formula for diSaaSter: message-market fit, product-market fit, & a non-working product

we’ve all done it.

sacrificed long term goals for short term gains.

and startups are just as tempted as people to take shortcuts, hoping to reach a destination of product-market fit and massive success faster.

but sometimes shortcuts take you down the wrong road. one you can’t come back from.

on this episode of the diSaaSter recovery podcast, we’re guided by our esteemed guest who's a marketing maestro with 16 years of experience across 12+ different startups.

you can expect a fascinating discussion ranging from the essence of product marketing to the impact of data-driven decisions devoid of a certain critical ingredient.

we'll also delve into the dynamic nature of product-market fit and the often-underestimated role of luck and timing. we'll navigate the intricacies of data interpretation and emphasize the value of context when making decisions. building on lessons from april dunford's "obviously awesome", we'll address challenges in saas sales and marketing, and highlight the significance of accurate positioning.

of course, no episode of diSaaSter recovery is complete without some thrilling diSaaSter stories. listen as our guest shares her journey through product launches, company mismanagement, financial struggles, and the aftermath. together, we'll extract valuable lessons that can pave the way for startup success.

so, grab your headphones and prepare for an enriching tour through the tumultuous realm of startups. let's learn from these startup diSaaSters and turn them into stepping stones for success.

full transcript

welcome to the diSaaSter recovery podcast. i'm your host, josh santo, and this is the show where we reveal the untold horror stories and hard-learned lessons of software as a service start-up life as told by the sassholes who lived through it. their stories about the managers, departments and companies they worked for will leave you thinking what a diSaaSter. our mission is to help you bring order and sanity to the chaos you will undoubtedly encounter in your own adventures in sass. there's stories and conversations with our guests who have been there and done that in all aspects of sass from sales, marketing, product and more. you'll get the tools and insights you need to recover from diSaaSter. today on the show we're talking marketing and the importance of product marketing. we'll examine where marketing should start, the failures of a very common strategy in marketing. we'll talk about how being solely data-driven can negatively impact results and, finally, we'll cover the dangers of hope and addiction to start-up life. our guest is a marketing professional with 16 years and 12 plus start-ups under her belt. she's always been a marketer at hark, but that wasn't her original career choice. initially, genetics was her passion, but in college she made the switch to marketing and focus specifically on consumer behavior and what drives them consciously and subconsciously, which is critical for understanding the personas that you need to target and reach out to in marketing. after school she began her career in corporate marketing before eventually moving to start-up life and has done everything from digital marketing to product marketing, demand-gen marketing, a cow-based marketing and more. i'm excited for you to hear her story, but before we get into the interview, i ask that you please keep the following in mind the stories shared on the diSaaSter recovery podcast are based on anonymous individual experiences at real companies. the goal in sharing these stories and perspectives is to help fellow sassholes learn from each other, get a much-needed sanity check and build empathy along the way. no specific company or person is mentioned. if a story feels like an attack on you or your company, then we encourage you to reflect on why that is. and with that, on to the show. welcome to the diSaaSter recovery podcast. i'm so glad that you decided to join us today. now i know you're kind of in between homes at the moment. you've got some renovations going on in florida, although it does sound like the places where you spend your time boston and florida. you've got a lot of home projects going on. how's that been going for you?

guest: 3:02

yeah, i felt, you know, this year i was taking a sabbatical to just relax and refresh and then i thought what better way to do that than to fully remodel the entire apartment. so lots of learning lessons along the way. i did this in boston. i should have known better, but i thought maybe it might be easier, considering the place isn't 115 years old down in florida. but now different set of issues. but it'll look great after. so i'll just skip the before and after pictures to see the difference and make myself proud.

josh: 3:31

has it felt refreshing and relaxing.

guest: 3:34

it did until we were in the mess at construction, permitting delays, like now, the 1980s, the money pit movie that's my life where everything is done in two weeks. two weeks is actually three plus months, and that's just the norm.

josh: 3:52

and it keeps going and going.

guest: 3:54

all right.

josh: 3:55

well, you certainly earned your sabbatical. i hope you are able to find those moments of refreshment and relaxation. definitely we're so excited to talk to you about your own diSaaSter experience today. but before we get into that, you know the show. the episode is going to center very much around marketing and i'd love to start with you with your experience in marketing across all aspects of marketing, across a wide variety of different types of companies, different sizes of companies, different products that you're bringing to different markets with different personas, and all these other marketing terms. had the lift to simplify and start, how do you define marketing?

guest: 4:35

yeah, i think it depends on who i'm speaking to. so simplistic terms, simple like creating an interest in a product and service and then getting prospective buyers to buy it, simply enough. and there are tons of different facets of marketing, but for me, i think the what are, the special key word is at the time and the focus is on the trend. all great marketing actually originates from product marketing. so, depending upon the company that you're at, they define that differently too, right? there's no easy explanation, i think. to me, this is basically product marketing is responsible for getting the right product to the right customer at the right time to make sure that there is adoption, simply enough, behind the details of that, basically, if product owns the product roadmap and how the product is developed, product marketing owns everything from that product out to the market, the go-to-market strategy or plan, how it's going to be communicated, how the long-term roadmap is followed, what the product needs to have in terms of taking that product to market and how to generate demand and interest and evaluate that for customer adoption going forward.

josh: 5:45

well, i love how you started out your answer with. well, it depends. it depends on who i'm speaking to, and i couldn't help but think how officially marketing that response is, because that's what it's all about. it's understanding who is the audience. what is the message that they need to hear, which ties into your comments about product marketing how do you make sure that the right product gets the right people at the right time? and a good deal of that is not just understanding the market, aka people. what is the context? who are the people, what is the world like that they are living in and the way that they perceive it? what is the product and how does that enable a better life? is that something that they would want and provide value, and does it provide value to them? which gets into the product marketing discussion. so i'm so glad that you highlighted that product marketing is obviously very close to my heart, since that's actually where i learned a lot from you about was product marketing. so, for those of you listening, this is someone who helped me develop my own understanding of product marketing as a newer product marketer who had no idea what he was doing. so it was very helpful to have someone with such a strong perspective on what it is. share that and help shepherd me to the right people at the right time and be the right product. now, next question that i'm going to throw your way what do you find that people typically get wrong about marketing?

guest: 7:12

i wouldn't narrow it down to one particular thing. i would say the challenge is the perception of marketing versus the reality. so typically and you know, you see this across the board you go on linkedin, you see people's profiles and in their header they're like x, uber, x, square, x fill in the blank of the top successful companies that they've been at, that have had acquisitions or have gone public, et cetera. and so then startups who are just growing, maybe a series a or c, and they need that savior to come in and really develop the product that they want to be the next uber or square. and so there's this perception that that person brings their success with them and it's like a copy and paste playbook. now, i can't tell you how many times i've seen that go wrong. i would love to say i've seen it go right because it does happen. some people are at the right place at the right time, just like product marketing. they just figured it out. in my case, you know companies hire that key sales guy and that sales guys must bring all these customers, and then it's a different company, it's a different aspect, different timing, different product and everything changes. and a lot of times the startups want all that success to ride on that one individual, the cheap product officer, cheap sales or cheap marketing individual, and it doesn't end up working out exactly like they had anticipated or their expectations aren't lived up to.

josh: 8:35

so i completely agree with that idea of you can't just copy and paste. but before i share what i think people should do, i'd love to hear from you if it's not copy and paste which you said, there's an exception. sometime you could just happen to be the right person at the right time in the right market circumstances. assuming that's not the case, if no copy paste, then what can you do or what should you do?

guest: 8:56

yeah, i think that the mindset is there, like, if you truly understand how to evaluate the customer, what the customer lifecycle looks like, you know, granted, the customer or the buyer personas will shift, the messaging might change, but you understand how the process works. you've seen enough to where you can fill in the gaps with enough knowledge of whatever company and product that you're at currently.

josh: 9:21

so it's almost like not necessarily focusing on the specific details, rather thinking more about the framework which got you to those original details.

guest: 9:35

the foundational elements.

josh: 9:37

foundational elements, yeah, framework. where do you think this perspective comes from? because, like you mentioned, a lot of people are on linkedin. they'll post i love that you called that out x facebook, x uber, x twitter, and sometimes you look and it's like customer support, tier one. it's like true, i'm still x apple, which is the case for me.

guest: 10:02

i'm x apple right time right.

josh: 10:05

right, right, right time, right title, all that stuff, this idea of copy and paste. like you mentioned, decisions are often made. this person was successful in this role at this company. they drove these results. they must have the secrets that we need to come in and get those quick wins. what does that perception come from? what are your thoughts there?

guest: 10:30

i think by that time they feel like it's the person that makes the change and not the company, not the culture, not the reality or the market. at that specific time, perhaps before they hire those individuals, they report to a board and when we talk about startups getting funding, we do the same thing. we say who's the investment board that's invested in your company? and we lift off the top names, top bcs, and that's just kind of how it's driven. it defines credibility if you have some really great names to show on your resume, and i think that's just how we're hardwired. we think somebody comes from, somebody goes to a great ivy league school. wow, they must be smart. we don't know how they got there, perhaps. or we work with that person and we're like maybe this isn't the right person and through tarot and error, i guess we just realized the pedigree that we're supposed to come with just doesn't live up to the expectation of what we have regarding the brand names. it's funny saying marketing brand names, because that's basically what we focus on in marketing. so we're trying to tell ourselves not to do the same thing when it comes to hiring, and it's contradictory and i don't really have the answer. i just feel like that's typically how things are done in education and professional environments.

josh: 11:46

i'm struck by this term that i heard a lot in working with sales teams and developing sales content. social proof. and when you're thinking about those people who are saying i should appeal to you. i stand out because i worked at this previous company with the assumption being that you want to emulate that type of success that they had, or repeat that success that they had. and i'm the key one, a key player in that, because i've been around success, i've touched the success, i have the mark of success and i've proven it by this logo that's associated with my name. so that's a thought that i was struck by, of just how wired we are to look at what others are doing and say, okay, that worked for them, they had this person, let's have this person as well. maybe, i don't know, it could be completely wrong.

guest: 12:38

sometimes there are those visionaries like johnny. i right he was the visionary behind apple and maybe steve jobs was a wonderful executor and also somewhat of a visionary, but if it weren't for johnny i it wouldn't have happened. i think some people it's really difficult to differentiate the true visionary and then others who worked with that individual, who are writing the coattails with that success.

josh: 12:59

absolutely. i have often heard descriptions of product market fit very much being this when you have product market fit, you know it. that's the first vague definition that i often hear. and the other part of it is like a nonstop adrenaline fuel roller coaster where you're going super fast and you're hoping things don't break, but the success just keeps rolling in and i am completely lost my train of thought. what's that with product market fit? yep, i completely lost where i was going with that.

guest: 13:41

a lot of times we think that product market fit is static. right, we're basically taught this. i don't think the curve has changed much throughout this 30 year time period, but we're taught. the minute that we hit product market fit, we cross the chasm. we've had large scale adoption, hockey stick growth. we made it. we're going to go public and the challenging time is actually maybe now is the best point that we can relate to is that you might have had product market fit with a lot of early adopters and maybe you truly didn't understand when that changed. or maybe your product was a nice to have and the market has changed. customers needs have changed and what would have been great two years ago now, if your nice to have product doesn't define roi, the cfos who are driving the budget now determine that product market fit changes and just because you have it at that one point at a time, doesn't mean it continues. it's more like a dynamic ecosystem. it's not a static point.

josh: 14:40

and your point there reminded me of what i was originally trying to say, which is product market fit can help you cover for less than ideal foundations and certain elements. when you've got that boom, the market hits the problem. wow, you might not have the best messaging and positioning, maybe you're the first out there and people just instantly get it. but the point that you just brought up, when the time comes to adapt, if you don't have those right foundations in place, which are processes as much as the people themselves like you mentioned johnny ives being the visionary and other people writing the coattails of his success or the success that he brought i should say that's kind of the same of when you have this thing that's really successful and it's really good, you can overlook these different foundations and really understanding what made it successful can be hard to analyze.

guest: 15:34

yeah, that's you're right. maybe it's a combination of factors and most of the times it is now. it's not that one person who was successful, it's a team of individuals, it's market timing, it's product. it's early to market everything right. it's like product meets some. luck is when perseverance meets opportunity.

josh: 15:50

yeah, the timing and luck is such a big big factor there. so, speaking of the ins and outs of marketing, what's a strongly held opinion in marketing that you completely disagree with?

guest: 16:06

yeah, the data drives everything. i remember even putting on my in fact, it probably still is there in millington procell marist. they like data during marketer because a lot of times at the beginning, marketers were fighting with being so brand focused and vanity metrics and that really wasn't the core data that you need to focus on. the core data was kdis that you were driving, so there was a difference between marketing at the time and how that shifted when everyone was focusing on big data. and what did that mean? so, everyone's data driven, everyone's consumer insights driven, but what does the core of that truly mean? how does that define you and how your working style is? and over time, it's great to be data driven. obviously, you need numbers to back up your decisions going forward, but there's a lot of context behind that data that's not even surfaced and that's the challenging part. as a marketer, we are always fought to go for the number, and where the scapegoat of many different times where you see there's sales and marketing friction or product marketing. it's product and marketing friction and the challenging part is we all have a number now, whatever that number may be number of leads, number of conversions, number of sales, number of bookings, et cetera, and we're all striving to hit that number so much we don't understand the context of why we're not hitting it or why we did in the first place, like why we have a certain number of leads, for example, why those leads are or aren't converting, for example, and potentially over time, like over many quarters, or when we have to go back to the board meeting and state we're not going to hit that goal even though we communicated we were full steam ahead, is because we never really got the context behind why we were doing or making our achievements or not. for example, we don't know why the customer bought to begin with. it could have been they were under the wire and they had to hit the budget number before their fiscal year was done. it could have been they needed something to put the steam behind their career and their next career progression that they were going to make. we don't truly know all the context that's there, but when we try to replicate that and scale it, it's really challenging without having that context behind the kpis and the data.

josh: 18:15

so, when you were breaking that down, the understanding or the summary that i took away from it is this idea that decisions with data without context could potentially put you at risk.

guest: 18:30

absolutely.

josh: 18:31

so it's not enough to be data driven.

guest: 18:34

it's not enough because you know when you are hiring someone or when you're trying to get these big players at your company, you're trying to show off all the success you've had in your state. we have x number of bookings, we have x number of retention for existing customers and nobody really explains why they think they have product market fit. they have the numbers to show why, and then you get there and you're like, okay, these numbers were inflated. you threw a bunch of money at the game and you decided to go all in on paid advertising and performance marketing and that's why you have a huge influx of leads. it's not because the market was driving interest to begin with, and then over time, you find out all of the pockets of missing information and the contextual data that you would need behind that.

josh: 19:20

it's to be clear. your argument is not that data is unimportant or data should be ignored, right? the whole thing is, you need to understand what the data is actually telling you.

guest: 19:33

and to do that.

josh: 19:34

you have to dig into why. why are we having these results, which can kind of be hard going from numbers to getting to the actual why? the example that you brought up is one of the examples being inbound leads and looking at those different data points, how would you dig into a number like that to really make sure that you understand the context and then make sure decision makers understand the context of the data?

guest: 20:02

well, that's the thing. when you were the manager, the tactical executor, of the specific marketing campaign, you know what's happened, you know if you've increased your budget, you know if you've adjusted certain channels for distribution, for marketing. but as you go up and report on those metrics and that those metrics get reported to the board, they just want the number, they want another percentage or decrease of that number and they want to see it obviously going up and trending upwards, going forward. so a lot of that reasoning and explanation gets lost or not communicated in until it's too late in your three or four quarters down where they want. that reasons why they didn't hit their goal for the year. so it depends upon the level of hierarchy and how many people are involved in the strategy versus the tactical execution.

josh: 20:49

and then from a numbers or metrics perspective, because there's no way that we're going to get away from that and being data driven to support that. like you mentioned, you know you're the people that you report to are reporting these numbers up to the people they report to, are reporting the numbers up to the people that they report to. the context is absolutely going to be lost. in some cases, the context might not even matter to those individuals, which, we could argue, is you know right or wrong. but i'm curious are there any metrics or you know data points you found in your career to be consistently the ones that should be focused on or prioritized above all others?

guest: 21:32

yeah. so i think, as a product marketer, i think it's more on the middle of the funnel metrics and bottom of the funnel metrics when you compare product marketing with demand gen. demand's goal is to get as much interest top of the funnel, beginning the process right. how many people come to our website? what's the conversion rate from those individuals to leads, et cetera? what ends up happening is the kpis that our focus on is, if they're stuck in the funnel, like they're not really converting, they're not closing deals, they're just kind of sitting there waiting, and that's when we truly need to evaluate whether those individuals are part of our personas. how many of those closed deals are actually the intended market that we built the product for and that we got the market validation for, versus random individuals that happened to just purchase the product? i think that's true evaluation. how many of those customers are your actual buyer personas versus outside?

josh: 22:22

the realm absolutely, because you're spending sales resources, marketing efforts and materials, different internal resources, beyond just that, to support what you're calling out people that may not actually be the people that we should try to sell to or invest in, not without the research and context needed because the product might work for those individuals, but that doesn't mean the positioning, the collateral, the things that are going to help them make a decision work for them and that takes research and you got to prioritize what's going to be those easy wins versus those hard wins.

guest: 22:56

or they might have a higher churn rate. that tends to happen a lot more in saas, where they buy but then they realize it's not the best fit for them. the sales rep's already sold the deal. there's no claw back. they already made their commission and yet we're stuck with a high retention. i mean a low retention and a high churn rate. that we need to fix later on.

josh: 23:12

yeah, which is a prime indicator. i'm reading a book right now called obviously awesome by april dunford, which is about positioning and the importance of it. one of the things that she calls out is exactly what you describe if you're finding that you're closing deals but those customers are churning and before they churn, what they're asking for are features that your team is like. this will never be a part of our product because, they're trying to get your product to be what they understood it to be or what it was sold to them as and when that's not the case, that leads to churn and it's typically indicative of a positioning context research issue. so that's a very timely point. yeah well look, you've got a lot of experience in stories. i would love for us to hear your diSaaSter stories. so tell us about this experience you had that, lest you feeling like what a diSaaSter.

guest: 24:12

yeah, i think i had a difficult time with this, trying to figure out the true diSaaSter story that i wanted to share, one. i wanted, maybe others to have something to go off of if they hadn't experienced a challenge or something like that. i wanted them to use this red flag and not make the same mistakes, right?

josh: 24:30

absolutely, and that is the goal it is. let's hear stories from real people who are cutting through the crap and sharing. hey, when this happened, this is what i learned, and if you're experiencing it, you might want to be on the lookout, because it's a rip.

guest: 24:46

absolutely so. i thought of one, and it's not just one mistake. it was like early on in my startup career and i always come back to this example and no matter how great the startup is that i'm at for a particular time unfortunately marketing doesn't have a long tenure i always refer back to this example. i'm like, oh, i remember i had experienced just this and at the time tech was so important and it was all over. the media was blowing up tech industry. everything was great. large tech publications were covering everything. large mainstream media was covering tech and it was just a great time to be in the industry period and i had recently left my corporation that i was at, who also had technology, and i wanted something that was more lively and engaging and just like fast speed. and i had these rose colored glasses on, like many of us do. sometimes they come on, sometimes they go off, and i followed techcrunch and i followed all the blogs and i was on top of everything the top vc firms. so i made a list. you know, here's what i would look for in, you know, great technology company. now, mind you, i had to have experience in that realm and the startup that i was at or going to. it was right up my alley in terms of the experience that i had and what they were looking for in terms of the fit and they had great vcs at the time. they had a really good executive team. everything seemed to check all the boxes. i think the only thing that didn't check off was i was living in the city of boston. i didn't have a car because i got rid of my car when the other company went remote and i thought, oh crap, i can't get out of the city. so the only checkbox that wasn't checked was i needed transportation out of the city to the burbs to work at the job. that was it, easy enough. and then i just thought like that was a great opportunity because i was going to be a one woman show. so i had a lot of responsibility of the huge growth opportunity for me. so i was the only marketer that they had at the time. well, they had a vp of marketing and she had all the product managers that reported to her. so i was the only regular general product marketing manager and i was responsible for brand awareness and generating leads for the sales team across, like numerous different activities, public relations and marketing sales support in terms of enablement that they needed. i was there to help launch and promote the two product lines that they had. this was before i even knew of product marketing. this was just marketing of what it was. we weren't so siloed in terms of the activities that marketing did, so they had one software and two hardware. they were doing two different markets. so i had to do the brand refresh for the website. the marketing material is a collateral and i worked with contractors obviously because one person can't do that. oh, product marketers, the data science team, the sales team every day was different in terms of their responsibility. they had lots of moving pieces and lots of people and i was working nonstop and i just loved it and i thought what a great time to be at this company because they had just raised a series being funding before i'd arrived. they didn't have enough brand awareness at the time, so i was going to be responsible to help me increase that and the focus of the company was such a great time where you know, when you raise around the funding, you have all this money and you want to focus on the culture and the visions and the values because, as you hire, that's what you're going to be hiring for is the shit. it was wonderful. so marketing obviously gets involved in that side of things internally. a lot of people don't think about marketing internally at the company, working with hr and the team, and that is also an area that we do. and so we were in the process of raising another round of funding, series c, and we had one of the top 10 vc firms that we were trying to secure funding with, and i just remember the ceo of the company saying one time i tried to raise with them a while ago and they wouldn't even take my phone call. and now, look, they're investing in our company. i had no idea what that would look like and how that would change the game, but i knew it was extremely important and i knew having the major investor was going to take us to another level and everything was great. everything was great for the first year. everything was awesome in the first year and i bragged about it. i was so happy and proud and i loved my call. i actually, throughout my career, i've had some great colleagues, bosses, et cetera, and i've been very lucky on that side. i haven't timed startups correctly, but i've worked with some great people that many couldn't right, and i've learned in some outs at the startups firsthand, and what i refer to as the smoke and mirror show, what we tell the world is our startup, what our positioning is externally, and then the behind the scenes stuff that we're reactively piecing together, that we don't want anyone to know about, and you don't ever know what's behind the scene until you're actually there, you're in the thick of it and you're like oh my gosh. and then you reevaluate and you're just like maybe this wasn't as great as i thought it was.

josh: 30:02

i think that that's such a common experience. i've certainly felt that firsthand. you're right, you don't know until you actually get there. and i've learned firsthand that you, as an interviewer speaking to an interviewee, you're stuck between how honest do i really get without scaring this person off because we could use their talents and their expertise and their ex uber, ex apple linkedin profile? it's a good club to have that social proof to say we're a team that really has it together, but you really don't know how much is actually happening behind the scenes or how chaotic it is. so i love that you brought that up.

guest: 30:43

so we were writing this huge wave of high profile success and we had had research grants at the time. the product was award winning. it was foundationally in terms of social proof. you can't get anything better than research validation and if you have that technology, it puts you in a different level. it's not just like oh, you have customers, you actually have data signers, that's rigorously validated, so your product works. so we were writing this quick, high profile success and we are invited to participate in ces consumer electronics show, which is enormous over 100,000 people probably even more so now than it was then just gathered together in vegas, and our invitation was to be a part of the startup section where we were the disruptive new, innovative technology at the time, great branding, especially for marketing, and we knew that all of the big brands were going to be there all our prospective customers that we wanted to have, like sony's and the samsung, et cetera, and then all of the market research partners who we were also selling to in the channel. they were also going to be there to see what new technology was on the market. so this was the perfect time to do a product.

josh: 31:54

it's a big deal. you got me amped to just think it about it.

guest: 31:58

yeah, we were in the advertising research space and the advertisers were going to be there, the publishers, the investors, everything. so it just made sense, it was very logical and we had done this campaign with our advertising about like eight or nine months before that where we had amassed enough data from our existing customers and market research partners where we could leverage that into a demo. so we had all these individual studies that were like piece mail and then certain ones that we could share and certain ones we couldn't. so that was, you know, important in terms of getting all of the data that we needed. but we had to package all those pieces into one nice public facing demo with a clean dashboard. that was like exciting and entertaining and engaging, because when people come to your booth and everyone's doing the same messaging, you want to really stand out. when techcrunch comes by your booth, you want them to do an interview with you. at the time techcrunch was really important not that it's not now, but i do remember so many other publications out now and so we were a small team and, like many startups, especially now, or even technology companies, we were heavily engineering driven right. we had big backlog of customer feature requests. we had a big backlog of bug fixes and we had additional feature enhancements that we had already put on our product roadmap that you communicate to the customer and secure. you know here's where we're going with azure. you get them aligned and then here we go. but because we were a small team, we were limited in terms of our resources. something had to kip and we knew if we were going to go all in across all departments. it was a big decision to do so. we had to shift our other priorities and go in with this one product launch and we had to put band-aid fixes on everything else, and we had to hope that we could. we had a great customer success team at the time thank goodness for them and we had great customers. you know those ones who are pretty flexible in terms of like the lot of stuff slide because they believe in you. so we had to hope that the customers loved us enough to wait a bit longer for their feature request that we had already committed to like two or three quarters back. and our data science team they were very fast, very nimble and very smart and intelligent, and they had so many great algorithms that worked. some worked better than others. so we decided to leverage our strength and, much like magic, focus everyone's attention on the algorithm that worked, and then a redirection ploy to not focus on the things that didn't?

josh: 34:36

that makes sense. that's the common vaporware strategy, right?

guest: 34:41

yeah, and then with this one demo, we had like everything going in our favor but we had problems with the demo. and we didn't have problems with the demo when we were in, you know, the lab or in our office. we had problems with the demo everywhere. we had problems with the demo. the night before, when it was crashing, we had problems with the demo. the time like maybe i remember like 30 minutes or an hour, i was on the phone and the vp of engineering was yelling at me because i was freaking out because the demo wasn't working for the biggest show and he was trying to keep it together for his engineering team and it was a high stressful situation and they did what they could do. but we all knew that we were doing it so fast that we were trying to crank out like a full scale demo within such a short period of time, and so we had crashes and we just assumed that was going to happen. one thing that worked in our favor was, if you haven't been to ces, you have all of these attendees and exhibitors. what you don't have is really great internet signal, you know. so we just blame the demo crashes on the poor signal. so the reality of the bugs that we were having that we just couldn't fix in time. thank goodness for that repositioning, i would say.

josh: 35:58

yeah, the redirection here. you know, obviously it can't work if the signal is overcrowded.

guest: 36:05

you get that right yeah of course, but give us your contact info you're very interested in the marketing team and make sure that our sales team follows up with you on the appropriate and that was our indirected yeah. so it was great. we managed to work it out and ces ended up being a huge success, just like we had anticipated, which thank goodness, because for everything that the team put into and all the hours worked and all the time and effort across the board at the whole entire company like it worked out in the best way that it possibly could have for us. so thank goodness. and then we came back from the show we were able to secure. when you got a trade show, you spent a lot of money filling all the expletives that you possibly can, because it's exhausting, it's expensive and many times than not you have a bunch of crap. you have some good leads in between the crap and then you have to convince the team to follow up on everything and it's exhausting. you know, i'm surprised after all these years they haven't got out a better way to do with marketing and sales than trade shows. and so, yeah, we had partnership discussions that we didn't previously have or we weren't able to secure before the event. we had the large scale brands i mentioned to you. they were coming to us as inbound leads instead of all of our outbound efforts. and we had the mainstream press. we had hit beyond the tech press we had done. the international press was actually asking for requested interviews vasco, forbes, wyatt scientific mag and i was like, wow, this is bigger than i thought it was going to be.

josh: 37:36

yeah, that's a lot of success. when you started out this story, i was expecting a bit of a crash and burn, but despite the hiccups and the stumbles, it's great that you had a very successful outcome included with all the redirection there. so if this was so successful, what happened?

guest: 37:57

the crash and burn came after. so when you have all the success from an event or a strategy or campaign, there is this huge high where you're writing and everyone believes in what you had originally anticipated your product success, market success, product market fit to the extreme. and then all of the challenges start to arise when the wave of the hype come down off of the the hope, i call it and you have this hope and things start to break through that very, very thin layer of hope. and then, when we got back after the demo, after the ces exhibit, we realized all the stuff that we had deep prioritized. we were extremely behind. we had positioned it a little bit in a more optimistic manner than what it was. our products still needed significant improvements. it wasn't just a demo that wasn't working. the algorithms still needed to be improved across the board rather than just that one we focused on. and we realized that, although we had tons, of tons of interest, the adoption part just wasn't fast enough within our burn rate. it was a longer sales cycle than we had originally anticipated. we had the early adopters, which they couldn't wait to buy. we had the testing and research ones, like honda. they were always involved since the beginning of the conversations, but yet they weren't moving the needle, they weren't closing the deal. and then we just realized we won't be able to continuously fund this, we won't be able to deliver on the backlog that i had mentioned earlier, that we had postponed for so long. and then the customers started the ones who loved us started to get really frustrated because not only were we behind in prioritizing that demo, that also put us behind for the next two quarters of our product roadmap. so then what happened? well, then you run out of money, you overexpand and you grow, you over hire based upon your last round of funding, and then things start to change and you kind of see the train kind of going off the tracks. now i identify it way earlier on. at the time i just thought, wow, this doesn't look good, but let's see where this goes. because the company was great. i believed in the company, i believed in the product, i believed in the people, i believed in the market. and we were going and i was drinking the kool-aid and taking all the hope you might get, and then the ceo who brought that vc, who brought the executive team, then he left and i was an utter shock. i mean, i was so naive at the time i think i actually remember crying and i put all of my hope into these people that were running and leading the company, which, of course, because it's top down right success starts from top down at companies, and if they're leading it and if he's not going to be there, what the hell are we going to do? because our vision and strategy was based upon this guy, our investors was based upon this guy, and then he left and that was besides, when the product started to not work. that was like the first thing, that was the first sign, because before engineering and product was, they were able to hide the ineffectiveness of the product. and then, kind of after that big show, and then marketing and sales and hr and everyone else was involved, we all got to see the challenges that our product had. and then, when the ceo left, there goes the vision, there goes the strategy, and then the other executive started to fall suit and my vp of marketing left and i just adored her and i thought, when she leaves and the culture changes, and it does. and then they did another round of layoffs and another round of layoffs and then finally i was a part of like the third round of layoffs, i think, and they replaced marketing with hr. well, that's very strange, but i guess if you were running out of money you're going to do whatever you can do.

josh: 41:55

and they weren't raising enough and they didn't have enough customer adoption at the time to really pull it through it's so much happening like very fast, right, and some of it actually ties back to our conversation around product market fit, because you certainly, especially with the civet, found the market fit but the product didn't actually meet what the market was needing. and what the market was needing was what the team was marketing and what the team was selling. so it sounds like things started to get a bit oversold, over marketed and, like you had mentioned before, prioritizing all these resources for this event took away from delivering on the success that customers needed, delivering the things that the customers needed and you mentioned, you get by with really great customers who are patient, who understand the stages of the company and who are willing to wait to some degree. but at the end of the day, if we think of the customer trust like a bank account, not only was the product being oversold and over marketed, but the customer trust bank account was being overdrawn, essentially constantly having to take trust out of it. and i think that's so interesting that you have such a clear moment of we're almost at like peak success and the montage would start right here credence clearwater revival would start playing and you would just see these successes and these deals going over and over, but instead this montage is not the greatest montage, it's a plunge, is what you described. you saw this start to tank and calling out the fact that the ceo left and other execs left and for whatever reason, if that was their own choice or not, those are still very alarming signs. and then layoffs alarming, alarming, alarming. and then finally, you got caught up in one of the rounds of layoffs.

guest: 44:02

yeah, and it was my first layoff and i wasn't understanding at the time that it was based upon resource constraints and money constraints. and we first get laid off in tech world, which is happening across the board beyond tech right now, but you think maybe it's a performance issue and then you don't realize it's beyond you, it's gonna happen anyway, yeah.

josh: 44:24

so you rode this waves and you experienced the crash. what happened after that?

guest: 44:32

yeah, so they had two co-founders and they had two different products, like i had mentioned before. so one co-founder took one product and the other one took the other, and then they parted ways and i followed the co-founder. she was starting up her own startup and it was great timing and i thought okay, and she said that they didn't need a full time resource at the time, but she would love to work with me and i could just do the marketing there, and so that's when i decided to scratch the itch up, wanting to start my own thing and do marketing consulting and start my own little firm for other startups as well.

josh: 45:10

oh, so that's so great. you went into this new experience of the startup world. you rode this roller coaster, you experienced a tragic for the company type ending, and then you found your own business as a result.

guest: 45:29

yeah, and when i consulting for i think four years, i had that consulting agency, and so a lot of the startups i worked at were through consulting.

josh: 45:38

wow. well thinking about your experience. what was one of the top takeaways, or what were some of your top takeaways and lessons that you learned, that you now apply, going forward?

guest: 45:51

yeah, absolutely okay. so i think that the first thing is you have to believe in the leadership team, because the team of the leaders in the c level, that's who's gonna drive you to success or failure. and, surprisingly enough, marketing tenure, the cmo, is not very long right, maybe two years for startups, maybe even less. but if a top c level leaves, like a cto, a cpo, a coo or the c, like everyone else except the cmo, if one of them leaves, you should really try to investigate why. because in my experience is when someone leaves to that high of a level, there's a bigger reason why, and then that's the first indicator that the company is having some challenges.

josh: 46:41

it's an interesting call out. the data point you have to go back to our previous conversation is an executive departure aside from the cmo. so make sure you understand the context, which goes right back to the argument you're making. data-driven decisions require context. you learn a data point to consider and then dig into the context is executive departures.

guest: 47:02

yeah, the other thing is the check boxes are still there. you still wanna work for a very strong executive team as the leaders. but throughout all of the office politics that i've been involved in through startups and every company has it right you wanna make sure, when things are extremely tough and challenging and you're really pissed off and you're fighting against each other for whatever it may be, that those executives can get through the challenging parts together. if not, the relationship significantly tumbles and everything around that relationship is a challenge. and then going forward, there's some issues with that. for example, the cto doesn't get along with the chief product officer or the cmo doesn't get along with the cso chief sales officer. what does that mean? because if they don't get along, their teams are heavily loyal to that leader of that department and there will be delays and there will be friction, and some friction's acceptable, obviously healthy friction, i call it and then some friction is really challenging for teams and people to get through. so if the executive team has worked together in the past, that's a great sign. if you just have individual executives that have great careers or pedigrees or profiles or whatever it may be, but they've never worked together, how do i know when shit hits a fan cause it always does they're gonna be able to get through it and then they're gonna lead their teams and departments and the company as a whole through that challenging time. and this still happens. i think this will continue to happen as funding goes and as startups raise funding, they spend a lot really quickly, and when we talk about the data, the context behind data, a lot of that is driven by short term vision and short term goals. we have to hit this number for this time period, for this around the funding and everything is short term, and by i mean short term, i mean like a year, a year and a half, maybe, max i'm like max, maybe anything less. on your short term for startups, right, and if those startups are only focused on going for that one goal, one product launch, one feature, one round of funding, they're not looking long term and they're never gonna anticipate what could happen in the market that would significantly affect their startup ahead of time. so start to evaluate the short term goals that the company has and long term and i don't mean long term like vision we're gonna be the number one disruptor. fight the vanity messaging, fight the marketing messaging that they're gonna give you and realize the long term growth and vision? is it sustainable and does the company have what they need to try to go beyond that next round of funding or whatever? that first or second milestone is that they need? and the last, which is probably the most challenging, because humans are emotional regardless. if we try to be as logical as we can, fight the hope em and get out sooner. you always want to hope for the best in startups and technology. you always people who are either startup people or they're not, and those startup people have a profile. we love change, we love innovation, we want significant growth and want stuff fast, and that's just typically how we all roll. but we have that hope em that we ride. it's very addictive and then, once we have more of it, we just want more and more and more. the challenging part is it with the rose colored glasses does not make you and does not help you to realize the reality of the situation. you think it's gonna get better. it doesn't get better. there's just more red flag after more red flag. you leave a bad relationship because you finally can't stand it anymore. it never got better what you thought it was gonna get better. the same thing is true in professional environments. you should get out sooner than later. don't ride it to the end because you're gonna wish not that you got out, but that you didn't get out sooner.

josh: 50:58

i think those are great takeaways and so specific. just to recap, do you believe in the c staff? does the c staff have a history, a successful history or record of working together? can the top leadership get the other members of the top leadership team to effectively work together so that you can accomplish the goal in which we'll get to with that idea of hope, em? but i think that's such a great call out. do you, as an individual, believe in the c staff and do you believe that the c staff can work together successfully and effectively? you also caught up this idea of is there a focus on short-term or long-term goals and getting away from the idea of the vanity messaging like we're going to change the world by doing x, y and z with this product that delivers abc, but really get it into. okay, how are you planning to do that? what's happening next? what do you need to accomplish right here, right now? what do you need to have accomplished in a year? what does the next year and a half look like? questions like that can help you as the person thinking about joining a company, or person who is at the company hearing about new okrs or new or whatever the case may be that's being thrown out can ask these questions to really understand for yourself. is this a short-term focus, which is unavoidable, that you will have short-term goals, but they should all tie to the longer-term goal and really understand what that is. and finally, and i think one of the most important points, fighting hopeium, being able to see things as they actually are, not the way that your very team has positioned them, really understanding the context and the applicability of the product within the market. is there actually a fit? because you're right, there is that hope. there's a hope of a very successful outcome financially, personally, professionally, i would love to put x, whatever on my linkedin and have that carry weight. and that ties to that idea of hopeium. am i going to get rich off of this? am i going to change the world in a positive way and leave my mark? those types of things? so i love that you called it out. you have to be aware of that and really sometimes the solution is just to get out sooner. because i know i've been on the hook before.

guest: 53:25

cut your losses. the culture will change. more negative stuff will happen. you will become jaded and then you'll resent how much you let affect you, even though you never anticipated it at the beginning.

josh: 53:36

so get out while you still can and spoiler alert you can still get out.

guest: 53:42

yeah, we hear about the crash and burn right, the big companies, the inflated numbers that they got funding for and they're being sued, or the ones that run out of money completely. we never hear about the majority of startups that are doggy paddling year after year, eight years, 10 years, and that's not success. it just means somehow someway they're laying off enough people to keep their money.

josh: 54:02

that's right, and it's ok if that's the type of experience that you want to be a part of. just see it from what it is. i think that's such a great lesson. i appreciate you taking the time to join and share your diSaaSter story with us so that we can all learn from it.

guest: 54:18

thank you for having me. i appreciate it, josh.

josh: 54:22

great conversation with a seasoned marketing pro who shared some solid and maybe even some controversial perspectives. we talked about how marketing is about getting the right product to the right people at the right time. and then we discussed that, when it comes to marketers or sellers or executives or really any roles you cannot copy and paste success. instead, you must stick to building the right foundation at that company, using frameworks and principles to guide efforts. and then we also explored the folly of making data-driven decisions without the context that's necessary to understand what the data is indicating. and now, how about that story of diSaaSter? but she spoke about an event that could change the entire trajectory of the company, and it did. but the problem was that the decisions that were made were prioritizing short-term gain as opposed to long-term goals. and even though they discovered a market fit, it all came crashing down because the products could not live up to the hype, to the expectations and to the overselling. and then came the plunge. and you heard those lessons that she learned directly about identifying the plunge and what to do about it. now, before you go, please take a second and subscribe to the show and let us know how much these stories resonate with you by leaving us a rating and a review in apple podcast or spotify or any podcast player of your choice. also, share these lessons with a co-worker or even a boss who's going through it with you. who knows, maybe your story of diSaaSter could be next.