Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You actually don't need an idea to start a company. You need to have a space that you're passionate about because again, you're going to be doing this for a long time and it's something that you need to, like, dedicate 510 years or more of your life to. So it needs to be a space that you are passionate about and that you want to build in. You want to have an idea, potentially of a Persona within that space that you want to build for. I was really interested in building for product marketers because having been a product marketer, I realized that it's a very misunderstood practice. It's underappreciated. There's not a lot of tools that are built specifically for product marketers.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Today on the seat series, I have Justin, founder of Acid Mule. He has been somewhat of a mentor to me and I shamelessly bombarded him with so many questions. I know listeners are going to learn so much from your experience. I'm so excited to have you on the show, Justin.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so great to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: We had a lot of chat and he had quite a career before founding acid mule. I kind of want to go back to your university days. I see you are the 2007 2009 national tennis champion and he also did finance internship in Hong Kong to Morgan Stanley. And then seems like you found your calling in product marketing. Now, how has all that experience shaped how you build your startup?
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question and good research. So I actually grew up in Hong Kong and that's sort of the reason behind the internships. Those were summer internships while I was in college, but I was also a competitive, a junior competitive tennis player, first in Hong Kong and then I actually, when I was 15 years old, I left Hong Kong to go to Florida and attended a tennis academy full time for three years and traveled the world playing on the junior circuit and eventually realized that I wasn't good enough to go pro. And partially I'm like five foot seven. So unfortunately, I didn't grow very much and the sport got very physical. If you see the guys today, a lot of them are definitely over 6ft and they're big and strong. And the physical nature of tennis has definitely become a big part of the sport. So I wasn't able to go pro, but I did play in college. I played at UC Santa Cruz, which is a division three team, but like a top division three school that was known for having a great coach and winning national championships. And I was fortunate to be a part of two teams that won national championships 2007. It was my sophomore year, and then 2009 was my senior year. And what was really cool about that was we're a team of seniors. All of us actually sort of were graduating, and every match during that national championship run was potentially the last that we would play together.
[00:03:02] Speaker C: Right.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: So it was just a really special moment, something that I'll always remember. And there's a lot of undertones with startups and the learnings that I had about working hard, going through hardship as well. You know, I'll just tell a quick story. When we came in as freshmen again, this was a class of freshmen, and then eventually a class of seniors, the team before us had actually won the national championships. So we had.
Yeah, we had sort of.
We had sort of inherited the number one ranking in the NCAA division three, and we came in kind of thinking we were all cool and awesome and ended up not even making it to the nationals. We end up losing to our regional rival, Claremont. And it was a big shock to the system for us, a big reality check. But what it meant was that we really locked down and trained really hard. The next year, we had a chip on our shoulder and were able to go all the way through and win a national championship, and again, to tie it to the startup world, just like the ups and downs, the setbacks that lead to the successes, it was just a real great learning. And the roller coaster, too, because, again, what's really interesting is my junior year, we ended up not making it to nationals again and losing to that regional rival, and in senior year, winning the national championship. So, talking about roller coasters and startups, I guess I was trained for my college tennis days for that.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Wow.
Talking about a comeback story. Most people have one, but you have two.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Yeah, two comebacks.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: That's crazy.
How has being an athlete.
Oftentimes, you hear a lot of people or athletes that take that discipline, because as any athlete, but especially collegiate level, you have to have that discipline to wake up early, to train, to go through a routine, to show up every day, no matter how you feel. Now, how, like, has that been? Has that benefited your journey as a startup founder?
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I see it as all part of the same journey, so it definitely has benefited, I think, the drive, the work ethic, but also the ability to take a loss and not, like, dwell over it too long, but to, like, look at.
Analyze it right. Look at the reasons why you lost, the things that you can improve and sort of move on and charge forward. Trying to improve in those ways is really analogous between being an athlete and being a startup founder or startup person. Before I founded Asset Mule, I was an early stage sales guy. And you win deals, you lose deals, and you lose deals that you thought you should have won or in the last minute, something out of your control or something that wasn't your control, you lose to a competitor. And there's a lot of the same principles that you can take to analyzing your performance, figuring out the areas that you need to improve, and working on those things that come from those college tennis days and translate very much so into being an early stage sales guy, and then obviously as a founder as well. So I think it's one of the reasons why you see a lot of people hiring college athletes as early stage startup salespeople, and then also how we've seen quite a lot of people that come from either a sports background or it could be like a musical background, highly trained musician, violinist, that then become founders because they're used to managing their own business or their own performance.
And they have all those qualities in terms of work ethic and drive and persistence that I think pays forward in terms of being a founder.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: So, yeah, one thing that we connected over, oftentimes when I have a failure, I'll share with you. And one thing we kind of connected is how predictable failure is as part of the founder journey.
I personally lost a co founder, and you're like, well, you know, it happens. And then, you know, I guess, put your. What's the saying? You. You pick yourself up by a bootstrap or, you know, put the next foot in front, the other, just keep going. Right? You learn from it.
You know, you learn from it. Try to do better next time. But it's gonna happen. Failure is gonna happen. That's the only thing that is guaranteed in the starter world.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know what's interesting, and I learned this particularly in my, in my sales days at this company tracker, is the fear of failure is usually more painful or the perception of the pain is more intense than the actual pain of the failure. And what I mean by that is whenever I have these deals, when I was a sales guy, I'd be like, oh, man, this might screw it up or I might lose it here. And there's all this worry, and it's almost like the world's going to end if that deal falls through. And then some of those deals did fall through for one reason or another.
[00:08:26] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: And when it actually happens, that news is delivered to you. It's disappointing, but you take a deep breath and you move on, right. And life continues, and then you get a win somewhere, right. So it's interesting how that sort of fear of failure is actually maybe more intense than the actual failure itself, right. And, you know, just knowing that can kind of, like, lighten that a little bit and make it, you know, a little less stressful and intense. Just knowing that you're going to get through it no matter what, it won't be the end of the world. You'll figure out a way to push forward and learn from it. If you haven't seen the Roger Federer commencement speech at Dartmouth, I think it was this year, he actually pulled out a stat that is, you look at for Roger Federer, one of the most celebrated tennis players in the world, won 20 something grand slams. One of the goats, right. One of the greatest of all time. If you actually look at the amount of points he won versus lost points, right. Not talking about matches, obviously on matches, he's had a lot of success, but points, it's something like he's won 50% of 51% of points and lost 49%. Right. He's almost lost half of the points that he ever played in his professional career. And it just shows you that failure is part of the process. And your ability to take that failure and move on and learn from it and stay grounded and positive and succeed because of that failure is just part of the process. We've heard the same thing with Michael Jordan quotes, right. I don't know the exact quote, but the reason he succeeds is because he missed all those shots and he failed.
[00:10:06] Speaker C: Right.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: So anyway, it's important to look at failure as part of the process and a step in the journey and not just the end.
[00:10:14] Speaker C: Right?
[00:10:15] Speaker B: 100%.
And I, like, we talk a lot about your experience. And I was going through Twitter, part of my research, and I saw you had a really interesting take. Right.
You said something about, like, being a misconception to have. To need to have a great idea to start a startup, but it's actually equally important to find the industry or the niche that you're interested in building in.
Can you tell me a little more about that?
[00:10:43] Speaker A: This is one of my biggest learnings so far in my asset mule journey.
When I started at my first startup as the first sales guy, I immediately learned that I wanted to be a startup founder.
Being in sales was a stepping stone to being a founder. And then eventually I built out a sales team and I went over to product marketing. But all of these things were to build out the skillset that I felt I needed to start a business. And I kept pushing it out too, right. Like, because I didn't have a good idea. I thought, you know, when I have a good idea, I'll start a business. I'm just waiting for that good idea to happen. And when it came to asset mule, the story is actually that both myself and my co founder, George, we were actually laid off from our jobs, right, in sort of the, in the big tech layoffs of the last couple years.
[00:11:33] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: You know, even then he's been started a bunch of companies, and I probably have him to thank for really pushing me in and like, getting me to that point to actually take this leap of faith and start this company because I was, you know, we were bouncing ideas off each other. We were thinking about starting something together. We brought in my, our tech co founder, Dane as well. And at the same time, I was interviewing for jobs and I was really on the fence, you know, like, do I.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Do I take this leap? And I, and so on. We didn't have a crystal idea crystallized, but we did sort of hone in on the fact that we wanted to build something in the go to market tech space, in the sales and marketing tech space.
George and I both came from sales and marketing, and we love that tech ourselves and the tools and always trying new things, but we didn't quite have the idea of what we wanted to build.
[00:12:26] Speaker C: Right.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: But what we did was very early on is we just started talking to sales and marketing pros, right, and talking to them about, like, their day to day and what they struggle with and, like, the biggest problems that they face on a day to day basis. And that's how sort of the idea for asset meal emerged. We were talking to a lot of product marketers at one point because my last role was product marketing and hearing a lot about how product marketers, they create sales assets and salespeople don't use them and they go rogue and create their own stuff. So we started talking to sales people about, like, hey, why aren't you using those assets that product marketing is creating? And they said, you know, well, they're, you know, they're, they're usually very generic and they're not relevant for my buyers. So I need to create something myself. And that was sort of starting to unpack the idea that eventually became asset mule.
[00:13:19] Speaker C: Right.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: So, yeah, like, the big learning here was you actually don't need an idea to start a company. You need to have a space that you're passionate about, because, again, you're going to be doing this for a long time, and it's something that you need to, like, dedicate 510 years or more of your life to. So it needs to be a space that you are passionate about and that you want to build in. You want to have an idea, potentially, of a Persona within that space that you want to build for. I was really interested in building for product marketers because having been a product marketer, I realized that it's a very misunderstood practice. It's underappreciated. There's not a lot of tools that are specifically for product marketers. And there's really an opportunity to not just build a product, but a community based approach to that practice. Elevating that practice, building awareness of that practice, building awareness of product marketers within that practice, and then just talking to them and understanding. Okay, what's missing?
[00:14:16] Speaker C: Right.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: What are the pieces that you're still doing manually or that's broken in the process and that you're struggling with? And very soon, you'll start to get a really interesting idea of a MVP or a very micro problem that you can solve, and you just start unpacking that more. Build a prototype, demo it. If people are resonating with it, what else does it need for you to start using it? Build an MVP. Get it in their hands. What does it take for you to start using this on a daily basis or pay for this thing? Iterate on that, and suddenly you've got a business that you're. You can start charging for. So that's kind of the journey that we've been on and all sort of grounded in this idea that you don't need an idea. Don't wait for the idea. You'll be waiting forever.
[00:15:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: I love that. There's a lot to unpack there.
So I think I want to start with beside the idea.
A lot of aspiring founders are always waiting for that, I guess that divine moment where they take the leap of faith and kind of like, if it's a movie, it'll be like background music, you know, everyone's cheering you on. It's like, yeah, do it. Just do it. But really, it sounded like it wasn't a, there wasn't a moment in time where it decided, all right, I'm doing this more. So you're talking with, you know, you found a, you know, a vertical that you're interested in. You talk to customer, and you slowly realize the problem that they're facing. You found a pattern there, and then you started building, and next thing you know, you turn around, you. You're essentially building a startup already. Right. It wasn't a moment in time. It was just a series of events.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I think another, like, misconception about startups or like a false truth, you know, a lie, if you will, and I won't call a lie because it may happen.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: Right.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: And I'm sure there's situations where, you know, somebody launched, launches a product and just blows up overnight and it's, and they know they're onto something immediately.
[00:16:14] Speaker C: Right.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: That also wasn't the case with us. Like, even after talking to 200, 300 product marketers, building a prototype and demoing people and then even building an MVP that we got into users hands, I wasn't certain that this was something.
The first version of our MVP, we weren't getting a ton of usage. There was a lot of bugs in there. There were a lot of missing features. There were a lot of missing things. And for that reason, the status quo might have still been better than what we had, or what we had maybe was two times better or three times better than the status quo, but not ten times better. So our early design partners weren't quite ready yet to take the leap of faith. So it was still on a daily basis going from a great discovery call where somebody's like, oh, my God, what you're building is exactly my problem. And being like, getting off that call and jumping on a quick chat with George, my co founder, being like, dude, we're onto something. This is awesome. Like, we found something to then, you know, getting the product in that person's hands or somebody else's hands and just seeing silence. Right? Like, them not using it.
[00:17:22] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: And, like, following up with them and like, oh, I still haven't, like, found the time. I'm really gonna, I'm gonna find the time to use it. And being like, what's going on here? Like, there's a disconnect.
[00:17:33] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: I saw a quote actually earlier today where, like, somebody said, the way to describe a startup is every day going from, like, we're going to change the world to, like, we're most certainly going to fail. And that is like, that is exactly my experience. Right. And I would say only more recently, let's say in the last couple months, right. Have we gotten to a point where we're like, okay, we're clearly onto something, right? Like, we have people that are paying for the product now and they're using the product every day. They're upgrading, they're bringing on more team members to use it. And, like, these people love the product, but we're a year and a half in, right? So it definitely was not like a moment in time where it just happened. It was, okay, why aren't they using it?
Maybe with assetneul it was like, okay, because we don't have templates in the system to make it easy for them to get started using it. So let's build some templates. Oh, we're starting to see a little bit more usage now.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: Right.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: But maybe they're not coming back. Why is that? Let's talk to them. Well, once we build the templates, we need to get our sales team to use it. So what's it going to take to get your sales team to use it? Oh, some analytics to show that people are actually viewing these assets and engaging with it. More visibility than a PDF, right? Making it ten x better than a PDF. Let's build that in. Now we're starting to see some usage from some early sales reps, but can we get them to pay for it? Not yet. We need more salespeople to use it. We need the VP to sign on it, off on it. What do we need to build to get them to do it? And it's just an iterative process and it takes time.
And that's another major learning that I think is really key for any founders is like, if you feel in your gut that you're onto something and you have a very clear vision of the path forward and you're getting that sort of feedback from the market, but maybe not in the product yet, but there's always that next thing that could help you get there, right? Iterate on it, keep going, just pull that thread, keep going. And I think hopefully you'll get there.
Obviously scenarios where you might, and I don't want to leave people down a path that they keep pushing forward forever, but at some point, as long as you're seeing a little bit more, you know, feedback from the market, a little bit more usage, a little bit more signs, but like, there's also something else that you need to keep going. You just got to follow that trail, pull that thread, and eventually, you know, I think you'll get there nice.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: And I resonate. I resonate and laugh hard on, you know, get off a good call and they're like, this is exactly what they need. And next thing you know, they're you. You build what they need and you give it to them and they're like, okay, where's the feedback? Why aren't you using it?
That happens so often.
But going back to, was it the early 2010 when the lean startup book came out. There was this phase where everyone's like, oh, you got to talk to customer. You got to talk to customer. And I believe that in order to build a good product, you have to talk to customers. But my question to you, and this is a selfish question, you know, I'm going through. I'm talking to customer for fincast, and something that I often wonder about is, at what point do you decide, okay, now, all these are good feedback, but I am going to focus on feature one, two, and three and not the rest.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really, really good question, and it's really hard.
So I definitely think I'm a huge believer on talking to customers all the time. It's actually the thing I do the most even today.
[00:21:20] Speaker C: Right.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: We have a product out there in the market. People are paying for it. We're continuing to build new things, but every day, I have at least two or three customer discovery calls. And actually, it's interesting.
It's the way that we approach our sales process, and I don't know if that's going to change at some point. And it also might be because we are a freemium, we're PLG, sort of motion, but most of our customers come from us actually reaching out for customer discovery, not asking, you know, not trying to pitch them, but asking them, hey, like, you're a product marketer at an early stage company. We're building a tool for somebody like you around sales assets. Would you jump on a call? We have some questions, and we'd love your feedback. And asking them a couple of these questions, confirming that the problem resonates with them, showing them the product, getting their feedback, and then them at the end being like, oh, you said this is free to try. Can I just sign up and try it out? Yeah, absolutely. Try it out. And, like, when you try it out, if you don't mind, we'd love to jump on a call a week later and get your feedback. They try it out. They're, like, really excited about it, and then it starts kind of evolving into a sales motion, and that's, like, a really interesting way that we've started doing customer discovery. But to your question, there needs to be a balance, right?
And I'm lucky that I have a tech co founder that that helps us keep that balance. He's very much a believer of, yeah, absolutely. We need to talk to customers, get feedback from the market, but in the end, we're building the product.
[00:22:50] Speaker C: Right.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: And we can't jump on every solution that our customers have on you know, every feature that they want, every way they want to approach that feature. In the end, we need to make the decision on, like, what we're building next and how we're building it. And it's our product vision that we need to build. And I think it is a balance, right? So we try and walk that balance where we record every bit of feedback. We have analytics on what's the most requested feature and all these things, and we use that to inform our decisions. But in the end, we make decisions based on our product vision and what we feel intuitively is the right thing to work on. And right now, we also don't have a very formal product roadmap process right now. And that may change over time, but right now the way that it works is we have a bunch of features in this system that we're using where we've added ideas, our users have added ideas, people upvoted ideas, so we see what's bubbling to the top. And as we're building one feature, we're talking about potentially what we should be building next. And then once we release that feature, we, like, make the decision, okay, what is what we're going to be building next? So it's not really a roadmap of, like, we're going to deliver this, then we're going to deliver that. It's almost like, deliver this one thing and then, like, have this ongoing conversation of the things that we could be building, the trends that we're hearing in these conversations. And then at the end of it, we usually do have a pretty good consensus between the three of us on, like, it feels like this is the thing, and then we do that, and then we can kind of continue that process. But I think to your point earlier, it is this balance, and that's an important lesson as well, is take feedback, listen to customers, you'll find trends, you'll get a sense of what to build. But it's almost like you're training your own intuition rather than you're getting like, okay, this is what we should build next, because that's what they're saying. It's more that you're building this product, intuition yourself through this feedback and constantly getting inputs from the market and then making the decision yourself with your founders on what's that next thing and what does this product vision look like and so on. And I can give specific examples on that as well. But that's kind of what our experience has been so far.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: It sounds like the whole process. So what I'm trying to get at is Sam Ultman. With this advent of chat GBT, you're going to see a lot of solo founder that's building billion dollar companies. Do you agree with that?
[00:25:27] Speaker A: I do. I mean, solo founders may. I think there will be, yeah, for sure.
I think there's more to having co founders than, you know, the skill set that you need.
[00:25:41] Speaker C: Right.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: I think the journey is very emotional, and there's a lot of those moments where you need somebody to share their perspective very strongly and help you make a decision. So I think there's a, like, emotional and psychological side to it as well that makes having co founders really, really valuable and important. In our case, it is a skill set thing. Like, I'm not a developer. George isn't a developer. Dane is. He's a full stack developer. So we need him to build the product.
I'm more of a salesperson, product marketer, so I feel like a piece of the puzzle. And then George is a content creator community guy, and he feels a great piece. So there is definitely a skill set balance that we benefit from having three co founders, but there's definitely an emotional and psychological side as well where Dane is a very balanced guy and he has a very clear vision and way of doing things.
Maybe George and I are a little bit more, like, adaptable and so on. So, like, there's a nice balance there and a nice healthy tension as well.
[00:26:49] Speaker C: Right.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: That, like, debating ideas and so on that come that that leads to a better outcome. So I think that's a benefit of it. Now, if you're asking me, you know, not necessarily solo founder, but like, let's say small founding team building billion dollar companies, I'm 100% like, like, in agreement that that will happen. Right, right. Because I feel like, you know, there's so much now that you can do without having to hire massive teams to support it, right. There's AI that, you know, you can do way more with less. Right. You can build products with a single developer.
[00:27:31] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: You can, like, you know, manage customer support, at least at the first level of answering questions and bringing the human when needed.
You can do things on the sales side at scale that you couldn't do before. So AI is a big piece in it. But there's also the product led movement. If you can build a very intuitive, self serve product and all the things surrounding that around help center content in product tours, then now you don't necessarily need a sales team to sell, or you don't need a customer success team to onboard.
And if you do, like, maybe you're doing a sales assist motion.
Or obviously you're going to have to do some customer success and onboarding at some time. Maybe you can do it with one of the co founders that that's sort of their space, right? Like one of the co founders can sell, right. And always be the supporting salesperson on top of that PLG motion. Another one can be sort of the onboarding customer support on top of the, on the self serve stuff that you're doing, right. And you can also more easily outsource things. There's a lot of fractionals now these days as well, right, where you can get fractional salespeople, fractional marketers, fractional support people. So I do think there's going to be a lot of companies that are building in this founder led way and that decide that they want to be that forever and that they can build very big and successful businesses. And what's going to be interesting is seeing how the venture community adapts to that. Because the venture community has been built on top of growth and growth around. You now have to hire that big sales team and you have to hire that vp and like your customer support and all these things. And in a world where you're getting billion dollar companies without that, it's going to be an interesting model.
[00:29:32] Speaker C: Right.
[00:29:33] Speaker A: The other thing that I just want to also mention is that you don't have to have billion dollar companies in this model too.
[00:29:38] Speaker C: Right.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: If you're just three co founders, you can build a very profitable business, pay yourself a really great salary, and have a great outcome in the end, in terms of an acquisition, without ever having to build a billion dollar company, you can be doing 1020, 5100 million in ARR.
And I'm saying ten, even with three founders, and have a really successful outcome. What's really interesting about this model is the optionality. It also provides founders in being able to make the journey worth it without having to be a billion dollar company.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: That's very true. I think. I totally agree with the advent of generator AI. It really does help teams become more efficient. They don't necessarily have to grow in terms of team size as quickly, but they can accomplish just as much, if not more. Right?
[00:30:33] Speaker A: And one thing I'll just say, I don't think, at least in the very, very short term, I can't predict the future in AIH, you know all that.
But I don't think that it's necessarily replacing salespeople, right, or replacing customer success people. I think it's allowing you to do more with less. So a salesperson that before could manage ten accounts, might be able to manage 100 accounts or 500 accounts now with the amount of information that they're able to process using AI copilot.
[00:31:09] Speaker C: Right.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: A customer success team that used to be customer success person, that used to be able to manage 20 accounts, now can manage hundreds of accounts or thousands of accounts based on all the stuff that the inputs that they're able to get and the data they're able to process. So there may be a world, I don't know, in the future where, yeah, you can have a fully automated sales team. I don't know.
I always think there is that human side that's really important in these relationship based roles, so I'm a little concerned about that. But I do think doing more with less, a lot more with less, is definitely possible with these tools now.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: Thanks for watching part one editor told me that episode was way too long, so we have to split into two on the next part. In this part, we're going to talk about what the pros and cons of raising versus bootstrapping, how to start charging users at early stage, focus on how to define a feature that's important to your early stage user and not to be too broad, and also how to stand out in the age of where everything marketing related is generated by chat GPT. Stay tuned.
