Growblocks is shutting down: here's what we've learned

Growblocks is done, but we're continuing the podcast - so we thought we'd share some of the things we've learned along the way in this episode.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:43) - Growblocks shutting down
• (03:36) - Why it didn't work
• (04:36) - The people we were selling to
• (07:56) - Internal Selling and Champion Challenges
• (13:16) - Category Creation and Market Positioning
• (15:50) - Impact of SaaS and AI on the Market
• (19:55) - Consulting vs. Product Focus
• (22:48) - Building Trust Through Branding
• (26:24) - Effective Outbound Strategies
• (28:29) - Future Plans and Show Continuation

Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com

Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

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: Hey everyone, this is Toni Holbein, you are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we're talking about grow blocks shutting down and three things we have learned that might be helpful for you. Enjoy.
[00:00:15] Mikkel: What are you doing now? You're gonna use the laptop now,
[00:00:19] Toni: Yeah, because no one printed anything.
[00:00:22] Mikkel: Well, it's my printer now, I don't
[00:00:24] Toni: vulture
[00:00:25] Mikkel: all
[00:00:25] Toni: the, the printer.
[00:00:26] Mikkel: on this shit.
[00:00:27] Toni: Like the printer wasn't cold yet and you just ripped it out of the hands.
[00:00:34] Mikkel: Can I have it? I need a printer.
[00:00:38] My wife has been occasionally, she's like, we should get a printer, and I'm like, but
[00:00:45] Toni: got Like it's so big.
[00:00:50] Mikkel: Oh yeah, small.
[00:00:50] Toni: it's Bluetooth. Bluetooth connected. And it basically, um, works like those printers that you have on, uh, like checkout machines.
[00:01:02] Like,
[00:01:02] Mikkel: yeah.
[00:01:03] Toni: and the way this works is basically special paper, and then it just heats it up. And that then creates it's, you know, you can't file it away. And in 10 years, it's still there. That's not going to be the case. But for like a mini thing that you just need to put on paper, Works perfectly fine.
[00:01:18] Mikkel: Yeah. Good. Thanks for sharing
[00:01:21] Toni: I mean, uh, now, you know,
[00:01:22] Mikkel: It's like,
[00:01:23] Toni: now you know,
[00:01:24] Mikkel: what has this show gotten to? We miss one day and now we're here introing with printers. Really? Really? That's what we're gonna do?
[00:01:31] Toni: I'm, I wasn't aware. I wasn't aware.
[00:01:33] Mikkel: Jesus, fuck. Oh, I felt like the first one where we didn't record. So we had such a great intro. We had such a great intro, but then it kind of died, uh, because we haven't been recording forever. And then I didn't hit the button to record.
[00:01:48] Toni: Sure. That was, that's the, that's the
[00:01:49] Mikkel: So you can do some marketing shaming. And if you do that, we're going to do some founder shaming.
[00:01:53] I just love that term coined here. You heard it here first, founder shaming. Um, because something's happened that we're going to get into today. And, uh, obviously we wanted to air an episode last week, uh, after me returning from three weeks of holiday, there was a lot of, let's say,
[00:02:08] Toni: unprofessional marketeer problem.
[00:02:10] Mikkel: I just wanted to say there, there were a lot of pent up intros to be tapped into, but you and I sat down Monday, you know, I sat down Monday and we just.
[00:02:21] We couldn't even find anything to talk about because I was probably jet lagged like crazy and your
[00:02:25] Toni: I was just normal. No, I was just normal.
[00:02:27] Mikkel: Acting normal. Yeah crazy What
[00:02:30] Toni: nothing printed out in front of me that I could just rattle off,
[00:02:33] Mikkel: has happened recently that's that's worth a discussion a conversation
[00:02:39] Toni: I don't know, nothing, nothing, nothing top of mind. Nothing top of mind for me, Mikkel.
[00:02:43] No, I mean, uh, you know, all jokes aside, we as Growblocks are shutting down. So we're returning the remaining cash to investors. We are, currently making sure that our customers, our employees, even vendors are made whole as much as possible, head through the transition and so forth.
[00:03:01] But we simply came to the conclusion that, that we haven't been able to live up to the goals that we wanted to achieve in terms of pro market fit and scale. And frankly, and quite brutally, honestly, it didn't seem like this was a venture capital case. You know, it, it seemed like this was on a different trajectory of growth.
[00:03:21] Something could have maybe happened with it. But it certainly was on a venture capital, trajectory. And it's very difficult to kind of change these things from one day to the next, right. And I think, that just led us to the conclusion that we simply can't keep operating Roblox as it, as it has been.
[00:03:35] Mikkel: company. Yeah.
[00:03:36] So what we talked about doing today was basically run through what are some of the things we've learned about why it doesn't, why it didn't work for, for us in this case. And we've tried to find some that are just not, oh, it's just specific to Growblocks.
[00:03:50] We tried to find some that are a bit more universal, that might even, even if you are operating in an established business, that might still be relevant to consider. And then on the opposite end, what were some of the things that actually worked out just to kind of get that away and then maybe talk a bit about what's going to happen
[00:04:08] Toni: next.
[00:04:09] Mikkel: uh, that was kind of the idea for today. Uh, give a little bit more context for it, especially those of you who might have been following us, following the show for a while, um, to know what's happening in, uh, in our world here.
[00:04:18] So let's start with why it didn't work.
[00:04:22] Toni: Yeah.
[00:04:23] So, and kind of, how What we're going to do is we're going to abstract it up a little bit.
[00:04:27] So make it a little bit applicable to maybe other folks, but also then give you the story from us to see kind of how that, how that specific worked out for us.
[00:04:36] So I think, um, What we wanted to build here with Growblocks was very much tailored and targeted towards, surprise, Revenue Operations
[00:04:45] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:04:46] Toni: right? And, and this was frankly a bet that we took super early on.
[00:04:50] And the reason why we were super comfortable with the bet was like, well, Gartner was forecasting or predicting, you know, tons of rev ops and all kinds of organizations. We saw revenue operations being one of the fastest growing jobs on LinkedIn. Yada, yada. They were like good science. That's going to be, you an actual thing kind of to build around.
[00:05:07] So that's why we chose this persona, right. Make it super, niche, super targeted, you know, a certain set of partners, they kind of hang out in the same, it was great. Like from that perspective, right.
[00:05:18] And, kind of that way of thinking about persona, I think that, that is super important.
[00:05:22] I think what we have learned since, and it's not like we woke up yesterday and we're like, Oh, So we realized this over time, but we basically were betting that way, maybe it would change, right? Because this is a, this is a venture capital case. This is not a me too. We're not copying anyone. We're kind of trying something new.
[00:05:39] Mikkel: think you also said it's like, well, the reason for the bet is if you look at different departments, you have different tools for those
[00:05:44] Toni: The thought was, every VP needs his or her tool. Like that's a little bit of a venture capital. Rule of thumb almost. So the VP of sales, well, that's Salesforce. VP marketing is Marketo. VP CS is Gainsight. And if you go down the list, then we were like, well, the VP of revenue operations says Growbox, right?
[00:06:01] Kind of, that's, that's how that should be working out. What we learned though is, um, And you know, some people will say like, Oh, you know, timing and it's going to come and then it might actually, I hope it will, I will keep working in the direction that it eventually will be so, but for now, RevOps is just not, just not ready yet to, either have many VP roles, there are some, not many, and they're usually also not ready yet to, because of their position in the organization to make a serious purchase for their role.
[00:06:30] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:06:31] Toni: Right. It's really difficult.
[00:06:32] That then usually then means two things, right? They can't just sign it themselves. They will have to either sell it internally or be good at that, right? We had like 25, 30 customers to pay serious money and got lots of value from the tool. It's not about that.
[00:06:47] But what we've seen is difficult with the Persona. It's, it has been difficult for them to sell, the value of this internally. And sometimes that also went hand in hand with. Being difficult to sell revenue operations in general, internally. Many cases, folks are still being a little bit seen like sales operations, you know, Hey, do the sales forecast, clean up the CRM, not as the right hand to the CRO, that was actually one of our bets was like, Well, Revenue Operations is gonna behave similar like FP& A to the CFO, right?
[00:07:22] Financial Planning and Analysis to the CFO is kind of the right hand team, super strategic, super important. We were thinking that Revenue Operations would behave the same to the CRO, right? With that way more, influence and so forth. And we simply saw that we had like tons of great disco calls.
[00:07:39] demos, people like, wow, this is absolutely insane. This is crazy. I want to have this. I need this. But then we're simply unable to sell this internally, right. Kind of to, to create that,
[00:07:49] Mikkel: How do you know, if there's a listener out there that's going to go like, okay, that's, that all makes sense.
[00:07:53] But how do you know, or how do I find out?
[00:07:56] Whether our champions are actually good at selling this internally. How, what were some of the symptoms or signals almost you picked up on?
[00:08:04] Toni: So number one, you will see it on your, you know, your win rate, the price, right? I think another one is, are they able, you know, once you have concluded that they can't sign this thing themselves, which is basically the case, if the person doesn't have a VP title or higher, usually that means they can't buy it.
[00:08:21] You know, things for like 10, 15, 000 euros and up. The other very clear sign then is, can they bring the person that can sign to the next call? Can they bring the person to the table? Right. And if they can't, that's already, and I think in medic it's like a champion level one, or there's some ways to kind of explain that, but in very practical terms, that's actually what that means.
[00:08:42] And if that doesn't happen, Then you solely rely on the champion trying to sell it internally themselves. It's difficult, right? And especially that persona, I think it's difficult. I think you have, you know, sales folks, marketing folks that are way closer to. knowing how to sell stuff because that's what they do for versus, the RevOps guy or gal, and, that's usually a sign for that, right. Then another sign is working with you on the, on the business case, you know, mapping these things out, but then not going anywhere, kind of not even kind of feedback from that,
[00:09:13] Mikkel: I think it's also, like, if you're selling a mid market and up tool in this environment right now, some of this is actually matters a great deal.
[00:09:21] So we had KD on the show. No, it was Chris Olab on the show actually talking about building business cases, And I think this is pretty important to take note of because very few, I believe, people are actually good at selling software internally. Right. So, I mean, before we had all this failed recordings happen, I mentioned to you, like, I've been in, on the receiving end of people on my team coming and pitching and wanting a solution where sometimes it didn't even make it onto my radar because it felt like a suggestion more than a recommendation.
[00:09:56] Right. And,
[00:09:57] Toni: yeah, exactly.
[00:09:57] Mikkel: That's
[00:09:57] super important to note, actually, and be aware of, and if that's the case, you want to make sure that you're building great cases.
[00:10:03] Toni: No, absolutely. And the, you know, everyone needs to be aware that 90 percent or 95 percent of the selling happens without you being
[00:10:11] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah,
[00:10:12] Toni: Right. So you have to rely on kind of a strong champion. And what we found is, RevOps sometimes just isn't really good at that specifically, right. I think that examples of where it's different, you know, some of our customers, for example, and then, you know, some very capable people were like, no, I don't need this, right.
[00:10:29] Obviously that's also the case. But I think that has been just an obstacle, and adjacent to that, what we also sometimes ran into is. Their boss, let's just say CRO or VP of sales or whatever, just Didn't get it, didn't get what we were doing, didn't get, you know, why this is critical for the business, why it's critical for the RevOps and, you know, them actually being able to do their job.
[00:10:51] Um, and you know, I think I mentioned this on another podcast previously, but I had this one call with a CRO. I explained the whole thing. Hey, you know, seeing the whole funnel end to end, monitoring, seeing where things go off, being able to jump into it, you know, course correct, yada, yada. Um, and, uh, and he was like, okay, full funnel.
[00:11:11] Okay. but, but what are you talking about before pipeline? Like what, what, what is that? Right? And then I explained it to him, and said, ah, okay, sure. Yeah, that makes total sense. He was, by the way, also in charge of marketing in CS,
[00:11:24] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:11:24] Toni: way. Um, but then, you know, then I finished explaining what comes before pipeline.
[00:11:28] And then, then he asked me, okay, and what do you mean after the deal is closed? Like, what do you mean by that? And it's like, well, you know, this whole onboarding, renewal, upsell thing kind of. I, I, I, okay, no, got it. And if this is kind of the state of the market where you need to kind of educate and, you know, we're picking and choosing and cherry picking kind of the examples, but just to kind of bring this forward, kind of, this was, this was an obstacle for us, right?
[00:11:54] Not necessarily getting why it was so important to, to get that visibility into your fund. And by the way, all of these things here. All of those are just little cry baby excuses of myself, why this didn't work out. So at the end of the day, I and the team take full, responsibility and ownership of this thing.
[00:12:10] We should have just fixed our approach and yada yada, but we just pointing out what were the things that were just really difficult that we didn't eventually failed on, on
[00:12:18] Mikkel: 2020 hindsight, it's, uh, that's always easy, but that's why we were doing this founder shaming session now. And there's another point we can shame, I guess you on, uh, no, and actually also the team, to be fair, because we were also part of it, even though we weren't founding it. When you have those other people involved in the purchase process, who's not the initial contact, meaning.
[00:12:38] The decision maker is not RevOps, there's someone else, they kind of also need to be educated. Like you said, they also need some kind of box to slot the software into, like you have CRM, right? So if it's pipeline, it's like, okay, I get it. Deals, opportunities, objects, accounts, CRM. This is what we can use it for, ish, right?
[00:12:57] When you aren't taking, I think, picking up the mantle and saying, this is the box we belong to, people try and guess. Thanks. And figure out where does it make the most sense? It's almost like when AI is hallucinating, it's like, okay, I, I think it's BI. Let's, let's put them in BI. And we have one already.
[00:13:15] Don't need
[00:13:16] Toni: so this is kind of the whole category creation conundrum, if you will. You can be extremely successful with it when it works out, you know, the first mover gets lots of, you know, be the market leader basically.
[00:13:28] But creating that new box is usually pretty difficult. I think what we did wrong here is not being forceful enough or flip flopping too much between, you know, not being like, All in on creating that category. there were some suggestions, GTM Partners was suggesting, revenue engine management.
[00:13:48] There was some other suggestions as well.
[00:13:49] Mikkel: forecasting at
[00:13:50] Toni: there's all kinds of like, all kinds of icons of, you know, things we should have maybe doubled, tripled down on, Versus, why can't we just attach ourselves to an existing category and kind of play in that game and be 10x better for that sub segment of that category?
[00:14:04] So I think we didn't do this extremely well, but it's also really fucking difficult, by the way. That part is really difficult and takes balls, which apparently weren't there. And the thing is, right, when you attach yourself then to something like BI, which I think is extremely dangerous, you suddenly talk to the RevOps person, um, and they, they understand that this is clearly different from BI.
[00:14:26] But if someone wants to make a decision that smells like BI, the data guy needs to be in there, right? And then the data guy looks at it, it's like, well, it's like graphs and it's numbers, I think, I think it's BI. Not getting the, the differences that were, you know, the engine that was sitting behind it, how, how fundamentally different that is from, from just a visualization
[00:14:47] Mikkel: No, I agree. And I think it's also, to your point, it's, if you're attacking an existing category, you also got to ask yourself, is it enough to just be 10x better? Is that really going to move people from one software to another, right? That one factor is what problem is it?
[00:15:03] Is it an efficiency thing or an ROI thing? If you talk about PMF, it's like hair on fire is one category, right? And there's a massive difference there, whether they even are going to be bothered. the time, right? For that 10x. And then when it's new, it's like just explaining what it is and why it matters.
[00:15:23] That is an art and a science in itself. And then comes all the other pieces like, well, from what box or category we're going to take the budget? Because folks aren't just going to make up more budget to buy more software. So it's going to come from somewhere.
[00:15:39] Toni: This is almost leading into. A third thing that we can happily blame someone else than
[00:15:47] Mikkel: Let's do that. Yeah. Let's blame others. That's the
[00:15:49] best.
[00:15:50] Toni: is, which is really, I think the implosion of SaaS, and the emergence of AI or Gen AI more specifically.
[00:15:57] Cool. It's not like we were oblivious to the fact that GPT 3. 0 came out and that that is changing things. We actually started using, or working on different AI applications in the product itself, but we didn't find Like, oh, wow, this actually, this is a place where we're leveraging this technology and it's actually changing stuff, like really solving a problem better or a different problem that we couldn't solve before.
[00:16:24] We didn't find that necessarily. And mind you this was around a time when GPT 01 wasn't around, kind of the whole reasoning that's starting to pick up wasn't there yet. So it ended up being like, UI fixes or things that weren't that super impactful. So on what we have seen and not just us, but I think Excel, the VC firm just, published AI is eating software.
[00:16:47] And
[00:16:47] there was like one chart, pointing out how. Enterprise software spent, decreased, you know, from 23 to 24 by something like 30%, across the board. And there's reasons, inflation, there's, capital markets are tight. All kinds of things are bad. But that money did go somewhere. Like money, people, companies are making money right now.
[00:17:09] You know, NASDAQ, S& P 500, all time highs. People are not poor right now. There's a sub segment in, in SaaS maybe that is, but generally speaking, you know, there's money around. So where did this money go? And this was also pointed out in the report, AI, Gen AI applications jumped by 20%, they grew.
[00:17:27] Everything else dropped by 30, this grew by 20. And I think there's a multiple things kind of coming around here. One is like, Oh, this is new. And the CEO said, we are now AI. We need to embrace this. You will have a lot of first time buyers out there buying something, realizing after six months, this is a piece of shit and they need to move on.
[00:17:46] Like that's, you will always have this in every new hype cycle that's starting like this. But also I think What people are expecting, and some AIs are delivering that, is like, it's not just some workflow help, you're actually replacing the workflow. Like you're doing the job, that otherwise someone else would need to be doing.
[00:18:06] And it went from, Oh, SaaS is making it easier for me to execute the workflow to, Oh, I don't need to do the workflow anymore. That's a different game, right? And then I think this is super interesting. That maybe it's a different episode, but that, that, Expectation in the market hasn't made it easier for software companies in general.
[00:18:25] Kind of read a post from Enzo, the June. so, like this product analytics and I was doing something different, but even he, you know, I not felt like this team is fucking going, even he was whining about, no one is buying SaaS
[00:18:39] Mikkel: SaaS anymore. yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:18:41] Toni: and he sadly is stuck with a software company, you know, it's like,
[00:18:43] Mikkel: But
[00:18:45] Toni: but it's, it's, it's a real thing.
[00:18:46] It wasn't, at least it wasn't helpful for us. Let's just
[00:18:48] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah. So those were some things that, uh, you know, is why it did work out. I think core takeaways for you, the listener is, think about a bit, a bit about the buyers you have out there. Can they actually buy stuff? The, the people you are selling to, are they able to buy it themselves?
[00:19:03] If not. Meaning they need to go through a decision maker internally, can they sell it, and are you doing enough to enable them to sell it, right? Or can they bring that person to the conversation? Pretty important to, to consider. The other is there a box you fit into, and is it the right one? What does the competition look like in there?
[00:19:21] And then the last, is it AI? Let's just call it that, right? Um, One of the things that did work, uh,
[00:19:28] actually
[00:19:28] Toni: before we go into this real quick, I think there were like plenty of internal reasons also why it didn't
[00:19:32] Mikkel: Oh yeah, for sure. Like me showing up late for work
[00:19:35] Toni: Which is one of them. But like that stuff, you know, I discussed with Mikkel beforehand. And I think You know, we want to have some more distance to everything and kind of look at this maybe a bit more objectively. And maybe then we talk about this another time. not saying all of the external stuff was the reason I think there's always internal access.
[00:19:52] There's always a mix of those two
[00:19:53] Mikkel: yeah. There's plenty of reasons.
[00:19:55] But there were also things that were. Because when I joined, there were, customers on consulting.
[00:20:01] Toni: Yeah. The aha moment here is not around like, oh, you know, consulting works. Um, I think it's more about, we had to build software first.
[00:20:11] So we started to do consulting first learning in that direction. Um, which was great. At some point we had to make the decision. Do we want to do like a software company or do we want to be a consulting company? And. And obviously, you know, we didn't need to ask the board, it was very clear, it needs to be a product
[00:20:26] Mikkel: product company.
[00:20:27] Toni: And so we made that switch, and focused only on the product pieces, which I think was the right call for what we eventually wanted to achieve. But. One of the learnings was actually that even as we then only were selling products, in the onboarding itself, when we were presenting people, Hey, this is not the overview.
[00:20:45] This is the funnel. We could actually in those onboardings. Point out where things are broken in their business, in their commercial business, which was extremely eye-opening to them. Yeah, it was. It was so much value right there. An hour long session with the team, and suddenly something that they were stuck with for a year or two, couldn't figure out why this didn't work.
[00:21:06] Suddenly there was like, oh, there are three good ideas or reasons why we are stuck. Right. And that was probably like always an endorphin high. for, for new customers. Um, and that frankly was a mix between the data and the product, and then some of the consulting advisory services combined, right?
[00:21:26] Mikkel: think also interesting because the, Having customers on consulting is also a source of learning, right?
[00:21:32] And I think the more, this is something we've talked about, the more customers you have, the more you can learn, the more you learn, the faster you can reach PMF, which we didn't. I think another, non obvious thing with consulting is when you look at SaaS, a successful business, meaning they've achieved go to market fit and beyond, you don't want to have consulting be too much.
[00:21:54] Of your revenue. I think the rule of thumb is like 20 percent or less, ideally,
[00:21:59] Yeah. Professionals. Yeah.
[00:22:00] Toni: The thing is, it can be super distracting. And that's why you need to And this is true also for pre PMF.
[00:22:08] whatever
[00:22:09] you do in consulting, you can do everything.
[00:22:11] Mikkel: but
[00:22:11] Toni: product you can't, so it's a little bit of a double-edged sword, I think to do the consulting route.
[00:22:18] And you need to be super careful with it. But if you do it well, it can give you a bunch of insights.
[00:22:22] Mikkel: of insights. But also, the point I'm trying to make here is also if, for some customers, they didn't adopt the software. But we were able to retain the relationship with them through consulting, up until the point where now the software has reached a maturity where, you know what, they do want to use it, and we can now onboard them.
[00:22:38] Right? So I think there's also that bit where you would never, in a million years, a hundred million AR SaaS company say to a customer, you know what, you don't want to use the software.
[00:22:48] We are happy to keep you on consulting and do that recurring like they would just say bye nullify this whole whole thing Right, but it's kind of silly actually, so I think that was kind of interesting Takeaway, and the other one that worked really well was the whole branding side.
[00:23:04] Toni: Yes. And you can pat yourself down the shoulder, dear
[00:23:08] Mikkel: I always do
[00:23:10] Toni: Well, maybe a little bit too often, I'm not sure. So I think we, going into this, we knew. We need to educate our market. We knew we needed to create kind of a category.
[00:23:20] We knew some of those things, even though they were difficult and maybe we failed with some of those things eventually. But we knew we needed to do that. So therefore we started, with some of the marketing pieces much earlier than other people would. And I don't think we blasted out a lot of money in terms of like ads or something like this.
[00:23:36] We went very, the very organic kind of route, right? We created the show, we created a newsletter. Uh, Um, We create, you know, the LinkedIn game, we call it, meetups, a couple of things that we did in this direction, which I think squarely put Growblocks on the map for our target
[00:23:53] audience.
[00:23:53] Mikkel: Oh yeah, for
[00:23:53] sure. Right.
[00:23:54] Toni: Many RevOps folks knew us, in Europe, in the U S.
[00:23:58] It was not necessarily a big issue to get a meeting with the revenue operations. Maybe there's a persona thing, but it's, I think also there's a branding piece in an, okay, you know, I've known these Crowbox guys for a while. And by the way, that was sometimes achieved inbound and outbound. We're going to talk about this.
[00:24:13] But I think there was a lot of awareness and then also subsequently trust.
[00:24:19] that we have been able to create through this branding audience building exercise. Right. Especially if you're a new company, especially if, you're in a new market, especially Unproven and so forth, having some trust that goes your direction, which by the way, I think needs to be connected to a person, you know, getting, trying the super early beginning to try and make it to a company is difficult.
[00:24:41] So you try and want to connect it to a person
[00:24:43] Mikkel: maybe a couple of thoughts from my end on, especially this last piece here is when people recall a brand, when you ask people, when you look at what, how people perceive brands, it's not as a logo, but as a collection of people.
[00:24:58] That's usually how people see a brand at the end of the day. That's one element. The other is also, we wanted to create an audience that not just knew us, but also liked us and trusted us because that's going to make it a whole lot easier to do a lot of selling. And I think when you're building something new in a new category, you're going to have a lot of shortcomings no matter what, right?
[00:25:18] So if they don't know you, if they don't already trust you, And like you, tens are they're going to say, you know what, there's too many things you just can't do. So sorry, we're not going to buy this Versus, I recall you saying at one point, I think we're in maybe six months into it. It's like, well, I, it's pretty intense.
[00:25:36] I don't have to introduce myself anymore. In most of the meetings, people already know me. And because they listened to the show, they know I have two kids and a cat or something, right?
[00:25:46] So instant. Uh, I dunno if they liked you that, you know,
[00:25:50] maybe they
[00:25:51] Toni: but, you know.
[00:25:52] I
[00:25:53] Mikkel: they, at least I think they trusted you.
[00:25:55] And I think that means they will also forgive some of the shortcomings knowing that, hey, this is work in progress being built. Right.
[00:26:02] Toni: And I think this is something people can copy. This is not magic in any way. I think that can be achieved. This can be achieved in the beginning of a journey, which I think many people listening, they're probably further in, right?
[00:26:13] But, this can also be achieved later on. It's not easy. It's going to take some time to kind of get there, but this is a nice tailwind you want to have on your side, I
[00:26:22] Mikkel: I think.
[00:26:24] And then, uh, the last piece, Outbound.
[00:26:27] Toni: So what we learned is we, build this audience and, you know, some of them came inbound and some of them we, yes, but some of them we tapped on the shoulder and they're like, hi, I was, you know, thinking about it and.
[00:26:42] I've seen you guys here, and here, and I'm aware, and it sounds pretty cool. Yes. Let's kind of check it out. And we realized that while you might have like a lukewarm audience that's growing and it's very kind of bang on, you still might need to go out and tap them on the shoulder and ask for the demo, right?
[00:26:57] You need to, you need to ask for what you want to have. So that's what we did, right? We created, an outbound operation. Very much using the newest tools on, we knew it was going to be on LinkedIn. We knew that, we knew that videos work best right now because text is kind of gone. Now you could say video is also gone.
[00:27:18] We also knew that we wanted to leverage me, like personally me, but, You know, I couldn't sit there and do all of this SDR stuff.
[00:27:28] So what we ended up doing is, creating quite some cool workflows that happen automatically, where we used me in a talk track that was recorded, but then adjusted to the specific person and company we sent this and we automated this and it was actually pretty darn successful, right? Basically leveraging this.
[00:27:47] Found a brand, to the next level of like, Hey, now I am sending you a message on Some of that, you know, you could say it's creepy or some of that, miss shots and so forth.
[00:27:57] But generally speaking, I think this was extremely successful. And I think, uh, if, if you want to hire someone to do that for you, David Kubler is your guy. So kind of try and try and find him. But ultimately I think those three things work extremely well for us, right? Really this, the consulting advising piece on top of the product itself, the audience building or trust building that we achieved, and then some of the outbound demand generation that'd be, that'd be kind of triggered there.
[00:28:25] Mikkel: But It wasn't enough. So, here we are.
[00:28:29] What is, what's next for us now? What are we gonna do?
[00:28:33] Toni: I mean, I honestly am focusing right now on making sure all of our employees land in the right way. Customers are transitioning out in the right way. But, um, but we're still here on this thing, building an audience.
[00:28:46] Um,
[00:28:47] Mikkel: Why? Why is that? Why is that?
[00:28:49] Toni: Why is that?
[00:28:50] Mikkel: I think it's, um, I think we've built something great with this show. I think we enjoy actually recording it. It's fun to be honest.
[00:28:57] Toni: despite each other, we don't like each other
[00:28:59] Mikkel: Exactly. People don't know what happens off air. It's terrible. You don't want to see that. No, I, I think that's genuinely it.
[00:29:05] And I think the whole, uh, like later today, we're going to have a guest on the show. We're going to record for later. You get to meet great people, right? So we want to keep doing that. Um, and potentially we're going to do some advising on some of the stuff we've done. Uh, we definitely want to, you know, You know, maybe recoup some of the money we spend on acquiring this
[00:29:22] Toni: So Mikkel and I bought the shop.
[00:29:23] Mikkel: Yeah, we bought it.
[00:29:24] Toni: it. Let's just say it straight up. So this is not hosted or sponsored by Growblocks anymore.
[00:29:30] Mikkel: So there's a
[00:29:30] Toni: but maybe it could be sponsored by you, you know? Um, so feel free, feel free to, uh, to think about that.
[00:29:39] And, and otherwise, yeah, for myself, um, I think I could totally build a new company. I think that could happen. I think I could totally, um, be a revenue leader again. Let's see about that. But I think for the short term, uh, basically focusing on advising founders, CEOs, CROs on getting to go to market fit, getting to series A, getting to 50 million ARR.
[00:30:06] Um, that's something I'll be spending some time on outside of, uh, outside of, you know, the
[00:30:11] Mikkel: know, you don't think you're gonna be too envious, like, ah, they made it past PMF.
[00:30:15] Arrgh! No, I'll
[00:30:17] Toni: No, I'll go back to what I actually know, you
[00:30:19] Mikkel: Oh, that's good, that's good. Wonderful, so it basically means this show goes on. This show goes on,
[00:30:26] Toni: on, um, we will be switching the substack.
[00:30:30] Mikkel: That's right, that's
[00:30:31] Toni: we're going from, uh, the revenue letter to the substack called the revenue formula. So we made it really difficult for everyone. Um, and otherwise, um, I don't know. I think If there are any questions, uh, any, any, any things you have, we're like, Oh, Toni, what's, what's up with that?
[00:30:50] Or Mikkel, what's up with that? Um, the, anything at growblocks.Com ceases to exist. So just DM us on LinkedIn or something like this and find us there and then ping us.
[00:31:01] Mikkel: us
[00:31:02] Toni: Thanks Mikkel. Thanks everyone else for listening and have a good one. Bye bye.