If there's something we all love, it's to root for david beating goliath.
And right now, there's a small team doing just that. Pylon, led by Marty Kausas, is going head to head with Zendesk.
Naturally, we asked Marty to share their playbook.
And right now, there's a small team doing just that. Pylon, led by Marty Kausas, is going head to head with Zendesk.
Naturally, we asked Marty to share their playbook.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (01:17) - The Motivation Behind Building Pylon
- (01:52) - The Journey to Becoming A-List
- (02:19) - Board Games and Strategic Thinking
- (04:16) - Targeting a Massive Market
- (09:46) - Building the First Product
- (11:42) - Competing with Giants
- (18:59) - Product Development and Marketing Strategies
- (26:35) - Embracing a Heavy Debate Culture
- (29:24) - Leveraging LinkedIn for Business Growth
- (38:22) - Scaling Sales and Hiring Strategies
- (42:31) - Navigating AI in Customer Support
- (47:59) - Reflecting on Business Learnings and Future Plans
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Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: What do you do if you're competing against a major public company?
[00:00:04] We are someone who's competing against Zendesk.
[00:00:07] Marty: we actually didn't think we could compete with Zendesk. Like we really didn't, we thought it was just like Salesforce. And like, you know, that saying, like, no one gets
[00:00:15] fired for buying Salesforce. It's like
[00:00:16] the same thing. Like you hire a VP of support and like, maybe startups will like you, but the moment they hire a VP, they're going to replace you with, you know, whatever incumbent solution. And yeah, we just learned over time that there were actually a lot of problems that Zendesk has
[00:00:29] Toni: That's Marty, co founder and CEO of Pylon, and he shares the playbook they use to win against Zendesk.
[00:00:37] Marty: The other thing that really worked out for us timing wise is that Zendesk, like the day after we had our initial idea, Zendesk was acquired by private equity.
[00:00:45] And like, this is like not this so well timed, obviously not planned. We can't take credit for like the foresight of that because it happened after we had the idea. Other a-listers as well. . That's what I meant to say. Sorry, .
[00:00:59] Don't worry. I I, by the way, I, we have a long way to go on our end. Like, I think we're great at marketing and we are great at being loud on LinkedIn, but you know, I, I would not say we're A listers yet. We're on our way though. I
[00:01:11] think that's
[00:01:11] yeah,
[00:01:12] Mikkel: What is, yeah, I,
[00:01:13] Toni: I think
[00:01:13] Mikkel: you're on the way. When are you an Alister? When do you know? I'm cu I'm asking for me, by the way.
[00:01:17] Marty: yeah, no, I mean, so, so our goal is founders and the, you know, when we think about building Pylon, it really feels like this gigantic, really complex board game. It's like the hardest board game in the world.
[00:01:27] And our motivation is actually. This might surprise people just purely for fun. It's like, we, we've so romanticized the idea of building a company by like, you know, watching movies, seeing our friends try it, like just being an SF that it was like, damn, like we kind of have to go on that adventure.
[00:01:44] Like that, like you can't, you only hear about it so many times before you're like. You, you just can't not and so that, that's actually the motivation for us.
[00:01:52] And when Robert Abbott and I started working together and this was not like the first idea or first startup that, that we'd worked on we said, okay, what's the end goal?
[00:02:00] And the end goal was, Hey, let's go for a really big company and let's try to get there really quickly. So we said, let's try to build a 10 billion plus public company and let's try to do it in under 10 years. So, that's the goal of the board game, and so, I would say we're truly A list if we get there.
[00:02:16] But, you know, well,
[00:02:18] Mikkel: I think that must be the market.
[00:02:19] Do you play a lot of board games, by the way?
[00:02:21] Marty: So I do like boardgames,
[00:02:23] as much these days, but my girlfriend is really into board games as well, so, like, when there is a more chill Saturday, and we're like, oh, let's stay in like, this past weekend, that's what we did.
[00:02:33] Mikkel: I think it's just interesting. I saw I think I want to say Victor Ripabelli from Synthesia. He was on another show and they were basically talking about the benefit for our generation. I don't, by the way, don't know if we're in the same generation, but let's just assume so for the listeners to make it easier.
[00:02:47] You look
[00:02:47] Toni: pretty young today, Mikkel. He grew
[00:02:49] Mikkel: up, so he grew up on red alert. You, those and Warcraft three. Yeah. And war are the same. Those, those type of games. And because it's like you need to make decisions so fast that the game just changes so quickly. You're better equipped for like the startup landscape.
[00:03:03] You also grow up on Red Alert
[00:03:04] Marty: Not on Red Alert,
[00:03:05] no, I was de I was definitely like let's see. Let's see. What did I play? I played in terms of video games, I played like call of duty a
[00:03:12] lot. And so that, that was kind of my, yeah,
[00:03:15] Mikkel: FPS, let's go. Yeah. Oh, wait, we were going to talk about some business stuff too, right? Yeah, no, but it wasn't
[00:03:22] Toni: wasn't the same thing. You know, board games, you know, real time strategy games. I think we're way into it. And I
[00:03:28] Mikkel: think the interesting piece is you already said it. You have a goal.
[00:03:31] That's 10 billion. You're taking on Zendesk. And that's kind of why we wanted to talk with you because who Who takes on the giants like that and is totally transparent about it. That's always, it's always fun to talk with David and tease Goliath a bit.
[00:03:43] Toni: Yeah, but, but it's, but it's really also like, sure.
[00:03:46] I totally get that you guys were, Hey, let's build a 10 billion business. So I, you know, I think a lot of people might have that idea. Maybe they don't say 10, maybe they say one or whatever, you know, but then the next logical step is, you know what, let's take, let's take on one of the giants in the industry, like a Zendesk.
[00:04:03] Or a Salesforce service cloud and so forth. Did, was this actually the starting point or kind of, you know, how do you ease it into like a massive market like this way to build so much stuff to really even compete?
[00:04:15] Marty: Yeah, totally.
[00:04:16] So actually our original idea was not to compete with Zendesk or Salesforce service cloud. That's where we are now, but it's not where we started.
[00:04:22] So we worked backwards from the goal, which was, Hey, we want to build that really big company of 10 billion market cap. And so first off, it's probably good if you're, if you want to do that is to look at.
[00:04:32] What companies exist that are worth that? And so it's actually really surprising if you look at us public markets and look at like that, you know, how many, how many SAS companies are there that are worth over a billion dollars?
[00:04:44] It's fewer than you probably think. Like you hear about unicorns like every day and there are only like, depending on the market, it's like 70 to 80. Like billion dollar plus public SAS companies,
[00:04:58] which is like, not that much.
[00:04:59] And then if you look at like 10 billion plus, it's literally like 20 to 30. And if you look at a hundred billion, it's like four. And so when the, you know, when we were starting to explore ideas, we kind of were like, okay, we really don't want to get capped by a market.
[00:05:14] Like you could like execute perfectly do everything right. And like, how shitty would it be if you like five years in, you're like, oh shit, my market's 10 million and that's it.
[00:05:23] Like that would really suck. And so, what we saw looking at these like 70 to 80 billion plus public companies was that and the SAS companies was that most of them were actually in horizontal SAS categories.
[00:05:36] So it's products that you can sell to. Any company. So think like sales, marketing, it, you know, customer support, HR, payroll, like things that every business needs because the market is just so big. And the way to experiment with this, if you want just from the start, if you're like exploring ideas is you just take like a Google sheet which is exactly what we did.
[00:05:58] We like plotted out one idea we had, which was like kind of a FinTech thing. We plotted out another idea in logistics. And just like. Do the math like bottoms up. Okay, like hypothetically, if we do everything right, like, what is the tan? And so we did the math and it's like, okay, the first idea we had was like, you know, high tens of millions.
[00:06:15] The second idea we had was like, you know, hundreds of millions. And then we like looked at rippling a company that was
[00:06:21] like, okay, doing well, like, clearly, maybe that's someone we want to emulate. And we did the math for them and you'd basically take 8 per month multiplied by every like working employee in the world and it's like, shit, the market is just
[00:06:33] so big and so it's like literally multiple orders of magnitude bigger. And so that's how you realize, okay, like there's like a big difference when you sell that type of product versus one that might be. More niche. So yeah, that, that we wanted to make sure we don't get stuck in, in a small market.
[00:06:50] And so we explicitly were looking for horizontal SAS categories, things that you could sell to, to most companies.
[00:06:56] Now we also wanted to grow really fast. And so we were specifically trying to see if there are any like trends that were happening in the market. And specifically we started exploring like post sales customer support, customer
[00:07:09] success. And what we did was we looked at like newer job titles that were popping up in the space because we thought, Hey, maybe new job titles means like new workflows or new software, like something is changing.
[00:07:21] Right. And so we looked at like solutions, engineers, customer success managers, like support engineers, like. And, and not necessarily like brand new, but new enough where it was probably like picking up momentum. And we were just cold DMing those people on LinkedIn all myself and my two co founders. So like, 40 times a day, which was the max at that point we DM these people with these roles and say, Hey, do you have 15 minutes where founders who are pivoting around and we're, you know, trying to like learn about your, your category and your space and like what you care about.
[00:07:48] And so we'd hop on these calls. They'd say. Oh, and it was totally cool. Like, what do you do? What do you care about? What software do you use? What does your boss care about? Like, how do you get promoted? Kind of like all of those things. And we're just totally blindly exploring.
[00:08:02] So it really was like, that was the starting point.
[00:08:04] We're like, okay, we want to make sure we're in a big category generally. Cause you can just probably like evolve a product to capture more of it. And when markets are that big, like you can probably become big, even if you're like doing a small niche thing. And then two, we thought the fastest growing companies were the ones that latch onto some sort of like emerging trend and then grow with it. And so over time, as we're talking to these people, we start hearing this like common trend of a lot of, and we were speaking to mostly like tech companies and they were saying. Oh, like one theme, they're starting to support their customers, not only over email anymore, but like shared Slack channels, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram, kind of like new places where communication was happening.
[00:08:43] And even though they weren't describing this as a problem, we like started to realize, oh, shit, a lot of your workflows break. Like, how do you send a product update to everyone if they're not like. You're not emailing them usually, or how do you track stuff into your CRM or how do you like have a support ticket, get logged or have SLA monitoring, all that stuff just suddenly didn't work.
[00:09:00] So we're like, okay, that seems like a big change. And then the question became, is it going to become big enough? Is it going to grow quickly enough? And then is there like an actual company or product to, to build on top of it?
[00:09:11] Toni: So, and I guess the first step for you guys then was to start solving for those niche use cases. Right. And obviously that by itself is not going to get you to be a 10 billion company. Right. So, but that is kind of a nice foothold to get started. Right. And, you know, when, when we, when we just kind of chatted here in the beginning, he was like, Hey, the idea was actually not to kind of go up against Zendesk in the beginning.
[00:09:33] How did you land from this foothold to going against Zendesk? Kind of, how did, how did that journey look like?
[00:09:40] Marty: Yeah, totally. So we, we, that wasn't the plan at all. We, you know, when we started, so our first.
[00:09:46] product was actually just an integration between Zendesk and Slack. And so, we were just trying to solve the problem of, hey you know, our first customers, they have all these like hundreds of shared Slack channels with their most important customers and none of it's getting tracked.
[00:09:59] And then they have their ticketing system like a Zendesk or Interhome or Service Cloud. And, like, you just, you couldn't ticket things in. And so, our first product that we built in 14 days and had our first customer in 14 days was just an integration between Slack and these ticketing systems. And, believe it or not, that's what we got into Y Combinator with.
[00:10:18] They actually hated the idea. They're like, we've seen people try this idea before, it sucks. Like, why are you guys different? And they really made a team bet. They're like, Hey, but we think you guys are really good. You've made like a lot of progress really fast. And so we went through YC with that. We got to 120 K and ARR in three months raise our seed round based off of that as well.
[00:10:35] Once again, I think it was more of a team bet and like gut feeling bet than a, Hey, like the current product makes sense to grow really fast. And then finally, like a year, I'd say like, yeah, probably a year after working on just the integration, did we finally start to make the transition to, Hey, actually, there are problems with the current support systems, which we like started to learn a lot about from our customers who were core users of them. And that started to show cracks in, in the existing products.
[00:11:06] Toni: And so I mean, the audience kind of that we're kind of talking to right now, like those 10 million folks and plus, and, you know, go to market leaders, I think for them, that's a really cool story to kind of get started. It's like, Oh, you know, cool. Promarketfit, Y Combinator, cool. You read about this on LinkedIn, but it's not really my problem.
[00:11:22] My problem is actually much more the, okay. I am competing against a Goliath in this space, right? Kind of, I'm a, I'm an entrant, or maybe I'm a small incumbent, or I'm like a, I'm a, I'm a small player in Europe. You know, that's trying to, you know, make a mark. So, now that you've, that you've landed with a team on, Okay.
[00:11:42] You know, shit, we are competing against Zendesk. We are competing against, I don't know, Salesforce service cloud. I'm not sure what specifically those are, but like, you know, the 500 pound gorillas, basically, how do you differentiate, how do you make, how do you make people come to you? Despite you having what a fraction of the R and D budget that, that someone like those guys have, right.
[00:12:02] How, how do you do that?
[00:12:03] Marty: So. Honestly, this is going to be a sucky answer for a lot of people listening, but we planned on solving a problem in an emerging use case. And when you solve a problem in an emerging use case or trend, so in our case, like Slack support, the big players aren't paying attention to it because
[00:12:21] they have other things to pay attention to, right?
[00:12:23] So Slack support, they still don't have a Slack support integration. So like a lot of our customers, that's a primary means of communication for them. They open up shared Slack channels or Microsoft teams channels, which we also support in addition to an app chat and email, and you just can't do it with send us like it's,
[00:12:41] there's not really like it's, it's almost. And I'd almost tell you like our early customers didn't want to use us, like they, but they had to, that's the
[00:12:50] problem there literally just wasn't an option for them to do that. And so, you know, that's 1 thing I'd say, and then in general, and so that works really well for the startups. Now, for the startups, they had no, they don't have desire to use Endesk.
[00:13:04] A lot of them like Intercom. I think Intercom is a great product. They definitely don't want to use Service Cloud. So, for the startups, they're happy to just get like, hey, like they will probably purchase on nice UX and then it solves like the core problems. And they actually don't need a lot of the complexity that you would think, you know, a series B or D company needs. So yeah, people didn't have an option. And then the other thing that really worked out for us timing wise is that Zendesk, like the day after we had our initial idea, Zendesk was acquired by private equity.
[00:13:32] And like, this is like not this so well timed, obviously not planned. We can't take credit for like the foresight of that because it happened after we had the idea.
[00:13:42] Toni: No, but you could, you could take credit for killing Zendesk, right? It's basically, you were, you were, you were pushing off that, that process there,
[00:13:48] obviously.
[00:13:49] Marty: And, and so it's, it's funny, like. And again, we actually didn't think we could compete with Zendesk. Like we really didn't, we thought it was just like Salesforce. And like, you know, that saying, like, no one gets
[00:13:58] fired for buying Salesforce. It's like
[00:14:00] the same thing. Like you hire a VP of support and like, maybe startups will like you, but the moment they hire a VP, they're going to replace you with, you know, whatever incumbent solution. And yeah, we just learned over time that there were actually a lot of problems that Zendesk has. And specifically it doesn't solve a lot of the problems that B2B companies have. And so it, it, the, the specific insights started to, so it started with, hey the wedge and like initial change we made was you can now be like B2B omnichannel, which was like a new emerging thing. Before like consumer was very omni channel, like you had Facebook popping up, Twitter popping up, Instagram popping up, whatever. Now, suddenly the same was happening for B2B. No one was solving it. And another like just timing thing for us is chat GPT also comes out like seven days after we start the company.
[00:14:44] So everyone in customer support is focused on AI ticket deflection. And the way you're going to make a lot of money with AI ticket deflection is you go to enterprise consumer companies where they have really high volume tickets that are solvable with AI. B2B is way more complex. It's like, it's just not, it's lower volume tickets.
[00:15:01] Like we have series B customers who have 200 tickets per month and that's it. And like, they have really high value customers, but it's like, if you're intercom and you're trying to charge 1 per resolution and you have 200 tickets per month, that's Not a lot of money, right? So it's we got lucky on, so both Zendesk being acquired by a private equity just over that year, as we're like talking to our customers and selling our integration, we learn they're kind of moving away from their down market customers.
[00:15:26] And they're also just hyper focused on AI up market. As is everyone else in our market. And so meanwhile, there we are. We're just like, well, we're like heads down focused on just solving this omni channel problem. And, and that's what we're going to do. And then it led us to this understanding that actually there are bigger problems that these companies are also facing that are just happened to be like B2B specific problems that no one else is, is trying to solve. Now, the specific, like. Way to think about this is in consumer companies, B2C companies they're like customer team is just customer support. That's it. They just have customer support teams. B2B, you have customer support, you have customer success, you have account management, you have professional services, you have solutions engineering, like.
[00:16:07] All of the, you have like product teams getting involved, talking to customers. You have like founders getting involved, talking like all these people are super involved with customer data and workflows. And so what you do historically is you buy the ticketing system and then a bunch of adjacent tools that you plug in. And then our, like what we started to realize is like, Oh, wait. If you only built a product for B2B companies, you would probably just build one with all of these things built in. Like, you probably, like, wouldn't think twice about that because it just makes sense. Obviously, all these people should be working together super collaboratively with shared data and shared workflows.
[00:16:40] Toni: you know, Mikkel, you're going to ask the next question, by the way. But if I, if I, if I kind of summarize this a little bit, right, it's, it's obviously the market is massive. Let's just, let's just say that to, to begin with. So even if you're niched down, you will still be left with a massive market anyway, right?
[00:16:55] But I think what you guys have found there is really kind of the soft underbelly of, of those ticketing vendors that have stopped focusing. On in your case, the B2B folks, right. And, and maybe even kind of the further lower market folks. And I think this is at least some insight folks can take away here and be like, okay.
[00:17:13] Hey, we are running up against, I don't know whom, which, which, you know, in common. Where, where, where do we think they're kind of soft? Where, where do we think they basically don't focus or don't care or, you know, have this in their portfolio, but actually don't really want to have that revenue. Where is that?
[00:17:29] And then go after that specifically, right? I think this is, this is what it feels like. You guys did fantastically well, by the way.
[00:17:36] Marty: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, that's, that's totally right. And I think there's that you, if you're like first starting, you look at maybe the competitors, but in our case we didn't look at the competitors first. We looked at the users first and tried to like work that way. So I think you could work in either direction. For us, we kind of like went straight to the source. And tried to hear from them and they often, you know, it's hard because before there's a product that solves the problem, you don't even realize that a product could solve it. Right. So like the, you know, when we were first talking to people about, Hey, like, what if we helped you track all the Slack support?
[00:18:11] And they're like, Oh no, like Slack. So this is just a temporary thing we're doing. Like, we're not going to like do this forever. Like, there's not a problem. Like it's like, you can't even conceptualize that. Like. Hey, what if we like put that in your ticketing system and it was like part of a unified inbox, right?
[00:18:24] And I what I what I started telling people so that they could imagine it and like like I, I would tell people basically imagine Zendesk didn't exist and you had to do email support. Like, imagine how difficult that would be. You'd have everyone logging into like one inbox, you had no SLA tracking, you have no ticketing, just total chaos. And so they're like, Oh wow, like, yeah, actually at one point that was the case. And then they built
[00:18:47] Zendesk and like, we're doing the same thing, but for like all these new channels.
[00:18:51] And it's like, Oh wow, okay, that makes sense.
[00:18:54] Mikkel: I mean, it makes me really curious about another aspect, which is how do you determine what to build? Right.
[00:18:59] You kind of said, Hey, it's, it's not great advice to those startups because we found a problem that send us didn't solve, but I guess that's not the only thing you've built, right? So how do you go about determining what to go for next that can kind of either reinforce the use case or help you in your path to, to beat send us basically.
[00:19:18] Marty: Yeah.
[00:19:19] And again, I'd say like, so our marketing is very like, Hey, kill Zendesk. But internally we actually don't think about Zendesk that much. Like we were very focused just on our, like, you know, the, the end goal, the 10 billion plus market cap, like, Hey, is the direction we're going in going to allow us to build enough revenue in that direction?
[00:19:39] So like, that's the type of thing we're focused on just like more. Just direct to the source. I think competitor focus is another type of thing that I think is also worth it, but I think it's even better to just be like, let me just like avoid competitor, thinking about competitors at all. And just think about like, is this market that we're growing into?
[00:19:56] Is there enough revenue for us to capture? Right? Like just. It's hypothetically, we build the best product, do the best marketing and we're like targeted towards that group first. Like will that get us there? And then like, you know, incumbents move slow, right? Like there is like, maybe you have to, you should think about them more if you're especially an enterprise where like, Hey, like relationships matter a lot more and it's like the sales process is just like very different, but especially if you're selling to like SMB mid market, I feel like.
[00:20:22] You should focus instead on, Hey, let's just do bottoms up calculation or like comparison to other companies just to like understand the market size and then determine, like, then listen to our customers and try to like come up with some idea of, okay, like if we built these things, like we would be the tax better product for them.
[00:20:40] Toni: And so, I mean, when, when, when Mikkel and I discussed you know, Pylon one thing that we stumbled over was actually comparing you guys to Drift. So I'm not sure how familiar you still are with drift kind of the web chat kind of guys now swallowed up by sales loft, I think and basically what we were kind of discussing was back then in the day, drift did a really good job of new feature and then pushing it out through marketing channels and kind of almost creating this, this sense, you know, on the receivers and it was like, These guys are grinding like crazy and pushing stuff out all the time.
[00:21:16] So now, you know, I don't know, I think a month ago you had like a, like a product week or something like this, but it feels like, You are using some of the product heartbeat to also, you know, push out into the market that things are happening, things are moving, it's going fast, et cetera. Is that a deliberate choice?
[00:21:35] Is it, you know, did you just stumble over this? Give, give us a little bit, your, your, your thought process about this.
[00:21:40] Marty: Yeah, 100%. So, the, the answer is 100%. Yes, it's deliberate. And LinkedIn is our best channel. And organic content, not like ads or not like anything like that. Like organic, good content is what drives a lot of our pipeline. In terms of like our sources that we can kind of control. So, you know, we're startup, like what's our advantage to speed. Speeds are advantage. And like just being able to like say things that other people won't say, or like, you know, avoid tech debt problems that other people are, have already run into. And so we absolutely want to lean into that. And we just, as founders are super grindy, like, you know, the team now, so. When we started the company, it was Admith, Robert and I, we all come from software backgrounds.
[00:22:21] I worked at Airbnb, Robert worked at multiple startups before one of them being a CRM company called Affinity. Admith he was working at Samsara, like IOT company. So we all, and we had like You know, in college, we were like hackathon people, we would organize hackathons and like go to them. I went to like seven hackathons my first semester in college, which meant like I was spending my weekends, not like partying.
[00:22:43] I did party too, but I, you know, I was going to, you know, other schools and just like spending 48 hours straight grinding
[00:22:49] and like, just like writing code because we thought it was fun. And so that just has continued. Right. So we, you know, our advantage is 100%. We can build really fast. We can listen to users when deals, because the competitor is going to say, Oh, like, yeah, we can't do this.
[00:23:04] I'll add it to the roadmap. We'll say, Hey, we'll deliver this in the next 12 hours. Right. And so we're, it's just like, that's the difference. And so you have to lean into that. And then also just, man, like people know that the market should be like, the product should be getting much better right now because of AI, right?
[00:23:21] Like everyone knows you should be moving faster. Everyone knows that. Oh, like, especially if you have a bunch of conversational or chat data, like you should be able to do something special with that. And so like. Yeah, we're just we're executing on that. We're like building the things that people want and then Equally important.
[00:23:38] We're making sure people know about it. And so we post on linkedin a lot founder led marketing has worked extremely well for us and you know you It works so well, even if the post isn't even a good post, even if people don't like realize what you actually launched, they will know you launched something.
[00:23:55] And so if we're posting every single day with feature updates, the perception, the signaling is, Hey, like this is the, this is the company to bet on. Like,
[00:24:03] this is the company I want to use long term.
[00:24:05] Toni: we had exactly, so I just wanted to quickly comment on this. We had exactly that impression. Actually, we're looking at one of your, your co founders post and it was like a gif of some feature of like, I don't know, send, send this message later or something like this because I were looking at each other's like, really, is this a big thing apparently in the space, but again, you have this, you have this.
[00:24:27] feeling of these guys, these guys are pushing stuff out. Yeah, so
[00:24:30] Mikkel: it's also like, if you know, some of the stories of outside of our industry, like Red Bull, what they would do in some of the new markets that would enter, they would basically outside nightclubs, they would just fill trash cans with empty Red Bull.
[00:24:42] So people thought like, man, people really love this stuff. Maybe I should drink it too. Right. There is some of that momentum. Just make this up. No, true story. You can Google it. And I also just wanted to say like. If this is a game for you, usually all these cool games, probably even Call of Duty, they come with cheat codes, right?
[00:25:00] I know and since we're talking about shipping product, which I think is a often neglected ingredient. You get banned though. You get that, that's true. It's often neglected like ingredient for growth. I know one of the things, by the way, Drift was really good at was, was saying, hey, you know what?
[00:25:15] We're not gonna invent something new here. We're just gonna innovate on what's already happening out there so we can move even faster. Like, what, what are some of the cheat codes? You've obviously revealed a few of them here. Are there any kind of other cheat codes? You're following to really deliver that other, you, other listeners should consider.
[00:25:34] Marty: Yeah, I think you know, this is kind of a cop out answer, but sometimes it is simple. Just like get really good people. The good people will figure out the right thing to do.
[00:25:44] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:25:45] Marty: And I'll say like, when it comes to product decision making, so. My co founders, Abbott and Robert, they lead product at this point and they are, they have, you know, someone else was asking me, they were considering starting a company recently and they were like, Oh, how do you guys think about product?
[00:25:59] Like how do you, how are you good at product? And I was like, damn Abbott and Robert just have excellent taste. Like they really just know like, and, and if we don't, so like usually there's like some like really good. And I'm also a big fan of the baseline intuition of, oh, even if they're asking for this, that's not what they want.
[00:26:16] They actually want this thing. Or, like, hey, like, that's important, but like, we should delay it because, like, even if they say it's really important, like, they won't need it for another year, realistically. And so. I think like just taste, some people just have better taste than others. Like I have worse taste in product than they do.
[00:26:33] I've like come to
[00:26:34] terms with that at this point.
[00:26:35] And then the, the other pieces, like having very heavy debate culture helps us make really good decisions. So we, you know, we're super low ego internally. In fact, like most people don't know who the CEO is or the CTO is like, I think only maybe one of us has that listed on our profiles and otherwise when we introduce ourselves to investors or whatever, like we don't mention it.
[00:26:55] And so it's, we're in, the way we make decisions is, Hey, we know what the end goal is, which is 10 billion plus public company. Like, is this the, like, how, what's going to help us get there? And then we'll debate for like hours on end, sometimes very small features, sometimes big strategic decisions. We'll debate until we get tired.
[00:27:13] And then hopefully we have a decision. If we don't. Like, have like a good gut sense of where to go, then we'll table it and be like, we don't have enough information, and then we'll debate it later. And so, yeah, like, super heavy debate culture, and then obviously the people you bring on are the ones that continue to keep that going and make the other decisions there.
[00:27:30] So, I, that's kind of a cop out answer, but
[00:27:33] like, that's, when you're like, building the engine, like, the engine parts matter.
[00:27:37] Mikkel: But I think it's then at least my follow up question becomes, how do you have a good debate? Because sometimes it can be very difficult there. Some people have a hard time separating emotion from the thing. I have this idea. I really want to get it out there. I've heard lots of different ways you can do it.
[00:27:51] I'm just curious, how do you run a really great debate to arrive at the best possible decision?
[00:27:56] Marty: Man, it's like, what's the way to describe this? Um
[00:28:00] Well, one, Yeah.
[00:28:01] I think, well, I think one trust is super important, like the, because I think it I'm actually in the beginning when we started working together, I was actually surprised we weren't getting emotional because I think like if you heard our debates, you would think that we hate each other.
[00:28:16] Like, we are, we're like, we get super loud and passionate but it's actually, we're just having so much fun sparring with ideas that like, it's, it's not, yeah, it's, it's, it's more about like, hey, like, We want to end up at this right decision and it's almost like a steel sharpen steel type situation So like the we're like trying to present the best idea over and over and over and then you just like refine until you get Something really good and I think the the ego thing it's probably like a high trust thing So all three of us know each other very well Robert and Advent went to school together and organized hackathons together.
[00:28:51] I met a bit through the Kleiner Perkins fellowship This like summer internship and we'd live together for three years. And so I think there's just like a really high degree of trust and then also because we're just and so high degree of trust clear goal and motivation So like hey, the goal is build this company not like hey like build the thing i'm passionate about or something or like Oh, like I want to like change the space in this way because of my personal past experience like
[00:29:16] whatever so I think because of that it just ends up being Easy for us to maybe put the the ego
[00:29:23] aside
[00:29:23] Toni: I want to switch pages a little bit.
[00:29:24] So we talked we talked about LinkedIn being a great driver for, for, for revenue for you guys. And, you know, we would call this like founder brand, right? Yeah. I mean, it's not, we didn't coin this, but kind of that, that would be, I think the, the stamp we put on this do you, do you guys do other stuff as well?
[00:29:40] I mean, and, and, and, you know, how, how do you think about those motions, right? I mean, you raised some funds from Andreessen. You have money in the bank account. You've previously been like very profitable or very cash efficient. Let's just say it like this. How does your thinking go into building out the go to market and and maybe what to lay on next and so forth kind of, if you could kind of give us some, some, some of your thought process in this direction would be really interesting.
[00:30:05] Marty: Yeah, 100%. And this is a decision that we made that was a mistake actually. So when we were first starting to, so, okay, we found out like LinkedIn could work for us maybe November of like 2023. I think that's probably like when our best, our first like good post took off and we got like 300 K impressions or something like that.
[00:30:22] And so
[00:30:23] demo started coming in. So. We, but that for some reason, like LinkedIn just felt like not a real go to market strategy. It was like, Oh, this is just like a, it's social media. Like, you know, it's
[00:30:35] not like. It's a toy. And the mistake I made was not looking at that and being like, well, I did it. It produced leads and those were good leads and like it helped push the business forward. And instead of like taking the common advice, which I think is good advice, which is double down on what's working. It was like, no, we need to like diversify and like do other stuff and like, you know, get off basically like not rely on LinkedIn at all. Like that. That's probably like the ideal thing. So. Instead of doubling down immediately, which I should have done, I should have been like, Hey, I'm going to post every day.
[00:31:06] Now I'm going to like push for my co founders profiles. Like we're going to like, just be super present and online. We didn't do that. And instead we started playing with like cold emails. We started playing with like Google ads, like other stuff. And that was a mistake. And I wish we had doubled down on the thing that was working. So when I did finally realize, okay, we, we tried other things. They didn't work. I was like, okay, well we have this thing. That's working. Like we should probably like max that out before. So, I basically made a decision. I'm like, I'm going to post every single weekday from my account. I'm going to start ghostwriting for my co founders accounts. And then I'm also going to post or create like some sort of recurring posts for our page. I'm going to optimize them. I'm going to optimize the headlines. I'm going to like, you know, add link tracking, all that fun stuff. So, We went really hard on that, and now we're like consistently every single weekday posting from all three co founder profiles minimum.
[00:31:58] Sometimes the page as well. We're doing cross engagement, we're cross posting the content to X slash Twitter as well. And so, that was a mistake we had made, and I wish we had Like, in hindsight, been like, hey, like we have something that's working. Let's maximize that first before starting to invest into other strategies and also like LinkedIn's one of those places where like you just get this compounding value because The more followers you get like the more
[00:32:23] impressions you'll get the more impressions you get the more people will engage the more people engage The more like their network sees it and they'll follow And so it's, it's, it's like this group, it's, it's amazing, honestly, it's like a great, great social network to actually like live on and invest into because it, it. Provides dividends long term versus a cold email just gets you one person wants
[00:32:44] Toni: So, so exactly. Right. And then, and I think you're preaching to the choir, I think not only the two of us, but also some folks that are listening here, but so, so, and maybe this is more of like a leading question almost, but what we have seen and you know, with our own company and, and also, you know, with other folks, like once you start building a brand, once people know you.
[00:33:04] Some of the cold stuff starts working,
[00:33:06] Marty: right,
[00:33:07] Toni: right? Kind of some of the cold emails or the cold STL reach kind of suddenly it works because it's not so super cold anymore, right? They, they have a connection with, you know, pilot in this case. And it's like, Oh, let me read this email. And actually, you know what? I was a lurker for one and a half years and now I'm going to, you know, take this demo is, is that, is that how you guys thinking about the next step basically?
[00:33:29] Marty: Yeah, that's what that's absolutely happening. And the way so, okay you're absolutely right. And we're seeing that anecdotally, like people, we had some cold emails and we'll, we'll have people reply to like a cold email from six months ago.
[00:33:41] And they'll be like, Hey, we've been following you on LinkedIn, like blah, blah, blah.
[00:33:44] And so that is happening. And it's awesome to see. So 100 percent agree on that. And then, yeah. We have a growth marketer right now who joined probably like four or five months ago, and we have him basically on more experimental projects. So, hey, we have the thing that's working and I don't, it doesn't really make sense to me to like get someone to just do the same thing.
[00:34:03] It, well, it's hard. That's actually one pain point. It's hard to automate LinkedIn because it's like, you just have to keep pushing out good content. And so we actually had tried to ghostwriter for like, actually a few weeks recently, and they just were not producing the type of content we liked. And maybe it's just a matter of finding the right person, but it was, it was very hard. And like, you just realized like you're the reason it's working is because it's authentic. It's because like,
[00:34:26] we know the right words to use. We like have this style that like, we have found some like marketing fit on. And so it's so hard to replicate that with other people. Yeah.
[00:34:36] Mikkel: I think it's interesting. I mean, we tried a top tier agency and it's this was the same experience. It didn't, I mean, they had one that worked out by, I will say by chance but, but you know, they have to really understand who is the person, what stories do they have to tell? And that's really difficult to drag out from someone versus.
[00:34:54] You, you were on a call with a customer and something amazing happened and now I want to go and tell that story and do it in your own voice. So I think what, what we learned was it's way better to, at least for, for the marketing teams to become a sparring partner and a source of inspiration where they can and help with some of the production versus taking it all on, then it's not going to work out.
[00:35:14] Marty: 100%. And I think there are like certain types of posts they might be better at. So for example, we started doing like industry posts. Like we had a post on like, Hey, like Zendesk sold their company for 10 billion private equity.
[00:35:25] And like, it was an unlucky acquisition. And then it's like
[00:35:28] telling the story of that.
[00:35:29] Like that's probably something they could draft pretty well. And then you could like comb over. So I think there probably is a correct way to use them. But yeah, I just have not. I haven't figured out how to, how to do it well. And then another thing I'll quickly say is like, for anyone listening, I'm sure a lot of people are trying LinkedIn right now, when when I say like double down on LinkedIn if it's working, there's so many ways that you can go deeper and deeper and deeper.
[00:35:52] It's like one, hey, are you posting every day? Like literally you might be posting twice, twice a week and you're like, okay, that's enough. It's like, no, if it's working post five times per week. Right. And I used to like worry about that. And then I talked to someone who works at LinkedIn and I was like, it's my, is the algorithm going to screw me over if I'm posting every day?
[00:36:08] Like, we'll get annoying, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, no, it's actually fine. Like, as long as you're just posting good content, it can continue to do well. And it's not going to impact the other posts. So like post every day instead of once a day. Okay. Like, can you improve the quality of your posts?
[00:36:21] Right? Like, instead of spending like half an hour, if you spent like a little more time, could you make it like even better or something like that? Okay. Now, like once you're doing that are you posting, can you post from other profiles as well? Like, can you start posting from other people on your team? Okay. Like now, are you using any tools that can like start auto liking from each other? So like there are tools where you can set up like. Multiple of your, your pod, essentially of like, for example, we have our co founders who auto like our stuff. Okay. Are you doing that? Okay. Now can you like set up some more auto engagement?
[00:36:49] Like we have, I write up the comments in advance of the company page commenting on our posts, right? And so like all of these things will continue to contribute. You could even go to, Hey, am I sending out automated connection requests to people we want to sell to? Right. Like, so am I seeding the network in some sense?
[00:37:06] And so all of these, they're like, you can go so deep. And now like my latest thing is we're about to start leveling up the type of content we do where, you know, it's LinkedIn's getting so busy. It's so, so busy. And so like, how do you differentiate, how do you stand out? We're about to start pumping out more like video content, which is harder to do. And it like, also I think if you do it people already feel this like closeness to Pylon before they book a demo because they're like, I've seen you guys, I see photos of the team. I like know who just joined the team, whatever. Like video I think is a whole different level where if you like see people smile, if you see them laugh, if you see them like say something, it's like the type of connections like a hundred X
[00:37:47] probably. And so we're going to start investing into that. And, and so that's just like coming from, okay, we're posting like a couple of times per week to like all those things that you could optimize in between. I think if it's working for you, you should just like do that before you start investing into other things that might not work.
[00:38:04] Mikkel: I'm just wondering, how much time do you spend on the LinkedIn game here?
[00:38:09] Marty: So much time. It's, it's like, I, I, so on Sundays I spend probably like five hours writing
[00:38:15] LinkedIn
[00:38:15] Toni: Yeah.
[00:38:16] Yeah. It's your side hustle. But that's what it is. Yeah. I can totally see this. So I want to kind of take, take the next step here.
[00:38:22] I think I think you guys have a couple of AEs, right? Less, less than a handful, I
[00:38:27] think. Right.
[00:38:28] So, you know, the, the next thing is obviously going to be, I think, I don't know, maybe not.
[00:38:33] But I was like, oh, we need a VP of sales. Right. What, what's, what's your thinking there, kind of, when do you think it's time, you know, what, how should she or he look like in terms of the skills and kind of w tell, tell us a little bit more about how can you build out that part of the organization further and, and, and what, you know, what would that look like?
[00:38:53] Marty: Yeah, that's a good question. I think about when we think about potentially hiring people, I don't want to hire someone because that's like the person you're supposed to hire at that point. I want them to be solving some specific problem. So when I think of like VP of sales and what. I think it would be coaching for the team and I think recruiting, those are like the two big things that I think they, I would want them to focus on recruiting.
[00:39:16] I've had an especially hard time with because we don't have go to market backgrounds and like, I don't know a bunch of salespeople. Like
[00:39:23] we do engineers and so, that's been especially challenging. And so if there, for example, was someone who had like a strong network already of AEs that they could just bring with them and like, you know, people they trust and know how to work with and train and whatever. I feel like that, for example, would be really, really high value add. And then the other pieces, I definitely don't think we're at that stage where you can have a VP of sales who doesn't know how to sell the product. Like, I think they would have to come in, like be an AE for a little bit, or at least like. Learn how to do it themselves and prove that then they can coach people on on how to do the sales process,
[00:40:00] Toni: And the I mean, and I think kind of, I guess the takeaway for anyone, you know, thinking about. I mean, I'm not saying joining pylon, but joining a new team, basically, kind of, that is a little bit earlier on, right? And we can all guess where you kind of roughly are probably in an AR, it's probably higher than we think, by the way
[00:40:15] Marty: It's probably lower than you think
[00:40:17] Toni: yeah, well, you're, we're Europeans,
[00:40:21] Mikkel: so we're very conservative,
[00:40:22] Toni: but no, that's also the other thing.
[00:40:24] I think you guys are good at you know, punching above your weight, right? Yeah. I think there's a little bit of like, Oh, you know, these guys are much bigger. And then we looked you guys up and it was like, what, 35 employees or something like this. I forgot what the number is, but you know, I think we were pretty surprised about this actually. so I was just kind of trying to summarize kind of the, the, the important takeaway here is sure you, you need to bring some people with you, right?
[00:40:47] Because that's, that's really difficult to achieve and bring in the right people and bring them quickly. I think that's a major leg up as, as to what you just said, Marty, but also the, the other thing is don't expect to someone to, you know, to just run the dashboards right. Kind of is, you know, jump in, be there on the phone figure this thing out.
[00:41:07] And, and I think then also be a, be a role model for the other AEs, right. Because it's going to be what, like a, you know, five, six, seven, eight, you know, folks there that where you can't just be a full time
[00:41:17] Marty: Right. And just to give you a sense, like, right now, our two AEs that we have run very independently, like, I don't have one on ones with them,
[00:41:26] Toni: Hmm.
[00:41:27] Marty: like, zero. I've never had a one on one with either of them, like, all, like, we, like, we sit right next to each other and, like, we talk all the time, but, like, we've never had a, hey, like, let me, like, review your pipeline or, like, let me, like, And I sometimes will listen to calls and, you know, be like, Hey, what's going on with this thing or whatever. But first off, I don't have time. And maybe that's like a mistake. Maybe that's what a VP of sales should come and do. And like, but we, you know, we run a super high velocity sales motion right now. Like our two AEs are closing like 20 to 25 deals each per month.
[00:41:57] Which is like kind of absurd. Like that's Like
[00:41:59] a really high number.
[00:42:00] I think we're only able to hit that because I get out of the way and let them work. And so, you know, I also don't want, like, that's where I think, like, okay, if someone comes, and we're not, like, it's not like we're losing deals. There are some deals we lose that we shouldn't lose, but, like, the ones that we lose are recently because we don't have capacity to spend the time on them, which is fucked up.
[00:42:21] Like, that's a, that's a, it's, like, that just means we need more people to do the same thing rather than, hey, like, they need more coaching because they're already winning the deals that they have. So,
[00:42:31] Mikkel: Do we want to end up talking a little bit about AI here? Yes. Because I, one of the considerations I had and I'm really glad we have you on is when you have a new technology like this, all kinds of crazy stuff happens, especially for the incumbents. Right. And now with AI here. One of the things I've just observed is a lot of them treat it as an add on for them to lift the ACVs.
[00:42:52] And it's, that's obviously great. Like if, especially if you're public, I mean, Zendesk isn't anymore. They've kind of regressing. So I'm just curious, what's your philosophy? How are you approaching AI as a technology for for your opportunity in this market?
[00:43:04] Marty: Yeah. So we on the AI pricing front are actually, so I guess pricing overall, we're not innovating.
[00:43:12] Like we're, we're innovating very hard on the product side, but when people look at us and compare us to, for example, as Zendesk, we want them to first off pay us the same amount of money, which is a lot. And then two, we want them to make the decision based on our products just being better and like higher value add for them. And so that's the ideal scenario. You charge the same amount and like you reduce the complexity for them to make a decision on like, oh, is it a pricing thing or is it a product thing? And we, if we don't innovate on price right now, it means it can just be a product thing. That said. It's not like we don't have concerns about whether pricing needs to change. So for example, intercom is going very, very hard on like ticket resolutions. And like, in fact, their whole business, it's, it feels like is actually pivoting towards just like ticket deflection and like more AI agents that like as an add on, like really, I think that's actually long term where they want to go. I spoke to their one of their like heads of solutions and success and they were saying that they only measure their CSMs on ticket resolution now. Like that's the only metric and so it's not like, Hey, are they like using these features in the help desk? Are they using the help desk at all? It's like, no, it's, it's just resolutions. And that's just for fin. And so, yeah, for, it's, it's interesting, it's, it's, so, okay, so our, like, scary scenarios here are, hey, like, the agents get really, really good, and, you know, you plug them into pylon, and, like, suddenly, you only need one seat, and, like, the agent does everything, right, so seats, like, just don't even make sense anymore or so that's like maybe one scenario and the problem for us is because we're serving B2B, which is like lower volume
[00:44:48] and like higher complexity tickets.
[00:44:50] Once, like I said in the beginning, it's like if you have 200 tickets. And you're a series B company who should be paying, you know, 20 to 40 K like you 200 bucks per month is like not enough 2. 4 K.
[00:45:01] Right? It's, it's literally just like too small of a deal size. So what do you do? I think it's really hard.
[00:45:06] I think that our business will have to look different pricing wise longterm from the people who start to shift towards more like ticket deflection because it just doesn't make sense. Like just literally the, the, we can't be like, Oh, pay 200 per ticket. And maybe that is the answer and maybe that is how we operate, but it's, it's just not, it won't, like, if we said that to a prospect right now, they'd be like, wait, isn't intercom 1 per month, right?
[00:45:32] Or 1 per ticket. Like, how does that make sense? Why are you guys 200 times more expensive, et cetera. So, for better for worse, that's you know, how it is today. And then also like in general, like another challenge that we're going to face over time, the customer support. Agent count for consumer companies is much higher.
[00:45:49] Like we have, they're like seed stage companies who have like 10 support agents that like around the world. And so you have like 10 minimum seats versus like B2B companies. You might not even have a support person at seed. Like you might have like. One CSM and that's it, but more of the team technically should be like using the support system because of what I mentioned before, where teams are like so involved with the communication. So, yeah, I think pricing will have to evolve for us long term and we'll have to figure that out, but. More likely we'll probably just, as we start to like add more modules for the different teams who start to use this, like the solutions team and the professional services team and the customer success team, we'll probably just try to like expand the number of people that use us across the company and then like, just charge more for seats and then AI will probably still be some like add on thing.
[00:46:37] Toni: But I guess when I, when I think about your category and kind of the niche that you're kind of focusing on, I think you, you have obviously on the one inside the ticket resolution stuff but also B2B is more complex products, you know, even the support reps have questions and then there's second line support and what have you, right there, there are a bunch of other areas where, we're kind of a, an AI can step in and be like, Oh, actually, you don't need to bother the engineer. Here's the answer. Right. So I'm guessing there's also a couple of other ways for you guys to use AI instead of only on the ticket resolution
[00:47:10] Marty: Totally. That's 100 percent right. So that's exactly how we've been, how we've been building is. Our AI is really right now Mormon, like you can do ticket resolution as well. And it's, it's pretty good, but the, you're right. The questions are more complex and then also you have to be way more concerned about the responses and accuracy.
[00:47:29] Like if you have a an enterprise customer, you don't want to say something stupid to them, right? Like you care about that relationship, like bugs, mistakes are way more costly. And so it's more for us about making, giving people like, I, I've heard the analogy, like give people in Iron Man suit and so like help them move way faster.
[00:47:46] And that's the right way to think about pylon right now is most of our AI is going towards giving people Iron Man suits internally. So the things they're already trying to do, they can just do with way more efficiency. Ha
[00:47:59] Mikkel: So I have a closing question kind of ready. I feel like it's the time. I mean, we should probably have booked you in for two hours. We could just have gone even deeper to some of this stuff and opened up LinkedIn and test some things out anyway. Since this is one big game sometimes the outcome is negative and you lose the game and you have to reset the board.
[00:48:17] If, should that happen for you? What are some of the things you would take with you to the next thing? Some of the, the most, let's say pivotal learnings for building kind of a high growth business. Yeah.
[00:48:30] Marty: easier if we did it again because I think. We just understand so much more of like all the problems that businesses or more problems that businesses face because now we're like running one. We see all the problems manifesting and like, oh, this team has this problem.
[00:48:43] The software has this problem, et cetera. So, I mean, like, and our networks and like, actually, this is the great thing about LinkedIn, right? We have like lots of followers now and like a lot of founders who like look up to us and are interested in what we think and why we think X, Y, or Z. So. It would be so once you like, so, okay, here's what I'll say.
[00:49:05] Like, I did not learn anything from my failures before starting a company. You kind of learn like what not to do, but you don't learn what to do. And so the, now that we've had something that's been working. I would try to replicate a lot of the same components of like, if I, first off, I don't know if I'd be like, Hey, I have the energy to be like, let's go build another 10 billion company.
[00:49:27] I like this shit's hard. This is
[00:49:29] so hard. And so I might honestly opt for, okay, let's go for like a slightly smaller outcome and like maybe more chill business because I don't know if I have two of these in me. So I, I would, I would, but I, in terms of like looking at the problem space and all that stuff. I would probably look for some sort of, once again, emerging trend, something that's not fully solved yet, and then like, dig into that, because I think that's where it's easy to displace people. You solve the nascent problem that doesn't have a good solution yet, and people just don't really have options.
[00:49:59] So even if your software sucks to start, like, you still have an opportunity to get in and sell your product and, and beat whatever incumbents are, are solving it historically.
[00:50:10] Toni: Super cool. , thank you so much for spending the time with us. I don't know, maybe even getting up early in your case and it's 9am and I don't know.
[00:50:19] That's fine. That's fine. And and enlightening all of us in the audience here quite a bit, Marty. Thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:50:27] Marty: Yeah. Cool. Tony. Thank you so much. I
[00:50:28] appreciate it. This was
[00:50:29] fun.