Episode 39: Interview with Tido Carriero, Founder & CEO of Koala
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[00:00:00] Transcribed by

Alex Allain: Welcome to decoding sales, a podcast where an engineer, that's me, Alex, and a salesperson, 

Peter Ahn: that's me, Peter, 

Alex Allain: talk about the art and science of sales that relates to life and business. In this episode, I am really excited that we are trying something a little bit new. We have a special guest, Tido Carriero, on the line.

Tido: Hi there. 

Alex Allain: Tido is the co founder of Koala, and prior to Koala, he was the chief product officer at Segment from the early days there through its 3. 2 billion acquisition at Twilio. Why is he on this podcast? Well, prior to that, he worked with me and Peter at Dropbox, where he was an early, , engineering leader on the Dropbox business team and did a bunch of other really great stuff there.

And then got his career started at Facebook on the ads team. So. , Tido, I'd love to just kind of kick things off here, , by explaining like, you're here because [00:01:00] you are both running a company that builds tools for sales, but also because you have experienced the life of an early stage technical founder.

Who's now going through the journey of becoming a sales leader and sales founder. So Tido, I'd love to just. Let's, you know, give you a chance to share a little bit more about your background, maybe,, talk a bit about how we all three met and worked together and also really curious, like, tell us just a little bit about Koala and what sort of the market insight there was.

Tido: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe I'll start my career at the beginning and we'll get to Koala in just a second. So yeah, as you mentioned, I started my career at Facebook, , sort of late stage startup days. I was one of the first members of the Facebook ads team. So while the entire business was basically working on growth, And consumer features, I was one of five or so, , engineers working on the B2B part of the business.

, you know, the little part that kept the lights on, , and fell in love with that. , you know, just like so many side projects, like helping the ad operations team, which was effectively our support team to be more efficient and, you know, actually [00:02:00] tweaking the ad units themselves and just tons of experience on kind of the B2B side.

, so when I got to Dropbox, , , my instinct, , Working with both of you was like, let's go build this Dropbox for business thing. And, , that was obviously quite a fun journey. , I spent most of the last decade at, at Segment, as you mentioned, Alex, , leading the engineering and product team, , from about 5 million of ARR to about 250 or so, , through the acquisition.

And, , that was quite a journey. Actually, probably my favorite part there was about halfway through the journey when a bunch of go to market stuff was not going as well as it could have been, , kind of getting , in the boat with the CRO and figuring out, , a bunch of just critical stuff about, , what do we even sell and what is the value that customers get out of that?

And, , that was a pretty transform, transformative,, moment for us. We actually had slowed growth to about 40 percent year over year. And that one kind of central sales exercise reaccelerated growth back up to about 80 percent year over year. Anyway, , long way of saying like, I think all of these moments in my career, I've actually been deeply tied to [00:03:00] the go to market team and I've always had this passion.

So when, , me and my co founders were thinking about what company we wanted to start, our minds immediately went to the sales teams. And, , we discovered that. BDRs and SDRs are basically the most underserved, , IC in the entire company. They're given this like tiny laptop and a tiny screen and six contact database tools and like a bunch of random reports.

And they're like, You know, go grow the business. And, you know, they're asked to do the most important thing, , that really anyone has to do at the business. And so, you know, I think a lot of the developer tools that, , me and my co founders have been using, which have, , the linears of the world that have these incredible UIs.

We're like, why don't sales reps get anything like this? And so that was the beginning kind of of Koala. And, , anyway, we can talk more about it, but I would say broadly, we're, we're trying to help reps have access to better data. , which helps them do better pipeline generation, I think more important than ever with the onslaught of AISDRs, just like jamming every single channel with, , lots of [00:04:00] junk, but we can talk about that later.

Alex Allain: Uh, I'm excited to get into that. , I love that, that market insight, you know, the engineers get all the good tools, but the salespeople are doing all the work to grow the business. 

Tido: You know, I think there's a funny thing that happens in our space, which is most companies are started by former, you know, CROs, no, no offense, Peter, , no, former CROs or former, , marketing leaders.

And, , there's just a way of sort of selling SaaS tech and Martech, which is like, people love to buy crazy visions and they love to buy features and they don't really ask a ton of questions about like, what is the data foundation here and like, are the reps really going to love it? Because everyone's a little bit more focused on these sort of top down features.

, so I think that's maybe a slightly more nuanced, , take on the market insight is just like, Hey, , what if some like really product oriented, data oriented people, , were to come in here and, , build something really special. 

Alex Allain: Oh, I love that. 

Peter Ahn: Yeah. It's so easy to get started too. Like a bunch of my clients use Koala, Tido, by the way.

Oh, 

Tido: thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah., a lot of it, , is sort of [00:05:00] like getting to a fast time to value because a lot of the tools in our space is a month or three months of setup. And, , obviously some of the more advanced data integrations, like you want to load, like all of your warehouse data and remodel it in Koala, that is going to be a more complex setup.

But we've, yeah, really focused on like, how does. Someone who wants to get value, get there in 15 minutes or less, like in a guided onboarding flow. I'm glad to hear that. , thanks for the positive feedback. 

Peter Ahn: Yeah. I'm seeing 

like Koala 

messages in Slack all the time, so it's cool to see. All 

Tido: right. I love it.

But I thought that maybe the more interesting thing, I've been a long time fan of decoding sales and a long time listener. , I've also just been through the, Founder led sales journey. , I've gotten lots of bad and some good advice about how to do, , the transition from sort of founder led sales to, , sales led sales.

And I would say we kind of completed that journey about six months ago. So I thought that that could be a fun topic for us to discuss or really whatever else is on you guys mind. [00:06:00] 

Alex Allain: Well, , I'd love to dive into that. , you know, and, and one thing I'm. Curious about as well, what, , is kind of, , you're talking about like selling, , you know, a lot of top down sales process, but you're taking this more kind of very similar to Dropbox.

So like, it sounds like the bottom up, it makes the user experience good. So I'm also kind of curious to hear how you're working that into selling to a very different audience. , but why don't we start just with that, with, with your journey? Like you're in the sales seat now. I know you're getting on these calls.

, what has that been like? . How did you start that process and what have you learned? 

Tido: , well, quite honestly, we started the process very gingerly and way too slowly. So Koalas existed for about two and a half years. I would say the first year, , just every problem we had, you know, I'm like a expert sort of product builder.

, that's what I've spent the last 15 years of my career doing. And so like every time we had a problem, We just would assume it was a product problem and we'd use this like product hammer to try to solve the problem. , which again, isn't the worst thing in the world. I think we did end up with like a really usable and great product for the [00:07:00] ICs.

And I think a lot of that feedback was real, but, my reflection on the first year of the company is we just weren't trying sales and we weren't trying marketing because we were being Too shy to put ourselves out there. I actually think in some ways my past career success, it makes me even more, , you know, have a fear of failure and kind of looking stupid.

, you know, and when you first start a company, , you don't have all the features that incumbents have. You don't have all of the, you know, SOC 2 compliance. You don't have like all of the usability. You don't have like the ROI have the logos. There's so many things someone could point to and say, like, no, And so we were just hyper aware of that.

And I think in some ways the company really started, at least like started working as soon as we got over that. And I started to accept myself as like the chief seller, , and that needed to be my job. I needed to go start marketing this thing and start selling this thing. , and I think for us that was actually way too late.

It was sort of the beginning of year two, , in the journey. , so maybe my first piece of advice is like, get yourself out there, , even if the product [00:08:00] feels not ready. 

Alex Allain: Uh, 

Tido: there are people marketing and selling things that don't exist at all. And there's no better way to find out whether or not someone wants this than like pretending you have it and seeing if they follow up, trying to rip it out of your hands.

, so again, it's, it's not like the most comfortable. thing. But I think that really held us back early. Then a lot of that second year was just sort of me doing founder led sales and like, you know, really trying to think about like, when is the right moment to bring in an AE? And you can certainly talk a little bit about, , what that looked like for us.

, but you know, it's awesome when the founder is doing it, like you are the product expert, the sales engineer, the solutions engineer, the CSM, like you can wear all of the hats and so you can kind of figure out , where you need to, you know, where it's weak, where it's strong, what's easy, what's hard.

, and that gives you, a great feedback loop also into the, into the product and figuring out like the next evolution of the product. So yeah, I've really spent a year or two doing that. And then we. We did decide to [00:09:00] hire an external, , seller, our first AE who's, who's now, , moving into head of sales role, , after six months of, of epic selling for us.

And, , yeah, so that, that's been kind of the, the go to market, , journey for us. And, , it's hard. It's like hard to put yourself out there and it's hard. There's a lot of like imposter syndrome around like, Oh, I'm not a, I'm not a seller. I'm like a PM. So anyway, uh, had to work through that. Maybe actually my biggest tip there is when I reframed every sales conversation into more of a support conversation, like I'm trying to help this person solve their problem.

And sure enough, like I've certainly thought about pipeline generation and pipeline generation tools more than 99 percent of people I'm talking to. That's just like what I do, you know? 50, 60, 70 hours a week is like, I'm just thinking about it nonstop. And so when I kind of reframed it as like, okay, I'm, I'm the expert here and I'm not trying to sell them.

I'm really trying to like help coach them on how they can solve their problem. [00:10:00] And also it's okay if I'm not the right solution to their problem. It's totally okay to like start to teach them about other adjacent tools. That might be better. And so once I adopted that sort of like support mindset, I think like the selling got a lot easier cause it felt a lot more authentic.

So that, that was a little bit of a trick for me , in year two, , that helped us, , break through, I think. 

Peter Ahn: I love that. Yeah. You don't need to sell the world. Right. You just need to sell your future customers. And so it just puts the pressure off of every single sales call, I think. And I think that thought leadership shows in your LinkedIn posts as well.

You do that a lot more frequently. I've noticed, I don't know if you have like a rhyme or reason to that, or if that was part of getting over the imposter syndrome too, but what I like about your post is it's very educational around demand gen and pipeline gen. Versus like trying to sell, right? , Coal is almost like an afterthought.

So I'm curious, like, what you think about that? Cause there's like a huge hurdle that my clients have where I'm like posting on LinkedIn, and I think it's very related to that imposter [00:11:00] syndrome you mentioned about getting your product out there in a sales capacity too. 

Tido: Yeah, that's the next phase of the journey.

After , the sales journey, which was sort of like mastering the one on one Conversation, , or at least like how to feel confident and how to feel authentic in that one on one or one on three setting of sales calls. The next challenge is how do you go do that in the one to many? And I'm earlier on that journey, but, uh, yes, as you noted, I have been doing a lot more, , posting on LinkedIn and.

, yeah, I think like that's even harder because you're putting your, your shouting into potentially avoid, , some, some message and, , yeah, it's definitely, , nerve wracking. But yeah, I do think that's another piece of it. And I think if I had like started doing what I've been doing for the last couple of months on LinkedIn and started doing the sales conversations all in year one of the business, like things would have grown even faster, , because these things are all really accelerating our growth.

Yeah. Maybe my advice on the LinkedIn side of the house or whatever, the, the channel that [00:12:00] you need to be messaging doesn't always have to be LinkedIn. It should obviously be wherever your potential buyers are hanging out is, , you know, how do you actually provide them something valuable? And, you know, ideally it's something valuable that's like adjacent to the product that you're selling.

, so it's not just something random and valuable, but something valuable that's adjacent and, Then you ask, well, I don't, you know, I don't have anything super valuable to say. So like, what would I say? And then you like look at your internal Slack or your customer ticketing system or whatever, and you just start looking at like.

What's going on? And I can almost guarantee you any single one of those tickets or screenshots or whatever, , is interesting content. , and then the skill is how do I, how do I turn that screenshot? That wouldn't mean anything into like a little bit of a mini story and a mini story typically has like a hook at the beginning, gives like a little bit of background, hopefully has like a bit of a resolution or like a really helpful camera.

[00:13:00] Uh, and then I like to throw in a P. S. Sometimes if I have something funny, I want to say related to it, but that's kind of like, that's been my, my sort of content process is, uh, every night is my one and a half year old goes to bed. She insists that I , sit on the chair next to her crib for about 15 minutes while she falls asleep.

I just pull up Apple notes and really I'm just looking for like, what happened today or what are my meetings tomorrow? And there's almost always like interesting content. You just think it's kind of mundane because like, you know, you have 10 similar bug reports in the past two weeks, but like maybe that bug report is actually like really interesting or there's like a story behind it.

That'll be really interesting, , to a broader audience. And I think it's one of the, the classic problems is anything you've been staring at. For a really long time seems really boring to you, , but all of those things are actually probably your, your zone of genius and , the things that you can really help others with.

But obviously getting the courage to stitch all of that together is, , easier said than done.

Alex Allain: I love this. This is [00:14:00] gold for our audience. I imagine everyone is like taking, furiously taking notes right now. Yeah. , I do have a question for, I have many questions, but one that I want to ask right now is , , you talked about how doing the marketing and the sales in year one would have been Like the best option, if possible.

Do you, would you recommend that to people? It seems like there was a lot of like learning going on, both like, I imagine like skill based, but also just like a motion of like overcoming that, like putting yourself out there before you were kind of ready, would you suggest that people actually try to do both of those things at once?

Or is there sort of a, a sequence that you would recommend? 

Tido: Yeah, , so the way I've sort of come to internalize this, , you know, as we near the end of year three of the business is. The go to market motion is much like the product. So let's talk about product. You're everyone's area of expertise first.

, when you first put a product out there, it always has like a couple of problems. It's going to have a couple of bugs. It's going to have a couple of rough edges. And the way you fix that is you try to get as many people to use it as [00:15:00] possible. You furiously take notes on like where the bugs are, what doesn't make sense, or like people were really excited about this, but we barely invested here.

So maybe we should do more here. And so I've always been sort of an expert at that iterative process of making the product better, but I never really realized that the go to market motion and the strategy and what you do is exactly the same. And so if you think about Koala, you know, as a, like a muscle, we have like a nine out of 10 product muscle for our stage, maybe 10 is really quite good.

And we have like a three out of 10 go to market, which I'm, I'm slowly climbing into a four out of 10. Uh, but I think that's really, And that, that muscle comes from iteration. And so I would say like, I don't, I don't know that there's like an exact formula I'd recommend, but I think about wherever the muscle is the weakest and that could be message channel fit.

Like I don't have a channel I can go to with a message that's helpful, that makes people like curious to check me out. If that's the problem, then [00:16:00] you should be in, you know, brainstorming and demand gen land, you know, on the marketing side, like, well. What could we be doing better? , if it's like, hey, we're getting like a lot of people interested in the first sales call, but then we're having a lot of trouble when we get in that second sales call, kind of like locking them into a POC or whatever the process is.

Maybe you have a weakness there and really you're going to have weaknesses all over the place. So I actually think the challenge is like, Realizing that that whole motion is a muscle that you need to train and constantly asking yourself and like looking in the mirror, like what is the most important, you know, parts of the muscle I can work on right now.

And obviously don't try to do everything at once, but I think our failure mode, as technical co founders, me and my co founders, Was , we just like kind of didn't , touch that for a long time. We're like, yeah, we're just going to keep making the product like really, really good. And like the best product is obviously going to win a little bit of that mindset.

And it's not that I don't think there's any truth to the best product, like matters a lot. I think there's a lot of truth to that, [00:17:00] but the reality is if no one's heard of it. Or people who have that problem are not able to like find you because they're not aware of you. , or you have some kind of, you know, fatal process in the sales cycle that gets everyone to die between the first and the second meeting.

Sorry, , not people dying, but the deals dying between the first and people dying between meetings. That's even worse. But, uh, yeah. Uh, but yeah, if deals are always dying in the same place, like that's important. And just starting to appreciate like all of that is like an organism that is as complex as the product itself and treating that whole motion like you treat the product.

Like that's been the epiphany for me. And that, you know, also helps reframe it, , It's not like tomorrow you can go sit down and write, like, three PRs that's gonna fix everything about the product. Same thing with the go to market motion, it's not like you're gonna wake up tomorrow and like suddenly think of a new H1 message for your homepage that's going to immediately fix everything.

But if you're constantly chipping away and iterating, like, you can make incredible [00:18:00] progress, you know, over the course of months and quarters, , and so I think that's really what it's more about and that's how I think about the sequencing.

Alex Allain: , there's a lot of really great stuff in there. Um, you know, I think one of the things that really stood out to me was the way.

Talking about this whole process is like a system, an iterative process. And I guess that kind of matches up with the, the notion of sales is like a funnel and you find where the leaky part of your funnel is and , you go tackle that. I love that, , perspective. I, I'm actually curious, , we're going to off road a little bit, but, , do you think that you over invested in product versus like, do you think that it should be a nine or 10 out of 10 right now?

When your go to market is a three or a four, do you feel like it'd actually be better to be more even? Hmm. 

Tido: You're cutting deep here, Alex. , 

Alex Allain: I think, 

Tido: I think we probably over invested a bit, , in product. And, , my focus really for much of this year has been how do we figure out all things go to market.

And I've been just insanely focused. , there, because of this imbalance, you know, I, I never want to say like, Oh, [00:19:00] there's too many bugs that had been fixed or too many like features that we have built that, you know, like. It's not quite that I feel that way. It feels awkward to say that, , but I will say, yeah, , it feels like an imbalance , here's a good example.

We have a couple of additional features which allow you to do various automations in the product. And so we have a number of very happy customers paying us about 10K ish per year. And I found out two of them actually bought compeTidors to do some of those automation modules because they simply were not aware that the feature existed in our product.

There is very basic life cycle marketing that we are supposed to be doing that like 

Alex Allain: notifies 

Tido: people and keeps us top of mind when we're shipping a bunch of new features. And like, we have just forgotten to build that muscle. And so, yeah, maybe that's like a great example where you're doing all of this extra work and you're not even shouting it correctly.

, to the public sphere, that's not even the problem. You're not even shouting incorrectly to your own, , home base of customers , that love you already. And so I think that's, [00:20:00] that's like a good example. So it's, it's almost like these features are being. Wasted if you're not, , also telling the story, making people aware of them, you know, getting into sales conversations, realizing that the pricing doesn't make sense for this new feature and you need to like iterate on it.

Tido: Um, so yeah, it's like a bunch of stuff we built could have been way more amplified, uh, if we had been doing the, the other thing well. 

Alex Allain: Oh, I love this. Yeah. What you're really causing to come to mind for me is this notion that it's a funnel from , potential customer prospect, not just to sale, but to like literally just like getting all of the value out of the product.

And if at any point. You're weak at one part. That's kind of like, okay, we should buff that up. If the product's not meeting all of their needs, like buff that up. If they don't know that the product literally meets their needs. Cool. That's another opportunity. Like, , let's buff that one up. And you just kind of like keep going and, and, you know.

I don't want to say plugging in the leaks exactly, but like patching up and sturdying each part.

Tido: I think that's exactly right. And I think I had never appreciated how [00:21:00] iterative every single part of that go to market motion needs to be because I, well, you know, frankly, I've never like built that thing.

And so I've always just sort of been observing it, like, take shape from the outside. And I think much like a, Go to market person might think like a product just sort of like springs up one day perfectly. I don't know, Peter.

Peter Ahn: I don't think so. I know there's a lot of hard work. 

Tido: All right. All right. Well, maybe I just had a very naive view of how go to market operates, but it's been really empowering for me, like having this thought that I can go plug this hole.

And I think plugging a hole is totally the right way to think about it. I mean, sometimes it's plugging a hole. Someone's like fixing a bug and sometimes it's building a new feature. It's like, we need a different. Deck to present in first calls. And so I think it's actually the analogies. If you go back to the product building kind of happy place, the analogies are really pretty deep.

If you look at all of the different activities, like you're doing all of those same activities on, on go to market as well. 

Alex Allain: I love that. The [00:22:00] thing that's coming to mind for me is just how. In any process, the thing that somebody else is doing always seems more straightforward until you get into it. , it feels like that's almost like the advantage of , going from your role as like a founder led sales, where you, you get to see all of that.

So when you onboard somebody new to that kind of role, you actually know what they're doing. What do they need to do and appreciate a lot of what they're bringing that maybe, you know, naively you wouldn't know was, oh, it really is very iterative. 

Tido: Yeah, no, I, I think that's totally true. I think the other thing that's been really interesting about having, , you know, go to market people who are not me, , is there's so many different aspects of the role that I do.

So, you know, some of it is like sales engineering work, some of it is post sales CSM work, some of it is the actual kind of classical AE work of, you know, champion building and, uh, figuring out the path to power and actually doing the negotiation and pricing. And I think a [00:23:00] lot of that was all blurred together in my head.

Like I wouldn't know where like one line started and the next line ended. And so it actually makes some of the clarity of thought that you want to have around like Which little features to go build or like, , , holes to plug. It makes that sort of like a little bit fuzzier. And then you start to have people and, you know, the person we hired is.

Way more specialized. Like, , sometimes we're in a call, especially as we're starting to move like upmarket , to more of like high mid market, like low enterprise. And like, we'll be in a call and I'll just be like lost. Like I thought we were talking about one thing and then he's messaging me on the side.

He's like, Oh, this is what's going on. There's this like political thing happening at this company. And this person thinks this, and this person thinks this. And. Like, please just be quiet for the next five minutes while I, like, sort a little, and then I'll, like, I'll call on you. He's like slacking me all this in the background.

And it's like seeing someone who's like 11 out of 10, who's been doing that whole thing for a decade, , it's just like, whoa, this [00:24:00] is awesome. But that wasn't even like a skill that was on my radar. But of course, as you're selling to these bigger companies, often is not actually what's best for the company overall, which is certainly how I like to think about.

You know, my role and how I've always wanted to do things when I was at companies, but often it's about like, does bringing in Koala mean I'm not going to get a promotion or mean I'm going to look stupid for like buying this other tool. And so , that's just, you're going to have, you know, people in these bigger deals.

Thinking about that and trying to, you know, figure that, you know, you were trying to figure out that maze. And so like, that was just an entire,, view of things that I just had no idea even existed, , until we, , got our, , our seller Nick in, in here and he's taught me a ton. So anyway, I think it's like helped a lot with the clarity of thought of like, What is an SE task?

What is an AE task? What is a post sales task? Like, you know, now that we're really starting to scale those things with, , a dozen or so deals happening a month, it's like really important that like [00:25:00] we decompose all of those things and then work on each one individually. , but yeah, that was, yeah.

Going from me doing all of the things to starting to break up my role into different things, which , provides additional clarity and you get like true deep experts. Who can show you the 10X version of what you were doing. , that's like a really exciting part and a great reason to start hiring.

Peter Ahn: Love it. So a lot of, I think what you're talking about, you've kind of done this through experience, ? On the ground, , you've gone through so many iterations of the go to market piece, even though you give yourself three or four out of 10, I feel like you've gone through a lot. , compared to a lot of our listeners.

But there must have been still some pieces of advice that you were seeking, right? So I'd love to shift to that. , how did you decide what you were going to read? What are you going to listen to? You know, who are you going to listen to? , can you talk to us about that? Because there's so much written about go to market.

Alex and I talk about this all the time. It's often hard to cut through the noise. And understand what's snake oil versus what actually works. [00:26:00] So now having gone through some iterations, can you start talking to us about what that journey was like, just getting advice and rejecting some and actually executing on others?

Tido: Yeah, I think whenever I had a problem that I was trying to solve, like, , is it time to hire an AE? And like, how should I go about that? I would often , try to talk to about five of the founders I trusted most and admired most, , in terms of just like how it appears they had done it from the outside and just sort of get some advice.

, so for that particular question, I think there's a bunch of common advice. You know, One of the pieces of advice is like, wait till a million of ARR. The other piece of advice there on the other end of the spectrum is like, yeah, you should sell a little yourself, but like once you're at, you know, 200 million of ARR and start at least starting to see like what the, you know, architecture of a deal looks like you should, you know, start going, , faster there.

And I've really, you know, as I talked to five people, I got that whole spectrum of, of [00:27:00] advice. , you know, another, And then the other common one is like, you have to hire two reps and you have to get them in a competitive environment where they're competing against each other. And if you don't have at least two, , you won't understand if you don't have product market fit or if it's like a problem with one of the reps, you know, the other maybe version of that advice, , is like, just, you know, hire someone, much more senior as like an AE leader who can like, you know, Show you and build a bunch of that architecture for you.

Then I got a bunch of advice of like, Hey, you should hire like two or three SDRs and BDRs first versus you should hire a full stack of AEs. Another one, you know, you should hire SEs, , first and like, you should be the full stack of AE. So really it's all over the map. And this was like the five people, you know, I trusted the most.

Peter Ahn: Uh, yeah, 

that's crazy. 

Tido: , I think what I realized is everyone has slightly different jobs to be done or like problems to solve.

And so I finally talked to, , Armand, who runs the, , 30 Minutes to Presidents Club podcast. , and , , he had an interesting take that [00:28:00] really stuck with me, which was like, what is the job you want to be done here? Like, that was basically what he, he asked. And I was like, well, I love doing the SE work personally.

We have no like SDR, BDR issues really. Cause we use Koala. I mean, we, we drink our own champagne a ton and like all three founders are like happily SDRs, BDRs because like we're using our own software and we have plenty of meetings booked. Like that's not the problem. I was like, the problem really is. Two fold.

One is like, I really don't like being bad cop on negotiation with customers who I want to love me. 

Alex Allain: But 

Tido: if no one's willing to be bad cop, the contracts end at like, you know, half of what is fair, if even that. And so we're like, I need someone else That can help me with that. And also I feel like there's just like a lot I'm missing in the mechanics of champion building, accessing power, the political dynamics, you know, especially in these, [00:29:00] you know, larger deals, , 50, 100k deals.

I just feel a little lost. Like , I get the value we can provide them, but there's like, That's that alone is not enough to get something signed. And so once I had clarity on the jobs to be done, and I'm not saying this is the answer for everyone, but my conclusions were, well, first of all, we waited till way closer to a million of ARR than we should have.

This comes back to the. Go to market muscle building. I super wish we had invested on the earlier end of that spectrum. , just because I think it would have like forced us to advance faster. It's like totally a way I would have wanted to spend our capital, just get more efficient at the market side of product market fit.

, so for us, it was closer to a million, but I would have done it earlier. It was clearly an AE role that was needed and it was clearly a more senior AE that like had seen a lot of the kind of bigger ACV stuff. And so we ended up hiring someone like really amazing. Uh, as I said, he's just moving into a head of sales role and kind of what was in it for him.

It [00:30:00] was like, I'm like, Hey man, I know you're used to working on 600 K deals. Um, You're going to work on much smaller deals, but you're going to help figure out the architecture of this. And as soon as this thing is like firing on all cylinders, you're going to, you're going to step into that, that kind of next level role.

And so it was kind of a perfect situation where he had a ton of A plus expertise that the business desperately needed. And we had, you know, a role for him that was really exciting and kind of the clear next step in his career. , but again, I don't think this advice is rinse and repeat for anyone. I think the point here is really thinking to yourself, like, what is this ideal job to be done?

And like, imagine you have someone doing that really well and does that meet your needs? And for whatever reason, I just hadn't been thinking critically like that when it came to this. I was looking for a one size fits all answer to like exactly the right way to plug in. Early go to market to the team.

And I think the reason the array is so different is like every CEO has like [00:31:00] slightly different jobs to be done. There's some that love closing revenue and there'll be the only AE up through a couple of million in ARR. And if that works for them, maybe they just need a couple of SDRs or whatever to, to help scale the piece that.

They don't want to be doing. And , , other CEOs are like not at all technical and they desperately need an, uh, an SE to sort of help ride along on deals. So they're not constantly bothering the product side of the house. And so it's just, there's a wide variety of jobs to be done here.

And I think, , that, that was really the critical thought I was missing. 

Alex Allain: , you know, one thing I'm really curious about here, , , you pointed out the different roles are actually pretty fuzzy, , when you're starting out, , you're not going to know what you don't know. It's just hard. And that seems like it also makes it hard to actually crisply define those jobs to be done.

So what advice do you have for somebody who's like sort of in, you know, you two years ago trying to figure out, okay, what job do I actually need this person to do? . How do you do that when you're not an expert? 

Tido: I mean, again, uh, always just talking to people that I think are really brilliant in this general [00:32:00] space who have sort of seen it before is always my, my first step is just like, Trying to sort of break down, , the world a little bit and, you know, just trying to understand.

Basically not, you know, reinvent the wheel from scratch, uh, here. I would say when describing the role, it's still good to describe it as crisply as you can, even if the description does not necessarily meet, like, the entire need that you have. And then when you're actually, like, trying to fill the role, I think one of the big requirements.

And I think that's one of the biggest requirements you can have is really looking for someone who is that sort of builder mentality. And I think there is a pretty clear split of people that like , you know, want to be a founder next, but they want to do like one more role at the sort of ground floor of a go to market organization.

And they're willing to bring like, you know, 10 years of Epic experience that they have doing that so that they can kind of see what zero to one looks like before founding. That's like a great profile for the early days. And so, yeah, I would often like write down the role. As [00:33:00] crisply as I could and sort of, you know, get a bunch of different advisors or people I looked up to, to like help me sharpen it, , almost, almost as like an exercise of clarity for myself.

But then actually when you're doing the hiring, really looking a little bit more for that generalist builder, kind of owner ownership skillset. , because , you're going to be all over the place. A good example is our other go to market, , person who just joined us about a month ago. I didn't even have a role for him, but he was like the right hand man of the CRO at Segment.

I had worked with him closely. I like loved the guy. And I'm, I'm just looking at the pile of like go to market iteration that I know we need to do. And I'm looking at like one of the best builders. In the go to market game, and I was like, let's like pencil in a job description of what we think the next 60 days looks like.

And like, we'll figure it out as we go. And sure enough, he's like building out a customer success organization. He's like, , incredibly deep with like 10 different customers. He's writing a decent amount of marketing content. Cause he's just been thinking about [00:34:00] sales enablement and pipeline generation for so long.

And those kinds of athletes are definitely who you end up wanting to hire. But I still think as much as you can, firming up, like, the main job you have to be done just is really helpful at kind of like shaping a little bit of, , the process and, and your own clarity of thought as you go into it.

Alex Allain: I love that. Peter, I'm just curious for your take on, , as somebody who's, you know, been hired into these kind of roles, , if there's anything you'd add. 

Peter Ahn: No, I love that. , I think what is very apparent is you were just thinking from first principles and you know, even like the two AEs to one AE discussion.

, I've seen that play out so badly with folks who are just trying to de risk their hiring process and just pit one against the other. And I think what's clear is that Six months as head of sales, I mean, that means that this person, Nick, had a ton of ownership too, right? And there's a lot of clarity. And so I love kind of hearing your thinking process because I think it's very logical versus just like, you know, reading what's out there from VC land and, you know, other operators that [00:35:00] haven't been in the game, um, recently, right?

And I think 

Tido: the 2AE example is actually great. , we're going and doing 2AEs now because we have enough pipeline to support. To folks, we want to like, be testing a little bit more on the kind of colder outbound side of things. And so , we now have enough structure we can give folks and , , we're going to, to really start hiring folks.

And so we're actually taking a little bit of the 2AE advice now, because we have, That job to be done and the logic behind that makes a lot more sense for where we are in the journey and, , our go to market muscle, , right now going forward. And so again, I think all the advice is good advice, but it just sometimes doesn't have the context of like, this is the actual problem , you're trying to solve.

Oh, maybe that means all advice is bad advice, but yeah, your job to apply the context and the job to be done, , to the advice, I think. 

Peter Ahn: Yeah, the plumbing is there now where you can actually scale, right? Whereas before you needed somebody to build. And I bet you, like, this other go to market hire, is his name Matt?

Is that the person? Yeah, Matt and Nick probably have very similar [00:36:00] characteristics, right, because they're both building, , rather than just executing on a single function, right? Because sales also is not a monolith. It's, you know, CRM, it's , first pitch deck, it's, you know, product feedback too. So yeah, I love just hearing about kind of the builder phrasing, because I do think that's more important than, , you know, specializing too quickly even.

Tido: Yeah, totally. . They're both very strong builders. Nick has like the 11 out of 10 expertise in the navigating the kind of contract politics, just sort of that whole thing. Cause that's what he spent his, you know, 10 years doing, you know, Matt has a little bit more of that spike in sort of sales enablement and sort of generalist strategy kind of rev ops work since that's where he's been specializing for, for almost a decade.

And so like, There are spikes, but yeah, more than they're spikes, both of them are generalist builders who like to solve problems. And I think that's like what your first five go to market hires absolutely need to look like, if not longer than that. 

Peter Ahn: Nice, nice. I'll have to mark that section of the podcast so they [00:37:00] both listen to it.

A lot of praise 

thrown their way. 

Tido: They're, they're great. 

Alex Allain: Fantastic. , so I'd love to shift gears a little bit to one more topic that I think is really interesting for many of our listeners, which is, you know, we've talked a lot about once you have the people, how to fit in your pipeline, what do you do, , Koala seems to not have a lot of problems generating pipeline, which is awesome.

So, you know, I'd love to get. You know, some of your best tips that you can share and maybe like also, Peter, just love to, I think y'all have probably some opportunities to riff on some tactics and strategies here. 

. 

Tido: , yeah, I would say, I mean, back to the very basics that, you know, I think we've got away from for the last decade or so with , , this ridiculous idea called the predictable revenue model, which, , effectively was like, if you do enough volume, You will eventually have enough revenue and this works, , up until, , ZIRP ended, , reasonably well and, uh, has come crashing down.

And so we're kind of back to the basics, but I think the basics here are [00:38:00] you got to do two things. Demand generation and demand capture. I think demand generation means you're going out to where your potential fans, potential future customers, et cetera, are already hanging out. You're not bombarding them with a sales pitch.

You're not bombarding them with a ton of features. But you're teaching them something new that maybe they didn't know or they weren't already thinking about or maybe helping them think about a problem a little differently or saying something that like piques their curiosity a little bit. And that's sort of the demand generation thing.

You know, you can offer a benchmark report on like, You know, what's going on across, you know, X, Y, Z space. And like, you can benchmark how you're like, you know, something like really valuable that you can give them. And , , that makes a couple of things happen. One is just makes people aware of who you are and maybe the third or fourth time they see something kind of useful.

That you put into this community, like they're like, Oh, I know these guys. I really like, I like some of the stuff they're doing. And so that, [00:39:00] that is like the basics of demand generation is like going one to many out into the community, figuring out something valuable, you can give them not asking for a meeting in return and just kind of like putting it out there and obviously doing that.

Repeatedly is the trick because you kind of need to be doing that across a bunch of different communities, , you know, in scale. And , you can't just put it out there once. , maybe one of the, I was talking to a CMO, I look up to a ton about lifecycle marketing, , after this, , issue we had with, , that I was talking about earlier with people not knowing about the products we have in the product, our existing customers, not knowing about the additional features of the product.

And , the CMO, she was saying. Yeah, Tido, you got to be like emailing your customers at least like five to ten times a week. And I was like, that thought just like truly blew my mind. Cause like, I'm having a good quarter if I email them one email in the quarter and I post on LinkedIn a bit. Uh, I don't know that that volume is quite where we're [00:40:00] heading.

I don't know 

Peter Ahn: about that. Yeah. I don't know what product is that, but that would annoy me. 

Tido: She, uh, I won't, I won't name, uh, name names, but she had a pretty compelling point. , she had me subscribe. She had, she had me subscribe to the, the product that she sells. This is like a billion dollar run rate product too.

So this is not 

Alex Allain: a 

Tido: tiny, a tiny product. And I was really impressed. I mean, , It's a, , a bunch of like, kind of interesting looking webinars, you know, occasionally like a product feature up at like the content feels pretty different, but there is this like drip of interesting things. And it's not that I read every single one, but it like keeps this product sort of top of mind for me.

So anyway, I'm not saying go out and like start sending two of these a day. , but there is really this sort of demand generation awareness challenge. That is much more of like a full time job than I think I, at least I appreciated in the early days. And so I think that's a big piece of the demand, , or the pipeline equation, I should say.

, [00:41:00] the other piece is pipeline capture. So let's say you are driving people to your website or people that are interacting with you on your LinkedIn, or maybe they're in your GitHub repositories or maybe they're, , you know, wherever like they're engaging, , you want to make sure you're sort of taking note of like.

What they're engaging with, , see if you can kind of figure out where they are in the process. And really what we preach a lot at Koala is you need to figure out how to hover over their shoulder. Kind of watch what they're doing, which is obviously a big piece of work while it does, and then send a genuinely helpful message to them.

Like sales meetings are not booked unless you're offering something valuable. People don't just want to meet. Cause like you're a seller who wants to sell something. They want to meet if they think you can help them with their problem. And so I think like a big. I think this is like the, I call these like smart campaigns in the product, which is like, you have like , a data hook.

So you've observed something like maybe they just installed a compeTidor. Maybe they're on your websites, checking out your SSO doc. [00:42:00] Maybe they're, , you know, something else, they're just started hiring a BDR, but something happened in the world that you can observe. That's the hook. But that is only half of the battle because you also need a genuinely helpful message.

You can send them that they're like, Oh yeah, this would be super helpful if this person showed me how like my compeTidor has solved this problem. Or this would be super helpful if this person could give me the TLDR cause I've spent two hours on the technical docs here and I'm still confused. , so that's really, that is the root of pipeline generation.

I think it's been a, About a lot of other things, but I really think it comes down to these smart campaigns of like, you know, someone who has done something in the world that means like, maybe they're a good fit right now. And then you reaching out, you know, one to one at that point and seeing if you can help solve their problem.

Some rough benchmarks here, I would say this kind of great outbound as I'll call it, you should be receiving response rates in the like 10 to 25 percent rate. You're not going to get a hundred percent. [00:43:00] Maybe as a founder, we could. Some like response rates north of 50 percent even, but it's not like a hundred percent kind of thing, but like 10 to 25 is very good.

And if you're doing like volume plays that are getting like less than 1%, or if you're configuring more mailboxes with other domains so that you can not get your main domain flag, I would say that these are like orange flags that I would be like thinking about a different strategy here. Obviously every business is a little different.

And so I don't mean to speak super definitively, but that's kind of like how I think about the demand capture side of the world in terms of benchmarking. 

Peter Ahn: I love that. Yeah. I think the high level is you want to just meet your prospects where they want to be met. Right. Which is why I love Koala.

I remember vividly, there was this conversation where you were sharing a spreadsheet with me. I don't know if you remember this, but you were like, Hey, this is the next phase of Koala. Like, look at this from this like very technical documentation page, this prospect is generating actually most of their pipeline.

And it was interesting to you and to [00:44:00] me, because you would think that a pricing page or like a case study page actually drives more pipeline, right? Because that's a signal for buying. But I think with Koala and kind of what you're doing just generally, , I know you don't want to make this a pitch about Koala, but I think it just, it's Shows the audience how you think.

It's like meet people where they want to be met. Sometimes an engineer really geeking out over an SSO integration could lead to a buying signal, right? And so meet people where they want to be met, not where you think they want to be met. I think is like the root of go to, go to market lead gen. And so the reason why I kind of laughed about that, like five to 10 emails a week is because that's not where I want to be met, but there could be buyers who want to be met there, there could be buyers who want to be cold call, so then cold call them, but you know, there might be buyers who want to be slack for text message.

So I just kind of love the discussion because to your point, there's no one size fits all. It's just like, think from first principles on how your prospect wants to receive your message. 

Tido: I love that point. And yeah, I think it is surprising, but our best signals [00:45:00] are often like, Support articles and like the depth of the tech docs.

And totally you would think that the pricing and the marquee case study are the two things, but you're actually much higher in the journey. It turns out almost everyone clicks on pricing like right after going to the homepage. And so like, that one's not as good as you think, unless it's like a minute long pricing page visit where they're really like digging in.

, but the, the technical doc, I mean, no one's on your technical docs or reading your support articles because like they love the CSS design of it. I can guarantee you, , they're on it because they have a problem and they're trying to solve it. And so if you can help read their mind about what that.

Problem is, and get in front of them with an async solution, even if it's not a meeting, like there is no better way to build trust and to start a likely sales conversation than showing up where your prospects are with real value. And yeah, Peter, I think you, you nailed it. Every single, , buyer type wants to be met in a different place and different people within a persona , want different things.

And so obviously you have to experiment and you can't get it right a [00:46:00] hundred percent of the time, but I think like the more work you can do in the back end, so you can show up with your best foot forward, , that really helps change the demand capture game. 

Alex Allain: So Tido, thank you so much. This was like a goldmine and our listeners are going Going to learn a ton. So, , for people who are like, I want to see this in action, or I want to buy Koala or like either of those are great. Where can people find you? , tell them a little bit how to learn more about what you're doing.

Tido: , well, I'm always happy to connect to founders. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you have questions or any of this resonated, or you have. More questions or whatever. Always happy to talk shop. Check out Koala. Getkoala. com. There's a free trial and it takes about, yeah, usually less than an hour to get going and people are often surprised how much interesting website traffic they have and the demand capture they can start doing.

But, , yeah, I'd be thrilled to connect with anyone. I am a member of this audience as a technical, , co founder. And so just always excited to pay it forward [00:47:00] and share more detail about what I've learned over the last, , year, starting to get this go to market thing off the ground. 

Alex Allain: All right. Well, thank you, Tido.

And, , for our audience, we're going to wrap this one up. Please don't forget to press all of those nice buttons in. The apps that make it, make us feel good when you give us five star ratings. We'd love that. And definitely check out Koala. Find, we'll put links to getkoala. com and Tido's LinkedIn in our show notes so that you can go connect with him and check it out.

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