July 16, 2023

Nabeil Alazzam, Founder of Forma.ai | How the First Enterprise Sale Leads to Product Market Fit

They say the best founders can walk through walls. Well, nothing can stop Nabeil. For the first two years, Nabeil and his team worked out of his house. His entire house, except for his bedroom, was an office. He would nap while changes were loaded to production only to wake up 2 hours later to test again. He got in a car crash a week before launch and didn't even set aside time to deal with it. A year later, Nabeil managed to convince a pilot to let him off a plane so he could make a b...

They say the best founders can walk through walls. Well, nothing can stop Nabeil.

For the first two years, Nabeil and his team worked out of his house. His entire house, except for his bedroom, was an office. He would nap while changes were loaded to production only to wake up 2 hours later to test again. He got in a car crash a week before launch and didn't even set aside time to deal with it. A year later, Nabeil managed to convince a pilot to let him off a plane so he could make a business meeting!

Insane focus meant there was only one thing that mattered: launching on time.

If you want to see how deals get closed in Startupland, check this episode out.

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

01:45 - Forma.ai Origin Story

05:09 - Opportunity of a Lifetime

07:33 - Navigating Unknown Unknowns

14:00 - Rolling out the Platform

18:44 - Maniacal Focus

23:43 - The key to B2B: ROI

27:43 - The First Pilot

31:38 - Building the Founding Team

37:56 - Land and Expand

43:37 - True PMF

45:00 - Recap

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When you're going from zero to one, everything is zeros and ones. It either is extremely important, must be done, or doesn't matter at all. It's the shades of grays that kill you because you have so many more things that you could do than you have resources for that if you start crossing off Number 4 or Number 5 because it's right there in front of you, you won't get Number 1 done.

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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. Today, we have Nabeil, the CEO and founder of Forma.ai. Forma is an AI-based sales compensation platform. They're based in Toronto. They have about 115 employees and have raised over $60 million. Nabeil, it's a pleasure to have you on the show here.

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Thank you for having me. Likewise, Pablo, it’s nice to meet you.

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The topic of today's episode is how to make your first enterprise sale. We'll definitely focus on that zero to one because cracking that is huge, but we'll go through a handful, especially reaching that first milestone of that land and expand, which is super important. We've spoken a bit about enterprise sales before in this show. Enterprise sales, it's the step function. It's hard to get going. It's awesome when you land them, but it is a mismatch between the startup pace of every day, every week, and the enterprise pace of every quarter, every year, every five-year plans. Finding how to make that work is a big challenge. Looking forward to dive into all of that. Maybe, Nabeil, the best way to start is at the beginning. We won’t spend too much time on this, but it would be great to understand kind of the origin story, where Forma.ai even came from, and what you were doing at that time.

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Yeah, 100%. I started as a manager consultant, and the saying “success comes when chance meets preparedness.” I literally had this idea and then an old customer of mine from consulting, who I helped with the strategy of their plans, but also implementing one of the – the large incumbents in the space. They reached out to me asking for help. The problem that they had was they implemented the sales comp platform to solve their current requirements in terms of their current plans, their current go-to-market strategy. All of a sudden, it changed from paying on a product category level to paying at a product skew level. Just that small change blew up their entire sales comp process. Now all of a sudden there's payout issues. There's disgruntled sales reps. They're not getting paid accurately. They reached out to me, because as the person who helped implement the architecture of the platform, I was one of the single sources of truth in terms of how to fix it and how to make changes.

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Maybe just for those that haven't been deep in sales, just an example, if you could, if you could extend on that idea of the product category products, too, besides – I mean there's salary and then there's bonus, right? What are the sort of nuances that make the variable components so complicated?

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Yeah, it's a great question. If you think about on the salary comp side of things, the reason why payroll, for the most part, gets paid accurately is because it's not changing, right? I set my salary. Unless there's a raise or promotion, it's pretty static. The problem with variable is every month it's – what's static is the set of business rules, but every month, new data flows in and it gets processed according to these business rules. For most sales reps, it makes up at least 50% of their overall pay, so 50% of your livelihood is made up of this variable component. In some industries, it's as much as 100%. There's a lot of – I would say you see that kind of 100% commission on either side, the kind of the small entry level door-to-door sales in the early stages of their career or in late stages of some med products is a common area where 100% commissions is not uncommon because they're large enterprise deals and the reps that are capable of doing those want as much stake – every month the data flows through and then the business rules are applied, right? Okay, this product falls into this category. This category gets paid at 10%. This product falls into this category, so on so forth. What territory do you have? I cover mid-market. Therefore, these accounts fall to my profile. Oh, but this rep is a specialized product rep that overlays all the reps in this region for just sales of this product. We both get credit, we just get paid a different rate. The logic, I mean, typical organization with a thousand reps is typically managing upwards of 10,000 business rules for an annual plan.

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Wow.

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When you think about it, there is complexity. It's complex. It's a mathematical problem. That's why historically everyone's focus area was how do I make sure I calculate accurately, not how do I create the best incentives and design the best outcome.

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Got it. This customer that you helped as a managing consultant in the past comes to you and you're at Spoonity at the time, right? You're still working full-time.

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Yeah.

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What transpires there?

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I mean, it's interesting. The opportunity came and I spoke to Max and I said, “Look, I'm being asked by this CFO to come in and help out on this problem.” It's in their early stage in the career. It's hard for me to say no. It's an opportunity of a lifetime that I've been given to kind of support. Initially, it was a consulting engagement that was very much part-time. I kind of just supported Spoonity while I was in it, helping them out in this part-time fashion as a consultant. Then it was about eight months into supporting them. I had supported them, helped them stand up, hire a new team member to kind of take it on, train that team member in the background. Again, all this while in the background, I'm working and supporting in Spoonity. At one point, it was very obvious that there's a much bigger opportunity. I had the opportunity to pitch my idea to – so this was Suzanne Shadgett, at the time the CFO of Striker Canada. I pitched her the idea and she got the bigger vision. I mean, I have to say, I think, no one – I can't say this enough, the amount that I owe her both professionally, from a personal perspective, I mean my life changed because she saw the visions, she saw the problem as well as I did. I mean, your earliest customers are just as big as visionaries in the enterprise space as you are because they see the problem and they put this solution together. I mean, I look back and I'm like, Suzanne took a career limiting risk. If we failed to deliver, I can't imagine the amount of pressure and impact that would've had on Suzanne.

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That's what I think, and it's hard – it's easy to miss that as a first time founder is selling, especially an enterprise where the path of least resistance, the thing that just keeps you up the ladder is not doing these crazy things, right? This can be – it’s just so asymmetric. It can totally derail you if it goes south. If it goes well, maybe you're seen as a hero, maybe it's just good on you sort of thing, right? That's not easy. You really need to find the right person at the right time to see it, right? That's why serendipity plays a large part and talking to a lot of different people plays a large part in that because not just because the thing has ROI doesn't mean everybody's going to give you a shot.

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Yeah. I mean, especially in those early days, I mean, there is a lot of risk, right? You're kind of beginning this journey with a ton of unknown unknowns and you start out – and I started out with an advantage, right? I knew this industry in and out. I worked with a ton of customers from numerous industries. At that point, it's not like I had this idea because I had felt the pains firsthand in a very isolated environment, but nonetheless, I look back, and I say this to my team all the time, had I known all the risks that I was truly taking on, I don't know if I would've gone ahead, because again, to share more context, when I started the company, I basically took my life savings. When I got the go ahead to, okay, let's do this, this is going to solve a problem, we basically got eight months to deliver. It was September, 2016. If we build the product and roll it out by April, 2017, then they wouldn't renew their contract because their contract was expiring with an incumbent and they would switch over to Forma, but understandably so, if we couldn't prove by April, 2017, they had to have a fail safe. At the very minimum, even if things were looking good, but it wasn't close, it would delay the contract by a year.

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They didn't pre-pay or anything like that.

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Exactly. I mean, it's basically all in, make this bet that you're going to deliver and –

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Did you sign something or was it just fully based on her word?

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We had a professional services agreement for the implementation that was effectively signed and scoped out, but that was just some revenue to cover portion of the costs of implementing, but if we did move forward, like that would've been a very bad outcome. For me, I mean, when we got that opportunity, it was still an amazing opportunity. I could – it was not something – that go-ahead in September was game changing, right? That happened, hired a team, by October it was three developers and myself, and we basically started building out the first viable version.

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You just funded that. Did you try to raise for that part of it since you had …?

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What’s funny is I actually – I met with – I was like, I'm going to meet with a few VCs just to kind of get a sense of what the temperature reading on what it's going to be like for me to fundraise. I know a few local VCs in Canada. I think it was maybe four or five. I got two things from those meetings. One was that there was buy-in into the idea and the vision, but I saw that it was going to be harder to – it's a complex nuanced problem. To explain the approach that we're taking was going to require some education. Yes, I had some credibility in the sense that I worked as a consultant in this space, but it's not like I was a multi – second time founder and I could just command a term sheet without anything. So in my – I knew that it was going to be harder to raise. The second problem was the comp space, specifically sales comp, had a tarnished history, right? Exactly was this kind of poster child of this SaaS platform to do sales compensation, but they didn't actually solve the heart of the – the root of the problem. By the way, I'm saying this as a consultant back in early 2010 to 2015 supporting and working with customers that were using that tool and that technology. I looked up to that company.

00:11:10.308 --> 00:11:20.850
Did you, now looking back – obviously at the time, I'm sure if somebody would've said, here's a million bucks, you would've happily taken it, but now looking back, was there an upside to not having in that period to being fully bootstrapped?

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Yes, yes and no. The benefits were that we worked on, I want to say, our schedule and our schedule was aligned with the customer outcome. I think we ended up building a better product because for the first three years I bootstrapped the only thing that mattered was our customer because they were the ones that were effectively footing the bill. If they're not happy, we're not happy. That created a very good alignment of the outcomes. I mean, it's interesting. One of the things that you'd get early on in enterprise sales is this big gap in the size of the business you're selling to and the size of yourself. One of the things I constantly had to reiterate is, you can't – you're afraid of us failing, but if you are going to put us in a position to sign a contract that is doomed for failure, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and the risk that comes with that. I look back, because of that alignment, it ended up creating a very good mutually beneficial relationship with all of our early customers. It fed directly into product design and build. On the converse side of it, I think it pushed us to make decisions that were very financially focused on the operations and the back-end side. There's certain things that you just have – you end up working harder. You find shortcuts, and in some cases, it creates an amazing culture. In other cases, you take a hit and you have to course correct when you start having access to capital because you start making better investments, especially as a first-time founder. Second-time founder is maybe a little bit different because you know where you shouldn't kind of cheap out or you where you shouldn't take away money from, but as a first-time founder, I think there are some mistakes for sure though that I made.

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I asked this because I do think in the early days there's – it's underestimated just how hopeful it can be to be bootstrapped. As painful as it is, it forces you to – you actually have no choice but to prioritize the absolute must do, must have things and kind of let everything else fall by the wayside. There's obviously – you have to pay for that in the future, for sure, refactoring and different sort of things that you might have not done properly the first time around, but you also – you protect yourself from getting lost in the noise, right? Because the noise can't matter because you will die tomorrow, right? You don't have that luxury and there's something to that.

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Yeah, I mean, again, to kind of give – to share a story of what it takes to actually get through those eight months and the kind of that focus, so we're on the basic – there was a critical decision point that we had to make and it was, do we support the – from a rollout – there's a decision about how we went about the rolling out of the platform. Do we wait until April and then roll out as all one big rollout, or do we break up the rollout and do the first version of the rollout in January or for January commissions, which would be February and then do the second stage of the rollout? We made the decision to do the February rollout, the staged rollout. This is February 10th, I believe. This is -- the deadline for us to ship was February 13th. On February 10th -- and just again to give you an idea, for – I founded the company out of my house. We basically started on my dining room table, after we grew past five, took over my living room. Basically, by the end of the bootstrapping days in early 2020, we got up to basically 23 people. The whole house was basically an office, basement, the whole house except for my bedroom and . I look back and I'm like, it's the funnest times I've ever – you always look back with such a fondness to those times. For the month of January, middle December to middle of February when we did that launch, it was nonstop work. There was never a moment – I would sleep, to give you an idea, we'd kick off a – we'd deploy a new feature or we'd do a new release or kind of merge something into production and then we'd kick off the commission processing as a test. It would take about, at that time, it would take, in some cases, some of the changes may take an hour and a half to two hours. I would literally go to sleep, set an alarm, wake up when it was in production, do the final tests, find any issues, debug. At the time, my VP of engineering, Jason, would basically have his phone on full blast. I don't know how he did it with his fiancee and she was okay with it, but literally would pick up at 3 in the morning. I'd be like, these are the issues. We need to get this done, 5 o'clock we deploy, I’d sleep for another two hours, wake up. That's how we operated for 60 days. Up until that moment I used – I’d go to the gym multiple times a week. Actually, you'd have some sort of social life. For 60 days, I basically barely left my house and it was heads down working. I share this because we had one or two rituals that we kept as a team that were already sanity. On Monday morning, we'd go for a breakfast as a team. There's a diner pretty close to my house. Then we'd go for a lunch every Friday. That was our one time for disconnect for an hour. That Friday, February 10th, we're feeling good. We're like, the finish line is within sight. We have – it's ton of work. We're not going to sleep, but it's there and things are looking good. We get in the car to go for lunch, we actually get hit by an 18-wheeler. It's a decent sized accident. It wasn't like no one got hurt or anything, but it was one of those things where the first thing that – it wasn't bad, the accident was – it was damaging to the car, but it wasn't like, oh, people are hurt. Looking around, as soon as you realize it's just the car that was damaged, the first thing that came to mind was like, oh my God, we don't have enough time to get everything done. Literally had to basically – I got out of the car and I was just like, give me your information. I'll deal with it later. I should have clued in that the person was like, oh, don't call the police. I'll pay you cash. It turns out that they were an unlicensed driver with no insurance driving an 18-wheeler through downtown Toronto, which I can't even believe it. I ended up reaching at the Cisco Foods, because it was the Cisco Foods truck. Anyways, funny enough, I ended up covering the full cost of that car accident. I look back and it was still the right decision because we literally made it back one – when we launched on February 13th, it was with maybe an hour to spare. I mean, it was a really successful launch, but it was one of those things where that relentless focus of it doesn't matter. If I had stayed there, I would've saved maybe, what, $10,000 for the car accident. I would've potentially had a much worse outcome for the business and it would've been –

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I couldn't agree more. This is the thing. You can look at this as just it's a funny story, if so, but really it's a lesson because the thing is this is maniacal focus and this is what it means. When you're going from zero to one, everything is zeros and ones. It either is extremely important, must be done or it doesn't matter at all. It's the shades of grays that kill you because you have so many more things that you could do than you have resources for that, if you start crossing off Number 4, Number 5 because it's right there in front of you, you won't get Number 1 done. Having focus means this kind of weird stuff happens, something that everybody would consider, oh, you got to deal with the accident. I mean, what's wrong with you? It's like, well, actually, I don't because this is my thing. My thing is getting this thing shipped on time, and if I do that, then the rest will take care of itself, and if I don't, nothing else matters, right? I think aligning on something that is extremely powerful. Very few founders can do it. In general, I think that's a superpower of startups because getting more than a handful of people to be that focused about one thing is damn near impossible.

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Yeah, I mean, it's 100% true. A very quick example of that is, when we started the company, it was a numbered corp, didn't even have a name. The first four people that joined the company, they joined a numbered corporation. That's what we're signing. It was only at the point where we were about to hire a few more developers where Jason was like, it's going to make it a lot easier if we have a name. You should start coming up with a name because hiring more broadly to a number of corporations is going to get a bit more interesting. Again, at the time, it doesn't matter, right? What's the point of having a name if your business is not viable and it's not going to be successful?

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One hundred percent. You shipped this. I'm curious what happened at that point. Did you already have pricing pre-negotiated? Did you know what would happen if they liked the product? Where did –

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Yeah, so we had kind of aligned on those terms and that was the kickoff in September was we had aligned on the terms and the pricing. We just had to hit those milestones.

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You kind of closed that customer. Are you already before that trying to get new customers or what – or do you now service that customer for a while?

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The first eight months was just getting to launch. As soon as we got to launch and everything was – and again, it's a big change. There's a lot of change management getting feedback. There's hiccups along the way for sure, but once we deployed and launched, I mean, one of our customers specifically, Suzanne actually said this; she's like, the silence was definite. When we rolled out the final version of the product and got into field, the sales team just went from constantly complaining about sales comp to just it working. Really there was zero focus for anything else except getting to that launch. After that –

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How much back and forth, just on that, how much back and forth was it through those eight months just for you to hit it? I know it's not perfect. I'm sure you have to iterate a lot, but you got into a pretty high bar on first delivery. What did you do right before that to get there?

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I think we knew – we spent a lot of time during the implementation, ingrained with the customer. We were part of every single communication to the reps. In the first 12 months of that – of I would say the beginning, that whole year, right? Because the fact of the 2017 year, every single sales rep in that org – that were in the teams that we deployed to had my cell phone number and would call me and I would answer questions. It didn't – basically it was to make sure we got the success, we had to be as close as possible with that organization. I think that when we pushed something out, it was pushing it out for ourselves. We knew exactly what we were expecting and what we wanted to see. It wasn't – we tried to remove the broken telephone of customer wants something because their team needs it. They translated it to us, then we translate to engineering. That doesn't work. You have to be in there with the reps. You have to be in there with the sales team. Basically, at this point, we had sold the customer that had – we had a ton of credibility with because I worked directly with them as a consultant and had proven my – my thought leadership in the space, proven my ability to execute. It was a big step for them to take a big bet, for sure, but it wasn't as big as, hey, we've just met this person through an outbound email or an intro. Getting the second customer was very, very hard. I mean, we spent, I would say, a year, a solid year trying to push and get into the second customer because we're going in, we're pitching this radically different idea about sales comp. We're pitching this very radically different approach, and yet here we are with a small startup with a handful of people working out of a house.

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What's the ROI that you're pitching, especially in that first year?

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The ROI was a cost savings of you’re effectively – your process today actually requires so many different resources across the organization to make any change happen. It's kind of – the way to think about it is today compensation, it's operating in a very waterfall fashion similar to kind of how DevOps used to operate 20 years ago. In order to enable the organization to move in a more agile way, you need to go to an agile methodology where every task is operated through a workflow. Forma is effectively this platform that helps orchestrate change and makes these businesses more agile. By doing so, we're able to kind of push and nudge them in the right direction of what incentives to roll out. You're pitching this cost savings right off the bat because I'm basically saving you the admin costs, all the different teams and the sales teams not having the information they need. More importantly, I'm saving you this uplift in sales, this opportunity to grow your business by deploying better incentives that motivate the right strategy for your team. This first one, you can kind of easily build up in the early stages with a customer. If they spend enough time with you, you could say this is what's happening today. Here's exactly what you're going to do in the future. I can build a case off of cost savings. The other one is hard to demonstrate and who's going to trust a brand-new startup to say, oh yeah, you're going to increase my top line by 1% or 2%. Okay, sounds great. It's hard to imagine how it's actually going to work in theory. Funny enough, our second customer, we got on a cold call, pitched him this idea and he seemed interested at the time. This was effectively the head of sales. This organization seemed interested, but he was hesitant. I could tell you he bought into the idea and the vision, but he was hesitant that we could actually do it. It's funny because I made the call on the sales. They didn't ask for it. It was I made the call to say, look, if you don't trust that we can do this, we can prove it to you. Give us your data, give us a couple days, and let us show you what we can come back with. It's funny, I look back and I'm like, I'm glad I went out to say that because I basically volunteered to do this free work, could have completely been for nothing or might have been a complete waste of time, but it was the right gut instinct that I had. I think, it did two things right on that call. It gave them – it gave any hesitation I have about this business ability to execute. Okay, well, now I get to test them for free, but it also shows me that these guys are committed. If I have a serious problem with sales comp, I want to work with someone that has incentives that are lying to me and failure is not an option for these guys. They sent us the data, funny enough, on Friday at 5 p.m. Monday at 10 a.m. was our meeting to present the results. I was like, you – I don't know if it was a coincidence or it was an absolute test to say, are you really that committed? Let's see what you can do. In 48 hours, we did not sleep. The team was at my house basically cranking away the entire weekend. Because we had to stand up the instance, get everything loaded in, configure the data, run our data models, produce the results, put up the – consolidate them and put them into something that we can share in a 30, 45-minute meeting. I remember I look back at the deck, once in a while I look back, and I get goosebumps when I look at it because I know the business. Now that I know the business and I know the problems they were having, our ability to articulate their problems, it was five slides. You make five slides to basically say this is what we produced from the data that you gave us.

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This is what you're producing how their incentives should work or you're producing – what exactly is in those slides?

00:27:41.910 --> 00:30:37.150
Yeah, so the way to think about it is, when we ingest, we take our customer's data, we map it to our platform. What we built within Forma is no different than what we did as consulting where you have a framework for solving a problem. You have this algorithm that you load in, but instead of doing it in Excel for every customer one off, we basically have this unified data model. Then we run these algorithms on all – anytime there's a customer instance, you can effectively choose which algorithms you want to run to kind of – or data models you want to run to produce results. The outcomes of those is effectively a benchmarking up here are the correlations that are – or insights that show that this incentive is working. This one is not. This is a problem with how the behavior you're driving from this incentive plan versus this one and here are tweaks that could potentially change it. It was effectively kind of a readout of how is your incentive comp strategy aligned with your business and where are the big gaps and what are the implications? It was five slides highlighting, and again, I look back and I'm like, they didn't give us any information outside their data, but just what we were able to come back with, and I'm saying this because sometimes you're on the edge and I'm like, oh my God, are they going to say yes? We left that meeting, we had no idea if they were going to say yes or not, but I look back and I'm like, there's no way they wouldn't have said yes, after producing that. When we did get the first signed agreement, it was still a consulting agreement. It was effectively, okay, look, we're not sure if we want to use you guys for the full platform, but if you're willing to do professional services agreement with us to help us redesign our comp strategy, leveraging your platform for a short-term period, we're willing to do that. I remember thinking why would you go with us instead of – because they were having some significant challenges. I mean, they were over budget on comp and all kinds of things. It was like, I'm surprised at a board of $100 million plus revenue organization is willing to let this small startup support this. Again, looking back at that deck, the capability of what we proved that we can do in just 48 hours is if these guys, they're willing to die to make this happen, these are the kind of people that I want to have on my side solving my problem. I think this kind of goes back to – I've told this to other founders. You need to build up that level of credibility because the people that are giving you that chance are betting sometimes their entire careers on the choice that they make. The visionaries that are willing to buy in, they have a lot more to lose. What did I have to lose? I mean, I was in my 20s. It's not worst case. It's amazing lesson experience. I've learned a ton. I go apply to another company. I go work somewhere else. This is someone who's well into their career. I mean, this is – it's a big gamble to make. When they make that gamble, you want to give them the utmost confidence that you are willing to die to make it happen. You’re willing to go that extra mile. Maybe dying is an aggressive term here.

00:30:41.670 --> 00:31:30.589
You do. You have to build – you have no credibility. I mean, you're a small startup selling to enterprise especially, you have no credibility. You have no stamp. If they buy something from Microsoft and it sucks, they're not getting in trouble. They bought from Microsoft. What do you want me to do? They're the best in best of breed sort of thing. If they buy from you and it's okay, they could get fired because why did they buy from you? You have to go out there and do everything you can to prove yourself because there's no reason to believe you. Let me ask this question. It's one thing to get yourself to be as committed. Maybe you had co-founders and they have skin in the game and so they'll work overnight and all these sort of things. When you think back, how did you get – how did you get your employees, your broader team to be so committed to be able to work 48 hours across the weekend to make something like this happen?

00:31:38.059 --> 00:32:23.369
I mean, I feel like – I've said this to a lot of the team members that we've hired over the years, and I don't feel like it's changed to the extent that much. I mean, we're still kind of early in the vision of where we want to go. To me it's every employee you bring on in those early days is a founding pillar. You know what I mean? You think about like a founding team, I mean, like you hire the foundation and everything gets built off of that. It's a hard question, right? How do you do it? I mean, we did it by all buying in to the vision. We did it by celebrating even the little wins together. I look back at the way that we operated in that house. Every win was a team win and every difficulty was a team difficulty and challenge.

00:32:33.390 --> 00:32:46.000
What about the type of people you hired? This is maybe kind of silly, but how much did you go for young and scrappy versus experienced and proven? Was that at all a factor? I'm talking your first ten hires or so.

00:32:47.599 --> 00:35:22.230
Yeah, first ten hires, I would say they were all more entrepreneurial and high potential younger – and I'll explain the way kind of I would look at it. The profiles of the first ten people we hired, for sure, even in the first 20, 30, I would say were individuals where I think they knew that they had the capability to perform up here or they had the confidence to perform at this level, but under a normal career trajectory, they would only be able to perform at this level. You're basically saying, I believe that you're going to get there. I'm going – I see the potential in you and I want to bring you in and we're all going to do this together and we all have to learn and grow or we all fail together. I say this to the team, even for myself. I am not – as a CEO today, I look back and I'm like, five years ago, I wasn't a CEO. I was an individual contributor. I was just – we're all working together. I'm like, we all have to scale. I think about myself the same way. In two years’ time, am I going to be the CEO that's running this company? I hope so, but if I can't scale myself, if I can't continue growing, I might not be the right person, right? That mentality is the type of profile that you need to hire for. I think it's the individuals that are not okay with going the standard career path route. They're willing to fight way above their weight class or punch above their weight class, as they say. Every challenge presents itself as an opportunity to demonstrate and grow. I think the biggest thing, when you look back and we see the challenges that we overcame, it was very important to sit as a team. Everybody knew this is the challenge we need to overcome, and once we overcome this challenge, it unlocks X, Y, and Z and it's going to be these next challenges. It was one of those things where I had had a common saying that everyone would joke about for me and what they'd hear at the office was, we're so close. I would constantly say that because we were so close. We were just so close to the next objective and the next objective and the next objective. I think had I not – had we just painted this big picture of, oh, we're just going to be this – oh, we just want to be this rocket ship startup, without recognizing that there's a lot of hardships you have to pass along the way and kind of setting objectives and then celebrating every time you make that milestone, right? The moment that we got that second customer and that contract, I mean, I think that was probably one of the best celebrations we've had as a company, as a team. It was small, it was six of us. It was very different.

00:35:31.909 --> 00:36:24.679
I think, and I'll go on a small tangent just here, but especially for a first-time founder, I mean, if you're a proven founder, then this may or may not apply, but for sure for first-time founders and you're thinking about your first 10 or 20 hires, I think you strategically have to go for the really high potential, unproven, more early types. Those are the people where you can get – it's not just bang for your buck, but what you're really going to get actual A+ work and effort versus thinking that you can hire the proven experienced. It's just, if that person's coming to you, they're probably not at the level that you think that they are versus the ones that just have been overlooked. They're kind of at the cusp and they're just – they don't have enough track record for someone to say, oh, you're legit. You give them that shot, right? Then you get a lot of it and they get – that fit is just ideal I think for that stage.

00:36:29.199 --> 00:37:20.900
Within each of the categories, I think the fundamentals need to be there. You're looking for someone that knows the fundamentals, but maybe they haven't executed on every part of it. To give you an – to kind of step back. I think, I didn't have experience scaling a company to where we are now, but my experience and knowledge within the sales comp space, combined with my experience technically in my past, whether it's coding and programming and kind of understanding the technical infrastructure, had I not had those two things, it would've been, for sure, I don't even think we would be here today, even if I had – I had the idea handed to me on the silver platter, but the areas where I learned were things that were not required for the success of the role. It would be the same thing for the early people. It's like, hire the high potential, but they need to have some grounding framework for foundation for the area that they're going to take over and scale.

00:37:29.610 --> 00:37:54.969
Makes sense. Maybe just to wrap up, let's talk about this kind of your – not your last customer, but the last customer we'll talk about, which was an important milestone, because as I understand it, it was kind of this land and expand opportunity, which obviously is a big kind of threshold to cross, especially when you're selling to enterprise. Maybe tell us a bit about that. You shared a story about what it took to get there, literally. It would be great for you to share it.

00:37:56.039 --> 00:42:26.829
Yeah, no, 100%. At this point, we're kind of starting to get – I think we're on the cusp of starting to feel a little bit more of the momentum and the flywheel, but nonetheless, every customer, especially when you go after enterprise, every customer means a big deal. This was an opportunity that came up, and effectively, this would be selling into one business unit of a multi-business unit, large organization. This is a year after, this is Year 2. This is a year after we've now sold into the second customer, the first professional agreement. We're just in the cusp of getting them to switch over to the full licensing. Now we get this opportunity and we present the vision. We get the buy-in from the senior stakeholders on the vision, but it's not – we don't officially have a fully signed contract and it's close. It's not there. One of the final meetings was to go into one of the smallest divisions, the smallest business units and present and kind of potentially kick off the project. Then right from there, that would be the final decision point. This was in February. This was in February, and there was a terrible storm that came through. It was negative 35 Celsius with plus wind chill. It was like everything at the airport came to standstill. We're going to the airport to fly to – it's a short haul flight, so it's an hour flight. We get to the airport, it's 5 o'clock, our meeting is a full day workshop the next day. We get to the airport. The flight is supposed to be at 6, and then the flight is canceled. The problem was that our key stakeholders, two people on the executive team that were flying into this division or presenting basically the whole day workshop had already flew out because they were flying from the other side of the country. It was like they'd already made their way out. In my mind, I was like, we can't just not show up. We have to show up. This is a – it's a level command. We ended up, I called him right away and I said hey, this is the situation. Flight's canceled, but don't worry. We have a flight. It's going to take us to Vegas. We’re leaving Toronto at 9 p.m., getting to Vegas for 11 and then taking the redeye back to Ohio. They were like, are you crazy? You don't need to do that. I was like, no, it's fine. The workshop is there. You guys are already there. Everyone's set up. We need to do that. It's funny. At the time, Miles was with me. It was Miles on the team and I going together. Miles was like, this is crazy. We shouldn't be doing this. I was like, it's not about the meeting. It’s about demonstrating that when we commit to something we're going to go through with it. The next day, so we – yeah, actually the funny thing is we got on the 9 o'clock flight to go to Vegas, and lo and behold, it's like 9:30. The plane hasn't taken off yet. I talked to the flight attendant. I was like, “We need to be at this meeting, and if I miss my connecting flight in Vegas, I'm not going to be at this meeting. It's going to be worse. I'm going to be in Vegas, not where I need to be in Ohio.” She was like, “Let me go check with the pilot.” She goes to check with the pilot, she comes to me, and she says, “I'm not sure we're going to make it. Maybe you should speak to the pilot.” I actually ended up going up, I get brought into the cockpit of this plane, and the pilot's like, “You know what? We're not going to make it, but normally we wouldn't let you off the plane, but I understand your situation.” They actually let us off the plane, which is crazy. Then we have to go, if you know the Toronto airport, you got to check into US Customs in Toronto to go into the US. Now we have to go back through customs back into Canada and then we booked our flight the next morning at 6 a.m. That got canceled because of the weather. By the time we actually got out it was crazy. We ended up – we got there for noon, and to this day, I mean, I look back at that journey and that customer was appreciative. I mean, they told us that night at dinner where they would basically give us the kind of go ahead. They applauded our commitment to make it happen. They recognize, I mean, they flew all the way across the country for this workshop. Then if we're not going to make it when we're using every possible option. I mean, again, it goes back to the concept of relentless focus, showing them that you're fully committed and that you're – their vision and their goals are the only thing that you care about.

00:42:33.659 --> 00:43:32.079
I think it demonstrates – we talk the cliches of pursing through walls, right? It's just so insane when you actually spell it out now in the moment, what it demonstrates is you're in the mindset of this is the thing that needs to get done and there's just no way it's not going to get done. Now, it's not like that day you woke up like that. Clearly this was the mentality that you had, which obviously kind of permeates into the rest of the team of there's no such thing as saying we're going to do this and then not doing it because this happened, because that happened. There's always going to be stuff between you and the thing, but we're the type of people that break through it. When you push that all the way to extremes, you get these kinds of ludicrous situations, but hey, needless to say, you close that deal and that's kind of the point, right? Anyways, we'll stop it there. I'll ask the last question because we always end with this, but when did you, you spoke about kind of these three big milestones, three big customers, but when did you feel like you had true product market fit?

00:43:37.260 --> 00:44:54.949
The true product market fit comes when you see the end. In sales comp specifically, the end customer is the sales team. When you see, especially because when we were close to our customers, first customers, yeah, okay, yes, that's one customer, it's end size of one, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth. When you start to see the value, the real problem that you're solving is actually unlocking your customers to do more, that was kind of the first – it's the first realization of this was an underserved industry for us. It's clear that we're solving a problem that has not been solved before in a way that is unlocking something that just did not exist prior to this. I would say to that point, it's having our first enterprise customers not only be happy, but willing to be advocates to our future customers and talk about the vision as if it was – yeah, it's not just our vision. It's their vision. That's how they talk about it. I think it's a combination, but it's harder in enterprise, right? Because it's not like you're closing 100 customers and then you get to see that kind of like, oh, it's 100 customers that are buying into it. You have to kind of look at other metrics, which is the success that you drive for that business and the value that's generated.

00:45:00.400 --> 00:46:01.559
We'll stop it there. This was a longer episode than normal, but I think there was just a lot to pull out of that. Maybe just to recap, start it off in management consulting, build industry expertise that came back later to be extremely relevant and mixed with some expertise in tech to put you in a place at the right time to actually take on what was originally consulting project, turn it into a startup idea and then grind, grind, grind. I think you build a culture where that was the mindset where you did what needed to be done, but also had enough to know what was the right thing to be done because you were actually aiming at something that made sense and ultimately provides meaningful value and you close sales. It took a while. By the way, this is an hour or less – a less than an hour episode, but we're talking about each step of the way, each big milestone was year apart, which is traditional of and typical of enterprise sales. You push through it and now you must have dozens and dozens of customers and on to plenty more. Really appreciate you spending the time with us. Thanks a lot

00:46:11.639 --> 00:46:13.519
Absolutely, Pablo. No, thank you for having me on. I enjoyed the conversation.

00:46:14.800 --> 00:46:20.840
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