This is Episode 15 of the OpenVC Podcast. In this podcast, Bocar shares how he helped grow Hootsuite from a million users with no revenue to $150M in sales. Now a sales coach at Harvard and GP at Forum Ventures, he discusses go-to-market strategies for early-stage startups, resilience in entrepreneurship, and key lessons from his venture journey.
Harrison Faull (00:27.873)
Hi, Bocar. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on a podcast today. How are you doing?
Bocar Dia (00:32.321)
I'm doing well, thanks for having me.
Harrison Faull (00:34.315). You've been an operator, now you're an investor at Forum. And let's get straight into it. Take me back to your operating career where you're at Hootsuite and you were there on the first day of selling their first ever enterprise sales product. You then grew the team to over 150 million in annual sales. How did that happen? What was that journey like?
Bocar Dia (01:02.985)Yeah, good question. So let me maybe take you back to when that was because this was back in 2010.It's hard to believe now, but at the time a lot of people still believe that social media was a fad. Right. And so you had to educate people on the possibility of social media before actually selling them a solution that would help them manage it. Right. So to clarify, I was part of the early team. I saw us grow to 150 million. I was one of the early salespeople and sales leaders, but we did have, you know, leaders there. My focus was mostly on new products, new markets, new verticals for the most part. just a little bit about kind of that time. My first sale was actually with a company that a lot of you are going to be familiar with called HBO at the time. And in a nascent category, I think you're seeing that a little bit with Gen.ai today.What you kind of have to do is that you have to first educate people on what's possible, right? With this new solution or category to help them build a business case internally for something that by definition, if it's a nasa category, it doesn't actually have a budget. And then you have to get internal buying committees to agree on spending enterprise level budgets. And in my experience, it's very hard to go from one to three.Right. So it's much easier in the early phase to find people that are already educated on the possibilities. And I think one of the smart thing that Ryan Holmes, our CEO, did at the time was that we actually had a PLG model before people started talking about PLG. was freemium at the time. But by the time we started selling the enterprise product on day one, which you're kind of alluding to, we actually already had a million users.on the platform, using the platform on a daily basis. And you could see who is engaged, you could see which accounts were actually adding users. So that was very interesting because what that allowed us to do was that instead of trying to go out and find users that we need to educate on the possibilities of social media, we're able to just kind of look at our user base and identify the accounts that we wanted to target. That's how we found one of the smartest marketing executives out there. Her name is Sabrina Kalori. She was at the time a director of social media at HBO and they needed our platform to help them launch a little show called Game of Thrones. I can disclose that now. I can disclose it at the time. But I remember at the time thinking, what is this niche nerd fantasy book that these guys are building a show around? But fast forward to today and I mean, the success of the show speaks for itself.
This really helped propel her career as well. She was she ended up being an EVP of marketing at HBO and then at Nickelodeon But really really interesting time in the early days of Hootsuite and social media there. So really glad that I was there to see it
Harrison Faull (04:22.427)
Wow, what an impressive brand to convert straight away as well. for the audience that aren't too familiar with Hootsuite, what kind of value were you providing to HBO at the time?
Bocar Dia (04:35.253)
Yeah, that's a good question. when you think about, you know...
social media as a category, it is a different medium, right? And you need to really have a solution that enables you as an organization to really manage those social media assets and be able to really report back on things. you need to provide permissions. You need to have the right people having access to the right accounts. You need to have the right approval workflows. All of that seems to be pretty
trivial when you think about it if you're an individual user but if you're a brand like HBO that maybe has you know dozens of shows at the time and social profiles are not just one platform but multiple platform it becomes very hard to manage right so what we did was effectively we provided the infrastructure that enabled marketers to really leverage social media as a medium so they could reach out to their audience get the insights that they needed and eventually really just kind of broadcast some of the things that they needed to broadcast in a very
impactful way.
Harrison Faull (05:43.09)
They're already on boarded. You could see that they're using the product quite heavily. Was it as simple as taking candy from a baby that you knew they wanted the service and then it was already providing value or was that first sale actually quite tough? Cause there were no frameworks I imagine. The pricing model was probably up in the air. How did you actually go about that first contract? Getting them to sign them on the dive line.
Bocar Dia (06:07.209)
So you would imagine that if somebody has been using a product for free and you have to call them up to ask them to pay tens of thousands of dollars, that conversation is a bit of a tough one to have, right? I'm actually glad that I was my first sales job because that was the hardest thing to do, right? But here's what I say, and goes back to what I was saying about really targeting the right users, right? Sabrina and team really understood that, you know, ultimately we're building a platform and we're providing
value in a way that really you couldn't really find anywhere else because at the time what we're doing was actually quite innovative, right? So they understood that we're an early stage company, we had to make money somehow, and the conversation was actually more about...
the impact of the solution on the actual launch of the show, as opposed to talking about features and other things, right? So they had specific targets when it came to how they're launching the show initially. They wanted to really build that community of early fans of Game of Thrones, really get them engaged, really get them talking about the stories there before they actually kind of started.
advertising the show and going out there to find additional folks to reach out to. they had a whole plan. So really what we spent a lot of time doing was really just kind of understanding what the plan was, how we could help them execute on that plan, how we could help make sure that they had the metrics that they needed in order to ensure that they're delivering on some of their KPIs. And ultimately that's kind of how we built the business case internally. But I have to say,
Really what you're looking for is somebody who's pulling the product as opposed to somebody that you're pushing to pour out the product to. And that's where you hear about those early kind of innovators, right? When you're selling a product in the early stages, those are really the type of people that you need. And so it was a bit of an exercise of finding a needle in a haystack because we each has lists of accounts that we could go after based on how many users they had on the platform. But.
you had to go kind of past the features conversation and really understand what they're trying to accomplish internally.
Harrison Faull (08:24.894)
Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for giving us an insight into landing HPI as your first ever enterprise customer. How do things evolve? Because day one, there's so much uncertainty and you guys managed to build a phenomenal growth engine in a very short space of time. Were there any best practices that you took away that were slightly unconventional that resonate with you today?
Bocar Dia (08:48.533)
Yeah, think, I mean, it goes back to the context, right? So I think one of the biggest misconceptions about HootSuite at the time was that it was a prosumer product, right? It's a product that a user would use and maybe there is a pro version of the product that you can use and that's kind of what the company was known for. But...
So people stood a dashboard and they saw that they could sign up for free, but ultimately if you took $100 million revenue slice of the business, and by the way, we got there in just over five years, which was no easy feat at the time. It still isn't an easy feat to get to 100 million in five years. But if you look at that $100 million slice,
The revenue would actually break down into, I would say, about 30-ish million of that was that per-sumer product, so users that would come in, use the platform and upgrade for their individual usage. We also had, but then the 70 % to 70 million or so was kind of split evenly between renewal revenue and net new revenue, but all enterprise, right? Now,
I would attribute the rapid growth to that healthy mix of revenue because when you kind of think about that model, that means that about 60, 65 million is actually pretty predictable. And you're focusing on that net new 30 million that you need to kind of produce that year, right? When you think of it that way on the product side, Ryan wanted to ensure that we were manilically focused on building the best product for users and growing the free user base, which I think was actually pretty smart at the time.
think we got to about 16 million business users in my time there at some point, right? That actually registered on the platform. Now, that ensures that you have a solution that people are familiar with, right? And a product that's actually battle tested at scale and a product that gets the collective feedback of users that are on the front line, right? Which meant that we often built innovative features faster than the competition because our users were asking for them, right? So that's kind of one. Two, I would say is,
Bocar Dia (10:56.305)
is on the GTM side of things, because we're able to leverage our user base to get the signals, right? Because ultimately you could see as an example that there's dozens of individuals on the marketing team at Nike using our product. So what do we do? We reach out to those users, understand how they're using the product, but really what we're trying to do is get a picture of what the actual initiatives are internally,
sort of KPIs are tied to those initiatives and what they're actually trying to accomplish. So by the time we got to the buyers and the decision makers, we knew so much about those companies that it was a very different conversation that they would have had with another vendor. And it's much, much easier for them to adopt a solution that they're already familiar with than a...
new platform, right? So that was very smart when you think about kind of that early stage PLG motion. But I'll touch on the last thing because I think it's as we expand it into new verticals and products and this is actually where I led the charge a lot.
we were able to really go.
find new verticals that we can kind of go and sell into, right? So as an example, we started seeing in our user base that there's a lot more higher education institutions using our product, right? A lot more banks and financial services organizations using our product, federal and state governments using our products, right? But when you went to talk to them, what you realize is that there are some needs around security, around compliance and other aspects that were not offered through the platform.
Bocar Dia (12:40.585)
We ended up really catering to those verticals. So I built each of those teams and in some instances we needed to rethink the product a little bit. So for example, for financial services, we had to really figure out the compliance angle of things. And we ended up partnering with Proofpoint, one of the public companies out there focused on this. But ultimately every single time you do this, you really kind of have to go back
to the drawing board in terms of product market fit, at least as a framework, right? I often have to remind founders that...
there's three words in product market fit and market is one of them, right? So every time you're going after your new market, you really have to think about, you know, that fit again, right? And we did that very systematically by having teams that were focused on really established markets that we knew how to sell to already. But I kind of led the teams that were selling into verticals that we didn't actually sell into before. And using that approach, we're able to land six, seven figure deals with governments and bam.
and other institutions, but it's really a multi-pronged approach where we basically have the product really helping surface signals, but then you actually have to layer an enterprise motion on top of that.
Harrison Faull (14:00.28)
Okay, there's a lot of amazing advice and content in that answer. If I was to put a common thread out, you're really taking the time to listen to your customers. You're really trying to position yourself as an ally to help them achieve their objectives. that, wherever that takes you, that takes you back to day one and what did the customer need from us, rather than trying to shoehorn your product into their scenario and their specific case.
which is quite hard to do because there's going to be lot of conflicting answers to questions when you pose them to customers, which ultimately result in you segmenting these new products into different sectors. Is there anything you learn about what to listen to and potentially what to ignore when it comes to customer research?
Bocar Dia (14:49.111)That one thing I was going to just say is here's what I would say about customers in general and the customer conversations, right? So customers are actually very good at really sharing what their problems are with you, right? Because these are things that when they're acute problems, they experience on a day-to-day basis and so on, right? But there's two things that I think are a little bit more on thethe sales side or on the vendor side when you think about it, right? One is that you can let the customer tell you about their problems, but don't let them tell you about the solution, right? That's your job, right?because ultimately you're building a product and really what you're looking for is that one repeatable kind of use case case study that you can kind of build a product around, right? And it's not an individual customer thing. It's about finding that one repeatable case study that you can then replicate across the board, right? So that's, think, pretty critical. And I have to remind founders of that all the time because a lot of times what you ask sometimes is that magic wand product question, right?magic wand and could solve this, what would that solution look like and then listen to it and immediately implement it, you're the product person, not the customer. Right. Think of the best solution for that problem. And the other thing that I would say also is that customers are very good at telling you about their problems that they're not, in my experience, very good at or always good at really quantifying.the impact of that problem for the organization, right? Remember that ultimately somebody is gonna ask for a business case or ask for the dreaded three words ROI, right? What is the ROI of this? And ultimately you have to be really laser focused, not on the features and the things, but one of the things that we really guide our founders towards is thinking about...identifying the specific value props.that they believe they can help with. And in my experience, always, when it comes to enterprise, and by the way, maybe for the listeners out there, caveat, we invest mostly and work mostly with B2B focused kind of companies. So lot of what I'm saying is kind of more applicable to B2B, but I think pretty general in how you can think about it. But ultimately there's really only four enterprise value props in terms of categories in my mind. It's you're helping them make money.You're helping them save money. You're helping them mitigate some type of risk. So think compliance or you know that type of risk or You're really helping dramatically improve a process, right? So that's where you know, you can help speed something 10x or maybe you can help Make a process with a much much better experience, but it has to be very a very dramatic difference and by the way I'm listing these in order when you think about it because if you can show somebody that you can makethem you can make them make money or help them make money they're more likely to buy from you it's just one of the realities right it's much harder to sell productivity much easier to sell money right easy easy thing to kind of think about there
Harrison Faull (18:12.537)
Yeah, the messaging you give whoever you're trying to connect to in the organization needs to make it easy for them to sell it internally. If they can understand it and communicate it effectively to their higher divisions and actually allocate budget to the solution, you're much more likely to get a sale than if they're struggling to communicate the actual benefits. So that is definitely a critical and key bit of advice. So let's just link this up a bit. you had a phenomenal...
You witness phenomenal growth at Hootsuite. You're leading new products. You're opening new market segments. And now you find yourself as a principal at Forum Ventures, which has just celebrated its 10th year. You've got over 450 portfolio companies. You have a combination of an accelerator program that has 90 companies now joining every year and a pre-seed seed fund that invests in 20 companies.
You guys are absolutely killing it right now in the investing space. How did you find that transition? What kind of pushed you into the venture capital side of things away from currently growth?
Bocar Dia (19:17.047)
Yeah, good question. By the way, quick correction, I'm a partner now, I guess, at Form. But yeah, so interestingly, if you had asked me actually early in my career, where like the trajectory that I kind of wanted to follow, I would have probably still answered that I wanted to probably get into venture capital at some point. I knew that very early. That said, I wanted to
really learn enough to be able to be helpful to founders, right? So I wanted to kind of do a few tours of duty. So spent seven years at HootSuite and doing a lot of what I just kind of talked about. I was mostly focused on that kind of zero to one, one to $10 million area or phase for the new verticals that we kind of had. My last gig was a little different. I moved to Toronto where I...
basically led the East Coast business and I had to kind of staff that office to a hundred plus people. So that was an interesting experience. Then I built, I wanted to be a founder. So I was in the founder shoes really working on a sales tech company at the time, which was when I think about it, manager, co-pilot before it's time, right? Forum actually invested in my company at the time, which is how I got to know the team pretty intimately. I was an LP.
in the fund as well, so long, long, long history there. I was an operator again after that, but really I think the hardest, what I really wanted to do was be able to help founders in that really formative phase, which is kind of that zero to one phase, which my time at HootSuite taught me that it was a very, very different beast.
than what you actually do when you're selling after you've established product market fit and you have a brand and you know what you're doing. The zero to one phase is actually very different and I can touch on that a little bit later. what attracted me to HooTweet is that, to Forum, that we're very hands on.
Bocar Dia (21:23.863)
And I didn't want to roll where I was just an investor day in, day out. actually spent about 70 % of my time almost acting as a fractional sales or go to market leader to the founders in the portfolio. really getting, you know, rolling, rolling up my sleeves and working with them to help them, you know, close deals, figure out how to get to the right revenue traction and metrics that helped them kind of get to that next phase. And really that's, that's what I love.
about what I do, which is that in a way, I found a way to still be an operator while being an investor. Obviously things are different, right? Like when I was a sales leader, it was very different because you've got a quota and you live on this like quarterly schedule or where.
have to hit the number and everything kind of goes back to you. When you are an investor, it's a little different, right? Because as much as you can provide advice to the founders, you can't actually tell them what to do always. I mean, it's their company at the end of the day. And the other thing too is that unlike sales, like it's delayed gratification.
You don't know how an investment sometimes is going to perform until the company has been around for five, 10 years. So a very different world, but I'm very much still in the operator space there.
Harrison Faull (22:46.27)Awesome, yeah, so you're able to place your strengths and actually deliver a lot of value to the portfolio companies. Having someone that's been there and done it and actually taking an active daily interest in your startup is very different to some hands-off approaches that some VC funds employ. How long have you been at Forums? Sorry, like four? Okay, okay. Are you able to talk to any of the largest outliers, any of the biggest successors that Forums actually had so far?
Bocar Dia (23:21.623) been two years full-time yet.
Yeah, we've been, as you mentioned, around for about 10 years, right? Now for contacts, for listeners, we run, we're kind of early stage focused pre-seed seed, but we actually have three kind of different vehicles on the investment side. So we run a program that's a little bit more focused on helping companies get to traction and fundraise.So that's generally for earlier stage companies. It kind of runs like as an accelerator, we write you kind of a 150k check or 100k check and help you get to where you need to get to to raise that large seed round. Then we actually have a pre-seed seed fund out of which we'll generally write checks between 250 and 750. About half of the investments that we make out of that fund go into our...know, program companies, but we also invest in kind of net new companies and we have a studio as well. The accelerator itself has been around the longest. We kicked off our pre-seed fund a few years back, I'm gonna say three or four years ago, actually three years ago, right? And the studio is actually very new. It's...something that we started doing just about a year ago as well. And we're seeing success across the board. The accelerator fund, you know, has been really, I am not going to speak about the returns there. I mean, I could, but let's just say that most of them are well above.you know, three to four X for the most part because we invest in enough companies that there is some good successes out there. We invested in companies such as Fireflies as an example, is a company that we work with. have, you know, we have companies such as Route Automation that just raised.
Bocar Dia (25:15.831)Series B based out of New York and I could rattle a bunch of other companies that we've got in the portfolio but we've made 500 investments. I don't know them all off the top of my head but there's some really good companies out there and we have some really good returns as part of the fund.
Harrison Faull (25:33.31)Wow, yeah, it's been a definitely potency of phenomenal numbers as a VC fund there. What do you see most people getting wrong at the earliest stages when it comes to sales? What kind of things? Yeah, let's just leave it there.
Bocar Dia (25:49.803)
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, that's a good question. So unpopular opinion first, I think. I think so one of the things that we do, as I mentioned, is that we're really focused on kind of the go-to-market side of things with founders and help them get to traction, right? What that means is that we tend to attract a lot of
technical kind of founders, builders, or we tend to attract a lot of folks that are senior operators, but have experienced a particular problem in a space that they were in before. So think of it as you're in healthcare for 20 years, you experience a problem, and now you're trying to build a company to help address that problem, right? So as much as we're generally is funded, say a lot of our investments tend to be in kind of vertical, I was going to say SaaS, but I guess I should say AI these days, right? Or
a lot of info as well. And here's what I will say, unpopular opinion, I think founders that don't have a sales background are actually more well suited to selling in the zero to one phase. I find that when you have sales jobs, what you don't realize is that you are persuading customers to work with you, right?
Whereas really what you're trying to do in the early phase is that you're trying to validate that you're working on a problem that a lot of other customers experience in a way that...
Bocar Dia (27:20.151)
could be venture scale as well, right? Product market fit doesn't actually feel like pushing a product in the hands of customers. It feels more like the customer pulling the product from you. So the first mistake I'd say that non-technical people make is that they don't actually, they don't think they know how to do the selling bit, which I actually think that they're the most well-suited to do, right? But the actual biggest mistake that I see early stage founders make
in this early stage kind of sales process is that they approach the process as though they're selling a product or they really should be approaching the product as though they're selling a service And here's what I mean by that. Last week as an example, one of the companies that we're...
intelligence with, though won't mention them, is a company that's in the RCM space in healthcare. So that's called Revenue Cycle Management. Think of it as kind of a platform that handles some of the backend financials of a lot of these hospitals and hospital systems, right? And the founders come from one of the leading RCM companies out there, right? They identify gaps in the markets and are building basically an AI native platform to help address that, right? And in the conversation,
with them, one of the challenges that they highlighted was that they struggle to sell to these healthcare organizations because they're a team of two and they keep getting asked all of these things from a security standpoint, certification and all of those things because they're trying to sell a design partnership to these guys. Now, healthcare organizations don't actually understand that term, design partner.
Right? I think sometimes we forget that some of the things that are obvious to us may not be terms that even some of those customers talk about. So one of the things that I asked them to actually test out was instead of going to these, you know, customers and trying to and talking to them in language they don't understand, here's the one thing that some of those healthcare organizations do all the time is that when I asked them how they currently address the problem,
Bocar Dia (29:37.195)
The answer was that they basically hire contractors, so outside help, to basically address that problem. And I thought, why don't you tell them, you used to work at the leading RCM company, you know this space very well, you know the platform like the back of your hands, why wouldn't you just hire me?
or us, the founding team, to help address this issue for you and see what they say. A week later, they reached out saying, these guys are now open to the conversation. And here's the thing that you don't realize when you're doing this is that these organizations hire contractors all the time. And if you're hiring a contractor, it's a very different procurement path than if you're trying to adopt a new solution. And remember, the customer doesn't actually care about your solution. They actually care about the problem.
being solved. And from a venture standpoint, by the way, for founders that are listening to this, what I actually want validated is that you're working on a problem that's important and acute enough that the customer is willing to pay you money to solve it.
Meaning that even if you did it as a service, but as part of that service, you're building a solution to actually help deliver on the problem. I don't actually care in the early, early stage, whether that's recurring revenue or not. What I actually want to validate is that you're working on something real, right? So very different kind of mindset because you wouldn't do that if you had an established product, because the product, the way you think you sell a product is that it's already built in a certain way.
and you basically buy the product before you get the value as a customer. Whereas a service works the opposite way when you think about it, right? You have a conversation, you scope out what needs to be true, and then as soon as you deliver on the value, you get paid. And I think it's a much better way to actually validate things in the early stage and trying to do things the other way.
Harrison Faull (31:47.235)
Awesome. Wow. No, that's really good. Making it easy for your customer to say yes, so repositioning the messaging from I'm a design partner, which is concept they might not understand, to becoming a contractor, something they do regularly, something they know how to do, something they already have systems in place to facilitate, makes a lot of sense. So that's, I feel like in my mind, that's very much refining your marketing and actually becoming an expert at selling.
And that's slightly different in my mind to product market fit when you're building product that is loved by the user so much so that you start being able to charge a very premium product. So have you got any examples of, and I really liked your phrasing of when you hit product market fit, you get pulled by a customer rather than you're trying to push your product onto the customer. Have you got any examples of when that transition has happened to any of the portfolio companies at the forum?
when they've started having customers pull them in a direction rather than both.
Bocar Dia (32:45.793)
Yeah, that's, let me maybe use, I'll give an example. One of our portfolio company called Doseform is a product where what they do is that they help you basically build a platform to help you basically run and manage a pharmacy with some automation and some agent workflows. Let me even touch on one thing that was maybe a little interesting about the founder as well and the initial kind of story.
where he already had a built platform. used to, so the Tochi, the founder, used to actually run his own pharmacy business, right?
He used to run his own business. And one of the things that was interesting about it, even his initial kind of marketing and how he was kind of reaching out to customers was that it was the typical kind of thing that you would do if you went and Googled how do you prospect and how do you reach out to customers and apply some of the things that you apply later in the later phases rather than the.
So he was having challenges connecting with customers, right? And was also having challenges really getting that pull that we're talking about because ultimately I don't know that we put our finger on exactly what was the thing that was the wow moment for them in terms of the platform. So first things first, we had to address the messaging, right?
And here's what I see founders tend to do in the in early stages is that like I said, they'll google and they'll have a perfectly okay message to send if you're a more established company, but it's a type of message that's not going to work if you're a small organization. So generally they'll send messages that kind of go something like this. know, Do you have problem x? We're building on a solution. We're building a solution to address it. Would love to talk to you perfectly reasonable, right? Except when
when you don't have a website or when you're a team of two, what happens is that customers go and take a look at you and right away think, these guys are early, I'm not gonna take this risk and then it's crickets, right? Remember what I said, he used to actually be an owner of this business. So he actually used to be the buyer.
of the solution that he's building, right? So we tweaked the messaging and the messaging kind of went a little bit more something like this where he would reach out and say, hey, I've been running, I used to own my own pharmacy and here are some of the challenges that I encountered at the time which prompted me to really want to build this platform, right? I don't have the experience of running a regional chain pharmacy like you do, but I want to make sure that we're building
a product that works, the right product for these regional chain pharmacies as well. Are you open to hopping on the phone? I've got some questions. Would love to talk to you peer to peer, understand a little bit more what, how those challenges kind of show up in your type of business, right? Very different message. When you listen to that, it doesn't actually matter that you don't have a product yet. You're going to go in and reach out and the right conversation with these guys, right? Because what you do initially is that you're seeking feedback and you're effectively catering to
they're at least trying to leverage your expertise as opposed to trying to really sell them a product.
Now that enabled us to really quickly home in on the actual value drivers. If I kind of go back to them, it's really showing how you can help that pharmacy business make money, save money, mitigate the risks that are inherent to the space that they're in and really dramatically improve the processes. And we're able to really go from a business that was doing just about, I think,
think under about 100k at the time to just a year later he's actually going toEnd year this year at a million in AR hasn't even raised a seed round yet by the way He's actually well to do that soon for those of you that are listening that are that are investors and also He recently signed a distribution deal with one of the largest This like drug distributors in the US. I'm not gonna mention them by name that opens up basically this this pipeline of 5,000 plus pharmacies that he can now sell to and and and really gothere. And here's going back to actually the question where you're asking about the poll. I think we use a lot of terminology, right, and I realized that I used it myself. But here's actually what he boils down to. I think the better way to think about product market fit is really to think about that one repeatable case study.that you can have. And I'm saying that on purpose because a case study really shows you what the problem was, but also what the impact of the solution was. Right. And if you're able to replicate that case study in such a way that you have customers that are really wowed by the product, it has to be kind of a hell yes type of, you know, vote on, you know, just the work that you did. I think that's the best way to attract other customers and really start creating that poll because what really attracts customers is them understanding that you're there to help deliver on the impact that they want to see. So goes back all the way to day one as a salesperson and the conversation with Sabrina at HBO, right? It was about understanding what the impact was and as soon as there is conviction that we are aligned and helping with that impact, then the customer is going to want to work with you. I know it sounds simple, but it should be simple.
Harrison Faull (38:40.389)
Yeah, it's definitely simple. So I have a question on the journey of getting there, the journey of getting to that message resonating. How many changes do you reckon like a founder should make to their marketing? Should it be every 10 outreach campaigns I do, every 10 customers I reach out to, I then change the messaging and I track it minutely. Is it something they should be changing daily, monthly? How focused should they be on making minute changes to the messaging?
Bocar Dia (39:09.909)
So the thing with prospecting in general and building pipeline is that generally you have to give it some time to really make sure that you've got enough of the data to give you a sense as to whether it's working or not, right? What I find founders do is actually that they change, tweak the messages too often.
Right. Or they will, you know, change things if it doesn't work for maybe, you know, 20, 25, different folks that they reached out to. But the reality of the situation is that, in order to really, because think of it as an experiment, right? Like when you're running an experiment, what you want to do is try it a certain way, same way every time, with, with a given amount of time so that you actually start getting, collecting data that kind of give you an understanding of how.
are progressing and then and only then do you decide whether to tweak it or not right so pointers that we give our founders is to really make sure that they're reaching out to at least a hundred contacts before forming an opinion about their messaging that they're also hitting up those contacts a minimum of three to five times because we all know how things work these days with with emails and other channels but more importantly I think what we do is that we really help them focus on
Having the right type of message for this stage that they're at so I go back to tochi right like the messaging was A sales message where it really should have been a i'd like to connect with you peer-to-peer to get your feedback on this thing that we're building type of message, right? So a lot of the times to answer your question what I find is that Founders actually tend to tweak things too much one thing that i'd say though caveat would be in the current environment of ai solutions and aisdrs and automation at
scale.
Bocar Dia (41:05.267)
I think outbound as a channel is starting to lose its luster a bit, right? The conversion on outbound is changing quite a bit. So we're starting to encourage our founders more and more to leverage their networks, getting in front of customers, to use things such as product at sales that we talked about at Hootsuite as an example, ecosystem led sales, partner led sales, and really building and leveraging their voice as a founder on platforms such
LinkedIn to talk about the things that they're trying to solve to attract people to them as well. So times are a little different these days when it comes to that but it's all about experimenting and finding the right bit for your own context.
Harrison Faull (41:50.012)
such tangible valuable insights for someone that's been there in the trenches hundreds of times before. Don't change it too fast, give it some time to work, but stay aware and stay aware of what you're actually trying to get at. Stay aware of the solutions that you're selling and if they're resonating with the customer. Awesome. Okay, so sticking on the theme of changing, what are some of the most innovative go-to-market strategies that you've seen?
500 investments. There must be some really incredible stories of new ways, new routes to market that you've seen at forum.
Bocar Dia (42:28.543)
So I'm actually going to take the other side of that. Here's what I'll say. Remember, we're focused mostly on early stage. So really what we're trying to do is help companies get to their first three to five enterprise customers that are paying them, right? Then get to the 30 so that they can be at maybe that $2.5 million AR so that they can go out and raise a Series A as an example, right?
I'm talking about 10, 30 customers. Here's one of my biggest pet peeves, actually, speaking of innovation in the early stage. I actually think that founders shouldn't really try to innovate too much with go-to-market in the early stage, or innovate at all. I'll talk to founders sometimes that...
well, at the very early stage, no customers yet, but they're using solutions such as, know, 11X, Clay, trying to reach out to folks at scale. And guess what? If you're doing something bad and using automation, you're just kind of doing something bad at scale, right? So what I actually try to do is get founders to really focus on the basics, right?
Don't even think about target market. Don't even think about target segment. Think about that target person.
that you think you want to build a case study for, if you think about it that way, right? And really go and find that one repeatable use case that you can focus on. So one of our portco companies, as an example called Psycho, is a company that basically enables you to basically manage and really kind of maintain your APIs and have the right documentation for it. They're leveraging AI for it.
Bocar Dia (44:19.739)
and.
When you think about the number of APIs out there, there's a ton of companies with APIs, right? So a ton of potential customers that they could have, right? So initially the conversation was in around the ICP and who they should target. And it was a very kind of broad definition of who they could reach out to. It's like folks with that have an API. I'm like, okay, well, we'll have to really kind of drill in there and understand who exactly, right?
about okay so this is the type of stacks that you might want to have and we really kind of went all the way to figuring out okay maybe it would be best to start targeting organizations that don't just have APIs but organizations that are in
verticals that are a little bit more challenging from a regulatory standpoint and where they had to have a certain approach to the data and the APIs that they currently had which kind of led us towards financial services, but we went even a level below that and identify specific types of stacks and specific type of engineering leaders that had people issues internally which led us to really selling some of the first enterprise contracts, right? So it's about really thinking about
I think we sometimes get fancy and it goes back to like the innovative thing. We think about all these like really fancy market research things that we could do. We build different personas that are just kind of these fictitious people, right? Ultimately, I think I want to urge folks to think more about just who's that target buyer?
user like name them ideally you have a person That was your first customer and you're trying to find that person again Right with the same use case and the same problem and that's kind of how I think you should really go about landing that first first off just kind of think of milestones as well like don't focus on just a number focus on just simple milestones such as You want to land your first paying customer? That's your goal, right? Once you land that first paying customer you want to find that same repeatable
case with three to five of them. That's the next goal, right? Once you are able to not just find that use case and you're able to really solve it in such a way that customers are delighted or getting an impact, then you can start maybe inching towards, let's go out, let's go and find others. Let's go find our first 10, then our first 30, right? Don't do this thing where you're trying to just put together this overall high level plan that actually has no
that's so high level that it's not actually connected to the reality of the ground because then you just end up floundering for a while as a founder thinking that you're doing something wrong but really you're just not focused enough.
Harrison Faull (47:15.886)
think this is more practical advice than most investors tend to give because if you're a VC, you're not interested in products that aren't scalable. You need to see 10x potential. A lot of people need to see total addressable market size of multi-billions of dollars. And going from the first customer, the first person, all the way up to a multi-billion dollar company.
You can't really, you normally can't map it out. Like the first idea is rarely the final idea that scales. It's playing in an exciting space and getting it really right that ends up becoming a rocket ship.
Bocar Dia (47:51.191)
I think there's two things that you're doing though at the early stage. And this is actually something that I think founders don't always kind of think about.
you are trying to validate that you're solving a real problem with a customer in such a way that it's acute enough that they're willing to pay you money for it, right? So you're validating that you're working on something real. But what I find that founders forget to do sometimes is to validate that there's enough customers that experience that pain point to actually justify your venture steel outcome, right? Now, I'm not saying that if the initial kind of use case is not a venture scale kind of wedge.
then know scrap it. There's ways to build multi-product, multi-market companies just like we did at HootSuite, but you kind of have to know that because in your pitch you're gonna have to convince investors that you're there to build a business that's gonna be generating hundreds of millions of dollars and generally you actually have to validate that before you go out and even.
a seed round as an example. you're not like the first thing that investors, well the two first things is the founder of course, but the market itself, you won't believe how many, what percentage of pitches we turn down mostly because the market story is not there.
Harrison Faull (49:12.559)
That's really, really interesting. Have you seen any large pivots, any companies that thought they were going after one particular type of customer and then actually through more research, through a bit more time in the market have found that actually they should be selling to someone completely different?
Bocar Dia (49:30.592)
Harrison, that's, that's kind of, that's kind of a daily occurrence for us, right? Like we're in the early phase and sometimes we'll work with founders are at the inception ideation stage. Right. So, here's what I would say. I think, you ultimately want to have this experimental approach as you're looking for that, kind of, for that, right fit, right. In terms of the problem and.
The way to kind of think about it is that you've got a few different experiments that you're running, right? If I think about go to market and building a playbook as a founder, it really kind of boils down to four things. It's having a clear idea of who your customers are, right? Define those customers, not in terms of, you know, your own thoughts in terms of what product you should build and so on, but define them in terms of what I said before, which is kind of the four ways in which you can deliver value.
based on a pain point that they have, and more critically, how acute that problem is, because that's kinda how you're gonna get to the right customers initially, because otherwise you'll run out of runway, right? So that's one. Have a clear idea of who your customers are.
Two is having a predictable and repeatable way to get in front of them. Right? Now that's going to look different based on who you're selling to. If you're selling to, you know, healthcare as an example, you'll find that you can send emails all you want, but it's going to be very hard to get in front of those guys unless you identify the right folks and the right conferences maybe that they go to so you can get in front of them. So it's going to be different for everybody. But what's critical is that you have a predictable and repeatable way to build that pipeline.
Then have a repeatable process to sell them. And I think what you have to focus on there is really building that one business case so that you're able to replicate it with additional customers because really I think the better definition of product market fit is really just having that repeatable business case. And finally having a repeatable process to deliver value to them.
Because if you think about it, if you have a clear idea of who your customers are, you have a predictable way to build pipeline, you have a predictable way to close pipeline, and you know how to deliver value to them, what else do you need? Right? Because then you can go and find other customers and basically do the same thing. Right? So the high level of how we think about things.
Harrison Faull (51:56.869)
the flywheel starts. Okay, awesome, thank you. I think for my final question, because I know time's running out now, I'd love to get an insight into the resilience and how you advise founders to handle bad days. Because being a startup founder isn't always that glamorous. Being a sales representative isn't always that glamorous. You can be the best in the world, but you're still going to have quarters where you miss your targets and it feels like the world's imploding and it's all your fault.
What kind of things, what kind of strategies do you suggest founders and sales reps actually do to retain their sanity and stay in there for the long haul?
Bocar Dia (52:36.159)That's a great question. So context first, I think in the current environment for most founders, what's true today is that there's more that you have to prove out in order to get that venture capital. Meaning that what used to be, you know, a team raising was just an idea, an initial mock-up or idea orMVP was maybe some design partners has now become a motion where VCs actually want to see customers converted into paying customers before you go out and actually even raise around, right? What that means is that now more than ever founders really, really stress about, know, what it's actually a much harder time to building, to be raising that capital. But I would say it's not actually a super hard time to be buildingproduct for different reasons. mean, I can get into AI and some of the things that are available today. But here's what I would say to answer that. I think the best way to keep your sanity as a founder of being in those shoes is to really make sure that you're living in two different planes, right? And what I mean by that is that one of the...One of the planes that you live in is kind of the short term kind of day to day milestone driven kind of motion. And I find that founders often think that they're in that plane, but they're not actually thinking in that plane the right way. And I'll expand on that in a sec. And the other plane is that you actually have to be thinking about the long-term here as well and the vision and really be driven by that passion to build that company or solve that problem you're passionate about so that you can generate hundreds of millions in revenue down the road. So that's kind of the cognitive dissonance a little bit. You live in the future, but you actually
have to live in like the second as well. Right. And I find that the best way to keep your sanity is to have a really clear sense as to where you're headed. So have a really strong vision, right. But then have really clear milestones that are immediate so that you can actually experience those small wins. Because if you don't have them, you're not going to be experiencing those small wins like, or at least if you're not deliberate about it earlier, what I was kind of pointing at is focus on just the initial milestones.
So number one is just like focus on getting to like that first kind of pilot then focus on just getting to that first converted pilot then focus on getting to like the first three, five paying customers. And then you move beyond that. I find that a lot of times founders forget what they're actually accomplishing along the way. And it's very easy to forget when you're in this, you know, I don't want to go back to the founder mode meme, but we're in this founder mode.
day in and day out, just remember to really break it down into small steps, small milestones, be very pragmatic. And I think that's kind how you keep your sanity.
Harrison Faull (55:44.221)
I really like that, I've never heard that actually explained before, but it makes a lot of sense, because day to day there's a lot of setbacks, there's a lot of draw, there's a lot of rejection, there's a lot of problems that you've got to deal with, but actually being mindful of the progress over a month, over a week even, and that you're heading in the right direction gives you that resilience, gives you that confidence that actually what you're doing is right in these small sets.
Well, look, thank you very much for your time, Bokar. I think that was one of the best episodes we've had on go to market and strategies and how to set up sales in the early days for startups. I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
Bocar Dia (56:26.709)Glad to help. You can find us at forumvc.com or I'm pretty easy to find. Bocar Dia, Bocar, last name DIA. Hit me up on LinkedIn if you're building something cool.
