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This podcast gets straight to the good stuff, providing real stories and proven strategies from the trenches of enterprise sales for tech startups and scale-ups.
In just 10 minutes and 3 questions, Vince Beese chats with Founders, CEOs, VCs, and execs to share raw insights and lessons on landing deals, finding market fit, and building scalable success.
Hey. I'm Vince Beese, the host of the Early Wins podcast. And on this show, we interview startup founders to uncover their secrets to success closing their first customers. During this 10 minute three question episode, you'll gain insights and lessons to help you land deals, find market fit, and chart your path to scalability. Our guest today is a good friend of mine, Robbie Allen, the cofounder of Bionic Health and a general partner at the Triangle.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show, Robbie.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Vince.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No problem. So the premise of this show is to share and enlighten our audience out there with things you went through as an early stage founder. But before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're up to these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I am currently the cofounder and CEO of Bionic Health, which is a preventative health company. We help people improve their health span or their ability to live healthier for longer, and, you know, we've been at that for a couple of years now, and it's going really well. Very excited about our progress there. Prior to that, I've started a few other startups.
Speaker 2:And so I've mostly been in the b to b SaaS world. But now with Bionic, it's kind of my first real more direct to consumer play.
Speaker 1:Cool. So you may have to go back a little bit for to answer this question, but what would what was the most memorable or or consequential deal that you guys did in the past that really helped move the needle for you guys as a first deal?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So at Automated Insights, this was 2010 to 2017. That was my first start up, and it was one of the first, if not the first, commercial generative AI companies. And so we were generating content, you know, millions of pieces of content a week and across a variety of different types of use cases, things like automated earnings reports. When a company would announce their earnings, we would automatically generate a story that summarized all of that.
Speaker 2:Well, the first, you know, maybe the the or at least the most consequential deal that we did in the early days was with Yahoo. And with that, we had this idea that, you know, where could we apply this technology in a in a place where people would want literally millions of of versions of a story. And that especially was true in the fantasy football world. You know, fantasy football, the really big online, you know, kinda area. There's a lot of data that's generated, and we figured if we could generate recaps of every fantasy matchup for every player, and there's literally tens of millions of people to play this, that would be big.
Speaker 2:So we went around to Yahoo, the NFL, ESPN, all the big fantasy football markets and told them about this new capability and and, you know, would they be interested in working with us to develop it? And Yahoo was the 1st big taker, and it was, you know, in in many ways, and this is kind of one of the sort of stories that I took away from it, is that it was in some ways lucky. And and that's how oftentimes, you know, with these early deals, you know, you could do all the right things. You could have all the right people in place, have all the right messaging, but it also, in many ways, you know, comes down to finding the right person at the right time. And so the head of Yahoo Sports at the time was a guy by the name of David Geller.
Speaker 2:And, we talked to him. He was great, forward thinking. We convinced him to do a deal with us, and it was just, you know, put us on the map and was really influential for us. And then he left the company, you know, maybe like 6 months after we had done the deal. And his successor you know, we'd already got the deal signed.
Speaker 2:His successor wasn't as big of a fan of us, but we'd already developed the solution, and it was wildly successful for their people, their customers. But the guy didn't really like us because he was more of like, we just develop it internally. And so the moral of the story is we you know, this hugely successful thing for us and also for Yahoo would have never happened if it had just been 6 months later and we didn't have David there and we had his successor in place. And so I think back to that, you know, again, it's a confluence of a little bit of, you know, good fortune on our end that that we just had the right person at the right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Timing is everything, isn't it? So follow-up question to that. Now think a little bit forward in this path that you're on with automated insights. What were the lessons you learned maybe, let's say, over your first 10 or 20 customers?
Speaker 1:Like, what were the challenges you were running into, and how did you fix them and address those challenges?
Speaker 2:Well, for us, the biggest challenge, and this is the case for especially any sort of bleeding edge technology vendor, is you have to educate the market. And early on, like I'm a technologist by training, right? I'm not a salesperson by training or, you know, by nature even. And so I'm all about creating cool technology. And like, can we create the most advanced technology you possibly can?
Speaker 2:And if you can do that, then you're differentiated and wow, there's not gonna be a lot of competition and all that sounds great to a technologist. But then once you get into the real world and you're trying to sell that, it's actually not so great because now you have to do something called educating the market. Anytime you gotta educate the market on your solution, there's friction and there's a barrier to entry. And what that means is you gotta convince the person you're talking to to kind of see the world in the way that you see it. And that's super hard because most people, they're just going by their day to day.
Speaker 2:They're inundated by different solutions coming at them. And the ones that they can easily understand and and resonates with them, those are the ones they typically move forward with. If you have to make them think and, like, try to understand, okay. Yeah. That's a new way of doing something.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, then maybe they have to convince other people internally, that's super hard. So another big takeaway from automated insights is that it's you know, while there's some advantages to having, you know, a technology that's very differentiated and new, it's also super hard because you gotta educate the market. And for all of those initial customers, you know, we were you know, now it's kind of taken for granted. Like, you know, of course, you can produce content automatically. Back then, we would give people, you know, sample output, and they would say, well, who wrote that?
Speaker 2:And we'd say, well, no one wrote it. It was our software generated it. And they're like, but somebody wrote the words. Right? I mean, software can't write words.
Speaker 2:And so it just became this kind of almost comical, you know, situation inside of every customer. It's like, no. Actually, software can write words.
Speaker 1:So you bring up a good point. You can enter a market that's already established, and you could be trying to compete against established players or be one of the players, or you can enter a new market that you're creating. I'm curious as an entrepreneur, as a founder, do you have a preference of which direction to go into?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, it it's funny because, like, all of the companies I've started have all been vastly different. Right? And partly just because I like doing new things periodically, and I like trying new challenges. You know, there's there's other entrepreneurs that I know that they were successful with the venture, and then they went on to their next one, and it was just rinse and repeat.
Speaker 2:And they went in and did the exact same thing. And, you know, they already knew the market. They'd already had the contacts, and they went on and, you know, were were successful that way. You know, again, I my curiosity has me wanting to do different things and learn new markets. But as an entrepreneur, it's way more efficient just to go in and repeat something that you already know really well.
Speaker 2:So I I think it's way easier to do something in an established market where you kinda know, know the market well than it is to try to, again, create a new market or educate on a new market. That's much harder.
Speaker 1:Making a better widget sometimes can be easier potentially. Right? Taking a slice of that big market can be easier. Yeah. I've I've been through both as well.
Speaker 1:So piece of advice to founders out there that are trying to land their first customers, what could you advise these folks on?
Speaker 2:So the advice is actually similar to how I think about audiobooks, oddly enough. And so there's been a couple audio. So I've listened to lots of audiobooks. I've been an audible.com subscriber since, like, 2004. I think I've listened to, like, 800 audiobooks.
Speaker 2:And hands down, the best audiobooks are read by the author. It's almost never the case. I don't care how, you know, like, unpolished the person is. It's almost never better read by someone else. It's always better by the author.
Speaker 2:And that's how I think about sales in the early days for a founder. It's almost always better for the founder to be leading the sales process until you've had those first ten customers or whatever. Thinking that you're just gonna bring somebody in and you can kinda pun on the sales question and leave it to them, that's almost always the wrong move. Now, again, not to say maybe you don't have somebody that helps you, but the founders founder or founders need to be involved in all of those early sales. I think that's the best way to get the product market fit.
Speaker 1:That's great analogy. By the way, is that true, by the way? Is that factual that authors that read their own audio have higher is there any kind of statistic that backs it up? Or is that just the first one? I've I've read, you
Speaker 2:know, a number of people have said similar things online. They're, you know, are in comments of of if you look at the books, a lot of the comments are like, oh, it was a good book, but the the you know, you you get these professional Yeah. Readers that they're fine. But, again, it's just much better to have it from the source.
Speaker 1:Awesome advice, Robbie. I I appreciate you coming on early wins today. Yep. Thanks for having me.