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How’d You Get That Number?! is the show that asks B2B SaaS leaders one simple question: where did that goal actually come from?
Hosted by Daren Ladua and brought to you by Outset, each episode unpacks how career-defining KPIs, revenue targets, and growth goals were set in the first place and what happened next.
If you're building go-to-market teams or chasing big numbers, this is the real story behind the metrics.
Sean Vasillaros (00:00):
I've hired some real doozies. I mean everything from, they're not good at their job or not a good culture fit to toxic, to fraudulent, to litigious. It made me wonder and question, what do I wish I knew about these people before I hired them? And I wish I knew that they had integrity or that they were accountable for their actions or treated others with respect. And that's where Candy was born. It was like, how do we figure this stuff out and how do we do it in a verified and in a repeatable way?
Daren Lauda (00:27):
You are listening to How'd You Get That Number brought to you by Outset This is the show where B2B SaaS leaders break down the real stories behind the goals, KPIs and revenue targets that shaped their careers and how those numbers were set in the first place. I'm your host, Daren Lauda. Hey everybody. Welcome to this episode of the show. Really excited to be with Sean Vasillaros today. I want to make sure I say that right. As a big last name, Sean is the co-founder and CEO of a company called KANNY during this episode. I've got to tell you, it's really cool. I've had the opportunity to watch Sean and the team work on it over the last year, seen big changes, and the app is awesome. I put my name into it, I saw my results. You should do the same when the time comes, but Sean's got a lot of things going on. I dunno if I should call you a Renaissance man, Sean or what? You're the chair
Sean Vasillaros (01:20):
Stretch the
Daren Lauda (01:20):
Board stretch, yeah, yeah, but go ahead. Renaissance men are stretched too thin. Those are one and the same these days. They totally, he's the chairman of the board of our rescue fighting human trafficking. He's a teaching at universities like Lehigh. He's a Penn State football fan, which is tough this year. You have my sympathy. I'm a Clemson football fan. We're having a very similar season.
Sean Vasillaros (01:41):
Thank
Daren Lauda (01:41):
You. But really happy to be talking to you today and to have you on the show. I know I introduced you already, but please tell us about yourself and what you're up to.
Sean Vasillaros (01:49):
Yeah. Hey look, first of all, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to talk to you and your audience and it's been great to get to know you and build a relationship. I'm really impressive what you're doing over there at outside. So a couple of thoughts. My background is in technology, entrepreneurship, building businesses. My last company, we built a SaaS platform that automates remote clinical trials, heavily regulated high science, high tech, and we exited, sold that to private equity in 2019. It's funny, we built a career trying to convince people they needed a remote strategy in clinical trials. And then we sold in 2019 and COVID hit early 2020 and everyone's like, we need a remote strategy in clinical trials. And so just kind of exploded from there and it was great. But the last kind of few years I've been really focusing on the startup candy that you talked about, and I think we get to talk about that a little bit later. But really just working on some personal and professional development and working on some passion projects that I really enjoy. A father of four married to an most amazing woman live here in Orange County, but I'm from Philly originally, so Go Birds.
Daren Lauda (02:56):
There you go. Your Eagles are having a tough time too. I'm sorry. This is a bad way to start the episode. I
Sean Vasillaros (03:01):
Apologize. It's been a bad couple of weeks, but that's okay. Hey, you know what? There's always next
Daren Lauda (03:05):
Week. Yeah, you knocked my rams down, so at least you got that under your belt again this year. Take it, repeat. Yeah. Super cool. Well, let's talk about Kenny a little bit. First. I have a feeling that's where the conversations going to going. We start talking about numbers. One of the things that I love about KANNY, but I hate about the recruiting process is trying to really understand how you get a reference or a quality review of a candidate and you're trying to solve that with can. Do I have that right? Yeah.
Sean Vasillaros (03:31):
I mean, it comes from a background of having hired, I've hired so many people and I've hired some real doozies. I mean everything from they're not good at their job or not a good culture fit to toxic, to fraudulent, to litigious. I've seen the gambit and it made me wonder and question, what do I wish I knew about these people before I hired them? And I wish I knew that they had integrity or that they were accountable for their actions or treated others with respect. These kind of value-based behaviors that you just can't get in the interview process. And that's where Candy was born. It was like, how do we figure this stuff out and how do we do it in a verified and a repeatable way?
Daren Lauda (04:12):
That's really cool. So you're seeking ways to ensure that people have integrity, accountability, and a level of respect for others. You're right. That's hard to interview for
Sean Vasillaros (04:23):
And
Daren Lauda (04:23):
I love those descriptors. So KANNY reaches out to your potential employment candidates network basically and has them score. Is that right?
Sean Vasillaros (04:32):
Yeah, so with the candidate's consent, it's all done with consent. Our system predicts who you used to work with and we reach out to them and we ask them a series of questions and those that are willing to participate, we take that information, we aggregate it, we wait it through our algorithm, and then we create some insights that a employer can view, but also the candidate gets to review. So this is an opportunity for self-reflection and professional development. Look at how others see you for real, not under the guise of anonymity, but verified. What do people think of you and how do you show up at work? And I think that's super valuable information. Everyone says they want feedback, here we
Daren Lauda (05:12):
Go. Here's some good stuff. I went through the process and I found it very insightful and very real. It didn't try to make me look awesome where I wasn't. We've all done a survey for a friend where we gave them 10 out of 10 on everything, and we knew it wasn't true. We've all probably done one for someone we didn't like. Somewhere you give some lower scores than you might've otherwise, or a vendor or product. I thought the results that came back were really very real, very usable, and I could see hints of people across multiple jobs and places I'd been. I thought it was really, really cool. I'm a big fan and what I wanted to click into now, and we could talk more about it as we go, but here you are, big exit PE clinical trials, and then you say, I'm going to start Cammi. It's going to kind be me and a co-founder. Yes. And man, that's a big swing. So talk about the big hairy number or goal you attached to that for yourself and let's dig into that.
Sean Vasillaros (06:08):
As a startup, sometimes your numbers are two and sometimes your numbers are four. And so kind of what we found is we set one massive goal, which was kind of a fundraising goal for friends and families, and we said, Hey, let's go and try to raise a million dollars friend and family. We hit about almost 800 K of that, which I'm really excited about. And the way we did that really was having an idea that we believed in assembling a team and saying, Hey, here's a need. And it's a need that was built from personal experience and it's a need that those of you guys who are listening, like you probably can relate to this. You've either hired or worked with people that were questionable integrity, questionable respect, and wish. You probably had a way to give that feedback and wish you had a way to know about that going in.
(06:53):
And so it's a real need. And so we found people that were willing to, I mean, it's a lot of work, trust me. It's a lot of phone calls and it's a lot of putting ego and pride to the side and just make the call and ask for the money and get people to believe in you. And we found that that people did. And so we had a lot of good reactions going down that path. And then we took that money and built a very viable MVP and we went through some beta testing after about a year of development and iterating and going back and forth, we went through beta, and this is another audacious goal out of beta. We had a list a mile long of the things that our potential customers would want that we needed to add in order to make this product ready to go to market. We had the indicators that people would really like this and would really use this, and our pricing was about right. We had all these indicators, but to get the technology to market, it was going to take a year of development time and at our budget, at our size, at our velocity of development and engineering, it was going to take about a year and raising more money. And
Daren Lauda (07:57):
So just to double click so far, you're a year into this.
Sean Vasillaros (08:00):
Yeah, yeah.
Daren Lauda (08:01):
You did $800,000 raise across friends and family. The goal is a million, but 800 is fantastic. Yeah, very, very happy with that. You've got a year into it and you're like, awesome, something's great, but there's another year to go, another year to go. Oh, wow, okay.
Sean Vasillaros (08:16):
And you know how it is. I mean, everything's three to four times longer or slower than you want it to be, and that drives me nuts. I know what we're capable of. I know what I want to do and I know all of these things, but being realistic to do this right and bring it to market the right way, it was going to take that kind of time. I made the decision actually prompted by my head of product. She said, Sean, listen, you need to go and look at what's happening in AI right now in code development. I said, nah, look, we spent a ton of money. We spent a year, we've got a moat, right? We've got a team that knows what they're doing. And she was very wisely. She said, Sean, go take a look. A look. Your moat isn't what you think it is. And I did. I took a look and what's happening right now in AI code development is absolutely insane. And so we tinkered around with it a little bit, and in three days I was able to build a working prototype of everything I wanted it to be, and it was our MVP. It was like 10 x the features and 10 x the capabilities and 10 x the data and the insights. I'm like, whoa. And most importantly, all the control Three days. Yeah, three days to build a protocol. Sorry. Yeah, that was it. Wow.
Daren Lauda (09:31):
And
Sean Vasillaros (09:31):
Not knowing a ton, I was like, oh, now that I built the prototype, if I needed to make this for real, it could take me three weeks. It took six. So in six, six and a half weeks of heads down, straight up just dealing with AI code development, some people call it vibe coding. We rebuilt our platform and got it ready for market, and we launched it six weeks later. So this timeline that we thought was a year, we turned it into six, eight weeks for additional testing, and we were able to go live. We launched back in Labor Day a little over a month ago, and it's like, it's mind blowing. As I walk my investors, as I walk, my advisors and all the people that have been on this journey with me, every one of them cannot believe how quickly we were able to take this MVP and turn into a market ready product. So for me, we shrunk a year down to six to eight weeks. I think that's a number.
Daren Lauda (10:28):
That's amazing. It's such a cool story. In fact, two thoughts popped into my head right away from my perspective. I found that outset about two years ago, two and a half years ago. And if I was starting the today, I would do it totally differently. I'd behave like you did. It's amazing how fast things have changed and to play it back for people who are listening, there's a year long process to get to Point a. Point B was, let me play with lovable for three days. Wait a minute, I can do it in three weeks, took six. But now we're six weeks and three days to have the product where you want it. Talk about a compressed cycle. Was that just you doing it all or were there other people coding with you?
Sean Vasillaros (11:08):
So I have a founding engineer who was super helpful through the process. We were learning together. And so I leaned on him heavily for things like deployment and security. These are things that are going to continue to get better and evolve, but we didn't want to just have, we wanted a more complex development staging and production environments, and those are things that he was super instrumental in. And then managing all of our multiple databases, it was super helpful. But when he came to feature development, as a founder, I know what product inside and out. Now I know every aspect of how it works. And when I'm talking to a customer, I can tell 'em what they can do and what they can't do. And that power as a founder is so I think unique. Even at last company where we built this massive product, I didn't know it inside and out and intimately. I know this and it helps me sell. It helps me build, it helps me build my roadmap. If a customer says, Hey, we need this thing. We wish we could do this thing, we could have that in three days. That's the kind of turnaround times that we have now, which is just insane.
Daren Lauda (12:14):
I love it because I was thinking about building an app. You've given me great coaching on it already. I appreciate all the help there. I built it once and lovable. I'm going to redo it. But my starting point was I'm going to write a PRD, write this big long 30, 40 page document that one other person would read by the person who's write the code around it. I would hand it off to he or she and a small team and $150,000 three months later, I'd have something that isn't what was in my brain but was translated as well as it could be.
(12:43):
And now when you use tools like Lovable and there's others, I'm not trying to sell lovable. We're not sponsored by lovable, but you can get from idea to wireframe, so fast flows, all those kinds of things and then build more behind it. It's fantastic. And for me, it went from what I thought was going to be PRD plus three months to get to an MVP. I wasn't going to like and 150 K. It's now me working on it myself. In fact, I just took the PRD that I started writing uploaded and said, Hey, lovable, get started. And boom, I was off to the races
Sean Vasillaros (13:16):
And here's the mind blowing part. This is the worst it's ever going to be. You give this a year and you're not just going to upload your PRD and say get started. You can be like, just let me know when you're done. That's what's going to happen, and it's going to talk you in and out of things like, Hey, you're thinking about it this way. Have you thought about it this way? And it is just going to really change the way things are done. And you mentioned, I teach at Lehigh University. I teach a capstone class, four engineers, and one of the things I've been leaning in on them is since I've learned this about ai, they're learning the traditional process, right? It's like it's agile, which is great, but they're like, Hey, give us the requirements. We're going to go do the requirements, functional requirements, so we do functional specs, so we're going to proof of concept, and then we're going to get back and forth, and then we're going to need ui, and then we're going to build the back.
(14:03):
It's a very laborious process. And for my classes, I said, let's try lovable. And actually the reaction has been, no, thank you. Right? We're going to do it these ways. And this is not an educational class. It's more like a capstone where you apply things. And I said, listen, here's the deal. Your ability to be an engineer the way you think, the way you've mapped out and learned how to engineer an application, plus lovable gives you a superpower. A superpower. The rest of us schmucks out here don't have that gift that you have, and we're hacking our way through it. It takes us six to eight weeks. It's going to take you five days to do something even better. So learn it now. And they're embracing it, and I feel like that's given to give them actually a huge step when they go to finding and build their careers.
Daren Lauda (14:52):
That's funny. Those are engineers who were resistant to the idea.
(14:56):
Yeah, I was resistant to the idea at first. I had heard about Lovable or Revit or a few other things. Is that Revit? I'm saying it wrong, I think. And then I was talking to the CTO of a company. I'm doing some consulting for now, and he said, use lovable or some other tool. I said, well, which one's easier for the ultra novice? Go with lovable and boom, the next thing I'm building prototype. So if it could make a novice like me more productive, the engineers you're teaching, that should hopefully propel them forward really, really
Sean Vasillaros (15:23):
Rapidly. Well, and they're staring down
Daren Lauda (15:25):
The disappearing
Sean Vasillaros (15:26):
Of the entry level engineer,
Daren Lauda (15:29):
Right? Yes.
Sean Vasillaros (15:29):
And so my second point of advice would learn the tech and learn AI so that you could get to senior faster. That's point number two, get to senior faster. There's not going to be a natural path for you because a lot of these entry level jobs are getting taken by ai. You've got to find a way to get as senior as possible, so self educate and get there quickly.
Daren Lauda (15:51):
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(16:37):
Yeah, I sat through a session with an entity, large public company. I won't name them because I might misattribute the quote, but the CEO had made a really fantastic prediction for his company. He said, today we are 7,000 employees. This is a very large entity. He said, within five years, we'll do the work of 7,000 people with the same 7,000 employees, massive scale that's coming from this. And this is all outsourced development. So you're going to have to use the AI tools because that implies that one person is doing the work of 10 within five years. That's right. It's a big, big change. Right. Hey, so we're talking a lot about AI and development, which is fun, but let's go back to candy for a second.
Sean Vasillaros (17:17):
Yeah.
Daren Lauda (17:17):
You launched on Labor Day, you've now got your product ready to go to market. What numbers do you think about day in, day out when you think about trying to get things going? And I ask this because you and I, as founders and CEOs, we can think about, well, I have to be a million or 2 million or 5 million a run rate on this timeline, but we're also generally the SDR R and the AE and everything else. That's right. So what numbers do you use to manage forward progress every day, week, or month right now as you're working towards that goal?
Sean Vasillaros (17:47):
So for me, we just got our three paid customers and we've got about 10 customers in our trial, which is great. So my goal is to have 10 paid customers by the end of October. And actually, I'll take a step back. In my world, your horizon is very short. I'm not thinking a year from now, because a year from now doesn't matter. A hundred things are going to change from then. So my goals are all like 30 day goals. It's number one, I want 10 paid customers, I want 30 people on trials. I want to contact 10 people a day. When I say contact, that's everything from follow up emails. This isn't my lead gen, this is follow up emails, it's follow up calls and demos. And so those are the kinds of metrics that I use right now to try to push this forward because really our metrics are about usage. I need to get X number of people using this X number of reports generated. The other metric is X number of days to actually create a report. So these are metrics that I'm using that are more operational to make our product better. And as we hit those metrics, then the product itself becomes better and it has a built-in network effect to be able to help us grow exponentially.
Daren Lauda (19:00):
I love this part of the discussion. I think that people, it's easy to romanticize an entrepreneurial journey. We can all see Mark Zuckerberg go from Harvard dropout to gazillionaire overnight. That's the way it looks. But there's this part of the race right now where you as a co-founder and CEO are like, okay, how many people did I talk to today? How many meetings did I have? How many meaningful conversations did I have? That's what leads to users in the application, which leads to the dollars in the door. At the same time, you're wearing this other hat of, okay, how fast can I deliver a report? You're doing the product components too. You could drown in metrics. You could think about 25 things at a given time. Do you try to limit the number you think about, or is it like a bing, bing, bing in your head? Three. Okay,
Sean Vasillaros (19:43):
Three. I go for three. And one's usually product two is sales. There's other metrics that we probably have when we talk through and our platform tracks, and I'll use them as needed. How many reports, how many reviews, how many, those kinds of things. But the things I care about, those three, one product, what's happening in my roadmap that customers are waiting for and how quickly we turn those around. Number two is are we getting the touch points a day? And number three, can we get those? The sales and trials per month that we're looking for
Daren Lauda (20:13):
Activity leads to dollars two and three. I love that for sure. And the product components as well. So let me ask you this, do you sleep all at night or are you up all night long? Is your mind spinning on these things all day long?
Sean Vasillaros (20:24):
So it really depends on the day, because during the day I'm selling, I'm on demos, meetings, communications. I'm also having to be an influencer. So I'm creating tons of content for LinkedIn, which is something I'm super uncomfortable doing. But you have to do, right? You're a solopreneur. People want to see what's going on out there. So I spend the days that and the nights working on fixing tech, building tech. And so sometimes I get four hours of sleep and sometimes I get 10. It usually is about four to six, which is a good healthy amount for me
Daren Lauda (20:53):
For right now. That's great. Is there anything unique you do to manage your day? Do you separate selling activity from product? Do you time block or how do you keep that whole flow going? Or is it just I fill my calendar with what's there and I do it as I go?
Sean Vasillaros (21:07):
Yeah, that's a good question. One of the things I've always coached my teams on is, listen, everyone is spinning too many plates. You just are the thing. The difference between success and failure is being deliberate about which ones drop. You're going to drop some plates. It's just going to happen. Be deliberate about those ones. And so that's what I kind of do every day. I have my list and I look at the things that absolutely have to get done. And if I get them done, that's fantastic. And there are things that I deliberately say, I'm just not going to spend time on that. I'll figure out a way to clean that up later. So because my horizon is so short, it's just hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle every day. I'm not doing anything specifically around time management to break up my day. It just goes.
Daren Lauda (21:48):
I love that concept though. I've heard it referred to as being consciously negligent. There are things I'm going to consciously be negligent about today because there's not enough time. There's not enough time. We're going to do things that matter and let the others slip. I find myself doing that a lot. I'm trying to figure out a time block. This area is for sales, this area is for follow up, this area is. But when you're in that founder mode and you're trying to get the sales meetings, and that's one of the big three you're chasing.
Sean Vasillaros (22:10):
That's right.
Daren Lauda (22:11):
You're going to take whatever sales meeting you can get whenever it's available, and that's always going to be in the place. So then how do you find the time to also do the philanthropic work you love to do?
Sean Vasillaros (22:21):
One of my gifts I've been given is I'm really good at compartmentalizing. And so you talked about it earlier in context switching. I'm able to compartmentalize and context switch pretty quickly. So the beauty of the philanthropic work is that it scales. There are weeks when I'll spend 20, 30 hours on it, seriously, and there are weeks and I'll spend 30 minutes. And so it goes just back to that being deliberate in what you're working on or what you're going to drop. The good thing is I've got a great team, and this has kind of been my MO from day one and everything that I do is my job is to build up a great team and make me irrelevant. And with the nonprofit, it was a turnaround. It was, I needed to come in there and it was really struggling and had a lot of really good solid foundation, but just gone through some massive challenges.
(23:07):
And so the first thing I did was build a team and get that team up to speed and build out a board. And we were able to, now that team is in place and is able to do everything that needs to get done, and now I'm just helping make decisions and giving guidance and advice as opposed to day-to-day transactional stuff. And so that's kind the same model in my startup is I've got a great team and delegating that work out to them and helping them get better and better. That's really kind of for me, that the secret make myself irrelevant.
Daren Lauda (23:36):
I love that idea. Make myself irrelevant. I challenge people who work for me generally that there has to be a little bit of scale in the organization, but the concept is if you aren't building a successor who can replace you, it's harder for me to promote you.
Sean Vasillaros (23:51):
Exactly.
Daren Lauda (23:53):
And so many people get caught up and if I build and somebody can replace me, I'll lose my job. That's not the concept. If you can show that you can build teams like that, you can leave at scale. I promise you the people almost to a T who work for me are better than me. They're probably smarter and faster than me. It's all about building that team and getting them in and helping them win. And I love it. One of the customers I'm consulting with right now has a wonderful woman on the product team who we use a lot of the times in pre-sales. I doubt she'll hear this, but I'm not going to use her name, but the leadership team says, we're going to be working for her someday. She's that good, she's that good. And when you build teams like that, your life becomes easier. You can build cooler stuff, and that's how your customers get real joy because you've got this real team building really cool stuff. That's exactly
Sean Vasillaros (24:40):
Right. And I've been a big fan of, like I said, of building people. There are some out there that are like, oh, I don't want my team to be better than me. That's the wrong approach. I actually read a post somewhere. It's like I talked to a recruiter today and I told them that job that they were talk trying me get wasn't for me, but I said, look, you should call my boss because he's perfect for it. And the recruiter said, well, why do you want me to call your boss and have him take this job? The only way I get promoted is if he leaves. I was like, how genius is that? And so I like the idea of building a team that wants your job because that's the only way that you can move up.
Daren Lauda (25:16):
Exactly, exactly. I love that too. Cool. Really good conversation. We're getting close to the end of the half hour. I always like to have a final question. This is stolen from another podcasts. Somebody's going to call me out at one of these days, but it's basically in the world of being a founder or startup tech, what's the one thing that we aren't talking about enough that we should be, in your opinion?
Sean Vasillaros (25:37):
Yeah, I mean, mine's going to go back to something that is kind of foundational to why I did this and why I'm doing Candy Can is all about character and identifying the value of high character leaders, high character employees, and the return on character. And so for me, I realized I've been very introspective about this. I can tell you I haven't always acted with character. There are times when I made terrible decisions or done the wrong thing and probably even deliberately. And so the thing that I would urge the audience to think about is your character actually will drive your success, right? We've read Study After Study where it's like a person's character is one of the most important indicators of performance and success. And knowing that it's like, do not compromise and make it top of mind. Help develop the character of your team, help hold people accountable to doing the right thing every time. If you have a high performer that's got low character, that's ruining your culture, it may be looking good on the bottom line. It is not helping your company grow. And it's just proven time and time again. And so my statement is, put character kind of at the forefront of making your people decisions.
Daren Lauda (26:53):
If you take nothing else from this episode of this show, there's a new metric that needs to live in your brain. How you write it down, what sheet you put it on, I don't know, but return on character. That's a great way to think as a business leader about who you're going to hire and who you want on your team. If they're hard on culture, there's lots of things to think about, but I can now look and say, wow, from this person, what's my return on character? I wish I could find an app that can measure that. That should be a feature for candy sometime in the future.
Sean Vasillaros (27:18):
One day. One day.
Daren Lauda (27:21):
Cool. Sean, I've really enjoyed the conversation. Where can people find you? Where can they find KANNY?
Sean Vasillaros (27:25):
Okay. KANNY is KANNY with a K. So KANNY with a C means making smart business and financial decisions. We added a K to make it kind of techy, so KANN y.com. And reach out to me on LinkedIn or Sean, sean@kanny.com.
Daren Lauda (27:41):
Follow Sean on LinkedIn. He's putting good content out there. Try his application. It's awesome. I've tried it. I love it. I'll be a user here soon as I get more people on board. Sean, thanks again for your time. I look forward to seeing you out around Orange County. Awesome, Daren, thank you for having me. This was a blast. That's it for this episode of How'd You Get That Number? Make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Daren Lauda. Thanks for listening. See you next time.