd like to, to end with on this show, which is, when when was the first time that you felt like you had product market fit? Like when did that happen and what did it feel like?

Hanif: (32:50)
The first time I felt it I shouldn't have is, is first thing I'll tell you it felt like product market fit. But really there was a long road before we had true product market fit. Um, we, uh, the first version of the product, I wouldn't even call it an mvp, it was more of a prototype. And the way we built the f prototype, because we have very limited resources, is we basically said, okay, we're gonna identify all the components to the way we wanna salt deliver this solution. And we're gonna effectively Frankenstein together from other software components and a lot of like manual services on top of it from our team, uh, and deliver the value. We just want to, doesn't need to scale. It doesn't need to like even be it, it can be u ugly with bubble tongue bubble gum and duct tape and alvas in the background, as they say, as long as the, the key thing was do the results, the performance.

Hanif: (33:49)
Can we deliver that performance as inefficient as it as it is? Because then we could, as long as we're inefficiency is almost like you're borrowing against future efficiency as long as you have a ledger for what you're giving up and you have an accounting of where what you can design and implement to kind of regain that efficiency down the line. It's a trade off, right? Like, so product market fit doesn't need scalability, it doesn't need efficiency. What it needs is effectiveness first and foremost in my, in my opinion. Um, and so we basically mashed a bunch of software components together that didn't really fit together all that well. And then we layered in a bunch of service on top of it, like manually handing off things and whatever to, and then analyzing it and so on, and then bringing in behavioral scientists on top of it.

Hanif: (34:39)
And the thing was, okay, can we Frankenstein our way to something that resembles what we eventually plan to build and will the results be better than what they do today? And when the people started engaging back with our thing, and I started to see the rate of enga, it wasn't even curate or lagging indicators, uh, at this point, it was those leading engagement KPIs and they were just so much higher, even in that root adventure prototype model, they were so much higher than what companies were doing already. I was like, Okay, I think we got something, but I still didn't know whether that could be turned, you know, I was like, I think we gotta build something, but now I gotta figure out this thing that I did very manually and it showed these that it's working. Where do I take it from here? How much more testing do I do before I start to build a platform and, and so on.

Hanif: (35:40)
So it was, it was a long journey still. What I would say, if there's one thing that I've learned is building for enterprise is really, really, really, really hard. It's sticky and enterprise is stick with you if you're delivering a great value proposition, but the nature of the way large, especially mission critical, large surface area problems and workflows, the cost of these things, building it at scale is enormous. And so you have to have a lot of conviction and you have to do as much as you can upfront to build a detailed understanding of what you need to build as humanly possible. Because getting it wrong with technology will be enormously expensive and refactoring a platform that has live customers on it, especially if they're enterprise customers, It it'll, it'll hurt you when you're expecting to hit on all cylinders.

Pablo: (36:40)
Perfect. Okay, well look, we'll, we'll end on that note. You know, just for a quick recap, you went deeper than many, many founders on customer discovery. You split it into two phases. You spent a couple of months just doing effectively online research and then six months or so talking to, you know, dozens and dozens, I think 70 customers. Um, and, and through it, really thinking about it as a list of assumptions that you have that you've built and that you're trying to de-risk, which I think is, is the right way to think about startups, is effectively a set of assumptions, a set at risk. And over time those kind of get ticked off and ticked off and ticked off. And, and as you do that, obviously other things happen, revenue increases and so on it, but really the value of your company increases and, and that that's what got you to, you know, build, build Symend into what it is today with all the employees, with all the customers, with all the money raised, and really on its way to being massive success in the Canadian ecosystem. So thanks a lot Anni for sharing your story with us problem. I'm sure founders will really appreciate it.

Hanif: (37:43)
Happy to Help.

Pablo: (37:44)
Thanks so much for listening. If you wanna see more content, check out pmf.show.