Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, the crossing the chasm kind of methodology, which you want to start narrow, you want to create this kind of small pond, where people talk about each other, and you can light the fire in there. In my previous company, by the way, I did read Crossing the Chasm, and I told myself, nah, I can do way better than that. So, we had one customer in, I think it was L'Oreal, or one of the cosmetics companies, and American Express, and Cisco, different industries, and there was no way we could scale it because everybody had their own lingo, the way they thought about the technology and whatnot. So, by having a smaller set of customers, or I see, definition of customers, you can develop much more focused, and then it's easier to light the fire, because people move right? At some stage, I think it was year one into the business, we heard from a company that they interviewed a salesperson, and the salesperson asked, "Are you using Gong?" And they said, "We are thinking about using Gong, but we're not." He's like, "Well, I'm only going to work for companies that use Gong." And that's sort of the power of a small pond with companies that are like each other, because you get this viral effect that is not common in B2B, but it's as close as you can because of those conversations. That other customer became a Gong customer, literally because they interviewed a person who told him he's not going to come unless they bought Gong. You can't do this if you have a wide market, where people don't even talk to each other, and there is an assumption that you're not burying yourself in this market. I love... Because today, like I said at the very top of this conversation, you're just so ubiquitous, everybody seems to be using Gong. And I love that you started with something, where there was seven, I don't know, different constraints to narrow down who you're going after, and it's such a good example of the power of starting very focused and then expanding from that, which is what you've done. Okay, last question before we get to a very exciting lightning ground, we have a segment on this podcast called Fail Corner, where so many of these podcast conversations, everyone's always sharing all the successes, everything's always going great, nothing ever goes wrong, when in reality it does, things often go wrong. Can you share a story from your career or just the journey of Gong when things didn't go well, when there was maybe a failure, and if you learned something from that time, what you learned? Yeah, I always joke that in my previous company we had done so many mistakes, that if life limited you to a certain number of mistakes, I wouldn't have any left I think. I still do mistakes, but just so many. So, every one of them probably done twice, and then it's like at some stages, third time's a charm. So, the one I just gave you is probably the worst, is crossing the chasm, you start a company, you have this technology, I was thinking let's go horizontal. And that technology was whatever, web integration, something, eventually ended up being an e-commerce content syndication, or [inaudible 00:45:28] management SaaS software, which is the right way to go because you want to specialize in a certain market. But initially, just going on in was just ridiculously not smart, and the other thing we did together was that was, the previous company started year 2000, so that was the bubble, one of those very, very nice bubbles. So, we're like, you know what? We actually got three customers, admittedly in totally three different segments, now let's go and scale. Now, we all knew we need one salesperson, one SE and [inaudible 00:45:59] what's now called product market fit, I don't know that the term even existed there, and we're like, nah, you know what, investors told us you got to hire more people. So, we hired, I don't know, 20 salespeople, all of them failing miserably, because A, we didn't have a true product market fit, but even what's worse, we didn't have a true focused ICP with a very, very repeatable product market fit. So, if you sort of hear me talk about how we started Gong, Amit is the CEO, and he drove a lot of that business strategy, but me being sort of a co-pilot there, it definitely bringing the same, I'm not going to make that mistake again, I might do new and fun ones, but not that same mistake again.…

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