Andy Kim
Appearances
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah, that's what we're really trying to solve for is what is the repeatable marketing funnel that works for us, right? We've tried outbound email. We've tried, you know, Google AdWords, of course. We've tried all the different kind of playbook items, and we're still really searching for what is the best example. that says I can put in X amount of effort and time and money resulting in Y leads.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
That part of the funnel we have not yet solved for yet. And that's part of the journey that we're on.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah, I agree. This is actually a common topic for our TinySeed masterminds group, actually, of, okay, we have a product that we think is working now. How do we reach the right people at the right time? And I think that's actually some of the value in the community as well, right? Because
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
I mean, I just use a Slack channel all the time to ping people and be like, hey, we're thinking about trying this. We are doing this. And just people that have been on that journey before, it's just super helpful to get all of their thoughts.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah, so I have been interested in my own startup for the longest time. I can't even begin to tell you how long it's been. And part of the problem was, how do I stand something up, right? How do I get the first customer? How do I get the first product out the door? How do I get first interest? And that to me was a big enough barrier that it felt like diving off the deep end, right?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
What ended up happening was I've been looking for businesses to buy on various marketplaces. And one that came across for me on Quietlight was John's business, this Trotto business. And John's part of the story is really he built this thing to be sustainable. But he has a full-time job as a software engineer. And this business just wasn't getting enough care and attention that it needed.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
And admittedly, he probably stubbed his toe with other partners in the past. But with me buying in, it's a real capital commitment to growing this thing. And I think at the end of the day, what mattered the most and continues to matter the most to us is the level of trust that John and I have built over the last... year plus of, Hey, John, like I'm taking care of his baby basically, right.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
His, his company and taking it forward. And he's, you know, there as support on, you know, critical issues that he has the experience and knowledge about. Right. And it's actually worked out better than I could have really imagined for, I think both of our cases. And it's something that I'm super happy about and, and, and, Excited that it's kind of turned out the way that it has.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Through Quietlight, the broker.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah, I think at the time I also wanted to acquire the full business. But in conversations, as John and I built trust, I think John wanted to retain a certain percentage. And in retrospect, it was probably the right outcome for both of us to kind of make sure that our incentives were aligned. Right. So he's still involved with the business. Yeah. I mean, we used to catch up every week.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
It then turned into every two weeks. Now it's on a monthly basis. But yeah, I ping him all the time on Slack and bother him with questions. And yeah, it's been great.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
I don't have a moment, but it is the general feeling of not knowing what the right answers are, right? Like you go to school and you're like, okay, I got an A or B on that test, right? You go to work and you're like, okay, I know I'm doing well or I'm not doing well. You know what the company's doing, but you're a smaller part of it.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
When you're at the size of company that we are, and it seems like at times we're flailing in a large ocean of everything else that's going on, the real question is, how do you know what your North Star is? How do you know that you're making progress against that? And how do you try to figure out the basic problems of going from basically nothing to a company with processes and with people and
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
with all of that. So I think the general frustration of the question is, is all of the effort that we're putting together on this thing worth what we think it's going to be worth? That's the real kind of crux of the problem. And into all of the various methodologies and end up with nothing, right? This is not a game where you're guaranteed results.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
And I think that general kind of frustration is the toughest part of this entire journey.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Definitely. The uncertainty, though, also makes it a little bit more fun when things do go your way and you do figure it out. And truly, I think that we would have some difficulty if it wasn't for the TinySeed community, just like being able to call you or call Einar or the mastermind group that we have. It's just super helpful to be like, okay, I'm not in this alone.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
And here's how we're all going to kind of get through it together.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
That's a good question. So most people probably have not heard of a Go link, but the way to think of it is a URL shortener. The consumer version of this is bit.ly or tiny URL, but Go links specifically only work for people within the same organization. So whereas you would use bit.ly to shorten our URL for like marketing purposes to the general public, where anyone can click on that link.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
GoLinks only work if you and I work at the same company and the purpose is really to share resources between each other.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah. And if you remember, Rob, when we were actually interviewing for TinySeed, you were questioning why do companies even pay for this, right? It's an interesting phenomenon. But the reality is this is a what I call like enterprise software tool that works independently. The larger the company is, the larger the problem becomes. So there's really three use cases.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
I'd say company-wide, team-wide, and then individual use. But the way that we break it down between those three, sometimes there's good overlap. But really the fundamental problem is, hey, Rob sent me a resource three months ago, and I don't remember where he sent it. Email, Slack, he might have told me over... a video conference.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
But GoLynx basically helps you remember where to go because it's a human readable link most of the time that's a lot easier to recall.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
We don't store or host anything. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. And actually you would just type in go slash Anar's file and that would be it. You don't even have to do the tiny seed portion. Yeah.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah, this was started back in the early to mid 2000s at Google. We actually have a very cool kind of interview with a couple of the people that started this at Google on our website. You can check that out. But basically, folks at Google were asking to set up these redirects So they would say, hey, I have a holiday party I'm planning for all of Google.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
It's really hard to communicate this to 10, 20, 50,000 people. And it's going to be go slash holiday party 2007, for example. And they just communicate that to Google. And these engineers were setting up these redirects internally for Google. And they thought, let's set up a service for this so that anyone can just self-serve themselves.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
And what ended up happening was as this just exploded in popularity at Google, folks left Google. They would go to LinkedIn or Netflix or any other large tech company and they would set the service up for themselves. And that's really what happened with John, my co-founder as well. He worked at Google, went to a startup, wanted GoLinks, set it up for them.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Other folks kept on coming back to him and asking him to set it up for their startup. And he's like, bang, idea. Let's make this a service.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
That's definitely it. We can see it in our user base. Depending on the company, there are 20-30% of users that use this more than five times a day. Anything that they're going to, they're using a Go link to get there. There are others that may be more like you who only use it once a month, if that. And it's because I as a power user sent you a link.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
But what we find is that the adoption rate of this within a company doesn't stop at 20 or 30%. It's like 70% average usage per month for all of the employees at a particular company once they've fully adopted this. It's a daily, weekly tool that folks use regularly. It just becomes part of your normal workflow. You don't look to bookmark things. You just know that a Go link exists.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
So think of it as a bookmark replacer. Think of it as a memory helper, all of that. Interesting.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah, we're profitable, which is great. We're six figures in revenue. The story generally is John built an awesome product. It stands up on its own. We have SOC 2 Type 2. We have a bunch of different services, including SSO. We have a Slack app.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
So all of the pieces are there that John built, but he was a classic founder who focused more on the product itself rather than a little bit more on the sales and marketing piece of it. And that's kind of where I come into the picture. And that's kind of where we are today, which is, you know, you'll talk about probably some of the issues that we may have.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
But that's the problem we're trying to solve for is how do we get awareness out there about what GoLinks are and also why Trotto is the best option for someone who is looking for GoLinks. And that's really, you know, the crux of where we are today.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah, I think if we were trying to get every company in the world to adopt GoLynx, that would feel like an impossible task, just like boiling the ocean. You're never going to be able to get the attention span of everyone out there to be able to do that. So that's not something that we really think about. We're trying to solve for, hey, folks that have already used GoLynx,
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
And you can pull folks that used to work at the Googles and Netflixes, the big tech companies of the world. And oh, they work at a new company now. And that becomes our ideal customer profile. These people probably have used GoLynx before. And in the best case scenario, they've loved GoLynx. I'll give you one example. We reached out to the CTO of a very large tech company, a Fortune 500 company.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
And they didn't have GoLynx and responded immediately to a very cold email outreach. And they have, I think, north of 10,000 employees. And it was an instant conversation. He was selling GoLynx to the other people on his team on that call. It was great. Now, we have to go and close that deal, right? And there's other considerations like budget and timing and all of this.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
But that's kind of the power of, hey, if you've used GoLynx before and it was part of your workflow, this is an easier sell than most. But the problem is if you haven't used GoLynx, then you fall into Rob Walling's world where you're like, why the heck would anyone buy this thing?
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
Yeah, I think what's exciting for us is that What we're seeing is, true, our target market continues to be technology companies, right? But there are non-technology companies, say in automotive, industrial, healthcare, government. And that is wide open greenfield opportunity for us.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
And they are, I would say, in a sense, starved of productivity tools like GoLynx that technology companies use every day and take for granted. DocuSign, CRMs are just one classic example of that. But there's so many other niche kind of productivity tools that if you work at a tech company, you're like, oh yeah, of course this works. Of course this works.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
And that kind of migration from technology companies to non-tech, we're seeing that live in our pipeline. And that's what I'm most excited about because... You're right. It'd be one thing if it was kind of slowly moving across tech companies. That'd be a slow kind of growing market. But because we have non-tech companies adopting this as well, that's kind of what I'm most excited about.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
For example, we have a nonprofit customer who said, truly, when new employees join and they use GoLynx, they were working at other nonprofit companies. before. Like this is, it's just magic. It's just, it just works. And that's kind of the magic that we're trying to achieve, not just that tech companies, but non-tech companies.
Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
I would agree. I mean, we have customers who have been with us for four or five years now and the companies are growing, which is great for us because again, we charge per seat. But we see the, hey, new people join the company, they start using GoLynx and it just expands the overall pie for us. And that's exciting for us. And that's what we're really trying to achieve.