#11: MVP Sales Strategies: How Founders Can Sell Before They Build

Christian: We spent one and a half years bootstrapping the company. So we were like super slow at developing it. And wasn't selling it until like 18 months down the road. And we did it on BetterMetrics. It's just like sitting there waiting aggressively for people to put in their credit card right? And it just doesn't really work because you need that feedback to say like, is our messaging correct? Do people get the pain? Do they have the pain? What's extremely important in the pre selling part is to ask for the money in the end. Yes, because you get the real truth there.

Sepehr: Like do you do the transaction right there?

Christian: Like Yeah. You know, put in your comment.

Sepehr: Okay. So how, okay. We have not had success with that. Welcome back everybody. To the Founders Korner. Today's episode, I have a very special guest. He has been in the game of SaaS for more than 13 years. He's the founder of the coolest name I've ever heard. Digital Wasabi. Yes, it is very spicy. His name is Christian Jorgensen, and he is here with us today. Christian, welcome. How are you doing today?

Christian: Thank you so much. I'm super excited to be here and definitely ready to share some truth bombs here.

Sepehr: I love it. Now, just so we can properly place you are actually not in North America. You are in?

Christian: I'm in Denmark, so Copenhagen, Denmark, which is not the capital of Ikea, which some people will assume once in a while. So.

Sepehr: Isn't Ikea Sweden? Ikea is Swedish, isn't it?

Christian: We're neighbor to Sweden, so that's why people confuse it sometimes.

Sepehr: No, i, now Denmark to me is the red flag. First of all, a blue red, that's very different. So I don't know how people confuse that. But, I've actually seen pictures of Copenhagen, and there's a lot of, you guys love bikes. There's a lot of like, yeah. For how cold that place is. I don't understand it.

Christian: It's actually not that cold, but true. It's a real, like a real challenge for a lot of tourists to understand, like where all the cars, like you're just going around on bikes. Yeah. It's super fast. And you know, it's.

Sepehr: One of my one of my profs, who is, who still, like, I'm very much connected with, I talk to him all the time. His wife is actually Danish. She's from Denmark as well. And, that's how I know so much about Denmark and how it's very different to the other countries. So I love it. I love it. Chris, and thank you so much for joining us. I'm actually very excited to have this conversation with you because You know, you not only come from a founder's perspective, you also have a digital, marketing company that helps startups with outbound and bringing inbound naturally and, you have 13 years of SaaS experience, which is huge, right? So, you know, I want to first start off with what do you see in founders and what, like if you're talking to a brand new founder, who's, you know, probably listening to this kind of going, I want to take the plunge, what is the number one advice and what do you tell them?

Christian: First thing they would, any entrepreneur basically, SaaS or not, would need to learn super quickly is to get super good sales skills. So because you don't have a company until you have revenue and hopefully profit as well. And you need, you need to sell to start doing that.

Sepehr: What is profit? I don't know what this means.

Christian: Making money.

Sepehr: No, I just mean most startups, they definitely are not thinking profits. They're thinking, what's the next raise? That's their profit.

Christian: Yeah, true. Which is, so actually that's an interesting angle because when I was visiting San Francisco, like, Eight, 10 years ago. And I heard all these American startups pitch me and their product. And I asked, I was like, yeah, we're going to do the new whatever Twitter or something. And I was like, what's your revenue model? And they were like, we don't have any, we just need users. I was like.

Sepehr: Skill at all costs. That's our strategy.

Christian: If you then compare that to the culture that we have in Denmark, where you have a ton of bootstrapped, SaaS companies, that was like a massive, like black and white difference right there.

Sepehr: Right. And I do notice that like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of difference between Europe and the U S right? Like European startups are quite. Like, I want to call them resourceful, right? Like they are very resourceful, they're very smart about how they target, companies like how they scale. 'cause they don't have access to the cash that the US does, right? So True. So I'm gonna love this conversation because you're gonna comment from a perspective of you don't need all the capital in the world to raise, right? So, okay. Yes. So yeah. So you tell them you have to be a sales led, founder. Okay. What else?

Christian: Yeah, because you know, the whole challenge with raising money all the time is because you maybe create a product and you have no idea if there's actually a product market fit for it and then you spend a lot of time developing it and then you're like trying to sell it after maybe a year down the road. You burned a lot of VC money, but you haven't been practicing your sales skills versus if I was to start a SaaS company tomorrow, I wouldn't write a single line of code. Like, I would literally go first of all on like a pain hunt, which I like to call it.

Sepehr: Is that an actual thing or are you making that up? Oh, that. Okay. That's a, that's, you're like kind of making your own thing. Okay. So you go under, like, find the people who are feeling the pain. Okay. I got you.

Christian: Exactly. And you can find that pain in two ways. Like you can either just research online, look in LinkedIn groups, Facebook reviews, people complaining about, right?

Sepehr: Yeah.

Christian: That's like a super effective way of finding those paints and then creating some kind of prototype and then pre selling that basically.

Sepehr: Do you know what I tell people in my workshop? I always say like, go to the review sites and you don't look at the five, you don't look at the four, right? And what you're trying to do, or sorry, you don't look at the five and you don't look at the one because the ones they're very unhappy. The twos are, or sorry, the fives are like very happy people. Ones are very unhappy people. So I always tell them to look between the three and the two and four to understand because they get productive, right? They'll say, Oh, I like this, but I don't like that. So I love review sites. So I'm with you on that one. Okay. What else?

Christian: Sure. So the reason why I'm super focused on the whole pre selling part was in our own SaaS company, BetterMetrics, we spend one and a half years, bootstrapping the company. So we were like super slow at developing it. And wasn't selling it until like 18 months down the road. And then.

Sepehr: Hold on, you guys didn't start selling it 18 months. Like that's because of the development, because it took that long to build. Okay. Got it.

Christian: Yeah. So it was a pretty long process and I was coming from a background where inbound, had scaled, several in. SAS companies with inbound marketing before, literally from like baby steps to exit. And then I was like, you know, that's going to be the tool in my toolbox that I will use for this. Because clearly, I mean, we have a great product and I know how to run paid campaigns, do content, all that jazz right? And so we started sending people into the onboarding flow, signing up for trials and they happen. We had like hundreds of trials coming in. But my challenge was that they just died in there.

Sepehr: Yeah, you couldn't convert.

Christian: No, absolutely not. I was expecting, you know, Stripe to just be like ding in the morning when I woke up. And it didn't really happen. So.

Sepehr: Why do you think that happened? I'm just curious. Because everybody has their own reasoning, right? Like, mine would be the fact that, like, you know, maybe it's a more complex product. So it's harder to just have a trial and someone just wanting to get on it.

Christian: The product, what it was solving was like pulling data out of Facebook ads, Google ads, and so on and like preparing all that data so you could report on it, combine it with your CRM data and so on. So what I realized.

Sepehr: What was that? The setup was hard?

Christian: Most of the setup was hard. They needed to like authenticate their Google account on all that stuff. And then what I found out once I ditched that strategy and started making like LinkedIn outreach and cold calling people, they were, they were giving me the real objections, which were like, how can I trust you with my data?

Sepehr: What was happening was people were signing up because they did feel the pain. They were struggling with it, but the underlying issue is, I don't know if I can trust these guys. And you'd really didn't understand that until you actually started picking up the phone call and actually calling them. Interesting.

Christian: Exactly. And that's why I want to reverse the whole flow and just start with the selling part. So you get those objections first and you actually understand. How are they solving this problem today if they are solving and is it a big enough pain or is it just like a nice to have thingy that we are developing? Yeah, but you get that on the sales call.

Sepehr: For sure. So in this podcast, I've openly, like we've, we have Emma, who's our marketing, VP of marketing at Corridor. And she came up, she turned, I'm gonna say she coined the term, but a product advisory board. So creating a product advisory board, which is basically going and talking to 10, 20, 30, whatever amount of customers you want to talk to, who are you building something for? And literally saying, hey, I'm building this. Can we talk? I just want to hear you out. I just want to talk to you. What are you thinking? What's your biggest struggle? How are you? Because I feel like a lot of people are actually willing to help more than people think they are, right? Like if you're building something for me, like I'm going to tell you what I want so that I have that solution, right? Yeah. And a lot of founders, do you find that are very secretive about their project as if it's like the next billion dollar idea?

Christian: Yeah, for sure. Some go more like in stealth mode, but, and we have maybe a bit of tendency to do that in Denmark because we have some very like deep tech, companies coming out and they cannot like show too much, but I think people have gotten better and like just drop that stealth thing and just what it is you want. We actually did that part with the, product, advisory board. So I had like five, six people in it, but it was actually only one of them. There was an ICP, like, so like the ideal type of customer that I would like to have in the company, but he was definitely challenging me, like just going through our signup flow like this, you're scaring the shit out of me right here. Like, Oh my God. And just like, why don't you sell through agencies or like just challenging our distribution?

Sepehr: Was it productive or was it counterproductive? Cause sometimes it's like, you know what I mean? Like there's some times where you're like very productive. You're actually helping me build it up. And then there's the other times where they're the comments they're making is like, Seriously, like, I don't know how you want me to respond to that. Like, I feel like.

Christian: I had a, I had a good advisory board. They were really challenging me, really pushing me like in a good way. Productive. I was just like, dude, you just need to go and get those first five customers. Yeah. Like, Oh yeah, you're right. And then I just focused everything on that. Like drop the, like. Having the product perfect, and just go and sell it.

Sepehr: For founders, you're, this is a nice lead up to what I want to, where I want to take this is. So your suggestion is that anytime a founder comes to you and says, what can I do to be a better founder? Your thing is, Go sell. Before you even start coding.

Christian: You need the revenue to pay for the bills. You need the sales skills to require, sorry, to recruit the best people. Oh, absolutely, yes. And then once you build up the team, then And you want to scale, maybe you want to get some VC money, and then you need to sell again just to the venture capital guys.

Sepehr: It is true.

Christian: It's just one big sales process.

Sepehr: Yeah, you are, you are consistently selling, no matter what. Like you're selling yourself, you're selling the brand, you're selling the passion, you're selling the product, you're selling the team, you're selling Yeah, you're right. It is non stop selling. As a founder.

Christian: You need to be also that, like you're going to be the most passionate guy about your product because you didn't, you came up with it, right?

Sepehr: You should be.

Christian: Yeah, hopefully it should be. So you're also going to be an inspiration to your entire sales team on like how you're pitching it and like passing all on that passion. So that's super important as well.

Sepehr: Yeah, true. So. What is, and since you're the expert here, I want to hear your thoughts. What you're like, I don't know if I'm calling myself a name. No, let's be, let's be humble. It's okay. Let, you know, a lot of founders go into, developing a software. The, a lot of founders, essentially what they do is they say, I got this. It's gonna blow up. I know it. I'm gonna just build it out. And the first month, like you said, people are going to just, I'm going to be just, it's going to kill it. It's going to crush it. Why does that never happen?

Christian: Oh, there's a lot of factors. I would say.

Sepehr: The important part.

Christian: Yeah, I would say.

Sepehr: Let's pretend product is perfect. Let's say they truly hit the mark with the product.

Christian: Okay. Yeah, then it can be like that Your messaging is just off your or you're targeting the wrong people you have the perfect product But it's just you're telling the wrong people out on the market about it. And then you're gonna go.

Sepehr: I see. Yep.

Christian: Yeah, exactly. And, if they don't get the value that your product is delivering because your messaging is off, then you're going to fail as well. Yeah. So you can have the best product in the world. I think it was the founder of Loom who was like, you It was like iteration number three, like pivot number three, where they really hit it because they were like, we developed this like thing for doing customer service, that wasn't what they were looking for. And then we pivoted and pivoted again.

Sepehr: I always tell. Yeah. I always tell founders, I'm like, you need to get really comfortable with pivoting because that happens way too often. And it's fair, right? I think, I think it is also because of the fact that most founders don't take the proper approach at the beginning, because in my opinion, it's the whole concept of a design twice or was it, what does it measure twice? Build once, right? Whereas most people, they don't do the measuring. They just build, right? It's like, I'll just build it and then they'll come. What is the difference? So for most founders, maybe this is not as clear. What is the difference between inbound and outbound sales? Since we're talking about the fact that they have to be good salespeople, what is that difference? What is inbound and what is considered outbound?

Christian: Sure. So inbound basically covers a lot of tools in the toolbox, which is like creating content, blog posts, running paid ads on Google, Facebook, doing PR, whatever that attracts people into your, company where you don't need to go out and knock on the door to open the dialogue, right? Outbound is the complete opposite you being out there and knocking on the door. Yeah.

Sepehr: What, so why does inbound never work at launch? Cause we always have founders that are like, yeah, I'll just do inbound. It's all good. I'll just throw a bunch of ads at this and we'll figure it out. Why does that never work at a startup level?

Christian: Because you don't get that feedback loop of talking with your customers. Like you literally have no clue what's going on unless you're like, I don't know, Twitter, but I'm pretty sure they also had like.

Sepehr: Oh, they did. Yeah.

Christian: Like research and just pull some people into the office and said, what would you do here? Right? But.

Sepehr: They pivoted twice, I think Twitter and then they went to Southwest by Southwest. In Austin and that was, they put some boards up with like live tweeting So anytime that someone tweeted it showed up on the board And that's really what it took, because it originally was built around the concept of just simple, like, I'm here, I'm there. That was the whole point of it, and then they kind of pivoted towards more of a conversational.

Christian: So, I mean, we did it on BetterMetrics. It's just like sitting there waiting aggressively for people to put in their credit card. Right. And it just doesn't really work because you need that feedback to say like, is our messaging correct? Do people get the pain? Do they have the pain? What's stopping them in this entire process? And once you've had enough of those, Fair enough. You can add the inbound part to it. But I would always, to this day, start with outbound.

Sepehr: A lot of founders find that uncomfortable. So what are some of the strategies you would suggest for someone who is about to embark on outbound? Cause again, there's a lot of times where like founders, in my opinion, if you put them in the room, they're terrible, but introduce them to someone, they're very good. Right. And that's just a comfort factor. I get it. Like I've been there as well. Like I can't, I hate going up to random people and having a random conversation. Right. But put me in the room and introduce me as this is Sapir and this is, you know, Christian, I'll talk your ear off. I'm totally good. I feel comfortable right off the bat. So what are some strategies you would suggest to a founder who's not so comfortable about you know, potentially like randomly going and talking to a girl at a bar, for example. You know what I mean? That's, I always use that as an example, right? If you can go up to a random girl and talk to them, you'll be okay with sales. But if you can't figure out how you're going to do it because you're going to need it.

Christian: Sure. So I have a few approaches to tackling this one. First of all, like what we want to do in our startup is first of all, measure our success or lack of, say like, you know, how many, how many qualified leads did we get in this month? How many meetings and how many customers? So like just tracking that in a simple spreadsheet. So, and what's your expectation? Like, I want to have 10 good meetings this month and. Right now, I'm at one or zero, maybe that's just going to be screaming in your face, especially if you have a fight report or something that you told this, these targets to, then you'll be like, next time you meet what happened, right? So there's some pressure you can create around yourself for that. And then my other approach is. It's extremely self shaming approach. So if.

Sepehr: I like creating self shaming, good. Yeah.

Christian: Yeah. So the mind twist that I'm using is you created this amazing product. It. Solves a real pain out there and it will save people a ton of money, a ton of time. But if you're not going out and selling it to them, presenting it to them so that they can buy it, they will keep doing things in a very stupid way. So you're doing them a massive disfavor. So like shame on you for not fixing, you know, the problems out there. It's a complete twisted way of doing it, but it can be, you know, a trigger if you're really persistent and like, Oh, I cannot do sales.

Sepehr: Yeah. I actually really like that shameless way of doing it. And I think one thing I'll always say to founders, I mean, tell me if this is a good strategy or not. But I take the approach on the factor of, you know, You know, when you're going and talking to someone, don't approach it as in, I'm going to immediately sell you something. Go present it as, I'm providing you some value, whether you go with me or not, I'm totally cool with it, but I just want to give you this value, right? And that really takes the pressure off cold calling. Because I feel like most people, the way they approach cold calling, or even a cold approach, Is that they have to close it, right? Like it's like you immediately have to, yeah, you immediately have to close that deal, otherwise you're weak or you didn't do well, or, and that's the sign is like, you have to make sure they part with their money right off the bat, whereas I kind of take the approach of relationship building and I take the approach of, Hey, like, I would love to just hear your feedback on this. Like I built something, I'm just curious. Does this look good to you? You're kind of like my ideal customer. Like, how can I sell this to you? Right. And it's more of a conversation rather than a sales pitch. And I love those conversations. If someone tries to sell me like that, I will have those conversations night and day. If someone tries to sell me with, you know, I always get these outbound email or sorry, yeah. Outbound emails where it's like, here's some, here's some thoughts. And then they go, the second email is thoughts question mark. I'm like, what do you want thoughts from me for? I have no engagement with you whatsoever. Like go away. Right. Whereas if it was more of an approach of like, Hey, this is what I'm noticing in the industry. And this is my thoughts on it. Do any of these relate to you whatsoever? I'll respond to those. Because it's a conversation, right? It's not a, you're trying to pitch me something.

Christian: Yeah, I completely agree. Completely agree. Like the whole like asking for feedback on the product is like one approach or just like how basically the inbound marketing strategy as overall is that you're like Bringing people a lot of value in the hope that they will then later convert, like fill out a form and you can get them into an email flow and give them more value. And then eventually they're like, wow, these people are the best. Like, well, what is that product they're selling? Right. That's basically inbound. So clearly agree on just over delivering value.

Sepehr: What are your challenges? Or I guess I should say a lot of listeners are probably going to sit there and say, well, okay, fine, cool. I like to pre sell, but how do you pre sell without a product? That's question number one. Question number two is how do you counteract challenges, that are being presented to you from the customer side of being, oh, I wish you had this. I wish you had that. Because let's be real, we're startups. Everyone, anyone that comes to you and says, I'm a startup, I just built this product. No one should have the expectation that it's a fully fledged product, but yet they do. So I'm just curious. So one, how do you pre sell without the product? Two, how do you sell the product that's not necessarily at its 100 percent yet?

Christian: Sure. So pre selling basically comes back to, like you can, you can do it in a super simple way. I mean, especially in now, 2023, like you have Figma, you know, just pull up a clickable prototype, like I literally. The interesting thing was that I was actually doing that just like a Google slide with screenshots of our product in BetterMetrics. I wasn't showing the real platform. Yeah. I was just showing them screenshots like, Oh, this will, this is the first thing, then this happens and boom, magic. You have all your data, right? Is that interesting? Yes or no? Great. Yeah.

Sepehr: To be honest with you, most people won't even recognize that's not even a software yet.

Christian: Exactly. And now in We have access to all these no code tools and you can pretty easily spin up some fairly functioning. Tool that.

Sepehr: Yeah, it doesn't have to be pretty.

Christian: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But you can just go with Slideshow or Figma or like something. Keep it super simple. Get that validation of like, is this interesting? Yes. No. Would they buy? I would ask in the end. Okay. So will you buy it? Yeah. And then we get the real objections, right? Yeah. Which is what you mentioned before, like you're missing this feature, this feature, this feature. And it's a super tricky balance because, you can be pulled in all kinds of directions. In our case, it was like, we need Snapchat integration. We need WooCommerce integration. All kind of shit, right?

Sepehr: All kinds.

Christian: So our approach in the end just ended up with being, we go for what 80 percent of the market needs, and they need like these six platforms to integrate with. And then we're just going to stick with that and make the product better. And that we did for a while.

Sepehr: Yeah, you do, you do have to learn, especially in an early stage, you have to learn to say no to some customers. Customers can overwhelm you. And it's, I call it the, well, I don't actually have a name for it, but it's a trap when you have a big client. Who's like, I'm willing to give you money and big bucks, but I need X, Y, Z. And then, and then your entire dev resource come becomes servicing them. But guess what? At the end of the day, they're not going to be happy with you because you're not going to deliver properly on the X, Y, Z. And. And they're just going to be unhappy. You just wasted a bunch of resources on trying to make them happy because of the big bucks. And then you, in the process, pissed off all your other customers who were actually very happy with you. So it's, I called that the, actually, again, I don't have a name for it, but it's the, Let's come up with a name for it. I need to come up with one, but like, it's the, it's the foul fantasy, the foul fantasy, I'll call it the founder foul fantasy, which is like, Ooh, I got a big customer. I gotta make them happy. Like if you're building something for airlines, like low budget airlines, and then all of a sudden United comes to you and says, I want this, but I want X, Y, Z, they're going to take you a completely different direction. Right. So.

Christian: Once in a while, I can accept the concept of taking a bunch of money to develop some features for a big prospect right? But what really needs to be super clear is that those features that they need. Is super aligned with your product roadmap and that it's benefits the rest and it will be available for the rest of your user base and it makes everything better. If it doesn't do that, hell no.

Sepehr: Yeah, I agree with that. There's also a different approach to, you know, you mentioned no code, or like even low code. I'm all, I'm a big believer in those. I think those are, those are a big one. Like, You know, we even, we even help out our founders sometimes with it. Like it just makes logical sense. Now that being said though, going back to it, I don't think anyone should just build product like the, like product is hard to build. So. What do you suggest from someone's perspective of, you know, they have no experience, they have no capabilities, they just know what the product needs to do. They don't necessarily know how to get there, how to do it or what not, but what are your thoughts on that?

Christian: I, if that's like a solo entrepreneur, I would for sure say you got to team up with them product people because you like have the, what is it called? It's like the, have the hacker, the hustler and the hippie.

Sepehr: The hacker. I like the hacker. Okay, cool. Yeah. You definitely need the hacker. That's for sure.

Christian: I just heard it recently. I didn't know it. So don't.

Sepehr: Hold on, the hacker, the hippie and what was the other one?

Christian: The Hustler, like the Hustler basically getting the deals and the Hacker being the tech one and the Hippie I think is more like the product?

Sepehr: Culture. Culture. I'm a product guy, I'm not a Hippie, so I don't know.

Christian: So, I mean, you need to have a founder's team that covers like both the commercial side and the product, like the development side and then the actual product. Delivery, right? If you don't have that, you're going to be pretty challenged very quickly. I had, I was the commercial lead and my co founder was the technical lead. And then I also became the product lead. So I was like doing two of them.

Sepehr: I think you can learn. I just, I hesitate because there's so much that goes into product. And again, if you're using it for demo purposes, totally okay. That's actually preferred. Like you use that to just kind of show, Hey, like, here's what my the system will do for you. And here's why we would respond, right? Awesome. I would suggest Figma because you can actually put more graphical design behind it. So you can actually make it look prettier. Because sometimes that's hard to do on the no code stuff. But I'm such a believer in pre selling. I'm with you on that one. Like I'm such a believer in pre selling. Yeah, like pre sale, pre sale, pre sale. If you're not even going to pre sell, at least have those conversations, the product advisory board, right? Like have those conversations. So you understand what you're building. Like, I remember we were building, we're building something right now and we were going to build. And right now the problem too is the market is quite saturated with a lot of software, right? Like you're in the SaaS business like 13 years ago for you Software was like you can almost pump anything out and it would probably hit somehow. Now, not a chance. There's software for everything. So I always say like what's your niche? What's your leverage? Yes, right. And we were doing this product research for one of the products that we were going to build. And we were like, okay, this is kind of the route we want to take it. And we were like, okay, let's go start talking to product advisory. And we collected, I think it was like eight product, eight, it wasn't even 10, right? We had eight guys that we talked to. And we said, hey, like, we're trying to build something like this. What are your thoughts? Like, is it useless? Like, is it pointless to do this? And they went, look, the number one thing I hate is X, Y, Z. And we were like, we went back to the drawing board. We're like, oh my God, that changed everything because we were going to take this route because we thought this is what they're looking for. But they were like, no. This part still hasn't been solved. And that's the biggest problem. Right? And so you learn so much. I'm so with you on the pre selling, like, just have those conversations and understand what it is that people want. And You'll be surprised what kind of information you get out of them.

Christian: It can, it can be, the reason why I'm like, what's extremely important in the pre selling part is to ask for the money in the end, because you get the real truth there, not what I'm always afraid of.

Sepehr: If you just do the transaction right there, like, do you do the transaction right there? Like, you know, put in your comment. Okay, we have not had success with that. Like, we do talk to them about pricing.

Christian: You rarely, you rarely actually sell, but you will get the objections. Yeah, that's the whole thing. And because.

Sepehr: That's what we do.

Christian: We do a focus group or something. Tell me what you think about this product. People are nice by default, right?

Sepehr: Yeah.

Christian: You can be misled into different directions because they don't want to say that what you just spend one and a half year on actually sucks.

Sepehr: Yeah.

Christian: It's like, but if they will give you the truth.

Sepehr: I'm with you with that. I always say, how much are you willing to pay for this? Like if I asked you to pay for this tomorrow, what would, what would your price be? And I have a little strategy. I don't know if it's a, it's a public strategy or not, but basically I say, okay, what is the price that this would become a no brainer? And they'll usually give you like, I don't know if you charge me like 20 bucks in that month. Yeah, that's a no brainer. I would always do that. So that's too low. Then you say, what's the price where this is just like way out of reach. Like, there's just not enough value of benefit for you to pay for that. And they'll say probably like if you go anything above a hundred bucks, I wouldn't even bother. Okay. Now you've found your peak, right? Now, you know, you're kind of sitting in the middle there, right? Like around that 80 now, right? So that's how I kind of do it is like, what's a no brainer and what's too high. And then you can kind of fill, because the pricing as well, pricing strategy, in my opinion, it impacts your sales strategy significantly. But like a lot of startups, they underprice themselves. And when they underprice themselves, what ends up happening is like, you're almost like running to get that as many deals as possible because you're trying to show volume, whereas you need to show revenue. Revenue is more important than volume. If you cut 20 of, if you raise your price by 20 percent and 10 percent leave, You've made more money.

Christian: Exactly. And you're good.

Sepehr: Right. Is that right?

Christian: Like, if you're 10 X your price and you only like get like 50 percent less customers, you made a ton of money.

Sepehr: Exactly.

Christian: Right. And you can do a whole other sales approach. Like you mentioned yourself, like now I can hire. Actually sales people and not be completely dependent on this. Inbound, like on my onboarding flow, that may be broken or whatever. Like.

Sepehr: Yeah, we had a, we have one of our clients. You know, they were like, well, like We have these guys, 10 companies, like they're using our software. I was like, okay, what's your, what's the total amount? Like how many users do they have? Oh, they have 43. I was like, that's one customer. Like on average, you're getting one customer that's doing about 50 users. So, and you're charging double the price of that guy. Why do you care if you keep that one customer with 10 companies? Who cares about the 10 companies? They only have 43 users. You want more users. Users are better.

Christian: I actually had that conversation with a, with a SAS founder the other day, because she was like, how should I price my SAS product? Yeah. And pricing is tough. It's a tricky one. And she was super early stage, had some, test customers like using her platform. I was like, sorry, but your real challenge right now is not if you should price it at a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars, but it's getting the people to use your platform and keep coming back and making sure that you keep solving that pain for them. If you nail that, then you can start to put the price a lot higher, right? Then she was actually starting out at like, your problem is solving maybe like a hundred thousand dollar challenge for this customer. Yeah, and you're, and you're charging $10, like, doesn't matter in the beginning. Get the users in, then you can price it out massively up.

Sepehr: I agree with that. The first challenge is your product. That's your pre-seed. Seed is your market. You have to show that people are willing to pay for this product. Now, how much it is a different story. And I think people get into the pricing way too early. I agree with you. Anyways, Kristen, thank you so much for being here, man. I really appreciate you, especially right now. What time is it over there right now in Denmark?

Christian: It's 7 in the evening.

Sepehr: Okay. All right. So it's not that bad, but I still, I appreciate you joining us in the evening. I'm sure you have, meals and kid and the wife to go back to. So I do really appreciate you taking the time with us here today. I think, I think what you said was super valuable to our founders and our community. So I really, I really thank you for that.

Christian: My pleasure being here, man.

Sepehr: Awesome. To everybody back at home, and thank you for listening to the Founders Korner. If you know anyone that might take some benefit from this, please do share, otherwise like and subscribe. And until next time, Corridor out.