A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
1st-time AI founder grows from $0 to $1.3M ARR in 8 months. Here's exactly how he did it. | Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Founder of Artisan
Jaspar graduated YC & closed a $11.5M seed round this week. He launched Artisan just 8 months ago. And this is the first venture-backed startup he's ever ran.
He started with product-led-growth but struggled. In May, he moved to a sales-first go-to-market & scaled from $200K ARR to $1.3M ARR by September.
We go deep and tactical to figure out exactly what he did to grow so fast: from hiring a Chief of Staff as one of his first hires, to living in the same house as his employees, to meeting 50-100 Account Executives for each AE he hires. He shares specific numbers, specific tactics, and specific mistakes he made along the way.
Why you should listen
- How solving a #1 priority problem is the single biggest reason for fast growth.
- How to use LinkedIn, Reddit, and SEO to generate so many leads your AE's are drowning. (Jaspar's AEs do 20 demo calls per day).
- How to close yourself by hiring a Chief of Staff early on.
- How to find 10/10 Account Executives that closes $300K ARR in their first month.
Keywords
startup growth, sales strategy, marketing tactics, customer success, hiring AEs, product-led growth, sales-led growth, founder insights, business scaling, ARR, product-market fit
Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:44) Getting leads from Reddit
(00:06:00) Launching V1 quickly
(00:12:28) Getting leads from blogs & SEO
(00:15:33) Getting leads from LinkedIn
(00:17:10) Why you should hire a Chief of Staff Early
(00:21:30) How to hire the best Account Executives
(00:24:46) How to get to $1M ARR
(00:26:10) Making Customers Successful
(00:29:43) One Piece of Advice
Pablo Srugo (00:00)
I just spoke with Jaspar, the founder and CEO of Artisan, and this guy is on a completely other level. He's gone from zero to 1.3 million ARR from January to August of this year. So in just eight months and just this week, he announced an $11.5 million seed round because he's growing so fast. We went super deep and tactical on all of the things that he did to grow so fast. He talked about why he hired a chief of staff as his fifth hire. Why he set up a house where everybody lives and works from, and why he does 50 to a hundred interviews for every AE that he hires. If you're on that early path scaling from zero to one to 2 million in ARR and want to figure out the sort of things that companies that are scaling super fast are doing, you have to check this episode out. Welcome to the product market fit show brought to you by Mistral, a sixth 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.
Well Jaspar, welcome to the show, man.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (1:06)
For sure. Good to be here.
Pablo Srugo (1:08)
I'm excited for this episode. Like you're young, you're like 23 years old. I guess you're not a first time founder, right? Like you've had other startups before this.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (1:13)
I mean, I had one startup when I was 18 that was an app for booking cleaners, errand runners that did not work out. terrible unique economics, but never do that again. but I had an agency doing votes, market branding, services that went relatively well. But this is the first like proper venture bank startup I've done.
Pablo Srugo (1:29)
Got it. And so you're kind of like first, like the first time ever that you're like facing the sort of challenges that you're facing now. And you started writing pretty openly and publicly about your road to a million ARR. You tell me like you went from zero to 200K, it took you a few months, but then once you figured things out from 200K to a million, it was like three, four months, right?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (1:48)
Yeah. We made a switch from product led to sales led and that just unlocked so much growth for us. Like when we were product led, our app has a long time to value. So if you actually want to see results from using an AI BDR, you have to put your time in the beginning.
So we realized that sales led made a lot more sense because then we can get people in longer contracts and actually they can see the value before churning.
Pablo Srugo (2:06)
Like maybe just tell us a little bit about kind of what it is that you're building. So we have a sense of what the product even is.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (2:11)
Yeah, for sure. So we have two missions behind what we do. One is consolidation. So we try and replace legacy software tools with one better, easier to use platform. And the second is automation. So once we've consolidated the software, we build these AI employees that we call artisans into the platform that automate different workflows for people. So we started with outbound sales. We have a fully consolidated outbound sales ecosystem. So with everything from B2B data to email warmup and everything in between. And then we have Ava, our AI BDR that sits inside the platform and automates the full BDR workflow. So finding leads, writing past ID emails, sending LinkedIn messages, everything within that realm.
Pablo Srugo (2:46)
And the goal, like you play from what to what, like from nothing to go demo call or what? Like what's your ultimate output?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (2:53)
Yeah, right now it's like when the user comes onto the platform, they set up a campaign from that point until the lead engages positively that whole workflow is handled. They take over with Co-Pilot once the lead has responded. So at that point they are getting suggestions from Ava about what they could say instead of Ava doing it for them.
Pablo Srugo (3:10)
Okay. And then you hand-hold them until kind of that first demo call or whatever, and then it's all on them.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (3:16)
Exactly. Yeah, for now.
Pablo Srugo (3:18)
So you get them with like MQLs, I guess. Is that like the end output?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (3:20)
Yeah. Well, that's typically sales qualified because we do some pre-qualification stuff. yeah.
Pablo Srugo (3:25)
Walk me through kind of…. you have this idea. I'm going to call it high level, like AI agents, AI agent, EDRs, right? Like this kind of a thing. What's your first move from a go to market perspective? You know, you're building it. That's fine. But like, in terms of actually getting customers to start trying it, like, first of all, give me some context on when, when is this and what it is that you're doing.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (3:44)
Yeah, so we launched a waitlist, I think it was last November or last December. And the first thousand signups that we got were from rage baiting posts on Reddit, where we were just like, emphasizing that we didn't have any products and that we'd raised like a funding round. And then some people got really mad and then other people were like, this is an interesting idea. And signed up to the waitlist. So it was a somewhat unconventional way of getting early traction.
Pablo Srugo (4:09)
Walk me through maybe more detail on that actually. I'm super curious. Were you already like a Reddit user or do you just go in and it was one post, many posts?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (4:16)
We did a bunch of posts. So like I wrote them and it was like, we raised a 1.5 million pre-seed at 50 million valuation with no products and no team. And then people would get really mad, but then I would add back links to the website and then they would end up signing up and we got a lot of users from that to begin with.
Pablo Srugo (4:33)
So it's almost like the rage gave you more visibility and then some people obviously read it, maybe weren't as pissed and they just clicked the link.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (4:39)
Exactly, yeah.
Pablo Srugo (4:41)
And by the way, how did you do that, man? One and a half million on 50? That's not –
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (4:45)
On 15, 15. that was...
Pablo Srugo (4:47)
Oh 15, okay.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (4:48)
Yeah, yeah. That was last, I think last October. I had nothing like a deck and a dream. Cold LinkedIn messages, ironically. I managed to generate some initial and meta demand before we then got into YC couple months later.
Pablo Srugo (5:00)
And even just on Reddit, I guess my follow-up on that is like, how do you keep, like, I get the one post, but that's probably only going to get you so much. What do you keep posting repeatedly on Reddit? Is it just the same thing over and over?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (5:12)
Yeah. I doubled down in it. I was like, we got a thousand waitlist signups from Grazing this post. And I was like going down different angles and we were publishing on the white combinator subreddit, our application video and everything like that when we were getting into YC. And that also did really well. So we were just like trying a bunch of different angles and seeing what works.
Pablo Srugo (5:30)
Was that by the way, like on accident that you pissed people off or was that on purpose?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (5:33)
Kind of on purpose. I knew people wouldn't be into that.
Pablo Srugo (5:36)
That alone got you a thousand waitlist customers?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (5:39)
That did. Yeah. That got us like all the way there to a thousand. Although that was a couple months before we even had a product. So a lot of them dropped off and didn't even end up trying the products.
Pablo Srugo (5:47)
What do you do with that waitlist in the meantime?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (5:50)
We didn't really do much. We sent like a few engagement emails like coming soon. but until we launched with our first product dev motion, we didn't really do much.
Pablo Srugo (5:58)
When did, so this is like November, when did you launch a product?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (6:01)
We launched a beta in February, which was super cheap, like self-serve, free trial didn't really work that well. And then switched to sales led in May time.
Pablo Srugo (6:12)
So let's drill down on that, on that first one. Like I don't want to gloss over anything. So that, that first one, what was the beta? How did you roll it out to the wait list? Like just if you can expand on all that.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (6:23)
Yeah, it was like a rudimentary version of Ava that didn't really work that well. And the rollout was just like, opened up a private link and we said, you've been granted access. We tried to make it feel exclusive, but, and then we sent it out to the entire wait list and waited to see what happened.
Pablo Srugo (6:38)
What did happen?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (6:39)
We got a couple of hundred signups, but most people, it was really difficult to onboard yourself. You basically talk to Ava on our app to onboard yourself. And back then it did not work well. Most people didn't make it through onboarding, but they signed up and they got into the funnel. just fell off.
Pablo Srugo (6:53)
Do you remember numbers high level? Like a thousand people get this email. How many sign up? How many onboard how many just, you know what I mean?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (6:59)
it was more than a thousand by that time they got the email. Cause we'd done a bunch more activation stuff, but it was like a, maybe a few thousand and we ended up getting, I think it was like three or 400 signups. And then the drop off was really high because no one finished onboarding.
Pablo Srugo (7:12)
What was on boarding? What were they supposed to do?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (7:15)
They basically had to onboard Ava with a conversation, tell her about their company so that she can write better emails. They had to set up mailboxes and domains, which was the biggest theme point. And then they had to set their campaigns
Pablo Srugo (7:31)
Create new emails or existing?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (7:33)
We recommended creating new inboxes so that you don't damage the reputation of your main domain. So that was like the biggest pain point.
Pablo Srugo (7:37)
What was so hard about that? Seems easy.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (7:38)
People just don't want to try anything that's going to take more than half an hour or requires any technical skill.
Pablo Srugo (7:45)
Interesting. Okay. Even for, I mean, even for getting leads, like that's a little bit surprising. I guess you also had no qualification on the waitlist, right? Like you could have been anyone.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (7:52)
No, that was a bunch of Gmail. So I was like, yeah.
Pablo Srugo (7:54)
Okay. So you're seeing this … What do you do?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (7:58)
We tried a bunch of things we thought mainly the reason was because the product didn't work Which was a lot of the reason but there was other problems as well.
Pablo Srugo (8:05)
What about it didn't work by the way?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (8:06)
It just didn't work at all like it was an MVP But it was like scrapped together like that you could technically send emails But the email quality was really bad The actual app looked horrible the UI was terrible a lot of features weren't built yet like email warm-up Which you kind of need for deliverability wasn't there the durability was pretty bad. It was just like a lot of things wrong with it, but we just wanted to ship something and iterate.
Pablo Srugo (8:29)
So because I've talked to a lot of founders about this, like YC founders, I know that YC, you know, really pushes you to kind of launch past, just get something out there. But do you feel like in retrospect, you maybe launched too soon, too early?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (8:40)
Yeah, to an extent, I get the thesis behind not wanting to launch something imperfect. Like we definitely burned some bridges with people who used the early products, but I think overall it pushes you to make it work a lot faster. And it pushes you to build things that people actually want. So I think overall it's worth doing, even though there's a lot of drawbacks. When there's a bug on a live app that people are using, engineers will fix it a lot faster than when there's a bug on an app that no one's using. it just, makes everyone have higher velocity.
Pablo Srugo (9:08)
So it was more about velocity. Cause a lot of the things are really about like, get it out there so you learn. the challenge is if your product, like you said, the product doesn’t work. there's not that much to learn, but you think even in that case, I guess the value is at least it gets you moving faster. gets you fixing shit faster. gets to a fully ready.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (9:26)
Exactly. You're inherently going to move a lot faster. If there's someone who's emailing you being like, isn't working fix it. Then you are like, it's just your co-founder saying, maybe we should talk about this.
Pablo Srugo (9:35)
The product doesn't work properly. That was one reason why it was failing. Why I was working the way you'd hope, let's say like what else was an issue?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (9:43)
The product wasn't working properly. And then just inherently the product that we'd built wasn't good for a self-serve motion. you need to spend a relatively high amount on outbound to see strong results. But just because you have to be doing high volume because the response rates are low. And we were doing lower volume because we had really cheap plans with the self-serve motion when it wasn't really viable. Like if you get one email a month, then you're not going to continue paying for a service. So we couldn't charge enough with the self-serve motion to retain people.
Pablo Srugo (10:14)
Why do you think like product growth is almost like -
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (10:19)
Yeah, yeah, people love it now.
Pablo Srugo (10:20)
Why do you think that is?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (10:21)
Yeah, I think it's convenient that you don't have to build a sales team and you don't have to have this huge BDR motion. There's a lot of difficulties that come with having a sales ad motion and product makers become really trendy with like product plan and everyone having their self-serve things. But there's a lot of value still to having a sales ad motion. I think that for most startups, it's actually probably the better path to go down to begin with.
Pablo Srugo (10:43)
Why is that?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (10:44)
Because you can speak to the customers more closely when you're selling to them. they have to make more of a decision because they're signing a contract and they're going to tell you anything that they don't like or want differently. And they're a lot more invested because they're spending a sizable amount of money on using your product than they are if they just sign up to some random link.
Pablo Srugo (11:00)
also depends like who are you selling to? Are you selling to the BDR or are you selling higher up to like the VP sales CRO or something like that?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (11:07)
We sell higher up. So like the head of sales/ founder/ VP of sales, whoever it may be.
Pablo Srugo (11:13)
Because what's the, are they replacing BDRs? Are they hiring fewer BDRs? Like how do they think about it?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (11:17)
With startups, it's usually they will use Artisan instead of hiring a BDR. So that's one path. With enterprise orgs, they might use it alongside hiring a BDR and then they'll reduce head count. And then there's kind of a variation. can either use it to augment or to replace BDRs essentially.
Pablo Srugo (11:34)
I think, I mean, that's, I think one of the things that really gets lost with PLG like you look at DropBox /Slack and they're like, man, look at how it spread or whatever. like, first of all, there's a virality element usually in the PLG that really works. And there's certainly a level of the people who get the most value are the users. You know what I mean? Like people just love using Slack. Like management kind of doesn't give a shit, right? If you use Slack or email, as long as you get, know, you're communicating well, but it's people who love using Slack. And I think with something like this, the people who care the most to your point are the heads up like the VP sales, the CROs were actually looking at budget or looking at, you know, leads per headcount or whatever these sorts of metrics that you're really moving the needle on.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (12:12)
Yeah, I completely agree.
Pablo Srugo (12:13)
So you shift to that, well, walk me through that actually, like, it's not a small shift. What do you do to kind of start kind of more of an outbound led motion?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (12:22)
Yeah, just like took the pricing off the pricing page made it so people couldn't sign up and change it so that on the website they have to book in a sales call instead of being signed up immediately. And then obviously we didn't show any pricing before the call. It was initially me and Tina making for something, all of the sales calls. so we had back to back calls every day, which was how I don't know
Pablo Srugo (12:44)
how many, how many per day,
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (12:45)
like 20 a day of new demos. it was horrible. so you did that and then we just iterated on the pricing model. We increased the ACV. We increased the volume of our app on the, we were doing with each one and just honed in on what would work and then hired sales reps.
Pablo Srugo (13:01)
Well, so we're getting to like the juicy bit, this is when things start working. So I want you to get as specific as possible for you to have a full day, 20 sales, 20 demos. need to have a crazy amount of leads. So what are you doing at the top of the funnel? This is something I see so many founders struggle with the demo to close rates actually pretty solid. You'd open solid. Otherwise you've got some of the things to fix, right? SQL to close demo to close, but it's just like, I can't get enough leads. I can't get enough people in the funnel. You had almost too many. So what was going on
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (13:28)
Yeah, we did a really broad go to market. So I did a lot of go to market stuff in my previous startup. So I understood it relatively well. So we had really good SEO and like if you search for AISDR or AIBDR, we come up like first or second typically.
Pablo Srugo (13:41)
How'd you do that?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (13:42)
A lot of content, a lot of backlinks, both paid and not paid. A lot of, yeah, we turned out like three or four blog posts a week and some of them ended up ranking really well.
So that's a really good top of the funnel.
Pablo Srugo (13:55)
Give me something really tactical there that somebody can just implement. mean, everybody knows, you know, everybody that's anybody knows like, hey, if you want SEO, you got to write blogs. Okay, cool. Like, and yet most people still don't rank at the top. Like what are some of the key things that you're doing or that you see people like doing wrong when they try to implement the strategy that really makes a big difference?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (14:15)
We just write really, really high quality content. Like we have a full motion. have someone who is a fractional head of content for us. Every single article is planned out using player scope, which is like an SEO planning tool. All of our keywords are very specifically chosen based on the difficulty of writing. When we create an article, we build backlinks to that article with the keywords we want to target. So we just follow all of the best practices to try and write with them.
Pablo Srugo (14:38)
Walk me through just the backlink building. What do you do there?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (14:41)
We work with a bunch of agencies and then we - like Hubstall is one of our investors and they build backlinks for us as well. And we just work with a bunch of agencies. We speak to other companies and we do backlink exchanges. a bunch of things.
Pablo Srugo (14:54)
So HubSpot does what exactly would they put your article on their domain somewhere.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (14:58)
Yeah. They put our article on that, on their blogs, which helps.
Pablo Srugo (15:02)
So that gets you more and more domain authority and then the quality of the blog hopefully takes care of the rest.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (15:06)
Exactly. Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (15:07)
Okay. So that's one, like the blogging SEO strategy. That's one channel. What else?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (15:11)
Cringy LinkedIn content. Still does really well. Yeah. Yeah. Still, we still get so much brand awareness and so many leads from LinkedIn content. Probably one of our biggest channels.
Pablo Srugo (15:21)
Why don't we do the whole strategy there, man? Like, I feel like, you know what, I would say LinkedIn, Reddit are probably the two least, most underutilized channels these days. So walk me through very specifically, what are you doing on...
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (15:33)
Yeah, we generate thousands of leads from LinkedIn. The posts that do best are usually about milestones. Like if we have a screenshot of our revenue close or something like that, and then can explain how we got there, that does well.
Pablo Srugo (15:45)
That's on LinkedIn or Reddit? On LinkedIn, it's all about for us: creating content that has some kind of a hook in the first line and then trying to keep people engaged throughout the post. But then also trying to subtly mention what we do so that they end up drawing back to our sales form.
Pablo Srugo (16:00)
I do a lot of LinkedIn, but I'm a VC. Like I just have a lot of time for this shit. I mean, fundamentally, I know like you got to have a nice hook. If you make it personal, it's better. You know, if it's an interesting take on something that's even better, you mix it all in, you have a viral post. My question to you dude is like, how do you set time aside to write?, because like the difference between an okay post and a 10, 20 % better post is 10 times more virality. So how do you take the time to actually write high quality content on LinkedIn? are you doing this?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (16:28)
Well, I like to send brainstorms of ideas to Tina, my chief of staff, who then turns the brainstorms into content drafts, and then we work together to finalize it. So I'm not doing the bulk of the work.
Pablo Srugo (16:39)
Well, even just there, right? I know you had one post that was like your first five hires were two engineers, a PM who was like also your co-founder, a designer. All of that to me seems pretty reasonable. I mean, the PM normally comes in later, like employee 20 or so usually, but you know, a product minded co-founder that I've seen a lot, but then you had a chief of staff, like five people and one of them's chief of staff, which is not normal. Walk me through the thinking there and like what sort of things the chief of staff was doing that you found was so valuable even in such a small team.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (17:10)
Yeah, so, as you've said, Tina, she was basically doing anything that I didn't have time to do. So, be it like hiring or marketing or content or literally anything, like whatever I was doing, sales schools, like everything that was overflow from what I had to do, she then takes on, which I think is a lot more helpful than hiring a specific marketing growth, whatever it might be rolled out on, because you have more flexibility about what that workload ends up looking like.
Pablo Srugo (17:34)
But they've got to be almost like a copy of you, no?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (17:35)
I think you just need someone who's smart and like a generalist and they can figure out how to do most things. I don't think they need to have specific experience necessarily, especially if you know how to do the things you can give guidance.
Pablo Srugo (17:46)
But the goal is that they do those things either as well, better or at least close to as well as you would have done those things, right? Kind of across the board.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (17:54)
Yeah, exactly.
Pablo Srugo (17:55)
You know, it's funny, man. Like I was reading, you know, Mr. Beast's leak thing came out like his operator. I don't know if you saw this, but Mr. Beast wrote like a 36 page onboarding document and just leaked last week. And one of the things he talks about, I don't know if it was there in an interview, but effectively the way he did all his first hires was people would just follow him for like months all day. And in his case, he was excessive, right? Like live together, all this stuff. He's like every call I would do, they would be in the call, like everything. And he's like, I just want to get them to a place where if something comes up, they've seen so much of me that they're like, is what Mr. Beast would be like, literally they just become a copy. Like, I don't know if you took it that far or if that's even what you wanted, but that's anyways, what comes in my head.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (18:35)
Well, yeah, I mean, we also have a house that we all live in. Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (18:38)
Oh really? Talk to me about that.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (18:39)
Yeah, we have a combined house office in San Francisco up in Russia. We have a billboard as well of Ava that I can see right now from the window.
Pablo Srugo (18:47)
How many people live in the house that you work in?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (18:49)
Only four people live there right now. And then we have most of our teams remote. We have 25 people total. But people fly in and come and stay. We have someone arriving on Monday.
Pablo Srugo (18:57)
But did your chief of staff then live with you live in that same house?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (19:00)
Yes, she does. yeah.
Pablo Srugo (19:01)
So how important was that? And just being close together? for you to like ramp her up really quick to where you're you feel super comfortable just letting her run on so many important things across the board.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (19:10)
Yeah I think it's super important to spend a little time together in person otherwise you just don't get the same level of context that you do that like when you're remote you never can get to know someone and get to know how someone would act in any situation as well as when you're in person and so I do think it's super important to have a month at least of in-person time together even for remote hires to be able to build that context.
Pablo Srugo (19:29)
Okay so we're back to you know top of the funnel, you’ve got SEO, you've got LinkedIn. Talk to me more about Reddit. What are you doing there? Is it the same as LinkedIn? Is it different? Like what's the new?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (19:39)
Yeah, Reddit we had slowed down on a bit. We don't do as much now, mostly because I got banned for most of the subreddits for self-promotion. But we still do some posts when we have a new feature. Whenever we're launching something, we'll think which subreddits it could be relevant for. And we'll create content specifically for them, remolding the LinkedIn content for Reddit and remolding the marketing emails for Reddit.
Pablo Srugo (20:00)
And that's what you're doing before. Like, and before you got banned, like it was actually, like it had a lot of volume for you. It's a good chance.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (20:05)
Yeah. Yeah. Before we got bad, I had a lot of volume. We might pick it back up soon. we've just been relying on like, we do a lot of outbound, obviously, like inherently you expect us to do that. Like we use Aver a lot. We do a lot of marketing emails. We have like an audience of 20,000 to come inbound one way or another. So we've been leading on those channels and we've slowed down on the Reddit. We'll probably pick it back up.
Pablo Srugo (20:24)
But yeah, I mean, the nice thing about LinkedIn and Reddit and all the, and like even SEO is like, mean, once you have an email marketing list, it's great, but like you gotta build that somehow. So you need something to kind of get that on first place. So just tell me more about just Reddit. Like I just want to get a little bit more specific. Cause I understand LinkedIn, but like in those days before you were banned. Yeah. Like I mean, you told me a little bit about before, like you, you're just posting kind like I raised this much money, whatever. And people get pissed. Is that the same strategy even as you're trying to go from 200k to a million?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (20:52)
Yeah. It's either like make people angry, teach them something or make them feel happy for you. I think those are the three things and like making people angry actually does the best by far. But you obviously face some backlash doing that.
Pablo Srugo (21:07)
Is that true everywhere or mainly on Reddit?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (21:08)
I think if you want to get impressions it's true everywhere but it depends how much you care about the negative sentiment that you're going to get. And then teaching people things is also really helpful on Reddit. I find like when we were applying to YC and going through that process we were posting the entire thing on the white combinator subreddit. And those posted pretty well.
Pablo Srugo (21:26)
OK, cool. So you've got those channels. They're driving leads. You're getting demos booked. What's next?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (21:31)
We hired a bunch of AEs because we had the inbound lead flow. Hiring AEs was actually shockingly difficult. I thought I was against recruiters. We ended up having to use recruiters for nearly every AE role.
Pablo Srugo (21:43)
Why was it so hard?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (21:44)
Because there's so many AEs, but most of them just kind of suck. I feel like to be an AE, you need to have a great personality. You need to be relatively charismatic. You need to be able to talk to anyone. You need to be able to happily do 15, 20 calls a day and finding someone who has the intersection of all those different things, it's just extremely difficult. So it took a long time for us to find the AEs.
Pablo Srugo (22:04)
How did you, - you had a post talking about how when your first day you did like 300K ARR, booked 300K ARR in a month or something like that, which is just absurd. So my question is more than anything about what are you doing when in terms of your hiring process to hire somebody who you think is going to be a really good AE, like what's a really good AE?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (22:24)
Yeah, so we probably interviewed 50 to 100 AEs for every one that we hired. I think the most important things, first of all, it is someone who you would want to talk to, even if they weren't doing the job, like would you happily sit down in the bar and have a drink with them? Second of all, they need to be really compelling and clear and have a skill with, it's a little ironic that I can't say it, but be able to organize their words well and be able to format arguments and be compelling. And they have to be just generally charismatic and interesting to the person and they have to be able to keep that energy even when they're like, if they're low and if they're not happy, they need to still be happy on a sales call. I think it's trying to figure out
Pablo Srugo (23:01)
but how do you test for these things? Like you're doing 50 to a hundred of these. You must have some way beyond just like the normal interview to figure out if they actually meet and have all those attributes.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (23:10)
We do like a mock demo. So we do a demo where we pretend to be a customer and they sell us whatever's up where they want. One thing that I'm big on is having good grammar and good spelling and good formatting. So if the CVs. mess it up anyway, or if they're missing full stops at the end of sentences, then it's a no go. But mostly you can just tell by speaking to someone and seeing their personality a bit.
Pablo Srugo (23:29)
And then, I mean, the other part is like your actual product, right? Like how much of your success is fundamentally not so much about, you know, the people, the processes or whatever, but just the fact that you're solving a problem that is top of mind for people.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (23:43)
That's the biggest thing for us. We have really, really strong market pull. Like everyone wants an AIBDR and most of the AIBDRs on the market kind of suck. And we have by far the most compelling product. Like when we go head to head, we never lose just because our product is the best. So that does make everything else significantly easier.
Pablo Srugo (23:59)
What about your product is the best? Like what do you find are the things that separate you and that customers specifically care about when they're putting you up to, you know, like what's even a competitor? Is it like a clay or is it something else more like an agent type?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (24:12)
Yeah, like a relevance AI or like an AISDR. But we have better email quality. We have pulled through a lot more data. We have a bunch of more data sources. The emails that we create are more personalized. Like we personalized down to the individual rather than to the company. Our UI is just easier to use. We have a bunch of interoperability tools built in. We are just constantly trying to make sure that every single feature that we release is better than any alternative available on the market.
Pablo Srugo (24:38)
Walk me through, by the way, just the numbers. So you're at zero in Jan, like month by month till today. What does that look like?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (24:46)
Well, was basically so Jan zero, probably still zero,I guess. March, we had a little bit of revenue, maybe like five K. April, I think we got up to like 20, but there was a lot of drop off going on there. And then in May, I think we stayed at around 20. And then when we switched to sales led in June, like May, June time, we saw everything pick up really fast. So I can't remember the exact numbers, but for example, in the last 30 days, we've closed 500K of ARR. And then before that, the previous, I'd say it was probably around the 300 mark and it's just been growing pretty exponentially.
Pablo Srugo (25:20)
And you're at what now? Like 1.2?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (25:23)
Like 1.3.
Pablo Srugo (25:25)
Nice. Well, congrats, dude. That's freaking awesome. And I mean, the other question I have, so like, you know, I'm just kind of walking through it like, okay, you got your leads, you've got your AEs that you've figured out kind of how to source and you're doing at least 10 times as much. kind of interview to AE closed than anybody else, like 50 to 100 interviews per AE, that alone, like, you're probably gonna get, you know, as long as you're actually getting a good pool of candidates, like if you're going through 50, if you're willing to go through 50 to 100 to hire one, then, you know, it's probably a pretty solid kind of success rate. Yeah, exactly. And so you're hiring some great AEs. Zero to 1.2 ARR in like four months is stupid good. So my question is, what part of your funnel do you think you guys just totally excel at? you know, relative to others.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (26:10)
Yeah. Like top of funnel, just getting leads.
Pablo Srugo (26:12)
How much of that, by the way, is your own, is your own product?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (26:15)
Probably about 40% now. we basically stopped using our product before because we had too much inbound.
Pablo Srugo (26:23)
Yeah, that reminds me. I remember, this is a company called Noibu. They do like e-commerce checkout errors, basically find errors that prevent people from buying stuff and literally their sales outbound was like, Hey, like, here's this error I found. And like our estimation is it costs you a million dollars a year. You know, it's like, okay, I got to call these guys. Okay. Awesome. And then maybe my final question, like, you're ramping up really quickly. What are you looking at to make sure your customers are successful? Because that's what can really kind of knock you in the face now, right? Just because you're getting so many customers in there. People are like, yeah, yeah, let's go. Let's go go. If they don't have success and word of mouth turns the other way, it could be a recipe for disaster. So what are you looking at? Like what metrics, what are you doing qualitatively on the customer success side?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (27:07)
The biggest thing for us is if our customers don't have a good product and good messaging, it's just impossible for us to make them successful. No matter what we do, we look across the border who's successful and who isn't with Ava, with our AIBDR. And typically the customers who do best are ones who understand their ICP really well, have strong messaging, have done some kind of outbound before and have a genuinely good product and product market fit. And the ones who do poorly are like the the ones who have just set up, they're like a one person company, they have a bad Wix website and they have never done the outbound. So I think that what we need to do is focus on getting the right kinds of customers in order to be able to effectively to go.
Pablo Srugo (27:48)
Do you disqualify based on those things?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (27:51)
We do, the AEs now disqualify before a meeting if they look at their website and it's just like terrible. But we're doing it more and more now just because otherwise it's just shooting ourselves in the foot down the line.
Pablo Srugo (29:01)
Do you think you would? like You'll see the website, maybe the website's good, but when you talk to them, you realize they never done it, or you just realized something that's like, this person isn't going to be successful. Are you starting to instruct them like, hey, let's just find a way to not even get these customers?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (28:14)
Yeah. If there's anything that's like a big red flag, like if they're B2C, it's just a no-go. If they're looking to use it for like a weird use case, then it's just a no-go. There's still some customers who get onto the platform and I'm like, I don't think they're going to be successful. Although that's happened once and they've ended up being really successful. So I can't necessarily say across the board, but I know it's right and wrong. But we're really holding in on what our ICP is to be able to double down on it.
Pablo Srugo (28:36)
That's exactly what I was going to ask because you have like the problem, the curse, which is like, everybody that does B2B sales is a customer. So like you could argue like everybody, my market is everybody. How do you go from there to an ICP that you can actually close today and deliver value for today?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (28:51)
Yeah, for the most part, we're just trying to let as many people who we could be a good fit as possible on. And then what we're going to do is just analyze the data and see who is genuinely the most successful and double down on that going forward.
Pablo Srugo (29:00)
Do you tweak your marketing message? Like if you find it's this vertical or this type of customer, you kind of start tweaking things to just attract those.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (29:09)
We haven't yet, but we've implemented full tracking across our full sales cycle. So we know where these come in from, where the deals come from, and we can attribute customers success to different channels. So we're working on it in the long run.
Pablo Srugo (29:21)
Perfect man. Well dude, we'll stop it there. This has been awesome. I mean, maybe just as a final question, like, you know, what, what top piece of advice do you find yourself giving founders? I'm sure many founders at UAP, especially cause you're so public with your content, that are struggling with, you know, that velocity, you know, for that first million or two million ARR, what do you find kind of telling them more and more?
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (29:43)
Yeah, well, I think we were in a fortunate situation where the product that we're building inherently has a really strong market pull. So we're kind of lucky that as long as we make a lot of noise, people come and want to talk to us. I think it's more difficult if you're building a niche product or building something with a very specific ICP, maybe do outbound. But I don't know if I have a good piece of advice on this because we have such a broad ICP. If you have a broad ICP, I would say do things that we did like post on LinkedIn, post on Reddit, do SEO content, like build up some buzz. But with a niche ICP, I think it's very difficult. It's like you have to… really find where the people that you're targeting exist. Is it a conference? it on one specific blog? Is there something you can sponsor? And then hone in on hitting those channels. But we're kind of fortunate that we can hit most channels and do well.
Pablo Srugo (30:32)
And I think the other thing that's in there, like it kind of sucks to give this advice, but it's real is like have a product people actually, you know, want to buy. Cause otherwise it's always, you're pushing the boulder up a hill.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (30:40)
Yeah, that makes things a lot easier.
Pablo Srugo (30:42)
Awesome, man. Well, dude, thanks for taking the time.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (30:45)
For sure. Thank you for having me.
Pablo Srugo (30:46)
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