Raaz Herzberg: evaluation

Transcript context

…I know people always talk about, "Look for pull," and I love that you're describing what pull looks like. Somebody's next day, filling out a really complicated annoying questionnaire, because they just want this product they've never heard of before you chatted with them. Now, they're like, "Just give it to me now. I'm going to do anything you need." Is there anything else along these lines, before we move into your current role and learnings there? I also think that one of the things we did very, almost uniquely, it was, was that, because things started rolling so fast for us, once we found the right path, we ended up selling before we had a seller's team. We ended up, almost in some ways, always being behind, right? Okay, I'm closing contracts with people, I haven't hired my first salespersons, I don't know what we're doing here, I don't know how to have the conversations. But we ended up learning so much from that, from us, ourselves, us being the founders, myself, closing the deals, actually going all the way to contracts and everything, by ourselves. We learned a lot, we learned a lot. And then, when we hired our first sales hire, it was also like, "Look, we sold a couple million of this, so you, for sure, as a salesperson, you kind of give that confidence." So I felt like there was multiple places where that ended up happening, just by accident, because of how fast things ended up happening for us. Actually, it was a really good learning experience to do it for the first time yourselves. I think, sometimes, when you start building a company, you have this wish that if you can't do something, you're going to hire the right person, and he will be able to do it. Okay, I feel like my message is not clear enough, and we just started this company, it's okay, I'm going to hire my first product marketer, and that's going to be it. Or I feel, we can't close a deal, because I need to hire my first salesperson, and that will be it. I hardly find that, I don't think we've ever had that work for us, honestly. It's like, if you can't do it one time end to end, and you're the core, core group, the chances of just bringing somebody from the outside to solve that problem, it's wishful, in some ways, but it never ends up that way. I love this advice so much. There's kind of two parallels here. If the founder can't do it, who has the most context and passion and motivation? It's unlikely an employee's going to be able to do it. And it's similar to the selling point, that if your early customers aren't pulling from you, later customers are not going to have a good time, right? It's like, the most passion comes early. How long did you all stay, doing sales as a founding team? How many millions ARR, roughly, do you remember?…

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