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What can you learn from someone who's built a motion from scratch to scale?
That's what we discovered with Maximus, CEO and Co-founder of Warmly. He shares how they built outbound from nothing.
This episode is brought to you by Fullcast, the only AI-powered platform that streamlines your entire sales lifecycle — from plan to pay. With modules like territory and quota management, routing, and capacity planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs — whether you need one solution or an all-in-one platform.
Ready to see the difference? Visit Fullcast.com and mention the Revenue Formula Podcast to unlock an exclusive premium gift, just for listeners!
Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com
That's what we discovered with Maximus, CEO and Co-founder of Warmly. He shares how they built outbound from nothing.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (03:05) - Building in Public
- (06:41) - Firing Customers
- (07:43) - Stacking Outbound
- (10:54) - Zero to One: Lessons and Learnings
- (19:08) - Dang outbound, it works!
- (19:52) - Consistency in Email Campaigns
- (20:34) - Profiles for Zero to One Phase
- (21:30) - Commandos, Soldiers, and Policemen
- (24:24) - Scaling Sales Processes
- (25:15) - Layering in more channels
- (27:54) - Hiring and Team Culture
- (29:19) - Navigating Growth Challenges
- (35:27) - AI in Sales and Marketing
This episode is brought to you by Fullcast, the only AI-powered platform that streamlines your entire sales lifecycle — from plan to pay. With modules like territory and quota management, routing, and capacity planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs — whether you need one solution or an all-in-one platform.
Ready to see the difference? Visit Fullcast.com and mention the Revenue Formula Podcast to unlock an exclusive premium gift, just for listeners!
Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com
Creators and Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, 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: how does a startup on a unicorn path build a new motion? And how do you take outbound from zero to scale?
[00:00:08] Max: in the first quarter of that zero to one motion, you know, how, what are hypotheses around how to get a bunch of meetings?
[00:00:13] And so we said, okay, we're going to try reaching out to people on email and LinkedIn only. And we're going to do an outbound lead motion from the founder's LinkedIn and the founder's email address to generate as many meetings as possible. And we will say anything to get a meeting.
[00:00:29] Toni: That's Maximus, co founder and CEO of Warmly, and he reveals not only how they implemented Outbound, but how they're stacking Outbound.
[00:00:40] Max: There's no way doing the same things that we did In 2024 are going to let us triple in 2025.
[00:00:45] You have to reinvent your own playbook. And so part of that is taking big bets with big dollars uh, we looked at the things that were working and we, yeah, we're, we're tripling down on them. I don't think that's like a controversial take.
[00:00:54] I think the like scary part, especially for first time founders like me is I'm going to spend more money this year than I have dollars in the bank.
[00:01:02] Toni: Before we jump into the show, today's episode is brought to you by Fullcast. The only AI powered platform that streamlines your entire sales cycle from plan to pay.
[00:01:14] Customers report up 80 percent cost savings, 20 percent growth in pipeline, and 30 percent boost in RevOps efficiency.
[00:01:22] With modules like Territory and Quota Management, Routing and Capacity Planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs whether you need one solution or an all in one platform
[00:01:34] Visit fullcast. com, book a demo, and mention the revenue formula podcast. To unlock an exclusive premium gift just for listeners
[00:01:44] And now enjoy the show.
[00:01:47] Max: I grew up in Colorado, and then I moved to Berlin. Moved to Berlin for love two years ago. And we we have half the company in Europe and half the company in the U. S. And we, we don't have any headquarters offices. Though I'm thinking about starting an office in San Francisco in in a few months.
[00:02:02] Mikkel: I just wondered, like, I didn't expect you'd be like this. I was expecting like a beanie or a cowboy hat or somewhere. What happens with all that direction goes in that direction. I
[00:02:13] Toni: think we're
[00:02:13] Mikkel: fine.
[00:02:14] Toni: I think we're fine.
[00:02:15] Mikkel: There we go. There we go. Also
[00:02:17] Toni: hoping for the cowboy hat. Actually, this is why.
[00:02:19] Mikkel: This is why, if you're listening right now, you want to watch, you want to go for the video edition of this show. Not just the audio. It's just not as authentic. You also have another place to hit the subscribe button. Yeah. You know, it's really
[00:02:30] Toni: great
[00:02:30] Mikkel: to have two
[00:02:31] Toni: of those.
[00:02:31] Mikkel: No, I really feel like we're in the, the vibrant SaaS sector in Colorado.
[00:02:35] Now that's,
[00:02:38] Max: I mean, here's the thing, I'm, as a digital nomad, you can't really place me anywhere. I mean, I'm happy to be in Texas, Colorado, Macedonia Berlin I go, I go wherever the the, the sass is, the SaaS is going.
[00:02:51] Mikkel: that's it. That's it. And one of the things so by the way, thanks so much for joining us on the show. You're gonna, I guess, share a bit of your playbook of how you've been stacking outbound. So really keen to get into that conversation pretty fast.
[00:03:05] One of the things I actually just personally really wanted to ask is you've been building in public.
[00:03:09] You're one of the few who also do it. Why and what has that kind of done for you and the team? I'm, I'm just super curious to understand that part as well.
[00:03:19] Max: Yeah. So, you know, some background here as a human I've always been somebody who wants to be liked and maybe call it a childhood trauma or something, but it's really important to me to get others feedback on how I'm doing. I've been this way my whole life. And when I started a company, I found it really strange that people had this like corporate veil or sort of this stealth mode aspect of what they were doing.
[00:03:42] And yeah, maybe people are like, Oh, competition we'll see. But I've realized over time, your competition doesn't care about you and you don't care about your competition. And it's not going to be the thing that prevents you from building a big business. So, you know, I've always I've written down a lot about how it's going at the company, shared it internally, shared it to my investors, shared it to my family, shared it to my friends, you know, monthly updates, quarterly updates, annual updates helps me synthesize my thoughts but yeah, I see no problem sharing it in public, and so I post all of our numbers and metrics on LinkedIn every month.
[00:04:14] Mikkel: And the whole reason I wanted to actually start with this question before getting into the good stuff is, then we know you're going to be completely transparent, right? There's not really going to be anything you're going to hold back where it's like is it one of those? Feels like
[00:04:27] Toni: entrapment here. No, I think we're going to have fun.
[00:04:31] We're going to have fun. So out of, out of my human interest actually on this How does it, how does it feel to post bad news? Like it's, it's, it's difficult enough to bring bad news to the team. I feel sometimes, right. Kind of, but exposing and putting it all the way out there. It sounds crazy to me.
[00:04:49] Max: Yeah. When I was in I think I was 16 years old, I did a half day meditation session with a guru who came from India and I was back in Colorado. And he talked about how whenever something bad happens to you, you can imagine yourself, your your soul, your ego living above your body. And you know, when some, when you get physically hurt or mentally hurt or something sad happens, Your human body has this physical reaction to the sadness or the negativity.
[00:05:14] You could cry, you could be upset. And he sort of coached us in this very meditative way on how to observe your body and go, Oh, that's just kind of like my stupid flesh and blood experiencing this negativity or sadness, but I live above it and I can watch it. And I sort of think of our business the same way.
[00:05:31] I mean. You know, if my business fails yeah, that's my responsibility. But like I'm learning, I'm growing, I'm a person. Like, I don't think my mom's going to stop, you know, taking me out to dinner. You know, when I come home to visit because my business failed, she'll still love me. And so, yeah, I think that the way that I look at it is we are all working on a science project, or an experiment, and it is this business, and so when I put out something bad, it's just sort of another bump, a bump in the road, it's another issue that, you know, happens, and we'll all work on it together.
[00:05:59] And the crazy thing about posting bad stuff on LinkedIn is people, one, appreciate the authenticity and transparency, but two, I get really good ideas on how to fix my problems from the internet. The internet trolls.
[00:06:11] Toni: Yeah, that's, that's actually a really good point. Kind of getting, getting that. And I also think, you know, this kind of content just also works really well on LinkedIn. You know, I think that's the other thing, right. Kind of, especially bad news. It's like, Oh, let me, let me, let me read up what's going poorly with these guys right now.
[00:06:26] Right. I can, I can see how like a human brain is jumping on this immediately.
[00:06:31] Mikkel: No, it's also good to know, like you're not alone in failing. Someone else shared their failure as well.
[00:06:36] Max: And speaking of, you know, bad news, I'm posting something today. That's I would call bad news.
[00:06:41] We are announcing that we're firing 11 percent of our customers.
[00:06:44] And so we know it's okay. And we did a bunch of analysis on our customers and realized that we had a bunch of customers who were taking up a lot of our time and weren't going to get value from the product.
[00:06:54] And rather than take their money when I shouldn't, or try to do something that is broken, I would just rather let them go. And this is my fault, and my responsibility, because I allowed our team to accept these in as customers without really qualifying if they were ideal customer personas. And we're moving up market, and so the majority of these are very small customers that, you know, toward the end of the month, we're like, Ah, we just want to hit our quota number.
[00:07:18] Sure, sure, you can be a customer. And you know, many of them are not getting value, and we're spending way too much time trying to help somebody with no website traffic, try to get warm leads and book meetings from their very small website traffic, and so, we made the tough decision to fire some of our customers.
[00:07:34] Toni: Yeah. That's a, that's, that's, that's a whole other episode we could probably kind of talk about. But we didn't prepare for that. What did we, what did we want to talk about? So we wanted
[00:07:43] Mikkel: to talk a bit about how you've been stacking outbound. I mean, this was really one of the, my impression is, is one of the first.
[00:07:47] channels you really bet on. And what I'm hoping we can run through is some of the different stages you walk through with that. Let's say motion. What were some of the decisions, you know, tough and easy along the way that led you to to where you are today. So I'm just wondering like, if, if, if we were to start, maybe just understanding what were the different phases of growing up with, with this motion for you and then we can take a one by one, what does that look
[00:08:10] like?
[00:08:11] Max: Yeah, so to set the scene warmly today is that 300 paying customers, about 3 million on ARR and we're basically about two years old with a live product. Technically we're five years old. We had three years of pivoting around trying to figure out what we're going to do, but we really finally hit it and figured out we wanted to do about two years ago.
[00:08:28] And so the last two years have been all about growth and all about sales and marketing and figuring out how to grow the business. And so the first year we went zero to a million, this past year went one to three million, and we hope this year to go three to nine million, three X ing our ARR again.
[00:08:41] And to do that, it takes a very disciplined and principled approach to experimentation and testing around your outbound go to market motion. And when you're a business that hasn't, no one's ever heard of you before, of course you need to go outbound hard to even get to the place where you start to generate inbound.
[00:08:57] And we're pretty lucky now, you know, we get twenty to thirty inbounds a day that are qualified, which is nice. We really appreciate that. But that came from a lot of hardcore outbound and even businesses that from day one, we're experiencing massive inbound, even if you're a large business, you know, a hundred million plus an ARR it's never too late or too early to start your outbound motion to generate higher quality leads.
[00:09:19] Cause at the end of the day, the leads that you chase intentionally will always be better than the random leads that come to your site and poke a meeting inbound.
[00:09:26] Toni: On, on that note, actually, because you introed with you letting go 11 percent of your customers quick, quick, interesting question. So you did, they, did they come mostly from inbound from outbound, you know, it was wrong targeting on the outbound side. Kind of, did you do that part of the analysis as well to try and, you know, make sure that you don't acquire the same customers again?
[00:09:43] Max: No, that's a genius idea. I'll get back to you tomorrow on this. And for the listeners, before we post this, I would like to do the analysis of what percent of those customers were letting go came from inbound versus outbound. And my hypothesis, cause I force everybody on the team at Warmly to guess before we learn the real data, my hypothesis is that two thirds came from inbound and one third came from outbound indicating a, you know, lower success rates of inbound customers than outbound.
[00:10:07] Yeah,
[00:10:12] Mikkel: a bet on that, but it's cool. It's cool. We'll, we'll circle back to it in the end. We'll wait, we'll let it simmer. What the bet should be about. So one of the, also, I guess the context pieces is you're in a very competitive space is my impression, right?
[00:10:24] Because you're selling basically. Sales tech, revenue, intelligence solution to kind of surface signals of who's visiting your website. So you can do outbound or whatever you want to call it outreach, basically. Right. So it's also competitive space. And I think even for our listeners, it's still interesting to hear how do you just take something from zero to one?
[00:10:43] Because I think it's one of the very, very, very difficult pieces to do. And there might be someone who has been doing inbound led or PLG or something else. And might be ready to consider outbounds.
[00:10:54] I think even this part the first chapter, I guess of building out outbound, walk us through, what was that like to get it actually off the ground and working?
[00:11:02] Max: sure, and I think for those that might think, Oh, you know, the zero to one piece isn't interesting to me, I'm, I'm operating at the 10 to 100 kind of factor and scale. Any new channel that you start, you have to take zero to one, any new team that you start, you have to take from zero to one, pretty much any initiative, no matter how big or small starts from nothing and then is built up over time.
[00:11:19] And so hopefully some of the principles or ethos is on. Or frameworks on how we created our zero to one motion will, will be helpful and apply. So the, the kind of first high level thing that I really got from my time as a product manager at Google before I jumped into the SAS early stage software game is that they put a huge emphasis on experimentation and hypothesis driven experimentation.
[00:11:41] And so we treat every new feature at Warmly, every business endeavor, every go to market motion, every outbound initiative. As an experiment with a hypothesis that we can measure in a defined amount of time. And I think, typically in quarters, I think it's pretty reasonable. So, for example, when we thought about our 0 to 1 outbound motion, it was, okay, across this year what are going to be our, you know, experiments?
[00:12:03] And obviously they can shift as you learn, but at least for the first quarter it was, what experiments do we want to make on what channels? What hypotheses do we want to evaluate? Questions to ask ourselves, metrics to hit, and then what are we going to do, importantly, if we hit or don't hit those, those metrics or hypotheses.
[00:12:21] Because I think so easily, you know, teams can get into this sunk cost fallacy, where like you invest 100, 000 in paid ads, you see a 100, 000 return, so you're break even, and you're like, okay, like, you know, I guess that's okay, but it's not amazing. Well, we've already learned a lot, so might as well just dump another 100, 000 in next quarter.
[00:12:39] But if at the beginning of the quarter, I had told you, If you break even on this initiative, what are you going to do? You might have told me, that's not good enough. I need to see a 2, 3x ROI for it to matter. And you need to have that discipline and principled nature to cut things off. From your original hypotheses.
[00:12:54] So that's sort of like high level framework.
[00:12:57] Toni: And so I think from a high level perspective, that makes total sense, right? Everyone's like, Oh, cool. That's, that's really cool. Really impressive that these guys are so disciplined about this. But could you maybe give us like one or two of those experiments and hypotheses that you use in the early days?
[00:13:12] And maybe even reveal which one turned, you know, turned out to be true or wrong kind of in this regard to make it just a, you know, that little step more tangible for
[00:13:20] folks.
[00:13:20] Max: Oh, for sure. I'm a big believer in quantity first, quality later. I take this approach in my personal life as well. Like, I love sushi. I just try to tell people I'm a quantity of sushi guy over a quality of sushi guy, which is a controversial take, but that's just how I roll. And so I applied this sort of factor with, with book meetings, which is, you know, first, in the first quarter of that zero to one motion, you know, how, what are hypotheses around how to get a bunch of meetings?
[00:13:43] And so we said, okay, we're going to try reaching out to people on email and LinkedIn only. And we're going to do an outbound lead motion from the founder's LinkedIn and the founder's email address to generate as many meetings as possible. And we will say anything to get a meeting. And so the kinds of experiments we ran were I have created a new product.
[00:14:03] Can I get your product feedback for 30 minutes? And that goal was like, maybe we can turn that into a sale. Another experiment cold was, you know, I'm trying to sell you this thing. Do you want to buy it? And then another experiment was you know, I'm early in selling this thing. I'd love your feedback or to see if you'd want to buy it.
[00:14:21] So sort of like three versions and naturally it was easiest to get people on the line to just. Learn about, you know, how cool your product is. Cause who doesn't want to talk to a founder about some cool product thing? Hardest to get on the line was people who were just being cold pitched to buy, and then somewhere in the middle was the middle ground.
[00:14:37] And the easiest to close deals was the cold outbound that we got replies for, and the hardest to close deals was. So if your ultimate goal is to close deals, which it probably is interestingly, the hardest thing that to get someone on the line for a first meeting was the easiest to close. And I think that just also goes to show you that your hypotheses need to extend beyond your immediate goal.
[00:15:01] Because I think a lot of marketing leaders, for example, will say, I need to generate this number of leads per quarter. And then they don't really follow that through to which of those leads from which channels turned into. Book meetings and sorry, into closed deals and in your earlier question about our firing of our customers, if we learn that all 100 percent of our customers that were firing came from inbound, that's a really good learning to try to iterate on our inbound motion, and I'm happy to give you more details on the experiment and the hypotheses, but that's just one example of for that very first quarter in the zero to one motion, focusing on quantity of meetings first, which channels we use in the messaging we tried.
[00:15:36] Toni: yeah. And just kind of to double click on this one second, right. Because The, you know, the, the bunch of meetings that you got that didn't turn out to, you know, close or go anywhere, right. Kind of that you got through this, Hey, let's talk about this cool product. What's it like an intermediary step as well, or kind of trying learning from that, because you had more conversations, you know, maybe that helped you with figuring out.
[00:15:57] How they're relating to your space, what words they're using for your product. And, you know, how they would, whether, whether you think in the, in the company, this is most applicable or the, you know, things like that. Did you especially in the, in the super early beginning, right. And the first quarter of this, right.
[00:16:12] It's not only all the time about you know, how much of this is going to close. There's also some of the learnings that are coming out from those conversations themselves.
[00:16:20] Max: To take it a step further, I would say it's this, and I'll say it for the listeners, zero percent about actually the number of deals you close. In the early days of any creation of something zero to one, the learnings are going to be much more important than the stats of, you know, how many dollars you brought in.
[00:16:35] And obviously an indication of finding a, let's call it a message that works, not necessarily product market fit, but at least message market fit is the ability to. Convince people to hop on a call with you and press by. But whether you're a founder or you're ahead of marketing or, you know, even a content writer, when you're creating emotion for the first time, number of conversations, quality conversations that teach you something is a equally valuable metric to dollars closed.
[00:17:02] Mikkel: What was for you actually most difficult at this stage?
[00:17:06] Max: Oh man, everything was difficult. I think what's, what's interesting, especially as a first time founder is you don't know what you don't know. And everyone's expecting you to grow steadily up into the right and exponentially. I had been lucky enough to come from three years of pivot hell, right? We were all over the place, trying different products, learning skills, learning what doesn't work.
[00:17:25] And so it was helpful, let's say like emotionally, to recognize that, you know, one step forward, two steps back is, is the norm. And so I think in the beginning of building our zero to one outbound motion instead of having the fear that, oh, what if this doesn't work? My expectation is this isn't going to work.
[00:17:41] Let me do everything I can to try to prevent that. And that like grit allowed me to iterate quickly on messaging, to put up different lending pages, to try different approaches to yeah, just figure out different ways and methods to be successful. I think one thing I didn't appreciate as well, and this is important from the zero to one motion is the.
[00:18:00] Response rate and the time of day that a founder is given versus a BDR. And while I think BDRs are amazing, I'm actually here in Macedonia hanging out with 15 of our BDRs and helping train them to get to success. They just don't have the same clout or response rate that the founder will, the same, not the same passion, they can have the same passion, but you're naturally going to get a much higher reply rate.
[00:18:20] And so, part of this zero to one experimentation was for the first quarter. Can we get anybody to reply to us? Can we get anyone to reply to the founders? Then can we sell from the founders? All of this had to be validated and proven true before we went to the next phase of experimentation, which was, can we do the same thing with a sales leader?
[00:18:37] And the next phase of experimentation, can we do the same thing with a BDR? And you have to realize that at every phase, you're going to be changing up your messaging and trying different approaches and iterating on product and your, and honing your message. Cause once you're super, super dialed in on your message, certainly you can train and work with a BDR to get them to generate enough booked meetings that just like the founder would have, you know, for us and now eight quarters ago.
[00:18:59] But yeah, I think that was one of the things that was hard or underappreciated was like your hypothesis driven nature is about the person as much as it is the tactics.
[00:19:08] Mikkel: And would you actually say the, so this initial chapter, like zero to one, is that also at the point in time where you went, dang outbound, this is gonna be a thing for us? Was that the time or did it later? When was that time? Yeah, if you know.
[00:19:21] Max: Yeah, I think it was about the time that we put automated sequences in. So, I was doing a lot of personal manual outreach on email and LinkedIn. And when I started automating it to maybe 500, a thousand reach outs per month and doing that using personalized messaging, because this is the very early days of AI and automation.
[00:19:38] And side note, we actually built this into Warmly's product, and that's one of the most fun parts about doing an outbound motion on a outbound tool, is that you get to use your own product and build your own product for your own success. But we can talk more about that later.
[00:19:52] I think I felt like it was going to start working when I was able to consistently, month over month, reproduce open rate and reply rate on an email campaign when targeting different, prospects within the same persona.
[00:20:06] And that's interesting, right? Because, you know, after three or four quarters, it actually would decline because email spam, you know, filters were changing and the messaging was getting tiring for certain audiences and more people had bought different stuff. So, you know, time or temporal factors external to your business will always affect things month to month.
[00:20:23] But it was seeing some consistency that made me start to feel like this motion is left. 0 to 0. 1, and maybe now we're in the 0. 2 to 0. 5 phase.
[00:20:34] Toni: When, when you're doing something like this, and, and obviously kind of this special situation that you are in being the founder, but also, you know, building in this space who do you think is a, is a good profile otherwise to build something like this from zero to one, right? Because it's there's a lot of experimentation, lots of iteration.
[00:20:50] If you take the. Oh, this is a proven SDR leader that was at Salesforce before. Like that's probably not the right profile. Right. So, and, and does it need to be a sales leader at all? Kind of what's your, what's your thinking on, you know, someone else listening that is maybe, you know, 10, 20, 30 million and the founder is not going to do what you just did there.
[00:21:09] Right. Kind of how, how do they find the person that can, that can take it? Those first terrible steps to get, you know, somewhere in a direction of like, oh, wow, this can actually work.
[00:21:19] Max: Yeah, the whole one man's trash is another man's treasure situation applies here, where you call it the first terrible steps, but there are people that are custom built for the 0 to 1 phase.
[00:21:30] And one of the things that I've learned as we've scaled from our Precede to our seed in a series a and hopefully sooner series B is you're gonna have employees or people you can hire contractors Maybe who are specialized in a particular stage and it doesn't mean they can't scale with you at every step of the business But it means their energy is most brought out at a certain stage And one of my VCS I think coined this very well when he said you have Your commandos your Soldiers and your policemen and he basically described three types of employees.
[00:22:06] The commandos are the crazy people who drop in in the middle of the night from a helicopter, an army crawl their way through the mud and they, you know, use a knife when their gun is taken away from them and they pull a tree from the tree branch and, you know, attack people that way. They're crazy, right?
[00:22:24] And they, you know, eat bugs on a tree. And these are the people you want to bring in to the very earliest stage of creating something, the zero to one, if you will. The next level up, and again, there's no right or wrong, it's just sort of stage of person. The next person up is the the soldiers.
[00:22:40] These are people who start to pave the roads for the army make sure there are tents set up, and that their you know, their commander has a nice place to sleep at night they're the ones who appreciate, you know, a couple rules and they're very loyal and hardworking and they're willing to go with you anywhere into battle.
[00:22:56] That's kind of the next phase, the one to ten, maybe. And then the, the ten to a hundred is where you bring in the, the policemen. And the policemen are people who look out at a system and anytime something is wrong, they go over and stamp it out and they say, that's not okay. You know, you need to do it this way on.
[00:23:11] They ensure peace and tranquility within the organization so that at the top level, you can sort of apply broad scale change to something that, you know, requires a lot of people to move. So those are the three kinds of employees that I've seen through, you know, friends and family who are all three.
[00:23:27] But yeah, I'd go for that commando type. To bring in for the zero to one motion and happy to give you some more skills or attributes of that person if it's helpful.
[00:23:35] Mikkel: So now we talked about the difficult chapter, do we want to go to the easy part, which is just going from, you know, one to 3 million, how, how can that be?
[00:23:45] Toni: Yeah, sure. Now, and kind of in translating this or shaping this maybe a little bit, it's really also about like, okay, there's a founder led stuff that you did, right.
[00:23:53] Both on the outbound and and, and in closing this You handed this over to someone eventually, at least that's, that's what I understand. Right. What was the new set of Of, of difficulties coming at you, right? You mentioned like, Hey, this messaging changes a little bit because it's not the founder anymore.
[00:24:09] It's not someone else. What else happened there where you were like, okay, kind of handing this over, wasn't just a copy paste. They were all the other things that I actually also needed to do to prepare this, I don't know, for the, for the military guy and to, to keep with your, with your analogy
[00:24:23] then.
[00:24:23] Max: Yeah.
[00:24:24] So, maybe broader into sort of three phases, founder led, zero to maybe like 333K of ARR. Then sales leader led, 333K of ARR at about a million. And then layering in you know, salespeople and sales managers from one to three million in ARR. So at each phase, everything breaks and you need to pretty much completely redo your processes and how you do sales and your messaging.
[00:24:50] And you combine this with the fact that, like, the market's growing and changing, right? All these competitors are popping up, and we gotta figure out what features to build, and so, I also love the analogy, like, you're always building the car while you're driving it. And this is thrilling to me. I mean, it's hard, but it's so fun to be able to make fast decisions at scale and ask the team to move with me as a unit.
[00:25:13] And so, yeah, again, at every level, everything breaks.
[00:25:15] But from an outbound motion perspective you know, founder led email and LinkedIn DMs were the beginning. He was a huge fan of and it really helped broaden our horizon. Not only in how we did outbound, but also in what we built in our tool, but of what he called an omni channel approach.
[00:25:29] And that's where you're not just resting on one channel that maybe has traditionally worked for you, but are layering in a bunch. And so our main kind of channels after the kind of first initial email and LinkedIn stuff became again, from an outbound perspective Email, LinkedIn, cold calls, and then we layered in something we call warm calling, which is actually a feature on Warmly's product which is like sneaky outbound.
[00:25:50] And basically what it is, is when people are on your website, navigating your site. We de anonymize them and ping you on Slack and say right now on your website is a great prospect that is in your territory that you want to go after. And you can jump on your own website and we call it warm calling, which is sort of where you call, you chat, video call them.
[00:26:09] And so that's a form of outbound in a way because you're getting them outbound on your website before they actually fill out a form inbound. So those became our four methods. We sort of doubled the number of sort of channels we were going after for the 333 K to million in ARR phase. And we did a very importantly to help train reps.
[00:26:26] We did sort of this rotation approach where you were always doing all four and some months, some would work better than the other. And we, for our business in particular, and I think this is probably true typically of go to market motions that are like 15 to 20 K ACVs. So not crazy expensive, not crazy cheap.
[00:26:43] We found a balance between many of those channels and of inbound and outbound. But I would say typically for mega mega expensive deals, it's almost exclusively outbound. And for really, really small deal sizes, it's mainly inbound. And we can talk about the economics of why that is, but we're a style of business based on our, let's say, middle size ACVs where a combo of inbound and outbound channels works, works pretty well.
[00:27:08] Toni: So, We, we went into the next step of figuring this out, not by yourself, but you know, other folks kind of doing this with you at, at what point, and maybe there's also some capital raising considerations in the end, what point where you're like, okay, let's, let's just triple down on this thing.
[00:27:22] Kind of this thing is not working. It helped us to get to a million. These things are all coming together. And and now you kind of just, you know, briefly mentioned you're kind of hiring you know, working with 15. BDRs right now, right? Kind of, that is, that is a tripling tripling down kind of thing that you're doing there.
[00:27:38] So kind of walk us maybe through the rationale where like, okay, this is working and now let's, you know, did you start with two BDRs first? So did you have five or did you go to 15 immediately? Kind of, how did you go through this progression of really kind of pulling this
[00:27:53] further?
[00:27:53] Max: Yeah.
[00:27:54] If you have the capital for it, I never recommend hiring just one. You should always hire at least two pretty much any sort of sales or marketing role. And the reason is because if something isn't working. You don't want to have to ask yourself the question is it because the person's wrong or because my messaging and the products or the the market or the channel is wrong and so to eliminate sort of confusion it's easier to just have two to help you learn faster because if it's if they're both doing great you're never going to complain if one's doing great and one sucks then you get rid of the one who sucks then you have a person who's great and is successful and then if both are failing then it's probably not their fault it's probably because your product or your messaging sucks so you Always start with a few.
[00:28:32] And then of course you start with a few before you grow. And it's also like a team culture thing, right? Which is like, you want to create principles for organization. You want to create an attitude or ethos of how you go to market and sell. And if you bring on more people all at once, then you're a size of the team.
[00:28:48] You'll lose your culture in the noise of like people coming in and bringing in their own opinions. But like, if you bring on, you know, some version of like 10, 20, 30 percent of the organization. That's new every quarter or two then you can sort of infuse them into your organization from a cultural perspective.
[00:29:06] So yeah, it's clearly a skilled process. We wanted to see people hitting quota, at least a few, before scaling. And then maybe it just coincides at the end of the year. But for us, it was like, all right, we went one to three this year. That's triple.
[00:29:19] There's no way doing the same things that we did In 2024 are going to let us triple in 2025.
[00:29:24] You have to reinvent your own playbook. And so part of that is taking big bets with big dollars and you know, it's, you gotta spend money to make money. And so, we looked at the things that were working and we, yeah, we're, we're tripling down on them. I don't think that's like a controversial take.
[00:29:36] I think the like scary part, especially for first time founders like me is I'm going to spend more money this year than I have dollars in the bank. And that means. That my revenue has to make up for in a serious way, and I have to grow to survive. And that's part of the venture game. But, like, just, just freaks me out, right?
[00:29:57] Like, to know that that's, that's on the table this year.
[00:30:00] Toni: you, did you do any kind of because you have kind of two, two forces that are pulling on you, right? Kind of one is the, Hey, you know, I'm on this unicorn path, you know, got to a million triple, and now we need to triple again. And the only way for us to do this is we need to take this channel that works so we can scale and we need to scale it even further.
[00:30:19] So this is one consideration where a little bit like, you know, what, what else are you going to do? Right. But then on the flip side did you think about you know, efficiency, do you think about, Hey, is the CAC payback of that thing working out for me? Or, you know, you know, how, how did you navigate those two forces that, that were busy kind of potentially we're pulling you in different directions.
[00:30:39] Max: So, maybe it's just sort of the early stage stuff. But the, I've never thought about the word CAC Payback in my life. And and I certainly plan to when I hit 10 million on ARR, but not yet. And that's because we're on the Venture Back Rodeo. The one number that I do care a lot about is my magic number sales magic number, which is the ratio of how much money you spent on sales and marketing last quarter to how much revenue you brought in this quarter.
[00:31:02] And so roughly as long as I'm at one or better, meaning my investment in sales and marketing is always made up for a new sales or better then I'm, I'm feeling fine in terms of the amount of money that I'm willing to spend to be able to justify. Certain sales and marketing efforts and take experiments.
[00:31:17] So that's been like my rough, rough barometer. But yeah, it kind of just depends. And I would, I would, for the listeners out there that are, you know, on that 10 millionaire or plus kind of style of business just being really clear with their manager around what metrics matter. And the assuring those, you know, align with the business goals overall.
[00:31:34] And making sure that, yeah, those are just taken into account when you decide which big bets you're going to take. But like one of the ways that I'm phrasing my budget this year, and I would recommend that marketers, especially when they go and ask for budget for the following year, ask is basically what's the revenue target.
[00:31:49] What's our goals. Okay, great. You know, with a budget of X, I believe I can hit those goals and I want to make sure that I can deliver these goals to our company without messing up. And so I need a buffer. And so in our case, for me and my business and the scale we're at about a million bucks is the buffer across the business.
[00:32:09] And so I basically told the team, I'm not going to allocate this million dollars now, but I want to throughout the year and more emergency situations or even a proactive stance, say to the team. You know, if you're a portion of that million is 200 K, what would you put this 200 K toward this year? That would guarantee you don't miss your number.
[00:32:27] And that's sort of my, like, yeah, just like buffer theory on ensuring dollars are well spent to hit our numbers.
[00:32:33] Mikkel: And I think also on, on this front, when you make bets, some of them, they fail and I'm just super curious in this phase of going to from one to three, I can feel the pressure almost of, you know, investing so much money and kind of needing it to get back what went completely sideways, what just did not work out or pan out as you expected.
[00:32:52] Max: Yeah. A couple of three, three things I'm reminded. First is the holiday months. I just never thought I'd need to factor in that, like, at least particularly for us. August, which is end of summer and November, which is the like hybrid Christmas, you know, Thanksgiving, U. S. Thanksgiving month. We're like half of the revenue we projected.
[00:33:10] Yeah, I had a nice little ticker, ticker, ticker revenue growth, growth, growth. And now I'm, I, I wisened up to being an idiot there and I like baked that into my projections. So that was probably the, the first thing that surprised me. The second thing is, when a channel starts working, it's not guaranteed to keep working.
[00:33:24] So, LinkedIn social content from my LinkedIn, where I'd post text based LinkedIn posts, went great for five months, and I thought it was going to generate 90 percent of our revenue for all time. And then it just went off a cliff, and all of a sudden I went down from, I think I was getting like 150 likes per post, and I'd post like twice a week, to getting like 30 likes per post and basically finding that I had saturated my direct audience.
[00:33:52] I had sort of, you know, hit up everyone that could be hit up, demo requests were going down from me as a percentage of LinkedIn. And it took like three to six months of LinkedIn retooling to kick back the LinkedIn content to being successful again. And it's just a variety of tactics around when you post, how often you post videos versus images versus text.
[00:34:12] And being really thoughtful and getting really nitty gritty in the weeds, but yeah, that channel stopped working for us for six months. And that was scary, because I thought we had made a, not a big dollar investment, but a big time investment in something that may not have panned out.
[00:34:25] Toni: And so now on your journey from three to nine, right. You're going to keep doing the LinkedIn stuff. I'm sure you're going to keep doing the outbound pieces. I'm sure. Are you, are you also thinking about adding new things on top? Are you adding, you know, do you have new hypothesis and experiments you want to run in order to, you know, build, build your, your channels out more horizontally?
[00:34:43] Max: Yes, absolutely. Paid ads would be big for us, partnerships would be big for us in person events would be big for us. Yeah, no controversial channels there, it's just like, it's time to do them and get them done, while not losing The speed and momentum we have on outbound, which is primarily driven by our BDR team here in Eastern Europe and growing that team, training them successfully and having them really hit email, LinkedIn and, and and calls and then on our inbound side, social content being our main primary driver and that being successful.
[00:35:18] While still investing in a variety of, you know, smaller channels, we have some SEO stuff going. We have some some like referral programs in the mix. All the normal stuff.
[00:35:27] Toni: And maybe kind of more of a general question, actually, because this is on everyone's minds all the time, especially also when they're, when they're listening to this show have you been playing around with, you know, AI to help you on your go to market, get better, get cheaper, get smarter, you know, do whatever.
[00:35:43] Do you have any stories to share with like, Hey, this would actually extremely well for us. We tried those five things, those four were, you know, not, not working well, but this one worked well for us. Do you have, a couple of stories to share on that one?
[00:35:53] Max: Yeah. Yesterday on LinkedIn I posted that 100 percent of Warmly employees are required to be AI proficient by the end of the year. And that we're going to be hosting AI hackathons where we ask our employees to go out and try different AI tools. As well as AI showcases where we bring in house. AI experts to give us presentations across different verticals within the company to get better at AI.
[00:36:14] And obviously I think we need to live, eat, and breathe AI because we're an AI tool to help people with sales. But across other verticals and vectors, you can use AI in all parts of your business. And I want my employees to think like AI first. Let's say excluding sales marketing, which I'll get to in a second.
[00:36:30] Two quick examples of where I think AI in practice is great. First is in interviewing. So we record all of our interviews with our interview notetaker called Fathom, fathom. video. And what's cool is you can ask Fathom questions about how that video call went. And so after every interview I ask it, How could I have done better in that interview?
[00:36:48] Or, what three questions should I ask this person before the interview? Based on the transcripts and recordings of their previous interviews with my coworkers. And so just quick ways to scale. Recruiting and hiring in a remote first culture using AI that I think is really great. The sort of second thing to do for it with AI, this is more, again, like internal is on the coding side.
[00:37:09] And we basically are requiring all of our engineers to use AI on a daily basis. And we're actually monitoring number of lines coded from AI as opposed to human coded. And the main thing is that we want to teach and really push our engineers to use. AI mechanisms to drive efficiency in their coding, rather than what they might be typically used to, which is sort of human lead coding.
[00:37:31] So, those are just two examples internally. Now I'll flip to two examples externally, if you will, around the kind of go to market motion piece that I think are great with AI. First is personalized email writing and message writing. This is not a controversial one, but tools like Taplio and AutoBound.
[00:37:45] Are really great for generating messaging at scale to individuals and personalizing based on what the person is most likely to see and respond to. And some people might say, oh, this is spam, but I actually think it's great. It's sort of like, why wouldn't you want to, of course, be compelling yourself?
[00:38:01] But importantly, if you're gonna spam someone or send them messages that they don't want, they might as well be relevant and, like, good to see. Which is kind of like why I like Instagram personalized ads, because I see stuff that's relevant to me. So that's probably the first example of AI in practice and sales.
[00:38:16] And the second one, of course, I have to plug our own product warmly, which takes all your warm leads across your total addressable market using signals like. Denonymizing your website scraping LinkedIn seeing who's hiring or, or firing and then taking all those leads and warming them up using AI to get them to book a meeting with you.
[00:38:34] And we do AI messaging and AI sort of follow ups in ads, email, LinkedIn, and a chat bot, all to service an omni channel go to market motion to hit your total addressable market.
[00:38:46] Toni: Yeah. So, I mean, I think it was totally fair to kind of plug the plug warmly there, so please everyone kind of listening, you know, go and go and check it out if you haven't already, because I think we have time for one last question, what's what's on your mind,
[00:39:00] Mikkel: I thought it was like, you wrote neatly in the note for me and it's done now, so I was like,
[00:39:04] Toni: I was, and, and, and
[00:39:06] Mikkel: question
[00:39:06] Toni: basically, can't
[00:39:08] Mikkel: you see, can't you see my, we're recording with Bethany from Sendspark later. I'm sensing you might know each other. Am I correct in
[00:39:16] Max: I gave a high five to Bethany six days ago in Austin, Texas at our warmly in person event where we brought customers and prospects to Austin to have drinks and hang out and get to know each other. Bethany is both a customer, a vendor, and friend.
[00:39:31] Mikkel: So, what should we actually ask her later? Because I have not done my prep work. Can we just, can we outsource it to you right now?
[00:39:37] Yeah.
[00:39:41] Max: Is a fun one is you know, why, why is she moving upcoming to Seattle? And then more of a kind of let's say go to market discussion is probably around like, so she's kind of the, the AI video queen, if you will. But really we talk about kind of the effectiveness of I generated video.
[00:40:00] Is the quality for a generated video there to be able to do this successfully at scale? And then because video as is calling is a more human thing, right? You look at a person, they smile, you call on the phone, you hear their voice. Maybe just trying to dig into you. You know, how does AI somewhat disrupt these more human tasks?
[00:40:21] Because in my opinion, and you can ask her this or tell her this, because I think it can be somewhat controversial, but we should leave email and ads entirely to AI, and humans should focus on calling and LinkedIn, where I think, you know, human voice and human, you know, behavior does best.
[00:40:39] Mikkel: So I think this is also just a neat little plug for the next episode. And obviously if you're not following Max already, you should, because we're gonna see how that bet we never made, I guess, pans out. I was gonna offer up to wear a cowboy hat for an episode if we lost, but I'm not sure which side of the bet I wanna be on.
[00:40:56] So we're just gonna leave it as is, I guess.
[00:40:59] Toni: And if you can't wait to kind of see the interview with Bethany, then hit, hit subscribe. I think this is where you're going with this, Michael. Jesus. Max, thank you so much for spending some time here and enlightening our our listeners on, on this outbound journey, which is really kind of told from a You know, found a perspective.
[00:41:18] I think some of that stuff is going to be hard to replicate. Some of that stuff is going to be super straightforward to replicate actually for many folks listening. So thank you so much. And yeah, enjoy your, enjoy your time in Macedonia.
[00:41:28] Max: Thanks, bye all.
[00:41:29] Toni: Cheers.