sf4lifer

Walking and talking is my preferred method of communication. I use to wait until I had a call scheduled but now I just go (3-4X a day) and send/listen to audio messages.

You shouldn't seek or take advice from the internet

Interesting! That would explain motivation. Any insight on how to track if we're on one of those lists and remove ourselves?

In my experience, there is no silver bullet outreach. Until you have dozens of customers you shouldn't do anything at scale. Best thing (depending on customer) is call, linkedin inmail and/or emails. It typically takes 3-7 touches before someone will buy from you (no more than twice a week). You just need to patient and provide them value. Remember they have no incentive to look at your solution. Just send them personalized messages knowing they are busy and you're not a priority. I recommend using apollo (to get emails), streak gmail plugin (or hubspot if you have it) so you get email read reciepts. At least you know when someone opens your message. Keep trying different value props until something works across multiple users.

Sales at a startup trying to find product market fit is probably the worst job of all time. You have no marketing/brand/leads and if by some miracle you do land a deal your product probably isn't quite right and there is no customer success to handle the daily demands of an unsatisfied customer. That said, if you want to transition to sales, with 17 years experience (assuming no sales) this is probably your best option. The pay cut is typical, the upside is real, IF you can find product market fit. Sales is not presenting a solution, it's asking questions to find the problem and more importantly finding the person who the problem affects financially the most. It's a lot of fun and a unique skillset. I'd say not closing a single deal last year is a warning sign. I'd evaluate what you would do differently. Be objective and critical about why you will produce different results. Only advice I'd give is what I tell all sales reps, focus on quality daily outbound activity (calls, emails) and everything else will take care of itself.

Because Stephen Wolfram is a billionaire who knows what he's sitting on

I went through extreme zoom overload as a senior leader at a large organization. I found myself on upwards of 16 Zooms a day. It was exhausting and I felt not very productive. I found most people were multi-tasking and just waiting for their turn to talk. There were also people who just hid on meetings all day every day instead of producing work. I've since switched entirely to async audio messages. You get far more context and discussion than text based chat. Teams/slack already have audio messaging built-in. Why wait until everyone is on a meeting to discuss something. Instead just start talking and people will respond when they can. I've reduced my synchronous meetings to a couple a week. Disclaimer: I built Airwave a push to talk app for frontline workers and use that exclusively.

The second you hit record the vibe on the meeting is different.

Things don't always go up and to the right. Life is not linear. If things aren't going your way professionally, you can always work on your personal life or physical body. You're only moving backwards if you stop moving.

Hang in there. These 5 months rank among the worst times to get a job in software. Things will pick up in a couple of months. Make sure you're working on an interesting side project

No, we had a group chat on Telegram that we used during meetings for our snarky comments

In my experience there are 3 types of justifications for big decisions. The first is data supported, any logical person would come to the same conclusion. The second is data sort of supports it, yes there is a leap, but people can see it and argue whether it's real. Finally there is no real data to support, in this case a founder type needs to convince people it's there but no one sees it yet (it's our secret and we're going to own it). What's worked for me is to have a short (like a day) period where you allow everyone to be heard, then you make the decision and make it clear that if you disagree once the decision is made you commit. Inevitably someone who thinks you're wrong will leave, that's ok. New people bought into the direction is good.

Sounds like a universal chat app: https://www.makeuseof.com/best-all-in-one-messaging-platform...

x.com

The telegram chat was far more interesting than anything ever said in slack

Zoom chat. It's a slack/teams competitor

we do audio messages. Taking the synchronous out of it allows for similar interactions on global time

Totally agreed. This is the part that makes RTO mandates make no sense to me. When I worked in an office, we would video call instead of going up two floors

I believe Eric is right. It's often the moments before or after the scheduled meeting when the side conversations happen that build relationships. Sometimes the insight comes 20 minutes after the meeting ends and you walk up to the person at their desk and keep going (even though there is no scheduled meeting). These things are still possible remotely over zoom, but they don't hit the same. In 3 years I think I've answered 3 zoom cold calls (from people I knew). The real value to the company of being in office is unstructured time together.

All that said, I fall into the camp of lets get in-person together once a quarter to plan and then execute remotely. We can meet up occasionally in between somewhere awesome (not in an office).

If you are growing MoM with clear PMF in a decent sized TAM you'll have no problem getting meetings or raising money. If you have paying a couple of customers who are passionate about your product (ready for seed round) then you can cold email VCs who will take a meeting. If you're pre-revenue, you're best bet is to raise from someone you know.

Build relationships with paying customers ASAP in the journey. They will give you all the guidance you need.

Most of the available addressable market of websites that want a chat widget already have intercom, drift, crisp installed. All these companies have AI-features either deployed or on the horizon. You're going to have differentiate considerably to get someone to rip and replace. I'd say you should look at app stores on website builders like Shopify or wordpress, but they have AI chat apps as well. It's just a crowded space.

When Path was shut down, a shared album became the default social network for my family. I now have one for different friend groups. It's not spectacular, but it works and privacy is the key feature.

How'd the fund do?

Ok. In that case, I'd position a paid pilot for 100 users to prove out the value/ROI at some rate that's less than the cost of the existing tools. This should be within VP discretion and won't trigger a procurement process. Once the ROI is clear, then you can negotiate a larger deal. Rolling any software out for 5K people especially if it includes replacing tools is a large undertaking for a company.

You should expect it to take at least a year. There are other contracts they will have to get out of. There is data in those systems that will need to be dealt with.

Sounds promising. But be skeptical. Large companies will rarely risk trying something new with 5000 people. $5000 * $50 * 12 = $3M. This level of spend (on anything) will require c-level executive approval. Typically for a large enterprise anything over $250K / year needs to be negotiated with a procurement officer who will create an RFP process with your competitors to ensure the corp gets the best deal. These are professional software price negotiators, they know all the tricks.

You should ask your customer champion what the value of your solution is to them. If they can't explain to you the tangible value/ROI, they won't be able to sell it internally.

Yah, I'll usually wait until I have a couple of messages, then go for a walk and listen and respond. I have a group message where we all respond via audio messages and it's fun. We've never been able to get that crew on a facetime or zoom at the same time. This allows everyone to participate on their terms.

I started getting voice notes a couple of years ago and disliked them at first. It felt presumptuous of the person that I'd stop and listen to their 4 minute monologue. Scanning a text message is much more convenient. But I ended up really enjoying them because you can actually have an conversation without being on a call. This made me much more accessible and looking at phone far more interesting. It was like having a podcast with a variety of folks from my network.

I've only ever gotten jobs through people I know, so applying was purely a formality...

I've done this twice. Here are lessons from my experience:

* At a startup, I made decisions fast. At a large company I had to build consensus for everything. This meant a LOT of meetings to discuss the same thing over and over. * At a startup, I interacted directly with customers. At a large company, there were layers of customer success, sales, that I had to coordinate with (pre/post meetings). It felt like more hassle than it was worth. * At a startup, mission is clear, payday is company success. At a large company, lets face it, everyone's mission is to get promoted. * At a startup, there were no restrictions on what we could try. At a large company, there is so many protocols, security, data handling, release notes. * At a startup risk is rewarded. At a big company, everyone talks about taking risks but no one gets promoted for taking one and failing (at least in my experience). * At a startup I hired and fired fast. At a big company, 90 days minimum to let a bad apple go. Everyone knows how to milk it.

All that said the corporate life was really good to me when I had young kids. Minimal work/stress, great benefits. Different priorities for different points in life.