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From cold LinkedIn DMs to nailing customer discovery and design partnerships to eventually raising $23M from Tier 1 venture firms.
Learn why most startups do customer discovery so poorly, why they fail at design partnerships and how Pocus CEO Alexa Grabell cracked the code by embracing skeptics over enthusiasts. Learn the counterintuitive approach that led to building a category-defining product in the crowded sales tech space.
Alexa Grabell is co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a revenue acceleration platform that helps go-to-market teams at companies like Asana, Canva, and Amiiro save 10+ hours weekly by turning data into pipeline. She's raised over $23M from First Round Capital, Coatue, Pear, and angels including Scott Belsky and Lenny Rachitsky.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:46 - How to structure discovery calls to validate hypotheses in 2-3 week sprints
03:12 - The art of sending hundreds of LinkedIn messages to get 10 meetings per week
06:27 - Why leading with curiosity beats leading the witness in customer interviews
08:33 - How pretending to be a competitor's sales rep validates product ideas
10:52 - Converting skeptical prospects into your best design partners
13:49 - The #1 mistake that kills the transition from design partner to paying customer
15:09 - Why charging $6K when you should charge $30K destroys early retention
18:44 - How a founder learns enterprise sales by failing at every step
22:26 - Why early churn from wrong-fit customers is a feature, not a bug
24:14 - Using design partnerships again after raising Series A for AI products
28:05 - The power of building with skeptics who think AI can't solve their problems
33:12 - How to navigate pricing conversations when you don't know your price
35:02 - Why design partnerships require 70% of founder time to succeed
37:27 - Building a 4,000-person Slack community through valuable AMAs
41:20 - The contrarian approach to hiring marketing as your first GTM hire
42:20 - Why the best startup advice is to ignore all startup advice
Learn why most startups do customer discovery so poorly, why they fail at design partnerships and how Pocus CEO Alexa Grabell cracked the code by embracing skeptics over enthusiasts. Learn the counterintuitive approach that led to building a category-defining product in the crowded sales tech space.
Alexa Grabell is co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a revenue acceleration platform that helps go-to-market teams at companies like Asana, Canva, and Amiiro save 10+ hours weekly by turning data into pipeline. She's raised over $23M from First Round Capital, Coatue, Pear, and angels including Scott Belsky and Lenny Rachitsky.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:46 - How to structure discovery calls to validate hypotheses in 2-3 week sprints
03:12 - The art of sending hundreds of LinkedIn messages to get 10 meetings per week
06:27 - Why leading with curiosity beats leading the witness in customer interviews
08:33 - How pretending to be a competitor's sales rep validates product ideas
10:52 - Converting skeptical prospects into your best design partners
13:49 - The #1 mistake that kills the transition from design partner to paying customer
15:09 - Why charging $6K when you should charge $30K destroys early retention
18:44 - How a founder learns enterprise sales by failing at every step
22:26 - Why early churn from wrong-fit customers is a feature, not a bug
24:14 - Using design partnerships again after raising Series A for AI products
28:05 - The power of building with skeptics who think AI can't solve their problems
33:12 - How to navigate pricing conversations when you don't know your price
35:02 - Why design partnerships require 70% of founder time to succeed
37:27 - Building a 4,000-person Slack community through valuable AMAs
41:20 - The contrarian approach to hiring marketing as your first GTM hire
42:20 - Why the best startup advice is to ignore all startup advice
Creators and Guests
Host
Pascal Unger
Co-founder / Managing Partner at focal.vc We lead pre-seeds in North America with up to $1M: We exclusively back AI native software startups at the very start. Thereafter, we help them get off the ground better and faster, supported by a network > 200 GTM executives. That's our singular, unwavering focus.
What is focal podcast?
Pivotal early lessons of today's best startups.
Welcome to the focal podcast where we go deep with some of today's best founders and operators on ONE crucial lessons from their early days.
This podcast is not the usual "highlight reel" startup podcast that goes one inch deep across 20+ topics. Rather, we ask the questions you’d ask if you were sitting across from them. No fluff, just the real, actionable insights you’d get if these founders were mentoring you 1on1.
We cover topics including:
- What worked and why.
- Costly mistakes and how they fixed them.
- Frameworks that truly made a difference.
- Tactics to move faster.
- What they wish they’d known sooner.
- And much more!
"Only a fool learns from their own mistakes. The wise learn from the mistakes of others."