#10: How To Sell to People Who Don’t Want To Be Sold to With Hywel Carver

Hywel: My name is Hywel Carver from Skiller Whale and I'm excited to talk to Christian and Soren about starting companies, experimenting with products as cheaply and as quickly as possible, about how you scale sales, about the complexities of pricing, and a whole lot of other things beside.

Christian: Welcome to the Messy Growth Show, the podcast that dives deeply into the heart of B2B growth stories. We are here to unmask the raw, the real, and the often messy road to success, because let's face it, growth isn't always neat and tidy. Join your hosts Soren and myself, Christian, as we sit down with top leaders mining for proven strategies to accelerate your business. Welcome to the Messy Growth Show. Your roadmap to success starts here.

Soren: Thanks for taking the time. Let's get started. Give us a brief rundown on, what it is that, Skiller Whale is doing.

Hywel: Yeah, so Skiller Whale is all about Learning that makes a difference to company strategy. So before starting the company, I was a CTO in a variety of startups and scale ups, most of which I founded. And I saw this problem again and again, where I wanted teams that could do more than they could already. I had perfectly good developers, software engineers who I wanted to be better. I wanted the backend folks to write frontend folk, frontend code. So there weren't so many handoffs between people. I wanted backend folks to write. Infrastructure code. I wanted my front end people to write app code. And all of this felt like within reach. Like I had smart people who were capable of learning it, but all of the learning that was available to them didn't really move the needle. It was very like informational, and passive. It didn't actually change what they could do. It just gave them new ideas. And I wanted learning that could change what they could do. And that's what we do at Skiller Whale. So we developed a new form, a new approach to learning, we call live team coaching, which is personalized and targeted. So we can ensure that people are only going to learn stuff that is relevant to their work and that they don't already know. It's hands on and it is problem based. So you learn by doing sure you have to take in information, but you are immediately going to put it into practice. And it's all expert led and feedback driven so that you have someone there who is leading a session about that thing you didn't already know, who can look at the code you're writing, look at the kind of the way that you're managing and leading and things like that, and give you immediate feedback to help you improve. And then you Have another go. And the way that we work is very continuous. So we do 60 or 90 minutes with each person every two weeks. And that means over time we can make a massive difference to each person's abilities. And in fact, last week we just published a, Published a case study with the Danish startup, Plio, which, is obviously like very late stage mature startup where we increase the productivity of their dev team by 40%, through this approach, through genuine learning that changes what people can do, not just gives them nice ideas.

Soren: How do they measure 40.

Christian: Just.

Soren: But.

Hywel: On the productivity. I think they Looked at I think it's a velocity measure. I would actually have to go and read the case study myself but it was a That's a quote from the cto mary williams who they looked at the productivity of the team? I think in terms of velocity or like throughput of work that the developers were doing and saw a 40 improvement from before and after. And I think this is another really key thing about our approach is we are very big on metrics. I think quite a lot of learning measures itself by things like engagement, which is it's like saying, did people actually bother showing up, which feels like a very low bar of quality for me. For us, we're always looking at like engineering metrics or commercial metrics. Like we have one customer, another very mature fintech company, Where they had a, I think it was a 10 percent increase in revenue. They attributed to working with us and the team being able to do stuff that they couldn't before. We're very interested in changing commercial metrics and improving them through learning.

Soren: How do you attribute increased revenue to your skill increasement improvement.

Hywel: With, there's always this step in between, right? I think, and again, I'm going to come back to most learning, like very much looks at cost reduction. So you think about learning for compliance, which is essentially trying to reduce risk by making sure we all comply with GDPR or PCI or whatever regime like we're under and need to comply with. I feel like there is a bunch of learning which exists to try and reduce employee churn so that you have to spend less on recruitment and essentially it measures itself. For us, we would take like a picture before and we just get these numbers from the company, right? We aren't measuring them externally. We don't do any. But we speak to the CTO or head of engineering or whoever in advance and say, what would a good outcome look like? We work with them on a measure for it. And in that case with revenue, the company involved, looked at their revenue over time, looked at what they had been able to do as a result of working with us. And they said, we don't think we would have been able to do that. Before, and therefore like this revenue we have now got wouldn't have been possible without us being able to build that additional product, which was only possible because of the learning.

Soren: To me, I relate this to even selling, right? You try to define what kind of problem your prospect has and how big the problem is, how it impacts to make sure you understand what problem it is that you actually need to fix. And then you measure on whether you actually fixed it. So this applies to any industry, right? And it's not.

Hywel: It really should.

Soren: Not even you defining what it is, it's in cooperation with the customer that accepts that if we can solve this, it's going to have this impact on my business.

Hywel: Yeah. And I think, I think this is one of the things learning particularly suffers here, I think, because learning is a sort of Swiss army knife of ways of improving what people can do. And so it can end up just being like. We think the learning was good because it happened. People turned up to people, use the videos, people read the books. Hooray for learning. And actually, I think it's really important that we do come back to the numbers. Like it's so easy to offer your tool to the world and hope that people are using it and seeing a meaningful improvement. I think one of the reasons we have got really into the numbers of our customers is because, Often with learning, there is a big gap there that doesn't connect the dots, just says people came to the learning. Did it make a difference? Dunno, up to you. We are very keen to demonstrate that what we're doing is valuable and Meaningfully different. I think before the call you, before we started pressing, press record, you talked about the phenomenon of engineers assuming that if they build it, people will come, right? We'll make the thing and then see who in the market wants it, which is very much an approach that lots of people do use where we're just going to build our product, throw it up online, run some ads, go to conferences, get our friends to use it. And then hope that they can tell us how it was valuable. And actually it's helpful to start the other way around to grab hold of your customers numbers and say, what you said is you want revenue to go up. Your revenue is here right now. So if it goes here, I feel like we can all agree this was valuable. Great. We're going to make that happen. And I think that's probably true in most industries that if you are, If you can prove and demonstrate the value in terms of a number, it's much easier to have a conversation about why you are valuable. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but if you can take your customers numbers and show that we moved you from A to B, and that's good for your company, you're much more likely to get More business, more of a renewed contract.

Soren: It's all, whether it's all engineers that is the reference you made or not, at least it was when I mentioned it was in regards to a specific amount of cases that we help.but I'm sure there's also great, positive cases where it's specific problems that are solved into a problem or a product or service. But what I'm excited about, what you mentioned here is that it's most times when you buy a service, it's not a service that you are continuously buying, which means that you are not necessarily articulated. Aware of how to evaluate that vendor versus another vendor for that service. And by you actually pinning down what needs to be solved and what success looks like, they get away from feeling good or feeling lukewarm or not so good about the actual service in the end into actually articulating what is great about your service. And how it helps them. And because that becomes articulated in that way, that becomes hard for anybody else to come in and compete with. Because you are now associated with hard proven deliverables and benefits. And I just think this is fantastic. To become articulated about that.

Hywel: I think that's right. I think it's really important. Case studies, is what we're talking about here. Essentially, like in terms of being able to market what you do, having that evidence that every customer essentially, we know we've taken them from bad number to good number is really valuable for finding new customers. And I think it's been really valuable for. Existing customers to stay. One of the, what I think is slightly different for us though, is I don't really see us as having competition in the traditional sense in that there aren't other companies that do learning in the same way that we do. I'm not really sure that there are companies that do learning and development that have the same aim. And so actually for us, it's much, it's a bit less about standing out from the competition and it's more about proving out this idea, this like new approach that isn't really available elsewhere. Cause for us, our competition is often people would hire someone to do this instead, or they would have their more senior folks spend time with the more junior folks on learning, but there's not really other suppliers that you can find that are trying to do something comparable.

Soren: I love how you see the competition, like the real competition, like the seniors teaching the juniors how to do it and that loss of productivity that happens right there. Like developers are notoriously super expensive hires. So a lot of money wasted there, right? The best teachers, so to speak, or coaches.

Christian: True. Absolutely.

Hywel: Skillset, right? To being an excellent developer and teaching other people to be better developers, right? Those aren't the same thing. And typically when we hire someone, we want them to be, fast in a straight line, we want people who are great developers who are going to get the job of development done. Getting those people who are really good at that. And can upskill the people around them is hard. I mean, we spend a lot of time writing the curriculum that people learn from. And I think we do a good job of it, honestly, but it takes us something like 10 person days to produce each hour of curriculum that people learn from. The idea that as senior developer in your team can do something equivalent to that, it doesn't make any sense. They can do something. They can help people overcome the problems in the code that they're writing. And they can help people get over the problem, right in front of them. But that is a different thing from people learning and being up skilled, which is where we come in. So even there, we're not really trying to replace the senior developer. We're more trying to let them focus their time on, Delivery rather than education.

Christian: Makes sense. Makes sense. How, I'm curious on the beginning of this, because the messy growth show is about, going from where we decide to start a business,and build that up over time. And we are facing, all kinds of random Challenges. So I'm curious, like one day you decided to establish the company and then a challenge many entrepreneurs have is like how to get those first 5 10, 15 customers, how did you go around that? Was it just network or, any, anything? What was your approach there?

Hywel: They were almost all network actually. So before starting Skiller Whale I had, I was running my previous, startup company called BridgeU and I realized that I, so while running BridgU which was another education technology company, I was part of this organization called EdTech Founders Forum, it was a place for EdTech founders to come together, meet, talk about their problems and solve. Solve them as a group. And in that previous company, I was the founding CTO rather than the CEO. And I realized that all the problems I had were more technology-focused than EdTech-focused They were more about building and scaling a tech team and tech services. And so I started a similar group but for CTOs and tech leaders and heads of engineering people in that kind of role. So I started the thing called CTO dinners, entirely stole the format, stole the venue. Even we met in exactly the same pub in London, chose a different night of the week. So I wasn't treading on any toes. And so by the time I started Skiller Whale I already had a reasonably large network of other CTOs who were friends and peers who I'd given advice to, or who I was just in the same communities with. So that when it came, when I started being ready to get the company out there, I had a bunch of people who I could message and just say, look, I have this idea. Can I try it with your team? Can we see how it goes?

Christian: Nice. And then from that, as a lot of companies start like that, which is a nice way, but then at some point you run out of friends and you need to, put some scale to it. So what was like the next, gross, lever, in your tool stack?

Hywel: Yeah, I think it was extended network and community now. So it was more people in communities of practice that I didn't already know. So there are a bunch of Slack communities, real life communities, and people who actually meet up in the real world, for CTOs and tech leaders. And some which I was already a part of. Some of which I joined after starting Skillawell and going to events and just talking to people and saying, what's going on with you? What challenges are you facing in your company? And people saying, Oh, like I have this problem now where this, and I'd say, To me, that's a problem that we should be able to solve by learning. Are you up for giving this thing a try? That was the kind of next stage. And I think one of the things that's really difficult about selling into technology organizations is we are people who do not want to be sold to, right? I hit like block, report, spam, unsubscribe more than anyone I know. If I'm still the admin on the company, the company, our email domain, which means I get the automated emails from Google when they're like a user in your domain has recently reported a high amount of spam and it's always me. Like it's always like myself that is being like, no, that Google is like, Oh, hang on this Howell character keeps getting spammed a lot. It's no, it's just marketing emails that I can't stand. And so one of the, one of the big challenges we have to overcome is that we are selling to people who don't want to be sold to, we sell to people who want to. Become aware that you exist, who want to hear about you from their peers and who want to, then six months later be like, Oh yeah, I know Skiller Whale like sure. Now is the right time. I have this problem in my team, come and fix it for us. And so anything that feels like a hard sell does not land with our audience. Outbound is really hard for us. Communities, people growing in awareness, like people, Hearing me speak, like I speak at quite a lot of events now, give talks at a variety of conferences. We run online events, just letting people know that we exist. And then when the time is right for them, they'll come to an event and say, actually, I'm interested in another talk. Tell me again what you guys do. And that's been the kind of what we found had to work. This is the messy growth podcast, right? So I should say this was not the first thing we tried. There was mess first. We spent ages on app and we tried ads. None of it worked. And actually it seems obvious in hindsight, but I should have thought about the things that I would click on, the ways I would respond. It's not ads, it's not outbound, it'sthe kind of conversations, the network and the community.

Soren: You have, you, so it's the, as you said, just to reiterate, it's the communities in which you are a member of, which is not yours, your own community that you recruit customers from today.

Hywel: Right, so even in those communities that aren't mine, I should say,But there's two main ones and I feel that they are brilliant in different ways. One of them, CTO craft, I knew the Andy who founded it. And quite early on, I was given the title of a CTO craft expert, which largely, was because I was a consulting CTO at the time, supporting other CTOs and mentoring them. But I that meant that going into that community, I had some degree of, I don't know. Status is probably the wrong word, but I was in a slightly better position. Some kind of recognition. Yeah, exactly. Which helped. And then the other one, LeadDev, similarly, I've given a lot of talks at their conferences now, and we've sponsored some of their conferences too. And so those things are really helpful because. Someone says I have this problem and I'll say I'll chip in and say like you might be able to solve that by learning like we do that but you can also go and do it for yourself like here's the methodology we use and typically then those people will have seen me talk or heard me bang on about learning at some conference or event in the.

Soren: Even in communities, you are acutely aware of not being salesy.

Hywel: Definitely I mean it's not really appropriate for the community either. If I was a member of that community, I wouldn't want someone DMing me all the time.

Soren: No.

Hywel: At all, honestly.

Soren: Point is also more about helping, right? So,give and then ask, right? In that you provide the solution and you give it because the reason why people buy is not They're not going to copy what you do because that requires a skill set and a bandwidth and resources that they're never going to invest in. And so this fear of sharing what you do and how you do it. At least personally, I don't think it's as big as people make it. They try to keep things secret, but you by sharing. Make potential customers understand what it is you're doing and can gauge how that's different from what they know to be the situation right now.

Hywel: Think that's right. I think so our category, our approach we call live team coaching, we, as far as we can tell, is the most effective way to learn a skill. This is our gift to the world. We are always talking about how to do it, how you can go and copy us, how you can do this yourself, what the requirements are, what the methodology should be to build your own. We don't make a secret of it being expensive and hard to do that. Like it is not easy to build your own, but you should go and do it if you want to. And we are like happy to support people who want to go and do it because this is a genuinely good way to learn. And we know that we can't help everyone learn everything. Yet. So that's definitely our gift to the world. When it comes to things like the curriculum and the content, we don't share that, out there with the world, partly because it took us so very long to create.

Soren: So.

Hywel: Mentioned, the methodology and that's actually a very powerful point because suddenly you're framing what good looks like what should be the way that you should work with solving this problem. And you have basically. So our framework solves that and they're going to compare anything else, they, any other solutions that might be out there with that framework, essentially. And it's just a very powerful move, doing the methodology. Maybe, there's also, I should say, there's pedagogy that we, pedagogical research that we rely on ourselves. So there are people who've done research about styles of learning, types of learning, approaches to learning, and outcomes that we rely on in building what we do. What's really interesting actually, is that a lot of the research focuses very much on knowledge, on like information that you can recall, and not on ability. The ability to go and do a new thing that you couldn't before. So one of the things that has been quite challenging is finding useful research that is not just about information recall.because ultimately when we're doing our jobs, most of the time, we're not really recalling information. Information recall is cheap in a world with good search engines. And what we want is abilities. We want to be able to do a new thing that we couldn't before. That's the thing that is, you can't yet Google for. And so that's the, that's where I think learning. Should be focused and yet that's not where most of the research is focused. I don't know if there are, if you have many, learning researchers in the audience for your show, but I'm, I would definitely like to pursue a collaboration with a research team on that because I think there is a huge, swathe of, research still to be done on what's going to be an increasingly important topic.

Soren: Do you have enough coaches today that when a person needs coaching and skill development that you can also match on personality match? Okay. So I.

Hywel: Don't really try and match on personality match. We look much more for, because our learning is quite structured, so that the sessions, the coach is taking you through a series of, slides effectively and taking you through exercises which are all already pre written. So it's much less about the kind of fit with the individual. We need a great coach who can help. Give you feedback help answer your questions and ideally has like real world experience to draw on to bring things to life There's not that we don't go that deep that into someone's like own personal experiences that we need a coach who you gel with really well but yeah, we do find we have ample coaches that if someone says actually this coach didn't really work out for me Then we can find someone else to do future sessions Doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's no problem.

Soren: Do the only salesperson in the company now. Networking.

Hywel: Not a salesperson in the company.

Soren: But, let me rephrase that, customer recruitment.

Hywel: I know we have four others who are involved in that to different degrees. And honestly, my job is really not about customer recruitment. I'm much more about Speaking about what we do, talking about learning, talking about technology and being kind of part of the conversation. I occasionally join sales meetings, but my role is much more to describe the category and what we do, which is hard for other people to do because I was pretty central to developing the product, the approach, and other.

Christian: Curious.

Hywel: Same.

Christian: I'm curious if those salespeople are CTOs or it's like a regular humans, you know,because I, it's a challenge I see across some companies. Companies, where there's a lot of super specialized knowledge in a space and you need to be able to talk that same lingo, otherwise you're just out as a sales rep. I'm curious what kind of profiles you hired there.

Hywel: I would say I absolutely suck at sales. And the reason why is that when I see people who are really good at sales, they have this like background process going in their head. That means that they are like steering the conversation towards. Requirements they have. So things like BANT is like a common sales scoring technique where you understand the prospective customer's budget and see, I can't remember what BANT stands for, A and N and timing, fit might be an extra thing, but, Really good people at sales have that running in the back of their head and they are having a perfectly normal conversation with you, but they are also steering it towards the things that they need to know to evaluate this prospect. I am awful at that. And I think at the same time, we want people in that conversation who can really get under the skin of the problem the customer is facing. So when they say. We think we want to, we're trying to move stack and we have all these people. We've got 300 developers who currently use this. We want them to be able to do that. Then. We want someone else in the conversation who knows that those tech stacks and says, okay So the problems you're going to have like people from that world in that world They're going to understand object oriented programming in the same way But the type system over here is different and weird. So I think we should focus learning on those areas We need a technical salesperson and someone who is like Genuinely good at sales. So yeah, this is the profile we need. We need, we need people who are salesy in that conversation and a good at that closing kind of approach. And we need the technical people who get the customer. You mentioned CTOs. My CTO mentions to me the other day that he is the, I think he said he was the fifth most experienced CTO in the company, but he is our CTO and he's an excellent CTO, but we have a. We have a, we're quite a CTO heavy company because we just have so many roles where we need people who have that level of, I don't know, technological and leadership experience. It comes into a lot of what we do, not just leading the company internally.

Christian: Makes perfect sense. I think, I have a customer where their best sales rep is not a sales rep, is one of their customer success, guys. Why? Because he's amazing at relationships. He's amazing at connecting with people. So when I hear you say I'm not a sales rep, I, You're just good at connecting with people and understanding their issues. And for me, that is the perfect version of a sales person that they understand the pains, without having to lead them forcefully in a certain direction of, sales, methodology.

Hywel: It's the second half is it's what happens after you understand the pains that I am very bad at. So we go to a lot of conferences as a company, and we'll often have a stand there and there'll be a few representatives from the company and the amount of stick I get from the sales team who, because I'm really good at having that conversation and be like, Oh, you have all these problems. Here's how I would think about that. Here's how I would measure this. Here's how I think about solving that problem. And then as soon as that person walks away, The sales team will be like, oh, that seemed like a really like warm conversation. They seemed really interested. What company are they from? And I'll be like, oh, I've got no idea. Okay, but did you know how many developers they have? I think it was between 10 and a hundred.what was their name? I think it began with a J like the conversation, but I'm great at the closing is where I need the tech, the salespeople to.

Soren: But, this is, in lack of a better, articulation. What, the question was initially is that you are the one that sparks the interest. You are the one that. Or at least were. I don't know how it looks today. That sparked people to come to the website and look for help. And so that becomes a crucial part of lead generation. And when they do, they speak to sales people. But so what's your main source of prospects and visitors and people who contact you. What activity and main source is that today? And are you still an essential part of that?

Hywel: I think conferences, generally speaking at a conference, we will have a booth and I will be doing a talk of some kind. And typically that is where we get. The sort of biggest amount of leads in one go. We do also get inbound now. This is a surprise to me. And I think that has come from us writing content. So we write long form articles about learning, but also just about interesting nuances of technology. Like one of our, one of our most read articles ever is about the, it's about Lambda functions in Python and like how variable scoping in a Lambda function is weird. And we wrote a fairly short article about that and it's Outperforms anything else we've ever written by a factor of three or something. There's a load of, I host a podcast as well. It's really very focused on technology leadership. It's called primarily context based because the in question, interesting questions for technology leaders are all contextual that not is Kubernetes good or bad, but should I use Kubernetes in this company or in this situation or solve this problem? All of those things together. Plus talks, plus being at conferences, I think, is how we grow awareness almost. It's, I think it is really a question of awareness, that people then want to come and speak to you. So we have to broadcast, shout into the void, if you like, and wait to be approached by people at our conference stand or via our website.

Soren: It's not quite the void, right? You make sure you are not on every conference, but something that somewhat relates to what you do. I think an important part of what you mentioned there is that Which is relevant for manufacturing as I'm focusing on, is that they still go to live conferences. But the difference that you make is that you do an effort to actually speak at the conference. And that makes a whole lot of difference in terms of what value you get out of the conference. Question, do you ever go to a conference where you don't speak?

Hywel: Yes, yeah, it's happened, but it's less successful. And I think, I really enjoy giving talks and public speaking, right? And I like the process of coming up with interesting angles on topics. Like current events, I like the process of, I don't know, I try and tell jokes as well as part of that. All of that is super fun, but also I think helps to personalize me and the company. So we are quite, I've tried to be quite thoughtful about how we are perceived because I think a lot of learning and development and training, such a horrible word, is it is really like boring feeling. Like most people associate training with boredom.everyone loves learning. People get excited when they get to think about learning. No one gets excited when they think about training. We have tried very hard to put forward like playfulness. And. We're still serious about learning, but we don't think it has to be dull. It is one of our kind of core brand values, if you like, to the extent that the name of the company is a stupid joke, right? It's skill whale. Ha. It's not funny. We know it's not funny, but it is a little bit playful, and I think that is has been really important too, because when we are, when people see. Me on stage, you can get a sense of I try quite hard not to be boring. I try quite hard to like, be a bit playful and at least show that I'm having fun, even if the people in the, can't guarantee the people in the audience are, which I think then means that you think actually this is a different company about learning. They're not trying to do the same things. I will go and say hi to them. I think if we just have the stand, it's quite hard to give a sense of that personality, that like DNA.

Soren: Okay, so just wanted to wrap up at least the part with the what you measure yourself by and how you agree with prospects on what the criteria of success is and what problems needs to be solved because I think you pitch in here, Christian, but depending on what we measure on. We then define what needs to change. What needs to be coded, what needs to be set up. We tie a whole organization's resources based on which direction we want to go. So be very careful about what you measure on and what you consider to be your criteria for success. Because it can go horribly wrong this way.

Hywel: I think that's exactly right. You want to know your impact on the customer. You want to know we were valuable to the tune of a million pounds. So I don't feel bad charging you a hundred thousand pounds, right? That's the situation you want to end up in. If what you're doing, you can't draw that line between the benefit you're giving and the price that you're charging. That feels quite a scary, precarious situation to me because at some point the customer is also going to realize that they can't draw that line between how much they're paying you and the benefit that they're getting. And in that situation, they may well leave. They might not want to stay. There might be another competitor that comes that does the same thing as you, but is better at drawing that line. Because ultimately, like the buyer and the customer also has to justify these things internally. If you are doing them a favor, if they believe in what you do, if you can quantify it for them, they then have something they can go and show. The CFO, the budget holder, whoever, the CEO, whoever is there, whoever is owning the budget that they are spending on you, they want to have evidence to say this was a good idea. We spent one pound and we got back five. Excellent.

Soren: Because.

Christian: I love that you start the process with defining the end goal, because what I often see is companies where they're very focused on lead generation, on closing the sales, but Not actually figuring out, just making those customer cases and figuring out what were the results. And they opened themselves up, like you've just mentioned for churns, customers leaving because at some point the CFO is going to come asking, what did we get out of that? And if they cannot give a clear answer to that, then they are just going to look stupid. And then I should probably cut losses here, right? So I love that you flipped that.

Hywel: I think it's, I think it comes back to our approach as well because we don't really believe in courses. I think courses are the bad old way where you essentially have like a series of, it's like a factory model for learning, right? We have a series of steps. Everyone does the same steps and we're going to get this kind of uniform. Outcome. That, I don't think that reflects the reality of people, but it also doesn't reflect the reality of companies. I don't know how technical your lessons are, but I'm just going to assume that they'll be on board with an example here. One of the languages we help people with is Python. And we worked with a company that uses Python. They don't use any classes in Python. They don't do any object oriented programming in Python. It's all,side effect free functions and structs, which is not how I write Python, but hey,if that's the way you want to live your life, you go for it. We can come up with a plan for them that is purely functions and structs, no classes at all. We don't have, A kind of strict set of modules that they have to pass through in order we can chop and change. So when we talk with a customer about what they're trying to get out of it, and we can go step into their role and say, what should the numbers change? What numbers should change and how we can also step back to exactly what learning happens, like down to the hour of time and say, you are saying that you're going to make more money if your page load performance is better because people will stay on the site longer, they'll be happier. They'll spend more money. The whole thing will feel like it works better. The things that we're going to do for your team are all specifically then to do with improving performance and nothing else. There's no point in us touching anything else, because that's not going to move the needle for you. And then we can go another step and say, we've looked at what your team can already do. And these five people are already good at these aspects of performance. So they aren't going to come to those sessions. And this person over here doesn't know any of this stuff. They're going to come to every session. We can get. Granular down to the person hour and tie it all back to this high level metric in the company, which is obvious. Like I feel like the thinking behind that feels really intuitive, but seems like very few other people are doing it.

Christian: I'm very curious on how you scale this, because what I hear is that you have spent a lot of time developing a curriculum and, but then I also hear you going super custom on some of the learning, like materials here. How do you scale that? Like without.

Hywel: Yeah. And actually this was the question that we asked ourselves before we had any customers, because I think a lot of companies, a lot of companies in learning start out doing a sort of As a very like one man band kind of thing, right? I'm good at a thing I'm going to go and help people be better at that thing And then they reach this inflection point where they have to decide do we keep up the quality of me? Or do we go for scalability? And I think you can see that this divide you have very like scalable learning approaches And you have high quality very expensive ones and there's not really anything that is both so Our approach is to make the curriculum be very modular and infinitely reusable. So we do this bespoke approach, but the only thing that's bespoke is which set of modules and which set of modules each person on your team attends. So the curriculum is the same as for every other company that has learned, say Python with us. But you're seeing different bits of it. And in fact, different people on your team are seeing different bits of it.

Soren: Does that not impact the coach and I imagine the skill set of the coach to follow this curriculum requires some level of experience is wise per hour, slightly more expensive, but I could be entirely wrong.

Hywel: I, it doesn't. Add that much to the coach because we provide the learning platform. We do the scheduling. We provide the curriculum The coach the learners get a calendar invite in advance They click a link in the calendar invite and then boom they're straight into The session with the topic that needs to be learned We do all the vetting of the coaches in advance So we know that they are really great at python and they're excellent communicators and teachers So then they're just turning up to do the training another session on Python. And today it's this topic, next week it will be a different topic.so again, we've tried to make that very scalable. Sorry. Someone has decided to do roadworks right outside my window. I hope that's not too loud for you. I should say as well, like this isn't, this actually isn't that original of an idea. So I was a student at Cambridge University and Cambridge does exactly this to scale its learning, like I think I had an amazing university education and have, I keep being surprised when I see all this discourse about we should get rid of universities because they're rubbish. And I think actually, maybe the difference is that my university did more for me than a lot of other universities do. Because I went to the lectures, I had I was in a room of 300 people 9am every morning, including Saturdays that I think my university could have done differently. But then the actual learning happens in these smaller sessions, what Cambridge calls supervisions, where you sit down with a couple of other students, solve problems with a master's student, not the professor, not the person who leads the lectures, but you solve problems with a master's student whose whole role there is to help you with the stuff that you didn't understand. And so we basically stole that idea, like how these small group sessions, someone who's not a professor, but who is very good at what they do. And it's like specialist and passionate about it. And then you solve problems, you get feedback and you learn that way. And this is how Cambridge can scale that education, like very small learning by doing and feedback based education to an entire year of, in my case, engineering students.

Soren: Brilliant. We can have a whole separate discussion on the, whether you should still have universities or not, because. I agree with you. If we can all decide on what we want to learn and what we don't want to learn, then we end up in a place entirely different if we don't require certain skill sets in all of us, something that we need to share, something that makes us able to actually communicate with each other and have a common reference point. If we don't have that, I don't know where things will be going. But one thing I think we need to touch upon, because We see this as a recurring problem, even when you start your own agency and you start charging, pricing. In the beginning, you are somewhat imposter syndrome and am I worth it? And what should I charge for it? Until you actually get the confidence that you are delivering the value beyond what the customer expected. And then you're there to charge more. Www. Dreamdata. Com I'd love to hear how you started out with pricing and how you settled on that all together. That's a, to me is a big challenge and hugely important for the company's survival and in short term cash flow.

Hywel: 100 percent we had that, exact that imposter syndrome, will people really pay? Should they pay? Is it immoral for me to ask this much? Yeah, I felt really bad charging people for this experiment. I was lucky that they were, they were friends because the first customers were people. First paying customers were part of my network. They'd been to a few dinners that I'd run, like I and other people at those dinners had helped them solve whatever challenges they had. So there was like good feeling, I think on both sides that meant I could say, is this reasonable? I entrust that they would say yes. That's a completely fine price to pay. We, for us, we. Looked at other forms of learning and looked at what was good and what was comparable. So if you think about the price people pay to go to a conference, if you think about the price people pay for having a like a training consultant kind of come and come up with a bespoke course for you and deliver that to your team, if you think about the price you pay per hour for a senior developer to sit down. With more junior folks on the team and help them learn. We could. We could look at those things and say, I think if I look at a conference or a training course, then I think we're probably higher value than that. Although with conference, you get networking benefits as well. So it's not quite comparable, but in terms of learning outcomes, we think we can do a better job than conference or a learning course. So I think that's like lower bound on what seems reasonable to charge. If we look at the senior developer. Principal developer, whatever, who is sitting down with other developers. That's probably a lower bound. Like we should be able to do a better job than those folks. If you think about the bespoke training consultant who comes in and comes up with a course, like that's. If anything, that's the model we should be significantly cheaper. Like we should be able to do as good a job as that, as those people. If we really principled and careful about what we do, we should be able to do as good a job, but we want to be able to do it a lot cheaper. So those people, like we should be at least 3x cheaper than that say, and ideally would be like 10x cheaper. And so all of that, back of the envelope calculations and we landed on a very like. Easy to understand pricing of 100 pounds per learner per hour. And that's appealing because it's so round. But it also luckily fits with those criteria we had, but I still felt like an imposter charging for it. Our first sessions, we didn't have any digital platform at all. I was going to people's offices in person and the first ones I didn't even have a website for them to open. Like now obviously we do all the learning remotely, it all happens via our site. Video conferencing is built in. The first sessions I was, I had bits of paper with the kind of curriculum on and I was sliding them across the table to people. This is why we were like iterating on the learning model. It was a very like budget way of doing it. And then. Slowly over time, we built functionality. So I would have, I'd still need to be there in the office in person, but now I didn't have to slide paper across the table. I could just press a button and they would see the next slide. But then of course, I would still have to go and look over their shoulder to see the code they were writing and give them feedback in the session until we then built what we call the sync process, which kind of solved that. So now I can sit at my computer in the same room and I could just be like, Oh, you've missed a semicolon on line five or whatever it was and then we had this one session where Some we I turned up to the office and they said oh like we'd forgotten you were coming today This person has gone back home to argentina for christmas and this person's gone back home toto Pakistan and I was like, no worries, get them to join a Google meet call and I'll have Google meet open and then we'll have like them work remotely. And we've got to the point where that was good enough. They said they had just as good an experience as in the previous session where I was in the office and I was like, I don't need to go and travel to these folks office anymore. I can stay home. And. And, do all of this stuff remotely. So then we built video conferencing into the app. And I think that was the point where it felt like we had got there. The product, right? I started off talking about costs and then went on that long ramble But I think particularly when I was traveling to the offices It was like the amount people are paying barely covers like my time for being For the amount of time it takes out of my day so I could justify it like that to myself, like one of the rules I have, I try and adopt around pricing is to price something at a point where you don't really mind if people say yes, or if they say no, like you should aim for that pricing, that price point where you're like, The amount they were going to pay is it wouldn't have been worth my time anyway, just about, or okay, I'm just about happy they said yes. That's the kind of ideal pricing for your time. And so the fact that our initial pricing kind of matched that helped to overcome the imposter syndrome somewhat.

Soren: How do you feel about pricing now where know exactly what value you bring and to the extent of value you bring to a company when you ask for price?

Hywel: Sorry, how do I feel about it in what.

Soren: Compared to how it was when you initially start out, you had to figure out a pricing point. Today, you know that you increase, in some cases, revenue by 10%. You increase efficiency and deliverability of an IT team by 40%. To me, that should give me the confidence to ask for even more because you can have the cost plus markup, or you can have target pricing, which is trying to match what's in the market, or you can run value pricing. I started out with some kind of Target pricing, but pharmaceuticals are infinitely famous for running value pricing, right? Has no relation to what it costs to produce or make. It's whatever the market can bear.

Hywel: I, so we aim very hard at value pricing and I think we have got more confident about what we offer, but I accept that we are not yet a well known brand. And so I think people, and in fact, our approach is not a well known approach, right? We have a new category that people have to buy into as well as buying into the company. I think while we've got more confident, I don't expect our customers to know that yet. They have to look at us. They have to price in some degree of risk that we're talking nonsense or we're inflating our own, the impact we can have. And so that has to be priced in. Because if we were, if we charged on a fraction of the value we brought, it would look very high. To the customers right now. As we become more established, we can probably revisit that. But I think at this point, the customer has to look at us and say, there is a, there is essentially a technological risk that this approach that they're talking about doesn't really work. This company like is a fairly, is a newish company. We have case studies, we have evidence, but by a lot of company's standards, we look fairly. Young and small and so they have to price in some of that risk. So we have increased pricing recently but by 10 percent because of inflation rather than anything more than that.

Christian: How quickly would a customer realize if it's a good match for them or not? A month, a half a year, or what's the time frame.

Hywel: On our website a ROI calculator which says if these are the things that you're aiming to get, we think you'll see value in roughly this. This time frame.that.

Christian: Estimate, like a couple, I'm just, I'm honestly just, I cannot avoid this. It's in my brain always trying to crack the nut. And what I hear is the, you need to fix the uncertainty they have about it. Your service and you can fix that uncertainty by giving certain guarantees and if you don't experience this, you know what, you just get your money back and then you could actually double your price. But you add a guarantee on top of it.

Hywel: That's interesting. Maybe. We currently estimate, something like three to six months when you first start seeing impact, because we work with the team. The idea is that we work with the team once every two weeks, and then in between they have this opportunity to go and use that thing they just learned and cement. The latest topic and apply it. So we often find one session to the next people are like, oh yeah, I used that thing last week and it solved this problem. Or even in a session they'll be like, oh, I did this thing literally yesterday and I couldn't work out a better way of solving that problem. And now this has made it all fall into place. It takes a little while for those things to add up. But over that kind of time, Again, depending on metrics, depending on like delivery cycle, right? Some teams do not ship that often. And so you're not going to see improvements in production as quickly if your shipping cycle is like once every month.

Soren: Does.

Hywel: Yeah, we generally would start more with a smaller pilot. And so it's a subset of the organization. So maybe just a single team or a few teams were looking at metrics for that team before then growing to a bigger part of the organization. Do.

Soren: They commit to any specific scope time frame or when you. No, we go for. We work one month rolling, like just a subscription, and when people put in their credit card details, we have some customers that prefer to commit to a like three or four month scope. And then we charge for that, deliver, and then work out where to go next. Okay.

Hywel: Both of those models work pretty well for us. And it's really about Which for the customer looks like lower risk as they're getting started.

Christian: Maybe son, we should just go for the last one. The, Advice for other like early stage startups, in the B2B stage.

Hywel: Yeah, I think, so I think my advice for other startups, particularly B2B. My advice for B2B startups is start at value and work backwards from there. It's very tempting to think I've experienced this problem. Therefore, I know what to do. I know the solution that's required and I don't think that's quite true. If everyone else, if all the people you were selling to were just the same as you, then they would also all be going and starting their own startup, coming up with their own ideas. Like they are not identical. You might have a good understanding of their problem, but that doesn't mean you need the same solution. So start at value and work backwards. I think my advice for startups more generally is I see a lot of people who jump to building. And I think building is A very expensive way of productionizing what you already know is going to work. And ideally in a startup, you would start with something that's much easier to experiment with. So I have recordings of the first sessions I ran, where I took along a camcorder and I was literally passing pieces of paper across the table to people, taking them back, like there was no building, I had to write the curriculum, But that felt like the bare minimum I could do to test out this idea. I actually reiterated a lot on what a session should look like in that time. To the extent if I had built a platform to do that, it would have gone, I've had to do a load of rework and waste a load of time. So people talk a lot about minimum viable products. But I think push harder on that word minimum and think harder about viable for what, because I think very often people are like, if I can't go and sell it straight away, then it's not a minimum viable product. But actually the thinking behind that whole concept is much more about starting with a hypothesis and then. And what is minimum for proving that? And a product doesn't have to be a technological product. So I started out with a hypothesis for what could make good learning. The minimum viable thing at those, in those early days was like printouts that I literally cut up with scissors the night before. Over time that evolved and like it became necessary to have technology deliver it, but only all of the testing and experimentation happened first. And then the technology was really added in. Later when we knew what would work.

Christian: Love it. Love it.Soren, you look like you wanted to say something.

Soren: We could carry on for hours, but, I think we got the gist of it. And,I was just pondering right now on just making a quick wrap up of, the very interesting things that you've said, both in terms of how you tested the product, and in terms of how you reached out and used network, what you do on conferences, realizing conferences are important and online communities and how you actually engage on them, like speaking instead of just showing up, etc. So there's a lot of learning that is not only for software, EduTech, but also for manufacturing as far as I'm concerned. But we can do that afterwards. We don't have to do that here, but I've learned a lot about at least confirmed a lot of things with our talk today. So very brilliant. Yeah.

Hywel: To hear it.

Søren Skovdal: Thank you for joining us on today's episode of The Messy Growth Show Check out the upcoming guests on messygrowthshow.com. And you can subscribe on Spotify, apple Podcast, Google Podcast, and YouTube, And if you do have any comments, feedbacks, or suggestions of topics that are particular importance to you as owner, marketer in the software or manufacturing industry, please do reach out to us on messygrowthshow.com. We'll see you on the next episode of The Messy Growth Show.