Zero to $1m/ARR with Olof Mathé - Co-founder & CEO @ Mixmax w/ Andrew Gazdecki

Foreign.

With me today is Olaf, CEO of Mixmax. Olaf, thanks for joining me.

Thank you, Andrew. It's so fun to be here.

Olaf, I have to say I'm a huge fan of Mixmax, everything you guys are doing. But we were talking before we started recording, and I want to talk about just the early days of Mixmax. So I guess my first question would be, you know, when you were growing mixed mags from 0 to 1 million, what was like the hardest part for you? I know that's a hard question.

Oh, my God. I mean, what wasn't the hardest part?

Tell me more.

Wow. So, so many things. I think probably one of the main things is when you're at zero, you have like, it's not just zero revenue, it's also zero brand. And. Yeah, and so that makes a lot of things really hard. Right? Makes it harder to get customers. Although when you start to have a product, you start to get a little bit of a flywheel. Above all, it makes it really hard to recruit. And what do you need as a startup? When you grow, you need awesome talent. So I think that was probably the hardest piece, not having a brand.

I really agree with that. In terms of the brand Mixmax, you have a killer brand, good personality to it. How did you think about brand in the early days for Mixmax?

It's funny because we worked with a really awesome agent. Well, the first way we thought about it is that we wanted some kind of really sweet visual identity that felt like playful yet serious at the same time. Given that we're like a SaaS product and sales automation for SMBs. And then we're like, we're going to fill this brand with more brand equity over time, but. But let's make sure we get the visual identity right. And I remember at the time we got this agency, I forget their name now, but they're actually pretty famous now. And I thought they were just like horrendously expensive. And still to this day, it's like some of the best money we ever spent because we got to work through a bunch of options and like, think about the type of identity we wanted to have as a company. And I think the end result turned out pretty awesome. Yeah.

Again, I love your brand. How much? Like, as one of your guiding principles is brand design user experience, is that at the core of Mixmax and kind.

Of your strategy always been and always will be freemium, barely driven, you know, product. So for us, it's key to be the easiest to use sales automation product in the market.

Awesome. How did you get your first customers. Did you hustle? Cold call, was it? I know, you know, you're one of the top companies mentioned for, like, product LED growth, but what was like the first five customers, like?

Yeah.

Were you embarrassed by the product too or anything like that?

Oh, so embarrassed. I mean, we were also very proud, but also very embarrassed because there's always this difference between, you know, how you see your baby versus how the world sees your baby. Right. Everyone's baby is always the most beautiful baby. Yeah. So, yeah, for us, the first customers. Well, actually, here's kind of a fun thing. So when we. I'll talk about not in terms of users, but actually, like paying customers. And so when we launched, we launched on Product Hunt, which was like a new thing back then, and they were like, desperate to get people to launch products on Product Hunt.

What year did you launch?

I'm sorry?

What year did you launch?

2015. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So different Product Hunt back then too, right? Yeah. So they were desperate to get companies to launch and we thought, oh, that's a cool thing. You know, another company looks like. Looks good for us, looks good for them. Just in the, like, literally, like the 24 hours before, we were like, hey, shit, we're supposed to launch. We don't have a way for people to pay us money. So fortunately, stripe's pretty easy to work with. So we put up a pricing page. And of course, we didn't have time to hook up the plans to the product so people could pay for the product, but they weren't actually getting any differentiated access. Like free users would get just as much as someone else paying. And the funny thing was we were like, you know, we should have a really expensive plan so the other ones will look cheap. And so our expensive plan was called back then, the premium plan. It was 65 bucks a month. And we were like, no one's ever going to buy this. And lo and behold, like, the second purchase that came in was like, for the most expensive plan.

Nice. Did you ever reach out to those customers just to pick their brain? Like, you know, what did you think about Mixmax? What'd you like? What you didn't like?

Oh, totally. Yeah. They were like prime interview material for us to get to know them and, like, understand what they were looking for. And of course, back then, and at least the way we did it, because now it's kind of fashionable to do, like, super bespoke onboarding, do a lot of qualifications straight away. We did the opposite. We did like full floodgates. Anyone can sign up Anyone can pay. And then from there we started to interview folks to try to see patterns of who's getting the most value. What are they liking here? And very clearly early on it was AES and folks in customer success who were eating up the product.

So that's a really smart go to market strategy where you went broad to start. You said, hey, this is an awesome product. Let's launch into the wild and see what industries job titles like, what is the icp. Would you say you kind of let the market guide you in terms of who Mixmax sells to specifically today?

Absolutely, yeah. It's interesting because I kind of find there are two types of companies or two types of founders. There's this one type of founder and company which they focus on a particular Persona and they say, hey, we're going to build something for whatever accountants or sales reps or engineers. And then they figure out what the product is. For us it was the opposite in part because I think as founders we have a product background, but for us this was how can we eliminate, how can we just make a 10x communication experience for folks who talk a lot outside of their own team? And so that's how we ultimately ended up in sales automation as a category, by working on email and connecting email to all the other SaaS apps you use.

So your product's amazing, but how did you come up with the idea? Where did it start? How did you just get started? How did you say, I have to build this?

Yeah, it's funny because as founders, we'd all worked online communications products in the past. My background there is I worked at Skype during the Silver Lake Industries and Horowitz takeover. So we worked always, like really interested in communication in part because it's like this evergreen thing, like it can always be improved. People do it like thousands of times per day. It's just like a really interesting problem set. And then we were like, okay, what's some of the worst communication experiences we have today? And very quickly it was like, well, you know what really sucks is any customer facing conversation or you want to talk to someone in a different company. Like Slack was around back then. It was clear they were doing awesome stuff for like teams, right? Talking within your team. You had the asanas of the world who were doing awesome, like task management stuff, GitHub for engineering, like all that. But there was nothing really that tried to be like an OS for revenue teams or people that talk to customers. And so yeah, it was like a lot of prototyping basically and then like showing it to people and like doing discovery from there.

How long did it take for you to build the first version of the product?

Probably took us. Well, the very first version was probably just like a couple of weeks or something. But I mean, you're talking about like just prototypes. You can show someone that like barely work and can't scale, etc. But I think the first version of the product we launched from like early prototyping through the launch was probably like six months.

Nice. And where did you build that out of? Was it like typical apartment? Did you have like small office? What's like the humble beginnings of mixednet?

Well, I should talk to you about our first office. Well, early on. Yeah, well, early on we were fortunate insofar as we had people who let us squat free office space. So carbon 5, which is like a dev shop, had a free desk we could squat at Designer fund, which is an angel investor at mixmax, let us squat there for a while. Once we had raised our seed round, we got our first office, which we found we didn't want to have any long term commitment. So we knew someone who had this really grimy brick building on the worst part of Market Street. People think San Francisco is like this grammar place, but as you and I know, a lot of parts of it are not pristine and super not gentrified.

And kind of sketchy.

And so our first office was the mega, ungentrified part of, of Market street, kind of like opposite Twitter. And so just to give you an example of how ungentrified it was, we were on the first floor. The office barely fit three, four people. We're three co founders at the time.

So that's like as big as this room then.

Yeah, yeah, totally. We moved out when we made our second hire, so when we were five and I had to work out of a windowless like corridor.

You were pretty scrappy in the beginning then.

We were super scrappy. Yeah. Company value is still achieved more with less actually. But anyhow, back to the griminess of this office. So was on this pretty rough part of Market street and we would work with the window open. And at some point I was like, wow, this is a really sweet smell coming in through the window. What is this? And my co founder, Brad, he goes like, I'm pretty sure that's crack. And I was like, how do you know? And he was like, I went to. He was like, I went to public school in dc.

Yeah, that's. That's two parts interesting. How did you know that smell? And then why is this going in my Office.

Totally, totally. And shortly thereafter, we were like, okay, we made it second hire and I was working in this windowless corridor and then we moved to an office. So it was. We definitely earned our stripes in that first office.

That's awesome. My second office was in Millbrae and it was a building that had office space available. Permanently painted on the building. I don't know if you've ever been to the In N Out near Millbrae, but it's right across the street. It had ashtrays in the hallways. Like, it was bad. So I can relate on some different.

Type of smoke smell. What's that different type of smoke smell for you then?

Totally different. It was like out of the 70s. So as you're growing to, you know, you're at zero, you're just getting your first customers, you're in this office where you're smelling, you know, like, some interesting things. What was, what was the hardest part during that time? What's like, maybe a mistake that you made that you would maybe do differently?

Wow. So much.

Or Olaf, did you just do it all correctly from, like 0 to 1?

I mean, I think, as someone said the other day, what's the first SaaS company that's going to go from 0 to 100 in like a year? And we haven't. So, you know, definitely didn't do everything correctly, which I think is the bar for that.

You know, it kind of goes back.

To the thing about when you're a small company and when you're starting out and you don't have a brand, it makes hiring, especially senior talent hiring, like, trickier. And I think we had a bias to. I think we were a little bit hesitant to invest in senior talent, which I think would have been awesome to do, like, earlier. And also probably as founders, to let more parts of the business, like, go to other teammates who weren't founders, versus, like, us having this, like, very, very strong sense of ownership, which is also great.

But similar mistakes where, you know, in the beginning it's these crucial exec hires, they're expensive and, you know, every dollar counts. And also, like you said, they're hard to recruit without a brand. Which brings me to my next question. What do you think he did really right from zero to a million? Is there one part of the business that you just look back and like, you know, maybe at the time you didn't know was the right decision, but maybe it was the brand. Maybe it was. You know, when I see Mixmax and like, email boxes, like, that viral component is just beautiful. Is there like one thing that you're like, man, I'm so glad we did that?

Yeah, there might be a couple actually. I mean, the first one that comes to, the first one that comes to mind since you mentioned seeing like Mixmax in your email is we kind of pioneered this thing that we call web previews, which is like actually imessage does this now when you send a link, right. You get the image of it. It's not just a dry link. And we did that in emails because we were like, hey, it's beautiful. I don't want to have to click on links. Clicking on links is awful and it makes things just more delightful. And even within our target audience of reps, we had reps who were like, hated it. And then we had a bunch of reps who loved it and we made the decision that we're just like going to focus on the reps that love it. And we were opinionated about that. Similarly, as you know, we pioneered instant calendaring in your message. So putting available time slots in a message, someone taps on it, the meeting's automatically set up. We had some reps who were like, it's super rude to be sharing times directly. I would never do this, et cetera. And we had a whole set of reps who like loved it. And we chose to say, hey, we're just going to be opinionated about this and like go with the folks that love us. And that at least at the time felt like a non obvious decision for us.

I think that's really wise because at some point you have to make a decision on, you know, who are you gonna focus on? Like one of my favorite quotes is if you're trying to please everyone, you're gonna please nobody.

Yeah.

So it sounds like you focused in on like a specific type of account executive that loved your product. You canceled out the noise of people who maybe weren't ready for. Because what you released back in the day was kind of like game changing. Click a button, calendar, everybody has it. Now would you say that's, you know, something that you would recommend entrepreneurs do in the early days? Like there's gonna be customers that might not like your product and that's okay and just accept that, but then trust your gut.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's good to be especially like today, unlike a social media attention economy. Right. If you're not controversial, how is anyone going to notice you kind of thing, as crazy as that sounds. Right. But like, so it's actually good to have a feature that some people like just Think is like awful because they'll probably talk about it.

Nice. And my point is, yeah, there's, you know, in marketing there's a term called branding. Like an enemy or just having like picking a side. I totally agree with that. Yeah.

Oh yeah, I love that concept. It's like very Andy Raskin esque. Like, paint the, Paint the old world, paint the enemy, you know? Yeah.

I think you guys do a great job with that. So as you're, let's say, okay, now we're at the point where you hit a million. Did you celebrate? Like, did you do anything to, you know, mark that milestone? How did you react, like, when you first hit like a million architects?

You know what's really funny? I think we were like, really amateurish, at least by, I mean, I think that's one of the wonderful parts with the entrepreneurial journey is you can look back every year and you're like, holy shit, was that us a year ago? Like, seriously? And so now when I look like that far back in time, I'm like, I don't even think we knew like what a million dollars meant or what a good growth rate was or anything. There was some point we, at some point before a million dollars, our then board member, one of our angel investors, lead angel investor Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal was like, hey, y' all should just like set a particular North Star target. How much do you want to grow revenue with? And we were just like 25%. What do you think? Like? And he was like, yeah, it sounds awesome. Yeah. And of course now I'm like, growing 25% would just be like, mind blowing. Like you're like 15xing in a like unheard of, like. And of course when you're on a smaller base that's actually like achievable. And so just to give you an example of how, like, naive we were around this, and we were just like, okay, we're going to grow 25% month over month as the target. And I think we crossed a million at some point during that year when we had that as a target and when we were hitting it. And I remember the month we missed that target, we were like at 22% and it felt like the world was going to end. And it's just like different denominators, different growth rates. It's everything so relative and, you know, it'll be fine.

Nice. How, how quickly did you get to a million revenue?

If I can ask? I don't remember. It depends. It's all about like, when, at what point do you start measuring was probably within a year of like some degree of revenue because we had a full year of like 25 month over month growth.

So I guess, you know, final questions. Who are some entrepreneurs that you look up to? Maybe other companies? It could be anyone.

Yeah. Wow. You know what? There are so many. Someone. So I just shared like someone happened to like bump into recently and we're like actually in touch from time to time is Roman La Pair from La Paire from Gorgeous. They do like customer success software specifically for Shopify stores. And I mean he's like not a household brand yet at least, you know, like a musk or whatever. But I just find what they do is super inspiring and they have a very idiosyncratic approach to how to build their business. And I find almost any founder you talk to, you are going to learn something about how they approach parts of their business, what they're doing differently. And I think what's cool about him is perhaps this goes back to scrappiness here. He has his entire own playbook that he's just running with and he's incredibly data driven and that it's just so inspiring to see.

I haven't come across him. I'm 100% going to after hearing that. That was a good pitch for him. Favorite books? Maybe top two.

Wow, that's a hard one to choose from. So yeah, so I'm a huge fan of this. Was a while since I read this book, but Madame Bovary by Flaubert, which is basically about this woman who has some very unhappy love stories and it's just such a portrayal of like society today, even though it was written like 150 years ago. And my other favorite book is by a British like diplomat, secret agent historian called the History of Venice, which tracks the history of the Venetian Republic from like 700 through to like 1800 when Napoleon put an end to it. And it is just incredibly fascinating because basically they built this like merchant powerhouse in the middle of like feudal Europe and it was kind of more like an oligarchy than a republic and it was awesome.

Why? So in terms of books, would you say you're more of like a non fictional history type reader?

Yeah, I read a lot of nonfiction and very little fiction actually.

Do you apply any of that into your work? Because the way I'm hearing that is, you know, you're reading these very interesting books on just a wide range of different topics. Do you ever somehow find a way to pull, you know, interesting pieces that you can apply to mix Max out of These books or is it just books you like?

You know what? I think books to me, actually serve almost an opposite purpose, which is make sure I can like, think about something completely different and try to like, exercise a different part of my brain. So it might be, but it's actually one of the reasons I read very, very few, like, business books. Yeah. Because I'm like, I'd much rather just like talk to an entrepreneur and hear what they're doing.

That's interesting take. I like that because I think sometimes you get so involved in the business, you almost get tunnel vision. And just sometimes, like, taking a step back, thinking about something else can really be one of the most productive things that you do as the episode is done. Yeah, I'm learning. This is awesome. I guess my last question would just be if you could go back in time and tell yourself anything, or even just entrepreneurs that are starting out as zero today, what sort of guiding principles would you give yourself or just other entrepreneurs today that could be brand, that could be hiring, that could be the book recommendations that you just talked about. Anything at all. Yeah.

So interesting. Well, one thing I think we would do is we would go remote first. We were a hybrid model for a long time. Now we're a remote first company and nurture and build senior talent way earlier. A lot of your company success is who you bring on and talent has like such a long firing time. So nurturing and building your network there really early. As a more product focused founder, I would say have a, have like initially a pretty strong point of view on the market, whereas I think we hacked our way to it. So those might be some that come to mind, but I'm sure there are several more.

That's awesome. Well, Olaf, thank you so much for your time. I learned a ton. And if people want to learn more about you or Mixmax, where can they find you?

Mixmax.com yeah, mixmax.com ixmax on Twitter and I'm Loftster on Twitter, so. So see you all online and thanks so much, Andrew.

Yeah, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it, bud.