Ep. #15, Everything’s Recorded Whether You Know It or Not with Amrit Dhangal

Amrit Dhangal: Acquire was started in London. We used to use Skype heavily. Our team was abroad in India, my co-founder team was abroad in India and so we heavily used Skype to speak to them and they would share their screen to us and we would see the work they were doing.

And we also had these live chat tools on websites that I think was Zopim at the time, before they got acquired by Zendesk. You had to have been in tech for like 10 or 15 years to know about Zopim. It's very old.

And we had some random idea that we would just have this live chat tool that would also have video and the ability to see the person's screen on the Internet. And to be honest, I was doing a printing company and my co-founder was doing a web development company and the world doesn't need another printer. The world most definitely doesn't need a web developer.

And I made no money in my life and it sucked, financially it sucked. So my co-founder at that point, he just randomly built what you would call an mvp and it was a live chat box, it would open, you would click the camera button. I could see you in real time on video.

And we thought, okay, let's try to sell it. And pricing was, you went on Zopim's website, maybe Zendesk at that point you just undercut them. That was a pricing strategy, right? Because we just thought, how do you get customers? You give them a better price.

And we continued and it was so weird. I remember selling to the largest auto dealership in the Netherlands and it was like sports cars. So what they wanted was when somebody came on the website, they wanted to show the car in real time and was like, "we have a camera, you can just use your webcam."

And slowly, slowly we just started selling the product. Probably got to a couple thousand dollars in revenue and randomly my co-founder applied to 500 Startups, an incubator here in Mountain View. And I remember the interview. I had a football game, European football game. I had my kit on underneath and I put a shirt on top because I was after this call, I got to get to the game.

If you know me, you know how seriously I take football. So I was like, cool man, we'll do it. It was an 8pm call. Football starts at 9, 8 to 8:30 did the call, went to my game. Couple weeks later they said, "you should come. We like what you're up to, you have some revenue, you should come."

And that's where I would say the journey really shifted for us. We finally got a little bit of money. I think we paid back three months of wages that we were backdated by. So that's where it started.

We couldn't raise money for the first two years. It was very hard for us to raise money. We were living in Tenderloin for about two years in a studio. Three of us at one point, then two of us. And it wasn't fun. It was what it was. Our Office was Market, 6th and 7th, so not the nicest place either. And there's no windows in the office.

Christine Spang: Okay.

Amrit: I don't know if it was an office building because people used to also live in there. People who had rent control for 10, 15 years. So you'd come outside on the third floor and there was only showers on the fifth floor.

So you'd come out and people would be in their towels. And so we would never bring any investors ever to this building. We used to call it the Vegas Casino because there's no windows. You could never tell the time . So you just work.

But I remember we were trying to raise money. We said if we ask people for a little amount of money, we'll have a high probability of getting it. Not knowing that VCs want a certain percentage of the company. So the formula was completely the other way around.

We did what we did best. I sold the product, my co-founder and the team in India kept building the product and we just went like that. And finally in 2018, we raised our first million dollars. And that's when I would say the business had another change of trajectory.

We then started hiring and then very quickly after, we raised our A round. And very quickly after that we raised our B round. We ended up raising a total of $56, $57 million, which is cool. And when you're a first time founder and you're growing, it's a lot of fun. I would say the most fun I had at Acquire was I think we were probably a 20-person company on Kearney Street. It was a lot of fun. We enjoyed that the most.

But the reason why I mentioned the ICP thing was always a constant challenge for us--

I realized that in order for us to really survive, we had to sell. There was nothing there.

There was moments where we borrowed money twice and I think I raised $20,000 once. I don't know how I did that. One was my friend and one was some random person. I think they were in Asia. So we never met them, we never spoke to them, but they gave us $10,000. We still have never spoken to this person by the way. We don't know. I think they sold the equity at the A round.

So because we never, I thought we never really had that luxury, we never really sat down and thought about who was the customer. We just sold whoever gave us money. So instead of raising money and thinking about who was repeatable, we just continued the same pattern. Whoever came, sell it.

Oh, you want this feature? No problem. Give me two weeks. You know, take 10 licenses now and then we would do it. You can take the additional 50 licenses. So that's the part we went on.

And I remember at the B round we got to this point where I was looking at the sales team. We had scaled the team on really shaky go-to-market foundations and it just started becoming so evident. We're hiring people. We have seven, eight landing pages for different industries, right? You have sellers on the call, asking "what use case am I meant to pitch?"

There's no training, there's no enablement. I don't even think we had a sales deck at this point. Every sales deck looked different, every pricing looked different. And then there came a point where I was like, we need to like try to figure this out because we hide enablement, we hide sales ops.

And then we end up doing this three-month exercise where we got 10 customers we won, 10 that churned, 10 that lost. Something along those lines. And we started deeply analyzing them. Discovery call, demo call, negotiation call. And I still have the sheet today. I don't enjoy looking at it, but it is a good reminder of that challenge we had.

And we have Slack, we have Gmail, we have Gong. God knows what we had. The tech stack was probably a million dollars a year. And even doing this ICP exercise to figure this out, impossible. I was no closer to looking at all these charts and pie charts and discovery calls. I was no closer to understanding the through line than I was if I didn't do the work.

And if I go back there today, I don't even have to look at any data. I would just turn around and say, "we provide a customer service product for remote customer service teams. If you want to provide remote customer service by video, we are there for you." That's it.

I wouldn't overcomplicate it. And I think we probably got in our own way there and that's what led me onto Aero, what we're building now. You know, where we've all been taught to believe the Salesforces and the HubSpots of the world are going to help us sell and they're going to unify, you know, they're going to give us the insights across our tech stack.

And I'm like, bullshit. We don't get any insights across our tech stack, at least from my experience on that side. So that's how almost a journey of survival turned into a systemic problem for the company overall. Which I think second -time founders and smarter first-time founders, try to define who they're solving for, who's it for, right. What segment of the market.

Even if they're wrong, at least you can validate your hypothesis or invalidate your hypothesis. When you don't have a hypothesis, you don't really know if it's right or wrong.

I know that was a lot there.

Christine: So I thought it was funny when you were like, "this is going to be a little bit long,"because it was like a whole fucking decade. That's a long time. It's okay. A lot of stuff happened during 10 years, right?

Amrit: Yeah, I mean this was the go-to-market side to it, right? And actually six months after I left, I wrote a 22-page reflection. I was like, "yo, what the hell happened?" Because I forgot some things, like I definitely forgot some things that happened which was probably because I was on a wild amount of coffee.

Like I got to an Americano with five extra shots and I'd have it like 5am in the morning. Yeah, it was bad. It was bad. And so sometimes people would say to me, Amrit, do you remember this? And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. Because I'd have three coffees on average a day for about two years.

Yeah, yeah, it was bad. I'm not doing that now, by the way.

Isaac Nassimi: Five extra shots?

Christine: Okay, five? That's a lot.

So you started Acquire as a side project and then you applied to an accelerator and your side project became a 10-year part of your journey. That is amazing. And now you're in America.

Amrit: Now I'm in America, yes. In the Bay Area. I'll be honest, I hated San Francisco for the first year. I don't know, I just didn't like anything. I was like, oh, the food is not cool. I don't like this, I don't like that.

And I think part of it was because you uproot a complete lifestyle, a good lifestyle, right? And then you come here and life was very challenging here for us in the sense that financially it was extremely challenging.

The startup was extremely challenging. We had two friends we made from the incubator who stayed in the Bay Area. Everyone else left and you basically didn't have any friends, you don't have any money, you don't have a business that's doing very well either. And at every front there's always this pressure.

So it was very hard. I didn't enjoy it here. And then I met my partner within my first year of coming here. So that was cool. And I remember on our first date, I had to get my brother to transfer me some money. I was like, dude, can you transfer me some money so I can go and contribute towards this bill?

Yeah. So it wasn't, it wasn't fun at all. I did actually play football in San Francisco for a little bit. And then I stopped for about five years because we were just working and all I cared about was work.

The more people I've met who've come from abroad and come to the US to start a company in the Bay Area, a lot of people are actually lonely.

And I didn't have any friends and my partner went traveling for two months. And I realized when she left, I was like, shit, who am I going to call? What do I do? I end up hanging out with my neighbor. And then she introduced me to some of her friends. And at that point in time, I realized that I had to basically build a lifestyle.

And in your 30s, it's very hard to build a lifestyle and make some friends. And it's uncomfortable saying you want to make friends, but I started saying it. And at the same time, I joined Oakland Soccer Club as a volunteer coach. And that's where I met most of the people I know.

And the sad truth is, once I wasn't the CEO of a company, everyone disappeared. You meet a couple of people, you make a few friends, but the vast majority, you just don't hear from them ever again.

Which I'm okay with now at this point in time. And I'm sure a lot of that is on me as well, probably not calling or making the effort and me telling myself that. But I think it was after a very long journey, there's only a few people I've ever kept in touch with and that have kept in touch with me.

And as I now go into my second journey, I'm very well aware that it's okay for there to be transactional relationships, for you to potentially identify friendships that may become something, but it's okay. I'm not going to do this journey and then look back and be like, oh, like it was only because of this reason. Right? At least from my perspective.

So it is hard. And that the most common factor, the one that I don't think founders ever talk about, is the emotional journey for the visa application. It's a very emotional journey.

The sad truth is there's probably a huge number of founders out there right now who are in the office today building a product, doing sales, investing their entire life into this company. They're taking venture capital and there's something in the back of their mind which is saying they may have to leave this country at any point forever.

And that small detail, as likely or as unlikely as it is, people will always have that in the back of their mind. And it's not uncommon for me to come across folks who are here today who won't go home. Even if they can, they won't. And I didn't do it either. I was too afraid to go home for about four and a half years until I got my permanent residency. I wouldn't go.

I was like, even if there's a 0.1% chance, I'm not going to risk it. And within that journey there's a lot of things that happen. Family, people pass away, people get married. So this is a thing that I don't ever hear about.

But it's something that was always in the back of my mind. My co-founder was like, "dude, don't go. You may never come back." And that's something that you have to live with quite a bit. You know, on top of the emotional journey of just doing a startup.

Christine: Yeah, you made some big sacrifices to be here.

Amrit: Me and many others made a huge sacrifice to be here. But it was worth it. It was worth it. At least in my scenario, for me, it was truly a life changing journey.

Christine: So tell me a little bit about the maturation of Acquire. Did you get to a point where you were like making a decent living? And then, how did you decide to go and jump and start something new again?

Amrit: Well, yes, I make a decent living, you know I'm very fortunate in that sense. We did start paying ourselves at the seed round, a livable wage. So in that way we've been very fortunate.

We might end up buying a house and we live here now. So as I said, it was definitely a life changing journey for us in that regard. But Acquire was a roller coaster. It was the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, right?

We came to a point where, whether it was a right decision or the wrong decision, we ended up rebuilding the product. And I wish no company ever has to rebuild their entire product because it was a very painful 18 months of my journey.

And on one side, of course, you have investors who, very rightly so, have given you money for growth. You have customers who are like, "where's that product we paid you $1,000,000 for or $100,000 for?"

And then you have a team who's like, "what's going on?" It's almost impossible to navigate that when you have to rebuild the entire product. You've raised a lot of money. You have ARR. You have people who pay you for this product.

And I remember there was this one customer, a very large company. And I was on the phone to their VP. And I said, "I'm just going to tell you straight, it's never going to happen."

I said, "this scale you want? I don't know how to tell you, it's never going to happen."

He goes, "how long do you need?"

I said, "dude, I don't know. I don't know."

Do you know what he said to me? He goes, "do you need developers? Shall I give you my developers?"

I was like, "I don't even know if I need them. I don't even know at this point. Okay, so just hold up. Like, I don't know."

And essentially we, once we had rebuilt the product, for me at least, I was like, this is it. I've given so much to this journey. Going through a rebuild is extremely painful.

We then essentially converted the company to a profitable company, and it still continues to run today. And that, I think, was probably the best outcome for the company. But at that point, I was like, it's time, it's time.

Then I got my green card, went to London, went traveling, took a break, and then I was like, what should I do with my life? But, yeah, Acquire was everything.

I learned so much at Acquire. Some things I wish I hadn't have learned, but I learned them anyway. But yeah, it was a hell of a journey.

Isaac: I really appreciate your emotional transparency because I think a lot of people talk about, "oh, it was really hard,"and that's about where they leave it.

Or they tell the story about how the funding didn't come through and the company was about to die and the employees were really scared. And then it happened.

Amrit: Yeah.

Isaac: And what they don't talk about is, you know, some words you use that are really, I think, meaningful and poignant and resonant, like "loneliness."

Amrit: Right.

Isaac: And I think you had to speed run this lesson. Most Americans never learn or take their whole lives to learn, which is that work can't be what gets you all your kicks in life, because it's capricious, it's fickle, it won't always be there for you. It won't always be in a good place. And you've got to learn how to make friends. You got to learn how to not be lonely.

Amrit: I think so.

I do fundamentally believe the quality of your relationships heavily dictates the quality of your life.

And I was talking to founders, literally this week and last week, where they asked me, like, oh, how are you doing? Like emotionally, like on the side. Not on LinkedIn or anything like that. And I don't blame them because I think where I always struggle is when I say to folks, "look, you have to find balance. You can't work 16, 17 hours a day," because I did it.

And I do feel that it did contribute to the company moving forward. But I know what I did back then, at least 30 to 40% of my time was probably wasted honestly, just clicking around doing some random shit that didn't really make a difference, right?

And I spoke to one of my other friends a couple weeks ago who's a second time founder and his first company, I think they were valued at like 5 billion on like their last round. So they went extremely far in the journey.

And I remember him saying to me, he goes, Amrit, I don't know If I worked 20 hours or 16 hours or 15 hours that the outcome of the company would have significantly changed. I think it would have probably more or less been where it is today. And they've had a really, really good journey.

So I think I wasted a lot of time. I think I was also scared not to work because what do you read online? What do you see, right? I think I was scared to just drop the ball or just not even drop the ball. I was scared to just put it on the side for an hour. Like I couldn't even put it away for 30 minutes to an hour because that would mean, at least in my mind, I wasn't moving forward and I wasn't productive, I wasn't efficient.

So now it's like I would say I have more balance in my life. And I always ask myself, does this really matter? Does it move the needle forward? And also if I do it right now, what difference does it really make? And I'm shocked by how many things I spent doing that didn't do either of those.

Didn't really move the needle forward, didn't really have to be done now. Made no difference to no one's life if I did this Google Sheet or not, right? But I did it. And, at least probably for me it felt good.

And I think most employees, when I would do that and then share a Google sheet with them, I can only assume most of them thought, "another Sheet? Come on dude, this is the fifth one you sent me this month."

This is a hard balance. It's a very hard balance to have a lifestyle and do the business at the same time, especially with how we think about efficiency, success, and productivity. I think they're so intertwined here.

Isaac: Yeah, I think that's the delineation between working on the business versus in it. Y ou've got people who are working in the business and you've given them leadership over stuff, you've given them autonomy, authority, all that stuff. And every time you open up the hood of the machine and you monkey with it and you think you're helping because that's just your go to, you might be making things worse. Very often.

Amrit: I think so. Yeah.

Isaac: It's a hard thing to rewire yourself for.

Amrit: Yeah.

Isaac: I do want to topic shift a little bit in that you seem to be a hell of a writer. I've seen some incredible posts on LinkedIn from you and I've also seen a manifesto.

Amrit: Yes, a manifesto. Yes.

Isaac: Can you tell us a little bit about this manifesto?

Amrit: I mean, do you want to know how many times I wrote it? How many versions? I don't know how many versions of it I have.

And honestly, even the manifesto probably needs some updating because as we've spoken to more companies and more startups, we've also probably had to understand a little bit more and make some shifts. I mean, what was the manifesto?

The manifesto was fundamentally how it just felt. I think the ICP that I mentioned, which we didn't gloss over what we spoke about, was a real pain point for us. Emotionally, it was difficult. Like I could just see it bleeding into the business. Right? I can just see it in everything.

I could see the product going in different directions. I could see the sales teams going in different directions, the marketing team, SDRs doing outbound calls to like five different verticals.

So I think the manifesto for me was really just sharing just my frustrations with the legacy systems today and what I fundamentally believe the change should be.

So that's where the manifesto was coming from, at least from my side. And of course ChatGPT helped me. I wouldn't say I'm a good writer. I'm glad you think so. I appreciate that. ChatGPT has helped a lot.

And one of the prompts or things I always tell ChatGPT is about some of the emotions I want it to try to incorporate into the writing as opposed to just do this. So my manifesto is written many times and some stuff needs to be updated because some stuff has changed.

I think the manifesto paints a picture of Aero being this one stop shop for a go-to-market engine. But really, as we've dived deeper, we've realized that it's probably not best for us to really try to do the entire go-to-market motion from the top of the funnel to post sales.

So we've actually shifted through our conversations to go focus on the middle and the bottom of the funnel, managing prospects, closing deals. But yeah going back to your point, the manifesto was more just sharing my emotion and frustration what we had to live through and endure basically.

Isaac: Well, can you give our listeners a little bit of a gist of the manifesto and the problem that you're trying to eliminate?

Amrit: Yeah, I think for us, the real problem we're trying to really bring to light, and one that we struggle with, the one that I see now, is that--

I am shocked by how hard it is for companies to actually use their own customer data.

What I see today is early stage companies, they raised maybe 2, $3 million and they have like $100,000 tech stack, like a significant tech stack go-to-market and it's like 25 play tables, 20 n8n workflows, and 10 data providers signal providers and all this stuff to really essentially build this machine and drive pipeline and close deals.

And what I see on that side is like this go-to-market motion. And what I see here is some customer data. And in some companies, a lot of customer data. And there's this complete disconnect that I constantly see between this really cool customer data you have that never really makes it to your outbound engine or your go-to-market motion you're having today.

And I just never see it coming together. I will see like an email outbound campaign to a VP of Finance and they've already spoken to 10 or 20 VPs of Finance, but you don't see any of that incorporated there. And that's like a real challenge we see.

So we end up realizing, and it was our challenge too, that it's very hard to use your customer data as a strategic advantage in your go-to-market motion.

And I'll be honest, it pisses me off when I see these crazy go-to-market tech stacks and they have all these signals. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, dude, you're using the same data everyone else is using.

This person just moved their job, dude, just another thousand companies just got the same signal. So for me, the competitive advantage on signals and this and that, it helps those things, mostly it doesn't help.

I'd argue that your real advantage is probably somewhere in your customer data, in the conversations you're having, in the emails that exist, in the Slack channels that are there. But it's really difficult to democratize that information for founders and their teams. So for me, the CRM, the Salesforce, was meant to be that place that helps us understand our insights across our go-to-market tech stack and was meant to help us sell more. But I fundamentally believe that it has actually caused the bad data we have today and has caused the fragmentation that we have to live with today.

So I think the reason why we've really struggled to understand these insights is because the system that was meant to give it to you can't understand it anyway.

Isaac: I really agree with what you're thinking in that we see in the go-to-market space, with the exception of pure marketing tools, we see a lot of these tools get created and then they never really get rethought.

And there's a lot of these hybrid outreach tools that popped up a few years back. I find them to be absolutely disruptive because everyone used to have to do this where they had to get a data service provider or create a system to get their own data and then they had to figure out how they were going to do the outreach and then they were going to have to figure out how they act upon it.

And these tools did a pretty good job of giving you the ability to do all of that out of the box pretty well. And isn't a very smooth path from taking that when you start your MVP or whatever and scaling that.

And so the next thing you know, you got every company under the sun that's popping similar ICPs into their tool, getting the same pool of data out and then these poor individuals that are on those lists are getting hit up quite a bit.

Amrit: Yeah.

Isaac: How do you solve this?

Amrit: Oh, I mean we're in the building phase, my friend. So we have our first design partner, which we took yesterday. So, a paid design partner. And with the design partner, what we're doing is we're able to integrate everything into our tool. It's just a checkbox, which is a beautiful thing.

So because our thesis is a CRM, essentially, Isaac or Christine, if you're in our product, hopefully we have your email address and your LinkedIn, which means if I just click, oh, this is my prompt, give me a list of all the questions Isaac asked and I just click I don't know Fireflies, because we actually use Fireflies on our side.

I just run it and I can ask the system to orchestrate the data, which essentially I can say, "update this prompt or this build every time there's a new call or when the deal stage changes."

So it's constantly monitoring what is happening. But at the fundamental level, essentially what we're doing on an individual field level is building the ability to put prompts on top of it and orchestrate multiple tools at the same time.

So what are people doing today? What I'm doing today is I have a call, I throw the transcript in ChatGPT and sometimes I throw some PDFs that I've had already, like a contract I might have with them and then I go ahead and ask it questions and it gives me an output. And it's a very good output.

But we believe that in the future your CRM, your Salesforce static fields are going to be completely dynamic and you might tomorrow have a field which is, "what questions did Amrit ask?" Or "what are the things that Amrit mentioned that we could drive for the podcast and w e want you to extract these things."

And the minute every podcast finishes, it automatically recognizes Amrit's email addresses, he's in the CRM and it just auto populates straight away for you.

But we're realizing it's not easy to orchestrate data from multiple tools. There's overlapping information. We might have that similar conversation on Gmail and on the call and on Slack. We may have the same conversation. So it's not been easy to orchestrate it. And we also realize that open prompting is fucking hard.

So just typing in a prompt and clicking Enter and magically getting the response you want, from bringing information from five different tools, is not easy. So we actually postponed that and built templates. So we said, okay, these are the templates. We have some control. A user can select a template which is called The Top Pain Points Mentioned.

As an example, we've constructed the template and it used the template, used the data sources and then the response is fairly good. And we are now moving on to open prompting. But it's very hard, it's very, extremely hard to get high quality responses on open prompting for us.

And yeah, we're in the early stages. What we are going to do with this product, Isaac and Christine, is we're going to probably put it on the market in like two months time and it's going to be shabby and it's not going to be that great.

But the lesson I learned is, I'd rather the market give me a reality check as soon as possible because I see a lot of companies now where I think they're developing the product for one to two years behind the scenes with a few design partners and staff.

But I just think there's no substitute for just putting it on the market and just seeing people go in the product and just absolutely fall flat on their face and then realize these are the things you have to do.

Because with design partners we still have the luxury of like, "what do you do, what is your stack, what do you want? And we'll walk you through it."

I'd rather get hit in the face as fast as possible because I think I'll learn faster.

Isaac: I agree. I think that's the right approach and I always love that quote that first time founders focus on product and second time founders focus on distribution. It's not because the product doesn't matter. It's because distribution is the way that you make sure you're actually solving the problems of your customers and not the problems that you want solved.

Amrit: Yeah.

Isaac: Because you can't buy your own product, it's actually not possible.

Amrit: Yeah. And I think the challenge most founders have is we actually experience the product very differently. Right?

We experience the product extremely differently and we're not onboarding ourselves on the product. We lose first principles thought process almost immediately, within the first couple iterations.

You lose first principles thought process. So that experience you have of going into the product, like adding some integrations, you can't repeat that.

Like I'm just going to click and the product's going to, it's already going to be there. You know, I don't have to log in. We're going to build up the integrations, we're going to integrate our stuff, we're going to see how it's working.

It's very hard for us to recreate those steps and we saw that at Acquire as well. For someone to get up and running, sometimes we miss the mountain in front of us because we don't climb it. The user has to sign up to climb it.

Isaac: I think that if you have 10 features, it's really hard to onboard a customer onto that product. And if you build for two years in silence, you're going to have 50 features and it's just impossible.

And I think you even see companies that really have a good onboarding flow early on and are really able to just get this foothold in market and grow it really fast, they lose it over time, that edge of onboarding, because, they've got larger enterprise customers, they got a bunch of people asking for features.

Their product engineering and design departments, what do they do? They ship new features and next thing you know, the product is as bloated as the very incumbents they were looking to disrupt in the first place.

Amrit: Yeah, yeah. I mean you eventually become the person you want to beat, if you get that far down the journey, you eventually just become the same people.

Isaac: Is there a Batman quote in there? You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.

Amrit: No, no. People say to me like, hey, like, Salesforce this and that. I'm like, dude, if you became that big, you're probably gonna be the same thing. You probably will end up in the same place. I would assume, but who knows how.

Christine: Have you been thinking about what to include in that MVP? You know, there's 10,000 data sources you could integrate. What's the most important data? And who are you targeting?

Amrit: It's a very small product. You just integrate your Gmail, you have people, you have companies and deals.

Where we've taken it significantly further in the initial build is what we call dynamic fields, where yourself or Isaac could just, like one prompt we have running in our test account is I put my Gmail there and I realized that I have spoken to so many people in my life, right? And I can't remember all of them.

So we connected my Gmail app and then we created a template saying summarize the entire communication I had with this person and secondly, tell me what was the last thing I spoke to them about.

And then the reason I did that was because obviously targeting companies, I was like reaching out to a lot of early stage founders, like series A companies. And I have spoken to a lot of founders and a lot of Series A companies. That's the reality. More than I can think in my brain.

So I threw this in our software and I'm looking at it's running the AI across every single person and every single company. And I'm like, oh shit. This person I spoke to three years ago about this.

And when I started reaching out to them, the likelihood of them replying for me went up instantly as opposed to me going on LinkedIn, clicking Connect. When they accept it, you know, they go in maybe like a "hey" reach campaign or whatever it might be.

And then I also found it where if I'd spoke to somebody before already and then they got like a generic message from me, they knew it was generic. So that's what we've been using the product for at the moment and what the initial version has.

We have a hypothesis for an ICP. Be weird if I didn't have one. But even within that we need to define it further, which is at the moment it's from early stage companies that have raised, you know, their first one to $2 million. They want to get a go-to-market motion going. They want to start thinking about pipeline repeatability and they want to start building the motion.

And then we're seeing another batch of companies who are like, "we've got Salesforce, we've had it for like six months or eight months and we really want to get rid of it. And we want to move to something that is AI-native, that can do some of these things for us."

And then we see those customers and the challenge we have with the really early stage customers that I'm seeing right now is, they're not sticky. They're not sticky. These early stage companies, I love them, but there's too many tools out there.

Every time I speak to founders, it's like a new shiny syndrome object. It's like, oh, there's a new tool, they go around and play with it for like two, three weeks and then fuck it, there's a new tool, then they go play around with it for two, three weeks.

So that's what I'm seeing like the really early stage and then like the A rounds where like maybe they've had a CRM, they actually have like direction. But the challenge dairies feature parity. We are uh, many, many years away from a feature parity of Salesforce.

So we actually have to, when we're vetting those customers who actually have a Salesforce or a HubSpot, we have to really understand the requirements. One customer we're talking to right now, they're a series A company, they have Salesforce, but thank God it's one of the most simple implementations of Salesforce we've come across.

And that's great for us. So we're in that notion there. Not quite sure where we'll land, which is why we really want to just get it out there and see what happens and see who comes, see who we can serve and take it from there.

Christine: That's a really interesting point about the target customer size for when you're first getting started. I actually thought that you were going to say that the early customers, well, for one, like early people, they don't really need a CRM, but they're also pivoting all the time and sometimes it doesn't work out.

So it could be a tough market to approach it first. And I'm curious, you talked a bit about feature parity with the things that people are already using.

You want people to be able to have enough of a feature set to dive into your thing, but I think you have to start with a wedge of some feature that is really just miles better than what they're getting from other tools.

But you also have to make sure that you don't take away a bunch of stuff that they need. How are you thinking about integrating with the bigger ecosystem of tools that people use?

Amrit: Yeah, what we plan to do is, the first initial company we're working with, they have the go-to-market motion going, they have their Clay, they have their Gmail, they have Slack, they have customers in Slack, they have a lot of call recordings.

They want to be able to start driving insight from across the stack they have. So for us the role we play as a CRM is to bring that highly unstructured data from all these tools that they're having into the CRM into the format they desire on their side. Because whether you're using a Salesforce or a HubSpot or even like an actual example today, you still can't really do that.

So that's where we're starting. We're essentially bringing insights from across the stack to the CRM in a way that has been quite difficult with the fragmentation that we've lived with so far.

So ideally that company will go from, okay, we know we have this information. We can't really use it to like, oh shit, we can actually see everything.

I wanted to know, I wanted to know the pain points. I created my pain points field. I want you to know the objections I got objections through. I wanted to know all the reasons they churn or whatever it might be. And we can start democratizing that information further and further from them today.

So there's no need to have any manual entry on their side. So what they're doing today is they put in ChatGPT, they do it, they copy it, they paste it so somebody else can see it on their side.

Then they have another call, they copy it, paste it back in, write the date, where eventually what we will be doing is building out every field in our product will be a historical field. So if you used Salesforce before, you know to have historical data in Salesforce, you'd have to snapshot the data every single day and then push it to a database and then build reporting on top of that.

Whereas we want to just hold the historical information within our tool. So if the pipeline numbers changed five times, you can see how it changed. If they started mentioning different pain points throughout the journey of the sales cycle, you will see that change over time as well.

So essentially we're basically building a context based CRM with the belief that the one thing that can give companies a better strategic advantage today is just a stronger insight into the data and the customer data they already have.

And the thing that surprised me to what you said about the early stage startups, they don't really need a CRM. I'd agree with you, but I'm also shocked about how much they have.

I was really surprised about how sophisticated and tool-centric the stack has gotten because I remember at Acquire, it was like maybe a ZoomInfo or maybe using like Hunter.io to scrape a bunch of shit, and just a LinkedIn Sales Navigator license and there wasn't much to it, but now it's too many tools to even keep count.

More on the early stage than the later stage, which was the most interesting thing that I took away, which I didn't think was going to be true, which was really the inverse of what I originally thought. And it goes back to my point of--

I think that once you understand your go-to-market motion, you actually can cut down the tools you don't need that don't give you an ROI. Whereas when you're early stage and you're going across multiple channels trying to find multiple data sources across multiple things, you end up incorporating a bunch of tools. Most of them just go to the wayside anyway.

But that's one pattern I didn't think that I've seen was true, that actually became true. Like at Acquire, as an example, we had at one point we just had one fundamental tool for reporting. We didn't have reporting in six, seven different tools.

All reporting was moved into Tableau. That's where it was. So we didn't use it anywhere else. Or that one tool we use for contact data was ZoomInfo as an example.

Now it's more providers providing different insights across different things. And that's what I mean. It's like one tool for LinkedIn outreach, one tool for email outreach. A Nooks for call outreach is what I'm seeing more on my side.

Christine: Yeah. Do you think that this LLM prompting is going to become like a primary user interface?

Amrit: A lot of people ask me, "are you gonna have a chat interface?" And I'm like, not straight away. Because once again, I might be right, I might be wrong. I do think we need it eventually. But here's my take.

I've been an SDR, I've been an AE, I guess I've been a CSL, I've been a support person. I've done most of these roles in being a solo founder. Not that I actually had jobs in these roles. Just doing the founding journey. And the information I want to know, I just know what I want to know. I know what I want to know.

I don't need to go type it in and be like, give me a summary of this core conversation or like, what was the last thing that I had? I already know. If I had like 10 accounts that I was selling to, I know the things that I want to know.

I don't want to have to go type it in for 10 accounts, wake up in the morning and go like, what was my last conversation with whatever, whatever, whatever? If I need to know that, I want to have it there ready for me to look at. I don't want to type that shit in again and again and again and again.

I use ChatGPT very heavily. I know the conversations that I have in ChatGPT where I have asked the same question five, ten times. I just can't be bothered scrolling up. I'm going to go scroll up and try to find that prompt that I put in.

So I don't think that the core experience of the information that people want to know on a daily basis with like, let's say accounts they're dealing with, they need to type it in every day. I want to surface those insights for you on the conditions that you have implemented.

Whether it was a weekly update, whether there was like, update yourself if there's a call, et cetera. But we will have the chat interface and we will see how people use it. I think we're going to actually invest a little bit more on voice.

I came across a use case recently where somebody had connected their Salesforce deals to NotebookLM and when they would drive to work they'd just get a summary of the deals and I'm like I love that shit because I want to go for my walk or go to the gym, just hear the deals, what's going on and maybe I can talk back to it and that's it.

But I think when it comes to a text-based format, the information you want to know every single day and every single week, why should you have to type it in?

Isaac: I really like that idea of like an assistant that, you wake up in the morning, you're like hey, what's going on? And it's like, "oh, you know, Chris moved the stage of this deal from this to this, this closed, this is still open. This is probably not going to happen." It's really hard to find in any CRM today.

Amrit: Yeah.

Isaac: Even if you're like a power user.

Amrit: And because you can see my hand is somewhat injured, I've been using a lot more voice and I've realized the vast majority of it sucks.

Isaac: Yeah, it's not there.

Amrit: So what I've been using the transcription tool in ChatGPT and then, because it's really good, I just copy and paste it into the tool I want.

We've thought more about voice. I think the chat does play a role but I don't think it's going to be the main mechanism for people to engage with the tool.

There was this company, Mercor, I think they raised a lot of money recently, a very fast growing company and they had heavily integrated the chat experience initially into the product and they realized that people just wanted the same information again and again and didn't want to have to continuously keep typing it in. They just want it to get surfaced.

So they moved to a little bit of a different UI, where some of the use cases we see with chat is if the AI is trying to do something and it doesn't know what to do, we will pop it in the chat interface, with a, "hey, did you mean this?"

And then you can use it as a way to maybe help the AI do what it needs to do. Or like you just finished a call and it's created a bunch of tasks and you can approve it or disapprove it. Because I've been using a competitive CRM tool, as you do when you're building a similar product, and the tasks get created automatically and half of them are not even tasks.

I was going to say to the AI. No, no, no, no, no. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, continue. That's where maybe we use that back and forth experience.

Isaac: I think we're going to end up in a weird space because each modality has its own upsides and downsides. I can speak much faster than I can type and I can read much faster than I can speak or much faster than I can hear.

And more than that, I can actually visualize or parse a visualization faster than I can do either of those. So I mean you could have always browsed the Internet using Postman or your terminal.

All these frigging web applications are is complex request builders to backends and data visualizers. And I think that there's a lot of places where data visualizations or dashboards, man, it feels so slow trying to read those in ChatGPT in this single threaded way.

So I think we're going to end up with this weird smorgasbord of voice and speaking and typing and reading and visualization in UIs. And I know that dynamic code generation, especially for generating these types of dashboards on the fly based off of what you type or what you say, I know that's the future of these types of tools.

Amrit: Right.

Isaac: And I think you're barking at the right tree.

Amrit: Yeah, we hope so. And I agree with you. I think I was using Cursor. I know I was using the chat, predominantly using the chat interface to help build out code and stuff. So in there, it makes a lot of sense.

Where my experience of CRM has been, you need to know the same information, usually repetitively, and see how it's changed and moved. I could imagine the chat interface in the CRM being for those small nuances that you maybe just need to know. Right?

There's the repetitive information that you want to know, but there might just be like a small nuance that you may want to know in the data. Like did they mention these words or anything like that? Maybe it's going to be something like that, but I'm not too sure that that's going to be the predominant way people interact with the tool like a CRM.

Isaac: I agree it's always going to be the escape hatch for information that we've never really had before in interfaces.

So I think we're actually at about time. But first we have picks, where we talk about something that, you know, could be a product, could be a tool, could be an article, could be a movie that we saw that we're really excited about. Spang, do you have a pick?

Christine: Yeah, for sure. My pick for this week is, I guess it's a business, but it's also a website. It's called artofaccomplishment.com and they're a coaching business, but they also have a podcast and I've been taking one of their coaching programs called Masterclass this summer, and it's been really great for me.

It's a little hard to summarize everything that it's about, but I would say it's like maybe you could call it like emotional regulation type thing. You really dive deep into how a lot of what drives your life is patterns that come out of avoiding things that you don't want to feel.

I'll just leave it at that. Check out the podcast if you're curious, Art of the Accomplishment podcast. It's just maybe a lot happier and that's great.

Amrit: Nice.

Christine: What about you, Amrit?

Amrit: So this is completely off topic. It's so off topic . So you live in Oakland, Christine. So one thing we're doing is actually in Oakport, which is a highly undeveloped area in Oakland.

We are actually raising money to build soccer facilities for a highly underserved community that lives on the east side of Oakland. So being part of that project is really special, I would say. So the majority of people that I play with and work with that OSC is, you know, it's an immovable community. It's really hard.

Some people come from gangs, some people don't. It's just a very different thing. And being able to really facilitate this build. For Oakland, it's cool because I think most things in Oakland probably get built more towards the lake and Temescal and Rockridge.

Very little gets built for people out like near Fruitvale areas and onwards, especially East Oakland. So I am very excited for that project which are raising for now and slowly, slowly returfing the fields that are there today.

Christine: Cool. I just looked at a map because it's down by the airport.

Amrit: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not really a developed area in Oakland, and it serves a very different community. So that's what we're very excited about. And I think over the next probably five to 10 years, it will be a complete redevelopment for football.

Christine: Nice.

Amrit: European football.

Christine: And if I wanted to support this, where would I go?

Amrit: The season is over. You can, of course, donate to the club, and I can send you the link. The club's actually been around for 50 years. A lot of you don't know. And so it's been serving the community for a very, very long time.

There's over 500 players, a bunch of teams, and I coach two teams there at the moment.

Christine: Wow that's awesome. Thanks for giving back to the community like that. I think it's so cool that, you know, Oakland's a very diverse city and soccer or football is I think, the most popular sport in the world.

Amrit: It most definitely is. I've had that conversation at so many bars here.

Christine: It's growing in Oakland.

Amrit: It is growing. Yes. And Isaac, how about you?

Isaac: I don't know if I want to follow that.

Amrit: Oh, okay.

Isaac: No, for real, though I'm always trying to optimize the travel experience, the work travel experience in every way, shape and form, because I'm a habit based person.

And every time I disrupt the habit, there's like a lot of dread that comes with it. And so mostly it's around the cats because I live alone and I've got two cats. Don't judge me.

Amrit: I have two cats. No judgment.

Isaac: Hey, there we go. Awesome. You know, proof of life while you're gone. If you're gone for a couple days and you know you're gonna have someone check on them, but it's important to make sure your cats are still kicking. And I feel like I finally optimize everything.

I've got a dual feeder now, so they can get both that at the same time. And there's a camera facing it. And I've tried a couple of these electronic litter boxes and they've all failed in their own way, shape and form, until I found it's called Leo's Loo Too.

Amrit: Okay.

Isaac: And I have no idea what type of drug someone took when they named that product because it's definitely unique.

Amrit: Yeah.

Isaac: But it's just really cool how much engineering can go into creating a litter box that's electronic, that's automated, that'll self clean, that won't stink up the place. All that stuff and be smart and let you know.

It's just crazy how advanced these can become over a short period of time. And so I'm having a blast with this litter box, as crazy as it is. And my favorite part is that it tells you the weight of the cat who use litter box. So I've got one skinny cat.

Amrit: That's awesome.

Isaac: Yeah. And I've got one not so skinny cat. And so I know exactly which cat used the litter box if I'm away from home. And I now rest easy knowing my cats are fulfilling all their biological needs between eating and not eating.

Amrit: I completely understand. Litter is a journey. The weight is important.

Isaac: Amrit, you're launching Aero. Let everyone know where they can find it, where they can make sure that they get access to the product the moment you go live.

Amrit: Absolutely. Website is aerogtm.com and you can find me on LinkedIn where I post on a regular basis, which will no doubt take you to Aero. So that's the best place to find myself and what we're up to.

And it will be a public build, so you'll see where we succeed and where we fail and what decisions we've made and how they went.